So I hope this provides you a little bit of additional insight into the economics of our programs. I hear from you and understand that it can sometimes be difficult to model our business given the lack of information to the early stage programs. But hopefully, this information today provides a bit more insight into the value of this pipeline. That actually will conclude our prepared remarks. And so we’re going to have some time to answer your questions. And I’m going to ask my colleagues to come up here on stage. And the way this is going to work is that if you take a look at your Zoom screen you should have a place down at the bottom, where you can raise your hand. And so if you want to ask a question, go ahead and click on that little button to raise your hand.
And that will let us know that you have a question. We will try to do our best to try to take your questions in the order that they come in. And we will let you know when — I’ll sort of announce when your line is up there is — we are going to open your line. One of the things just to remember is we are going to unmute your line, but if you muted your line on your end, you will have to unmute your line there as well. So let’s go ahead and we’ll try to get our first question lined up here.
A – Kurt Gustafson: All right. So the first question is going to come in from Joe Pantginis. Joe go ahead, unmute your line and hopefully we will be able to hear your question.
Joe Pantginis: Great, guys. Can you hear me?
Kurt Gustafson: We can hear you, Joe.
Joe Pantginis: Awesome. Great to see all of you. Todd, I hope you had a great trip. So a couple of topics I’d like to discuss. First, on the underlying business. First, Matt, you mentioned about looking at minimal headcount growth. I was just curious if you could provide any more color with that since you have continued to grow your technology basis, so how those sort of two reconcile?
Matthew Foehr: Yes. Yes, Joe, thanks for the question. Really, so we’ve come off a year, now this last year or so with pretty substantial headcount growth. It’s been one year since we split off to become an independent publicly traded company. And as a result of that, we added our administrative functions. Kurt built out his finance team. We added an internal HR people team and we’ve leaned into other areas of new science. We’ve added new team members in our screening platform as well as on our engineering platforms, also have continued to, as we have for many years, lean into the AI and ML elements of big data management and other things that that Bob highlighted. So we’ve come off a year where we’ve added a significant number of fantastic new colleagues.
But as we look forward, I do see some headcount growth, but it’s fairly minimal in many ways, largely because the business is highly leverageable, right? There’s an efficiency built into the business around how we work with our partners, how they leverage work that we do for them, but we are also the beneficiaries of the fact that our partners have some of their own work streams as well. So really, what is meant by that statement is that we see substantial growth coming in terms of new partnerships and new programs being added to the portfolio, but expect those can grow at a higher clip than we need to grow our infrastructure. And I think that really says something about the levers that we have in the business. I don’t know, Kurt, maybe you want to add anything?
Kurt Gustafson: No, that’s absolutely right.
Joe Pantginis: Great. Thanks. And the second part of the business question is, obviously, Kurt, you talked about headwinds in the markets and what have you and you see attrition of clients or partners, so obviously, the main reasons, which no one should be surprised, failed clinical trials or strategic moves by your partners. I’m curious, has any attrition come from the lack — or companies that face financing headwinds that are not able to commit the capital that they want to at the time to be able to partner with you?
Matthew Foehr: Yes, you could — I mean I can add as well. But I’ll make a comment and then Kurt can fill in anything I missed. But the first point I’d make, Joe, is as you look at our metrics over the recent years, everything we report is net of attrition, right? So we report our partners net of attrition, our programs net of attrition. And those have all continued to grow even in this I’ll say, last 24-month period of headwinds in the pharmaceutical industry. So we’ve continued to grow both our partner count and our new programs net of attrition. But we have had some partners who have, I’ll say, gone away. I mean one that was disclosed was Seeker Biologics. They were one really interesting science and were VC-funded a few years ago.
But early in the year this year, announced that they were closing down. Actually, some of the programs, those assets actually returned to us, and those are ones that could be potential for future partnering events in the future. But I think that’s one example. When you talk about bigger partners, it’s a little harder to define some time. So Kurt referenced clinical attrition that we saw early in the year this year. That clinical attrition was driven by a global big pharma partner who was realigning therapy areas. He decided to get out of inflammation. It was the specific example. I can’t talk about the specific partner, but that is one of those situations very hard to define if that is that macro or is that driven internally? I think even with perfect information and dialogue with the partners or best information we can get, it is a bit hard to know exactly if something like that is driven by macro factors or simply a business refocusing.
So I mean that’s kind of answer. Kurt, if I left anything out?
