Episode 11: Building Precision NanoSystems and the Road to a Danaher Exit

[00:00:00] 

James: Yeah. We, we don't, we don't do it because it's easy.

We do it because we thought it would be easy. 

Armon: Yeah. If we knew going into like, no, how 

James: hard, how hard is, yeah. So I think, I think like underestimating. Market, underestimating building commercial. 

Armon: Yeah, 

James: there's a lot of things outside of the technical founders knowhow that I think is very challenging and, um, you know, also causes, you know, equal levels of risk as the technical risk.

Yeah. And so I think all of those things you're learning along the way and, you know, any, anytime you're learning it feels painful, but, so you feel a lot of pain along the way, I think, too. ​ 

Armon: Well, Jamie, thanks for coming on. See, I went informal. Dan, what's the verdict on the coconut mango Boom. 

James: It's uh, it's good. It's a lot. It's, 

Armon: we won't tell you the calorie numbers. 

James: Good. [00:01:00] 

Armon: Don't let ruin. Yeah. When the first time someone told me, I'm like, why did you tell me that? Like, I was happy here.

James: Ignorance is bliss. 

Armon: Yeah. All that mango sugar is bliss too. Uh. 

So, uh, love to start with some of your background on kind of. What made you wanna start a company in the first place? Why loading up nanoparticles? Like what was, what was the backstory there? 

James: I'm technical founder like yourself, so studied engineering physics at ubc mm-hmm.

And did a PhD in, in genetics, um, during my engineering degree. Did lots of co-ops internships and got the entrepreneur bug. Then working at like photonic crystal, um. Uh, wireless, you know, various physics oriented companies. Yeah. And switched into health. And during my PhD was in Seattle at the institute, persistence Biology.

And also worked at a VC during that time. And so I always had the entrepreneurial bug. Never had any intention of academics, uh, being a professor or anything. And so when I got into my PhD, I was [00:02:00] gunning to find something cool and interesting to do. And then, uh, met my co-founding team, which was of Precision Nanosystems, which was, uh.

Peter, who's, um, sage in, um, lipid, nanoparticle delivery systems? 

Armon: Yep. 

James: Another professor, uh, Carl Hanson Microfluidic and, uh, my, my entrepreneur, co-founder Wan Ramsey. And yeah, we invented a technology to make making nanoparticles easier and better and thought it was worthwhile to try to make a go of it.

Armon: Was there like a particular moment you remember that was the go? No go to do it. I think a lot of people fantasize about this stuff. Yeah. But then they don't actually do it. 

James: you know, we started the company super early, I would say. Uh, the technology was very raw, but I think it was seeing, you know, when Peter in particular, who had been in the field for 30 plus years at the time, said, this is gonna make a huge impact to manufacturing.

Um, we were like, okay, let's, let's try to make it happen. And then went some non-dilutive grants [00:03:00] to get going and then yeah, just started building from there. And then you get a couple years into it. You have to make it work. 

Armon: So when did you guys start, uh, and like what's like the Cliff Notes version of the trajectory from there, because we'll dive into various parts along the way.

Sure. 

James: Uh, so founded in 2010. 

Armon: Okay. 

James: Uh, built it for 11 years and sold it in 2020. Uh, one, um, in the first. Two to three years we were in the labs building technology and with some early customers. Yeah. Um, early partners with that, uh, developing our, our technology. So technology is, is a micro fluidic based approach to manufacturing nanoparticles.

And so I spent a lot of time doing that. Um, and then raised some angel investment along the way. I think we did our series A financing, not until like five years into the company's life. 

Armon: Oh, wow. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: How big was they? [00:04:00] 

James: What did we raise? We raised just under, it was like between 15 and 20 million, I think.

Yeah, yeah. 

Armon: And then, and then how many rounds did you guys do before the Danaher exit? 

James: Yeah, we raised a total of 26 million all in. Yeah. So we did some smaller Bs and Cs just internal to um, uh, you know, keep, keep growing, keep accelerating, and, 

Armon: yeah. 

James: Yeah. And then by the time we sold, we're profitable. 

Armon: Very nice.

Everyone's dream. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: So going into all this, what did you underestimate about what it would be like to start and run a company? 

James: Um, and, um, actually, can we stop for a 

Armon: second? 

James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I, did I mention my co-founder Yuan? I don't, 

Armon: yeah. To start. You did. 

James: I did. Okay. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Okay. I just wanna make sure he gets a lot of credit.

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Okay. Cool. You wanna start again? 

Armon: Um, so getting into all this, what did you underestimate going in? Like what was different from what you expected, um, when pursuing that [00:05:00] dream of a startup? 

James: probably might be a similar story for a lot of people that start companies right outta their PhDs or their school schooling is like, I don't know if you have expectations.

Mm-hmm. So I think underestimated probably everything at that point in time. Right. 

Armon: Yeah. The expectation that it's easy. 

James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What's, 

Armon: you're like, I went to that talk. They said it's all rainbows and unicorns the whole way. How hard can it be? 

James: Yeah. We, we don't, we don't do it because it's easy.

We do it because we thought it would be easy. 

Armon: Yeah. If we knew going into like, no, how 

James: hard, how hard is, yeah. So I think, I think like underestimating. Market, underestimating building commercial. 

Armon: Yeah, 

James: there's a lot of things outside of the technical founders knowhow that I think is very challenging and, um, you know, also causes, you know, equal levels of risk as the technical risk.

Yeah. And so I think all of those things you're learning along the way and, you know, any, anytime you're learning it [00:06:00] feels painful, but, so you feel a lot of pain along the way, I think, too. 

Armon: Well, well, one thing I liked that you said earlier was the, uh. After a few years in, we had to make it work. Do you wanna expand on that?

Because I can totally relate to that. 

James: Yeah. I think, I think you, especially as a young person, right? You, uh, you're trying to build your career, you have high hopes for what that will be, right? And you make a decision to do something that has a, you know, could be greater, could be zero. And so I think as you look at your co, your colleagues, I have.

You know, cool jobs doing this or that, whatever they're doing. You know, you kind of feel a bit lonely and isolated I think, as an entrepreneur. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Until it starts to become something that is, you know, getting traction. Something you're proud of. So I think, I think a couple, yeah, a few years in, once you're doing it, you start to realize that, you know, making a huge bet on this.

You know, the risk isn't that big in the sense that you're always gonna eat and put food on the table, but you are sort of. pressure you have on yourself makes it [00:07:00] feel like it's a life and death type type experience, so we have to make this work for hell or high water. 

Armon: Yeah, for sure. Because I also think there are like all those times where.

Your friends are like, oh yeah, let's go just get drinks on Tuesday. I'm like, no, I have this grant to write. Like, I'd love to but 

James: to work. 

Armon: I'll be up to two till 2:00 AM just like you, but for very different reasons. 

James: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. 

Armon: Yeah, I could. 

James: So it's a lot of work, but it's rewarding and it's exciting and it's, it's fun and.

Stressful. It's, it's good. 

Armon: how did you view the role of the board throughout this? Because I think on paper people hear one thing about what with boards they're gonna provide strategic insight and blah, blah, blah. But then I think the reality of what our lives are like, um, with investor board members, non investor board members, and how those dynamics sometimes are super helpful, other times can be problematic.

Like, what was your. Experience with that side of things. 

James: I think a few things there and, and I, and as [00:08:00] you go through the experience and you start to understand how things work, uh, you learn a lot. And, and for me, I think one of the, where I was naive was I assume that because these people had tons of experience, had a tremendous amount of to offer that the board would be more actively.

In helping to drive what the company should do or even the execution. Right? And then I remember vividly kind of being frustrated and talking to a mentor of mine and they're like, well, no, boards don't run companies. Management runs companies, right? And so I think that was a good learning where I was like, okay, they're there to help guide and support and you know, obviously with governance, but it's up to us to really make everything happen.

And I think that was a really healthy realization for me. 

Armon: a lot of times they might just be indecisive and they're kind of like, yeah, go do the thing. If it goes well, we'll all be excited together. And if it doesn't go well, we'll say, [00:09:00] you screwed up you child. 

James: Well, yeah, exactly.

And it's, it's, it's the role of the CEO and, and the executive team. Just figure out the direction and, and where to go. You know, we're in the weeds doing the work and we have the, you know, the ear to the ground, the ear to the street, so we should know where to go and 

Armon: and, and how do you feel about the dynamics with, let's say, investor board members?

Because I think there's an element of like, on the one hand, they're trying to be helpful, et cetera. On the other hand. You gotta be selling to them for the next round. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: So it's never truly, uh, hey, here's all the skeletons in every closet. 

James: Right? 

Armon: Um, so how do you feel about that part? 

James: I think always very upfront and honest with the board in that way. Like I think the, um, you know, no surprises is a good, is a very good, good way to approach them. But I do think in terms of dynamic. One thing that comes out seems to come out in a lot of boards is with, say when you have your VC investors or what have you, is that they have a fiduciary [00:10:00] responsibility to their companies.

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Which isn't your company. And I, I do see that the influence can be, or the discussions or you know, what's happening can be, um, driven. Probably too much by solving for their needs rather than the company's needs. And they'll do their best for the fiduciary duty of the company or, or what have you.

But it's, it's not as idealistic, I think, in that way. Yeah. Or as, as it could be sometimes. Um, probably just the reality of it. But I think then you'll see it and you'll see like, um, you know, even in a single board, different investors may have different needs, be it time horizons. Amount of money they wanna put to work, sensitive solution, all these things.

Right? And they can be in conflict and you're sitting around trying to solve for things outside of the, making the company successful. 

Armon: Yeah. 'cause I think the board stuff's interesting 'cause I feel like it's so mysterious to 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: Anyone not [00:11:00] in that room all the time. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: Uh, and I think some overestimate how.

Impactful it is and some underestimate and generally they'll get it wrong as to like why it impacted. 

James: Yeah. And I, and I, I think like everyone around the table should be a really smart, caring person, I think. Yeah. And, and I found that there are, there are different superpowers come out at different times.

So we had a couple operators on my precision board that were, uh, excellent for helping to think through strategy and tactics and mm-hmm. Um, you know, doing things, you know, the VCs can help with some networking, but also really came to shine during those, um, things that they'd be obviously good at. Yeah.

So helping maybe with the financing. Uh, for us, the exit was really like a, a real strong value add, things like that. 

Armon: so one question on geography. Like, you guys built this all out in Canada. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: Uh, what do you feel like were the pros and cons in doing it there? 

James: Sure. Yeah. So we're a [00:12:00] Vancouver based company.

Um, so the pros of that was, uh, Vancouver is one of the world leading places for lip and down particle technologies. Uh, real critical mass of companies there. So, um, that was great for talent. 

Armon: Yeah, 

James: great for, you know, people coming through. Great for recogni. Um. I guess brand, almost awareness being tied to someone like Peter Elli for this type of technology.

Um, also, I would say there's a lot of really good science scientists there. Uh, really, really good to, to get talent. And the talent wars probably aren't as vigorous as they are here in, in Boston. Yes. So we had good retention and things like that. Um, and we had employees here as well, uh, all over the states too.

Um, so you could see the different retention, different areas and so on. Yeah. Um, you know, I think some of the cons with it, at least for us at the time, uh, probably still is the same, where there's a definitely less vc, less funding. Mm-hmm. So you come down to the US to get, to get [00:13:00] your funds. There are good VCs in Canada that are making a a big impact.

But they're just less of them. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: So in your matchmaking process, you need to come and kiss more frogs mm-hmm. 

Armon: In 

James: the us Um, 

Armon: find your prince. 

James: Yeah, 

Armon: American Prince. 

James: American Prince of course. but for us, like it, it caused us to kind of harden the company a lot more before we started to.

Get capital to scale. Yeah. So I think we had sold 50 instruments before we raised our series A, so we had to really prove ourselves. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Which I think was a, you know, it was tough, but it made the company stronger. 

Armon: What, what do you think, and from your perspective, was defining the difference of like. I'm sure you were looking at other companies and founding teams, you're like, their stuff is nowhere near as I'm biased as you could be.

Their stuff is nowhere nearly as good as ours, and they just got a, you know, x million dollar check. 

James: Oh yeah. 

Armon: What the hell? 

James: Yeah. It wouldn't be competitive com companies per se, but it would definitely be [00:14:00] other life science tools, companies that had, you know, raised a ton of money, easily in the Bay Area or, or where have you, and you still see it now, like you see.

And I think it's a challenge for these types of companies if you do take too much money mm-hmm. You can, you, you can, you can put on the gas to scale, but it doesn't happen. And then you start to get in trouble. 

Armon: and related to the scaling, I mean, there's always tension between improving the product versus just.

Selling it harder. 

James: Yep. 

Armon: Uh, how did your view evolve on those things? Like, as far as how often you'd be like, all right, we just gotta make the product that much better. Like, no, we just gotta try harder. 

James: So 

Armon: like, 

James: yeah, it's a great question. Um, I think once you have a product and you launch it, then a big part of your mind share is like, how do we sell the hell outta this thing?

Right. How do we do what we need to do to convey the value to the customer and, and, and, and build awareness around it and all those, those facets. Uh, and then in the background, like [00:15:00] every customer feedback you're thinking about, okay, how does this fit into the improvements of it? 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And then do a very conscious launch of those improvements and say a new, new design, new product update, what have you.

But you don't, you learn so much from your customer by being out there on the pitch with them. There's just so much value in selling what you have and you need to make money. That's what these companies need to do, right. To be successful and you know you're as good as your last quarter kind of, yeah.

Attitude. So you do need to push that commercial team and you just learn and Yeah, and grow as a team so much. 

Armon: Yeah. 'cause I think a lot of people, at least technical founders, will probably fall on this trap of like, oh, my thing is if I make it great enough, it'll sell itself. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: And then they realize like, no, you gotta go still do that.

James: Yeah. 

Armon: No matter how great it is. Um, are there any things in particular that you change a lot about your approach to commercial execution over time? Like how you started off with the first product you were pushing [00:16:00] versus the last one? 

James: Yeah. Yeah. 

James: I think when you start off, you're founder selling the product and yeah, my co-founder Ewen, um, he was, uh, I was the engineer, he was the pharmaceutical scientist.

Yeah, so he was the customer, so he really had a good sense of what the customer thought, how they thought and what, what, what, what they needed. And so really helped to, to shape that. So you start off selling it as the entrepreneur, but then. You need to scale by transferring that magic to your, to your sales team.

So a lot of the challenge and the, and the things that need to happen is figuring out how to do that transfer. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Of how do you, how do you have the founder in the room without having the founder in the room? 

Armon: How do you clone parts of you and the brain 

James: into Yeah, exactly. Into these. And so it's building materials, it's training, it's picking the right people, it's getting the right team of sales, the right balance of science versus.

Selling excellence [00:17:00] 

Armon: and do you guys feel like you were, or maybe it shifted over time, actually, but do you guys feel like you were selling into a zone where it was more category creating? It's like, oh, you don't normally do this, but you should because X versus, oh, everyone wants a machine that can make them nanoparticles.

Is your box better than the other box? 

James: Yeah. So we, when we started the company, um, for lipid nanoparticles, it was a mix of. Small molecule. So chemotherapeutic, uh, reformulation. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And those are liposomal type products. And then what I was really excited about with my systems genetics background was the RNA space, right?

Armon: Mm-hmm. 

James: But when we started, it was only srna. Yep. And so then the field went from SRA to mRNA, crispr, all these different modalities. So as that happened, then you have this totally new market coming out. And so people wanted to get into the space, but making a nanoparticle was, was very [00:18:00] daunting and very hard.

Armon: Yeah. 

James: You had, and you had people that were in the field for a long period of time and were like, no, we can already do it with our. Mixing apparatus that we've home brewed. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: But then a large, large proportion of people are like, okay, that's, I can't go that slowly. I need to go faster. And so used our system to To do that.

To do that well. So it would definitely, making a new market, I think would was the dominant for us. 

Armon: like for you and you and as technical founders, what were some of the hardest concepts to learn on the business side, let's say, or would go most against your. 

James: I think building channel was hard.

I think that was really, really, running a team. I think those are things that you need to learn as, as you go as a technical founder, by the end, we had over 200 employees, so running that size of organization mm-hmm. Isn't something you learn, your PhD or even like running the 10 person team and being a good leader isn't part of your, you know, training.

Right. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And so you have to, and you have to kind of recognize that you don't know those things and, [00:19:00] and try to try to be better. 

Armon: Were there any, like big things you felt like you got wrong early on and then you're like, that was a near miss just because I was new to this? 

James: Yeah. I think, um, our biggest like, uh, near death experience, I suppose was, uh, when we started to scale our channel mm-hmm.

And, and scale our sales team. And so we had, um, Everyone wants to go fast, we want to go fast. Investors want to go fast. So then you hire your, professional to come and lead the sales team and, and take things over. And we had sold, you know, a fair number of systems by then, but that, that didn't go very well.

I think, uh, it was just probably the wrong fit of person. Person was excellent what they did, but not at what we did. And then being a a, a first time CEOI think he kinda let that linger for too long. 

Armon: Yep. 

James: and then things start to go badly and, and so we had to remedy it by changing that, that leadership, getting the founders [00:20:00] back, uh, giving you lots of credit for this to, to rebuild the sales team and.

Resha messaging to customer. And so, 

on and if you're listening, Jamie's been very concerned enough credit off.

Armon: Yeah. And I can totally relate to that by the way. 'cause I feel like one of the promises I was trying to make myself second time around was, 

James: yeah, 

Armon: I know I was way too slow to move on things where like the person was nice, but I knew this was not gonna work out well. 

James: Totally. 

Armon: And it dragged out for by far longer than it needed to.

To the detriment of themselves and others around them and everything. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: And so this time I'm like, alright, fine. If you know, you know, just deal with it. Yeah. Even though you hate it. 

James: Yeah. And it's best for both people, right? 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Yeah. Exactly. 

Armon: It, it just makes the inevitable happen faster. 

Uh, and I'm sure you guys face the platform versus therapeutic debate.

James: Yeah. 

Armon: Uh, so how did you go about that? I mean, the sexy thing to do, as we all know, is do therapeutics. So why would you be a, you know, lowly [00:21:00] tool person? 

James: Yeah, for sure. so we decided early on that we, like right away, 

Armon: yeah. 

James: We wanted to be a. Um, a product company, a tools company. 

Armon: Mm-hmm. 

James: And never really wavered from that.

Armon: Mm-hmm. 

James: We, we had developed technology, lipid technology for licensing, so kind of like a drug drug delivery part of what we did. yeah, I think that was never, never in question for us, and it was a great experience like building products. Your customers are using it, right? You, you get to see that iteration.

You can iterate with them. I think by the time I left, we had shipped over a thousand machines working with hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies. Uh, when I was recruiting drug developers to be on our team we're like, okay, you can either make one drug or you can work with hundreds of our clients and make tons of really cutting edge medicines.

Um, so it was both satisfying from a impact pharmaceutical impact sense, but also from working directly with your, your customer sense. 

Armon: Was there at any point [00:22:00] a significant investor and or strategic pressure to go down the route of therapeutics? 

James: No. 'cause we, we had kind of picked the people, like aligned everything.

Investors. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Uh, I would, I would say when we were raising our series A, the number of investors that would do. Tools per se 

Armon: mm-hmm. 

James: Was much smaller than therapeutics. So you have to go and, you know, beat the bushes to find those people that liked that business model. Yeah. It's probably different today, but, 

Armon: in hindsight, when you think about business model, like some people will try to do royalties and licenses, others will just sell the box and the consumables. How, how did you, how did you view the pros and cons of that at the time? Because I think it's like speaking for ourselves with our history, like it was very tempting to think that, oh yeah, Pfizer's totally gonna pay me a million plus annual.

Sure. Give a few percentage points on their drug. 'cause obviously they did this other deal, so naturally they would give us the same deal. Like [00:23:00] that can be very tempting to people. How did you guys think about it back then and what was, what is your retrospective analysis on it? 

James: we came out with the technology, it made a huge impact on, on people. Mm-hmm. So same thing where you're like, Hey, we're creating a ton of value. How do we maximize that value? And that's like align it with the, you know, per unit economics with the royalty or something. The manufacturing technology we had, so we had manufacturing technology services and lipid delivery technologies.

Mm-hmm. Were three different business models in the end for the manufacturing technology, was an instrument and concealable model. We tried to make that a royalty model at the start and that that we had some success convincing people, but it was extremely hard and I think it caused us, meaningful time.

Yeah. Because, and the lesson there is that invent on the technology, you know, do a business model that the customer is comfortable with. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And you can extract similar. economics through a cost of [00:24:00] goods versus a, a royalty, right? Yeah. Percentage. If you do the math and figure it out. Without calling it one or the other.

And people are just, um, more comfortable with what that is for the drug delivery technology On the hand, we're able to do license of, you know, royalty bearing licenses. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And that's just because that's what that field is, is used to. So I think really matching that economics with what the customer expects is a good way to go about things.

Armon: Yeah. And maybe stuff like that is a great example of like. If you're a technical founder, you're constantly thinking of how do I make my product better so they'll gimme more royalty versus try or more, are more likely to give me a royalty versus being like, you know what if I actually do the math on the like cost I'm selling it at versus the cost of goods.

To me that delta on the margin is functionally a royalty. I just shouldn't call it that. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: Uh, and let it roll. And then in this other zone where they are comfortable with it, I'll do it their way. 

James: Yeah, exactly. 

Armon: And like apply their analytics and problem solving to, yeah. The commercial side. [00:25:00] Um, so I guess getting into some of the highs and lows for you guys, what were, was there one or two moments where you felt like you kind of pulled a victory from the jaws of defeats, uh, that you're like, man, that was a really close call.

James: Yeah, I think, I think the sales thing, the channel one, the one that stands out, you know, there's other times where we. One of our more complicated instruments and it, it did not launch well. Yeah. And so we were sending people out on red eyes to Cambridge here to, to fix things. And some customers gave us a lot of slack on, on instruments that, that weren't, didn't perform as well as they should have right away. Yeah. but just, you know, you deal with the pressure and you, you handle it and you, you know, work really hard to, to make your customers successful. 

Armon: is there something you felt like you guys learned to do to make the customers more forgiving and collaborative, let's say when you're like, cute new toys, they break half the time.

James: Yeah, yeah, 

Armon: yeah. Like what makes them tolerate that and like it. 

James: Yeah, so our, our [00:26:00] flagship product, the benchtop, became the Ignite, super stable instrument, you know, always worked and super easy to use. So it's like, it's like making. Nanoparticle drug delivery. Yeah. And, um, so running the machine was easy.

Armon: Yeah. 

James: But making a drug delivery system that was good and worked and, and potentially innovative was extremely hard. 

Armon: Mm-hmm. 

James: we built the expertise to do that to, to make those drug delivery systems. And what we decided to do is we, to support our customers better, we set up a service. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And so we would run a service, um, that the customers could access.

we would help develop the protocols with them and then send it back to them with all the, and they have the instrument, but all the, all the ways and methods to do that. And then we found that not only were we having to be experts in our one unit operation, but the full, uh, set of operations across the full processing.

Armon: Yeah. And 

James: so we'd set up an, we set up analyticals, we set up, um. [00:27:00] All the upstream and downstream processing to do that. And that still exists in the company today. 

Armon: going back to the highs and lows, are there is, were there moments that you, in retrospect, you're like, man, I wish I did that, but I didn't and I wonder what would've happened if we did?

James: I think the big one for me would be accelerating. The manufacturer of our large scale 

Armon: mm-hmm. 

James: Manufacturing. So our, our, our business manufacturing business benchtop equipment, you make that preclinical, you start, you start to translate that, um, through an into clinical development.

Once you have a clinical development, you need a GMP ready machine that's probably at larger volumes. 

Armon: Yep. 

James: Uh, and so on. It took us, I think we got developing some other systems in between there. Whereas I think if we spent more time on the. ultimate GMP manufacturing platform. Um, we probably would've had more success getting clients on that side faster.

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Yeah. 

Armon: Because this was also around the time of like COVID and [00:28:00] the RNA vaccines really taken 

James: off. Yeah. When, when COVID vaccines took off, We weren't quite ready Yeah. As we could have been. I think we did work with some companies on their, their vaccines and so on. Yeah. But, um, but the scales that we were talking about was just very different.

Armon: And getting towards the end of the story, like, um, the acquisition with Danaher, like how did that come about? What made you decide to solve versus keep doing this for another whatever, many years? 

James: Yeah. Forever. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: we were like 10 getting 11 years into, into it. And, um, it was, you know, 2020 when we started making those decisions.

Armon: Mm-hmm. So 

James: kind in the thick of COVID. And we were deciding, you know, do we either go public? We're kind of at that stage where it's like, okay, we gotta start thinking about liquidity and we gotta start thinking about, you know, scaling further. 

Armon: Mm-hmm. 

James: Or do we partner with the strategic we were looking at all options from IPO to spac, all these things, right.[00:29:00] 

That were happening at that time. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And, uh, 

Armon: no more SPACs 

James: now. Yeah. Happy you choose certain doors over other doors. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: we decided the best thing for the company and where we were was probably a little bit too small to go public. Yeah. Uh, would've taken another 18, 24 months of mm-hmm.

Of growth, I think, uh, other than like going out super early. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And so we're like, okay. I think we, we just collectively management and board, um, look to do a strategic sale of the company and find a great partner. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Uh, went through a very competitive auction process. We knew Dan Hur, we knew all the players going into this, but we're really ecstatic to have.

Cytiva and Danaher as the partner for the company. Really great company. 

Armon: you know, after that, how did you think about what you would wanna do? Next, like you've gone to that end point, you're like, all right, this whole time I wanted to start something and make it happen. And now, now that part's done.

James: Yeah. It's a, it's a funny thing. Like I, I stayed on for two years to make sure everything's stuck in Vancouver, and, and it's now like a, [00:30:00] a center of excellence for Cytiva, which is, which is awesome. and so, but it's interesting because throughout your life you, you know. Person like myself, probably Like yourself, like you're pretty driven.

Armon: Yeah. 

James: And you're like, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that, and then I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna start a company and then I'm gonna grow, gonna exit. Oh, okay. 

Armon: What do I 

James: do 

Armon: now? 

James: So, so I took a year off full, full year off where I was like, you know, you see the picture of like two pairs of shoes and just smoke?

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Kind of like you're just kind of a wet noodle at the end of 13 years of, of all that. And so, and then at the end of that I was like, okay, I'm missing a piece of me. I wanna get back into doing science and technology and entrepreneurship. Helping companies, helping, uh, start a new project and yeah. Got 

Armon: yeah.

Your wife's like, thank God she's outta the house again. 

James: Yeah, yeah. Working at home, like home office. So still probably little bit too much that 

Armon: uh, alright. And then last question. If uh, you had a magic wand you could wave to change anything you want about the industry, what would you change? 

James: I think [00:31:00] maybe just kind of globally looking at capital, I think it would be great if we could figure out as an industry, how do we get more capital into solving these big problems. 

Armon: Mm-hmm. 

James: And I think it's a very small share of, of the flows of capital that will go into, say, innovation, right?

Yeah. And true innovation, right? So we're out here all trying to make new medicines, health, you know, other deep tech similarly. So how do, how do we tell our stories better? How do we. Be more reliable, whatever it is that capital needs to come in. 

Armon: Yeah. 

James: Such that a bigger percentage of the total capital pool is for making these great changes in, in society to, for the betterment of human.

Armon: Yeah, your answer is too similar to mine because I'm basically like, I think we have a communication problem where, 

James: right, 

Armon: people don't understand what we do, and that's why the average public's interest doesn't swing in our direction. Instead, they're like, Ooh, what's the latest app? Uh, 

James: whatever. 

Armon: Yeah, whatever.

Yeah, because they can relate to that and it's more comprehensible, whereas it's like, ultimately everyone cares about [00:32:00] healthcare and having better medicines and all that, but we make, it's. We as an industry, make it so hard for them to understand what the hell we're talking about. 

James: Right. 

Armon: Like, all right, nerds, you go over there.

You know, back to my candy crush here or whatever. It's people do now. 

James: AI Candy Crush. 

Armon: Yeah, AI, candy Crush, like Gemini. How do we get more money into our zone? Alright, cool. Well on that note, thanks again for doing this and uh, we'll, we'll post it soon. 

James: Yeah. Awesome. Thanks 

Armon: guys. Thanks. 

James: Cheers. Cheers.