[cultureulterior]

I'm a potential customer, and I'd like to treat this as any data storage company- because that's what this is, a genetic data storage company.

One of the things I find annoying about existing companies is that I can't see how my data is doing. For digital data, I can monitor to see how my data is doing, but all I know about existing companies is that they will tell me if something fails.

I'd like to see live monitoring data from your freezers. Is that something you'd share?

[khaledkteily]

That's a great question, and one where keeping everything cool is important in both cases.

We get a lot of monitoring information, both on the way to the cryostorage facilities (everything from humidity to temperature variance to battery level of our trackers), and we similarly get daily or weekly checks of the frozen sperm (like manually checking on levels of liquid nitrogen).

We hadn't considered making this information front-facing, although I understand why you'd ask that. What would you be most interested in seeing? Would 'last checked' and 'current temperature' be enough for you to feel it is secure?

[neolog]

- How long without cooling does it take for the samples to be destroyed?

- When it does go down, how long does it take you to catch it?

- Are you doing active "chaos monkey"-style testing such as intentionally turning off random systems and ensuring your backup procedures detect and solve the problem before the samples are destroyed?

- Given the current deterioration rates in your industry and your facility under normal operation, what is the probability of a sample surviving 10 years? 20? 30? What about after accounting for the possibility of equipment/system failures?

[khaledkteily]

Facility backup generators activate within seconds of an outage, and are load-tested regularly for 30 minutes. In case of heat/smoke/motion detection, facilities managers are sent smartphone alerts. There are very clear SOPs for almost every possibility.

THAT SAID, you can plan for all kinds of issues - power outages, natural disasters, human error, technical error, etc. - but you will never be able to bring risk down to zero.

For this reason, we also offer multi-site storage, whereby we divide samples into multiple tanks across multiple locations. AFAIK, we are the only company in this space to do so.

[neolog]

> you will never be able to bring risk down to zero.

I'd avoid these straw men, trust your customers to understand risk management.

> you can plan for all kinds of issues - power outages, natural disasters, human error, technical error, etc

Great, I'd love to see this risk modeling. Which sets of components would need to fail in order for a sample to be destroyed? Which components have failed? How often? Are the failures correlated?

What legal risks exist for the customer in your industry? When things go wrong in that way, how does it happen?

Do samples degrade over time? How fast? What is their viability rate?