Just over a year ago, soon after the dramatic exit of Francis deSouza as Illumina’s CEO, the company announced that it had appointed a new leader, Jacob Thaysen, PhD. The initial reactions were mixed. Thaysen had held multiple roles in the life sciences, most recently at Agilent Technologies. But despite his experience in the life sciences business, he was unknown to many in the genomics world. GEN reached out for an interview when he first took over, but Illumina declined the invitation. A lot has changed over the past year. Last November, GEN secured an interview with Thaysen at the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG), which was held in Denver, CO. He described how the past year has been, why he took the job in the first place, and what he is looking forward to doing in the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LeMieux: Let’s start with your background because I think that people would love to get to know you. We all read about your credentials when you took the job at Illumina, but can you tell us a bit more about your career?
Thaysen: Yeah, for sure! I’m originally from Denmark, and I have a PhD in physics. I don’t have a biology background, so I’ve done some self-learning there. After my PhD, I founded a startup company that used MEMS [microelectromechanical systems] technology for making small sensors that could be used for many different applications, but really for biochemical interactions. I did that for four years as CTO of the company, and I enjoyed it. But in the end, the technology was not strong enough to survive. It was driven by venture capital, and it had good momentum, but we could see it was not really differentiated enough.
After that, I moved into management consulting for a few years to look at something completely different. I spent a few years there and worked with nonscientific companies—airline companies, freight companies, media companies. I learned that every segment has the same challenges and that having the right strategy, the right operations, the right execution, and of course the right people is everything. From there, I was hired to be the chief of staff at the cancer diagnostic company, Dako, and I really enjoyed that, too.
I didn’t really need to be in the life sciences industry. But after a few years at Dako, I saw the impact of working with patients and what it means to fight cancer. That crawled under my skin, and I got really passionate about it. A few years in, I was offered the chance to become head of R&D. After I had spent all this time getting out of science! But it was one of my best jobs. It was really fun being there.
Dako was a Danish company that was acquired by Agilent because Agilent wanted to move into IVD [in vitro diagnostics]. With that acquisition, I was offered the chance to run the genomics business for Agilent, in the United States. I thought that I would try that for a few years, and then go back to Denmark. But after six months, I told my wife, I don’t think we should go back. It’s way too fun, and this weather is way too good!
It was also very clear—and this was back in 2013—that genomics needed to move much further into IVD and into cancer. And I have a unique background. I know IVD from the inside out. I know what the IVD laboratories look like and what the clinical laboratories are looking for. I also learned a lot about genomics at that period of time.
And then I got the call last summer, for the opportunity in San Diego. To me it felt like coming home. I am very passionate about fighting cancer and I am very passionate about genomics. And there is just no better place to be than Illumina to do those things.
LeMieux: Last year was a tumultuous time at Illumina. Did you have any reservations about stepping in at that moment?
Thaysen: There was a lot going on at Illumina. Everybody was sitting on the sideline, with their popcorn, looking at the Illumina show. There were so many opinions. It’s unbelievable how interested people are in Illumina. But you can either decide to sit at the sideline or you can decide to step in and be a part of a solution. You have one life, you have one career, you have one opportunity. And Illumina is a strong company. I knew that there would be a few years when it is going to be tough. But that is true of all companies. Every company will face challenging times. You just don’t know when that will happen. But in the end, what drove me was the desire to be in a company that is really doing something transformative for health. And yes, there are some challenges, but I believe we will get through them. We are on a great trajectory now.
LeMieux: Now that I know about your background, I’m wondering if your diversified job history helped you take on this role.
Thaysen: I only have my own career to look at. It’s difficult to say, but I think I learned a few things early in my career. Starting up a company directly out of school, nobody told me how to do a competitive analysis, or build a business plan, or really anything about running a company. So, I had to rely on learning on the job and on common sense and instincts. And that common sense can take you quite far. I learned that very quickly because that’s the only way to survive. When I was a strategy consultant, I learned the main components of how to think about this, because I saw so many different businesses and industries. Look, in the end, companies all have the same challenges. It’s about how it’s led. It’s about a clarity of strategy, a clarity on what you expect from people. And it’s about a plan that everybody understands and can execute on.
I stayed in Agilent/Dako for many years, and I had many different roles which gave me confidence that I could move into something new. I can build clarity on strategy, and I can successfully execute it. But every new job, every new adventure, is different. So, I’m not just saying, “yeah, it’s just all going to be fine.” It’s hard work every day. But that’s what I like. I like doing this.
In the end, you only have one life, and you only have one career. It was never important to me to be CEO. It was very important to me to be part of something where you can make an impact. When you have a patient sitting there, with the worst news they have ever got in their life, and they’ve just been told that they have cancer or another devastating disease, and we are there to help them fight that disease … I’m proud to be a part of that. That is what is important to me. And then everything else in the end becomes daily challenges. There will always be ups and downs in jobs. We all have that. But I want to be a part of that, and I think Illumina is that company.
LeMieux: Let’s get back to what you said about the interest in Illumina. There are people, who I’m sure you’ve bumped into, who are incredibly knowledgeable about, and love, the technology. Many are so invested because of what they want to do with that technology. So, there is always this marriage between the users and the company.
Thaysen: And that’s super-fascinating. We have the power, and the position in the market, to really make a difference. But I also found, coming in—and I think this is very natural—that it’s difficult to keep your feet on the ground when you have been a market leader for a long time. And at some point, you start to believe you have all the answers yourself. I think we’ve seen others go through the same thing. So, when you’ve been successful for many years, you need to remind yourself: What are you? Who are you? What is your
true calling?
When I came in, my clear focus was to make sure we went back and focused on who we are as a company. And there were a few things that, for me, needed to be put front and center. One was, as you said, the marriage with our customers. Illumina has done tremendous business because we have worked very deeply with our customers and the industry. And I felt we had lost a little bit of that. You’ll see here at ASHG, as we are coming out with new innovations, researchers speaking on the behalf of the technology to show what is in our R&D pipeline. So, we don’t just surprise people or customers with what is coming out. We engage them into developing the right solutions.
LeMieux: You mentioned your focus on establishing the company’s identity. So, who is Illumina now?
Thaysen: We are separating GRAIL out and going back to being a company that is really focused on the tools themselves. That doesn’t mean that we’re never going into IVD or into the clinic. But we can build the sequencer and the workflows—from sample prep all the way into informatics—in different directions. We can take it both toward the clinic, but also toward researchers. This is who we are. This is what we do extremely well.
The other part is focusing on operational excellence, which sounds boring but is important if we want to grow. We are a $4.5 billion company, but we want to be a $10 billion company. To get to that, we need to always change ourselves, the processes, the way we work, the way we engage with each other. If we want to be much bigger, there are certain ways we need to change how we work. And clearly, we’ve been super-successful. And when you grow a lot, you tend to solve a lot of your problems by adding more people. And even though that’s a good thing to do, and we love getting more people into the company, it might not drive productivity. In the end, you end up being slower. You end up not being as agile as you want to be. That is a key pillar in our strategy and in who we are as a company—both customer centric and strongly committed to innovation. But we’re also committed to keep improving who we are and how we do things.
LeMieux: Are you too big to innovate?
Thaysen: No.
LeMieux: Besides making new and better instruments, what other innovations are you focused on?
Thaysen: When you say tools, you think about an instrument. That’s not how I think about it. So, let me qualify that a little bit. Fundamentally, we are developing solutions for labs, whether they’re clinical labs or research labs. And they are using tools, but those tools are not just instruments, they are workflow solutions.
I would argue that 15 years ago, or 10 years ago, people were excited just to be doing sequencing. But now, it’s about moving toward the outcome and what you can use those solutions for. And the more we can simplify it, the more information will come out of it. And it will help the scientists, or clinicians, use that outcome either to make treatment decisions or, of course, to expand science. This is who we are. And that’s why I say that tools are also building workflows. There is a lot of innovation coming out now that is pushing us from being a genomics company to a multiomics company.
We will always have a foundation in genomics. But we envision that in the future, you will be able to look at multiomes using the sequencing platform. That is super-powerful, and I truly believe that it is going to change biology.
LeMieux: Someone once told me that you can’t build a Swiss army knife for the post-genomics era because you can’t analyze all of the omes using the same tool.
Thaysen: I’m not sure I fully agree with that. I mean, I think that companies that are not Illumina would claim that. But we still haven’t really taken full benefit of the power of the sequencing platform itself and the ability to look at many things at the same time, whether it’s on the genomic, epigenetic, or proteomic level. So, if you have a powerful tool like the [NovaSeq] X, you can do all of these different types of assays. You can use the same instrument with a different type of workflow to do genomics, proteomics, epigenetics. Some of those can be combined, others will be different workflows, but you don’t necessarily need many different tools.
LeMieux: My last question is about your first year. How has it been? And how much of the first year’s tumult is still part of your day-to-day work? Or is it all behind you?
Thaysen: Whenever you get a new job, there are always surprises. But on the big themes that you mentioned, I knew going into the job that there were things that we needed to take care of the first year. So, in that sense, it was not frustrating. It was more like, okay, let’s work through this. Let’s find the right way of doing this in a way that makes sense for everyone. And I think, here, a year later, we did that.
Of course, when you sit in the middle of it, it can be frustrating. And externally, it could look unclear. But we had a very good understanding on the steps we needed to walk through, and I think we came out with a good result. Under the circumstances, this turned out as well as it could.
Looking back on the year, we have done a lot to get clarity on who we are as a company. We have done a lot to clean up and make sure we can focus on our calling. We have done a lot to set up a new leadership team, bringing some people in and promoting other people who I believe are the right ones to move the company forward. We have put a strategy in place and started to engage much deeper with the customers, and build some of those customer relationships, that I think have been on a pause for a while. So, when I look back, I’m very pleased with where we are. But I’m very ambitious also. So, this is just a start.
