A note from Deeya · July 23, 2026
I am launching a
podcast called
Good Pharma.
When there is bad pharma
there is also good.
· 4 min read
If you say the word pharma at a dinner party, it is rarely met with a positive reception. Mostly it brings to mind drug prices and the opioid crisis, or one of the many other scandals. The word itself has become a shorthand for greed.
Nobody brings up the scientist who mortgaged her house to keep a disease program alive after it was killed or the founders who spent years getting rejections before their platform changed how an entire class of drugs was made. I want to cover the people who looked at a disease with no treatment and no reason for optimism and started a company anyway (think Martine Rothblatt!)
These stories exist but almost no one is telling them. Biotech does not get the same coverage as tech and it is a shame since some of the best business stories exist in this domain. So I am going to tell them.
The name
Why the name
Good Pharma?
The name is a provocation in itself and it is meant to be. We have an entire cultural genre dedicated to bad pharma. We have all heard the exposés and the congressional hearings. Some of that criticism is deserved, I will admit, and I am not here to launder anyone’s reputation. Empire of Pain is still one of my favorite biotech books.
But the criticism has engulfed the whole picture. Behind every drug that works is a group of people who bet years of their lives on an idea that was statistically likely to fail. 90% of drug candidates die and the people who kept going anyway are entrepreneurs in the truest sense. Their stories are being lost because the media has focused on how ‘awful’ the biopharma industry is. That is a loss for the space as a whole and for anyone who might have been inspired to build the next thing.
Eli Lilly and Company archives
“Behind every drug that works is a group of people who bet years of their lives on an idea.”Deeya Kotecha
The show
What the show
actually is.
Every episode tells the story of something built in this industry: be that a drug or a company. Sometimes that means sitting down with the founders, scientists, and investors who lived it. We talk about the real stuff:
- The moment they almost quit, and what stopped them
- How they raised money for something thought to be impossible
- The failures that never made it into the press release
- What they would tell someone starting a company in this space today
Sometimes it means going deeper on my own: long, reported histories of a medicine and the company behind it, the business decisions as much as the scientific ones. If you can follow a good business story, you can follow the show.
The audience
Who is this
podcast for?
You, whether you work in biotech or pharma or don’t and especially if you have only ever heard the villain version of this industry but are curious about what the other side might be.
The bet
Why now:
the bet I am making.
I believe entrepreneurship is the most underrated force in medicine. I believe the stories we tell shape who decides to build. And I believe that if the only pharma story in circulation is one of greed and deception, we should not be surprised when talented people choose to build elsewhere.
And I believe AI has brought us to a pivotal moment: thousands of talented people are looking for their next bet and I want it to be in drug discovery. Good Pharma is my attempt to make that case, one conversation at a time.
Let us tell the stories worth telling.
Deeya