Example:I once worked in a startup building a new type of supercomputer. One of the markets we had picked was the arcane field of production geology. Since I knew nothing about the field, I realized before I could even hire a domain expert to manage this market, I needed to get educated in depth. I traveled to all the petroleum geology trade shows and conferences, I spoke to customer after customer to understand their needs. I spent days in the Houston petroleum engineering library. Just when I thought I knew enough to fake it as a technical expert in this area, I convinced Chevrons La Habra research center to allow me to offer their research group a two-hour course on the use of graphics supercomputers in petroleum applications.

I promised it wouldnt be a sales pitch, just an update on what advances were occurring in computing that were relevant to petroleum geologists. In front of an audience of 30 or so, I spoke about the state of the art in computational reservoir simulation and what could be accomplished on the new class of machines that were coming from companies like ours.

During the question-and-answer session my heart was in my throat, since my depth of knowledge, like any good marketer, was no more than one level away from being a complete idiot. At the end of the talk, the head of the research facility approached me and said, That was a great presentation. Were glad your company hired real petroleum engineers to come speak to us. We hate it when the sales and marketing types show up and try to get us to buy something.

For one of the few times in my life I was at a loss for words, and I was completely unprepared for what came next. Heres my card. If you ever want to consider a career in Chevron research, wed be happy to talk to you. Thats what I mean by understanding your potential customers and problems in sufficient depth.

An email #1 Subj: iBinom at the edge of genome analytics

Dear Anthony,

My name is Alexandra and I represent an innovative company iBinom which has an expertise in cloud based genome analytics based on raw genome and exomesequencing data. Our primary focus is to improve inherited disease diagnostics which is especially crucial topic in neonatology and pediatrics.

Our analytic service is simple and fast: a clinician may upload genomic data to our web-site https://www.ibinom.com/ and get a comprehensive medical report less than in an hour. The report contains a list of mutations detected and scored by pathogenicity as well as data quality statistics. In the next months we are going to introduce clinical symptoms support system in order to narrow down potentially causative mutations and add more value to genome annotation we provide with.

We seek for collaboration opportunities with professionals in medical genetics across the world and we are curious to know your opinion what challenges you see in clinical applications of genome analysis for Mendilian disease diagnostics. We invite you to register at our web-site and to access our free-trial offer. We would be happy to get your feedback about our service and kindly ask you to let register your colleagues working with genome data.

Our developer Anton is going to be in San Francisco early next week. If you could contribute some of your time to meet him, he would be pleased to discuss with you current needs and opportunities in the field of genome analytics.

Thank you so much,Kind Regards,Alexandra

Business Development iBinomwww.ibinom.comav@ibinom.com

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Sarah, Claritas:

I checked in with a group of colleagues who have been responsible for evaluating options for our bioinformatics. Unfortunately, we have already identified our bioinformatics/ analytics provider will be announcing that within the next several weeks.

Thank you for being in touch. However, we will not be pursuing an investigation of your solution.

An email #2 Subj: Boston Innovation Summit; iBinom intro

Our team performs NGS data analytics for inherited disease diagnostics.

We study different NGS data analysis pipelines and annotation tools based on public databases (HGMD, ClinVar, dbSNP etc) and predictive analytics scores such as PolyPhen, SIFT etc.

We are very curious to learn about NGS diagnostic processes in your lab and to share our experience in data analytics field. What NGS projects do you usually work on, are there many of them that relate to inherited pathologies?

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Sean Hill:

We study genetic causes of neurological disease, and focus on inherited disorders from multiplex families, though we find de novo mutation in simplex families. Our dataset currently consist of ~1500 individuals from 600 families. Our analysis pipeline consist of aligning and variant calling using GATK and annotating with annovar.

The annotated variants are stored in a mysql database and queried for pathogenic variants. Like may other labs, our largest problem is identifying causative mutations from the list of 3-10 (or more) candidate variants that we usual find in a family. I would be interested to see how your software can help interpret our data.