一般社団法人
日本質量分析学会

第121回　関東談話会講演会

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.