[dekhn]

The way I describe it is that his actions (even before the human genome) clearly showed that the individual-driven, "artisinal" sequencing was far less productive.

When I started in computational biology (1994) the E.Coli genome was not even done, and there was one lab doing the work, very slowly. You'd FTP to some server every week or so and download a few more kilobytes. It really felt like slow science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_science). Venter helped convince people (Lander was another) that sequencing was an industrial process that could be accelerated significantly.