In this interview segment, former Illumina CEO Jay Flatley recounts the company’s 2000 initial public offering, describing how a $100 million raise was achieved when Illumina had only 40 employees and no product. He details the dramatic stock swing from $16 to $56 within two months, followed by a decline to a pre‑split $2 per share in 2001, emphasizing that employees remained focused on long‑term product development rather than short‑term share price. Flatley then updates Illumina’s financial performance, noting $1.8 billion in revenue last year and an analyst‑forecast $2.23 billion for the current year. The conversation shifts to the total addressable market for DNA sequencing: a prior estimate of $20 billion is now considered a lowball figure, with growth driven by non‑invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) and especially liquid‑biopsy cancer‑screening applications, which analysts expect to expand the market substantially. An anecdotal comment about a $100 k investment in 2003 potentially growing to $46 million underscores the massive returns possible in the sector.
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Okay, they must be happy because someone gave me a calculation here that's mind-boggling, and maybe you can tell me if this is accurate, but $100,000 invested in Lumina in 2003 would today be worth $46,029,629. I'm happy shareholders.
I'm not one of them. I wish I had bought one.
I wish I had too.
Well, that's interesting because we went public in 2000. I came in October. By December, because the market was just on fire, as we all remember in '99 and early 2000, we decided we got to take the company public. And we were 40 people. We had no product. But we raised $100 million. We filed 2 days after that famous Clinton-Blair speech that tipped over the marketplace. And Goldman was very conservative. They're a conservative bank. Between the time we filed, they kept saying, well, we need to hold. They're not ready to go. We gotta wait for the market to turn around. It kept drifting down, drifting down. Sequoia had done 2 offerings in that time. So you guys are doing great. And so I finally said in July, I said to Goldman, we're either going with you or without you. And they said, okay. And so we went, raised $100 million. And then the stock went from $16 to $56 in a matter of about 2 months. $6, and then we started drifting down like the rest of the market, but we were kind of above the rest. We were drifting down but at a slower rate. We got down to $2 a share. My God. In about 2001. Right. Something like that. And people from the outside looking in said, "Oh, those were the dark days of Illumina." But the fact of the matter was we were just marching on our development plan, meeting our milestones. We had $100 million, and we were just very focused on making our product. And there's At that point, the employees didn't care so much about the stock because they were all looking at the long term. And that was a pre-split price, in fact. So it was equivalent of $1 a share. Wow. So yeah, so had we bought a million shares back then—
Let's stay on that theme. So I think your sales are about $1.8 billion, something.
That was last year. So $2.23 billion is the the analyst numbers for this year.
And I think about a year ago you made a prediction that the overall market for sequencing was somewhere in the neighborhood of about $20 billion, but I think you've more recently said that that's way too small. So first question for you is, where do you think it's going numbers-wise? And then the other thing is, I don't see anyone as your competition right now. It looks like the sky's the limit for Illumina. I'd love to get your perspective on where you think things are going.
Sure, yeah. So at our Analyst Day a year ago January, we did a very broad perspective of what we thought of the market. At that point in time, we said there's a $20 billion TAM in sequencing, total addressable market. The reason we've said recently that that number is probably conservative, and our analysts do as well, is because it didn't include a whole host of things that just 18 months later are absolutely clear are going to be big incremental contributors to that market. And that has to do with average risk in non-invasive prenatal testing, which wasn't in that number. We can go back and talk about NIPT if we want to. Probably the most important market it doesn't include is what today is generally being referred to as liquid biopsy. So the ability to sequence your blood and to detect cancer DNA in your blood. And this is broadly applicable. It's going to be an absolutely gigantic market. It will apply initially to diagnosing tumor types. So once someone comes symptomatically to their physician and they get diagnosed with cancer, we'll be able to molecularly characterize that tumor simply through a blood draw. And then it can also be used for monitoring as you start applying therapeutics. For watching the disease go into remission, can be used to predict recurrence. As you monitor somebody who's been in remission for some time, you can detect recurrence way earlier than you can through any other traditional method, symptoms or imaging. And then the holy grail is screening. So we don't think we're too many years away from the day when in all our physicals you'll have a blood draw that gets sequenced and it will detect cancer vastly earlier than anyone can do today. So you start adding up those numbers and we've had analysts come up with numbers of 50 billion.
