The Secret Sauce

You've received numerous honors, including being named to Fast Companies List of 100 Most Creative People in Business. Congratulations on that. What strategies do you use to inspire creativity and innovation at Veracyte?

So we have an interesting style in our company of doing a lot of white boarding, even when we're virtual without the whiteboard. It's creating an environment of brainstorming and debating in a healthy way, and allowing a problem to be tackled and discussed and holes punched in ideas and new ideas emerge. I think that's a little bit of the secret sauce of the company. We had a product actually a few years ago that was coming to market, and some of the early data emerged and we determined that in addition to the original goal that that product was achieving, we had an opportunity to answer another clinical question just by looking at the data in another way. It emerged in a meeting that we were in, and within a week, the team went away, reanalyzed the data, decided we could add this to the offering that we would bring to market, and we basically just pivoted and repositioned the product, launched it, the product's been very successful. So I love creating an open, transparent, and safe environment for people to think out loud and brainstorm. And look, I'm not a perfect CEO. There's oftentimes when those ideas will be out, and they'll fill out in left space and I'll be the first one to make a comment about it. And then I think, why did I do that?

What? You're not perfect? How can that be?

The intent is to create as much of that environment as you can.