Building Confidence in the C-Suite

Dave Watrous was halfway through a PhD in cancer biology when he realized bench science wasn’t his future. He left his graduate program and channeled his analytical skills into outside sales, where he advanced for over two decades through life sciences instrumentation, services, and enterprise software. That journey took him from Fortune 100 companies to private equity-backed start-ups and, most recently, through consecutive C-suite positions in the life sciences industry, including his current role as Chief Commercial Officer at Axio BioPharma.

What made that final leap possible, Watrous says, was learning to translate what he already knew into a language that worked at the executive level. That’s what brought him to the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Executive Education. “Coming from a hard science background, I was comfortable with analytics and structured thinking,” he says. “The program helped me translate that mindset into a commercial context—specifically around go-to-market strategy, organizational design, and leadership. It gave me the tools to systematize revenue leadership.”

Watrous entered the CRO program while serving as VP of global sales at IDBS, a software company inside Danaher. Having spent his career in life sciences, the software business came with new challenges and he was looking for an edge. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” he says. “I wanted to identify the gaps in my leadership as I moved toward the C-suite.”

The program gave him practical frameworks that he could apply immediately. One example, the bowtie model, maps the customer life cycle from acquisition through expansion and renewal. In his prior roles selling capital equipment, the economics came from making the sale and then continuing revenue from consumables and service contracts. In SaaS, the whole business model changes. “Realizing how critical customer success, retention, and user adoption are to protecting renewal and driving expansion was an inflection point,” Watrous says. “It fundamentally changed how I structured teams and allocated resources.”

Because the coursework was so tangible, Watrous integrated assignments directly into his day-to-day work. “I don’t think there was one bit of homework or collateral that I didn’t put into practice within weeks,” he says. One of those deliverables—a presentation deck built around the frameworks he was learning—became part of the pitch that landed him his first CRO role midway through the program at Titian, a Battery Ventures–backed company.

“The differentiator was being able to show the system,” he says. “Not just strategy, but how you instrument the funnel, establish operating rhythm, and make outcomes repeatable.”

For Watrous, the time investment—initially a concern—quickly proved worthwhile. “When you’re looking to grow in your career, 80 percent of your effort needs to be delivering for your day job,” he says. “But that other 20 percent is where you differentiate yourself. The program gave me tools I could use to level up my deliverables. The time I put into class I absolutely got back by saving time elsewhere.”

The flexibility offered by the program’s design helped make it possible too. Watrous took classes from Australia, Japan, Germany, and across the United States. He once joined a session from a cab on the way to the airport in Beijing. “The asynchronous structure made it possible to stay engaged while managing a demanding role,” he says.

Watrous has applied these frameworks across multiple leadership roles, including serving as CRO at Titian, which later integrated with Labguru to form Cenevo, and now as CCO at Axio BioPharma. At Titian, he led through a complex commercial integration spanning the UK, Israel, and the US—without direct ownership of RevOps—requiring tight alignment across functions and cultures to deliver against board-level expectations.

At Axio, a US-based, early-stage company building an AI-enabled biologics services platform, Watrous owns the full commercial system end-to-end. “The environment is different, but the principles are the same,” he says. “You’re still diagnosing where value is created, aligning resources, and building a system that can scale.”

What the program gave him was the confidence to steer through uncertainty. “I sleep better at night because I know I’m doing what I need to do,” he says. “It’s not the fear of the unknown anymore. Now it’s: here’s the problem, here’s how I diagnose it, here’s how I act.”

The experience also sharpened his sense of sequencing, which is central to highly regulated industries like life sciences where adoption of new processes can be slower. Instead of trying to change everything at once, Watrous homes in on the small number of areas that will deliver the greatest impact first.

The confidence also came from the cohort itself. Watrous stays in regular contact with several classmates and has shared his interview deck with others preparing for CRO roles. When he started presenting to his company’s board, he reached out to a cohort member with board experience. “I sent him my deck and asked for fifteen minutes of feedback,” he says. “That was invaluable.”

For Watrous, the CRO program also addressed the isolation of senior commercial leadership. “There’s only one of me in my day job,” he says. “To have a safe space to talk to peers is incredibly rare.”

“Nobody knows everything, and the CRO role demands a broad, holistic understanding of revenue leadership,” Watrous says. “The biggest impact was confidence—being able to assess myself against a peer group in a noncompetitive environment. That was transformational.”