Added value, a requirement for business survival

In the startup environment, it is a habit to talk about successes to keep our hopes alive for the future, but it is a big mistake to forget the failures of the past and not benefit from the experiences of the past. For this purpose, the Ecomotive team has collected the experiences of a series of failed startups, so that reviewing their failed stories may be a basis for the success of new startups in Iran’s startup community. This collection will be published and made available to the audience in the form of the story of failure. We review the thirty-second part of this series, which deals with the failure of the DoubleTwist startup.

Pangea Systems started working in 1993 with the aim of providing online portals in the field of biotechnology and changed its name to DoubleTwist in December 1999.

This company, which has an elite scientific team; Consisting of experts in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology, protein chemistry, bioinformatics, computer science and computational biology, it started supplying its products in 2000:

• DoubleTwist is a search environment that integrates approximately 25 distinct genomes and other scientific databases and provides users with the ability to analyze genomic information and store the results of this analysis using web-based tools.
• Profession The company’s exclusive human genome database, and software for data interpretation and visualization.
• Gene Forrest It is similar to the previous tool, except that it contains sequences of genes that have been experimentally determined to be activated or turned on in certain cells under certain conditions.
• CAT is the company’s software product for processing and analyzing large gene sequence databases.

In March 2001, amid the record highs and lows of biotech stocks, DoubleTwist, which had decided to go public six months earlier, called off its initial public offering because the market was not big enough for such an IT company to achieve a favorable valuation. Also, bioinformatics had a competitive and limited market, and the tools provided by the company could not compete with the bioinformatics tools of companies such as Incyte Genomics, Celera Genomics, CuraGen and Internet genomic resources such as GenBank, because the information contained in them did not have much added value.

A few months later, the company’s online newspaper DailyTwist was shut down. January 2002, Board of Directors, former Chief Operating Officer of the Company; That is, he replaced Robert Williamson as CEO and Kosh became the chairman of the board of directors. Two months later, Williamson lamented that the company was winding down due to lack of revenue, despite having good products and an experienced team. The company’s revenue never rose enough to survive, so in January, DoubleTwist’s membership dropped from 200 to 60, and the company finally came to an end.