Comments on: Lee Hood’s Proteges Strike Again: Nanostring Ships Its First Commercial Cell Analyzer http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/07/14/lee-hoods-proteges-strike-again-nanostring-ships-its-first-commercial-cell-analyzer/ Business + Technology in the Exponential Economy Sat, 11 Feb 2012 03:54:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 By: Krassen Dimitrov http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/07/14/lee-hoods-proteges-strike-again-nanostring-ships-its-first-commercial-cell-analyzer/comment-page-1/#comment-24070 Krassen Dimitrov Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:38:29 +0000 http://www.xconomy.com/?p=3358#comment-24070 The statement by Chad Waite contained in the article is grossly inaccurate. The delay at NanoString was due to a prolonged opposition to a high-throughput product on part of the Board of Directors(Perry Fell, Chad Waite and Jennifer Fonstad); my ‘departure” was a consequence of this opposition rather than a cause for the delay. In the article above Perry Fell boasts unashamedly about high datapoint throughput of the company’s product, however in 2005 he and the other two individuals on the Board were militantly opposed to it. For example, in an e-mail from July of 2005 Fell wrote to me: “Everyone that I have spoken with agrees that Affy in particular is pushing high through-put. However, it is by no means clear that it will in fact be successful, much less threaten the larger current market.” The next month I was fired “for cause” from NanoString for my insistence on a high-throughput, robotics-based product (similar to what NanoString has now on the market). Determined to continue the fight, I wrote a series of letters to the Limited Partners at OVP, explaining how wrong the Board position was and how throughput was what the market really wanted. Initially the Board responded with intimidation and legal threats, however, my persistence eventually paid off and they gave up on their flawed conceptions. The delays cost me dearly in financial terms, however, at least we were able to publish the technology in Nature Biotechnology. Waite’s quote “We made the cover of Nature Biotechnology, and not a lot of other companies around here can say that” is a bit unclear. If by “here” he means companies in his portfolio then he is correct, however, that’s nothing to brag about. For example, OVP portfolio company Complete Genomics was funded to commercialize the sequencing-by-hybridization (SBH) technique invented by Rade Drmanac. Unfortunately for OVP they were scooped by a paper in Nature Biotechnology from a group in Sweeden ( Nature Biotechnology 26, 676 - 684 (2008). With ample financial resources and the SBH pioneer on board, I can only speculate what kind of harmful interference Mr Waite has exerted on that company’s technological development to be beaten so badly! I have preserved these letters and e-mails, along with other documents from that period, and would have gladly shared them with Mr Timmerman, had he contacted me before publishing the article. Unfortunately, it seems that Xconomy is more interested in inaccurate puff pieces than in real journalism… The statement by Chad Waite contained in the article is grossly inaccurate. The delay at NanoString was due to a prolonged opposition to a high-throughput product on part of the Board of Directors(Perry Fell, Chad Waite and Jennifer Fonstad); my ‘departure” was a consequence of this opposition rather than a cause for the delay.

In the article above Perry Fell boasts unashamedly about high datapoint throughput of the company’s product, however in 2005 he and the other two individuals on the Board were militantly opposed to it. For example, in an e-mail from July of 2005 Fell wrote to me: “Everyone that I have spoken with agrees that Affy in particular is pushing high through-put. However, it is by no means clear that it will in fact be successful, much less threaten the larger current market.”

The next month I was fired “for cause” from NanoString for my insistence on a high-throughput, robotics-based product (similar to what NanoString has now on the market). Determined to continue the fight, I wrote a series of letters to the Limited Partners at OVP, explaining how wrong the Board position was and how throughput was what the market really wanted. Initially the Board responded with intimidation and legal threats, however, my persistence eventually paid off and they gave up on their flawed conceptions.

The delays cost me dearly in financial terms, however, at least we were able to publish the technology in Nature Biotechnology. Waite’s quote “We made the cover of Nature Biotechnology, and not a lot of other companies around here can say that” is a bit unclear. If by “here” he means companies in his portfolio then he is correct, however, that’s nothing to brag about. For example, OVP portfolio company Complete Genomics was funded to commercialize the sequencing-by-hybridization (SBH) technique invented by Rade Drmanac. Unfortunately for OVP they were scooped by a paper in Nature Biotechnology from a group in Sweeden ( Nature Biotechnology 26, 676 – 684 (2008). With ample financial resources and the SBH pioneer on board, I can only speculate what kind of harmful interference Mr Waite has exerted on that company’s technological development to be beaten so badly!

I have preserved these letters and e-mails, along with other documents from that period, and would have gladly shared them with Mr Timmerman, had he contacted me before publishing the article. Unfortunately, it seems that Xconomy is more interested in inaccurate puff pieces than in real journalism…

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