Interview with Accuray's Founder, Dr. John Adler

Matthew Rafat, who previously wrote about Accuray's shareholder meeting (2009), has a great interview with Accuray's founder, Dr. Adler, on his site.

A must read, thanks to both the author and Dr. Adler.

Here we'll report just a few lines:

>>7. What do you feel Accuray is doing poorly?

In planning for unrealistic growth, Accuray scaled operations prematurely and needlessly burned through a lot of cash, and at the same time, communication with investors deteriorated terribly. Of note, since the arrival of CFO Derek Bertocci’s, both of the above issues have improved. However, the company has tragically lost touch with what was once a credible and very unique base of surgical users. The CyberKnife product is increasingly becoming bloated and overly expensive. In parallel, internal company processes have the complexity of a company 10 times the size, which is not a good thing for a company so dependent on rapid innovation. Many CyberKnife features were poorly conceived and in the process of development, robbed engineering talent from more important projects. Rather than envision and drive new clinical applications for radiosurgery, Accuray has chosen to spend a lot of energy and focus backtracking into the traditional radiation oncology market, long dominated by Varian and others. Internally, dissenting opinions are frowned upon, and the Accuray board has virtually no background in any of the medical or technical fields that are relevant to company business. For many years now Accuray has done a very poor job of selling to major US academic centers, which represent vital hubs of clinical research going forward. Moreover, because it’s under represented at major medical centers, Accuray lacks political clout within major medical societies and the government. In belatedly following my mother’s admonition “to not say anything, if you can’t say something nice,” I will stop here.