People searching for long-lost facts about their ancestors is a hobby that ranks close to gardening in popularity, but what if the “family tree” in question is corporate instead of human? Those stories can also come alive.
Such was the case recently when nearly 150 people gathered in Madison to mark the 30th anniversary of an improbable venture capital investment in Third Wave Technologies, then a new company founded by two UW-Madison professors with the goal of producing diagnostic tests to detect genetic markers for diseases.
That $300,000 first-round investment by Madison’s Venture Investors LLC, itself a relatively new firm, proved to be financially successful over time. Just as important, that 1994 investment and a preceding change in how the university community handled such discoveries were seminal events in the growth of Wisconsin’s life sciences “family tree.”
