Being Mission-Driven is a Superpower: Matthew Rabinowitz's journey with Natera highlights the importance of a strong mission. His personal experiences drove him to solve significant problems in prenatal and cancer diagnostics. The sense of mission that pervades the company allowed it to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles and grow into a thriving business that’s making a big impact in healthcare.

Interdisciplinary Innovation Can Yield Profound Results: Natera's success was built on integrating unique insights across engineering, biology, and genetics. The founders leveraged their engineering backgrounds to innovate in the field of genetics, showing that crossing disciplinary boundaries can lead to groundbreaking solutions.

Expanding Your Scale of Ambition: Initially focusing on IVF, Natera recognized the limitations of that market—but successfully expanded the application of their technology into ever-broader categories, from natural pregnancies and oncology to organ transplants. This adaptability allowed them to benefit more people, tap into larger markets and drive significant growth.

Weighing Growth Opportunities and Opportunity Costs: Natera faced skepticism when venturing into unproven new categories before maximizing their penetration and margins with existing products. However, persistence and belief in their mission and technology helped them overcome these challenges. “Science doesn’t lie,” says Matthew. While the company worked doggedly on the commercial side, it ultimately put its faith in its technology, believing science would win in the end and its products would be adopted. The calculation proved correct.

Embrace Constraints: Natera initially secured funding through NIH grants, and Matthew says the process helped validate their technology and build credibility. Many times they’ve faced constraints in expanding to new categories while existing product categories were not yet profitable. These constraints “brazen” a company and force operating teams to learn to do more with less, which serves the company long-term.