Honestly Impactful #4

What makes someone keep choosing to build from zero — again and again?

​Markus Riester has spent more than 25 years moving between science, MedTech, diagnostics, startups, and leadership roles — as founder, CTO, investor, advisor, and now CEO of Nephrolyx, a company developing new approaches to kidney diagnostics.

​Across multiple ventures, one challenge keeps returning: how do you turn promising science into something that works in the real world — as a product, a company, or part of clinical practice?

​Join us for an honest fireside chat with serial entrepreneur in life science — and what it means to keep building over time.

​🔥 Fireside chat with Dr. Markus Riester, serial founder & CEO of Nephrolyx

​🍕 Pizza + peer-level guided networking

​🧬 All people interested in creating impact in life science

​Agenda 

​17:30 – 18:00 | Arrival & Informal Gathering

​18:00 – 18:15 | Introduction by Nucleate

​18:15 – 18:30 | Speaker Keynote Speech

​18:30 – 19:30 | Moderated Fireside Chat

• ​Block 1: Personal Journey & Spark 
  From student life to the first spark of startup curiosity.

• ​Block 2: From First Startup to Serial Entrepreneurship
  How the journey changes after the first company: spotting patterns, choosing problems, building teams, and deciding which ideas are worth turning into ventures.

• ​Block 3: Building Companies in Practice
  What company-building actually looks like: identifying real customer needs, testing ideas, finding product-market fit, and turning science or technology into something people use.

• ​Block 4: Honest Reality 
  The hard parts of building again and again

• ​Block 5: Lessons & Advice 
  What students should know earlier if they are curious about entrepreneurship — how to think about risk, ambition, resilience, timing.

​19:30 – 20:10 | Small Group Q&A with Speakers + Pizza

​20:10 – 20:30 | Peer-Level Guided Networking​

​This event is part of Honestly Impactful: Role Models in Bio-entrepreneurship — an event series in Rhein-Main region featuring founders, startup scientists, and intrapreneurs who are translating life science research into real-world ventures. Our speakers share what that journey really looked like: the doubts, failures, trade-offs, and hard choices behind building something beyond the lab — and why it’s still worth it.