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Could More Frequent Blood Testing Transform How We Detect Disease? · Diagnosing Dx

• David Filby: Welcome to the show this week, Octavian, how are you? Octavian: I am well. How are you? David Filby: I am very good, very good. Where in the world are you? Octavian: San Diego. We're in beautiful Carlsbad. We've had a run of swell and weather, can't complain. David Filby: Surrounded by lovely plants. Octavian: That's right. The jungles of Southern California. David Filby: There we go. I'm really excited actually, because you and I have been in discussion about having this podcast for quite a long time now. Actually, it might be close to a year. And I love speaking to founders early and then knowing that these milestones are coming up. So whenever it's like, now's a good time to do it, I always get excited about hearing ultimately progress in the industry, which is not easy. Progress in this industry is not easy. Octavian: Yeah. David Filby: I'm sure we've got some exciting things to go through. before we do that, be great to understand more about you, your background and career and give us sort of an insight and introduction to yourself. Octavian: Sure, sure. So my name is Octavian Florescu. I'm the CEO of In Diagnostics. And my background really by training, I'm an electrical engineer, a microchip designer. And I went to grad school and made the painful transition to analytical biochemist. and then we spun out a company out of my research and made the painful transition to entrepreneur. and now I'm a dad, a husband, an entrepreneur, just trying to keep it all together, you know, the American dream with the American problems. David Filby: So straight out of PhD into entrepreneurship, is that right? Octavian: Yeah, we spun out the research. That's right. David Filby: And so corporate life, not something or have you touched on other companies before and worked within other companies before? Octavian: I had. I was an undergrad at University of Waterloo and they had a internship program. So I actually rotated through a large number of companies. So my first job at 19 was designing nuclear power plants for GE. And then I moved on to a small startup, we're doing fiber optic development for high gigabit Ethernet. And then I moved over to Qualcomm, and that's where I spent about two and a half years doing chip design. So by the time I went to grad school, I kind of had like a lot of industry experience. I had seen a lot of management structures. and so when I spun out, you know, being an intern, you don't get to see a lot at the very top. But being in the Bay Area, because my PhD was at Cal. You kind of are imbued with that ecosystem. There is just a lot of discussion about companies and technologies all the time and it's hard not to jump in the fray, you know. David Filby: I think that's a great point. I feared being an entrepreneur for a long time in my career working for other companies because I always felt like I didn't know enough to lead a business outside of the infrastructure and support of a corporate environment or even though I worked for small growth companies. And then actually when you become an entrepreneur, what you learn is that all these resources, yeah, nobody knows and everyone just helps each other. There's so much community to it. Octavian: Nobody knows. Yeah. There's no rules. You just do what you gotta do to get to the end zone, you know, that's it. David Filby: Yeah, you just really learn quickly. So what Octavian: Yeah. David Filby: was the spin out that you first launched and sort of take us through that journey? Octavian: Yeah, being a chip designer, it was quite obvious to me that microchips are powerful tools. It was also quite obvious that there's very nonlinear and exaggerated gains from integrating things on microchips. So my natural thought was let's integrate blood testing on microchips. It just seemed like a natural progression of technology. And I looked sort of around and I'm like, we're still stuck with the glucometer, we're still stuck with these like Technologies from the 1980s, and this is one aspect where there hasn't been a lot of progress. A lot of the other industries were kind of like on their own. They were they were fine. Like semiconductors were well funded. The progress was being pushed on by a lot of individuals. But blood testing, you know, I felt from a semiconductor perspective was lacking that approach. And so I started working on that on my PhD, and you know, it's kind of weird because I have this mentality where it's like, this is really difficult - to your point about how difficult it is in the diagnostic space. And I kind of want to stop. And so I'm trying to kill it all the time. And so in my PhD, I kept on trying to kill the project and be like, no, no, when we get to a fundamental barrier, I'm gonna move on, I'm gonna go back to designing semiconductors. And it just kept on going. And so, like, by the end of my PhD, we had this little prototype. It was janky, it was, you know, like terrible. But it showed signs of life, and I'm like, well you know, obvious next step now is spin it out. And we started doing business plan competitions to learn a bit. And even there it was kinda like co-op at Waterloo, it was business plan competitions at Berkeley where we spoke with some of the leading experts in the world, both VCs and the Corporate Titans, and they were giving us insight. You know, like one of my first board members coming out was running a giant company and we just had all sorts of insights into what to do and what not to do. And so it was a fast education. It was a very, very interesting and complete education from a startup ecosystem perspective. David Filby: Is the current company a continuation of the tech from that company or are you now doing something different? Octavian: Kind of, yeah. So it is a continuation of the philosophy and ultimately we even bought my original company. So it's both, but it's kind of an evolution. I would almost say so one of the things about being an entrepreneur, I feel like you're never an entrepreneur until you've been fired by the board that you've seated. That's like a real feeling, you know? so that's eventually what happened. And so I started another company that had a different technology, but in the same, idea of integrating things on microchip, integrating blood testing capabilities, including the sample prep. And David Filby: So does the previous company still exist? Octavian: I guess not. We bought it. So it's ours to own. We kind of rolled all the assets into the new company. It was a typical kind of thing where I didn't wanna exit. The company we had a large strategic that ultimately wanted access and control and so I said no, board said yes. You know, there's only so much you could do. And in the end we sold controlling shares to that company and we walked away and started something new. So I call it an aquifier. It was a great outcome and we learned a lot. But I would say more importantly, what it did, and this is something that like I kind of talk about a lot, or increasingly so. When you're an entrepreneur and you have an idea, you tend to get married to that idea. And it's really hard to pivot. And I feel like especially in a first idea where you really don't know the lay of the land, you almost have to treat your idea as a passport into a new industry. but then you gotta lay the land and you gotta look around and be like, where are the really low-hanging fruits and the sweet spots in this new territory that I've embarked on, you know? And when you have blinders, and I definitely did in my first company, I had blinders of like, this is what we committed to, this is what we're building, there's no pivot, there's no going back. It's like it was kind of like white knuckle approach to building it. And getting released from the company actually was like a get out of jail free card to then pivot. And so we took everything we've learned and we looked around. Anna, my co-founder and wife, was working with me in the previous company, and we asked ourselves, what are the weak spots? Where are the easier to get to kind of markets that we could go into, what are the easier technology burdens? And we pivoted to a new direction that ultimately was actually faster growing and more dynamic than the previous company. So that's how we ended up acquiring them. David Filby: This is super, technically you've exited, which is good, put that on the resume, right? So Octavian: Right. David Filby: was it a difficult decision to get back in and do it all again and be an entrepreneur again with your wife? I'm sure that wasn't just one conversation over dinner. I'm sure that was an extended. Octavian: It was one conversation. It was one conversation. She's gonna hate me for saying this, actually. Not one for the controversial things to say. So she's the one that's like, you know, we should do this again. Because she joined sort of later in the process of my previous company, and we had already been like we were kind of on an upward inflection. We closed shortly after like a six million series A, all sorts of things. What she didn't see was like the ten years prior. Like I bootstrapped the previous company probably for about seven years. Like, if you could believe it, without like salary. That's like it, like, it was ramen. I was like looking at myself. I had a PhD, I had standing job offers from like Qualcomm for like multi-hundred thousand dollars a year. And I'm like, I'm eating ramen. Right? And so she caught on the tail end of that. And but I tell her stories, and she, you know, it's like one thing to actually tell the stories, it's another thing to live the stories. And so she was like, let's start again. And I'm like, are you sure you want to do this? Because this is kind of like a thing, you know? You gotta do it because you love the process, not because you want an outcome. If you're looking at the outcome, you are going to go through the roller coaster ride of your life. If you kind of just like understand you're on a roller coaster. And there's gonna be ups, there's gonna be downs, and you have to now figure out how to manage yourself, then do it. But she came to me, she said, let's do it again. I said, absolutely, I'm down if you're down, that was it. And from then on we just shoved off and, you know, floated off to sea. David Filby: I love that. I love it because I think every entrepreneur knows that to make it work, you have to have the approval and support of the nearest and dearest people to you, right? But Octavian: Absolutely. David Filby: I love what you say about the, you gotta love the process. So who is In Diagnostics and what's the product, what you guys trying to achieve and then we can work backwards from that. Octavian: Sure. So In Diagnostics, the full name is Integrated Diagnostics. And it's kind of interesting because that was the original name of my first company in 2009 when we spun out. But we did a quick check, and there was a company that was already called Integrated Diagnostics up in Seattle run by Leroy Hood. And so we're like, man, that's like our dream name because it's Intel, it's integrated electronics, integrated diagnostics. It's like that's kind of our business model. We staggered everything so that it could run off this intelligence inside business model. But we couldn't have that name. And so we chose another name for my prior company. And then this time we kind of got a little bit like modern with it. So like In D, and it has multiple like entendres of like we're super independent. And it's also integrated diagnostics and you know, all sorts of like little threads we could pull on that. But our whole our company is dedicated to building microchips to run blood tests. It's been Anna and myself for the longest time. People talk about minimum viable product, but they don't talk about minimum viable company. Like when capital goes around, it's like, yeah, okay, you're gonna wanna grow fast and you're gonna wanna basically set yourself up for the learning curve ahead, like basically pull in people that have seen the future and could help you navigate it more efficiently. But when capital is tight, as it has been in diagnostics for decades, except for COVID, you wanna structure a minimum viable company, which is what is the minimum amount of resources that allows you to get to an MVP and to sustainability. And so luckily with Anna and myself, it's just us two. And so until we get to sustainability, the plan is to stay as minimally viable as possible and grow more organically, which this is not a message that resonates with the venture crowd, but probably increasingly so with founders that, maybe don't have access to capital. So we did kind of our on our second go around we took a different approach from the traditional venture route and did kind of like this organic, homegrown, build it yourself kind of thing, and we'll see how far we can get with that. David Filby: And so introduce us to the product itself and the unmet need you're trying to solve. Octavian: Sure. Well the unmet need is kinda simple. It's data. You know, like we have all this information coursing through our blood. I call it like the information superhighway of the body, right? You have a hundred trillion cells that are all sending packets of information in the form of molecules back and forth, and we don't have access to it. And so that's kind of the problem. Like we're getting into the generative space on the information technology side, not even talking about the access. Whereas on the biology side, access is curtailed to, you know, you have your glucose, you have your creatinine, you have a couple indications, and that's it. And so it just seemed like that's where the need is. If we're really to take a big bite out of the chronic disease space, which accounts for 15% of GDP, you gotta start getting access to that information, that well of information. And so we developed this little microchip. It looks something like this. This is our little eight-in-one test that takes a drop of blood. So you see kind of the poster behind me. David Filby: Yeah. Octavian: it takes a drop of blood and gives you the results on your phone. So this is the full cartridge. So you put a little drop of blood in the middle, and there's kind of like a modular sample prep. So that's one of the key things we took from a Qualcomm-esque idea. It's that you really have to integrate everything and you really have to make everything modular, you have to make it scalable, all sorts of things. And so we now give eight indications for liver and kidney. So we give BUN, creatinin, eGFR for kidney disease. And ALT, AST, alkaline phosphatase, T Billy, and GGT for your liver health. And this is obviously valuable for a variety of different people. So providers can now run more tests outpatient. If you're uninsured, you could run these at home. So we're trying to really improve access to routine blood testing. And then the next question there is what do you do with that access? And from my perspective, I think one of the most valuable things to do with that access is to start personalizing the medicine. So if you're taking statins or you're on chemotherapy, you want to know what your baseline liver levels are and kidney functions are. And then you want to monitor them over time. And so now all of a sudden, I could be a critic of AI, but what AI is really, really good at is extracting patterns out of data. And so if you start generating reliable, good quality, range-bound data, like not over like a surface of operation that is multidimensional, but really kind of range-bound, AI is fantastic at peering into that data and picking out the patterns sooner than any human ever could. And so that's where we see kind of like the future is that if we're developing this tool that provides a huge amount of data, it could really enable new models of care that could detect things, or at least our whole thing is diagnose sooner, stratify better, monitor often. That's kind of the solution to that problem. David Filby: The testing that you're talking about the improving access to what does that level of testing look like? Today for someone who wants to go get these things tested and how frequently are they having to go? Octavian: Yeah. So well, most people, I don't even know what the statistics are, but let's say 50% of the population, they run routine blood work once a year. There's a small fraction that runs it, let's say more. Like let's call them like the very motivated well. Most people run it less than a year, and there's some people that almost run it never. And the problem is there's kind of two problems. I'll come at this from an engineering perspective. You have inter individual biological variations, which is like my levels are different than yours. So my one point reading and your one point reading might mean different things. That's the first thing. And the second thing is the intra-individual biological variability, which is that they move throughout the days, weeks, years, they shift. And so if you're interrogating this like baseline offset plus noisy system once a year, you know, from a signal perspective, you're folding all the noise back down into your measurement. You know, like all the noise in the system basically comes right back into your measurement. And so really you're under-sampling your signal. And so if you start increasing the frequency at which you can test, you could then fold less noise into the signal and get to a truer state of the underlying physiological function. And so that's kind of the idea behind it, which is increased access equals increased frequency, which equals decreased noise in the measurement. And that's how you get additional information to tackle these big problems head on and actually make a dentity. David Filby: And so you've mentioned about keeping lean and not necessarily raising large institutional capital. So where's the development now? Where's the product up to and even sort of commercialization of the product? Octavian: Yeah, so we are in a prototype form on our Aplex. We just finished it probably like a couple months ago, a month ago, and we're releasing it for beta use in the veterinary market. So one of the aspects of making a minimal viable company is that you gotta figure out what your early revenue sources are. Back to that whole concept of the pivot, the get out of jail free pivot. Chemistries are really interesting application in the veterinary space because they're completely unregulated and the implementations are identical to the human. So the transition does not require any kind of changes in the implementation. And it forces multiplexing, which is one what we want to do, and 16plex basically captures the entire market. And so this is available for testing to any veterinarian as a beta right now. And we wanna iron out the kinks and then we will be pushing it into mass scale production. We hope to get profitable within the next year or two. And then we will use free cash flow. I mean, if somebody comes to us and says, Hey, I love what you're doing, here's a stack of cash on good terms. We believe in your vision, we believe in you, let's go do this. Let's accelerate. But if not, the plan is to use the free cash flow to then get into the human space and start developing products there. And so we look at the veterinary space. First of all, we love the veterinary space. I mean, the people are awesome. You don't have third party payers, you don't have insurers. Our usual sweet spot is like kind of like the owner operator. So you go talk to the veterinarian that owns the practice. If they like what you do, they'll listen to you for about 10-15 minutes. You run a demo, boom. We've had people literally give us dollar bills for a box, right? So like when was the last time a doctor in the medical system ever pulled out their wallet and handed out dollar bills to somebody selling something out of the back of their car? David Filby: Love it, love it. It's like old school medtech from like 40 years ago. Octavian: Old school, old school. That's right. That's right. And so we do that. And we love that market. It's wonderful. It's great for new product introduction. It's great for development. And then obviously, then it has to be transitioned over into the human space. And we love the human space too. I mean, like, you know, as tough as a startup is, your North Star is always the impact you're gonna be making. And so we look at just the millions of people we could help in a real sense. I mean, it's kind of fascinating. Like if we could get this thing into the human space, we could save millions of lives a year. Like that's the bottom line. And that to us is kind of wild and we lose track of that all the time. Like there's no way, you know, on cloudy days you're not gonna see the North Star. You just have to know that it's there. David Filby: Let me ask you this Octavian, because this is fascinating. You've mentioned not raising capital from VCs, running lean, where you're getting your early revenue from is a really important focus for startups. And even aiming towards profitability. How much of that comes from your experience with your previous startup and you having been there, done that and sort of just gathered incredible lessons learned versus just the necessity in today's market to have to operate like this because there isn't that many options. It's not like you could just go out and have 20 offers from a VC. It's just incredibly difficult right now. So what's at play there? Octavian: I think of C-3PO in these moments. It's my lot in life to struggle. You know, he said that too, R2-D2 at some point, walking through the sand. So like I grew up my parents were refugees from communist Romania. We bounced around refugee camps and homeless shelters and all sorts of stuff. So I grew up like outside looking in, you know, like we didn't have a lot. And so that was kinda normal for me. And when I started in the Bay Area, obviously I didn't know anything about business, so we kind of did the dance steps that you're supposed to do when when you spin out a company. But I always like one of my big passions is economics, and I always thought that like we got a problem here. Like we're walking into a serious dearth of capital. We had already seen it. Even by the time we spun out in 2009, the party was over for diagnostics. There hadn't been a lot of exits. The partnerships were starting to shed the members that knew diagnostics because it had not been returning. And so we've come in a world now that I think is being hit on two sides, which is one, diagnostic for the past twenty years has not returned. There are a couple bright spots in the LDT space that kind of have returned, but it's not a home run hit. Definitely the Cologuards of the world, the billion to ones, the Nateras, that kind of space is very ebullient, but traditional point of care blood testing. Starting late 90s, early 2000s, after the introduction of let's say point of care troponin, that was a big hit. BNP, maybe you could say, was kind of like one of the last little post-tremors. You had the abacus exit, handful of little things that happened. I mean it's funny because I say little. At the time, they were huge. my gosh, you know, whatever Biosight was bought, I believe 700 million, I don't remember, maybe a billion, two billion. Abaxis was a billion, two billion. We are talking about trillions now. Like back in the day, that may have made a headline, you're not even getting like a tiny little sliver on the Wall Street Journal for a two billion dollar exit at this point. It's just like it's invisible to the system, you know. And so between the fact that the exits are not there, and between the fact that there is a mismatch in the life cycles of a diagnostic, which often take 10, 20, 30 years to really blossom. And then there's one more factor, which is to your point, if you're not doing AI right now, you are not raising capital. It's just that simple. It's super, super tough. Maybe, you could kind of put together a round, but it's just really, really hard. And so those things have converged. And I'm just reverting back to my programming of like, you know, kind of shell-shocked five-year-old refugee living, you know, in a bombed-out hotel. It's like you just survive. You do what you gotta do to make it to the end, and that's it. Life is not glamorous, life is hard work, and then that's it. David Filby: It's the people that can get comfortable in unknown, right? The uncertainty that just keep going. It's good that you've got a smile on your face, you know? Octavian: Well, there is a kind of like freedom from your desires when you put aside the outcome and you start to learn to appreciate what you actually have. Like no one's life is better or worse. You just have to look around and make the best of it. And so I think that if you can actually internalize that philosophy, then it's a lot easier than working towards something that may or may not be there. And every time like the access obscures, you get scared, you know? David Filby: Now, commercially talking about the animal health space, is there other early commercial avenues that you're looking at in terms of generating that early revenue with the tech itself? Octavian: Yes, yes. That's a good point. So we are exploring partnership. So we want to be the Intel inside. And one of the things we've done is we've tried to make our business model as unique and modular as possible too. Because that's kind of what one of the success stories behind Intel is that they could be a supplier to anybody that deals with information. And so we want to do kind of the same thing. We don't have an instrument. Which means we don't have to cater to it. We have no reverse compatibility constraints. We are not beholden to particular implementations aside from maybe a production line that has to stay the same for regulatory reasons. But we could keep on innovating and we have kind of this plug and play capability of like making progress on the technology. And so I think the vision is kind of unique of like trying to get exponentially more information out of a drop using microchips. I don't think there's value in these large partners buying out the whole thing because they do not share that vision. They have other priorities, which are fine. And so maintaining that nugget of capability intact is useful. And there's also kind of like competitive leverage. The veterinary space and the human space are essentially non-competitive. And so we could afford to have non-competitive partners already off the bat helping us out because they would get new products and their synergies because their volumes would consolidate in our factories so we could have scale at a lower price. And then on top of that, they also cross-pollinate ideas in the sense that, like, let's say on the vet space, they wanna move towards molecular testing of parasitic disease in blood sooner. Well, imagine having a multiplex molecular test in the human space. And so that kind of cross pollination, I think, when you get to a critical mass of partnerships, build a new industry. And so that's kind of the approach we're trying to pull off. I mean, obviously with two people, we have a lot of hats, including business development, and so it's kinda hard to maintain the type of relationship these large partnerships are normally accustomed to. But, you know, hey, it's what we do. We just try to get to, alignment within these companies, which can be quite difficult and time consuming. And we're seeing if the partnership option actually is a viable business model ultimately. David Filby: That makes sense. Now for people that want to follow along with the In Diagnostics journey, what happens next? What are the milestones we should be seeing over the next 12, 24 months that we should be keeping an eye on? Octavian: I would say to the point of partnerships, we have a few partnerships in the pipeline. Hopefully they will cross the finish line. We'll see if that goes. We will be doing a broader launch on our 8-plex. So that's going to be fun. A lot of the milestones are actually kind of internal. Our number one priority right now is get profitable. And so, from a value creation perspective, it's very silent, but also very powerful. And so I think mostly from that all you'll see is a bigger smile on my face at some point. That's the only way you'll be able to tell. So yeah that's kind of the next thing. And then in terms of technology, we keep on progressing. Right now on our system we're at 80 microliters, which is two drops. We're working on miniaturizing it. We spoke to the FDA, they gave us some feedback on how to best get this into the marketplace, and so we're busy implementing some of those. And then obviously the next generation. So we've embarked already now on starting to integrate immunoassays. So our product roadmap is actually quite detailed David Filby: Yeah. Octavian: going forward, and so we're trying to put immunoassays on our system, and we have, I would say we're kind of at the advanced prototype stage on an immunoassay system that's looking very nice and just doing the same. I mean so far it's been working well and there's no reason at this point to slow down. David Filby: That's great. I'm sure if we had done this podcast a year or two ago, it would have been a very different story. When you're starting to talk about profitability, I mean, that's exciting, isn't it? Because if you're talking about it, you must believe that that's possible, you know? That's incredible to be honest. Octavian: We're two people, you know? We're two people. It's possible. That's that That's the minimum viable company approach. I mean, you know, it's not easy, but it is possible. David Filby: Yeah. Final question for you, Octavian. You've mentioned the challenges around diagnostics, the history of that and raising capital. How do you think that progresses in the near future? Do you think that gets easier? Do you think the landscape is changing or what's your prediction for diagnostics and capital being invested into the space? Octavian: Good question. Well, I do think the dearth of data is going to be a real bottleneck. I think demographics are pushing more pressure onto getting more data because the current system's unsustainable. I think with AI to the point that there are some very valuable uses for AI, in particular managing the data. And so I think the AI doctor is going to be something that's going to be increasingly utilized by people that maybe are disenfranchised by the system, or maybe even like if you have a system like this, now you could pop up a healthcare system in areas that don't have it, in rural areas and OUS markets immediately with an AI doc plus testing. And so I'm kind of optimistic about diagnostics. I also see massive headwinds in the sense that there has to be an exit. Like at this point, if there's no $100 billion exit, even $100 billion kind of doesn't move the needle. Like to really get on the headlines, you need a trillion dollar exit for people to be like, I am going to start putting a considerable portion of my portfolio into diagnostics, you know? And so I think that considering that chronic disease care is like 15% of all GDP, there's an argument to be made that there should be a substantial allocation placed in that direction. Diagnostics is not gonna be the solution for everything, but I think it's been so relegated technologically that there is some catch-up to do with the rest of society. And so I'm optimistic. I think it'll take time. I don't know how venture capital is going to adapt to diagnostics, considering that the timelines do not fit with a current model. I know there's like evergreen funds and all sorts of different models to do that, but it really doesn't fit. You kind of have to have like a 20-30 year mindset to do diagnostics properly. Like you pitch that and it's like crickets. Like in fact, you probably ought to get out of the room at that point because they have other things to do. David Filby: Yeah. Octavian: And so and so I don't know how that's all gonna play out. And you know, on the downside, the dearth of capital is gonna hit diagnostics hard, big time. Like if AI does not really engender the productivity gains that it has promised, we are all gonna be extremely poor as a society. We've gone all in, you know. And so David Filby: Yep. Octavian: I've seen that in Romania in places that, you know, maybe are a notch lower in level of development. Healthcare is not a priority. Healthcare is a consumptive good. You know, if you look back at like the USSR, they prioritized heavy industry because that was like the bread and butter. They needed to produce capital. And they're like, we're gonna put our money in heavy industry. We're not gonna do it in like consumptive good. Luckily, you know, healthcare does have a productivity aspect to it where if you could, increase the productive lifespan of an individual, that returns. And so there is a kind of like economic capital engine that you could tap. That's kind of what we're trying to tap. We're trying to get to that economic engine so that capital comes back into the space and you recycle it and it keeps on augmenting that way. But by and large, a lot of it like I don't know, 30, 40, 50% of all healthcare expenditure is end-of-life care, which you know is important. All of that dignity is critical. But it is technically an economic consumption. And so when we get David Filby: Right. Octavian: poorer Then people start cutting that off. And you get all sorts of bad policies, but the bad policies are there because we can no longer afford to do what we're doing. And that's where I hope that there's more capital that flows into diagnostics because they could understand that long-term investment is helpful, as opposed David Filby: Yeah. Octavian: to the fear of quick losses that then pulls the capital away. David Filby: Does that not then lean into the fact that it's not about institutional capital, it's about government direction in terms of what's important? Not to get onto this because you and I could probably talk about this for hours, but it does feel like Octavian: Yeah. Yeah, We hit the politics. There we go. David Filby: It's a bigger change at a government level than it is any sort of money managers. Octavian: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, like government on some level is the institution that's supposed to look beyond the horizon, you know? That's fundamentally its role. Corporations, they are free to look at whatever horizon, you know. You could be a day trader and your your horizon is fifteen minutes, or you could be a foundation where your horizon is 2000 years, you know, that's up to you. Yeah, I think there is a role there. It's unclear to me exactly how, just because a lot of diagnostic dies for very technical reasons, whether it's technology, whether it's marketing, you know, all sorts of reasons. And so it's often hard to predict. And what you want, in my opinion, is a diversity of shots on goal to ultimately get to the solution that works and scales. And the government approach often lacks that diversity. It's usually monolithic. And it's often scale, right? Like it's the easiest is when a business model works. Like healthcare. Let's say healthcare was a very healthy industry, but there was uninsured, and Obamacare was let's just scale it up. Like the whole the whole concept of increasing the insurance pool was a scale argument. If something works, government is great at scaling it up. And even that comes with problems because then when it stops working, you've scaled up a system that maybe has problems at the margin. And so government I think has a lot of pluses and all offers a lot of minuses in terms of of trying to push diagnostics forward. it'll be interesting to see how how that interplay ultimately works out. But what I would say is you need people, ultimately, that think beyond a human life scale to build these things. And so that's kind of the problem. David Filby: I agree with that a lot. Octavian, thank you for coming on and sharing the insights in diagnostics and the fascinating journey you've been on and are still in. I think there's so many great lessons for founders and especially first time founders to be taking from this, but aiming for profitability and what you guys have developed through your wife and you as a two man team is unbelievable. I really would love you to come back on and tell us when you hit profitability and you're working on humans. That would be awesome. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story. Octavian: Yeah, thank you, David. Thank you for taking your time and I'm happy to come back on any time. It's a pleasure to talk and we should riff on some more controversial topics next time. David Filby: Thanks, Octavian.