Perspectives on Starting a Business in Mass Spectrometry Using the "Bootstrap"
Method
Mark E. Hail, Ph.D.
Novatia, LLC
Abstract:
Starting a high-tech company is a challenging task, particularly in the difficult
economic climate that now exists. We started our company in the year 2000
during the height of the dot-com craze - a time when companies were raising
tens of millions in venture funding for merely putting up a website! Few of
these companies are still in business today. Instead, we focused on trying
to build a company slowly and deliberately where we retained control of our
own destiny. We chose the bootstrap method. Bootstrapping is where the owners
fund the business with their own capital and use the proceeds from their activities
to grow the business. Our initial seed funding was insufficient to fund a
laboratory where we could develop analytical products and services with expensive
instrumentation. Therefore, we formed mutually beneficial partnerships with
a number of existing successful companies, which allowed us to open a laboratory
and gain access to LC/MS/MS as well as NMR instrumentation. In this presentation,
I will chronicle the startup of our small business including our overall strategy
for developing an integrated suite of products and services, which utilize
LC/MS and NMR technologies to address the needs of the pharmaceutical and
biotechnology communities.
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