In this episode, we sit down with Christopher Ghadban (WG ’23) to explore his unconventional path from a 2.7 GPA and initial MBA rejections to earning a 740 GMAT score in just five days and ultimately getting into Wharton. Chris shares how his early experiences founding a synthetic biology lab at 19, working in clinical strategy and innovation at AstraZeneca, and later moving into venture capital shaped his views on resilience, curiosity, and impact in the biotech ecosystem. He reflects on using Wharton as a platform for exploration, the real ROI of an MBA, and the mindset that helped him turn setbacks into success. This episode is brought to you by Juno, the collective-bargaining platform that helps MBA students secure lower rates on student loans. Learn more at juno.us/m7a
Applied twice. I didn't get in anywhere the first time around. My undergraduate GPA was, let's call it, poor. I had a similar undergraduate experience to my business school experience - I mainly showed up for exams, and you can only do that to a certain level of success in engineering. I actually tended to do better because most of those exams are open book. My undergraduate GPA ended up being about a 2.7. Business schools didn't love that, and frankly I understand it.
I'm a first-generation American college student, firstborn. I grew up in Draen, Massachusetts, a small town about 45 minutes north of Boston. Pretty typical immigrant story - I started working in the family diner when I was 8, and did that through middle school, high school, and college.
I stayed local at Tufts University so I could keep working at home. At Tufts I was a double major as an undergraduate in chemical engineering and biotech engineering. When I was 19, a friend and I co-founded a synthetic biology lab, which was my first founding experience.
Those majors were intentionally chosen because I was told they were the most challenging, chemical engineering in particular. Honestly, I was very bored in high school and I wanted something that was more academically rigorous.
The practical answer is that I always enjoyed math, physics, and chemistry, and from what I had seen and understood, chemical engineering offered not just an opportunity to go into things such as petroleum, plastics, and oil and gas, but a much broader swath of job opportunities. Using that as a jumping-off point and adding in the biotech focus was just out of personal interest - I realized I was taking so many bio classes that I was two away from the second major anyway, so I might as well just finish them off.
My friend Peter Todorov - still in a similar space as I am today; he's actually at the BioInnovation Institute over in Copenhagen - and Peter and I started this biolab because he was part of a class at a group called the IGI at Tufts, the Institute for Global Leadership. They had a year-long course that included at one point going to a conference at the Whitehead Institute. At that conference, they saw something next door called iGEM being organized - that stands for the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. It was an organization that was originally started, I believe around 2012 but possibly earlier, at MIT, and it grew quite quickly. In the majority of cases, professors were getting involved with teams of undergraduates and giving them small projects to run. We saw that and said, well, if groups of undergrads are able to do this, why don't we try our hand at running it ourselves?
As a result, we ended up raising about $120,000 of financial and in-kind support. We had a negotiation with the university that ended up with us getting free lab space as well as IP exemption. We co-taught a class to 30 other students and ended up helping about 15 of them design, execute, and run research projects. It was a lot of fun, and it was within the more structured university environment, but still a good - at least in my opinion - entrepreneurship opportunity.
I decided to go to AstraZeneca because they had a rotational program, and normally it was geared specifically towards scientific R&D, but I told them I'm more interested in this intersection of science and business. They were pretty forward-looking and said yes. So I joined AZ - as the British like to say - to focus up front on clinical trial operations on the oncology clinical trial strategy team, and helped oversee over 53 clinical trials, helped select our global partners of choice, and helped inform a digital transformation project rebuilding the pre-clinical study and clinical trial backend for the company. That was a great opportunity. From there I did a brief stint in the bioinformatics group, and then I helped join and build a group called the Emerging Innovations Unit.
The EIU was doing four functions - I was involved in three of them - but you could think of them almost like an early-stage venture firm within a pharma company. We were doing the search and evaluation to look for early-stage technologies, then we were doing the BD work to set up collaborative partnerships with academics and founders. These are technologies that are five years, ten years, even twenty years down the line, which in some cases is earlier than when venture starts to look. On top of that, we were helping devise the innovation strategy to drive the company forward. And if you've ever tried to steer a 65,000-person ship, it moves pretty slowly. That's where I took a step back and started to look around and explore what's next, which is part of what led me to business school.
For a long time I always said I wasn't going to get an MBA, and most of my friends went on to get PhDs. I was the odd man out who was more interested in that entrepreneurship business path. Not having friends who'd gone the MBA route before, I maybe wasn't as familiar or exposed, and as I met more people and considered more options, I was lucky to have different offers. I had an offer to join a startup company as chief of staff - they had just raised their Series A - and a potential option to go to Genentech and join their BD team, a potential option to go to a tech VC firm that wanted to build a synthetic biology investing arm. I was considering all of this, and I was considering business school.
Deciding to go to business school was a question of figuring out that none of these options was exactly right, and I wanted a year or two years to take the time to explore firsthand and to understand and see which I thought was the right fit for me. Business school was meant to give me that platform opportunity to explore a number of career paths - as I suspect so many use it for - and then to dive into one wholeheartedly.
Were there specific skills you felt you were missing?
I didn't feel as though I needed the MBA from a knowledge or skill set perspective. Where the MBA was valuable for me was a combination of name brand but, more importantly, platform.
I started with Harvard, and my reason was to spend a couple of weeks thinking carefully but also questioning my own motivations pretty significantly - why, what was the story I was trying to tell, and what resonated with me. While there are a very large number of skills I wish I knew and a huge amount of knowledge I wish I had, the knowledge and skill set perspective wasn't where the MBA's value lived for me.
What I will say about the business school applications is that, thankfully, no one asked how often you plan on attending class. They do ask - maybe inadvertently, in some cases directly - how engaged you intend to be with the school, and I will say from that perspective I do feel like I was lacking. But when we think about the narrative I told: I've had a lot of different career focuses, and I tried to thread those together into what has always been my personal mission, which is driving innovation for positive impact.
The story I was telling in my business school applications was: I started working when I was eight. I have seen a number of elements of innovation - academic, startup, and large company. What I'd like to do now is use business school as an opportunity to synthesize those pieces and then come back together and keep building in this space. Ideally, my next step would be either joining a large company through a rotational program or joining a startup as a chief of staff - to understand firsthand what it's like to build a company from soup to nuts. From there, that gives me an opportunity to eventually step back into pharma, maybe as a chief innovation officer, and help drive innovation strategy at a large scale.
There were elements of that story I wove through pretty much every application, but that was the main message. I wasn't trying to make something up to get in. I was trying to be practical about what the next step after business school looked like - an opportunity to step into a more direct leadership role in innovation, build some of the necessary skills in business school along the way, and then be in a better position longer term to understand what it's like sitting in a seat like Alex Gorsky's, for example, as a Wharton alum - though he has since left J&J. I was trying to be as authentic as I could, and for me that has always been the goal.
Venture isn't a career I was even really aware of as an undergraduate. I became more aware of it over time, primarily at AstraZeneca, because in my role with the emerging innovations team we were doing so much work connecting in the early-stage space and unintentionally starting to build quite a large network among early-stage VCs. That's where - then in business school, having opportunities to join different VC fellowships as a starting point - I started considering the path more seriously, and quickly transitioned from fellowship to chief of staff and then to principal.
I applied twice. I didn't get in anywhere the first time around. My undergraduate GPA was, let's call it poor. I had a similar undergraduate experience to my business school experience. I mainly showed up for exams, and you can only do that to a certain level of success. In my engineering classes, I actually tended to do better because most of those exams are open book, and I learned quickly enough that I was able to understand the material rapidly enough during the exam that I would normally get anywhere from an A to a C. My undergraduate GPA ended up being about 83. Not bad overall when you hear the number, but it translates to about a 2.7 in terms of GPA. Business schools didn't love that, and frankly I understand it. But keep in mind, I wasn't just taking classes. I was working 40 hours a week at home in the diner. I was building a lab. I was consulting for two different startups. I was also on the school of engineering curriculum committee. I was chair of the education committee at TUS reviewing all the tenure and promotion cases for the faculty. I appreciate academic learning, but I prefer the practical experience, and that's where I was focusing my time.
If I was going to rebalance my application in any way, I would have had to start earlier. I do think I was maybe a bit too distributed. If I had spent more time on my classes, I might have gotten more out of it, and that's something I would strongly consider doing differently.
With regards to the business school application, I tried to do all the standard things. I reached out and talked to 20-plus people on a per-school basis.
What would you ask someone when you reached out - what were the good conversations that were helpful to you?
I mostly asked them about themselves - where did they come from, why did they go to business school, what are they finding most useful. I wanted to understand what they were getting out of it, and then try to weave some of those elements into my story - be it classes that they actually found impactful, be it the experiences they had with classmates, or opportunities to work with professors or outside of the school itself. For the most part, these were cold LinkedIn outreach calls. People always say that if you have an opportunity to reach out and build a relationship, often times people on the other hand are willing to help out, and I at least found that to be true. The hit rate was quite high - easily 80-plus percent. I had a relatively short crafted message. These weren't just random ads on LinkedIn. I would include within those 300 characters something along the lines of: my name's Chris, I'm doing this role, applying to your school, love to chat, here's my email. Folks were typically very generous with their time. I was lucky to be able to meet a couple of people in person in the Boston area, which is where I was based at the time. As I thought about weaving those elements together, it felt like I was trying to make the application more personal. Instead of going to and visiting every campus, I was visiting through phone calls.
Was that the main difference between the first time you applied and the second, or was it a tighter narrative, or job changes?
I did change the narrative slightly between the first and the second. In the first application, I talked more about being an entrepreneur. But actually, what changed most between the first and the second was the schools I applied to. Believe it or not, I was rejected from all the same schools both times, but every new school I applied to the second time accepted me.
Start to finish, it took five days. I took three days off from work. In the morning I took a practice exam, then I reviewed what I got wrong. In the afternoon I took a practice exam, then I reviewed what I got wrong. I did that for two days. The third day, I took one exam in the morning, reviewed in the night, and then it was Saturday and I took the exam. I got a 740.
I have a different learning style. If I was to study every night for six months and then take it, I would likely do worse than if I had crammed to get it in that quickly. My learning and processing style is large amounts of information and pattern recognition in an incredibly short period of time. I did go back and attempted to take it cold when I had a little bit more time, about three months later, and I got a 690. So for anyone out there who finds it useful, I know it can work.
I also probably just got lucky - at least on the math section. Believe it or not, I'm actually much better at the English sections than the math section.
Without Wharton, a lot of those opportunities likely wouldn't have been possible. It's because I was at the school that they were an option in the first place. That said, the majority of them were coming through my personal network - and that's not to say I don't think Wharton couldn't have provided more. I did get a couple of relationships that I started through Wharton and that ultimately turned into engagements, but networking and connecting with folks has long been a personal passion for me. Building organizations, building ecosystems, getting involved with mentor programs, helping build and scale them - I've probably been either a direct mentor in or helped build about 20 different regional, national, and international mentor programs at this point. I spend maybe too much time networking and talking to people, but through a lot of those connections, that's where most of the roles I had during Wharton came from.
Broadly, yes. The reason I say that is because I went in with the intent to explore. I got the opportunity to do that and I'm happy where I am now, and I don't know if I would be here had I not done that. Now maybe I would be happy somewhere else, but I did make some really good friends at Wharton. I did have a lot of really good experiences that came from being part of an ecosystem that gives you that chance to explore.
Was the cost - 200K-plus - worth it?
That's a different story. Student loans are real.
I grew up working. I spent a lot of my time working, and while business school frankly was an extension of that because I just spent it working, I did also take time and travel for really the first time in my life in a way I hadn't done before. When I was a kid, I grew up working seven days a week. I traveled a couple times internationally, but it was new to me. I had friends who spent every weekend traveling - I was nowhere near as ambitious in that regard - but the exposure to new ways of living was also something I frankly hadn't had before.
During school I was working as a principal with a VC firm, Alix Ventures. They were a pre-seed to Series A life science fund investing in therapeutics, diagnostics, tools, and infrastructure companies. I joined them full-time after graduation.
Alix was also the producer of BIOS, which was the storytelling platform for the life sciences. While everyone today has a podcast, BIOS was one of the first life science podcasts. We had a phenomenal time interviewing some of the titans of industry. Two days after Carolyn Bertozzi won her Nobel Prize, we were her first podcast. After the $43 billion acquisition of Seagen was announced by Pfizer, we were their CEO's first podcast. We brought on Frank Nestle, the CSO of Sanofi, a couple of times. We interviewed folks in venture, folks in startups, folks in academia, folks in pharma, and folks like the editor-in-chief of Science.
For someone like myself who really liked the networking piece and learns by connecting with others - especially those who are at the tops of their field - it was a really great opportunity and platform to both meet people and connect, but also tell their stories and help put that information out there for the world. If you're talking about interviewing 30-plus of the leading biotech VC funds and their partners, these are organizations that are a bit of a black box, and giving startup founders especially the chance to hear: this is what we're interested in, this is why we invest, this is how we invest, this is who we're looking for - that's genuinely valuable. On top of that, we put together a large number of resources. Three years ago, we put out a list of the top 100 US biotech VC funds - the people to contact, the stages at which they invest. I still have founders thanking me and using that as their primary tool today, even though it hasn't been updated. Updating it is one of the things I intend to do now.
BIOS especially was a really great vehicle to help support that early innovation ecosystem, which is something I've always wanted to do - and that was part of what I wanted to accomplish at Alix.
I ended up leaving Alix last February, and last June I joined the venture collective TVC, where I am now, to lead their life science investing. At TVC, we invest from pre-seed to the occasional Series A, but primarily we're pre-seed investors. We'll lead, co-lead, and syndicate. We also support our companies pretty hands-on - five of the seven of us on the IC have been founders before - and we all genuinely like getting our hands dirty every once in a while. About half the fund is bio-focused and the other half is industrial transformation and applied AI.
On top of that, I founded a nonprofit called OneBio - short for one ecosystem in bio. The name reflects our belief that we're better served by bringing together the disparate pieces of the ecosystem to support each other. To date, we've hosted well over 100 events and brought together a lot of people across 10 different cities. We're building out a number of other activities: a mentor program for startups, as an extension of work I'd previously done with pharma and VC partners, and a lot of publicly facing resources. I'm also an adviser to Merck's Digital Science Studio, which brings in a dozen startups every year - and next year will be 18 startups every year.
I like helping good people do good things - as silly as that sounds.
If you are exploring what to do with your life, an MBA is definitely a place that gives you that opportunity. There is something to be said for considering where you are in life and what you want out of life. Do you want a 9-to-5? Time is the one thing we have in very limited supply. There are far better and easier ways to make money, but figuring out what you want to do that's also going to make you happy is a different story, and there's not always that option to figure it out. Most jobs don't just let you explore a half dozen other roles and see which one you like so you can pick and choose. But that said, if you want to take a break, or if you have very intentional careers and know what you want to make, use that opportunity. And if you're looking at the world around us right now and saying there's a lot of turmoil, maybe taking two years for the world to settle might not be the worst idea. That happens too - I was going into business school around a pandemic. There's no one reason to go. Be clear on yours.
If anyone wants to reach out, my email is chris@theventurecollective.com. I don't know if I can get to everybody, but always happy to chat, especially if you're building something interesting.