The Uncertain Cost of Commitment
Starting a company, raising children, getting married, or sailing across an ocean all share something in common: their true costs cannot be known in advance. Commitment begins where transactions end.
Earlier this year, before leaving for New Zealand to take possession of Rosemary, I dissolved GenoFAB, Inc., a company I started in 2012. GenoFAB was meant to be a vehicle to bring technology developed in my lab to market.
I always felt that traditional academic metrics — publications, citations — weren't enough to justify a career in research. Research needed to address a real market need. It needed to create jobs, generate revenue, justify itself beyond the university walls. I understand that many academics see it differently, but without trying to bridge that gap, I would have felt like an impostor. That idea is what got me out of bed in the morning. It represented a path to growth — personal and professional.
So I invested in GenoFAB. It happened in stages. I wasn't rigorous about tracking the money at first; I eventually learned to be. I don't really want to know how much I invested in total, but it was significantly more than I should have spent by any reasonable measure.
GenoFAB was not a financial success. But I want to believe there were other outcomes worth accounting for — jobs that gave students experience they couldn't get inside academia, a different vision of the world for me, relationships that still matter. The ledger isn't only financial.
What I know now is that I never really looked at GenoFAB as an investment. An investment is a transaction: bounded cost, defined equity stake, calculable return. GenoFAB was a mission. I pursued it as far as I could.