Aperio CEO engineers way into imaging business

By: ANDREW PETERSON - For the North County Times | Wednesday, March 29, 2006 8:12 PM PST ∞

VISTA ---- Six years ago, Aperio Technologies founder and Chief Executive Officer Dirk Soenksen, working alone in the garage of his house in Carlsbad, set for himself the goal of predicting the future.

The future in question revolved around pathology imaging: microscopes, slides, biopsies and tissue samples. How would the practice of medicine and science in this area change in the next 10 or 20 years?

"The answer," Soenksen, 44, said in a recent phone interview, "was that people are going to look at microscope slides on a computer screen and not through an optical microscope. The future of microscopy was going to be digital."

He said he then asked himself a question:"Why isn't it digital today?"

Soenksen drew on his degrees in chemistry and engineering, his training as a systems engineer and his extensive background with corporate technology companies (most recently as vice president/general manager at Applied Spectral Imaging, and before that in product development at GEC-Marconi) to find the answer. "The most important bottleneck was that people couldn't digitize so much information quickly," he said.

Soenksen, who also has an MBA, had to figure out how to build a device ---- a scanning microscope ---- that could digitize an entire microscope slide in minutes at an extremely high resolution of 100,000 pixels per inch and do it quickly enough so that it could be integrated into the breakneck pace of the work flow at a typical hospital.

"I set out to actually build a prototype in my garage," he recalled. "Only (when) I had a working prototype and a patent application and a business plan did I then go raise some money." The prototype soon evolved into Aperio's first product sale, to UC Davis.

Luckily, Soenksen already knew his market.

"Our early sales were to people that I had previous met in my prior jobs ... so I had the connections."

Aperio (the name is Latin and means "to make clear") is based in Vista, and is growing explosively.

"We have gone from about 35 to 60 people in the last three months," Soenksen said. "It wouldn't surprise me if we're close to 100 people by the end of the year. We are in a very steep growth phase ... and there are growing pains. ... Every part of what you do is challenged. Everything from your teleconference system to your IT infrastructure to how you communicate with employees about what's going on ... the capabilities of your managers to take on more people while still getting the job done."

Soenksen says his leadership style is collaborative and participatory. "Obviously, if a decision has to be made, I need to make it," he said. "But everybody knows that they have input. I lead by example ... I think it's very important to empower other people in the company to be successful ---- management is all about allowing people to succeed.

Aperio's revenue growth is robust.

"We won't discuss revenue," Soenksen said. "(But) I can tell you that over the last three years, the company's had more than a 200 percent compounded annual growth rate in terms of sales."

Aperio has more than 100 customers in 15 countries. In the United States, its clients include U.S. labs and major university medical centers in Michigan, Pennsylvania and most recently North Carolina, among others.

Soenksen is understandably optimistic about the future of his company.

"We believe digital pathology has the potential to be a billion-dollar-a-year market," he said. "Aperio is the tip of the spear into that market."

Contact freelance writer Andrew Peterson at andrew.a.peterson@cox.net.

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