I am happy with my current life, but that sounds like an exciting thing to do. So let’s sit down and discuss things in person with all the people involved, how about I come visit you in Delhi next week? I asked Ishaan after he pitched me the idea of a genetic diagnostics startup and asked me if I wanted to be a part it.
I thought about that myself for the next week and thought it was important to ask why I wanted to do that. My main reason was my concern with the data privacy laws and how ignorant the current market was (and is) about data privacy (maybe that was triggered by what I learned from the HeLa controversy and what I heard from Ishaan’s experiences from some of his interviews). It seemed like a possible thing to do because of Ishaan’s expertise in bioinformatics, my experience with technology, and the networks we had. Our competitors were not doing anywhere close to volumes we had predicted. So we thought there was room for everyone to play, and if we played fair, we could win (I know, I’m a stupid idealist!).
That was an opportunity that wouldn’t happen every day. So the experience seeker in me wanted to try that. Building and designing things always gave me a pleasure and I could remember my times in college when I wanted to start my own business when I got inspired by Ricardo Semler’s Maverick!.
I flew to Delhi the next week to meet them and in the first 3 days, we discussed the future of the company and we realized that we had some fundamental differences. We talked about it and reasoned that it would be better to solve these issues when we did not have money rather than when we had it. On the fourth day, we were down from three to a two people startup.
Over the next ten days, we were on a mad startup mode. We wanted to dig more deeper into the market information. We “made some calls” and were surprised by the amount of information that was shared with us by the desperate sales people and service providers. The opportunity seemed real and we decided to pursue it.
We shot about 20 interviews of people with some random questions on DNA as a prelude to be used for creating a public awareness campaign with the help of Tahir, a photographer and a friend. We did the interviews in UDSC and at the Delhi Pride 2015 as that was happening then and Tahir was covering that event. We also thought of a blog by scientists to talk about science in English. We did a network search of people who might have been interested in collaborating and contacted some of them and some of them liked the idea.
We negotiated with some service providers for the genotyping and after my return to my hometown, we got some sample saliva kits shipped from Canada. Scott at Oragene was the fastest in shipping some sample kits and we also liked the way they did business and designed their product. That was the most user friendly thing we tested. My only point to pick on the design is the size of the tube. It’s a bit too big for what it could have been as these things consume more energy to dispose off than to make them.
Over the next 2 months, we got our first 3 paid customer samples (which is a souvenir now). At that point, we were already having our questions about the future. I could imagine how we would relate time to money when big money flows in. Somehow, that was not what I wanted. I felt I was better off with enough free time to go for a long walk with Isha and be able to attend the spontaneous calls like the one from the resort manager.
It was a hard decision to tell Ishaan. I wasn’t sure how to tell him that and I knew I should not delay it because there are some bridges that cannot be rebuilt if things are not said at the right times. I am happy that he knew me well enough to understand that and he also had a similar feeling about the thing. So we decided to drop GeneScope Genetics.
After that, we reanalyzed what went wrong. One of the main reasons (save for the personal ones) was that we had felt that the team wasn’t complete. We were spending too much time to learn things that could have been easily solved by collaborating with people. The ineptness of the service providers to stick to the promised timelines was a major factor too. I guess there must be something fundamentally wrong with the sense of time keeping in a country where a TEDx event that was announced to start at 9 when they actually planned to start 10.15. To top it off, the organizer also pats himself for coming up with another gotcha on the punctual assholes.
Back to Genescope, we thought of designing and making better and cheaper lab equipments so that the labs without access to latest technology can also do more things with their limited budgets. We thought of starting with making magnetic beads and also thought of building small PCRs (like openPCR) that could change the pace of diagnostics of many diseases in rural areas. But we needed people and we had not found them.
So we decided to shelf the project only to revive it in a while with an idea of a crowdfunded genotyping project done by a collaboration of scientists around the world to find a better system and we wanted to start the conversations about better data privacy laws and better science awareness. But time was a problem. I was sure that I could not spend time on that at that point of time and we shelved it and decided not to actively pursue it and Ishaan moved to New York.
But the experience was great. It was a chance to meet a lot of great people and have some amazing conversations and realize what all things could be done and who are the people who can be counted on. But I guess I had other crazy ideas to be done first. Maybe that was inspired by the crazy idea wall we had in Steinmetz lab where the Maria project was born 😉
LifePickle 