This document summarizes a talk given by Chris Dwan at a DNA Nexus User Group Meeting. It discusses how platform requirements change as companies mature from their early startup phase focused on agility, to a growth phase where compliance and governance are important, to a mature phase where financial considerations are critical. It provides rules of thumb for choosing platforms in the different phases, noting that platforms that reduce time and work are attractive early on, but financial oversight becomes more important later.

1. One Size Does Not Fit All
Platform Requirements Change As Companies Mature
May 2023 – Cambridge, MA
DNA Nexus User Group Meeting
Chris Dwan (chris@dwan.org)
https://dwan.org

3. It’s Good To Be Back!
A very similar gathering ~8 years
ago in this same room.

4. Chris Dwan
2000 - 2004: Jumped to
Genomics, started learning
biology, built my first HPC system
Including
petabyte
scale storage
at NASA
2004 - 2013: Built and
led a consulting team
And a genome center in Manhattan
2014 - 2017: Led research
computing and IT
Since 2013: Freelance working with
startups in therapeutics and diagnostics,
academic labs, and technology companies
Late 90’s: Built AI / ML
systems for Military R&D
Built a bunch of
systems for science
(mostly genomics)
iNquiry
2020 - 2022: Built and led
“Production Bioinformatics”
at a diagnostics startup
Started out in
Computer Science
& Engineering
Including two longer stints
building teams and managing
organizational transformations

5. First / Best / Cheapest
Make it work!
Make it fast!
Establish governance
Make it cheap!
First
Best
Cheapest
Growth (Summer): Compliance and governance
Maturity (Fall): Harvest season
Early days (Spring): Agility is everything

6. Rules of thumb for
springtime
If AWS has a service relatively close to what we
need – that will be our default and budgetary
benchmark.
If there are multiple vendors with offerings
relatively close to what we need –AND- if we know
that we’re not going to sell our own version as a
product (being a therapeutics company, or similar)
it’ll be a lift to convince me to build our own.
Times change: Many things that were perfectly
respectable jobs ten years ago are hobbyshopping
now. This will continue to happen, at an
accelerating pace, throughout your career.(*)
(*) obligatory ChatGPT / AI slide at end of talk.

7. The Summer Of
Growth
Operational Support:
All systems break. When this one does, who fixes it and what
goes un-done while they do?
Using our Bench:
Do we already have an in-house team that could do this?
Alignment with Digital Strategy:
Does data and metadata wind up tagged, indexed, and
appropriately stored for re-use?
Enterprise Integrations:
Does the software play well with our in-house systems and
partners?
Information Security:
Credentials (FISMA, FedRamp, GxP, ISO) plus practical measures.
Vendor Viability and “Fit”:
Is the vendor likely to survive in their current form? If they go
under or change course, what happens? Do our companies
share funding sources or board members?

8. Fall, the marginal
season
Money always matters. It’s just that sometimes other
things like velocity, focus, and time to result matter more.
Licenses coupled to cloud spending, data volumes, sample
count, or other metrics of growth are at risk of becoming
“success catastrophes.” - For every leadership team, there
is a dollar amount on a license renewal at which they blink
and ask “how big a team did you say you would need to
bring this in-house?”
As an enterprise matures, financial observability becomes
critical. Can we see who is using the system, and for what?
Can we break apart R&D from COGS, and split out lines of
business for the P&L? Are we merely tracking / reacting
or can we proactively control spend?
There is still no space for hobbyshopping, but the calculus
is wildly different from springtime.

9. First / Best / Cheapest
Make it work!
Make it fast!
Establish governance
Make it cheap!
First
Best
Cheapest
Growth (Summer): Compliance and governance
Fitting in with an enterprise strategy usually
reduces velocity, which is fine – because now
you have mass so the overall kinetic energy is
still growing.
Maturity / Harvest (Fall):
Congratulations, you’re a public company
/ in market. Your CFO is sharing numbers
with the market every three months, and
investors want to get paid.
Early days (Spring): Agility is everything
PAAS (Platform As a Service) offerings are
compelling because they reduce time to
result and remove entire categories of work.

10. DIY is fine – but please do not re-invent the wheel
Really seriously: We do not need yet
another domain specific language for
bioinformatics workflows or a new file
format for short read sequencing.

11. Obligatory
ChatGPT
Slide
Early-stage requirements (2 minutes)
... flexibility, scalability, and ease of use to
support rapid development and
experimentation.
Growth-stage requirements (2-3 minutes)
… increasing need for reliability, stability,
and high availability …. advanced security
measures … robust integration capabilities
…
Enterprise-stage requirements (2-3 minutes)
… scalability to handle large workloads and support
global operations … performance optimization …
advanced monitoring and analytics to gain insights into
application performance and user behavior …
significance of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support …
avoid vendor lock-in.
Nobody wants to party with robot

12. The opposite of
play is not work, it’s
depression
Jane McGonnigal,
Reality is Broken

13. Thank you!
Chris Dwan (chris@dwan.org)
https://dwan.org
@fdmts