Founder’s Lessons: Hui Tian and Igor Ivanov, CEO & COO of Axbio
Hui and Igor reflect on their relationship as co-founders, their most interesting experiences, running a cross-continent company, and their best advice
About
Welcome to the tenth installment of Tsingyuan Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Read past interviews here.
Axbio
Axbio is a Silicon Valley company with development groups in the USA, China and Europe. The company was founded in 2016 by a group of experts in semiconductor, chip development, microfluidics, biotechnologies, and informatics, with a proven record of successfully launching many high volume products. The team has developed a microfluidics Bio-CMOS platform and associated reagents and cartridges, capable of high-throughput single-molecule sequencing and diversified molecular diagnostics. Axbio’s sequencing platform enables fast cancer diagnostics, rapid pathogen detection, and drug development where accuracy, speed, and cost of comprehensive tests are of utmost importance.
Dr. Hui Tian is CEO and cofounder of Axbio. Prior to that he was the Vice President of Roche Sequencing Unit, and the Vice President of Genia Technologies. He has extensive DNA sequencing, image sensors and semiconductor engineering experience. He has held senior technology and engineering leadership positions at multiple high-tech companies, including Pixim (acquired by Sony), InVisage (acquired by Apple), and Aptina (acquired by On Semiconductor). Dr. Tian earned his PhD and MS degrees from Stanford University, and MS and BS degrees from Tsinghua University.
Dr. Igor Ivanov is COO and cofounder of Axbio. A graduate of St. Petersburg University (where Prof. D.I. Mendeleev created the Periodic Table of Elements), he started his material science career in the electronics company Pozitron. After moving to the US, he worked at EAG/Eurofins on many semiconductor, biotech, materials projects with HP, Intel, AMD, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Merck, and BASF. He moved to AMD introducing Cu interconnect technology and became a technical entrepreneur developing new materials, processes and equipment — including CuTek Research (sold to Mattson), Blue29 (acquired by KLA-Tencor), Intermolecular (IPO), and InVisage (acquired by Apple).
Why we invested in Axbio: A new generation of compact, low cost, high performance and easy to use genetic sequencers are critically important for the precision medicine market. Axbio’s patented 4th generation sequencing platform is based on single-molecule sequencing technology and can provide long read length. We also believe that Axbio’s founding team members — successful serial entrepreneurs with extensive experience in sequencing systems — are well-qualified for such an audacious project.
Meet Hui Tian and Igor Ivanov
Note: We conducted this interview with Hui and Igor in tandem. Their trust, mutual admiration, and complementary points of view were evident throughout the conversation. We hope you find this interview as thoughtful as the conversation was.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
“I like to think from his point of view, and he likes to think from my point of view.”
Hui and Igor introduce themselves
Igor: I’m Igor Ivanov, one of two founders of Axbio. We’ve been working on challenging projects and have known each other for a very long time. In previous projects, we managed to develop technologies people didn’t believe were possible. We started this company with two goals: to achieve something that has never been done before, and to actually help people. That’s more important than anything else.
Hui: I’ll add something for Igor. He’s from Russia; he went to the same school and was in the same year as President Vladimir Putin. He also has a classmate who used to be a prime minister. Igor has strong connections in Russia, but he took a different route and moved to the US in the 90’s. He started a few companies in the Valley since then. Some sold to very big companies, one of them had an IPO. He’s a successful serial entrepreneur.
His training is in theoretical chemistry. We complement each other, even from the domain point of view. I’m more on the physics side. I graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing. And then I did my PhD at Stanford University. My major was in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering.
Hui shares more about his background
Hui: After graduating, I worked in the semiconductor industry. I was building CMOS image sensors for cameras. My group at Stanford (which spinned off a startup called Pixim) was one of the first two groups in the world developing the CMOS image sensor. I saw that industry go from zero dollars to easily a 30 billion dollar market. And it’s still expanding. For example, each car has multiple cameras on it, and your phone probably has four or five cameras on the front and back side.
I was in that industry for about 10 years. Then I met Igor at this company called InVisage. Pixels at that time were less than one micron already, and were very hard to make smaller. (Today, it’s still one-micron-ish.) The sensitivity was 60–80%, which was also very hard to improve. So most people were working on incremental improvements. But at InVisage, we worked on another groundbreaking sensor: quantum dot image sensors. We synthesized man-made material, the so-called Quantum Dot. If we tuned the dot size, we could change the sensitivity and the bandwidth, ranging from visible to infrared wavelengths. That made the sensing much, much better. The camera could take a nice picture on a moonless night.
After that, we diverged a little bit: Igor kept working on that product while I joined another company called Genia, where I got exposed to the biotech industry. Genia was founded by a circuit-designer-turned-biologist. That group was trying to use chips to do sequencing. They needed talents to design chips, integrate different materials on top of the chip, involving surface chemistry, surface physics, electrochemistry, and so on. This integration was similar to what I did at InVisage, so my past experience turned out to be very useful.
Genia was later bought by Roche, a world-leading biotech company. I was VP at Roche Sequencing for a couple of years, and learned more biology then. In 2016, Igor and I met again. We both were thinking about doing something new. We came up with this idea and started the company to target a big market.
An interesting object in the room
Hui: This is a 3D-printed model of a protein and a DNA molecule together. I was trained as a physicist, while biotech involves lots of chemistry. This model gave people a very good view of how biology works. When I was studying physics, I saw chemistry and biology as really hard to quantify. I thought: you try this, try that, and eventually something works. But you can actually make a protein work the way you want, you can mutate stuff and change the kinetics and engineer the protein. I’ve always thought that’s amazing.
In my view, what we’re doing is really a marriage between integrated circuits and molecules. The molecule is a bio-engine that can work with our chip to generate signals.
Igor: You take hundreds of atoms and make something amazing, and there’s a life.
Hui: There are a million of these colors and shapes. Why do they behave the way they do? It’s part of evolution. Nature makes something that is pretty hard to predict. So far, with this kind of biomolecule, the best ones are still based on nature. If you invent something totally new out of your own imagination, generally it works less optimally than the nature-based ones.
Their most interesting experiences
Igor: For me, my most interesting experience was when I left home. As a kid, I went to school and did reasonably well in math. So I had options. Stay at home, be nice and comfortable, and earn my degree. Or, go to competitions and move to another city where I could actually learn more, under more difficult conditions. That was probably the most important decision in my life. If you see a challenge, just fight it.
Hui: I have a lot of interesting experiences, probably too many to summarize. Here’s one lesson I learned from a previous company where I was a VP: as an entrepreneur or senior manager of a company, you have to learn how to compartmentalize. You have to put everything into different compartments and not let them interfere with each other. Otherwise, you will go nuts. In the startup world, there are so many things going on. They all seem like they could be related. But when you’re working on something, you have to let yourself focus on that. Don’t get polluted by other things. You also need to adapt. If you’re solving a technical problem, and then meeting with a customer soon, you have to be able to pull yourself out of the details and present to the customer to make a deal.
You have to learn how to compartmentalize.
How they work together as partners
Igor: It’s actually a bit easy. We respect each other. Hui has enormous background and vision. He can see the bigger picture, besides the tree he sees the whole forest and beyond. If we encounter a problem, we solve it from our own point of view, but we’re going in one direction and with one focus.
If we encounter a problem, we solve it from our own point of view, but we’re going in one direction and with one focus.
We also both have a global vision. We have help we can get in China, Israel, Japan, and Russia. We’ve built a network of our friends and partners worldwide. I’m slowly learning Chinese.
Hui: I’ll add to that. I like to work with smart people. I’m not a genius. I’m a people-person, I like to talk to different people and organize them together. Igor is a real genius. In China, there is a 少年班 program (special program for the gifted), where very young students go to college much earlier. China learned this young genius program from Russia. Igor was part of the Russian Young Genius program. He was selected into college to graduate directly with a master’s degree.
He’s a very nice person and easy to work with. It’s very easy personality-wise and domain-knowledge-wise. We complement each other in many things. We worked together at InVisage. Naturally, we ran into problems. But we liked helping each other. I like to think from his point of view, and he likes to think from my point of view.
What they look for when hiring
Hui: Of course the candidate has to be smart above a certain level. But there’s no shortage of smart people in the valley. The number one thing we’re looking for is someone who is self-motivated. A self-driven person can actually initiate and run a project. It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer or a manager. You should be able to find a problem and solve it yourself, instead of waiting for orders from the top. And we want people to work nicely with each other. We don’t like a “wolf” sort culture. We’re a consensus-driven company.
Biggest challenges
Igor: The biggest challenge is trying to move faster and have faster progress than people expect you to.
Hui: It’s also an unusual time in history. We have to work through the international political nightmare to see how we can keep flourishing in this situation. Our company is based across the U.S. and China. We also have a strong presence in Russia. So it’s not easy.
Running a cross-country company
Hui: The advantages are pretty obvious. Each country has a unique talent pool and their own market signature characteristics. We look into each country and analyze which are the most valuable assets for developing our product that we can acquire in that country. And then we partition our work across the continents. It’s the same for markets. We look at how we can penetrate the market most efficiently and have the biggest impact, and we put more emphasis there. So basically we analyze the geographic locations and deploy our resources accordingly.
In terms of disadvantages, we all work in different time zones. Every day at 6 PM, we have a meeting with our China team, which still isn’t enough time. We still have to shuffle in meetings at 10 PM or 12 PM. Another bigger disadvantage is the political aspect. We don’t know what will happen in the next three months. There are all kinds of new rules that aren’t too friendly for international collaboration.
On failure
Igor: Often you’re behind schedule. So you have to adjust your schedule, learn how to catch up on something you missed because you didn’t plan well, or because of external circumstances. You’re late to the break, what are you going to do? You run faster.
Hui: When you develop a product, there are many more failed parts than successful ones.
Igor: 90% of your effort is failures.
Hui: It’s really high. Do you run from it, do you give up, or do you change direction? There’s no right or wrong answer. Sometimes it’s different in different industries.
When I was in Silicon Valley, my attitude was to never admit failure, because I could always fix the problem. I could mostly predict outcomes. If something didn’t work, it’s because I did something wrong. So I would go back, fix the equation, and change my design. I would just work hard and fast to fix all my problems.
But when I went to Roche, I learned to “fail fast.” In drug development, if they launched ten pipelines, they stopped nine as soon as possible. They know that only 1 (or none) of the 10 can go to the finish line. The executives in pharmaceuticals like to fail the products early on.
Their best advice
Igor: My previous partner and mentor told me: if you see a challenge, don’t fight it yourself, find friends who can help you. Communicating with an expert and smart person gives you the best path, so you don’t have to go dig yourself and read too many papers.
If you see a challenge, don’t fight it yourself, find friends who can help you.
Hui: My advice to startup founders is: be really sure you’re ready to do it. A startup is quite challenging. You need to be very sure before you start. Once you start, there’s no way back, so you have to just keep going forward and try anything you can to make it successful.
Vision for Axbio
Hui: We’d like to build this into a foundation of many different tools to enable POCT (point-of-care testing). We want to transform what used to be a very scientific toolbox into a clinical and hopefully consumer product. It’s a convergence of semiconductor technology and biotech that can be taken into people’s hands.
Impact of COVID-19
Hui: We’re more impacted from a supply chain point of view. Because we’re building instruments, some of our mechanical engineering got delayed. We also have some downstream customers that have shifted their focus to fighting the virus instead of doing genetic studies. Morale is also hard to keep up internally, because people have stayed at home for too long. It can affect productivity. But overall, we’re fine. Our Chinese operation got back to normal in March, and it’s working very well. We are a biotech company, so we’re also developing some diagnostic kits for the coronavirus.
On social media
Hui: I used to use social media, but not after we started this company. I actually don’t know why or when I stopped.
Igor: I used to use Facebook, but not anymore. In our world and business, it’s actually a very small society. We’re working on a pretty complicated project. so you communicate with your family and society of people with similar education, similar background, and similar interests, and most of them actually don’t use social media. We still use LinkedIn, but it’s more like a database.
On questions
Igor: There is no one single question which is most important. Questions are usually for specific situations. But if I talk to someone, I like to ask: what do you want to do as a person? And you can tell. Some people want to work in a nice place, some people want to have fun, some people want to work on cancer.
Their hobbies
Hui: I like all kinds of activities: hiking, strategic games and video games, and traveling.
Igor: I used to play chess, but with an international company it’s more fun to travel. I guess we we have our own “company chess game.” What’s our next move, what do we do next?
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