First 180 days as CEO

Setting sail: reflections on the CEO’s first 6 months

Paul Scagnetti, MBA, PhD, joined ONI 6 months ago to implement a new strategy to accelerate commercial growth and expand its impact in research and discovery. Here, he shares his reflections on the first 180 days, the exciting future for ONI and what super- resolution microscopy can become for drug discovery and research.

Today marks my 6-month anniversary with ONI. It has flown by and has been amazing. I am loving the experience and thankful for the opportunity. I have been able to meet many of our customers and the entire ONI team. I left a job and company I genuinely loved to join ONI for several reasons but among them were the team, the technology, and the promise of what super-resolution microscopy can become for drug discovery and research.

There are very few ways to see individual biological molecules in their natural context and even less ways to observe them dynamically. Those capabilities are important because many significant biological events and structures occur beneath the limits of standard microscopy. But it has been challenging to routinely enable super-resolution analysis for researchers who just want to get their research done and often don’t want to become super-resolution microscopy experts. ONI was founded and has developed with the premise that simplifying this incredible technology and capabilities will be game changing. And we are on that journey.

The “we”, the ONI team and our customers, is another important reason I joined. Creating integrated workflows out of instruments to enable the simplicity our customers want will require a symphony-like combination of chemistry (reagents), flow cell (microfluidics), imaging, automation, and incredibly complex intelligent software. Our current team is the start of that symphony. We are still early on this complex journey but moving fast.
I’m thankful to our customers who are encouraging us to radically simplify and push this set of capabilities to a level in which single- molecule microscopy can be carried out at massive scale in order to resolve the most complex and important biological questions. I am thankful to the ONI team for welcoming me, sharing their curiosity and energy.

We are definitely at the very earliest stages of this new area, and new opportunity. Our mission is to accelerate human discovery and fight disease by enabling everyone to see and understand the microscopic details of life. I am so excited to see what the next 6 months and subsequent longer anniversaries will bring to our field, to my new company, and to our customers. I am even more confident than the day I started that the opportunity is massive because the questions we are helping our customers answer are essential.