Clint joined Fulcrum Genomics in August 2023. Clint’s notable career achievements involve the invention and application of high-accuracy DNA sequencing methods as applied to genetic safety assessment, early detection of cancer, and cancer minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring. Clint’s passion has been the study of early initiating events leading to cancer and how to ultimately prevent genetic disease. Despite training as a biochemistry-focused molecular toxicologist, Clint now enjoys modern software development and leading technical bioinformatic teams. We recently sat down with Clint to chat about work and life as a genomics consultant.
What’s your area of expertise, and what excites you about your work?
I have a unique path getting to Fulcrum. Although I’m a relatively new addition to Fulcrum’s team, I first met and collaborated with our founders Nils and Tim nearly ten years ago. I arrived here through my work in error-corrected DNA sequencing, having studied Duplex Sequencing since I first learned of it and applied it to genetox assessment in 2014. Coincidentally, Tim and Nils wrote some really important software back then to analyze that type of data. The software was sponsored by a client of Fulcrum’s, but it was available as open source and early enough in time to become an industry favorite! This software was foundational to a startup that I joined, so that’s how I met Tim and Nils—through their solution, their software.
Fulcrum was young and my startup was too. We grew together and my company retained Fulcrum for my entire tenure there, about seven years. We learned things from each other and we grew our businesses together. That experience gave me exposure to the Fulcrum business model and personalities; I had a little window into some of the problems they were trying to solve—they were the people who got called in for the tricky stuff, the interesting stuff—and the community always relied on their software. Given my scientific expertise overlapped with one of their renown software offerings, it was logical that I consider joining this supergroup someday.
In my work I enjoy getting to observe a variety of different teams, different scientific programs, different ways of running businesses. I can give a lot of different people small (but very strategic and important) pushes as they go and solve real and tricky problems that maybe they’ve dedicated parts of their life to solving. And I get to witness some of that, and I get to be involved, and I get to help out in perhaps brief moments where I’m needed most. I enjoy that because sometimes when you work for one company, those moments are few and far between the small or low-value tasks that just have to get done. Whereas now I get to do the interesting stuff full-time, because that’s why we’re brought in across all of our clients.
And I’m curious, so I’ve wanted to learn more—scientifically, of course, and have an impact there, but I also want to see how companies run themselves. I care a lot about business operations. I want to know good and better ways for managing teams and managing people; what are good ways of iterating on science and industry all while managing money and, in general, I want to see what is out there, what is working, and what isn’t.
What’s a common challenge in our industry that people don’t talk about enough?
We’ve already talked about how much I care about business process.
I had one CEO who taught me quite a few things and I respected many of those teachings. One pithy thing he used to say that I quite liked is “Science only moves at the speed of thought”. That was really impactful then because (in this intermediary time before LLMs have taken over) it’s true that science and the business can only move as fast as people are able to critically think and respond to new information. Anything that removes bottlenecks allows scientists to work at the speed of thought. It can look like making things a little more efficient; maybe choosing to not do something and avoid a waste of time. Just thinking about the fact that there’s a bunch of humans in the loop and critical thinking needs to happen, so provide a context for it to happen, and often!
The irony is that sometimes the effort to make things more efficient results in heavy process and rigid controls that have the opposite effect, you no longer have the right degrees of freedom. The trick is knowing when business process accelerates thinking—and when that structures just slows everything down and prevents you from necessary inspiration, discovery, and pivots.
What’s one tool, tip, or mindset shift that has made a big impact in your work?
I am a people manager. I have built and managed teams a lot in recent years, through good times and challenging business times. There are a lot of different styles to getting things done, managing people even, but I don’t want to get into any of them because everyone develops their own style and there’s not one piece of advice I could give that will work the same for everyone.
At the end of the day, though, positive leadership is really important to me. Leading with a positive attitude and being excited about the potential of the future, not rose-tinting or anything, but being excited to come to work and meet people and create something with your colleagues and solve problems is motivational. Doing the hard stuff together. So if anyone is looking to try to do a better job at their work, you should try to have positive leadership over your projects, your people, and your science. It’s an important ingredient in my recipe of success.
What’s a recent project or insight you’re particularly proud of?
We’re working with a team that’s developed an advanced diagnostic test using high accuracy DNA sequencing—my personal specialty—and I’m really proud of how we’ve supported them from the moment they reached out for help to where they are now, about a year later. We jumped in quickly, reviewed their existing software line-by-line, and understood exactly what it was doing and what needed to change. Because this is our area of expertise we weren’t reinventing the wheel—we came in with the knowledge already in hand. It was a great fit: they came to the right people at the right time. We built software scaled perfectly to the company they were aiming to become—not too much, not too little—and it just worked. From basically “zero code” or pseudocode to CLIA/CAP accreditation in under a year for a cutting-edge diagnostic test. That’s the kind of project that feels really good to be a part of.
If you could give biotech startups one piece of advice, what would it be?
The most important early decision is getting the right team aligned on a clear, shared goal.
It’s critical to build your foundational team with intention—and to make sure they’re aligned on where they’re going. They don’t need to know every step of the path, but they do need to agree on the destination: one mission, one vision, one goal. That early team needs to work well together and have the right mix of experience to move the program forward. If you get that part right, everything else builds more smoothly. But if you get it wrong, a few years down the line you end up with problems that are hard to unwind—cultural habits that get baked in and become almost impossible to change. The early team sets the tone, and the culture follows.
What’s something outside of work that inspires how you think about problem-solving?
It probably comes more from my upbringing than any current outside-of-work hobby I have now. I grew up in an engineering-minded household with an expert craftsmen father, and I think I’ve inherited that way of thinking and doing. I was also raised in New England, so I naturally lean to business first and leisure second. Later in my life, I spent time on the West Coast where that mindset felt flipped, with the same amount of work completed, just a different order of operations. That engineering mindset—being curious, breaking things apart to understand them, then putting them back together—has served me especially well in software. Because often the insights only come after a lot of head-banging and debugging. You’ve got to dig in and really tease things apart. A project’s not done until you understand it and it’s working.