10x Genomics: Ben Hindson, CSO
“When someone says it's impossible, that's when I get interested.”
In 1675, Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek found long-buried treasure concealed in a drop of rainwater. Armed with only a homespun microscope, he reported his finding to the Royal Society of London: “I discovered living creatures in Rain water...no greater pleasure has come to my eye than these spectacle of thousands of living creatures in a drop of water.” Van Leeuwenhoek’s sudden discovery of single-celled “animacules” is a stark reminder—when passion collides with the right tech, a scientist can turn a drop of rainwater into gold.
Yet digging for buried treasure is backbreaking work, made impossible without the right “picks and shovels.” Microscopy, organic synthesis, antibody production, molecular cloning, recombinant protein engineering, sanger sequencing, PCR and now CRISPR are just a few of the tools that have enabled countless scientific breakthroughs.
In 2022, it is clear that high resolution single cell analysis is a crucial “drill bit” allowing scientists to access the deepest discoveries. We can “zoom into” the fundamental units of life first visualized by Robert Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek, and assess their individual transcriptional state, epigenetic modifications and spatial relationships to other cell types. “We knew single cell technology was important, even though at the time [2011] probably 50% of the world was thinking it wasn’t that interesting. We felt that analyzing samples at the single cell level was fundamental to biological discovery,” says Dr. Ben Hindson, CSO and co-founder of 10x Genomics.
10x was founded to build technology that would enable the next century of biologic discovery: “This is where the ‘10x’ name came from—we have got to strive for this exponential impact…it is important to think in big orders of magnitude change” (Q #5). Established in 2012 by Hindson, Serge Saxonov (CEO) and Kevin Ness, the company first focused on genomic DNA before turning its sights to RNA-sequencing. Hindson describes this pivot: “We realized that we had to do something different…and that if we didn’t do something different, we were not going to be around very long.” Around 2015, 10x prioritized single cell RNA-seq as its lead application, selling 20 systems in just two weeks: “other companies didn't have the right technology to be able to scale in the way we did,” reflects Hindson.
In 2019 10x Genomics went public, with share prices climbing ~45% above the initial offering price by end of day. Financial success aside, the company prides itself on scientific discoveries made using its instruments. At the 2019 IPO ~500 academic papers cited the technology in their methods; in 2022 that number has climbed to over 4,100. Now the dominant player in single cell analysis, 10x offers several other products (apart from RNA-seq) that perform sc-ATAC-seq, combined sc-RNA/ATAC-seq, spatial transcriptomics and proteomics. Hindson provides an apt summary: “We're really pumped about our portfolio” (Q#7).
Dr. Ben Hindson currently serves as CSO and President of 10x. Originally from Australia, he completed his undergraduate and graduate work in chemistry at Deakin University, where he conducted research on chemiluminescent reactions in the lab of Professor Neil Barnett. After a very productive PhD (published 7 papers between 1998 and 2001), Hindson went on to a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). At LLNL, in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, he worked on autonomous pathogen detection systems that the government was looking to deploy at potential bioterrorism targets. This experience developing prototypes on an interdisciplinary team proved to be the ideal training ground for his subsequent entrepreneurial endeavors. With a team of ex-LLNL researchers, Hindson co-founded QuantaLife, and helped develop digital droplet PCR (Hindson et al., 2011). In 2011 the company was acquired by BioRad. Hindson teamed up with QuantaLife co-worker Serge Saxonov, and the rest was…history.
In Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece The Alchemist, the protagonist Santiago (a Spanish shepherd searching for buried treasure) receives a famous piece of advice: “When you want something, the whole universe conspires in order for you to achieve it” (see Q#6). Such has been the story of scientific discovery over the past several hundred years. With continued development of novel technologies, such as those pioneered at 10x, it seems likely the universe will continue to “conspire” to reveal itself.
Below is an interview with Dr. Ben Hindson, CSO of 10x Genomics from October 2022:
1. What first made you interested in science and chemistry? Was there an early mentor or teacher that set you on this path?
Back in high school I had a good teacher. In ninth grade, I was starting to pay more attention [in school], and science was one of the subjects that I took interest in. And as a result, I started to get better grades in that. My dad was a science major, but he ended up going into IT. More concretely, when I was thinking about going to college, I settled on studying chemistry. Universities had these open days in our school gym where the professors from different departments would set up at tables. One of the professors of chemistry, was just a very approachable guy [Neil Barnett]. I was a shy kid, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do. And he just said, “hey, come on over here and have a chat.” We talked to him, and he got along well with my dad. My dad thought he was a good gentleman. This professor said “just come and be a chemist, and be the best chemist you can be.” I always liked chemistry because it made sense. And I thought: “It seems like I'm not going to be a rockstar. I'm not going to be the next Guns N’ Roses. So, I might as well go to college and study science.” Chemistry seemed like a good fit. Plus, the university [Deakin] was close to my house.
Professor Neil Barnett and I ended up becoming friends – and we are still friends. It was one of those things that started off with an impromptu introduction and chat. He supported me throughout my undergraduate work, my career decisions around postgraduate work when I went out to look for a job, and even in some of the work that I've done over the years in the US. We've just stayed in touch throughout. So as far as science mentors go, he was the earliest mentor.
[What type of a mentor was Neil Barnett, and what did you learn from him?]
Barnett was my undergrad chemistry lecturer. We have a year after you graduate – an honors year -where you can go work on a project. So, I did a project in his lab. You take some coursework and if you do well at that you can go on to do a PhD program. I didn't actually qualify for the [PhD] program initially: I missed qualification marks by a couple points. But he [Barnett] somehow went and rallied up enough money to get me a special scholarship, so I was able to go on and do my PhD. He always went above and beyond, believing that I had potential despite the fact that I didn't get the top grades. That is definitely something I value and learned from him: it doesn't necessarily matter where you come from - some people are just gifted in different ways, and it’s not always necessarily being book smart. Doing a PhD gave me an opportunity to prove myself. [Barnett] put himself out there on my behalf, and I didn’t want to let him down.
[You mentioned Guns N’ Roses – did you have a band? When are they playing at 10x?]
I had a band in high school and in college - we thought we were really awesome and we really weren’t that great. We were just jamming away at college functions every now and then. It became more of a hobby, as science became the career.
I played guitar and sang backup vocals. Occasionally, I might play the old cameo Christmas song [at 10x]. Last year I pretended to be Santa Claus on a Christmas video and just had a lot of fun with it.
2. What was your first experience with research? What attracted you to scientific discovery in the first place?
We had summer internships at the University [Deakin], and you could go and work in different labs over the summer. I did that for a few summers. The first one I tried was in organic synthesis. I wasn't that great at that - it was really hard. I did another one at Professor Barnett’s lab. That was more focused on spectroscopy and characterizing these chemiluminescent reactions, trying to understand mechanisms. I thought that was pretty interesting. I would say that these summer internships are really valuable for students, especially if you're wondering what kinds of work you enjoy doing, and also what you are good at. These don’t necessarily have to be at your own University. They can be in companies - we offer these [at 10x]. It's great for the company--it's a great recruiting tool so we can show people what a different career path might look like.
[Was there a high point when the lightbulb went off, that made you want to keep doing science?]
[In Dr. Barnett’s lab,] we had suspicions about what the emitting species was in this particular chemiluminescent reaction, and we started getting some clues. We would triangulate it with different techniques, some of them really basic. I got paired up with another professor who was visiting from the UK. He was an inorganic chemist, and we worked closely together during this honors year. We got enough data together to publish some initial papers on this mechanism. Just getting a publication out was a real moment for me, and I thought “wow, I can publish a paper in this international journal, and people want to read it.”. I got hooked on that as a key metric for success; do enough work to add value to a problem and its understanding, and then sit down and take the time to write it up. That's what I learned during my honors year.
When I got to my PhD, I already had a couple of papers published [from internships], so I kind of knew the mechanism and process of how to write them. In grad school, whenever I got a chunk of experimental work done, I would just sit down, write it up and get it published. It doesn't have to be in the world's fanciest journal, but the whole point of doing this is making sure people can see your results. Those early repetitions made my PhD so much easier. When it was time to defend my thesis, I kind of had to just put them [several publications] together and write an introduction, which was already published as well. Then when I went to go for a job, I already had these six or seven publications I could point to.
[You moved to the Lawrence Livermore National Lab for your postdoc – what drew you to that and what types of things were you working on?]
The natural thing, especially in Australia, is to do a postdoctoral fellowship abroad, as a rite of passage - you leave the nest and experience something else. That thinking [of going abroad] was drilled into me. Originally, I was going to go to the UK and study with a professor doing something related to my research in grad school. But then I got an email forwarded to me – it was probably forwarded five other times – from [the Lawrence Livermore Lab] looking for someone to come to the US. I asked my advisor, Neil [Barnett], what I should do, and he said “send them your resume, put your hat in the ring.” You sometimes think “who’s going to ever want to hire me” when you finish your PhD, because it can be pretty esoteric. But I threw my hat in the ring, and sure enough, they got back to me the next day or so. I did an interview – it was on WebEx back in 2000 - and then they [ from the Lawrence Livermore lab] said “come on over.”
I didn't really know what I was going to be working on, because they couldn't tell me that much. So, I just packed my clothes into one suitcase and a bicycle, and borrowed some money from my dad. I got a room to rent in this town in Livermore - it definitely got me out of my comfort zone. The things I got to work on there were really cool. It was around the time of anthrax [2001 attacks], when everyone was worried about bioterrorism and weapons of mass destruction. People were thinking “what happens if someone releases anthrax at the Salt Lake City Olympics?” The key was to be able to detect pathogens sooner – it’s all about time management [in those scenarios]. So we were building these things - think of it like a biological smoke alarm – which were called autonomous pathogen detection systems. [The device] sucks in air, gets all the particulates out and deposits them into fluid form, where you can then run multiplex proteomics or PCR assays to look for your top 20 pathogens, for example. When I got there, the project had a lot of ambitions but was well behind on the technical progress. We had some upcoming milestones for demonstrating that our prototypes were going to work. So I got thrown into the deep end. I had nothing else to do, I didn't know anybody, and so I just immersed myself in my work. We had a really awesome team, and that's where I first got exposed to working in a multidisciplinary environment. We were building an instrument with hardware, software, biology assays, molecular biology, chemistry… you name it. On that project team, I got to work with some really smart people and figure out how to build something from scratch.
We put our prototypes all over the place, and I went on a lot of the deployments because I would just sign up. I was a single guy, no friends, so I said: “I’ll go!” I got a ton of experience - real world experience - making sure that these things actually worked on real samples by going out and testing with pathogens. It had to work, because if it didn’t, then we [the LL lab] don't get the next round of funding. There was a lot of pressure, but we did pretty well.
It turns out, the program itself didn't actually go forward. It got pretty far, and we did a lot of field deployments. After you work so hard on something - for like six years or so - if it doesn't achieve a degree of longevity, you feel like it’s a bummer… to work so hard for all that time on something that's not going to see the light of day.
My boss Bill Colston - who was few levels up - was the one that originally hired me to Lawrence Livermore. He had some other early research projects going on, and one was doing PCR with these tiny little droplets - like picoliter type things - and our thinking was that could be better than running bulk 25 microliter reactions. It was mostly geared towards the detection of pathogens application, but it was fun trying to do things in a million times less volume and see what you find. They filed some early patents and then I was given an opportunity. We were playing golf one day after work—by the way, you always say yes when your boss asks: “do you want to play golf?” I think we were at the 18th hole, and they said, “We are thinking about starting a company. Do you want to join us?” It took me like one second, and then I said “absolutely, count me in.” From there it took several months to figure out how to form the company out of the lab work. But that's where we took a leap of faith and decided to try our hand at starting a company [developing digital droplet PCR].
3. Did you always have an interest in entrepreneurship, or was that built out of this unique experience at Lawrence Livermore National Lab?
I think it was during the time at the LLNL, because several alumni had incubated or spun something out of their research. In fact, we were using some of the technology in our research that had been spun out and commercialized. So, a motivating factor for me was that there had been some proof points where people had done really well in industry. For example, a company called Cepheid was acquired by Danaher, but they had some really early work on different thermal cycling technology that could make accelerate PCR reactions. By the time I got to Lawrence Livermore, they had already spun out the company, licensed some IP from the lab and were selling products. As a result, there was talk around the lab at the time, “maybe we – the lab - should encourage more entrepreneurship.” So [entrepreneurship] was something that I was cognizant of, and I could appreciate why it could be exciting, but I had no idea what it really was. But after 6 years at LLNL, I was looking for a change: I'd done things like write grants, get grants, get my own funding. I thought that I didn't really want to be doing that forever. And I saw [entrepreneurship] as an alternative path. I don't mind taking some risks, and this was pretty risky. But, it seemed like it was worth it, because we were betting on ourselves.
[So you joined this group starting Quantalife – what was the transition like? What advice do you have for people considering this leap?]
It is crucial to surround yourself with the right people. When you don't know anything, some things that may seem really hard actually may not in reality be that difficult. One piece of advice would be that you can get a lot of help for free. You can get a lot of simple things - that may seem really foreign to you - figured out without overpaying.
Another piece of advice is to save up your equity for the critical people who are going to be in this for the long term. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but having that [equity] for the critical people that are going to stay part of your core team through all the development is crucial. Titles, they kind of matter a little bit, and I think early on everyone wants the biggest title possible… but your job is going to be doing everything you can to make the company work.
I think part of that job is just to make sure that you and others have the right ownership warranted given the contributions. It is also important to have the appreciation that [ownership] is going to change a lot, especially if you do well. It's more about building value than keeping a percentage of something: make it bigger, and then everyone's winning… more so than if you held on tightly to something that stays a small opportunity. That is something that people wrestle with. You have to be careful about who you're asking to help you, what their commitment is, and then if you want them to be in it for the long term, you need their interests aligned with the company. On the other hand - if you're starting a company for the first time, asking someone for some tips and tricks doesn't cost you anything, and people will mostly be happy to help you.
I think the other lesson is to make sure you know what the applications for your technology are going to be. Don't get too focused on your initial application, because your tech could be used for many different things. Many people try to shoehorn their technology or spend all the money on developing it, without thinking about who's going to pay for it. What's the customer and what's the application? Even though you may have thought through all of that, go and test it out and talk to people. You don’t have to give away your secret sauce. We didn't do that early on in Quantalife. We were going to make a point of care molecular diagnostic test, because that's what I was used to writing grants on. It turns out that was not a great business model at the time.
We [at QuantaLife] got advice from one of the investors who did diligence on us, to switch to life sciences, and build a new tool for research applications. He was a marketing person and worked on real time PCR at Applied Biosystems. He knew exactly what this tech could be used for, and how we could sell it. With his advice, we ended up changing the whole thing over. But my point is to test out the market and the application, because we spent a year doing a whole bunch of things that were not useful. Make sure you understand what that application is, and how your technology roadmap is going to fit that over time.
A final piece of advice is to get some computational modeling people in early – people who have the ability to map things out about where your technology can go based on given decisions. With that insight, you may know: “I can only hit 5% of the market with kind of capability,” or “we can access the whole market if we go after the really hard thing.” Ultimately, as that [bigger market] is where we want to go, that insight can justify putting in the hard work. This interdisciplinary nature that computational people bring to teams is something that has definitely given us an advantage over the years.
4. What is 10x’s origin story? What were your early conversations like?
Serge [Saxonov] and I worked together at QuantaLife for about two years. He joined after that period where we switched from doing pathogen diagnostics to life sciences digital droplet PCR. He understood the applications, and had a computational biology background. He got introduced to me through his roommate, Kevin Ness, who was the third founder at 10x. Kevin and Serge were roommates, which I think you guys might get a kick out of.
Serge and I really liked working together at QuantaLife… we are really complimentary, and like to figure stuff out together. After the sale of Quantalife to BioRad, [Serge and I] stuck around for five or six months and tried to figure out what our future was going to be like in a bigger company. But when you sell something, it's not yours anymore. On the other hand, we wanted to make sure [ddPCR] was successful. We wanted to make sure that this technology, that we just spent the last three and a half years of our lives on, would be long lived. But after about six months [of helping establish ddPCR in Biorad], we decided to leave, probably for similar reasons. It wasn't the right fit for us long-term. We took maybe three months off, and then met to catch up in San Francisco. I sketched a couple of things out: if we were going to think about a company, what we could do and how we might be able to do it? Serge was thinking about what advances in next generation sequencing could deliver and where the gaps in the space were. So, we agreed to start a company, wrote up some ideas and filed our first provisional patent application. We then went back and asked some of the prior QuantaLife investors if they would be interested in investing in 10x—though it wasn’t called 10x at the time. They said yes, and we talked to other investors as well.
[And what was the initial vision that you pitched those early investors? Did you already have things fleshed out in the early discussions?]
It was definitely not fleshed out. But the vision hasn't really changed since the early days. We wanted to get really fundamental, high scale, high complexity measurements of biological systems. In that initial pitch, it just so happened that we started out with genome applications; we said we could do better genome [DNA] sequencing. Single cell gene expression [RNA-seq] was next on our proposed application set. I think there was a third, some proteomics concepts, which we kind of put out there as a placeholder. Those were the three categories we pitched, and then we had some specific ideas about how to do each of them.
We had 10 slides that we made up in Keynote at the time. It went something like, “here's a problem with next generation sequencing, here's some engineering approaches for how you may be able to tackle it by building big complex microscopes, here's what we need, here's roughly our roadmap and timeline.” That's basically it. That's how we got our first 2 million in a Seed round—then we later got an extra million on top.
Once we had funding, we began by filing IP on everything we thought relevant. We spent the first million dollars on filing patents, and also getting some licensing deals done. At this point, we were in a garage and didn't really have any labs. We were just iterating on the architecture and implementation. We had this joke: “you have plan A, plan B, and plan C. Plan A never works out. Plan B usually doesn't work out either. But plan C is the one that comes through with the goods.” So, we have found that we usually need three iterations on an idea.
5. It is easy, from an outside perspective, to view 10x’s rise as a steady progression of successes. Were there low points in the 10x journey, where your tech, team or vision were tested? How did you weather the storm?
There have been many challenges, and there were different periods that presented different types of challenges. Early on, it's all about getting to that early milestone to prove your company is worth investing more money into. But you're also trying to build a business, and you need to make sure the technology matches up with the business. Early on some of the things you try out, may be counter to building a good business—so it is important to iterate fast, and not get too attached to a single idea. Those can be some pretty heated arguments – when you decide to change course. It is really important to be able to agree to disagree, and then move on. These difficult decisions and conversations can be made easier by modeling [of outcomes and opportunities], as we discussed earlier. As a group you need to keep asking “what's going to be the winning solution overall?” Get as many perspectives as you can on that question.
When we first started, we were only going to have a little consumable microscope slide that wouldn’t need an instrument. I thought that was going to be nice and neat. But [we realized] those slides could only do that small subset of applications, and the market was limited. Over time, we ended up changing the whole architecture, and we included an instrument [along with the slide]. That turns out to be a really good thing in our industry: if you commit to buying a piece of hardware, you're more likely to use it [and the associated consumables]. This makes the product less likely to get displaced by the next thing that comes along. There are lots of these little lessons and tradeoffs that you make as you go along.
The other key inflection point [in company formation] is when you start to do more than one thing at a time. The way you operate must change. You must have some process and guidance for people to be successful as they manage parallel activities. With parallel activities, you are usually competing for the same precious resource [company funds]. But it is important to have these parallel activities ongoing, as we saw with our first application [genome sequencing]. We thought it was going to be a blockbuster success. But it turned out that after we went commercial, we didn't sell as much as we would have liked to—the sales were going in the wrong direction.
We realized that we had to do something different…and that if we didn’t do something different, we were not going to be around very long. We had already started a small project on single cell RNA-sequencing in parallel. We made a decision to rush that program and get something out quickly, and this became our second application. In 2015, we accelerated the release of this product to make sales for the quarter. It worked – we hit our number. We sold 20 systems in just over two weeks. We were able to do this because there was built up [scientific] interest in this area, as other companies had been building out the market. However, these other companies didn't have the right technology to be able to scale in the way we did. At points [this transition] was pretty painful—to move forward with things that weren't quite ready. But we just had to move forwards because if we didn't the company wouldn't exist. So that was how we got into single cell analysis. We knew this technology was important, even though at the time probably 50% of the world was thinking it wasn’t that interesting. Serge, others at the company and I, felt that analyzing samples at the single cell level was fundamental to biological discovery…and it's also potentially a great business. So that's what we did, and it ended up fueling a lot of our growth.
Another early key decision was around pricing. How much are you going to charge for your product? People were used to spending $50 on a bulk [RNA-seq] assay. Are they really going to want to spend $1,200? We ended up coming to the conclusion that they would. If we - a few handful of people: me, Serge, the person who was in charge of marketing - didn't come to that decision [on pricing], we wouldn't have been able to afford the subsequent growth. So, there's a lot of these little things that, in hindsight, could have changed a lot. If we had gone with a price near what we were selling our genome for, maybe $300, we wouldn't be where we are right now.
Culture is another thing important to a company- I just can't stress enough how important that is. When things are tough, having the key culture pillars in place, and standing by them, can help you make tough decisions. They can help people excel when times get tough.
6. On that topic of culture - what are the core values you try to give the team as CSO and how do you build culture at 10x? How do you maintain culture as you scale?
I used to think culture was sort of an HR buzzword. I didn't really internalize what it meant or how important it was, even though we had been doing certain things [pertaining to culture] without writing them down—just because that's how we liked to work together. As time progresses, and more people come into the company, it's really important to write your culture down—and it cannot just be some buzzwords that you can put up on a poster.
Serge originally wrote our culture document and got a lot of input on it. He wrote down, with examples, what our culture is and why it's important. [A culture document] Is also a way to think about what makes 10x special in our eyes. And this process is ongoing; we need to continue to evolve, to appreciate what it is we have today and identify where we can improve. New people bring different aspects to the culture. But writing things down allows you to make sure you're not losing sight of what a couple of key things are.
Culture starts with the mission - why are we doing this? A lot of people will come from different jobs and different industries because they're passionate about the same things that we are. And we want to stay completely focused on that mission. We also operate from first principles, and I think that's sometimes that's confusing to people. What does that mean? Really, it's about figuring out what's the most fundamental way, the best way, to solve a particular problem. Once we get everyone’s input, have we got the right thing? If not, then we keep iterating and keep working on it.
I think this [culture question] also relates to the name 10x, and how we settled on the name. I was told by my mentors at the [Lawrence Livermore] lab, “don't try and work on stuff that's incremental, come to me with something big.” That's how you can get your projects funded back in the lab, and that's how you can get people's attention. They always said to me, “you have got to come back with something that’s going to be an order of magnitude better, otherwise, don't even bother.” That's where the “10x” came from; we have got to strive for this exponential impact, and so we put it in our name. It is not to say that lots of little things all stacked up couldn't add up to a factor of 10, which they can, but it is important to think in those big orders of magnitude change. Try to approach that change in a way that may be non-obvious, which will give you the ability to differentiate from other people who have either tried and failed or are current competitors.
Teamwork is another important piece of our culture. It's the people that make all the magic happen. One of our values is “put the we before me.” Think about the company, think about your colleagues, and then think about yourself last—together, we'll figure it out.
We've had certain quotes and things attributed to us over the years, but one we refer to is “when someone says it's impossible, that's when I get interested.” Often, it may just have been impossible at that point in time, or it was seemingly impossible. But don't just take people's word for it. You will often hear “I tried that at my lab, that's never going to work.” Okay, those are all good reasons. Now, let me prove you wrong. This is where you unlock these whole new modes of doing things that people thought were impossible. Sometimes cracking that nut will allow you to build a phenomenal product that people are going to pay their hard-earned money to use. Reward for outsized results is another thing that we value
One last thing is to lead by example. I have been called out at certain times when I haven't necessarily done the best things, and I think it is important to hold each other accountable. It's all a learning experience. We're all in this to learn together and do awesome stuff.
7. What is one book that has influenced the way you think, which you would recommend to fellow scientists or entrepreneurs?
I read mostly emails and a lot of science papers. But I've always liked The Alchemist [by Paulo Coelho] It's short, and it's a simple read. My dad gave it to me when I was thinking about what to do next. I read it before setting off on my adventure [of starting 10x]. I think it encourages you to listen to people, to learn, and then to follow your dreams. I think that’s good advice.
8. Any recent announcements about 10X you want people to be aware of?
We just had a preprint come out on Bioarxiv. It is really a showcase of all our latest technologies, and how they operate in concert with each other. We have three different platforms; if you use all these capabilities together, what insights can you get? You can really see the value of say, looking at single cells and how they’re organized in a tissue, and then go on to study super deep on subcellular events- what's actually happening in these cells and what's going on with their gene expression or regulation? We're really pumped about our portfolio.
Working with biological samples is tricky and can be a throttler to your business. Some of our key capabilities now work off fixed [e.g. with paraformaldehyde] tissue samples, which is the standard way of processing histologic samples. It's been one of our biggest years of Product Development at 10x, and it’s been one of the most challenging as well. We’re going to ship our first in situ sequencing instruments this quarter, which has been a huge push for us. It’s been a multi-year effort, tracing back to work that started off in George Church’s lab at Harvard many years ago. There were some companies that started from that work which we ended up acquiring. So it’s been a multi-year effort, and now this vision is going to become a reality.
We're seeing things now on our pre-commercial instruments that are just mind blowing, in terms of the resolution and the capabilities. Ten years from now, there will be Xenium’s in just about every lab, and we will be doing high resolution single molecule measurements on all different kinds of analytes. It'll be so easy that everyone will want to do it. The clinical impact will start to take off too. Now's the time that we're going to start seeing another revolution.
9. What is another biotech (public or private) that you think serves as a paragon of an impactful company? What are the key learnings from this case study?
I have followed Illumina closely over the last decade. There are key learnings you can take from watching other companies. Focus, relentless execution, hire really smart people, know your customers and markets, keep innovating to outpace fast followers.
10. What was a learning from any key or thoughtful investors from the early days of 10X?
Relationships matter, investors are going to invest in the people first and foremost—especially the CEO. Our seed investors got us started. Our Series A lead investor, Bryan Roberts of Venrock, took us to the next level, and made it clear that time matters, a differentiated product that’s orthogonal technologically to solve for a big application is essential, and we better like each other because we are going to be in this together for at least the next seven years. It has been longer than that now, but taking the long view and appreciating that building a great company takes time was good advice. Also, trust in the CEO. Serge built that trust early on, and has continued to do that as 10x starts on its second decade in this “Century of Biology”. Our Chairman of the Board has also been instrumental in guiding us and helping us make the right decisions.
Biomarker doesn’t miss, these interviews are amazing in their depth and breadth of the titans of biotech!
Very Nice!