Ship of ThesION

The Ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical riddle: if each year some of the planks and other parts of Theseus' ship are replaced so that eventually every part is different than the original, is it the same part?  In a similar way, every human organization undergoes changes in personnel which can lead to the question: is it the same organization?  Oxford Nanopore has been undergoing a great deal of change in upper management - longtime SVP Rich Compton posted his departure on LinkedIn last week.  Will ONT be the same company after all these changes?

At the very top, it has been announced that CEO Gordon Sanghera will be leaving next year.  A replacement has not been named yet and this is a typical planned CEO transition rather than an abrupt change.  Will the new CEO be as pugnacious as Gordon?  Is loving punk rock a requirement for the replacement, or will future London Calling's feature smooth jazz before the opening address?

Speaking of pugnacious, it has also been announced that founder and designated attack dog Spike Willcocks has already left the organization.  As I've written before, Spike was willing to publicly take very aggressive enforcer stances against perceived threats against brand purity, but conversely was never seen on the London Calling stage.

Back in May at London Calling - the first since CTO Clive Brown left late last year, I was looking for change.  In addition to Clive leaving, which Sanghera noted in a heartfelt manner in his conference closing talk (and then publicly chastized me for looking at my screen as I tried to get the tweet right), Oxford Nanopore has been under increasing scrutiny in the markets and press as to when they will become profitable. In general it felt the same - highly produced, the classic architecture of Old Billingsgate decked out in ONT livery, but as Vincent Vega said "it's the little differences". Now I don't mean the always excellent food was replaced with Le Royale with Cheese or Krusty-brand gelatinated non-dairy gum-based beverages.  But there were noticeable differences.

First example is the obvious one: without Clive, there could be no Clive giving the technical update at the end of the first afternoon.  Now that had evolved from the original spectacle of Clive giving an hour plus impassioned monologue to sections given be various lieutenants, but with Clive typically giving the final segment. Now it's Rosemary Dokos, who used to follow Clive with the "here's what Clive said that is actually operative" and Lakmal Jayasinghe who had in recent years given many of the most science intense portions of the update.  

Clive used to spend a good 10-15 minutes of the talk reviewing nanopore sequencing in detail, a section of great utility to anyone unfamiliar with the technology - but who goes to London Calling who isn't already familiar with the technology?  This was pretty much eliminated this year.  Another difference is that in the past great amounts of time were spent on platform technologies that would not deliver until some unspecified time in the future; this year they were all crammed into a slide or two with no detailing at all.

Clive was famous for seemingly getting to the end of his time and they "just one more thing", which would be the most amazing, harebrained, visionary, and impractical new idea.  This year Lakmal did say "and one more thing" - and then launched into the specifics of the promised release schedule.  

Another example, the ONT product showcase area.  Typically this would have all the gear currently for sale or previously announced.  After Clive's talk on the first evening, all the new toys he had unveiled would be added to the mix so one could hold them and pseudopaparazzi like this scribe could photograph them and tweet them to the world. 

But this year, the lineup of gear when you got in was strictly what was already for sale, save the low technical risk laptop configured and optimized for supporting P2 Solo.  Everything else appeared to be a product - and also conspicuously missing were Flongles, which the Technical Update made clear are being sent to pasture.  

After Dokos' and Jayasinghe' talk?  No changes.  No new toys since they didn't announce any.  Now that's a change!

It was also interesting how little time in the Technical Update was given to the ElysION robot, the Tecan-engineered beast that must weigh several times more than all other ONT products in the company's history combined.  A very un-Clive offering, one might think it would have gained stature with his exit, but that certainly wasn't the case.  It was mentioned in the talk, but no dedicated slides IIRC.  

ElysION was out on the floor and doing some limited demos.  It was striking how long I could stand by it - or at any product table - and not be approached by a single member of the ONT sales force.  I did note one of these times that apparently very, very important sales discussions were taking place between such individuals while I waited in vain.  Now, this could just be me, but I talked to at least one other attendee who reported a similar experience.  I'll be the first one to wave away unwanted salesperson attention, but this seems like a very poor execution by their staff.

ElysION does feel like a bit of a odd duck at London Calling.  This is, after all, peopled mostly by ONT enthusiasts.  Many are from small labs that like to stay small and have small budgets. So perhaps this isn't the conference to be selling it at. ElysION is an expensive solution to de-expertise ONT sequencing.  Worst, ONT is getting new applications onto it at a snail's pace - the original microbial whole genome sequencing appeared to be the only fully operational protocol.  It isn't clear how well ElysION is selling, but I'd hardly be surprised to see it on the sunsetting list come next London Calling.

But back to the organizational change theme.  There's also reports on ASeq, which I've been too lazy to verify, that an increasing number of ONT Sales and Marketing folks have Illumina on their resume.  That would have seemed anathema at the height of the Spike/Gordon/Clive era of distrust for anything tinged with Illumina, but the market leader with a huge sales organization over many years is certainly going to show up on many such resumes.

When I was at Millennium, we had what was frankly a very arrogant attitude towards legacy pharma - but we were also hiring aggressively out of legacy pharma to get the downstream experience we simply did not have and could not realistically develop quickly enough internally.  Which had me thinking at that time - could we really cherry pick all the people in big pharma who wouldn't drag over the supposedly stale pharma culture we were the antithesis of?  The longer that is in the rearview mirror, the more absurd the idea becomes to me.

Another change:  ONT was touting that they won an award for logistics.  Half a decade ago I would have taken that as prima facie evidence that nobody else entered the competition; we often had our kits or flowcells delivered late (or were they? There really was no delivery date promised) and they were often the wrong kits - flowcells mismatched with the library prep.  But apparently they have corrected all this - in no small part by shrinking the complexity of their product offerings. 

And there have been many changes in the technical staff lineup.  While many veterans remain, there are many former stars of the London Calling presentations who now have senior roles at biotech startups in a diverse array of fields - though interestingly while some are working on nanopores none seem to be building companies that leverage Oxford Nanopores.  

So Oxford Nanopore is growing up and morphing into a mature product company.  For various reasons it is shedding some of the people who did the initial building.  Some of them may just not fit anymore, some may be just looking for a break, and some may just be seeking new opportunities.  Oxford's ship sails on, changed but not beaten.