16
I met Gregory Alton at Perry’s in downtown Palo Alto on Thursday. What a difference a year had made. I had stopped even trying to come down here at the height of the boom. University Avenue traffic had stood still then, like a pipe clogged between Stanford at one end and Highway 101 at the other. Now I actually found a parking spot on my first pass. The sycamore trees along the avenue were curled a dusty yellow. I strolled the sidewalk without being knocked over by lines of marching MBAs. Attendants at the salons and spas loitered by their doors, wondering where they’d have to move for their next job.
I got a table right away. Once upon a time I would have waited outside, along with the mostly male clientele in their polos and striped shirts. Cell phones, PDAs, and laptops would have been arrayed on the blue-checked tablecloths like pieces on a chessboard, the buzz of electrons and venture capital in the air.
Gregory swaggered in and took a look around. “It’s a good thing biotech is happening, huh?” he said as he joined me. “Otherwise I’d probably be doing egregiously trivial sys admin for some corporate suit.” He said suit in a manner meant to imply he and I were brothers-in-arms. “And you’d be — what, shooting weddings?”
I ignored this. “You new to biotech?”
He shot me a sneaky grin. “I majored in computer science in college because I loved video games. Got an MBA so I could speak the tongue of the suits. I was in the first wave in South Park.” South Park was the epicenter of the Web boom in San Francisco. “Dude, in those days it was like a gumball machine. Put in a penny idea, turn the knob, and get a wad of cash. You jump on that?”
I gave a sort-of nod. I did get mesmerized by those candy colors, until I had to factor in consorting with the Gregorys of the world in order to turn the knob.
When the waiter came around, I ordered the Chinese chicken salad. Gregory didn’t look at the menu. “I’ll have the grilled ahi sandwich,” he said. “The tuna should be crisp, very crisp, on the outside, like bacon. Soft on the inside, like jelly, but not raw. And keep the capers off it, okay?”
His attention came back to me. “So you know the L curve. Big drop and now we’re bumping along the bottom. I give myself credit, though. Never promised eyeballs. Never made a B-to-C play.” He meant business-to-consumer. “I always got the quick flip, then slid over before any of my ventures turned up on fuckedcompany.com. I wasn’t going to be no dead man driving.”
“Dead man driving?”
“You know the guys. Instead of doing something smart with their severance, they buy a Jag. So they can look good driving to their nonexistent job interviews.”
“Keep looking like a big man, and maybe the world will treat you like one.”
“So anyway, this guy, my partner Ron, he clued me in on biotech as the next exponential industry. Guess who are some of the major individual investors? Bill, Paul, and Larry.”
He listed them on a first-name basis, as if the trio was as familiar as Moe, Curly, and Larry. Gates, Allen, and Ellison. “Curing disease must be hot,” I said.
“End users can ignore a banner ad. They can’t ignore cancer.”
“How did you get up to speed on molecular genetics?”
“Well, Ron’s got the bio side. I’ve got the information architecture. That’s our play, bioinformatics. We got cooking last year. Once the human genome was sequenced, boom! It’s a race to monetize the genome, just like the Internet.”
“Explain bioinformatics to me.”
“There are mega databases of genetic information out there. Somewhere in that galactic cloud is precisely the data a lab or pharma needs to define their disease target and test their drug candidate. We penetrate the cloud for them.”
“With some kind of specialized search engine?”
“It’s way more gnarly than that, Bill. We’ve got some proprietary code in the works. Let’s say you’re looking at a particular stretch of DNA. You’ve got an idea that it’s involved in, I don’t know, cancer of the cuticle. Now, this gene is maybe four thousand base pairs long. Base pairs are the rungs on the twisted ladder of DNA. They’re like a very long address. Now, people out there have researched what goes on at this address. They might be able to give you codons, receptors, promoters, protein sequence assembly — the kind of stuff you can use to design your drug. But that data is dispersed. All you’ve got is the address. It’s like having a house number, but you don’t know the street, you don’t even know the city. That’s where we come in. We use our tools to put you in touch with what everyone else can tell you about this address.”
The food came. Gregory lifted the top of his sandwich, inspected the ahi like an Olympic judge, then tore into it. I said, “And this is what your company wants to do for LifeScience.”
He showed me a chewing version of that smug smile of his. “Oh yeah, your buddies at LifeScience. What’s so fascinating about them anyway?”
“It’s a personal thing, Gregory. A friend of mine worked there.”
He took a gulp of soda and eventually got around to swallowing. “We’re playing for an alliance with LifeScience. They’ve got a new molecule that’s supposed to be monstrously effective against cancer. It’ll be in trials soon. It’s already bringing in big bucks for new programs. Their pipeline’s going to be stuffed. Meaning new targets, new drug candidates. We’ll help them find both. Later, if we grow like I think we can, we’ll test the candidates in silico. Find out what the compound does in various tissues, cell processes, metabolic pathways. All of these human functions are being modelled. The computer is the lab.”
“LifeScience is on the verge of going big time.”
“Yup. They’ve been up and down. The new cash machine is a monoclonal antibody. Their science guy, McKinnon, was big into them back when. Didn’t pan out. They were gasping for air, got some new management, a new target, and now they’ve got this hot candidate, MC124. McKinnon dropped the bomb at a med conference. Cheesed the crap out of his bosses. By the way, you heard none of this from me.”
“Don’t worry. Who do you deal with there — McKinnon? Dugan?”
“I’ve heard of Dugan. He’s COO. I met McKinnon. He’s got an underling named Doug Englehart who’s set to get his own program there soon. Plus, LifeScience has acquired a new agri division. What exactly do you want to know?”
“Hear about any problems with MC124? Troublesome lab results? A researcher named Sheila Harros?”
Gregory shook his head. His eyes narrowed. “You got some money riding on this?”
“None whatsoever. But you did see Sheila, that first time you and I met in the parking lot. Why do you think she looked so startled?”
Gregory tongued some food from his back teeth. “Not because of me, pal. Probably your camera scared her.”
“How does this monoclonal antibody, MC124, work?”
He waved a hand. “I don’t keep up with the trivia. All I know is that monoclonal candidates can be produced faster and cheaper than your average drug. Large pharma is hot for LifeScience. The money pump is running. Meanwhile, I’ve got Bigfuckers breathing down my neck this minute. We gotta have the LifeScience deal. That’s why Kumar is pissing me off so bad. If he steals my technology and this gig—”
“It’s hell being stuck at Littlefucker level, isn’t it?”
A look of suspended disbelief crossed Gregory’s face. He might have gotten up and left right there. I wouldn’t have minded. Instead he decided to break out laughing. “You’ve got some sense of humor, Bill.”
I smiled. “Pretty much my only good point, isn’t it?”