All right, good morning, everybody. I'm Doug Schenkel from Wolfe Research. It's my pleasure to welcome Serge Saxonov, the CEO of 10x Genomics. 10x is the market leader in single-cell analysis and spatial omics. The company has a long history of leading with innovation in the scientific community. For some reason, what's coming to mind is, I don't know, we've known each other for a little while, and I remember when you guys were just getting going, we would hear great things about all the innovation at 10x. I think you being who you were, and who you are, you were always like, "All right, I know we're doing some good work, but tell me what's wrong. Tell me what we can do better." I think it's that attitude of always trying to be better, always trying to be innovative, and being at the cutting edge that's really put you in the lead in a couple of key categories. Sorry for the digression, but thank you for being here, Serge. I really appreciate being here as well and having a chance to have this chat. Yeah, I appreciate the kind words. That has always been a pretty important part of our philosophies. Like you always want to be focused on not just kind of the great things you're doing, but where you could be doing better, but also what could shape you up in the future, right? Yep. That's where you find opportunity. That's right. I want to start off with a high-level question. Excuse me. Lots of change at the company. It has been a very challenging environment. It does seem like there is a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to policy. Where do you think you are in kind of being ready to play offense as we hopefully move into an environment that is more stable from a policy standpoint? Hopefully, spending is freeing up. Is the company ready to play offense given everything that has been going on from a macro- level and all the changes you have been making internally? Yeah, I would say so, kind of a few different dimensions to the question. Obviously, going back to last year, actually a year ago, about a year ago, I was here on the stage and we had just finished doing a major restructuring and changes in our executive, made some changes to our executive team. I said back then that I was feeling really good about the path forward, like where we are with the team, what I was expecting from the commercial restructuring, and also from sort of where the new members of the executive team were going to take us. I feel really good about having said that. Now, a year later, kind of looking back at the progress we have made, I would say we put us in a really good position, especially glad given what we faced this year in terms of the environment and being able to respond to the environment. We were in a much better position than we would have been otherwise given the changes we had made earlier. I think from the perspective of the team and the organization, I feel like we're in a really good spot. You can see how we manage to navigate this environment this year despite all the different shoes dropping and all the different sort of events in the environment, kind of being able to execute solidly quarter- after- quarter and drive the business forward, especially the underlying sort of metrics. That is what gets me to the kind of the second sort of dimension of the answer here, is like there are a lot of things that have been, like the fundamentals that have been going in the right direction in the business over the course of the past year in terms of Chromium reaction growth, in terms of spatial consumables growth, and the product launches that we have had that I feel like put us in a really good position kind of as we look at the landscape of other players in these fields and also position us well to take advantage of the opportunities, whether in academia or biopharma. Yeah, as I think about going forward, obviously the environment is still quite choppy and uncertain. Recently, there have been a lot fewer shoes dropping. To the extent that things start stabilizing and improving, I think we're in a really good position to take advantage. Yeah, I think if I were to dumb it down for myself in a tough environment, I think you've done a lot to basically optimize on what you can control. There's been a lot that's been outside your control, whether it's certain areas of macro- geopolitical impact and demand in certain areas. Obviously, the funding uncertainty hasn't helped. I know there's still uncertainty out there. Does it feel a little bit better heading into year-end? I don't mean this as that comes across as a Q4 question, but really what I'm trying to get at is even if the activity levels, even if the dialogue is picking up as we have a little more certainty on things like NIH funding, I think that could make us all feel a little bit better about the environment getting better, maybe more importantly as we look ahead to 2026 and beyond. Yeah. The world we are in now feels different than it was in the first half of the year. When you talk to customers, at least the mood is better than it was before. Now, there's still a lot of uncertainty and people are, there's a whole host of factors where the funds are not getting dispersed in a way that they had been in the past. There's the issue of multi-year funding, which no one quite knows how that's going to play out. There's still kind of lack of resolution on indirect caps to universities that's holding them back from knowing what to do and spending the money. There's still sort of like various disputes that are going on between universities and sort of the administration. The environment is still to a large set kind of uncertain. As you look kind of longer term for our customers, somewhat unpredictable, but at least the mood and sort of kind of the orientation expectations are better. We're still in a period of uncertainty, but I think overall people are feeling better. I want to go back to one of the things you talked about in terms of comparing where we are now versus where we were when we were on the stage a year ago. The commercial restructuring, the changes you've made there, I think we're pretty far along in where those changes have been in terms of implementation, but also starting to see some of the fruits of your labor. Simply put, how is this playing out? How's the new commercial organization performing? Why don't we start there and then I have a quick follow-up. Yeah. First of all, just really happy. Like I said, really happy we did it. It was a lot of work both in terms of the initial sort of burst of reorganization and reassignment of territories and reassigning people's responsibilities and then actually kind of filling up the open roles that we needed to fill up. We went through that process, finished it earlier in the year. Really, like I said, I'm really happy that we have the structure. Our sales leadership is really happy that we have the structure. It has allowed us to react and adjust to this world a lot more readily and be able to track what is happening because again, we have a separate function that's focused on CapEx instruments, separate function, like high CapEx instruments, separate function that's focused on biopharma, academia, kind of lower spending accounts in academia. Having all those levers and being able to see very clearly how the business is going in all these different areas has been really helpful and allowed us to deploy and react well. Everything is always kind of like every organization, you're always looking how you can make things better. Sitting where we are right now, I do feel very good about both the new structure and the work that the team has done to get us here. Part of the change, and just help me out if I'm mischaracterizing this, but you now have pharmaceutical and large CapEx specific teams. Are you starting to see some benefit from those changes? This is one of those things where we made the changes and then the world changed us as well, right? You always want to be careful in terms of kind of looking, not over-indexing to the output metrics, but looking kind of inside on the input metrics in terms of what kinds of activities are happening and what are the fundamentals of the driver, the fundamental drivers of the business that ultimately result in output metrics, which is sales and revenue and things like that. I have been very happy about the progress we have been making in terms of funnel management and in terms of opportunities and opening up new accounts and things of that nature. That, unfortunately, has been in the background of kind of a number of shocks to the system from the macro environment where all of a sudden, as we went into this year, high CapEx became a lot more challenging to, obviously, to prosecute. The instruments are a lot more challenging to sell in this environment. And biopharma as well, whereas the macro environment about a year ago felt quite kind of on a good trajectory last year, Q4 and kind of early in Q1, kind of in many ways got, well, way, way softer on the early discovery side throughout the year. You kind of need to balance these factors. I would say that in terms of the fundamentals of commercial execution, really strong signs and metrics in terms of the output that has been somewhat neutralized by the worsening macro environment that we've been seeing. The changes you've made, if we're not thinking about quarters, if we're thinking about years, at some point, instrument demand comes back. At some point, pharma spends more. These changes presumably put you in a good position for when things do start to improve. Yes. I mean, I do feel quite good about that. Going back to your earlier question, kind of setting up the company to be able to play offense when things kind of clear up. That has been one of the overriding imperatives as I look over the course of the past year is, A, control what we can control, make sure we get through this environment the best way possible, and set ourselves up for maximum success once we're through. One of the things we've probably been talking about for the better part of 18 months is basically an evolution of pricing, especially as you've rolled out new products. Where are you in the process of essentially turning the corner on the consumable side of basically having pricing headwinds? Yeah. I think the question specifically on the single cell, the single cell side of experience. Yeah. Yeah. Big picture-wise, I've always talked about that there's a lot of evidence and a lot of reasons to believe that there's a lot of elasticity in the marketplace that's waiting to be unlocked. Over the course of the past two years, we have been executing on kind of lowering prices of single cell consumables through the introduction of various product configurations and kind of driving, opening up more applications, more use cases, and ultimately more volume. In multiple ways, this has been playing out. If you look at the actual metrics, like we've been communicating, we've been very pleased to see the volume of Chromium reaction, single cell consumable volume going up consistently despite sort of this downward pressure from the macro- environment. That has been working well, working out for us. We expect that to continue. Yes, it's on the background of new launches. We just this quarter started shipping our latest version of Flex assay on Chromium, which comes with lower price per sample at larger volumes, larger configurations. In that sense, it's going to put some more pressure on pricing while, again, we expect it to drive volume as we have been seeing that for other launches over the last 18+ months. I do think, yeah, like big picture-wise, we do expect that there's going to, we're going to keep pushing into elasticity. We're going to kind of do that through product configurations and through segmentation so that because different price points are appropriate for different customers and different volumes. We have been for the past 18 months, two years in a particularly sort of acute phase, I would say, of doing this. There is still some more work to do on that front to let kind of the new Flex products to kind of make their way onto kind of a more of an equilibrium situation. I think we are getting substantially closer to getting to that more of an equilibrium point. I think there will be much more opportunity going forward, it is just kind of the pace of how we get there is going to, I think, it is going to normalize. Maybe saying it in a different way, which is probably more clumsy knowing me, but to some extent, your business model is always going to be about driving price a little bit lower in exchange for an elastic response on volume and opening up more programs. Like you said, it was more acute for a little while. It was maybe a little more drastic than what we were used to. It seems like we're probably two to three quarters away from getting to kind of a normalized balance of pricing trends driving an elastic response. Is that reasonable? I hesitate to give a very precise limitation in terms of timing, in terms of quarters, but I do think we're getting closer, substantially closer to the point where things are going to equilibrate. I think at this stage where we are right now, it's very clear there is way more capacity in the marketplace in terms of dollars, in terms of people to adopt single cell. We have lots of opportunity. There is going to be a point at which beyond which maybe more driving down on lower pricing doesn't make as much sense once you get to a certain amount of prevalence and once other kind of considerations become more important. I think we're still pretty far away from that point. Big picture-wise, yes, I think there's tons and tons of opportunity to drive a lot more volume. We have been in a particular acute sort of part of the curve. I think that's going to equilibrate sometime soonish. Are you at the point, and part of the reason I ask this is I'm wondering if you're one at the point where you feel like you are competitive enough where you're not going to lose on price relative to some of the other companies that are out there. Then building off of that, I want to talk about some of the big single cell programs that could click into place over the next 12 months- 18 months because obviously if you're well positioned competitively from a price and innovation standpoint and feature standpoint, and then we have some more programs coming up, that's going to be really important, especially when you combine that with hopefully an improving funding environment. That was a lot. First thing, competitively, you think you're pretty close to where you need to be price-wise? Yeah. I think we're in a really good spot now, again, especially with the launch of the latest Flex assay. Although in many cases, we actually have been in, if you look at sort of the end-to-end cost of these experiments, we've actually been in a quite good place for a lot of applications. If you take into account the workflow advantages that we have, take into account sequencing costs that are entailed in experiments. With the latest launches, it really puts us in a really good position. We've always had an advantage when it comes to data quality, robustness, breadth of applications, and customer satisfaction. I mean, our double-blind NPS scores are off the chart when we look at these things. That's always been the case. Price has been the one wedge that people have tried to kind of get in there. I do think that that has been largely closed off now at this stage going forward. Yes. To your question about sort of the opportunities opening up, especially for large-scale kind of projects in single cell, there's a kind of almost feels like kind of a resurgence of interest in single cell with the kind of rise of interest in AI modeling and building very large models of biology where single cell, I would say high-quality single cell data becomes kind of a fuel for building these models. Yeah. We have started to hear, I would say, again, maybe it is early in 2025 that there was sort of a pickup in interest in doing larger-scale high-volume single cell programs. I think even before AI got layered onto that, we were starting to hear a bit about that. It sounds like AI, to the extent this is getting, my words, not yours, turbocharged, meaning larger single cell programs, projects, could it get further turbocharged by layering in AI as well? The trajectory looks quite exciting for sure. As there are conversations around what you could do if you build sophisticated, powerful enough models, like how much biology you learn and how you can improve drug development, discovery of targets, and improving your ability to predict efficacy in human biology, there is a lot of interest and a sense that single cell data, perturbation data, large-scale kind of these combinatorial kind of screening experiments is the way to generate these very large models. AI is the way you kind of make use of the data, right, and actually kind of make it all concrete. I think this convergence is for sure very promising. What is also helping is that there are now analogs outside of the space of biology where there are huge returns to scale. These models, as you build them, as you kind of feed them more data, you're getting disproportionately high kind of returns. Where we're sitting right now, no one quite knows what are the different step changes in terms of where the scale delivers you more and more value. You're starting to see kind of glimmers of the kinds of things that people are able to discover with still relatively modest-sized models. You're looking at millions, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of cells. You can start talking about billions. You can start talking about tens of billions. There's some reasons to think at 10 billion you start seeing the kind of step changes. As we've seen in other domains, you can imagine going well beyond that. Probably you kind of keep getting more and more value. I think there is a general belief among many people that this is the way that both science and drug discovery is going. Who funds that? Academia or pharma? Good question. There's definitely pharma that's working on that. I think a lot of that work is being spearheaded by biotechs. There's also interest in academia. In fact, I would say in a way, the most rational thing for the government to do is going back to the idea of the human genome project and make a very, very large investment. It would be a really big public good to invest and build out these virtual cell models that would then underlie a lot of future development. Spend several billion dollars or more building out that kind of resource. It would be incredibly valuable to the world. Obviously, unfortunately, we aren't currently in a moment of time where there's more challenges than making that happen. That would be a natural thing to do. Even setting that aside, we're seeing a lot of interest, philanthropic interest, biotechs, pharma, and to the extent that academics can participate, there's also interest there. Do you play a role either as a standalone or potentially with technology partners in building out LLMs or other ways of actually trying to make sense of this data? Did I actually sound like I knew something about AI? It is interesting. The conversations definitely kind of because these conversations do span different sort of areas of expertise, right? It's kind of bringing different worlds together. We are certainly open. There are definitely companies from the tech world that are very interested in helping out on building these kinds of models. We are involved in those kinds of discussions and very much open and encouraging kind of partnership because the scale of these kinds of experiments are very obviously much larger than anything has been contemplated before. Probably would in many cases require sort of a coming together of multiple players. We have the technology. Other people have expertise around how to kind of use the technology and kind of collect the best possible samples to run the right kinds of experiments. Then there's expertise on analyzing and building the AI model. These kinds of efforts do often entail multidisciplinary kind of players coming together. One thing that is very clear is our technology is the key enabling foundation for all of that. Yeah. Interesting. We spent a lot of time on single cell. How does Spatial play into this, if at all? Yeah. No, Spatial is a bit earlier kind of in the sort of evolution of technology in terms of if you think about scale and throughput, all of that. It is definitely one of the axes that's also going to be critically important. If you think about, okay, we're trying to model biology, what is it that we need to model at the highest level? Molecules, cells, tissues. That's what comprises human biology. The one technology that's meant to bring them all together is Spatial. Ultimately, that's what it's about. If you think about where everything is headed, it's like, yes, ultimately, you do want to run tons and tons of massive numbers of spatial experiments and tissues and cells in that context. The technology is not, again, in its evolution is not where single cell is these days from the throughput and scale perspective. We're working hard. We do anticipate that as we look forward, there will be, and as we kind of make improvements, it'll become a bigger and bigger part of the story as well. Would it be shocking if there was some announcement about a partnership with a tech company pursuant to what we're talking about more on the single cell over the next year or two? I mean, it wouldn't be shocking for sure. I mean, we had a partnership announced along kind of a different axis with Anthropic. It's a sort of different, also really powerful application of AI kind of in the world of biology and single cell. Yeah, I mean, we're certainly engaged in discussions with sort of the players and the companies in the tech space. There's more and more, especially given we are in the neighborhood. You're in the neighborhood. There's a lot of crossover that's been happening. We only have a few minutes left. With that said, from a competition standpoint, there's been a number of smaller instrumentless peers that have been acquired by large competitors. So Parse, Fluent, you yourself acquired Scale. How are you feeling about the competitive landscape as we sit here today? Like I was kind of alluding to earlier, feeling really good. Fundamentally, we've always had an advantage sort of with product performance, quality, breadth, and so on. The single cell space has always been from almost day one, actually very competitive. Different sort of kind of periods and waves and sometimes less competitive, sometimes more. It has always had competition. Last few years, there's been more with all these kind of new players coming into it. The story has largely been very similar. Customers would try them. Usually, as I mentioned earlier, these other companies come in, try to wedge themselves through pricing. Customers will try them and do the comparisons and by and large would come back to us because of all the advantages of performance and quality and customer experience and things of that nature. I think that's going to keep playing out. If anything, with all the launches that we've made over the past year and a half plus, I think we're in a better position than we've ever been relative to the competitive landscape out there. Maybe cutting this a different way, you are completely sequencer agnostic at this point. Will that also, when Roche comes to market, will that still be the case? We've always had this kind of philosophy. We build the products to be single cell products to be compatible with sequencers, any sequencers, as long as it can sequence DNA, which all of them by definition can. It's been maybe in the past that did not make that much of a difference because you can sequence any sequencer as long as it's Illumina because that was the only sequencer. That was the sequencer that was there. Right. The world has been changing in the last couple of years. I think it's going to change a lot more going forward as well, right? We have partnerships with Ultima. That's a great technology, especially when it comes to large-scale projects, large-scale sort of single cell experiments. In many cases, in other many cases as well. Certainly, with Roche coming and coming online next year, they've been making really strong announcements that look really promising for a lot of applications. I think that also puts us in a really, really good position to offer great value to the customers. In basically every case, if you look at the end-to-end cost of these experiments, we will be offering superior value to say nothing of all the advantages that we have in terms of quality and performance and robustness. We talked about Flex, or you brought it up a couple of times. I did not bite, but I want to make sure we come back to it. I mean, it has only been, I think, about three weeks since Flex has been available. It is early. Is it too early to talk about whether there has been any increase in number of cells sequenced? I would expect we are going to see that at some point. Yeah. I think at this stage it's too early. This is a product where we were pretty engaged with quite a few early access customers and really great feedback. We talked about it when we first started shipping. That gives us a lot of confidence in terms of how it will perform. The early sales, you would imagine, would reflect that enthusiasm. It is way too early to kind of comment on its actual impact in the market because we just started shipping. It's just got going. Yeah, it just got going. We're about, actually, we are out of time. I'm going to try to do two rapid-fire ones. Presumably, you're considering bringing back full year guidance next year. At this point, no decision's been made, correct? No. I mean, we're in a highly uncertain environment. Until that clears up, it's hard for me to give guidance on when we would give guidance. When you'll give guidance. Fair enough. At a really basic level, again, keeping it simple for me, you continue to place more instruments. It may not be growing at the rate we used to see, but the installed base is expanding. We talked about a lot of things that are going to drive utilization up over time, even in an uncertain environment. As long as you're putting more boxes out there and they're continuing to get used at a somewhat stable level, mathematically, revenue should be growing. Absent some other disruption in the market, doesn't that mathematically put you in a position taking the Bruker comp out for you to grow again next year? Well. Mathematically. Yeah. I've got to be careful. I'm not giving guidance on 2026. We're not giving those numbers. In general, we feel good about the underlying drivers of the business. Our focus has been on driving consumable revenue. In Chromium, right now, it's in terms of volume. I think that's the most important metric for us and keep driving into that. On Spatial consumables, revenue has been doing well. We expect those drivers to keep going. That said, lots of uncertainty around the environment, lots of variables, lots of puts and takes there. We hesitate, like I said, to give a definitive. I understand. I apologize. I appreciate you indulging me. Thank you very much. We really appreciate you being here. Thanks, Doug. A lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you.