Markus Roggen
The Power List 2021 – Processing Pros
Founder and CEO, Complex Biotech Discovery Ventures (CBDV), Vancouver, Canada
Career highlight: CBDV surviving 2020! In 2018, I made the leap from bench chemist to company founder, moved to a new country, and set about building a new kind of cannabis company. All this was tough enough, but when 2020 cut us off from meeting new clients at conferences, stopped us doing on-site research, and caused many existing clients to cut their research budget, things looked dire for us. We accelerated our plans to be a remote research laboratory, launched web-based products like our compound database, and pushed forward with our extraction AI research. Now in 2021, we have a solid client base and even more remote solutions in the works.
Lessons learned: I don’t know all the answers – no one does. While there is still so much to discover, we need to collaboratively work together.
Dream dinner party guests: Heston Blumenthal, Alain Ducasse, and Jiro Ono. Dinner parties are not for work, they are for enjoyment, so I’d invite three of the greatest chefs in the world to ensure great food for the party.
Nominator comment: “Fantastic pedigree in chemistry, excellent attitude, and the ability to dissect difficult problems into solvable bits.”
