Chuck Witkowski, Protein Discovery

“I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul.”

-W.C. Henley

The most important take away message from my visit to Protein Discovery was the “never quit” attitude of Chuck Witkowski. Many obstacles stood between him and success but he never let those hurdles take him out of the game.

Chuck graduated received his MBA from the University of Tennessee where he met his mentor, Dr. Lee Martin through the New Venture club. He went on to take an entrepreneurship class offered by Dr. Martin where he learned valuable knowledge of licensing technology from national labs and the SBIR program, or Small Business Innovative Research program, which offers research grants to small companies. Chuck was so determined to start his own company that he wrote 25 SBIR proposals (each 25 pages long) within a six month period of time. This surely was no easy feat especially considering Chuck’s schooling background was not highly technical.

Of the 25 proposals submitted 2 were approved and Chuck was able to seed his company. Chuck’s first intended product was based on a technology that he licensed from Oak Ridge National Labs. His first employee who led the research efforts was Jay Hawkins. After much diligence from Jay and Chuck it was inevitably determined that the technology was not going to perform the way they had intended, so they needed to head back to the drawing board. Chuck jumped right back on the horse to write four more SBIR proposals of which three were approved.

Through his due diligence Chuck knew there was a market need for high throughput protein analysis and this is where he focused his efforts. The company hit a milestone when venture capitalist Gary Stevenson came onboard and invested $1M in Protein Discovery. While he considers this a step of success Chuck emphasized that it is always best to take your company as far as you can before looking for venture capital. Venture capital can be risky as you will lose some equity in your company and it is very hard to obtain.

Not two weeks after the venture capital had been allotted Chuck’s partner decided that he needed to move on from Protein Discovery for personal reasons. This presented a great challenge for Chuck as he was concerned he would lose the valuable venture capital. However, Gary still believed in what Chuck was doing and felt that the market need was very great.

Between 2005 and 2008 Protein Discovery was able to complete and launch their first product, the Passport System. It provided high throughput protein analysis that was not available on the market at the time. Unfortunately, Chuck was presented with another hurdle as the Passport System failed in the market. It had taken too long to commercialize and had features which did not satisfy the customer.

Chuck knew that focus on the user was incredible important so researchers at Protein Discovery worked to repackage the product into a smaller more user friendly design. He used the printer/printer cartridge business model, meaning that the majority of revenue streams would come from the purchase of one time use cartridges rather than the device itself. Chuck discovered something very interesting about his market. While it was rather small—only 50,000 to 60,000 target customers—the need was very great. This strong market need makes the future of Protein Discovery very promising. Chuck taught me that going after a large market size is not the only strategy that can be successful.

It was very encouraging to learn about Chuck’s journey and see the impressive facility in downtown Knoxville. Many times it might have seemed easier to Chuck to just give up. His will to succeed in the protein analysis industry remained strong as he overcame the challenges. He is getting positive response on his product from users and has been able to start a dialogue with distributors that could lead to growth in sales.