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Update January 2024
Looking back on 2023 and looking forward to 2024
I started doing monthly reviews for friends and family as I continue down this startup venture. This is the second update I am posting on this blog, and it also coindides with the end of the year. So I will use this post to look back on 2023 and look forward to 2024.
Year in Review
I will remember 2023 as the year that I graduated with my PhD, officially started on this startup venture, moved to Florida, turned 30, and found out that I am going to be a father! This year was a big phase transition. I feel pretty much the same, but my priorities have definitely shifted.
As for Saguaro Solutions, I think we are definitely in a great spot, but it is funny because it is a completely different spot than I expected. The original goal was to spin out our fluorescence microscopy analysis algorithms developed in Presse Lab into a software suite for labs in biotech and bootstrap our operations by doing consulting. However after doing a round of customer discovery interviews we found that while there is a demand for consulting, the market size for fluorescence microscopy analysis is too small to support a new scalable software company. So we pivotted our focus to clinical applications for machine learning in biotech, which is a much larger market. As of my last update, this was a relatively new pivot, but today we have actually made promising progress in this direction.
This past month we began reaching out to potential collaborators in the clinical space. The first person we contacted was an alumni from our lab who is now a medical physicist in Georgia. For those who do not know, a medical physicist is completely different than a regular physcist; they are more like doctors who specialize in radiation therapy and bioimaging. They still do research, but the majority of their time is spent working with patients. Originally, we just contacted this alumni to scope out the field and see what types of demands we may be able to fill in the clinical space, however, after our first meeting we realized that there was enormous potential for a mutually beneficial collaboration. We get exposure to our first true clinical application and he gets to offload some of the more technical and time consuming aspects of the project to us.
This first project we are working on is related to diagnosing diabetic retinopathy and identifying lesions in retina scans. This is incredibly related to projects we have worked on in the past, so I believe we will have preliminary results soon. My biggest goal right now is to create a proof of concept that demonstrates our work can be applied to medical imaging.
There is one big concern regarding our first true medical project: the diabetic retinopathy space seems to be saturated with existing solutions and products. With that in mind, we still may work towards an academic publication to get our foot in the door in the medical imaging space, but ideally we would like to identify a different niche where we could have a bigger impact. It seems as if our new contact in the medical world can help us obtain the right training data sets if we can identify a good problem. Identifying a good problem is becoming the highest priority for us.
Focus for January
I ended the last post with three focus points for December. I’ll do the same here by setting 3 focus points for January:
1) Prepare for fatherhood. Family first. This is my main focus for January. 2) Identify a market niche. I truly believe we have the team, the network, and the expertize to tackle any problem in biotech. We just need to identify a problem worth solving. Previously I mentioned that by building backwards from mismatches between patient needs and available solutions we should be able to identify the best problem to solve. This is my main professional focus for January. 3) Create proof of concept for diabetic retinopathy application. We need to get our foot in the door for medical image analysis. We have a wonderful project to work on, so we need to make sure that we can deliver results to demonstrate our capabilities.
Looking forward to 2024
I think this year will be a great year, both personally and professionally. Really, the most important thing is that sometime in the next few weeks my wife, Taylor, is going to have a baby. I’ve been preparing as much as I can for it, but I know that I wont really know what to expect until it happens. My one goal for this year is to learn how to be a good dad.
As a final note, I want to say that I think I have been pretty good about providing regular updates, however, next month I may opt to skip the update to focus on the baby. So my next update will likely be in March.
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