A founder can carry an astonishing amount of a company around without a briefcase. The history of a customer. The reason a price was agreed. The judgment that separates an urgent problem from a noisy one. Aytug Kulaksiz has been thinking about these businesses, and about what happens when their owners eventually want a different life. The company may have an office, a team and a set of accounts. Part of its operating system still goes home in somebody’s head.
For a buyer, that presents a rather awkward question. What exactly changes hands? A transaction can transfer ownership. Experience is less obliging. It has to be explained, observed, practiced and passed between people. Kulaksiz’s answer involves training, documentation and a deeper technical bench: more colleagues capable of making sound decisions without summoning the founder to every conversation.
He is approaching that question through Uptime Lab Services, the business he founded to find an independent laboratory services company and personally operate it over the long term. NextGen Growth Partners lists him as a CEO in Residence. The ambition is deliberately singular: one business, with customers and employees whose existing confidence he hopes to preserve.
There is a story here about becoming an owner. There is also a more interesting story about learning to inherit. Kulaksiz wants the authority to lead a company while taking seriously the knowledge of the people who made it work before he arrived. Buying the keys is the straightforward part. Learning why a particular door sticks takes longer.
“It is to make sure the knowledge can travel.”
Aytug Kulaksiz, on founder knowledge
The equipment already in the room
Kulaksiz came to this search after leadership roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Fluidigm, IDEX Health & Science and Life Technologies. His work has spanned product leadership, strategy, business development, corporate development and general management. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a business administration degree from Bilkent University. This is a career spent around the commercial and operating machinery behind scientific instruments.
A new instrument is easy to make the center of attention. It has a launch, a product description and the considerable advantage of being new. Kulaksiz has been asking a less glamorous question: how much more useful work can a laboratory get from the equipment it already owns? Maintenance, refurbishment, relocation and redeployment all enter that calculation.
That shift in emphasis makes service consequential. An installed instrument continues to demand attention long after the purchase decision has left the meeting agenda. Keeping it productive requires knowing its history, understanding how it is used and recognizing what has changed. A dependable older machine can be a very persuasive argument for looking after things.
Kulaksiz links this interest to capital discipline and sustainability. His position leaves room for new technology while directing attention toward the full working life of existing equipment. The practical question becomes when to maintain, move or refurbish an instrument, as well as when to replace it. For someone who spent much of his career on the equipment side, that is a revealing change of vantage point.
One laboratory, several phone numbers
In a recent reflection, Kulaksiz describes the problem from the customer’s side: an instrument stops during a run, work is waiting, and the delay begins affecting other tasks. The manufacturer’s name matters to the technical diagnosis. The immediate operational need is to find someone who can help. In a laboratory with equipment from several vendors, even that first step can become complicated.
Separate service agreements can mean separate technicians, separate contacts and separate views of what is installed. Kulaksiz respects the product expertise that manufacturers bring. He also asks whether customers could have that technical depth with fewer handoffs and clearer accountability. A laboratory experiences the equipment as a working environment; its service arrangements can divide that environment into pieces.
His concern is the person left joining those pieces together. One contact and better visibility across the equipment base are among the improvements he discusses. The appeal is easy to understand: when work has stopped, the customer would rather have an answer than become an amateur directory of service providers.
This is where his proposed acquisition becomes personal. He is seeking a company he will run, so the service promise would eventually become his responsibility. The point of the search is to move closer to the daily operating decisions: who responds, how information reaches the technician, and whether the customer knows who is accountable when something goes wrong.
A manual cannot notice everything
Kulaksiz’s interest in artificial intelligence begins with the technician. He describes experienced service people as valuable because they know what to notice. They listen to customers, examine the history of a machine and interpret changes. Access to a manual helps, but the useful work happens when information meets judgment.
He sees a possible role for AI in making past service records, troubleshooting knowledge and remote diagnostics easier to reach. Lessons from elsewhere in an organization could become more available to the person standing in front of a difficult instrument. Newer technicians could learn faster; experienced ones could have better information to work with.
He presents this as a possibility worth exploring. It is a view of technology organized around supporting skilled people. The desired outcome is a more capable technician, with useful context close at hand. The appeal lies in shortening the distance between a question and the knowledge that helps someone answer it.
That thinking connects directly to his concern about founders. Both problems involve experience that exists but is difficult to share. One lives in a service history, another in a colleague’s memory. Better access matters, though access alone cannot supply judgment. A search box can find a record; somebody still has to decide what it means for the instrument and the customer in front of them.
What happened before
What matters now
How the work is used
The old boss returns as an advisor
After Harvard Business School, Kulaksiz worked as a product manager for Andy Watson. The two stayed in regular contact as his career developed. Watson has now joined Uptime as a strategic advisor, bringing the relationship into a different setting. A former manager has become someone the founder can ask to challenge his thinking.
Watson recalls watching Kulaksiz move from product management into commercial leadership, general management and responsibility for substantial instrument and service businesses. His account gives this reunion some texture: the advice rests on years of familiarity, rather than an introduction arranged to fill a space on an advisory page.
Kulaksiz has also brought in Valerie Bressler-Hill and Victor Saad. He describes Bressler-Hill’s contribution in terms of commercial leadership, transformation and acquisition integration. Saad helps with leadership, culture, succession and team growth. Together, their perspectives address the commercial decisions and the human transitions involved in taking responsibility for an established company.
The interesting feature of this group is how closely it fits the job Kulaksiz says he wants to do. An acquisition introduces questions about growth, people and continuity at once. He is assembling people who can press him on those questions. Watson’s return adds a small pleasure to the story: sometimes the person who knew you when is precisely the person you want in the room.
Kulaksiz’s stated acquisition goal puts his own operating role at the center.
A beginning that asks for patience
When Kulaksiz introduced Uptime, he paired its beginning with the birth of his son that summer. Becoming a father again, he wrote, sharpened his sense of responsibility. He connected trust with showing up, listening and creating stability, and with helping people grow without trying to control every part of their future.
The connection is his own. It reveals how he wants to describe leadership at this point in his life: as a continuing obligation to people. The company he hopes to acquire already has a past. His family has entered a new chapter. In both settings, he is thinking about the work that follows a beginning, rather than allowing the announcement to stand in for it.
There is a quieter outdoor life alongside that ambition. He enjoys running trails and paddleboarding mountain lakes with his family around Greater Salt Lake City. Those details offer a glimpse of how he spends time away from work, without needing to turn a paddleboard into a management theory. Sometimes a lake is allowed to remain a lake.
His present search remains an intention with a demanding test ahead. Find the company. Understand the relationships. Learn which habits preserve reliability and which can improve. Then take responsibility for what happens next. The plan gives him a concrete place to apply the ideas he has been discussing, with a team whose working lives would be affected by his choices.
What should survive a change of owner?
At the NCSL International Conference, Kulaksiz found himself returning to customer proximity. The person managing a contract and the person using an instrument bring different knowledge to the relationship. The end user understands what the equipment does in practice and what an interruption disrupts. He wants technicians to retain direct contact with that person as service companies grow.
It is a modest-sounding principle with consequences for how a business is organized. Systems can help a team coordinate work. They can also put distance between people who need to speak. Kulaksiz’s question is whether growth can preserve the conversations that make technical service useful. Efficiency has limited charm if the relevant person becomes harder to reach.
Across these reflections, his proposed next chapter comes into focus. Share the founder’s knowledge. Give technicians better information. Stay close to the customer. Ask experienced advisors to challenge decisions. The ideas all return to a practical concern: keeping the business dependable while making it less dependent on any one person.
The company he hopes to lead will bring its own answers, accumulated through years of work. His first task would be to understand them. For Kulaksiz, the attraction of buying a business lies partly in what already exists: people who know the equipment, customers who know the team, and judgment that has earned its place. The next owner’s signature can be added in an afternoon. Becoming someone those people trust will take the work that follows.