David Novo-Lake (De Novo Research)
Welcome to Flowstars candid conversations between doctor Peter O'Toole and the big hitters of flow cytometry brought to you by Beckman Coulter at Bite Size Bio.
Peter O'Toole:Today on Flowstars, I'm joined by Dave Lobo, and he talks about his humble origins of his flow cytometry software company. How inspiring it was to work with the one and only Howard Shapiro, and cooking chicken tikka masala. All this and more coming up in this episode. Hi. I'm Peter O'Toole from University of York, and welcome to Flowstars.
Peter O'Toole:And today, I'm joined by David Dave Novo. God, I could have nearly called you David. D o
David Novo-Lake:e. Sorry.
Peter O'Toole:I I I would say, usually, I'd introduce you guys to where they're from. But, Deb, you're retired.
David Novo-Lake:I'm retired. Semi retired, yeah. Mhmm.
Peter O'Toole:At this moment. Are you busier now you retired than before you retired?
David Novo-Lake:Maybe no. Maybe just as busy. But I am doing things that are a little maybe more interesting to me at the moment with with it, with all of that.
Peter O'Toole:I'm sure your company would love to have heard you just say that now it's more interesting. Maybe it's either way from it. So I guess, maybe maybe to introduce you to the audience a bit more. I guess you're, certainly from my perspective, most famous for software analysis. Would you say that's fair?
David Novo-Lake:Well, considering I'm not really known for anything else at all in the world, then then that probably is my, by far most well known thing. My my opera singing leaves a lot to be desired, so. So you opera sing? Only in the shower.
Peter O'Toole:Well, we'll get a rendition later. Everyone can listen. Dave, sing some opera. So I said, okay. So we know what you're famous for.
Peter O'Toole:And with FCS Express, the software side, bringing it all through. I'm gonna start slightly different to the others. What was the first job you ever wanted to do? So when you were eight, nine, 10 years of age,
David Novo-Lake:what was the first thing you ever imagined being when you grew up? I mean, I don't My memory doesn't go back that far. I have a terrible memory for the most part. The one thing though that I do remember being fascinated by probably the earliest was the stock market, and I was maybe like 12 or 11 or something. And my grandfather was always checking his CDs and checking, he was a very, looking back I realized he was a very conservative investor and he was always checking his interest rates and CDs, but he also had some stocks and at that point, like you couldn't find anything online, you didn't do anything, so he not far from his where he lived was a stockbroker, and we would go in once a week to the stockbroker's office, this like satellite office, and there'd be like stocks go stock ticker going along, and it was all very exciting.
David Novo-Lake:And that's the one thing I remember first is being like, oh, this, and then I learned, you know, the people there taught me about what's an option, and what's a stock, and what's a put, and what's a call, and it seemed like such a fascinating field. And I remember when I was like 13 or so, I put $800 of my own money into Commodore sixty four, Commodore stock. Yeah. And Commodore subsequently went bankrupt about a year later, and I lost my $800, and that was my final a long pause in my investing after after that. But I do remember thinking that that would be a really awesome career.
David Novo-Lake:Right.
Peter O'Toole:I think you integrated it again. You now have some stocks and shares now.
David Novo-Lake:Yes. Now I do have. I I've sort of dipped back into it again.
Peter O'Toole:If that was what you saw at that point, you got burned to that point, so when did you what what was your next option going forward? What do you think? Oh, I'm not gonna be a stockbroker now. I'm going to do something else. What was the next?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, I mean, I'm not one of those people who had and growing older, realize there's not many people who actually did have this linear vision and then accomplished their vision and everything went on. I was just a teenager who whatever sorta came up, you know, I didn't really think too much about my future or whatever at that at that time, and it really was many, you know, not until my, you know, early twenties where I started thinking about, you know, what I wanted to do. I did always love science during high school, and I did always think that it would be sort of as a vague thing cool to be a scientist, whatever that meant. Yeah. So that did kinda guide an overarching thing, but I didn't have anything really specific.
Peter O'Toole:So what was your first degree in?
David Novo-Lake:My first degree was in biology and pharmacology from McMaster University in Canada, in Hamilton. And again, you know, talking about, you know, sort of non linear, when I I I never even, know, McMaster's not a super famous school or anything even within Canada, although it's it's known. But it just had the distinction of being far enough away from home that my parents couldn't visit easily and close enough that I could go home without much trouble. It's about an hour and a half drive from Toronto where I grew up and where my parents lived. So, you know, that's why I kinda ended up up there instead of anywhere else.
Peter O'Toole:So so so from your undergraduate, so you still, I I guess like me, undergraduate, graduating, probably still didn't know what to do.
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. I mean, that's it it was all very random. My the undergraduate program that I did was a co op program, and so I did it, and I, you know, did some of the co op work terms, is basically, it was five years instead of four, but about at the end of it you had worked for a year and a half in various jobs. And you know, again, I sort of knew that I wanted to I I did think after my undergrad I was gonna go on and do postgraduate studies, but not really where or why or how. But that's when I sort of fell into flow cytometry kinda randomly.
David Novo-Lake:And through a whole series of very lucky chances ended up at UCLA.
Peter O'Toole:And how was that move as a Canadian going to UCLA?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, it was wonderful. I loved UCLA. As somebody who grew up with six months of winter, I mean, you cannot cannot be. I mean, UCLA is a great school and whatnot, of course. But, you know, to be honest, the reason that I even applied there so Howard I was working with Howard Shapiro at the time, and I applied to a bunch of places, including Purdue and whatever, that had well known flow cytometry programs.
David Novo-Lake:But it actually worked out that if you applied to UCLA, the application was $25. And if they wanted you potentially to be part of the program, they would fly you out to LA for a weekend. And it was February in Boston, and I hadn't seen Sun for like three weeks, and I'd already written all these applications. So I was like, alright. Like, I changed the name from Purdue to UCLA on the application letter at the time, and sent it in.
David Novo-Lake:And fortunately, they asked me to come by, and it was a beautiful weekend in Los Angeles that weekend. And again, it was February, and I'm like, well, if I have to go somewhere for, you know, four years, there's West Lafayette, Indiana at Purdue, and there's Los Angeles. And so I said, alright, UCLA's a pretty good school, and ended up there. So again, I wish I could say it was because of a concerted evaluation of the intellectual rigor at the various universities, but it really was because Los Angeles has much better weather.
Peter O'Toole:Brilliant. Where do you live now?
David Novo-Lake:Now I still live in Los Angeles. So you're still enjoying the weather? I'm still enjoying the weather.
Peter O'Toole:Do you not miss the snow?
David Novo-Lake:We get, you know, there's easy enough here to find snow. There's mountains are an hour and a half away, and really big mountains like Mammoth, like world class skiing is like five hours away, and I go visit my parents. So I get my two, three weeks of snow a year, and that's more than enough. These days actually, even when I visit my parents, I think because of global warming, I don't even get snow a lot of the time anymore anyway.
Peter O'Toole:Yeah. What were your what was your parents take when you said, you know, you were only an hour and a half away. It's long enough, far enough away to start with, but then you well, that's quite a big distance. How were they then?
David Novo-Lake:I imagine they were would have preferred me to be closer to home, but I traveled a lot before then, and I think that they were used to me sort of running off, and they like to travel as well, so everybody visited. It wasn't a big, a too big drama.
Peter O'Toole:I'd usually ask who your inspirations are, but you've already mentioned that you were you were working with Howard Shapiro. I'd imagine he's one of your biggest influences?
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. I mean, scientifically, absolutely. He's sort of a combination of a, you know, scientific so I worked with him, for him for about a year almost at his lab in Boston. And, you know, saying his lab is conjures up maybe something grander than what it was. It it was him and a wonderful woman named Nancy Perlmutter, who I'm still friends with to this day, and it was the three of us, and that was his lab.
David Novo-Lake:So, you know, we saw each other every day in this small environment. You know, we we had a lot in common. I mean, Howard was Jewish, Nancy's Jewish, I'm Jewish, so it was this very, so Howard became kind of like a surrogate father slash grandfather figure, and I was invited to his house for Jewish holidays and whatever, and it became kind of like, you know, definitely close much closer than an employee. I wouldn't say like a son. That's probably a bit much.
David Novo-Lake:But, you know, let's say a nephew, you know, maybe is is what it turned out to be like. So he was a mentor in many ways.
Peter O'Toole:Tick tock, I I unfortunately, obviously, I never got to record with Howard himself. So it would be good just to reflect a little bit. How much guitar playing did you have to listen to?
David Novo-Lake:You know, in the office, it was more or less strictly band. So I didn't have to to listen to too much on a day to day basis, but definitely wherever we went, you know, he was constantly in demand and so I did hear live renditions of his songs a lot. He was recording his his little album. His son Peter helped him record a CD shortly around the time where I started. So that was I was hearing a little bit of practicing and various editing of the of the songs then over and over for the first couple weeks, but that that was about it.
Peter O'Toole:That's cool. It was really nice to hear that he was he was like a father figure. Grandfather, father, grandfather figure. It's quite nice to hear just, you know, how Warren was welcoming, and and how how the lab wasn't a massive lab.
David Novo-Lake:No, and it wasn't. You know, towards the I think before I came, Howard did He had written all his books, obviously, and he did a lot more of his own research. By the time I came, he was doing a lot of contract work for, you know, people would come to him on occasion with very obscure questions about what's the best way to do this and what's the best way to do that, and he would sort of set up a flow cytometer and show some proof of principle that he thought, and then, you know, then they would sort of move on. So he did a lot. He helped a lot of people.
David Novo-Lake:He wasn't really doing too much of his own research at the time.
Peter O'Toole:Actually, one of his passions was obviously to support ACE monitoring in Africa and low middle income countries. Do you think that's also influenced you? Because you obviously got you're involved in the open an an open source project to yourself, aren't
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. That was a Howard's passion towards the end was to basically use super cheap microscopes as much as possible to do some kind of low resolution cytometry for monitoring various diseases. It was interesting to me that, you know, this was like a sort of ten year more or less unsuccessful effort of his to try and get large manufacturers to buy into this vision. I've heard various reasons why it didn't happen that I'm not gonna get into.
Peter O'Toole:No, no, no.
David Novo-Lake:You know, that's not But the one thing that I did see, what's interesting is that I did learn that you can't really Howard never Howard at this point was older. He was not about to start on a major venture on his own. But I did realize that if you go and rely on other people and large organizations, it's like a pipe dream sometimes where, yes, they have infinite resources and so much money and so much talent, but, you know, in order to justify moving the giant monster there, you need to have a large incentive and it's a very very difficult route to take. And if you wanna do something, you gotta do it on your own and get things at least to a certain point where you've got some momentum and then often maybe a bunch of people will jump on the bandwagon after you've gotten to that point. And so talking about the cytometry, we are I've a group that's trying to build and design open source flow cytometer for use, you know, other things, people in the third world who are developing countries who could build it at lower cost.
David Novo-Lake:And as a shameless plug, if anybody wants to get involved in that, we can use as much help as as we can at opencytometryhardware.org. But I do I think it's up to us to take it to a certain point, not to just keep going to the manufacturers and trying to pitch the idea, but we need to build it, we need to make it happen, and then once it's there and we've shown that it's useful for various things, then we can talk to other people to hopefully get, you know, more wide spread adoption or or make it available to more people in in in more different ways.
Peter O'Toole:Yeah. No. I I I think it's the right way to go about it. I if you it's not competing with the companies. So competition or anything, but at the same time, they're they're commercial companies.
Peter O'Toole:They they do have a remit. You know, they are charged with certain tasks. As I guess in the academic world, we're grant funded to do certain research projects, not to then use that funding to do a lot of other things with. That's probably not so dissimilar. But, you know, I I think where there's a potential success story, that's when they will come in, I think.
Peter O'Toole:Because they want to be associated with that success. And they can see they won't be burning money, but they'll get something deliverable positive out of it. So I I think he's got a good shout. And I think the open source project itself, I think is the right time. I I think so I think your timing is good.
Peter O'Toole:I think Howard was probably a bit premature in the way that people are open minded to to different approaches. Because we're so used to off the shelf products with good support that, you know, an open source project needs you need to be a bit more geeky. But I think with the three d printers now, with software, the way it's driving, it's now not super geeky. Yeah. It's been in the possibilities of a hobbyist or to someone who's got a PhD student who just started their PhD can probably put this together, and that makes a big difference.
Peter O'Toole:I don't think that was the case even ten years ago.
David Novo-Lake:No. Absolutely not. I mean, Howard was making his own preamplifiers by hand. You know, now you can upload a spec to China and and the two weeks later you have a board for for $12 that they printed just for you, and he was really, you know, you were shopping for the parts and you were scrounging for everything and he built a lot of, you know, if you needed anything custom, everything was very limited. It's a thousand times easier today and that's our vision is that we can have like this you know, you you can do this today, like come up with an IKEA parts list and say, here's the IKEA parts list, and then with instructions and videos, show how to assemble the IKEA parts list, and you literally don't even have to know how an op amp works.
David Novo-Lake:Like, you you have to do ideally, you know how to to stick plug one cable into another cable and plug the thing into the wall and just assemble the parts. And, you know, of course you will have to align it yourself and you will learn really all the little bit of the nuts and bolts, but any person who knows how to operate a screwdriver should be able to use it, I build it, I hope.
Peter O'Toole:I think the the other part of this, and I'd to know how far you've got along with the project at the moment. In the microscopy world, you can now buy three d printed microscopes in flat. Oh, yeah. But just three d with a little Raspberry Pi. Yeah.
Peter O'Toole:Running it with a lens, camera, lens on it. The lens is the most expensive part, I think, of the whole Yeah. Yeah. Microscope. So is it is it a similar ethos to actually Yeah.
Peter O'Toole:You gotta assume in a lot of low middle income countries, they may not have easy access to three d printers either. But in this case, it's quite cheap. Just like you said, the IKEA, we can just go to the the microscope IKEA to and actually sort of order the printed sheets to put together. Yeah. Mean, I think Open flexure certainly works that way.
Peter O'Toole:And we've got a couple of OpenFlexures. We put in some OpenFlexures ourselves into different low, middle income countries at the moment to see how we can maximize them because they're still not perfect. Mhmm.
David Novo-Lake:But they're good. Yeah. The open source movement has done well. There's I mean, don't remember the names of them off the top of my head because I don't use them. But when researching this, I saw that there's at least four or five there's like an open light sheet microscopy project.
David Novo-Lake:I mean, there it's amazing. Cytometry is a little flow cytometry is a little more difficult because the electronics component, I mean, we have like, you know, ten microseconds to acquire pulse from a cell and we're trying to get, you know, many thousands of pulses every second. And so the the data acquisition requirements and component requirements a little more stringent. You're not gonna be able to just three d print a whole flow cytometer. But you will be able to three d print many of the components.
David Novo-Lake:The idea is is that we'll provide, you know and even Thorlabs and most of these people, for every single part that they have, they have the CAD drawings for that part. You can just download and print that exact part. Of course, it won't be to the specifications and the quality of the machine Thorlabs piece, but often you don't need that. So we hope to have all the parts list up there and then you can get the three d printed versions and we may or may not need custom three d printed version components and we'll figure out how to distribute those. So the idea is to make it as cheap as possible but actually really functional.
David Novo-Lake:You know, we're sort of envisioning making two models. One for teaching purposes for courses that's like as cheap as possible but still lets people assemble a fully functioning site How cheap is cheap? That we don't know yet. What's your target? Well, mean, so Suwad Dervish made a machine that's probably under a hundred dollars for teaching purposes.
Peter O'Toole:It is
David Novo-Lake:not including some of the maybe maybe not including one of the PMTs, but he uses APDs and and detectors. It's a beautiful piece. We sort of have competing balances because if you make a super cheap machine, super super cheap, you can't reuse any of it for the research quality instrument. And we don't have enough resources and people volunteering to build 25 different instruments that are each completely independent. So we're trying to strike a balance between the parts that are difficult to be able to reuse those in both the teaching and the research Makes But that'll increase the price, obviously, of the teaching instrument compared to what it could be if we solely designed a teaching one.
David Novo-Lake:So, you know, I'm hoping for, you know, under $23,000 in parts to make the teaching instrument, and, you know, maybe even cheaper. And then for, you know, under $10,000 in parts to be able to make the research instrument. But we're still sort of looking around and seeing, you know, by research instrument, we're hoping for a six to eight color, you know, thing, one or two lasers, like nothing super fancy for the first step. But I don't know if we'll we'll push comes to shove, we'll see if that can actually happen.
Peter O'Toole:If you were successful, would you say that would be your greatest achievement, or would you still go back to your software and your your baby essentially with FCS Express?
David Novo-Lake:I mean, I guess it just depends how many people uptake the cytometer. I mean, if it turns out that, you know, by the time I move on, there are thousands of installations of the open source cytometer. And and the open source cytometer, to be fair, to be clear, it's not just me. There there are and are going to be a lot more people involved in it. But but yeah, if it's if it really makes an impact in other people being significant numbers of people being able to do more science and being able to spread cytometry around at a you know, teach about it and and whatever, you know, my greatest achievement, I don't know, but I'd be very proud of it, certainly.
Peter O'Toole:You seem Yeah. You seem very relaxed about it. So now we're gonna take you back in time to when you started your own business.
David Novo-Lake:Mhmm.
Peter O'Toole:Now I'd imagine right now you wouldn't quite be so calm and you'd be almost shouting at me with excitement and enthusiasm because a, you were obviously younger it's super edgy because you've a lot to lose. So, what was a, how did you have the guts to step out and start your own business? And what inspired you to do it? And what what were you worried about?
David Novo-Lake:I'll get to all three. Sure. So it's not as exciting as as today where, you know, people go and they start their thing and they take their whole bank account out and then they get $10,000,000 and they've got two years to spend it and things weren't that crazy when I started. When I started writing the software, I was working for Howard, and it was a very pragmatic thing. The first paper that Howard and I published together, which actually is to date the paper I'm most proud of, even in spite of all the few PhD papers that I published, was a paper that required us to do a ratio metric analysis of the dies we were using.
David Novo-Lake:And at that time, there was WinMDI, which was a software we used all the time written by Joe Trotter. It was a free software. And there was Winlist, we're really, at the time was, and it was an expensive software, I remember correctly, it was 3 or $4,000 at a time when 3 or $4,000 was a lot of money. And Howard wasn't gonna buy that to do the analysis. And so we needed something to do this ratio metric analysis of flow data.
David Novo-Lake:And I was living in Boston and and like I mentioned, it was me and Nancy. And when I moved to Boston, all I knew of Howard was his book. I'd never met him before, and it said that he was affiliated with Harvard, And so I imagined his lab, of course I don't know anything about Boston and all I had was an address, but I imagined, oh, that's on the Harvard campus and Howard has a lab at Harvard and there's gonna be all these Harvard students and whatever. Howard's lab was not on Harvard campus. It was a good twenty minute walk away.
David Novo-Lake:And so I basically knew nobody in Boston and I was there for like about a year and was working a lot. And so basically had a lot of spare time where I didn't know anybody and spent time writing this tool to make these ratio metric parameters and then I would want it to plot the ratio metric parameters and then I wanted to gate the ratio metric parameters and then I, you know, so it slowly evolved and I worked on this, you know, sort of in my spare time there, which I had a lot of because I didn't have any sort of life. And when I was done at Howard's lab, I realized that I almost had something that was as fully functional as WinMDI. And so I had the summer before I started my PhD in February or 02/2001, and so I worked very hard that summer to sort of polish off as much as I could. And concomitant with starting my PhD, I sent an email to the Purdue mailing list and made a crappy little website about that this software was available, and if you wanted to get it, could download a copy of the software.
David Novo-Lake:So I actually it was actually a very low stress situation for me because I was doing my PhD and I was starting my I had a salary as a PhD, and I was doing it very much as a part time thing to get your money and extra money above and beyond. So were you charging for the downloads? I was charging for the software, yeah, if you purchased it. After thirty days, it was a whopping $99 at that time for version one. Paul Robinson was actually, I think, customer number three, and I think he actually never installed nor used the software for about twenty years until many versions later.
David Novo-Lake:He just did it to support some poor putts who was trying to sell flow software on the Internet, and and and I appreciate him for that to this day. And basically, over I just did it really part time. There was no stress. If I made $5,000, that means I could go to that many more pubs or bars in LA on top of my whopping grad school salary. And if I didn't make anything, I didn't make anything.
David Novo-Lake:There was really no expenses. My mom was a bookkeeper and she did all the books and everything for the first few years from Canada while I was doing my PhD. But it became, you know, somewhat successful, and people were using it, and people were buying it, and it enabled me to travel to conferences. My PhD supervisor was very understanding of me taking time off a couple times a year to go to flow conferences and whatnot, and I did, I went to Citeaux and anything that was sort of close by Los Angeles I went to, and had a little booth and did my thing. And it sort of took off, at least enough that by the end of my PhD, I sort of had a choice of do I wanna continue on in academia, or do I wanna give this thing a try full time, and decided to to give it a try full time.
Peter O'Toole:So you went well, I suppose, so you went straight off. You had I guess you were already getting some income, but Yes. You're worried that the people who are gonna buy it have bought it. So where's your money gonna come from? Is it not good?
Peter O'Toole:Yeah. Are you not worried about that?
David Novo-Lake:That was always that's always the nature of a business, you know, where you're gonna get more customers and, you know, you sort of try to make a new version and get customers to upgrade to the new version. My major worry was that I really did have a worry that if this thing flopped, because it's, you know, a big jump to go from making an extra $40,000 a year that I could live on as a single person, you know, even without my extra PhD salary, but I could, you know, live with 23 roommates and eat ramen and survive on that. But like if it didn't really take off and eventually one day be able to support a better lifestyle, you know, it's kinda throwing my academic career in the toilet because you know once you've been gone from academia for however many years, probably not that many, you're never gonna get hired back as a postdoc when you you know, oh I finished my PhD six years ago and my business flopped, will you hire me as a postdoc? I knew that wasn't gonna happen. So that part was a little bit nerve wracking certainly and what would I do in that event then?
David Novo-Lake:And, you know, at the end of the day, I spoke to a bunch of people including my parents, I remember, and they were just like, you'll figure it out. Like, something's gonna happen. And and you just sort of have to have faith.
Peter O'Toole:That I'd say, obviously, it worked out well. Mhmm. Were there any difficult times when actually it wasn't going so well, and you're thinking, oh, no. I I you know, you maybe got a staff. What were those dark moments of thinking, this is all gonna collapse around me?
Peter O'Toole:Did you have one of those moments? Any of those moments?
David Novo-Lake:There was in in this in the first week, I got we gotten to the point where we hired three people working for me, and we've gotten to the point where things were I wouldn't say it was ever like, oh, I couldn't pay the next paycheck, but we didn't see really any way we had sort of stagnated and as trying as hard as we must might, we didn't see a a big path forward. And that was a little bit, you know, oh, what are we gonna do? And and we were just basically breaking even given all the salaries and everything. But fortunately, that didn't last for very long. I was really really lucky.
David Novo-Lake:We were at a ASH meeting in San Diego in December, and I don't even remember the year, I'd have to look it up. And a gentleman by the name of Ken Bloom, who was the chief medical officer at US labs at the time, basically came over and said, hey, we're doing flow cytometry, you know, basically clinical flow. Doctors in the hospitals send us for leukemia lymphoma. This is the very beginning of sort of outsourcing leukemia lymphoma analysis to third party flow labs that that is now very common here in The US. And it's like it's incredibly inefficient.
David Novo-Lake:We're doing analysis in Excel. We're taking it from this from like I think they were using a fax scan at the time. So taking it from CellQuest and we're exporting it to Excel and we're trying to create reports and from Excel we paste it into Word and we it's incredibly inefficient and I see that your software has a whole reporting capability and if you just add these you know three features we'll be able to implement it. And so they actually paid to develop the three features that they needed which had to do with reporting, extra reporting features they needed, and they paid well for it, and that saved us a lifeline, and then they bought a license to the software. And then after that everything was really great because the clinical, other clinical labs saw how it was really a quantum leap in efficiency and quality in terms of what clinical labs were doing.
David Novo-Lake:And we were able to really tap into that clinical market in The US at least. And eventually got registered as a medical device with the FDA which further made that thing. And so we had a very huge presence in the clinical flow market, and from then on I was never really worried we were gonna go bankrupt or there was never really a stress.
Peter O'Toole:How many staff did you grow to?
David Novo-Lake:By the time we sold the company a couple years ago, it was about 25 people. So not huge, but certainly enough to keep me busy. And talking about what's more interesting, it wasn't it wasn't when we sold that, you know, the flow cytometry and the date the data analysis part was still really great and the software development part was really great. But there's just so much b s that goes along with running even a 25 person company that took like 75% of my time. That was completely uninteresting and everything from you know taxes to HR, just administration, tons of administration, your website is falling apart, your this needs to be upgraded, the virus scanners aren't working, the this and you know we never, we're not big enough that we could have a dedicated IT person and a dedicated full time accountant and a dedicated this and a dedicated that.
David Novo-Lake:So I ended up having, you know, 5% of my time involved in a lot of different stuff that wasn't super interesting, really.
Peter O'Toole:But, yeah, I I just working through this. So you'll be Would you clad to yourself as retired now? Sort of I mean not
David Novo-Lake:based on my amount of free time, certainly not.
Peter O'Toole:But I've got to ask, how young are you? See, not even how old are you. How young are
David Novo-Lake:you? So I'm in I'm 50, 50 one right
Peter O'Toole:now. And now into just following your hobbies, your passions in the world.
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. So fortunately for me, my passion sort of dovetail a lot with what I was doing. So I'm still working for currently for the company that purchased FCS Express. So I'm still involved with that and helping them out on a sort of consulting basis and not consulting, but, like, special projects and questions that they have, and I'm still continuing to do some work for them on a regular basis. But then in my spare time, one thing I definitely am devoting more time to is my health.
David Novo-Lake:I have too many friends who are starting, you know, as you get into your fifties, everybody starts developing odd diseases and high blood pressure and this and that. So one of the things I'm definitely focusing on is making sure that I have time to work out and and exercise and do all the things that I didn't do for the thirty years I was running the company. I'll take
Peter O'Toole:a look. What's your exercising regime? What are you doing to keep it?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, quite a bit. So I have bad knees, so it sort of takes takes a lot of things off the table, but I bike a few times a week, and I swim, and do a class at the local fitness place called Orangetheory, know, sort of a cardio kind of thing. So I'm trying to keep at least a few hours a week, just keep in shape and keep all those old age diseases under control.
Peter O'Toole:See, it's interesting. So you've the bad knees. Always hear people in their fifties who have exercised a lot that blame their exercise on their bad knees. Here you are having not done much exercise and got bad knees. I think it is just whichever.
Peter O'Toole:And actually, have you tried building knee strength up so you can do more?
David Novo-Lake:So on top of my bad knees, actually tore the meniscus in my knee exercising a year ago, so I've just given up on my knees. But everything else, so I do do a lot of biking, is, you know, sort of strengthens the rest and supposedly will help stabilize all of that. But you know, what can you do? What are the help you do? So I do aside so so one of my hobbies now is both my job and my hobby is that I have I run a small research team, me and a couple people, and we actually do research.
David Novo-Lake:And so I love it. It's you know, there's a lot of ideas came up over the last twenty years or so about different ways of doing things that you can never really pursue because I had a business to run and I didn't really have enough time nor resources to pay somebody to just be, do research with no economic But fortunately now I'm in a position where I can do that. So that's a hobby actually, so I do research a few hours a day, maybe half the day is usually doing different projects. I try to spend more time doing it, but with everything else that's involved, it ends up being four or five hours. So that's kind of a hobby.
David Novo-Lake:Again, combines what I really love with not really much stress, although I would like to get some papers out eventually, which again, when you have no stress, it's the stress of of having to publish or perish actually probably is useful for getting things out the door. I I have a tendency to try to keep looking and making it more perfect and more perfect and more perfect and answer every question, and I feel like sometimes you
Peter O'Toole:just Yeah. But that's not good. You're better to do a part a and part b and come out with Yeah. And then follow it up with more, and you know that.
David Novo-Lake:That's what I need advice from more academics to to to get tell me when to kick the thing out the door and and it's good enough, you know? And it's funny because in my job and in in the company, there was always, you know, nothing was ever perfect. You're always making decisions about when is it good enough to release, when is the documentation good enough, when is the website good enough, because you really there was really the longer you dawdled, there was a real economic penalty to it. And with this with these projects, you know, I could use some maybe economic penalty a little bit somehow.
Peter O'Toole:I've I've got an interesting question. So throughout the time with FCS Express, I guess your main competitors were FlowJo. Correct. How competitive did you feel them as competitors, or were you just you just getting on with your own thing, or did you feel that as competition? You know, what were your emotions about that?
Peter O'Toole:I I know what I'd be like. I'd I'd be constantly looking. I in a friendly way, if that makes sense. But
David Novo-Lake:We definitely always kept an eye on what Flo Jo was doing. At the beginning, actually, Adam Treister and I, who was the founder of Flo Jo along with Mario Roterer, but Adam was sort of working on it full time. We were great friends. At the beginning, Flo Jo was only on and I still like Adam and think he's wonderful. I haven't seen him in a long time, but but Flojo was really on the Mac only and FCS Express was on the PC.
David Novo-Lake:And believe it or not in in the Saito in Montpellier, we actually shared a booth together and we both saw our job as trying to fight the entrenched, the CellQuest and get some of these CellQuest users and others to just switch to one of ours. We didn't really, if you wanted to be a Mac, you were on a Mac, if you wanted to be on PC, you were on PC. And we had that site in Montpellier, very fond memories of it. We gave away bottles of wine, and we had wine at the booth, and it was a great was a great time. You know, once Flojo came out with a PC version, it put a damper on the Kumbaya relationship that we had and definitely became more competitors.
David Novo-Lake:And you know, I will definitely say towards the end it was certainly frustrating. You know, again, we had a big clinical market which we kinda had to ourselves and that was very allowed things to go stress free. And on the research market, we really were constantly butting our heads against Flo Jo and and you know one of the things that was really challenging is you think that scientists are working on the cutting edge. They always wanna be new. They always wanna be innovative.
David Novo-Lake:They're like at the but you know scientists are as stodgy as anybody else and you try to take the tools that they're used to and give them something new, and it's out of their cold, dead hands can you claw things away sometimes. So eat I don't I don't know if you've experienced that.
Peter O'Toole:I was joking. We have both FCS Express and we have FlowJo, because you can't get FlowJo users to use FCS Express.
David Novo-Lake:Mhmm. You just it
Peter O'Toole:just doesn't. They just
David Novo-Lake:Yeah.
Peter O'Toole:They they went to it.
David Novo-Lake:And one of the things was is at the beginning, it was because, oh, FlowJo has this feature, and we really use this feature, and it has that feature. And over the years, we narrowed down, like, we had ways there were legitimate things that that that Flo Jo could do. And and if you use those, there was really no way of doing them in FCS Express. But over the years, we winnowed those away one by one by one. And at some point I realized, okay, it has no longer anything to do with the lack or not lack of features in the software.
David Novo-Lake:It's just scientists are as stodgy or stodgier than anybody else. And it makes sense, everybody has stuff to do and it's really time consuming to learn a new software potentially. And if you spent ten years banging your head against a certain wall and now you know how to make that wall do exactly what you want, you're perfectly happy with it. And so you know, that was definitely a challenge towards the end of trying to figure out what we can do to because really, Flo Jo controls such a big part of the market that if you wanna grow on the research side, you've gotta take users away from Flo Jo.
Peter O'Toole:I'm sure there'll be FCS express users that feel exactly the same way the other way. You're right, and that's also to do with the instruments that they use, or the manufacturer's instruments they use, or a reagent company that they swear by. I think some would actually divorce their partners rather than divorce get move from what they're using.
David Novo-Lake:No. No. Absolutely. And there's network effects like, you know, we've had FCS Express users go to a lab, and they're like, oh, the whole lab uses FlowJo, and nobody will talk to me. You know?
David Novo-Lake:They're like, you know, like, they won't look at my data. They won't, like, help me analyze it. They won't do anything. And so, you know, Flo Jo, you know, started before us, and they were working full time while I was still in grad school and got a lot of and so they just had they had a big head start. And so by the time I decided to go full time, and again at the beginning it was just me and and a colleague full time, they had an entrenched user base long before we got started.
David Novo-Lake:So again, it was just difficult.
Peter O'Toole:Well, York, we have both. I think the very first one I had was actually besides Winlist and WinMDI using those. I think the first I had was actually FCS Express for ratio metric analysis. Oh, really? I'm pipelining batch batch processing lots and lots of data through.
Peter O'Toole:So there you are. From right back Oh, great. Actually started, which FlowJo didn't have a good option for at time. But then we did get FlowJo as well, and now we got both parties working concurrently. So we talked about difficult times.
Peter O'Toole:Would you say that time when you before you got that contract was the most difficult time in your career, or there'd been other more challenging times for other reasons?
David Novo-Lake:No, that was the most difficult time. I mean, it's always been a challenge balancing, you know, certainly balancing family. Like, there never really were economic challenges. I mean, I never tried to grow the company beyond my means and and take large risks and bring on 50 staff that like, okay, we're gonna increase our revenue 10 x so that I can pay them. Like I only hired people and did things that we could actually afford to do.
David Novo-Lake:And again, it's it's a different from the VC model right now. It's a very old mom and pop model, you know, where the VC model, that's not enough to grow 15. Like all I needed to do was feed my family and pay my mortgage. Like that's all I really wanted to have. Right?
David Novo-Lake:But that's not enough for a VC model these days and the VC model you need to like gain 50 x like every year or else you're kicked to the curb. So there's a lot even if your company is doing exceptionally well, you know, by any standard and growing 15% a year, that's not enough and you're still under stress in order to get that 50 x return, you know. Whereas for me, like, we it was never at the point after that where I couldn't
Peter O'Toole:feed myself. Do you think that's so I'm just reflecting for what you said much earlier, and the way you got burned when you did your first stock market bit. Would you say that's made you also more risk adverse and like to do things conservatively and carefully and within your means rather than putting all your money on a certain stock and knowing that it could go flat? Do think that actually that was actually a good lesson at that point?
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. I mean, that may have percolated through in some way. My grandfather owned multiple businesses and liked to talk about them and whatever, and he was a bit of a role model for me in terms of, you know, what it's kind of like what you want out a business and it's very personal. Right? Some people wanna be billionaires.
David Novo-Lake:And if you wanna be a billionaire, you can't do it without, either being exceptionally lucky and being in the right place at the right time times the power of infinity, which happens occasionally. Or you just have to take huge risks. But if your aspiration is not to be a billionaire, and your aspiration is just to have a comfortable life and do something interesting, and you know, then you don't have to go take all those risks and and you know, so you sort of can define upfront what your goals really are.
Peter O'Toole:I I think you mentioned because family side and that's important. You can't It's a very big risk to go for all out because it would then impact your family as well. So do you have children?
David Novo-Lake:I have three children, yeah.
Peter O'Toole:Does any any of them followed in your footsteps? What are
David Novo-Lake:they all doing? Well, so they're still a bit young to be following in my footsteps. I don't even think that they know I think that they could tell you that I do flow cytometry, but they couldn't really tell you what it is.
Peter O'Toole:How old are
David Novo-Lake:The oldest is 14 and the youngest is six.
Peter O'Toole:Very
David Novo-Lake:good. Little one there who's 11.
Peter O'Toole:Now you need to go and ask your 16, 11, 40 year old, what do you want to be when you grow up? And then they'll remember it. When they're in this position, what was the first job that they wanted to do?
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. Well, actually, my the middle son in particular is very engineering related. We do have a three d printer at home, and he loves to print up things. And so he's actually, like, all excited when we get to the point in the open source project where we're gonna print up parts and he wants to help design them and whatever. So we may may get a little flow cytometrist side of it somehow.
Peter O'Toole:I'm gonna throw some quick fire questions at you. Mhmm. Are you an early bird or night owl?
David Novo-Lake:By tendency, a night owl, by necessity, and having three kids, it's my job to get them to school in the morning, so I'm an early bird most days.
Peter O'Toole:PC or Mac? Oh, PC. Now, I was always confused, wasn't Considering considering what we've just been speaking about is the most dumb question I think you've ever asked in a quick fire. McDonald's or Burger King?
David Novo-Lake:They're both And you've got
Peter O'Toole:three kids. You gotta go to one.
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. I mean, McDonald's. It's gotta it's gotta be McDonald's, I guess.
Peter O'Toole:What what's your go to when you go to McDonald's?
David Novo-Lake:I guess a Big Mac would be the the Okay. I mean, you're really it's it's not a preferred location, believe me. That's for sure.
Peter O'Toole:It's not that bad. Tea or coffee?
David Novo-Lake:Sorry? Tea or coffee? Coffee. Chocolate or cheese? Cheese.
Peter O'Toole:Beer or wine?
David Novo-Lake:Beer.
Peter O'Toole:Okay.
David Novo-Lake:Feel like I'm gonna come out there like, then after you punch it all on the computer, you're gonna be like, oh, 80% chance of being a felon, 20 chance of being homeless based on the
Peter O'Toole:I can't say what I
David Novo-Lake:was gonna say. We'll come
Peter O'Toole:to it after we stop recording. If you were to go out for dinner and someone was to order, what would be your favorite food to eat at?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, I love Indian food. I really love Indian food.
Peter O'Toole:You must love coming to The UK, though.
David Novo-Lake:I love coming to The UK, and in the last site, was at Rachel Walker's place.
Peter O'Toole:Yeah. Down at Baybraham. I'm doing a course down there, I think, weren't you, with Rachel?
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. Yep. And I went into Cambridge every night to eat, even though we were sort of out a little bit where her where the Baybraham is. I went into Cambridge every day just to eat Indian food, and yeah, it was awesome.
Peter O'Toole:Me flip that the other way. What would be the worst food that could be served in front of you? Yeah, you're an invited speaker, they take you out somewhere, it's a set menu, and what is the worst thing they could put in front of you?
David Novo-Lake:There's not much I won't eat. Know? If I had to be stereotypical, a plate of like roasted vegetables or something like that, it wouldn't be bad, but be exceptionally boring. Probably. But there's no real style of food that I that I don't like.
Peter O'Toole:Okay. Do you prefer to eat in or eat out?
David Novo-Lake:I love to cook. I do love What's signature dish?
David Novo-Lake:I make a really mean chicken tikka masala, to be honest. Okay. As well as Cajun food, both because they're I I enjoy that they're very complicated to make, and I do feel like a scientist, you're measuring out 40 different spices and adding them at different times and cooking them. It's not so different from following a protocol and an experiment at that point.
Peter O'Toole:Do you know what? I nailed a chicken cicapatia recently. Oh, good. And it's definitely not from recipe because those spices vary in the flavor of them.
David Novo-Lake:Yeah.
Peter O'Toole:I'm over the batch and it's constant tasting all the way through. But it's the first time I've actually got it just right. So many times it's, ah, it's okay. I'd rather go to my local. Sure.
Peter O'Toole:But no, I
David Novo-Lake:So that's what I'm missing. So I actually spent some time and there there aren't any to take a proper Indian cooking class. I need to like rent an Indian grandma from somebody and because I know there's so much subtlety in terms of like putting the spices in the oil before you cook exactly the right amount of time, and the oil has to be the right heat, and it brings out the flavors, and But like, that's hard to figure out on your own is how to how to do that.
Peter O'Toole:Please. And still later on, might have to add some more smoke pack paprika or some more cumin or some more cinnamon or some more coriander or some like
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. Now if there was a like three hour a day, once a week Indian cooking class somewhere in Los Angeles, I would 100% take it for, you know, whatever, six months and and really learn. It's it's super fun and the food is so good. TV or book? It depends.
David Novo-Lake:It depends. I love reading and I read a lot.
Peter O'Toole:What sort of genre? Sci
David Novo-Lake:fi, fantasy is my Oh,
Peter O'Toole:okay. Is my What about TV? What's your t what's your TV sin? What what's a God confess
David Novo-Lake:to you've never
Peter O'Toole:confessed to.
David Novo-Lake:Ultraviolent movies are like my I do love a good action movie with, you know, John Wick level of Okay. Of destruction. And that is a secret pleasure because I have to watch them when my wife's not around because she can't stand them. So it's like really something I gotta do if she's like gone away somewhere and I can sneak in an hour. It's it's
Peter O'Toole:No. It's a good action movie. I can go that's not bad. So what was your favorite film?
David Novo-Lake:I think The Shawshank Redemption is up there as one that I really, really loved and
Peter O'Toole:Okay. Georgetown Redemption's good. I asked this all year long. What's your favorite Christmas film?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, I don't have one. I never got into them. Coming from a Jewish background, I never got into too much of the Come
Peter O'Toole:on. Die Hard, surely for you.
David Novo-Lake:I'm not gonna get drawn into that debate. Sure. That that has
Peter O'Toole:to Okay. Star Wars or Star Trek?
David Novo-Lake:I'll say Star Trek. I feel it's a little more long lived. Okay. There's lots of different versions.
Peter O'Toole:Spectral or mixing or compensation?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, don't get me started, Peter.
Peter O'Toole:That's a quick answer. Quick
David Novo-Lake:one. They're both one and the same.
Peter O'Toole:That's what Mario said. Beg to differ still subtly, because the additive rather than subtractive purpose. Favorite color?
David Novo-Lake:Green.
Peter O'Toole:Again, not Fitsi, not GFP. Oh.
David Novo-Lake:See, remember, I don't actually run experiments, so all of the stuff's just data. The fact that it came from a dye, a molecule or not, that's a nice coincidence, but
Peter O'Toole:I know. You said at the very start that you like copper music. What what is your favorite music? What is your what do you listen to?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, for real, my favorite music is probably seventies funk, parliament, and and James Brown, and those sorts of I mean, it dates me, I have to say. I wish it was something a little more modern, but, you know, I still think when I'm cooking and you've got some parliament going on really loud, it's a it's a great day.
Peter O'Toole:That's cool. Do you know what? I realized just I've spent too much time chatting to you. I'm sorry. Very quickly, besides Howard, have you had any other inspirations?
Peter O'Toole:Who's inspired you in your career or in your life?
David Novo-Lake:You know, from a career point of view, you know, again, although I don't realize it overtly, but I think just the example set by my grandfather certainly as a, you know, he was a very much like, just go out and do it. He also retired at his low fifties, early fifties, after a string of successful businesses in Montreal. And it never because of him, it never really seemed scary to start a business. It's just like that's what you do. You start a business.
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. Like that's fine. It's not intimidating. It's not like if he could do it and he's you know, just my grandfather. So it didn't seem very strange which you know sort of from a social point of view always made me appreciate more about sort of your culture and where you're from as opportunities that you have.
David Novo-Lake:And certainly if you don't have those role models and you don't even know, you know, everything seems so intimidating and so scary and so like But when you just have these role models, they're just normal people and they're not like Uber geniuses or Uber whatever, they're just your grandfather. Missing that I don't know where things are just much more difficult I think so.
Peter O'Toole:My own dad started his own business. And actually, if I think about it when I do my a levels, I probably thought I'd end up running not his business, although he probably wanted me to do that. Was definitely not my cup of tea. But I probably thought I'd have a business, but then when you get into science, that's a lot harder to find a business to start up in science. So I think you've done really well to find a niche and succeed at it.
David Novo-Lake:Yeah. And I do the other thing that I think definitely % influenced me is I did a program in the Israeli army when I was 18, and it was a basic training program where we did, you know, basically basic training in the Israeli army. It was a program for foreigners to sort of see what that was like. And while I'm not I'm very not non military and not whatever, but there was a certain attitude there in the army that, you know, you got a job to do. You're given and this is 'm I'm sure universal to all armies everywhere.
David Novo-Lake:You're given a job, you're given a task, you're given a time limit, and there's just no excuses. There's no like, if you have to load up the truck and they give you four minutes to do it, like, if you didn't do it in four minutes, you ran laps for thirty minutes, you know, and they didn't care, and nobody cared. And that was, you know, when you're doing that for months and months and you're getting that attitude, that really stuck with me throughout university and throughout my life is that, you know, you gotta set yourself a goal and you can make as many excuses as you want, but at the end of the day you didn't accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. And that's all that matters at the end. And that's something that really stuck with me, and I think is a big, changed my attitude from the way I was before certainly, and was certainly a big help in my life in terms of setting goals in ways that I could achieve them.
David Novo-Lake:Because if you set goals and you just consistently don't achieve them, what's the point? And then on the corollary of like, there's no excuses. Like you set yourself a goal, you just do whatever you have to do to make it happen. And that was I think helpful in life and in business. So wasn't really a person, but that was a big influence.
Peter O'Toole:I've I've got two more very quick questions because I think we're up to the hour already. If you could do any job in the world for a day or a week, just to try something different, what job would it be?
David Novo-Lake:Oh, an astronaut, for sure.
Peter O'Toole:Okay. That that that's not not the first time you've heard that, but not all that common. And do you have any regrets?
David Novo-Lake:No. I don't have any regrets. I mean, there's 10,000 things I could have done differently, and potentially if I had done those differently, my life could have been better in 500 ways, but they could have been worse. You know, so I don't really believe in regrets. I mean, I haven't murdered anybody, so you know, probably regret that.
David Novo-Lake:But you know, within the normal realm of activities, I'm very happy with the way things turned out. I have a wonderful family, a wonderful wife. I'm doing what I love to do. And I always loved, aside from the administrative purpose crap that went on, I always loved what I did. It was never a chore to go to work and deal and meet.
David Novo-Lake:I got the opportunity to, you know, because I was selling stuff, I traveled around the world and met almost every single person who's been on the Flow Stars show over the years, and it's such a wonderful community, and I met so many nice people, and people were so supportive and so friendly, and I really have no regrets about the, you know, nobody I had to deal with was some MBA type that I'm just trying to, you know, schmooze money from. They're all real people who I felt that I was really helping them in their science, and they were all very nice and very appreciative. And to this day, I love going to Saito in spite of the fact that I have no real need to go. But just to see all the people and to interact with them, it's a wonderful community. So I have I somehow lucked into what I feel was a great job and a great life.
Peter O'Toole:I should just to just to wrap up actually, do a big thanks because it is that community, and you're very much part of that community. And I think that's interesting where you have sort of being more commercially on the scene than academically on the scene, but being very much part of the academic community. If that makes sense. You know, your your time and efforts in with Isaac as well. The support that you've given all of us through developing FCS Express as users who wanted you to put new features in, how you responded that, The amount of academic input and impact you've had is not insignificant.
Peter O'Toole:And, you know, when you reflect, when you look back, you've been extremely influential on the flow cytometry market, and you should be super proud of that. I'm sure you are super proud of that. But as a flow cytometrist and someone who's used and benefited from Essay Express, a big thanks for me and a big thanks for many other people. So I I just before I sign off, just say, please, everyone who's watched or listened, obviously, go and have a look at the open source project. And what was the website, Dave?
David Novo-Lake:It was opencytometryhardware.org.
Peter O'Toole:So go and have a look at that, see what's going on with it. You've heard him mention Paul Robinson, Howard Shapiro, and others. Please go back and look at the other Flowstars. Please do subscribe to the channel. But most of all, Dave, thank you so much for taking your time to join me today.
Peter O'Toole:We didn't even get to talk about your courses that you're running, and so please look out for Dave's courses as well. There won't be a better tutor when it comes to data analysis. Dave, thank you very much.
David Novo-Lake:Thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me. Was a great chat.
