Marsh was the GameChanger Guy. 

For those who haven’t been on the sidelines of youth sports lately, GameChanger is an omnipresent app for livestreaming, scorekeeping and team management. The app has changed the viewing experience for millions of youth-sports participants and families since its founding in 2010 for baseball and softball. 

During a game, users can track each pitch, hit, out, run, steal and more. Anyone interested in a team and granted permission from the coach (since these are minors) can watch the video feed. Afterward, users can send around highlight clips or an artificial-intelligence-generated article recapping the game.

Nearly every parent in the stands that day in Tualatin had their phone open to GameChanger to keep track of their seventh- or eighth-grader’s game—the 2023 version of keeping a scorebook with pencil and paper. 

“It keeps me focused on the game,” Marsh said. “I don’t get to daydream as much.”

As a team parent for the Cleveland Youth Baseball and Softball program in Southeast Portland, Marsh’s job was to enter all the data from the game in real time. He sat on a wooden bench behind home plate, his cell phone plugged into a camping battery to ensure it didn’t die in the middle of the game.

After all, grandparents across the country — from Salem, Ore., to Florida and North Carolina — were following the game in real time, waiting to see how their middle-school grandsons performed. Marsh’s wife was across town watching their third-grader play baseball live in Southeast Portland while also keeping up with the Tualatin game on the app.

“It’s nerve-wracking,” Marsh told Oregon Business between innings, because he could not speak during game play. “I’ve lost the plot a little before.”

Periodically, the parent who was GameChanging (it’s a verb now) for the opposing team came over to compare data with Marsh. The umpire and the coach relied on him occasionally, too. 

“That’s when I get nervous — when the coach comes over,” Marsh said.

About 36 million youth-sporting events happened in the U.S. in 2022; GameChanger scored 6 million of them. It is the No. 1-rated youth-sports app in the country and has been owned by retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods since 2016. About 11,000 Oregon teams use GameChanger, according to the company. It’s available for free on iOS, Android and the web, though users can pay $74.99 a year for a premium subscription, which gets them access to highlight clips, season statistics and “spray charts” of the path of every ball put into play. 

GameChanger’s reach extends all the way to Major League Baseball, which announced a multiyear partnership with the company in June. In addition to MLB, the app is wriggling its way into baseball recruiting, journalism and the 19 non-baseball and softball sports now listed on the app, including basketball, football and soccer.

“In two years, families in six or seven of the major team sports will all use GameChanger the way they use it in baseball and softball today,” GameChanger president Sameer Ahuja tells OB. “That’s ambitious, but I am hoping we get there.”

---

---

Ahuja’s familiarity with GameChanger began after he started coaching his daughter’s kindergarten softball team in Westchester County, N.Y., in 2014.

“At that age it’s mostly just having fun with them, but it was literally the best part of my week,” he says. “I really took to this coaching thing.” 

The app kept the team connected, especially sharing photos of the children with the busy parents who couldn’t make it to every game. In 2017 he got an offer to join the company. “I just kind of jumped in and the rest is history,” he says. Ahuja worked his way up to president in 2021. 

Ahuja says he may be a lifer at the company because working there is both interesting and uplifting. (“This is about as wholesome as it gets,” he says.) He loves being known in his community as “The GameChanger Guy,” because of the affection people have for the app. 

Once, on a family vacation, he wore a GameChanger T-shirt to the airport, and strangers took photos with him when they learned he was the company president. His daughters, now 13 and 10, were appropriately mortified. 

GameChanger merchandise is available at, of course, company parent Dick’s Sporting Goods. One straightforward T-shirt says “Leave Me Alone, I’m Scoring” on the back. 

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, GameChanger had 45 employees working at the company headquarters in New York, according to Ahuja. Now they have 160 employees working in 30-plus states (three engineers work from Oregon). What changed? In a word: video. 

After introducing video in 2020, GameChanger is now the largest streamer in youth sports in the country. Users can watch games like they’re on TV, albeit with poorer video quality than a professional broadcast and only one camera angle, since the filming is typically done with a parent’s phone mounted to the fence behind home plate. 

“Customers reach out to us and say this is more valuable to them than their Netflix subscription, which is so cool to hear,” Ahuja says. 

Jeff Passan, ESPN’s senior MLB Insider, is one such customer. A Kansas City, Kan.-based baseball dad, Passan has purchased Wi-Fi on a plane to watch his son pitch at a high school baseball game from 30,000 feet in the air. He first used GameChanger this past spring.

---

---

“I was kind of hooked from the jump,” he says. “As a baseball nerd and as someone who grew up loving nothing more than the box-score agate page … the idea that this could be applied to youth sports kind of blew my mind.” 

Passan says he is used to the “spectacular” MLB app with its bevy of information about pitch velocity and a hitter’s hot and cold zones. MLB’s app makes GameChanger look like, well, Little League, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Passan says. It helps parents get a better grasp of the sport.

“The bare-bones nature of GameChanger is a feature, not a bug,” he says. “As much as it is a tool for following, it’s also a really good teaching tool for someone.” 

Despite a two-decade career in baseball journalism, Passan has not yet been invited to score his son’s varsity games on GameChanger, only the JV ones. The parents take it so seriously in his community that they often lobby the scorer to count errors as hits to improve their children’s batting averages. (Passan doesn’t budge: “I’m pretty strict.”) 

Before games, he used the app to scout opponents so he could warn his son and his teammates which hitters to watch out for. 

He’s not the only one using the technology this way, he suspects. Now that MLB is partnered with GameChanger, Passan sees potential for MLB teams to more easily scout which youth players they want in their pipeline — especially those from small schools that might be overlooked by recruiters. 

GameChanger touts its highlight clips as a tool for youth to attract the attention of recruiters, but the app hasn’t reached up to the college level yet, at least not in Oregon: coaches at Oregon State University, Portland State University and University of Portland all declined interview requests due to lack of familiarity with GameChanger.

While highlight clips are GameChanger’s most valuable feature to customers, Ahuja says, the app’s artificial-intelligence game recaps are also buzzy. Though GameChanger rolled out the recaps on the app back in 2012, the national conversation about AI has exploded in the last year. 

ChatGPT surged in popularity in the last year to much existential hand-wringing. In July The Oregonian announced that it is using an automated tool called United Robots to generate dozens of articles about real estate transactions each week. The Writer’s Guild of America went on strike in May in part to create job protections from AI tools that could threaten their jobs.

Thirty-seven million AI recaps have been produced by GameChanger, Ahuja says, and he hears regularly from customers that they love them.

---

---

“In the event that your kid is featured in them, it’s like your kid’s name in lights,” Ahuja says. “It’s the coolest thing to receive it. Grandparents burst with pride.”

For example, the AI recap of the game Mike Marsh scored in Tualatin began: “Cleveland fell behind early and couldn’t come back in a 9-4 loss to Tualatin on Wednesday.” A chronological recap followed, including some details about the pitcher. “The fire-baller allowed one hit and zero runs over three innings, striking out two and walking one.” 

Passan isn’t fearing a robot takeover of his career anytime soon, in part because he reads GameChanger’s AI recaps.

“As a person who writes about baseball for a living, every time I look at the game story, I am appalled,” Passan says. “It’s a terrible misrepresentation of what has happened during the game.” 

Lori Shontz is a veteran journalist who now teaches at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. She’s covered sports all over the world and now teaches sportswriting along with other reporting fundamentals. At OB’s request, Shontz evaluated the recap of the Tualatin game and said she couldn’t determine if the game even mattered, since the article didn’t include either team’s season record of wins and losses. There are no interviews with coaches and players, of course, and no stakes or tension. 

“The people who do this work really well are the ones who truly put it into a story with a beginning, middle and end with turning points and with some level of analysis,” Shontz says. “And that’s very difficult to do, and sports happen on deadline.”

Shontz lives in the Eugene-Springfield area and has observed the diminishment of The Register-Guard’s sports coverage. (The once-robust newsroom is now down to seven employees after a 2018 acquisition by Gannett Co., Inc.)

“It has been gutted,” she says. “So I completely get that there’s a need for this.” 

GameChanger recaps don’t run in mainstream news outlets, though Ahuja has seen reporters reference them on Twitter (rebranded as X at the end of July). GameChanger partnered with Narrative Science (now part of Salesforce) on the “natural language generation” technology in the early 2010s but has built a good bit of it themselves.

“It hasn’t taken something that humans were doing and replaced it,” Ahuja says. “It just wasn’t being done at all.”

Settled into a low-slung camping chair on the grassy sidelines of the Tualatin game, Portland mom Jessica Young watches her eighth-grade son play ball in real time and then the statistics load on GameChanger moments later on her phone. 

“It’s super helpful, because it is so rare that they ever have a scoreboard,” Young says. “If you don’t use this, you’re constantly asking people the score or trying to keep track in your head.” 

As a mother of four, her children play baseball, soccer, track and football. Young’s phone is cluttered with seven apps to keep track of all those teams: one for soccer, one for club soccer, one for tournaments, one that she just uses for which jersey color her son should wear and so on. “It’s obnoxious,” she says. 

If Ahuja’s plans come to fruition, she could be down to just one app in the next few years. 

Transitioning the GameChanger technology to other sports is the biggest challenge currently facing the company, Ahuja says. Baseball fans are notoriously obsessed with statistics, which is not the case in, say, soccer. Tailoring its product to dozens of new sports, each with their own cultures, is tricky.  

“We have to make sure we’re delivering what each sport wants,” Ahyuja says. “We’re spending a lot of time making sure we’re smart on that front.”

Size of the field or court, pace of play and reliance on statistics (or not) all factor into how new sports will use GameChanger. Basketball and volleyball are easy to film in gymnasiums, whereas soccer and football are on huge fields that are tough to capture with amateur equipment. (Passan thinks that hockey would be “almost impossible” for amateurs to track statistics because of the relentless pace.)

One commonality? 

“The emotion at the parent/grandparent level is the same no matter which sport it is,” Ahuja says. “People are people and they want to be connected to their kids.”

Click here to subscribe to Oregon Business.

New Zealand-based fleet truck performance management software company EROAD announced Tuesday that it is relocating its North American headquarters from the Portland area to San Diego.

The press release said the move means EROAD is joining a growing number of area tech businesses focused on transportation and logistics, fleet telematics, video-based safety, and data-driven fleet management for commercial vehicles.

“A broadly recognized innovation sector, coupled with the growth of the advanced fleet technology ecosystem in the region, makes San Diego the ideal location for our new North America headquarters,” Akinyemi Koyi, chief innovation officer and president of EROAD North America, said a press release. “This move, coupled with the expansion of our U.S. leadership team with highly accomplished and tenured professionals, represents an important milestone for our business. These moves will help fuel our continued growth as we expand our fleet management, compliance, safety, and performance offerings.”

---

---

EROAD’s new base of operations in Carmel Mountain Ranch, a community in San Diego County, includes an office space and a fulfillment center for the company to ship to its customers across the country.

The move will bring EROD into the same neighborhood as Cubic, which develops fare and toll collection technologies, and Netradyne – a motion detection and biometrics software company which supplies Amazon with AI trackers to monitor freight drivers.

The company, which saw 46% annual sales growth in Fiscal Year 2023, also announced three new executive hires in finance, operations, and marketing in the same release. According to the release, Tracey Herman has been hired as executive vice president of finance; Kerynn Holtzman was hired as vice president of operations, and Sarah Wicker is now the company’s vice president of marketing.

EROAD’s move comes amid news of other companies either shuttering Portland-area locations — like Cracker Barrel — or moving out of downtown Portland. EROAD’s North American office was situated in Tualitin.

The contractor issued a press release Tuesday saying that on May 30, someone exploited a security vulnerability in Progress MOVEit, a software product several state agencies use. The release says PH Tech learned about the incident on June 16. The information accessed varies from person to person but includes personal information, including names and social security numbers as well as protected health information like member ID numbers, diagnosis codes and claim information.

The company says it disabled access to the platform and fixed the security vulnerability, and has directly contacted customers to offer free identity-theft protection services through IDX, a data-breach response service.

Also Wednesday morning, the Oregon Health Authority issued a press release encouraging OHP members to watch for additional information, to request a free credit report from each of the three major consumer reporting companies — Equifax, TransUnion and Experian — and to contact PH Tech directly if they need further assistance.

“We’re urging OHP members to activate credit monitoring as a precaution,” Dave Baden, interim director at OHA, said in the health authority’s release. “It’s disheartening that bad actors are looking to exploit people in our state and that their actions create a burden for others, who have more than enough to manage already. However, there are important steps that OHP members can take to further protect their data.”

OHA is the second state agency to experience a data breach this year. In June Oregon Driver & Motor Vehicle Services — which also uses MOVEit — confirmed that 3.5 million driver’s license and identification card files were compromised in a hack that happened earlier that month.

Lora DiCarlo was founded in 2017 by Lora Haddock DiCarlo and Doug Layman. In its early years, the company received a blitz of press coverage hailing its high-end vibrators and its founder as a blend of technological savvy and sex-positive feminist leadership. In November the company abruptly went dark, taking its website offline and leaving orders unfulfilled. An investigation published by Oregon Business in February revealed the company was the subject of multiple Bureau of Labor and Industries claims alleging sexual harassment and unpaid wages. Earlier this month, Fortune published a feature on the company detailing allegations of financial mismanagement and harassment, with former employees telling the magazine they were asked to test “used, not-clean sex toys” as part of product development.

The company has not filed for bankruptcy, and the whereabouts of its principals are not known; when OB tried to reach Haddock this winter, an email request bounced back and her phone number was no longer in service. Recent court filings in an ongoing patent lawsuit show the company has not had legal counsel since November 2022 and has not responded to motions filed in the case this year, leaving the plaintiff pessimistic that it will receive damages in the case.

The company was headquartered in Bend but had filed incorporation papers in Delaware under the name Uccellini, with Lora DiCarlo listed as a trade name.

---

---

Novoluto, a competing sex-toy maker, sued Uccellini in December 2020 for patent infringement, asserting that Lora DiCarlo’s products — Osé, Osé 2 and Baci — infringe on the patent for its signature toy, the Womanizer.

On May 26, Novoluto filed a motion for a default judgment against the company, as well as an injunction prohibiting Uccellini and those associated with it (including directors and employees) from acting against the patent. Novoluto requested $2,165,351 in damages in the suit. The case’s docket history shows that on June 1, Magistrate Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai signed an order granting that motion.

The judge’s order is sealed due to a protective order, but a redacted version of Novoluto’s May 26 motion says Uccellini “fails to provide discovery and fails to defend, generally, frustrating the patentee’s ability to prove its case,” and that the status of Lora DiCarlo remains unclear.

---

---

“Moreover, while Defendant has not declared bankruptcy or otherwise formally dissolved or gone out of business, its operating status, and whether it is solvent or insolvent, and if it is in some sort of suspension or is, instead, planning to resume business activities, is entirely unknown and unknowable (by Novoluto) at this time,” the motion says.

The document further argues that an injunction is necessary because the legal remedy would not be adequate given Uccellini’s status: “Novoluto’s chance of actually recovering any damages award from Defendant is ‘speculative at best.’”

As Oregon Business reported in February, both companies continued to file motions in the case through 2022, but in November of last year, Uccellini’s attorneys, Nathan Brunette and Steve Lovett, filed a motion to withdraw as the company’s legal counsel. A follow-up motion filed in December said the reasons for withdrawal could not be disclosed in the public record, but that “counsel has not received the needed instructions from Defendant regarding positions it wishes to take on the substance of this case.”

Brunette told OB he could not comment on the situation. Portland attorney Scott Davis, who has served as Novoluto’s lead counsel on the case, did not respond to a request for comment.

---

---

Semiconductor manufacturing is the state’s largest manufacturing sector by employment, exports and contribution to Oregon’s GDP. The available money is intended to support Oregon firms in their expansion around the state.

Applications will be accepted beginning on June 19, with an initial review of applications starting on June 28. The first round of funding will close on July 28 and additional rounds will be dependent on what dollars remain.

Business Oregon and the Governor’s office are partnering to administer and distribute the funds as envisioned in SB 4.

---

---

Oregon Business spoke via email with Business Oregon’s Global Trade and Business Manager, Colin Sears.

Approximately how many businesses do you anticipate distributing the money to?

We don’t have an estimated number of businesses. We do know this is an important opportunity for businesses interested in applying for the federal CHIPS program and expect the program to be popular.

Is there a cap on how much funding one business can receive?   

There isn’t a cap. The overall program is limited to $190M in funding.

---

---

How does the bill’s investment in research and development give Oregon a brighter outlook?

The semiconductor industry in Oregon is already robust. We hope this investment continues to assist companies engaging in research and development to ensure Oregon companies remain a leader in this space.

What kind of workforce development opportunities do you foresee coming to the state because of these funds?

Recruiting, retaining, and advancing a diverse workforce pipeline is critical. We hope that these funds will leverage opportunities and partnerships to ensure jobs in this industry are available to all Oregonians, including those from traditionally underrepresented communities.

---

---

Has the state developed any other new incentives to encourage the semiconductor industry to stay here and to expand?

The state and local partners have a number of existing programs that have been utilized by industry. These programs have proven to be effective in retention and expansion of industry partners here in Oregon. 

The Oregon Legislature is currently considering an R & D tax credit that would have significant benefits for Oregon semiconductor businesses engaged in research and development. 

What other important information should we know about the Oregon CHIPS Fund?

The Oregon CHIPS Fund is a tremendous investment in our existing Oregon businesses. We hope this investment will leverage additional funding, particularly funds available from federal programs, to elevate Oregon in the semiconductor space and position our local companies and Oregon as a global leader. 

---

---

To learn more about this funding opportunity and the CHIPS Act, visit www.oregon.gov/biz/.

Tech industry analyst Dylan Patel tweeted about the cuts Saturday, saying the company is planning to cut 10% of budgets from its data center and client computing groups, possibly resulting in 20% employee cuts. In January Patel broke the news that the company was cutting employees’ pay.

Intel has declined to comment on specifics but did confirm its plans in a statement sent to reporters.

“Intel is working to accelerate its strategy while navigating a challenging macro-economic environment. We are focused on identifying cost reductions and efficiency gains through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company,” the statement read. “We continue to invest in areas core to our business, including our U.S.-based manufacturing operations, to ensure we are well positioned for long-term growth. These are difficult decisions, and we are committed to treating impacted employees with dignity and respect.”

---

---

The microchip manufacturer is based in Santa Clara, Calif., but is Oregon’s largest private-sector employer, with about 22,000 workers at its Hillsboro campus.

The upcoming cuts would be the second round of layoffs at Intel in less than a year. Earlier this year, more than 500 California-based employees lost their jobs in cuts announced in November. Employees that remained received cuts to their pay, and CEO Pat Gelsinger received a 25% reduction in his base pay.

During an April 27 quarterly earnings call, the company reported $2.8 billion in losses in the first quarter of this year and a 36% year-over-year drop in revenue. The fourth quarter of 2022 was also tough for Intel: The company reported a $664 million loss and a 32% revenue decline.

Last summer Congress passed the CHIPS & Science Act, a $280 billion bipartisan spending package intended to boost domestic semiconductor production. The bill includes $52 billion in subsidies for microchip manufacturers.

---

---

Moore founded Intel with Robert Noyce in July 1968 and served as the company’s executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. In 1979 Moore became chairman of the board and chief executive officer; he held those posts until 1987, when he resigned as CEO but continued as chairman. In 1997 he became chairman emeritus.

In 1965 Moore forecast that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year; in 1975 he revised the estimate to every two years for the next 10 years. But the idea that electronics would continue to get cheaper, faster and smaller was borne out and dubbed Moore’s Law.

“All I was trying to do was get that message across, that by putting more and more stuff on a chip, we were going to make all electronics cheaper,” Moore said in a 2008 interview.

Moore was born in San Francisco and spent most of his life in California but leaves a massive footprint in Oregon. The company’s Hillsboro campus, established in the mid-1970s, employs 21,000 people — making Intel Oregon’s largest private employer.

---

---

In 2022 Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that Intel’s Ronler Acres campus in Oregon would be renamed Gordon Moore Park at Ronler Acres. The RA4 building that’s home to much of Intel’s Technology Development Group was also renamed The Moore Center, along with its cafe, The Gordon.

“Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his insight and vision. He was instrumental in revealing the power of transistors and inspired technologists and entrepreneurs across the decades,” Gelsinger said in a statement released jointly by the company and foundation Friday. “We at Intel remain inspired by Moore’s Law and intend to pursue it until the periodic table is exhausted. Gordon’s vision lives on as our true north as we use the power of technology to improve the lives of every person on earth. My career and much of my life took shape within the possibilities fueled by Gordon’s leadership at the helm of Intel, and I am humbled by the honor and responsibility to carry his legacy forward.”

Before they established Intel, Moore and Noyce participated in the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor in San Jose, Calif., where they were involved in the first commercial production of diffused silicon transistors and, later, the world’s first commercially viable integrated units. Prior to that, they worked together under William Shockley, the founder ofShockley Semiconductor, which was the first semiconductor company established in the area that would eventually be dubbed the Silicon Valley.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which Moore founded with his wife in 2000, donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes. Its beneficiaries include the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis, the University of Washington eScience Institute and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

“Those of us who have met and worked with Gordon will forever be inspired by his wisdom, humility and generosity,” foundation president Harvey Fineberg said in the foundation’s statement. “Though he never aspired to be a household name, Gordon’s vision and his life’s work enabled the phenomenal innovation and technological developments that shape our everyday lives. Yet those historic achievements are only part of his legacy. His and Betty’s generosity as philanthropists will shape the world for generations to come.”

To subscribe to Oregon Business, click here. 

Liz Lovelock does a little bit of everything. Originally from Massachusetts, Lovelock moved to Grant County 13 years ago for a job as a student trainee in geology at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

Seneca resident Liz Lovelock makes use of the cybermill.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

More recently, she worked at the Silvies Valley Ranch Retreat outside Seneca. She’s also an artist and has been “pretending to be a singer/songwriter — but I actually got a gig, so I can say I’m a professional musician.”

She uses the Seneca CyberMill for everything, she says: looking up and printing guitar chords to learn new music, attending telehealth appointments, attending parent-teacher conferences and taking online classes — most recently to get an Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission server’s license.

The Seneca CyberMill is one of two institutions like it in Grant County; economic development officials are currently developing a third in John Day.

Liz Lovelock, left, and Didgette McCracken in Seneca’s cybermill.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

They are the brainchild of Didgette McCracken, Oregon State University’s open campus coordinator for Grant County, and Allison Field, then the economic development coordinator for Grant County. McCracken conceived of the cybermill concept in 2018. They’re spaces where members of the public can easily access the internet, charge devices and print documents. It’s a simple concept, but residents say these spaces have served as a lifeline for their communities, where consistent internet access is rare.

In many parts of the country — including more populated parts of Oregon — it’s easy to take for granted the presence of coffee shops and libraries with reliable internet access, not to mention coworking spaces for remote workers.

---

---

Grant County, though, is Oregon’s fourth least-populous county, recording a population of 7,233 in the 2020 census.

A 2019 Federal Communications Commission report noted that the digital divide shrank considerably in the years between 2015 and 2019, with 82.7% of rural areas reporting 25/3 mbps deployment (the minimum speed the FCC defines as “broadband”) versus 61.5% in 2015. Those percentages still lag far behind the rest of the country, however: In 2019, 95.6% of Americans lived in areas with broadband access.

Those numbers also don’t tell the whole story. A January audit from Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s office pointed out that the FCC’s geographic data are based on information from the U.S. Census Bureau, which measures access by census block — numbers that “may not be sufficiently granular to give an accurate picture of broadband coverage.”

“If a single home in a census block can get broadband, the entire block is considered served, despite how many other homes without broadband access may exist. In rural areas, these blocks may stretch miles. The flawed maps present a big problem as the government tries to distribute broadband funding,” the report notes. The state of Oregon is expected to receive between $400 million and $1 billion in federal funds to improve broadband access for underserved communities.

A private conference room in Seneca’s cybermill.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

According to survey data from the Grant County CyberMill, just 61% of Grant County residents have access to high-speed internet. In Seneca, where Lovelock lives, even cellphone service is inconsistent: She had to call me from a landline to do our interview, after her cellphone abruptly dropped a call. The Seneca CyberMill opened early last year; the town recorded a population of 199 during the 2020 census. Prairie City, where the second cybermill opened in fall 2022, has a population of 848.

John Day’s only coffee shop went under during the COVID-19 pandemic, McCracken says.

“Our need for meeting space and just a place with public Wi-Fi is great because we don’t have those amenities,” McCracken says. “In Seneca we had people parking outside their minimart because they had Wi-Fi access.”

McCracken notes that there is a county library in John Day — that’s 20 miles from Seneca — but its hours are somewhat limited, and there isn’t much space for some of the things she wanted the space to be accessible for, such as private calls.

Both facilities offer a private conference room with a microphone, speakers and a camera; three publicly accessible computers; a printer/copier/scanner; coffee and a minifridge; and Wi-Fi with speeds up to 100 mbps.

Seneca’s cybermill.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

McCracken’s interest in bridging that divide was an outgrowth of her work with OSU. In theory, rural students could attend OSU through distance learning. In practice, many lacked computers and internet access. Economic development officials were interested in the business-development side — specifically in projects that could attract and retain solo entrepreneurs.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Service-oriented businesses like coffee shops and restaurants shuttered, in many cases for good. Schools went online, and so did a lot of white-collar work — putting isolated and low-income people in a position to scramble for internet access just to do basic activities.

“My side has been it’s really important for businesses and folks within our community to have a landing space,” says Tory Stinnett, who stepped into her role as Grant County economic development director in 2020.

---

---

The “cybermill” name was the result of what McCracken describes as a “pretty extensive branding process” with the Portland-based design firm Ditroën.

“We needed something new but wanted something that fit our culture,” McCracken explained in an email to Oregon Business. The logo includes an illustration of an old kiln dryer, which is located in Seneca and is part of the lumber mill there; the name is both a nod to Grant County’s history with the timber industry and also explains the newly available services. “Mill is a ‘place’ that is familiar to our landscape.”

Now, McCracken and Stinnett say, the project is more popular than they could have imagined, and people are using the spaces in ways they didn’t foresee.

“It’s surpassed our expectations by a long ways,” McCracken tells OB.

Prairie City’s cybermill.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

While the concept of the cybermill isn’t exactly new — in some ways it hearkens back to the cyber cafes that began cropping up around the country in the 1990s, and in some ways to the coworking spaces that have become popular in more recent years — there are a few things that make the Grant County sites unique.

One is the model: The cybermills are membership-based, and membership is free, though members do have to pay for color printing. Prospective members fill out a short survey on the Grant County CyberMill website and are assigned a personal identification number they can use to access the sites. As of mid-January, the Seneca CyberMill had 217 members — that is, there are more cybermill members than residents in the town.

That’s because some of the members are tourists who stop in at the space to check email or participate in a Zoom call. McCracken also says she’s heard from part-time residents of Grant County — that is, people who have vacation homes there — that they love being able to do business while visiting.

According to data compiled and released by McCracken, in the period between Dec. 16, 2022, and Jan. 16, 2023, a majority of those who accessed the Seneca CyberMill had ZIP codes in Burns; a plurality (just under 50%) were between the ages of 25 and 34, and most had attended some college.

Finally, a key difference between the cybermills and the bank of publicly accessible computers at a public library — or a coffee shop — is that in 2023 people don’t use the internet the way they did in the 1990s, or, for that matter, five years ago.

---

---

Lovelock, for example, has visited the cybermill for telehealth appointments with providers in Fossil and Central Oregon — appointments that, just a few years ago, she would have had to drive an hour or more for. Lovelock is also going through a divorce and has used the facility for video meetings with her attorney. She also has two children in grade school and has attended parent-teacher conferences online.

So the cybermills include private conference rooms where one can have a private conversation.

“Restaurants are restaurants,” McCracken says. “If you have a private conversation, it’s probably not private. We definitely lack those amenities.”

The year-to-year operating cost for each cybermill is about $20,000, according to McCracken. Startup costs are higher: McCracken says it cost $50,000 to get each of the existing sites up and running, but the John Day CyberMill will cost about $1 million in startup funds, in part because the facility is so much larger and is in significant disrepair.

Cybermill-to-be in John Day.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

The cybermill project is funded primarily through private grants and donations, McCracken says, with the Oregon Community Foundation and the Ford Family Foundation offering grant funding. Grant County Digital and the Prairie City School District have also provided grant funding to the site, and Prairie City has pledged CARES Act funding to keep the Prairie City facility going.

“The goal is to keep it so that folks don’t have to pay,” Stinnett says. According to Stinnett, McCracken has already found enough sponsors to keep the mills operating for the next year.

“The coolest thing about the cybermill is that it’s created within our community,” Stinnett says. Often, in Eastern Oregon, “people feel like things happen to them” — things outsiders dreamed up without community input.

“It’s been all positive. I’ve seen people in there that I wouldn’t even think would be using it,” says Grant County Commissioner Jim Hamsher, who also served as Prairie City’s mayor until January. “I also see people that are using it as a gathering place, so that’s nice as well.”

Lovelock moved to Seneca in June. She didn’t have a landline at first, and relied on the cybermill for pretty much all communication with the outside world.

And in fact, the presence of the cybermill had a significant impact on her decision to remain in Seneca. She had considered moving to Monument, but “it just doesn’t have the same resources.”

“I’m still surprised about the amazing community that’s been around it,” Stinnett says. “For me it gives me chills that people are so excited and are using it.”

The exterior of Seneca’s cybermill.  Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

“I walk to the cybermill — it’s, like, four blocks from my house,” Lovelock says. “There’s this guy that I walked by, he’s shoveling his driveway while I’m walking there. We chat and I told him what I was doing, and he’s like, ‘Oh, do they, like, need some help over there? I have an ATV with a plow. I could go plow [the driveway at the cybermill].’ I was like, ‘Sure, thank you.’ I feel like the community cares about it — even people that don’t personally use it. Because they know it’s something good for the community.”

To subscribe to Oregon Business, click here. 

At the beginning of 2021, Twist Bioscience announced Wilsonville would be the site of its “factory of the future,” a state-of-the-art facility that would employ 400 people and revolutionize the way DNA is synthesized for research.

Two years later, the Bay Area-based company has seen a drop in stock prices and a swirl of questions about just what’s happening at the Wilsonville site. Multiple law firms have put out press releases announcing they intend to file a class-action suit against Twist for securities fraud, and they have asked investors to reach out.

All of this was prompted by a report that decried Twist as a “Ponzi-like scheme” and repeatedly compared Twist to the defunct health technology company Theranos. Twist’s co-founder and CEO denies those claims. Some local leaders are still cautiously optimistic about the company’s future, while others are withholding comment.

---

---

The Scorpion’s Sting

On Nov. 15, Scorpion Capital — a company that self-describes as an activist short seller focused on uncovering fraud — released a blistering 236-page report on Twist with the headline: “A Cash-Burning Inferno That Is Not a Going Concern, Operating a Ponzi-Like Scheme That Will End In Bankruptcy. Just Another ‘Synthetic Biology’ Swindle, This Time With an Absurd ‘Silicon DNA Chip’ and Financials So Phony It May Be Criminal. Target Price: $0.”

The ensuing pages are no gentler, comparing CEO Emily Leproust to convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, saying the company’s signature technology has never worked as described — and that it’s nothing new to begin with.

“Twist claims that its ‘chip’ enables it to manufacture DNA at a 1,000X higher throughput and ‘at a significantly lower cost than our competitors,’” the report says. “Former employees stated the claims are false and described a fatally flawed, manual, labor-intensive process plagued by errors, delays, and horrific losses. Far from being automated and efficient, an ex-senior employee started [sic] that ‘what they do is very low margin and labor-intensive’; ‘takes manual labor’; and ‘has a very low value.’”

The report also accused the company of misleading investors about its profitability and the usefulness of its proprietary silicon-chip technology. It says Twist’s strategy has not been to create truly new technology but to flood the market with underpriced product and create a price war and the illusion of profit.

The report is compiled from 20 anonymous interviews with ex-executives, manufacturing employees, customers, competitors and industry experts.

After the report was released, Twist’s stock dropped 20% to $27 a share, Fierce Biotech reported. That’s nearly double the company’s initial public offering of $14 per share in October 2018. But right before the Scorpion report came out, the company’s stock was surging, reaching $39 per share on Nov. 11, 2022. (As this issue went to press, TWST shares were valued at $27.54.)

Twist was the third bioscience company targeted by Scorpion in a one-year period, after Boston-based Gingko Bioworks and Emeryville, Calif.-based Berkeley Lights. Berkeley Lights and Gingko Bioworks’ stocks have declined 92% and 86%, respectively, since the short seller published reports on them in the fall of 2021.

RELATED: What’s Twist, Again?

---

---

A Revolution, or Race to the Bottom?

The price tumble prompted Twist to issue a press release describing Scorpion’s report as “highly misleading, with many distortions and inaccuracies,” though the release does not say what, precisely, Scorpion got wrong.

In an interview with Oregon Business, Leproust held that line but did shed some light on the specific problems she found with the report.

“There were a lot of fantastical claims in that report,” Leproust tells OB, referring to the Scorpion report. “When the goal is to make a quick buck, the goal is to manipulate the market. And in that respect, they have been successful. Our goal is to create long-term value based on truth and facts. And I’m bonded by the truth and they are not. I think the characterization is a wild misunderstanding of what we do.”

Leproust holds a master’s degree in industrial chemistry from France’s Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry, and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and nucleic acids chemistry. She co-founded Twist in 2013 with co-founders Bill Banyai, who remains with the company, and Bill Peck, who left the company in 2020 to start a motorcycle company.

In 2016 Leproust was sued by her former employer turned competitor Agilent, which claimed Leproust had stolen proprietary technology. The Twist CEO described the lawsuit as an “old middle-school fight” between her and her former employer. In February 2020, Agilent issued a press release confirming Twist paid the company $22.5 million to settle the lawsuit with no admission of liability or wrongdoing.

Leproust says the Scorpion report relied on a gross misunderstanding of the company’s proprietary technology — a silicon chip, which attempts to solve an old problem in synthetic DNA production.

Twist and other synthetic DNA manufacturers grow synthetic DNA strands for research and development use called oligonucleotides. These synthetic DNA strands must often be custom designed to meet researchers’ needs. In gene therapy, for example, researchers able to have exact copies of a particular cancer cell can potentially create identical “Trojan horse” cells that combine with the cancer cell and render it benign.

Emily Leproust from a TEDx talk.

But offshoot DNA strands — called “replication infidelities” — can form on the plate during the growing process, diminishing and potentially corrupting the end product. The appearance of these strands has posed persistent challenges for DNA growers since the process began in 1981.

Twist says its proprietary silicon chip can stop replication infidelities from occurring. That means the DNA synthesis process can be automated, allowing the company to produce more DNA at a lower price point than its competitors.

“For the price of one gene from our competition, people can get three with us. And so when researchers are trying to discover a new life-changing therapy, they can try three drugs for the price of one,” says Leproust. “That’s why our gene business grew 50% last year, because our cost structure is so much lower.”

Silicon is flat at microscopic scale, meaning the fluids required for the chemical reaction flow uniformly across its surface. It’s also hard, so materials can be added or removed during the synthesis process without changing the surface. Silicon can also be aligned, patterned and imaged, and it conducts heat well, enabling researchers to change the temperature more quickly.

According to Scorpion, Twist’s proprietary chips don’t fix the replication infidelities and, in fact, create more problems on the production line than they solve. Far from making DNA synthesis automated and more streamlined, the report says the chip requires a human team working 12-hour shifts around the clock, creating the strands with conventional methods.

“The labor-intensive nature of Twist’s manufacturing process — a stark contrast to its claims of ‘silicon-powered DNA synthesis’ — came up repeatedly in interviews with ex-employees, who detailed a workflow no more efficient than legacy DNA synthesis with plastic well plates,” the report reads.

The report says Twist’s profits and growth are also illusory, depending upon unsustainable pricing strategies to outsell competitors by as much as 70% to 85% and creating a “race to the bottom” price war within the industry.

---

---

Leproust does not deny the company was selling synthetic DNA well below market prices, but she says Twist’s ability to compete on price is evidence Twist’s silicon chip is a success.

“I’m a strong believer that you have the best technology, then you get the most aggressive market strategy,” says Leproust. “It is true that we compete on price, but that’s not the only place we compete. In the biopharma field, we position ourselves as the drug discovery of last resort. You have to make a billion antibodies to find the one that works against a targeted disease. Since we can make more DNA at a higher quality and lower cost than anybody else, we can do that more effectively than others.”

Although the report’s release caused a drop in Twist’s share prices, Leproust is confident the company will rebound once the economy picks up.

“Our main investors understand we are a growth company, and in this microenvironment, growth companies are not really popular. As the tide turns, we will go back to being the most favored by investors,” says Leproust. “At the end of the day, you’re only as good as the numbers, and we grew 54% last year. Our fiscal year [ended] on September 1, where our revenue was $203.6 million. Soon our core business will break even and then be profitable.”

She also says the investors suing Twist do not represent a majority, and that the company will be vindicated once its proprietary technology upends the market.

‘A Viable, Healthy Company’

While the Scorpion report on Twist is extensive, it’s also explosive, using language one might associate with tabloid headlines. And while the report uses quotes it presents as being from nearly two dozen company insiders, almost everyone is quoted anonymously. That doesn’t mean the quotes are false, but it does make many of the report’s claims difficult to verify independently.

And the fact that Twist’s stock fell after the report came out was not an accident: As Leproust notes, it was Scorpion’s intent. Activist short sellers like Scorpion Capital make money by betting stocks in a specific company will decline, then releasing damning information about the company in question with the intent of making that happen.

It’s a form of policing markets that’s come under the magnifying glass of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some observers say these sellers are manipulating the market; some say they police it.

“Short sellers have long been told by their lawyers that as long as their reports contain no material inaccuracies and are not based on inside information, they have done nothing illegal,” notes a February 2022 The New York Times story on the phenomenon.

Liisa Bozinovic, executive director of the Oregon Bioscience Association, of which Twist is a member, is skeptical of the Scorpion report.

“It’s definitely possible to play games with the market. But I really wouldn’t have any way to assess that, but everything that I have seen indicates that Twist is a viable, healthy company,” says Bozinovic. “They’ve been great partners to us. I’ve been in this industry since 1999, and I haven’t heard of anything like this happening in the startup space, besides Theranos.”

She says Twist frequently participates in the organization’s job fairs and posts on its job boards, and that the company already has 175 employees in Oregon.

Scorpion has claimed that an independent investigation found the facility nearly deserted and that no lab work was taking place.

“We sent a private investigator to the Oregon facility, who encountered a deserted parking lot, a quiet loading dock/construction area , and about a dozen office employees sitting in an open and mostly empty floorplan — no evidence of manufacturing activity or an impending production scale-up,” the report reads.

In December Leproust told the Portland Business Journal the company was “on track to begin commercial production in January.” (OB asked to tour the Wilsonville site, a request Twist said it could not grant until late January, making it too late for our production deadline.)

---

---

In 2020, Oregon’s bioscience sector produced $15.6 billion in economic output statewide, $5 billion in income and approximately 66,000 jobs across the state, according to a report from OBA.

The report also notes that Oregon’s bioscience industry generated $1.7 billion in local, state and federal taxes and fees in 2020 — an all-time high since the group started taking a measure of the industry 20 years ago.

RELATED: Bioscience Company Announces Plans for Bend-Based Lab

Monique Claiborne, president and CEO of Greater Portland Inc., which helped Twist zero in on Wilsonville for its factory site, says her first reaction to the Scorpion report was shock.

She says her organization was introduced to Twist by the OBA, of which Twist is a member. The company began looking to expand outside of the Bay Area, where it is based, in October of 2020. She says her organization presented 10 different locations in the greater Portland area for Twist to build its factory.

Claiborne says her organization brings bioscience companies to the region regularly, and when her organization evaluated Twist, the company had all the hallmarks of a successful biotech startup.

“We qualify projects depending on the industry, and so we ask different types of questions in terms of where money’s coming from, the acreage and square footage for facility projects, utilities, workforce, accessibility, wages, labor — all of these are parameters we use to qualify projects and companies coming to us, and we share that information with other economic-development practitioners,” says Claiborne.

“That’s on the business-development side, but a lot of what we do is marketing, making sure we’re touting the competitiveness of the region. Sometimes you get into incentives; that can be a factor both at a state or regional level, depending on the company. That’s how we zero in and we move them.”

Claiborne declined to comment on the allegations against Twist, but says Twist chose Wilsonville in large part due to the city’s tax-rebate program, designed to bring companies to the area.

Matt Lorenzen, economic development manager for the City of Wilsonville, says the city created the Wilsonville Investment Now program to incentivize businesses to develop projects outside of the city’s existing urban-renewal areas, and bring family-wage jobs to Wilsonville. The program provides compliant businesses with property-tax rebates, and was developed out of an existing rebate program meant to address the city’s high level of industrial vacancies in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

Lorenzen says that based on what he has seen, he is confident Twist will likely far exceed the employment and $50,000 minimum-capital requirement to qualify for the program.

“As I understand it, their capital expenditure and the number of jobs has far exceeded the minimum requirements of the program. The diversity, equity and inclusion piece might come later as they build the programming around their workforce in Wilsonville,” says Lorenzen. “The wages, I’m not familiar with, because they haven’t reported on it yet.”

The city’s agreement with Twist happened a year before Lorenzen took his current position, but he says it was the city’s rebate program that was the deciding factor that brought Twist to Wilsonville. In August of 2021, the Wilsonville City Council approved a development agreement with Twist for a 4.4-acre site in the ParkWorks Industry Center, the very first development agreement under WIN program rules.

“[Twist] had shortlisted a property north of the river in Vancouver, and then the Wilsonville property, and ultimately it was the economic-development incentive in combination with one of their C-suite executives living in Happy Valley that sealed the deal for Wilsonville,” says Lorenzen.

Lorenzen is aware of the Scorpion report. He says Twist will have to show it meets the city’s workforce development and diversity, equity and inclusion requirements before the company receives any tax rebates from the city.

Lorenzen says he and several other officials took a guided tour of the facility on Oct. 12 — a month before Scorpion published its report claiming the Wilsonville facility was deserted. He said he saw fixed machinery installed and that it appeared to be in service, but that he did not remember exactly what the equipment looked like and declined to describe it, citing respect for Twist’s proprietary technology. He also says he saw employees working in the designated lab areas but did not know the nature of their roles or duties.

‘Staged Kabuki Theater’

Kir Kahlon, founder and chief investment officer of Scorpion Capital, says Twist shows multiple signals of a company headed for bankruptcy, and that the factory tours Twist conducted for its supporters in Oregon were staged.

“The factory tours are simply staged Kabuki theater,” Kahlon told OB over email.

“A sell-side analyst from Cowen apparently stated that he made a surprise due-diligence visit to the factory in July 2022 but was prevented from entering, so we take staged tours many months later with a grain of salt,” Kahlon wrote.

A building permit issued to Twist by the City of Wilsonville in August gives permission to install labware washers and an autoclave. The company’s building permit history also includes a permit for a walk-in cooler.

Scorpion has been vocal since the short report’s release, posting new information on Twist that it calls “red flags.”

Twist’s chief financial officer said the company had spent $46 million on tenant improvements to the Wilsonville facility during a Nov. 18 fourth-quarter-earnings call, which Kahlon says strains credulity, even for a facility with a $3 million rent. Twist also fired its auditor in March of 2022, which Kahlon says lends even more conviction to his company’s investigative research.

Angela Bitting, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Twist, says the massive amounts of tenant-improvement spending is because of the large size of the Wilsonville facility. She also says Twist’s decision to find a new auditor was a cost-saving method, and that Twist is now audited by Ernst & Young.

---

---

As for the surprise visit in July of 2020, Bitting admitted the Cowen analyst was denied access but says it was because there was no one available to give them a tour.

“I know it sounds nefarious but it’s not,” says Bitting. “Our CEO wasn’t on-site and it was somebody that didn’t have a badge. We received a temporary certificate of occupancy for the building in late June, so only then could we start to fill the building with people and do the construction.”

Leproust hosted an investor meeting at the Wilsonville factory on Nov. 29, and on Jan. 9 she presented at the 41st Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Fransisco.

Next year, Bozinovic says, Twist will help develop and take part in an apprenticeship program alongside the Oregon Bioscience Association using funds from the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industry as part of the state’s Future Ready Oregon fund, a $200 million job-development initiative approved by the Oregon Legislature last spring.

Bozinovic says Scorpion’s allegations haven’t shaken her support for the biotech company.

“What employers like Twist are doing is helping us understand the occupations that are most difficult to fill. They are the jobs that are in highest demand,” says Bozinovic. “Companies like Twist and including Twist are helping us develop the standards for those occupations, which will be approved by the state.”

“We have technology where we can make more DNA than anybody else at a lower price than anybody else. That means when you do drug discovery, because our DNA is cheaper, you can try more. It really all goes back to the silicon chip and the investments we’re making,” says Leproust.

“We want to be good citizens of the ecosystem, to generate employment and taxes so that the state of Oregon and the country benefits from the innovation of Twist.”

To subscribe to Oregon Business, click here. 

WHAT’S TWIST AGAIN?

Founded in 2013 by Emily Leproust, Bill Banyai, and Bill Peck, Twist Bioscience is a public biotechnology company based in South San Francisco that manufactures synthetic DNA for customers in a wide range of research and development fields related to the life-sciences sector.

On January 12, 2021, Twist announced Wilsonville as the site of its new “factory of the future” — a state-of-the-art DNA-manufacturing facility that would use Twist’s proprietary technology to grow synthetic DNA at a rate that far outpaced competitors.

WHAT DOES TWIST DO?

Twist’s core business is gene synthesis — manufacturing synthetic DNA strands called oligonucleotides. Synthetic and molecular biology labs need high volumes of synthetic DNA so they can create thousands of sequence variants at once. As such, they are widely purchased by research institutions.

WHAT ARE OLIGONUCLEOTIDES?

Oligonucleotides are strands of synthetic DNA or RNA that serve as a base for many molecular biology and synthetic biology applications. Oligonucleotides are most commonly used by researchers to create a polymerase chain reaction, which can generate thousands or millions of copies of a particular DNA strand using synthetic DNA as a primer.

Oligonucleotides are made using a repetitive, four-step process in which the four nucleic acids are added one by one to a cellular building block called a phosphoramidite.

The process for synthesizing oligonucleotides was developed in 1981 and still has room for innovation. During synthesis, shorter chains or failure sequences can emerge, which disrupt and compete with the main sequence. While automation technology has improved the manufacturing process, oligonucleotides are still relegated to relatively small-scale operations due to the hardware necessary for automation and miniaturization.

Recent advancements in the field of DNA manufacturing have come from controlling the plate upon which the oligonucleotides are grown. U.K.-based Evonetix uses a proprietary semiconductor chip in place of plastic plates to create islands of independently controlled temperatures on the plate, effectively controlling what spots on the plate the DNA strand can develop. Switzerland-based Bachem has built synthesizers able to adjust the nucleic acid portions in real time during the synthesis process, which helps control for competing offshoot DNA strands.

WHAT’S TWIST DOING WITH OLIGONUCLEOTIDES?

Twist says it can generate oligonucleotides more efficiently than its competition. Its ability to do so relies on a proprietary silicon chip, similar to Evonetix, that acts as a plate upon which synthesis process occurs — referred to as “a lab on a chip.”

Silicon is flat at microscopic scales, meaning the fluids required for the chemical reaction flow uniformly across its surface, and materials can be added or removed during the process without changing the surface.

Twist says the efficiency of its proprietary silicon-chip method generates 1,000 times higher throughput than the conventional process at a significantly lower cost than competitors using traditional plastic plates for DNA synthesis.

SO DOES IT WORK?

It depends who you ask: read our full story, “Twist and Short,” for a deep dive on the competing claims about Twist’s technology.

A former director-level employee quoted in this fall’s report from Scorpion Capital says the company’s chip does little to help in the synthesis process, and in fact makes Twist’s oligonucleotide generation method more costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive. Other Twist employees quoted in the report said incorporating the chip didn’t make Twist’s workflow more efficient — and, in fact, created bottlenecks.

A former director-level employee claims the enormous capacity of the silicon chips means Twist must wait to fill multiple orders at once to remain cost-efficient. They compared Twist’s lab on a chip to building a plane that’s a thousand times larger than a typical one, only to spend days at the airport gathering passengers to recoup the costs of fuel and labor.

Leproust begs to differ. She has said the claims in the Scorpion report were “wild misunderstandings” of how Twist’s silicon chip manufacturing process works, but also says she is not able to publicly say how Twist’s proprietary method generated synthetic DNA.

— Sander Gusinow