How I started my company and why-Jiwu Wang's speech at SDEE's naugural event

Originally presented at the first ever SDEE meeting held at Sanford-Burhnam Institute.

I started Allele Biotech when I was a fourth year postdoc at UCSD, just finished my postdoc fellowship. I wish I could say it was all planned out with clear goals and measurable milestones, as how I would like to describe everything we do these days, but it was not. Actually I had all the reasons not to start a company. My background, training and interactions with my mentors and colleagues really set my mind on an academic career path, and I had a pretty good publication record and a hint of an invitation from a former committee member to apply for a faculty job. On the other hand, I had no experience at all or much interest in business.

The one factor that did push me in the direction of becoming an entrepreneur was that I was exposed to the fact that small business could get NIH grants through an application, review and award process not too different from that of a typical research grant. That is something I kind knew how to do and had interest to try. I had friends who were truly interested in business and wanted to get their feet wet in a startup before moving on to higher positions in bigger places. We had no way of attracting real investment though. If I were an angel or venture investor I wouldn’t invest in ourselves since we were all postdocs with no experience running any serious business. So I started doing the one thing I did learn how to do through years in academic labs, writing grants, and my publication record didn't hurt. The reviewers said this is a first rate scientist with a good idea, let’s give him a chance.

The core of these grants were basically something I knew very well, such as RNA molecules, polymerase, protein-RNA interactions, and they were presented in such a way that suggested the research results could be turned into something useful for advancing biology. Well, I got my first grant, then the second, and the third…that was how we had the company up and running. To be a PI on a business research grant you need to be above 50% employed by the company, so even though I wasn’t committed to the company and didn’t draw any salary from it for a long while, I had to request a demotion to 49% status at UCSD and lived on a half postdoc pay.

The above is how I started my company, here comes why I am still there. The number one reason that I gradually moved to be completely dedicated to the company, believe it or not, was academic freedom, by which I mean you can run wild with any ideas for an experiment and don’t have to worry about any pressure from anybody, as long as you take responsibility for all the consequences. To me, research in a small business setting provides the ultimate freedom in the broadest sense. We got our first product two years after the company started, a patent filing on RNA interference which was outlicensed to Promega for marketing.

A couple more grants and patent filings later we have built a critical mass in terms of products, company structure, and a gradual understanding of the difference between pure research and running a business. In 04 we started direct marketing of research reagents in siRNA and genotyping, in 08 we acquired a company that was bigger and older than us, and added more than 1,000 products in the fields of antibodies and viral systems. We were hit pretty hard by the current economic downturn, and we pulled ourselves out by the hair focusing on two things: online presence and adding new products. Even in the summer of 09 when we were in the deepest financial trouble, we did not make any dramatic changes in our employment situations, but rather, we added one new product line per month in the field of stem cell/iPS, fluorescent proteins, biosensors, screening services, etc, at least one new product per week. We are very active in social networking, having daily activities in Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. That’s where we are now.

Biotech is a fast moving field, we should never run out of ideas, rather our challenge is to build products around new discoveries and find a balance between trailblazing and completing what we have started.