PharmaTech Deals: When Wins Turn to Dust

Failing your way to mastery

The email arrived with a thud of finality.

After months of painstaking presentations, product demos, and price negotiations, the deal was off. The potential client—poised to speedscale its clinical operations with our damn fancy, automation-powered ClinOps platform—had pulled out at the eleventh hour. At the contract signature stage. Autsch!

Another casualty in the brutal world of drug development technology and services.

Building and selling R&D Tech in the life sciences industry isn’t a game for the soft mind. Drug development deals are thrillers.

Sales cycles stretch into eternity. Deals crumble with disheartening regularity. Maybe the clinical trial got delayed. Maybe Phase 1b or Phase 2 data weren’t impressive. Maybe there was a portfolio shift, anticipated funding fell through, or the people managing the deal transitioned to new roles. And so on. And so on.

Rejection is the rule, not the exception. As I tell my team:

“We are in the business of rejections.”

I even calculated a rejection ratio per day per person—just to make rejection culture at Yendou official.

There are days when I get rejected more than 33 times. My highest score? 98 rejections within a Thursday.

And then there are days when I don’t get rejected at all. Those nights, I can’t sleep. My mind keeps circling:

If I wasn’t rejected enough today…

• Did I try hard enough?

• Was I pushy enough?

• Did I care enough?

• Did I want it bad enough?

So I get up, pick up my laptop, and go back to work—chasing more opportunities to win or lose at 2am. In the global game of clinical trials, it is surely noon somewhere.

Learning to Love the “No”

But it wasn’t always this way. Eighteen months ago, it was the opposite. The first real rejection hit me hard. A large biotech deal—fully negotiated, lawyers involved, everything prepped—and then… nothing.

Ghosted.

Till then, I didn’t know that kind of thing happened in the professional realm. Turns out, it does. And that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned running Yendou:

People are the same at work as they are in life.

They struggle to confront. They avoid difficult conversations. They ghost.

At first, every rejection tore me down. Even on days when I got 10x more yeses than nos, that one “no” could ruin everything. I had to fix it. And I did.

Now, I feel nothing about rejection. No sadness. No frustration.

What I feel is fire. A huge desire to conquer the world. Adrenaline. Focus. Excitement.

Like a psychopath :D

But that’s just me. As a CEO, a lot of my job is, as I joke, parenting. I need to be aware of my team’s emotions. Channel them. Listen. Because at an early stage, every hire isn’t just an employee. To all of us, Yendou is an identity.

And in the early-stage game, we’re not just proving our business model.

We’re proving the right of our vision of accelerated research to exist - our right to exist.

Rejection Isn’t a Business Loss. It’s an Emotional Drop.

When I informed the team about the opportunity loss, one of my team members messaged me privately, saying he was very gutted about it. It hurts.

The following is an excerpt from my response to him:

“Thank you, [name], 

The first time a customer dropped out at the proposal stage, I was completely crushed. Hurt, too. Then, I had to aggressively do sales, and I went from being everyone’s darling at Parexel and AstraZeneca as an individual contributor to being ghosted, ignored, and rejected as a no one—all the time.

This triggered so much trauma from my past. I had to find myself, to find comfort in rejection. I found it in understanding that, in the grand scheme of things, I am not important. Neither is Yendou.

The Earth is millions of years old. Humanity, too. And yet, no one wakes up thinking about how Tesla invented electricity or how Bill Gates and his co-founders made personal computing possible. Still, every day, we wake up and create things—on personal computers powered by energy invented by mortals.

Turns out, we will never truly matter, no matter how much we are approved or rejected.

BUT! We decided we want to play a role in Earth’s history, and that’s a bold thing to want. So, of course, it won’t be easy.

I love reading, and I’m still blown away by how every great inventor was rejected too many times to count.

I’ve learned that nothing worth existing can escape societal resistance. So “No” is what we should expect, and “Yes” is what will surprise us.

And yet, I damn well know we will win. I don’t know why. I just know it.

Six months ago, it was just you and me, and a product in its early stages. That’s when we had our first conversation with [Client name].

Now, we have a team, a quality-focused product, a determined salesforce. We are going to kill it!

It’s okay to be hurt. To feel rejected. We were rejected. 😆

But we use that energy to prove we are worthy of existence. And we will.”

But you know what I love about Yendou’s team. He might have been hurt but in the same message he writes, that he knows it means nothing. Because we are winning.

You might wonder, Why I’m Telling You This

Most people are slaves to the fear of rejection. Even the boldest among us. We dare in some parts of our lives—and hide in others. I do, too.

But in the end, we never matter enough for rejections to define us - For them to restrict how much we can experience in one life.

So why the hell do we take them so seriously?

Why do we let them chain us to the ground?

Another reason why I am sharing this, is because it is a taboo to talk about it, making most people enter this journey unprepared. I want you to be well prepared. I want you to know, that rejection is the reward of those who dare.

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