Dan Brennan. Obviously day one of the TD Cowen Healthcare Conference, 43rd annual. Pleased to be joined with me on stage, senior management team of 10x Genomics. To my left we have Serge Saxonov who's the CEO, and to his left we have Justin McAnear who's the Chief Financial Officer. First off, Serge and Justin, welcome and thank you for being here. Thanks. Good to be here. Glad to be here. Awesome. So, you know, kinda high level kind of introductory question or two to kinda kick it off? 10x has grown revenues at an exceptional CAGR if you go back over the last five years, you know, north of 50%. Obviously 2022 was, you know, a much lower year coming off a tough comp and your guide this year of 12%-16%, you know, overall reflects, you know, low teens single-cell with spatial 40-plus. You know, I think the slower growth in 2022 has created just a lot of questions around end markets and competition and where are we with the evolution of these, of these technologies and the market opportunities. Maybe from a high level, just, you know, just as an introduction, like, Serge, you know, where are we in the, you know, the penetration, if you will, or the opportunity for single-cell and kinda how do we think about that, you know, kind of the trajectory of 10X as we look out? Yeah. By the way, is this working? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're good. Yeah. Good. Can you guys hear in the back? Hello? Can you hear me? Better? All right, cool. Use this one. I think they can hear me, so it's good. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Well, kind of maybe to step back a little bit. We built 10X to be a fast-growing company fundamentally, right? We're going after large markets, very important markets, and we invest accordingly, invest in fundamental technological foundations. We have huge, you know, very differentiated products, hugely powerful technologies that have big infrastructure, commercial infrastructure, operational infrastructure to take advantage of these markets. Single-cell, you know, back to your question, single-cell we definitely see this as from first principles and from all the feedback you can gather from customers especially, you know, people sort of have a far forward-looking view is that it's the potential is massive. We see that ultimately basically every measurement that will, whether for research or for ultimate, you know, translation applications or for clinical diagnostics, ultimately will need to preserve single-cell context when they start to issue more cells. If you take that perspective, it's pretty clear we're very, very early in that trajectory. We have strong conviction around the endpoint. Now the path there is not always going to be linear, right? It's going to be lumpy as we go through different markets, different applications and different macroeconomic sort of environmental factors. You know, last year was certainly had its challenges, but we're feeling quite optimistic as we look over, you know, over the coming years in terms of trajectory, what the new products are enabling for the interest from customers. Just the opening up of markets generally. Great. We'll certainly get into some of the pharma opportunity on single-cell. Basically, you know, in the 30 minutes we'll spend certainly a chunk on the, you know, core Chromium and extensive, you know, new products there, and then we'll, you know, spend probably a little more than half on spatial and then, you know, kind of get to the balance sheet and, you know, the margin opportunity. Just on the core single-cell market for academia, if you will. You know, you know, we did a survey recently that showed like low 20% growth outlook. We spoke to some customers that are well north of 30, a few that are already beginning to shift to spatial and they're, you know, the growth is a lot less. Just trying to think through amongst that core academic customer base, when we think about that single-cell growth rate, like again, the guide this year of low teens. Is that the right zip code for that customer base, or how would you frame an upside downside case as you look out for that customer? Yeah. I mean, one thing to appreciate is academic, the academic customer base is itself a fairly heterogeneous. As you mentioned, there's definitely like people like the early technologies, technology adopters, early technologists specifically who are oriented to sort of, you know, this whole sort of purpose in life, right? Is evaluating technologies and adopting technology as a product. Certainly single-cell, while was like the leading kind of new technology, number of years ago, you know, spatial is sort of passing it right now. It makes sense that some of them will start shifting the research, the scholars there. The vast majority of the single-cell customer base is not that, right? I mean, you kind of as you expand out from early technologists, there's the sort of genomics people, then there's like a much broader set of mainstream biologists. Yeah, and it's, you know, different people have different sort of predictions. It's hard to sort of to say kind of explicitly how it all kind of plays out. There's a lot of, there's definitely a lot of interest in kind of taking on new studies, taking on new projects. We do expect growth on average. Certainly that is pretty clear. There's a number of moderating factors. Again, people sometimes overestimate how fast they can, you know, ramp up projects or their students. The enthusiasm is there, the timeframe is gonna be, yeah, maybe a little bit TBD. We also, you know, one of the things we're watching this year is the effect of Flex, this new capability that we launched, and in particular, it enables multiplexing the samples, which over the long term is to be hugely enabling because it allows you to lower the price per sample by pooling multiple samples in a single panel plane. In the near term, it could provide a bit of a headwind because, you know, if you are constrained by the number of samples, now you can spend less per sample and process less samples. I think that effect is gonna be moderated in a bunch of different ways, but it is something that we need to watch. That's, you know, if you think about it's around You know, we heard Kevin this morning on the panel, he discussed, you know, this demand elasticity equation and said kind of similar sequencing, cut the price, we'll just do more. What are you hearing as sequencing costs come down, maybe from the field and from your customers? You know, did you assume anything in your guidance this year for the benefit from lower sequencing costs stimulating more spending on your products? Or just how do we think about that kind of dynamic? We always watch the sequencing prices. In fact, in some sense, when we started the company back, you know, 10 years ago, a lot of our thinking was premised on sort of this NGS price growth, right? The, the products will just naturally become more and more and more prevalent, and we'll benefit from lower sequencing prices. Now, you know, the last 10 years, that sort of has happened to some extent. I think that dynamic is accelerating now, you know, with Illumina introduced and some of the, some of the new competitors in the sequencing space. I do think, you know, so that is definitely like a very central part of our of our thinking. The thing that you wanna also be cognizant of, is like that ratio of our price to, or our cost to sequencing cost. It's, you know, when we started, we started about 50/50, with most of our customers actually skewed substantially more towards us. With some of the heaviest users, it tends to be more even, because they multiplex our stuff a lot more. The sequencing price drop will have different effect on different customers. Some of the heavy users will potentially benefit, a fair amount, so that should drive more demand, more usage for us. The other note to kind of keep in mind is a lot of the times it takes some amount of time for the announcements from sequencing companies to actually propagate into actual experimental practice. They have to purchase the instruments. Those new systems have to become available, then they have to actually acquire those systems, then they actually have to validate them, run them. There's a delayed factor in terms of how quickly this actually propagates. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe just on Flex, you know, you brought it up in terms of the multiplex capability, but it is, I guess, a different chemistry to some degree it is. It's also from some of your early papers, it looks like it's higher quality. Just kind of what are you hearing separate from the ability to fix and do FFPE, which we'll get to in a moment. Just what are you hearing early on from customers who are utilizing Flex, you know, their initial feedback? Is it all positive? Are there any drawbacks? Just how do we think about the early feedback there? Yeah. Initial feedback is overwhelmingly positive. People are excited. I mean, first of all, like conceptually, once they get like what it does, they realize all the powerful potential benefits, then they kind of dive a bit more into that. So far, the feedback loop has been quite positive. We see that sort of trajectory where people start with small kits, then they subsequently order larger kits. We definitely see that trajectory, which is always a sign of a product that's on a good run. Definitely see that. In terms of, overwhelmingly positive. In terms of, you know, any negative feedback, you know, there's some questions around the fact that this is a probe-based assay, so it works on human and mouse only. People have questions what about like the sort of genes of normal probe set. That is some of the drawbacks. We also released recently protocol instructions for how to have custom probes, and that's actually a huge benefit. For the Xenium, you know, you can actually customize it. You You can actually go after genes that other approaches cannot go after. In fact, in some sense, it's a positive. The workflow is somewhat different as well relative to our, like, flagship products. It's a bit more, it's a bit more complicated upfront, but it's more simplified downstream with library preparation. People have to do a little bit of adjustment for that. That's another variable. I think those are the two major, but they're really minor relatively to the positive effects for people. You know, and kind of on this multiplexing idea, whether it be on Flex or just even with Chromium X, is there some potential like, you know, near term, which you mentioned could be, you know, maybe a near-term gating factor for some customers? Is it a function of sample availability? Is it something with the workflow? Why would the initial Flexing, if there is this, you know, if, you know, single-cell still, you know, has so much upside opportunity in terms of, you know, expanding a use case, why wouldn't they just say, "Hey, we have a budget for X for single-cell. For Flexing, we'll just get more samples and we'll do it."? You know, is there some factor that would prevent that from some customers? Yeah. Say it again. Turn your microphone on. Oh, really? You're really not hearing him. Yeah, it's dead. Yeah. Doesn't seem to be. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm not sure if this thing is on. Yeah, it looks like it's off. Yeah. Let me see. Do you wanna bring one up, sir, really quick? Yeah, sorry about that, guys. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you. All right. Yeah. The question just was like, why would there be. Yeah. A potential near-term headwind if in fact, you know, customers are, you know, have this insatiable demand for single-cell, and they can just get more samples in the door. Is it some factor with the workflow or sample availability? Yeah. I think to the first order, I think your sort of question is correct. All you need is more samples, right? Like Kevin mentioned this morning, for the most part, we do expect and people do expect to just run up to their budgets. They've got a particular budget, they'll spend the same amount of money now, spend on more samples. Maybe not every customer necessarily has that, you know, the samples readily available. They still have to kind of arrange them. The other thing is it is, it does require you to multiplex a lot of samples. It's a bit of a different kind of workflow. You do need to kind of orient yourself to running more samples. I think those are all, solvable and fairly minor issues relative to the potential now to do a lot more. You know, it is a friction point. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe just one here. 1122. Maybe one on pharma. Obviously there's a lot of excitement, investors and sales starters alike all see this, you know, really big opportunity for pharma to adopt. Like what is? It publications? Is it just familiarity with like, and, you know, all the maybe nuances of which FFPE samples they work in or not? Just how do we think about the pathway forward if we were to look out two years and pharma adoption was really accelerating? What are the steps to get there? Right. So first of all, we have had presence in pharma, and it's been growing kind of in line with the rest of the business. It has been concentrated in early discovery, and we do think we agree there's a potential for it to expand much faster than the rest of the business, and that would entail kind of moving more downstream in development. There, you kind of, you basically need to be able to work with the examples, whether it's retrospective biobank samples for FFPE or just like even sort of regular workflows, you need to be able to time shift and place shift. Until the advent of fixation last year from us, that was really not possible to do, which is a big part of the reason why so much of our presence has been sort of in that discovery side. I think now the product set has at least the major necessary components to be usable in pharma. There's definitely interest to move downstream, and we'll keep developing more capabilities again, around some of these logistical and sample prep issues. Then, but I think we're poised now in a good spot. The other element is you also need to evolve your commercial organization, right? We grew up very much in academia, selling onto academic customers, and that entails a certain sales process, entails certain kind of reps, certain type of marketing. Now we're putting, you know, kind of the next phase, we do need to add some more pharma-oriented people and tactics, right? You know, we brought in a new chief commercial officer, Jim Wilbur, last year, who's actually his background, his previous company was kind of flipped. It's was mostly selling into pharma, and academia was as a minority. That's kind of the next step for us, is to expand the sort of the commercial capabilities and tactics to now go after this opportunity that's well set up for us from a product perspective. Maybe just one more on pharma. Like, is it a function if you went to the top 50 pharma customers, are they all doing single-cell in some regard using 10x and it's just a function now of trying to expand that use and educate them on Flex and kind of go deeper? Just, you know, I mean, I'm sure there's an 80/20 rule, but how do we think about what your current business is with customers? Yeah. How does that grow? Yeah. For sure, like all of the top 50 or top however many use single cell, for sure, and some of them use it very, very heavily. That's a very small minority, right? In the sense of them using across the board. For the most part, they use it, but it's the departments that use them, right? Now we need to expand into other areas of those pharmas to educate them and to get the right sort of champions and, yeah, and sell to them. Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe final one on single cell then. Like, does your guidance for this year and any, you know, do you reflect any kind of moderation in spend? Maybe it would've been above instead of low teens, maybe it would've been high teens and mid-teens. Are you reflecting any cannibalization at all from spatial yet? Like, how do you think about that? I know it's a fluid kind of dynamic, right? Just kind of wondering the feedback and as you build your, you know, your forecast, do you see any cannibalization from spatial? I mean, we are aware of the fact that, you know, there's definitely application areas. They may choose one or the other. Mm-hmm. We do know there's dynamic, and I've talked about. The fact is we don't really, I don't think anyone really in the world really has a clear idea of like which way some of the applications will trend. That which is why we invested so intentionally, aggressively in all three platforms. Kind of regardless of how the world turns out, we will be the ones sort of making the revenue and the money. Yeah, there's some fundamental uncertainty around the sort of the degree of cannibalization between the platforms that we have, but we feel pretty confident that regardless of how it turns out, we will take that revenue. In some sense, the confidence intervals around the sum total are smaller than the confidence intervals around the components. Mm-hmm. If that makes sense. Okay. Just to add that potential impact of cannibalization, you know, that is part of the reason why we guide the company level. Right. The total revenue. Right. You know, this year there is a lot going on, so we try to give some additional information around how we saw single-cell and how we saw spatial at this time. You know, that does point to guiding towards the total company revenue than having, you know, one of those platforms kind of stall. Great. Then maybe, I'll add just one quick final one. Competitively, you know, you got a couple of these smaller players, these boxless companies that are seemingly adding a lot of customers. I don't know what the revenue base is, but just how do you think about, you know, we heard today on the podium, I think you guys are in a great spot and you're the dominant player by far. Would you assume some moderation in share over the next five years? Like, you know, how do you think about the competitive landscape in single-cell? We don't really anticipate it changing materially. I mean, there's always been, since the beginning of the Chromium back in 2016, there's always been a flux of competitors. In fact, people tend to forget that the early days were actually really competitive, right? Lots of people. Since then, you know, it's kind of waxed and waned. Occasionally you would see new companies come in and try the market. They're usually kind of trying to go after kind of either higher scale or lower cost. You know, we had the dynamic somewhat more last year with some of these new companies that kind of around split-pool approaches, trying to commercialize those approaches coming into the market. Stalled some kind of sales as customers were trialing them, and I think we're seeing that, but it's pretty marginal. By and large, almost universally, we see customers, you know, they're trialing and then they come back to us ultimately for a variety of reasons. They've got much better data, easier workflows, and ultimately there's no cost advantage doing it though. Mm-hmm. Got it. Okay. Maybe on spatial, your guidance this year calls for, you know, 40-plus percent type growth in spatial. Just wondering, any, you know, when we try to build that up, like 40 seems like the bottom, just given the new product contributions you're expecting to get this year. Any color you could offer about the, you know, the different components, whether it be on, you know, Visium and/or CytAssist and/or Xenium, how we think about the drivers of that 40% plus? Yeah. A few things to keep in mind when looking at spatial increase year-over-year. We launched CytAssist, you know, the bulk of the launch was in Q3 of last year, it was a really strong launch quarter for CytAssist, so over 100 sold. We said that Q4 was very similar to, to Q3, so you can assume over 200 CytAssist. Whenever we launch a highly anticipated product like that, there is some pent-up demand. Mm-hmm. You can attribute at least $10 million of the 2022 spatial revenue to the CytAssist instrument. Mm-hmm. And so I think we need, it's still pretty early, so we've got to see what the sustained level of demand for the CytAssist is. Mm-hmm. Throughout the course of 2023. Then because spatial includes Xenium as well, it's really early days for Xenium. You know, we just started shipping that last quarter. You know, and you know, we've talked about being deliberate with our initial placements, focusing on early customer success, and then ramping it up from there. Everything that we're seeing so far, we're seeing good signs coming from the early customers and the data that they're able to generate off of the instruments. If that trend continues, you know, I think we'll feel better about placing more. Then we'll talk more about how we see 2023 shaping up when we get more inputs in from Xenium as well. Initially, we are more conservative on the Xenium side than on the Visium side. I do think that if current trends continue, there could be room to go higher on Xenium. Got it. Okay. For Visium, you know, we explored it on, you know, on the panel this morning, and even some of the experts there said it's unclear really how the multicellular or single-cell in situ will really play out. It depends on the use case, right? As you look at the world, and you have over 2,000 Visium customers, and separate from Visium HD, as you look at the world and you think about the utility of, you know, multicellular technology versus the single-cell in situ, how does that multicellular profile look as we, you know, as it keep growing for a year or two, flatline, and then go down? Do you see like a long runway of growth, probably slower than single-cell in situ 'cause given the base of revenues? Just how do we think about that product now as these new single-cell in situ platforms roll out? Yeah. I would, we wanna probably draw a distinction between Visium current configuration... Yeah. Which is largely multicellular Yeah. Visium HD Yeah. Which will be at the single-cell scale. Yeah. The way that I see it is like the customers are, the Visium HD should generally displace most of like the Visium, standard Visium kind of use cases. I think there is still some place, and, you know, obviously it depends on how we price the two. Mm-hmm. There will be, but Visium HD is likely to be kind of largely replaced. Then the question becomes like Visium HD versus Xenium versus an in situ approach. I think there's lots and lots to be said for Visium HD. Again, this is one of those empirical things t o be kind of borne out by virtue of technology and science questions that people are able to answer. Like, if you think about it, if you start with a, with a set of samples, and in some kind of a translational context, a cohort of samples, and you want to run a discovery to discover a biomarker signature or something like this, there's really no better solution than Visium HD approach. As we think about all the translational applications that are kind of gearing up around spatial and around possible single cell as well, like Visium HD really has a huge potential to really kind of crank through, you know, large meaningful studies and cohorts. Mm-hmm. We do expect it to grow quite rapidly. Different type of a application of advanced maybe than in situ type approaches, but it has a lot of potential, yeah. Mm-hmm. If we took Visium HD out 'cause your competitor has a multicellular product that competes with Visium directly, do you think like the traditional multicellular would still persist and grow given the single-cell in situ approaches? I mean, obviously different use cases and different customers, and we're just wondering for that particular product. Is Visium HD necessary in order to kind of maintain the growth in that franchise? I don't think it's strictly necessary. I think there's a lot of potential, but, like, once it comes out, I think it'll take over a lot of the applications. Mm-hmm. The timing on that is what? We haven't. Good question. Yeah. I'll give you that. We, we haven't updated the timing on the, on the launch yet. Right. Right. Right. You just said what. The words you chose was not near term. What were the words that you chose to define the you know, when we know about that? Oh, nice try, Dan. When the launch is imminent. Imminent. I think you'll hear more. Imminent. Okay. Yeah, but so it's not quite imminent yet. Not quite. Okay. That sounds good. So CytAssist has been a nice contributor, as you mentioned. Sounds like there was some pent-up demand, that's great. You know, you have over 2,000 Visium customers and, you know, a lot of those might be really small individual PIs, so maybe they're not gonna buy a CytAssist. Just you've been very positive about how material the benefits that CytAssist offers to customers. It seems like there's gonna be a pretty long runway of placement opportunities. I don't know, you know, while 2023 might have some, sounds like incremental headwind from some of the pent-up demand, like what's the runway for CytAssist? I think it has tremendous potential. Yeah, certainly we have lots of customers. All the people who've tried Visium are potential opportunities. Sort of, we anticipate a very large fraction of them will buy it. I think, well beyond the initial Visium customers, I think there's a lot more beyond that too, because, you know, it's like a really, really big hurdle for Visium has been precisely the things that CytAssist is addressing. I mean, we definitely see the placement opportunities in thousands, potentially many thousands as we go out there. Again, early, like the platform just launched, we need to get through into sort of, as a, like a consistent sustainable trajectory past the initial pent-up demand kind of first. Mm-hmm. All the signs are pointing to a lot of optimism. Again, we built it to address the key sort of logistical and workflow issues around the product. It also turns out to be very beneficial in terms of data quality and, you know, the kind of data you can get from your experimental runs, and now the feedback from customers has been very positive. They're all pointing to it becoming a major platform. It is clear to us, clearly clear to the customers, it is now a fundamental kind of necessity for running this kind of an approach. You really need that instrument. So Xenium, I can appreciate it's a very complex product, and you want to ensure, like, the launch goes right. Just maybe give a little bit more color about how you thought about, you know, you didn't break specific guidance out, but we have 50 placements this year in our numbers, which kind of gets us to that +40%. Is it factors on just the learning for customers? It's really complex to learn. Is it, not concerns in a bad way, but it's a complex product, so you wanna see how it performs in the field before you kind of push it, and maybe it has to be some tweaks, software issues, manufacturing issues. Like, how do we think about the factors that dictate? Is it really like, we feel great on manufacturing, feel great on the product working every time out of the box, it's just we wanna ensure that the customers know how to use it first so that, you know, before we really push it? There's a lot of factors that go into it, so it's all those things. Think about this, it's the most complicated product that we've ever produced. There's a lot of components that go into it. There's a lot of complexity in the supply chain. When you pull a timeline like that up, like we did, and you're still developing it up pretty close to when you launch it, you know, you've got supply chain lead times, that's a consideration, you know, for operational capability. Initially, that's not so much what we're worried about because we have, you know, we have demand, we have the instruments to ship. It's making sure that those initial customer placements are good, making sure that you flush out anything that you just don't know, so you can adapt quickly before you get too many placed. I think we were cautious in that regard to make sure that there weren't any kind of issues that we needed to address quickly before placing more. From what we can see right now, those early customers are doing well. Like, we're seeing good data coming off of the instruments. Some are, you know, posting that data publicly in the images. That's good. If those trends continue, then you start to feel better about placing more. You start to have the operational constraints really around manufacturing capability, supply chain lead times, and just the service capability. We're doing all the service internally, and we're taking that over for the Connect instruments as well. You know, that's the next constraint that you hit. I think really, you know, for this right here, for this year, I do think that eventually when it hits that operational cap, like that's gonna be the key determinator in this year for Xenium placements. It's not gonna be I don't think demand or customer training issues. It's really gonna be the operational capability when we get towards the back end of the year. Maybe two quick final ones. Xenium versus Visium in terms of, like, customers, like, you know, I think you and others have sized the market, you know, well into the billions. How do we think about, like, the number of customers you think that could be adopting, whether Xenium or broadly these single-cell in situ boxes over the next five years? I think broadly, yes, the market potential is huge. It feels like, at least as intense as kind of the early days of NGS, in terms of customer interest and the customer kind of understanding where this is all going, and just almost predetermined conclusion from everyone that this is the future. I think that's, you know, kind of a reasonable proxy or analogy at least to kind of keep in mind in terms of the potential. I think you can get easily to sort of that NGS install base potential and be on that trajectory. In fact, I think there's a lot of upside beyond that. Again, this morning you heard Kevin mention this sort of like you're really kind of merging three worlds together here, microscopy, genomics, and pathology. I think that's why, like, when we look at this platform, it has that natural sort of attraction within the world of sort of the NGS genomics world, but it goes well beyond that into many other areas of biology and also then, like, in translational clinical markets. I think the potential here is, like, is, yeah, is awesome. It's boundless. It's gonna be a question of, like, going through all those motions of, like, ramping things up, working with customers, making sure that, you know, the data gets validated appropriately and all the rest of that. Which is why we're investing very aggressively, and we do feel very strongly this is like we've got the best-in-class system now, and this is just the beginning of investing very aggressively to add more and more capabilities, really rapidly, just like we've done before with Chromium and with Visium. Charles, I'm gonna ask you one last one since it's 11:40. You're gonna turn free cash flow positive in the 4th quarter, EBITDA positive full year next year. We've got a 5% margin. How do we think about, you know, you're investing aggressively, but yet you also wanna be able to show this margin expansion. We look out a few years. Yeah. How do investors think about this idea of where margins could go? Obviously, you know, you control the purse strings. What's realistic? Well, starting with just gross margins. Yeah. The biggest driver on gross margins this year is gonna be the number of Xenium placements. You know, as that flexes up, you know, there will be an impact on the company margin overall. You know, we make decisions like that strategically to drive what's best for the business overall. Thankfully, the consumables, you know, have a margin profile similar to what we're currently shipping. When you go down, you're talking about, you know, EBITDA beyond cash flow positive. You know, we're gonna have some increases in OpEx this year, mostly it's gonna be in non-cash stock-based compensation, just on the nature of multi-year grants. I do expect us to start getting leverage out of our operational spend, and there's things that we're doing across the whole company, to make ourselves more efficient, to prepare ourselves for the next level of scale. That's been a primary focus as of late. I don't think you have to sacrifice growth in the near term, to do that. Great. I think with that, we're out of time. Serge and Justin, thanks a lot for being here, and thanks for being in the room with us. Thank you.