Inspired by Failure

The guest on this episode of the Inspired by Failure podcast is Kayla Nguyen, EMPAD co-inventor.

EMPAD stands for Electron Microscope Pixel Array Detector, which is a highly efficient detector for the electron microscope. EMPAD benefits a large number of researchers across a wide range of scientific fields.

This hard-fought technology went through many stages of trials and failures, but finally resulted in success not only scientifically but also by earning a spot in The Guinness Book of World Records for the highest resolution microscope in the world

EMPAD started through a collaboration in 2006 with Professor Gruner, a well-known figure in the field on X-ray technology. He started building detectors for free electron lasers. As an experiment, this detector was put it into the electron microscope to see what would happen. It caught on fire. This project was shelved for almost a decade, until Kayla and other co-inventors stepped in to resurrect the research.

Through collaboration and tweaking, they were able to successfully complete the EMPAD in 2014.

Key Quotes:

“It wasn’t an epic failure; it was more like a marathon of failures.”

“It wasn’t resources, it was just working with a lot of people with a lot of expertise. It was definitely a group effort to get this detector to work, and to uncover new information, and new physics.”

Links:

https://lemelson.mit.edu/winners/kayla-nguyen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib3_bISFn4A

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The guest on this episode of the Inspired by Failure podcast is Josh Horne, Inventor of Portal Entryways.

Portal Entryways is a smart phone accessible App that allows compatible doors to open upon approach. This is possible with Bluetooth low energy technology, and is specifically targeted to users with accessibility needs.

Unlike traditional Bluetooth technology, Bluetooth low energy technology doesn’t have to be paired. As long as a door has the Portal Entryways technology, and a user has enabled the app, and is carrying their smartphone, the door will open automatically when they enter into the programmed range.

Josh and classmates were inspired to create this system as they talked with a fellow student who used a wheelchair. The student shared that one of the main stressors and struggles during any given day, was opening doors. Josh and collaborators were inspired to find a practical solution.

Josh is passionate about bringing accessibility to people through technology.

Key Quotes:

“I was able to learn and gain empathy for somebody who has a disability and lives their life in a wheelchair, and all of the different considerations and struggles that they have.”

“People with disabilities are completely normal people, just like everybody else in the world. They just want to be independent, like anyone else does.”

Links:

https://www.portalentryways.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-horne-3b21928b

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The guest on this episode of the Inspired by Failure podcast is Enid Partika, creator of an anaerobic digester that is turning food waste into fertilizer and biogas. Enid and her team at the Rogers Urban Farmlab are working with medium sized vendors such as university dining halls to collect food waste which is placed into the anaerobic digester they have created and will produce liquid fertilizer and biogas without the use of oxygen.

Enid and her team have worked tirelessly to cultivate the right types of bacteria to produce the optimal biogas and fertilizer byproducts. Every 600 pounds of food waste can produce 3 kilowatt hours of biogas and 150 gallons of liquid fertilizer, which Enid and her team have been using to grow hydroponic plants and fruit trees at the Farmlab.

While there are other similar efforts going on around the world, Enid believes that their anaerobic digester is unique in its scale and their capability to control the environmental factors of their project. They are constantly monitoring chemical and environmental metrics to ensure that their production levels are optimal. The best advice that Enid has received is to make the best use of the resources you are given, which she employs through experimentation and increased sustainability efforts.

Key Quotes:

“What resources are available to me? What tools do I have?”

“How can we best service the environment? How can we best service our community?”

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Christopher Bean and his team are using their Micro Electric Turbine System (mETS) to create electricity with no combustion and no byproducts. They capture this energy through the pressure that occurs through the flow of gas. Their main target customers are off-shore oil producers who are looking for a way to be more sustainable and who have extraordinary amounts of the oil needed to produce this sustainable electricity. This mETS software is more practical than solar and hydrogen for off-shore oil producers particularly because of issues that solar and hydrogen have with cost and scale.

Chris and his team have not met many barriers along the way and they view this as the optimal time for implementing this technology since oil and gas industries are primed to implement this kind of system to solve some of the problems they have been experiencing. The team has been talking with representatives of the oil and gas industries during their development phases and they believe that their product is exactly what they need. Chris is excited about the future of mETS and the potential for widespread carbon emissions reduction as the product is widely distributed and accepted.

Key Quotes:

“We are utilizing a readily-available pressure system.”

“What goes into our turbine comes out in the very same form.”

“The potential customers of this technology are hungry for this.”

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On this episode of Inspired by Failure, we talk with Jack Chernov, founder of an AI-powered video editing software. Jack is from Siberia and he recently moved to San Francisco to pursue his dreams of helping people tell their best story through their video content. Jack found that he was always trying to capture the most emotional or poignant moments of trips that he took, and he realized that it wouldn’t be difficult to integrate AI into the editing process by having it sort out frames that show emotion and defective frames.

Jack conducted 23 hours’ worth of interviews with video editors to determine their criteria for choosing which frames to include in their final content. After 1 year of research, he narrowed these responses down to the 50 most common reasons. Now that he knew what he wanted to do, the next step was to understand what to do and hire talented people to help him do it. Jack emphasizes the importance of hiring people who do not need to be managed, but can effectively accomplish their job tasks with excellence.

Jack is working to develop the product and complete a seed round of investments and then continue on with the same level of fervency and efficiency until the product is ready for market. He has been networking with other like-minded individuals in the San Francisco area at every opportunity and learning from their knowledge of startups in addition to their experiences in honesty in selling. He is looking forward to the continued growth and development of the idea and product.

Key Quotes:

“People don’t like to do this part of video editing.”

“Automation of video is only possible if you choose a certain type of video.”

“Everyone is looking for emotions.”

“I don’t understand the deep technical aspects, but I understand what’s possible and what’s not possible.”

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Julie Bliss Mullen grew up loving and appreciating the outdoors, and after a trip to rural Guatemala during high school to study the water issues of that community, she knew that she had found her life’s purpose. She took environmental engineering and sustainability courses in college and after her internship with the EPA, she was awarded a graduate research fellowship to study emerging contaminants in water. She began looking at conventional treatment methods and then began her PhD studies where she continued her research by looking at new types of water treatment technology.

During this program, she discovered the potentials of electrochemical water treatment to remove contaminants and she hired a co-founder to help her thrust the project forward. They chose the name Aclarity because it is unique and memorable while conveying their desired message of clarity and having a nice ring to it. During the electrochemical process, they found it effective to group the types of contaminants based upon the power ratings needed to destroy them in water. Their technology is able to desalinate water and allow for water reuse in addition to typical water treatment functions.

Julie has greatly enjoyed learning more about electrochemistry with the ultimate goal of providing clean water to as much of the world as possible, inspired by her first trip to rural Guatemala. They are working to make Aclarity scalable and hopefully widely available for solving the world’s water problems.

Key Quotes:

“It generates really fast reacting chemicals that destroy contaminants.”

“We have to regulate the power to destroy certain contaminants.”

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Acoustic Wells was created by Sebastien Mannai as a robust solution to oil well pumping issues. This device is able to listen to how the fluid is flowing (or being inhibited from properly flowing) to diagnose problems in oil wells such as machine failure and other functional metrics. While he has leveraged machine learning in terms of the physical and acoustic modeling, the device comes from fundamental physics, meaning that it does not require a lot of data before implementation.

Sebastien has found the toughest part of this journey to be creating a device robust enough to be used in heavy industries and be accurate up to 99%. He has also been surprised to learn that a lot of the oil well machinery in the U.S. is several decades old, dating back to the 1940’s and earlier, and is very simple in design and function. He has also found out that there are over 1 million oil fields in the U.S., a significant portion of which are owned by independent producers.

Sebastien and his team won a $100,000 entrepreneurship competition and began to gain some recognition as a result. This has helped them overcome one of their previous challenges of reaching these large industrial complexes with the message about their product. Sebastien loves the diversity of his tasks as CEO of Acoustic Wells and he looks forward to the bright future for the company.

Key Quotes:

“I really enjoy the field of heavy industries – building something that has an impact.”

“If your model is based on physics, you don’t need a whole lot of data before you can start working.”

“The startup experience is an emotional roller coaster.”

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Steve Hoffman has experience as an electrical computer engineer, television executive, and video game designer. He has started 3 venture-funded and 2 non-venture-funded startups during his career, so he has plenty of startup experience to draw from in his latest venture, Founders Space. Steve realized along the way that he liked helping founders build their vision by coaching and mentoring them.

He says that the key to knowing whether an idea will be successful is the founder. The main questions Steve asks himself when evaluating a founder are: Are they capable? Do they demonstrate leadership? Do they have tenacity? Are they curious?

The other essential team members in a startup are a hustler, techie, designer, and marketer. They each serve their own purpose in the early days of the business, laying the foundation for future growth.

Steve has heard a lot of crazy ideas from founders, and he knows that most of the ideas he hears will not sound so crazy five years from now because of the improvements in technology that will occur between now and then. Many founders are tempted to start working on patents for their ideas early on in the process, but Steve says that they should instead focus on building their business and work on patents only if and when they feel they are vitally necessary.

The biggest challenge that he has seen founders face is not knowing when to give up on an idea and reevaluate. Because so much mental and financial investment goes into these ideas, founders are not quick to give them up, but Steve says that sometimes it is best for them to reevaluate and restart in a better direction.

Steve and his team want to accelerate startups to the next level through training, guidance about venture capital, coaching, and connections. He was once told to invest his time in the most impactful people, and he now passes that wisdom along to the other founders he works with.

Steve makes a clear distinction between inventors and innovators, stating that inventions take years to create, and innovators can find new ways to use the inventions of others

Key Quotes:

“Founders Space is a global incubator and accelerator for startups.”

“With a weak CEO, even the best idea will fail.”

“When an idea sounds crazy, they are often just a little ahead of their time.”

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Maher Damak has a passion for solving tough and important problems. He first realized that pesticides were so inefficient about 6 years ago and he quickly set out to come up with a solution, now called Sticky Pesticide. In fact, 98% of sprayed pesticides do not serve their purpose because of natural elements such as wind and because most plants are hydrophobic and repel the pesticide liquid.

Maher started out talking with farmers and planters to get their perspective and integrate their feedback into his process. He was committed to the product being biodegradable, which sent the team in the direction of electrically-charged polymers. Using scientific literature and conversations with farmers using pesticides, they have been able to create a product that can be added to the existing pesticide spraying process but make it 10x more efficient.

Sticky Pesticide involves one positively charged and one negatively charged stream of liquid that create an electrostatic attraction and change the surface of the plant to accept the pesticide spray. The next steps for Sticky Pesticide are field trials, testing at MIT, forming a startup, and taking the product to market.

The best advice he has received was to know your users. He has done his best to heed this advice by openly communicating with farmers and growers about their needs and how he can create a helpful product. His biggest frustrations have been development and waiting on field testing, but he is hopeful that Sticky Pesticide will soon be serving its purpose and increasing growers’ efficiency.

Key Quotes:

“We are building on others’ work.”

“People don’t realize that pesticides are so inefficient.”

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Bill Cox is the creator of Libsonic, a software that can speed up or slow down speech. Bill began this creation journey out of necessity: he was losing his sight and he needed a TTS software that would work effectively at the high speed he needed. The options out there at the time were not good quality and typically only went up to 2x speed, when most blind people need TTS to go up to 6x speed.

The biggest challenge that Libsonic faces is adoption, but he has seen some success with Google and Android using his software and he has created his own Java port to make his software more accessible. He has committed 182 items to the repository that he created since November 2010, making it one of the broadest repositories of its kind.

Bill is committed to improving the lives of the blind through accessibility. Most of his ideas have failed, but they have all had purpose. One of his latest ideas that has worked is a true random number generator which he programmed manually and can be housed on something as simple as a USB drive.

Bill says that the biggest key to overcoming failure is to follow through. Many ideas fail because the inventors give up or move on too quickly, not giving their ideas a good chance of flourishing. He is excited about the field of speech recognition and is intrigued by neural networks in light of the limitations of machine learning.

Key Quotes:

“For me and other blind people, the productivity of our work depends on the speed of our screen reader.”

“Google TTS at high speed is now very usable.”

“It’s easy to invent things. It’s hard to change the world.”

“In invent things, you have to imagine it working in your head, you have to build it and see that it works, you have to understand why it works, and you have to convince other people that it can.”

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