Dr Stephen Turner

Dr Stephen Turner spoke on 24 July on a Distinguished Technopreneur Speaker (DTS) Forum. He qualifies as a speaker as he is a physicist turned entrepreneur, who founded Pacific Biosciences in his pursuit to develop technology capable of performing gene tests and DNA sequencing at the cost of $1,000 or less. Despite difficulties in surviving on small grants, his determination and perseverance has put him in the lead to develop the disruptive single molecule real-time (SMRT^TM) technology platform that is unique in the field of DNA sequencing and offers the ultimate combination of speed, long reads and low costs. 

During his speech, he gave a succinct analysis of the entrepreneurial landscape in Singapore, which he found is rather entrepreneurial. Dr. Turner performed a quick word search on LinkedIn with keywords such as "entrepreneur", "CEO", "start-up", and analyse the prevalence of entrepreneurship in various cities. It was surprising that Singapore ranked closely behind San Diego which is widely regarded as having a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. What he felt was lacking in Singapore, yet a crucial determinant of success, is not the lack of entrepreneurs, but the lack of access to local VC community that has courage and conviction all ready to mentor and fund fledging start-ups. He also highlighted the importance of access to a chain of funding (from pre-seed, seed, series funding, bridge financing to an eventual IPO). Availability of a chain of financing will ensure start-ups continue to put efforts in growing, instead of worrying over cashflows. The reason he chose to establish office in Silicon Valley was primarily due to access to VCs and to allow VC to gain access to him. 

There are many ideas but execution is the key. What is the cost to test the hypothesis? How high is the risk that the hypothesis fail? The strategy is to challenge the hypothesis and prove it is wrong at the lowest possible cost, as such:

V = N(PsVp – Ce), V is net value, Ps is probability of success, Vp is value, Ce is cost of enterprise.

One way to start is to form a hypothesis which is going to be important in the future, e.g. for effective R&D efforts to transfer to enterprises, countries need to groom “soft companies”.

The other importance of a start-up is the team. Dr Turner gave an analogy of the game "Angry bird". Different people with different skills required to win the game. 

"What was the toughest decision you have made during your journey as a technopreneur?" "Many… To start a company and to keep going."