At ABRF last weekend (Association for Biomolecular Resource Facilities) not only was I able to attend George Church’s talk, but I also was able to hear Steven Roever talk about his new nanopore sequencing company, Genia, where he is CEO.
As George Church introduced him, he has an unusual background for a next-generation sequencing company – involved with encryption and Digital Rights Management in prior roles, he met Roger Chien, a Maxim semiconductor company Digital to Analog Conversion chip expert, while at a Sand Hill Road Starbucks, as Roger was reading a book about the origin of life. (I’m not sure exactly which book, but it could have been Freeman Dyson’s.) Maxim, by the way, is a 9500-strong, $2.5B revenue company.