We thought it would be a 25 or $30 million business and someone like Abbot or Roche would come in and scarf us up, and for four years work it was worth 75 to $100 million based upon doing 25 to $35 million in revenue. So that was the plan. Never thought we'd go public.

HATTIE: At what point did you say whoa, we don't have to cash out. We can keep playing.

KIM: I think that probably started about the '95, '96 timeframe -- we had gotten this product launched, it was starting to ramp, we had some operational issues, but the cash flow was good, we were profitable. And Ted Greene and Tim Wollaeger at a board meeting one day challenged us saying hey this was a one product idea, you've got to clone yourself. You guys have got to turn this into a strategy as opposed to a product company.

HATTIE: They also, I heard you say, planted the seed to do the public offering. The board, not the three of you.

KIM: Well, I have to admit I was scared of the thought of ever having to go public or run a public company. It was sort of the business equivalent of Mount Everest. And the stories that I heard about not only how hard it was to do it, the difficulty of being a public company afterwards, it makes you want to run from that potential challenge and experience.

HATTIE: Why do you think you all decided not to take your money and run?

KEN: Because I guess that wouldn't have been a fun thing to do. I think that we didn't feel that we were really successful at that point. I think we recognized we developed a product, but in no way I think did we consider that was success. I think that was a milestone, it was a stepping-stone to what we felt that we could really do. And at the time that was drugs of abuse. The technology for that was considerably different than the technology today that we use with the Triage meter. And so we recognized that there was this need, a totally new technology had to be developed. Technology that hadn't existed at all anywhere, and it was that challenge and that's what made it fun to continue to work.

GUNARS: The crucial time was 1992 when the first product went to market. It was successful, it was profitable. There was sort of a decision at that point, do we sell this company off and we could have, maybe for $100 million or something and gone off and done something else. Or, do we invest that profit and do something larger in this same business. And so we decided to invest the profit and really it resulted in two things. It resulted in the device technology that we now call the Triage Quantitative Device, and the antibody technology that really is sort of the source of how we can manage to do all of these projects cost effectively.