TetraScience: Noise and Signal

In 2019, TetraScience CEO “Spin” Wang needed advice. Five years earlier, he had cofounded a startup that saw early success with a hardware product designed to help laboratory scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical spaces more easily collect data from various instruments. At the time, longtime technology CEO Patrick Grady warned the cofounders that the growth was illusory, and that they should think about how to better structure their business and to start anew thinking about design in four facets – category, product, organization, and ecosystem. Paying attention to these “first principles,” Grady believed, would lead TetraScience to pivot away from its initial hardware business and into a new cloud-based service. The cofounders had rejected Grady’s advice at first, but in 2019, with the company facing bankruptcy, Wang called him up again to talk strategy.