Mehrdad Mahoutian, PhD - PEng, is an award-winning scholar, entrepreneur, and co-founder of CarbiCrete. He is also the co-inventor of CarbiCrete’s technology. Mehrdad serves as CarbiCrete’s CTO and is an expert in the carbon capture and utilization, mineralization, sustainable construction materials and concrete technology. 

I loved this conversation because we broke down the entire process of inventing a game-changing technology as part of PhD research, determining with your advisor if something's novel, introducing to the tech transfer office and working with them on patenting, getting introduced to a successful entrepreneur who becomes your co-founder, leveraging non-dilutive funding and much more. Mehrdad highlights how luck met preparation in a crazy story that was a turning point for his invention - no spoilers! The audio is a bit rough as he's at the R&D lab for their concrete production company but the content is well worth it. Enjoy! 

More about Mehrdad

Dr. Mahoutian has published more than 50 peer reviewed journal paper and conference papers. His research and studies have been cited by more than 600 papers and reports. Mehrdad has seven granted and pending patents and was the team leader for CarbiCrete as one of the finalists of the international $20M Carbon Xprize competition. He won the Canada's 2019 Clean50 Award in the research and development category.

Find Mehrdad and CarbiCrete on LinkedIn 

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Donald Sadoway is a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT where he teaches the most popular freshman course that is offered. His accomplishments include inventing the liquid metal battery for large-scale stationary storage and molten oxide electrolysis for carbon-free metals production. He is the founder of four companies, Ambri, Boston Metal, Avanti Battery, and Sadoway Labs. His TED Talk is animated and inspiring - and with 2.4 million views it is as much about inventing inventors as it is about inventing technology.

Professor Sadoway's mission to improve the environment, the success of his lab, the propensity to create spinout companies that commercialize his inventions, and most importantly the way he mentors grad-students and post-docs in his labs to ultimately be future technology leaders. We talk about thinking from first principles, knowing your limitations, thinking ahead of time about environmental impact of material inputs and the social considerations of extracting them, and much more. 

Check out his free series of lectures on MIT open courseware: Intro to Solid State Chemistry This is the course that Bill Gates loved to the point of wanting to meet Professor Sadoway which ultimately led to Bill Gates investing in Ambri, the liquid metal battery technology that Professor Sadoway invented. 

More about Donald

Donald R. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and Ph.D. in Chemical Metallurgy are from the University of Toronto. He joined the MIT faculty in 1978. The author of over 180 scientific papers and inventor on 35 U.S. patents, his research is directed towards batteries for grid-scale storage and towards environmentally sound metals extraction technologies. Online videos of his chemistry lectures hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare extend his impact on engineering education far beyond the lecture hall. In 2012 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.­­

Find Professor Sadoway on Twitter and LinkedIn and the website for Sadoway Labs. 

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Dr. Iris Good is a scientist-entrepreneur and investor, specialising in commercialisation of medical devices in India for over 20 years. She has established and brought to growth several medical device companies and has been a non-executive director in several countries. Iris is chair of Imperial Innovations Seed Fund, of London Business School HealthTech Challenge, of Good Relations India and is a member of the investment committee of Cambridge University Seed Fund.

Iris is inspirational in how much she has accomplished from her work as a scientist, entrepreneur and now investor. We talk about her experience transitioning into these roles, lessons she's learned and failures she's experienced, qualities of good startups and scientist entrepreneurs, new initiatives from technology transfer organizations, her experience as a woman in science, and much more.  

More about Iris 

Soon after completing her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, followed by two post docs (molecular biology and brain research) Iris moved to technology commercialisation in international markets. She co-established UltraShape (high-intensity ultrasound device for fat emulsification), acquired by Syneron Medical Ltd, and led the business development of MetaCure (a diabetic pace-maker). She took MetaCure to India, setting up pan-India clinical-trials and commercial operations. She founded I-Connections, an India market-entry firm focusing on cutting edge technologies, establishing strategic partnerships and commercial expansions. I-Connections later merged with Good Relations India, a 33-years old award-winning Strategic PR & Market Entry consultancy with offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and London, providing full strategy and execution to international companies in India. Iris became its chair in 2008. Good Relations India has handled leading clients such as Apple, Barclays, Bloomberg, Cartier, CNBC, Etihad, The UN and Virgin Atlantic and hundreds of start-ups. The company brought Marks & Spencer to India and created their JV with Reliance Industries, Sun Life Insurance with Birla Group, Scottish & Newcastle with Kingfisher and many others.

In recent years Iris has served on boards of Sight Diagnostics, Step of Mind and Tikal Networks (Israel) on the advisory board of Trapezia Capital and Puridify Ltd and on the main board of Accloud and Touchlight Genetics (UK). She has been active mentor/judge/investor in London Business School, Judge Business School, Oxford Foundry and Imperial College. She is a member of the Cambridge Seed Fund investment committee since 2018 and chairs the Imperials College Seed Fund since 2020.

Find Iris on LinkedIn. 

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David Allen has spent his life working in technology development and commercialization at five US universities, in a career that saw him supervising over 600 exclusive licenses, enabling over 175 start-ups, managing nearly 225 POC projects and successfully negotiating two major ($40M+) royalty monetizations. He's spent almost 30 years in technology transfer and knows his stuff on what makes a university tech transfer office (TTO) successful. In this episode we talk about what it takes to build and run successful TTOs, the importance of engaging the local business, entrepreneurial and investment community, proof-of-concept funding, and how to make the TTO your friend in a license negotiation. It's a high-level technical conversation but useful for any entrepreneur, grad-student or researcher that's looking to get into the mind of the technology transfer organization on campus. 

See his TED talk entitled The Potential of Technology Transfer and find him on LinkedIn.  

More about David

Early in his career he earned a national reputation as a researcher, consultant, and manager in the field of technology business incubators. Later in his career he gained a national reputation for turning around underperforming university technology transfer operations, and for creating and operating university proof of concept programs. Over his career he developed a knack for identifying the asset potential in research derived inventions and how to move the inventions into the market through intellectual property strategy and early-stage technology development. He spent decades building and using innovation and commercialization networks to augment technology transfer operations. He retired from the University of Arizona (UA) April 2018 after 5.5 years as Vice President of Tech Launch Arizona (TLA).

Before coming to the UA, Dave was the University of Colorado System (CU) Associate Vice President for Technology Transfer from February 2002 to August 2012. Prior to CU he served as the Associate Vice President for Technology Partnerships at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Before coming to Ohio State in 1997, he was Associate Vice President for Technology and Economic Development, and Director of the Edison Biotechnology Institute, at Ohio University in Athens. 

Prior to his tech transfer career, he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he taught graduate and undergraduate statistics, management, and entrepreneurship classes. During the decade at Penn State, he was also a consultant to a regional seed venture capital firm and the principal in a technology enterprise consulting firm. David earned a doctorate in 1980 from Indiana University, Bloomington. His Ph.D. chairperson and mentor was the late Elinor Ostrom, a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics.

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Diana Yousef is the CEO and founder of change:WATER Labs, a startup that designed and developed a low-cost, portable toilet using a simple membrane to rapidly evaporate 95% of sewage without using any type of energy. Diana is a PhD, MBA, MA and a serial entrepreneur with 10+yrs experience commercializing technology for social and environmental impact in the developing world.

In this interview we talk about what to do after your PhD, how to get entrepreneurial as a scientist, the value of small grants, how motherhood in part helped lead her to entrepreneurship, the inspiration and early days of change:WATER and much more. Tune in for more bits of wisdom like “if you have a hunch that you’re onto something, keep going.” Also, change:WATER is hiring and raising a round - so make sure to reach out if you believe in their mission and would like to help. 

More about Diana

Diana consulted for McKinsey, co-founded IFC/World Bank’s Life Sciences Investment Group and the United Nations’ Inclusive Markets incubator, and was a seed-stage VC with Battelle Ventures. She co-founded: WeCyclers (social venture to clean up urban slums and create recyclables supply chain linkages in Nigeria), Immerse Global (Stanford-spin out to develop atmospheric water capture technologies), and SachSiSolar (MIT-spin out to develop revolutionary new materials to lower the cost of solar energy). She is a former protein biochemist (A.B., Harvard; Ph.D., Cornell), and holds an MBA and MA in International Development (Columbia). She serves as an advisor to the TED Fellows Program and a Founding Council Member for NASA/USAID’s LAUNCH Accelerator. She is founder & CEO of change:WATER Labs. The work of Diana and her team has been covered such publications as Forbes, Fast Company, BOSS Magazine (on the cover of April 2018 issue), Bloomberg, the Discovery Channel, The Daily Beast and the Boston Globe.

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Ofra Weinberger is the Director of Commercialization and Licensing at Columbia Technology Ventures (CTV). She oversees the management of over 400 inventions, 200 patents, approximately 100 licenses to industry, and the formation of approximately 25 new startups per year.

This interview gets into the weeds of what successful technology transfer programs look like. I learned A TON about how one of the best TTOs out there operates. They constantly keep their mission of doing good in the world top-of-mind, and let it trickle down to small practices like responding to emails within 24 hours. The programs they have created to increase the chances of success for their student and faculty inventions are industry-leading, including the Executive in Residence Program, their Lab to Market Accelerators, and their Fellows Program. 

We talk about walking before you run, the importance of industry engagement and networking, and some detailed licensing terms that university entrepreneurs should know, including recommended process improvements for launching university startups, as well as term sheet recommendations for launching university startups. 

More about Ofra

Ofra is also Associate VP for IP and Technology Transfer at Columbia University. She leads the licensing and startup formation team at Columbia, overseeing the commercialization of technologies in a portfolio comprising both life sciences and physical sciences opportunities and has extensive experience negotiating licenses, research collaborations and strategic alliances, and spinning out companies to commercialize university technologies. Ofra received a PhD in immunology from Harvard University. 

More about CTV

CTV, the technology transfer office of Columbia University, has been involved with launching over 180 companies based on Columbia's technologies to date, and has returned over $3B in revenue to Columbia, making it one of the most successful university tech transfer programs in the world.

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Alexandra Wright-Gladstein is the co-founder and CEO of Ayar Labs (formerly OptiBit), a technology startup that is bringing the high bandwidths and energy efficiency of fiber optic communications directly to silicon computer chips. Ayar Labs will revolutionize the performance and energy efficiency of data centers, and ultimately of all electronics.

Alex brought together the team of researchers across three universities (MIT, CU Boulder, and UC Berkeley) to form Ayar Labs, where she raised its first $27M in venture funding and recruited Charlie Wuischpard as CEO. 

We get into the nitty gritty of what it takes to spin out a piece university research into a startup, talking about her early days knocking on professor's doors looking for technology to license. We hear secrets of applying to SBIR grants and the importance for an entrepreneur to establish trust with researchers. 

This conversation is a must-listen for anyone looking to turn a piece of research into a fully commercialized startup. 

More about Alex

Alex graduated with an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Business. While at MIT, she was the Energy Practice Leader at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, helping students create clean energy startups out of MIT labs. Prior to MIT, Alex worked at the leading smart grid company, EnerNOC, where she managed and grew data-driven energy efficiency and demand response programs. She has also worked for early-stage clean energy companies Loci Controls and Angaza Design.

Follow Alex on Twitter at @ga1ex. 

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Richard has facilitated the commercialization of innovative technologies in Canada and the United States for three decades. He is currently the CEO of Industrial Climate Solutions, a company developing and commercializing industrial breakthrough process equipment and technologies to address greenhouse gas emissions. Their technology, the Pulse-Enhanced (Regenerative) Froth Contactor, is a step-change in gas/liquid and gas/liquid/solid processes. The RFC eliminates fouling, that pesky 'diffusion limit', and enables highly efficient mass-transfer. 

In the episode, we discuss his thoughts on the Elon Musk $100 Million carbon capture prize, which has since been announced. The interview was spurred by Richard's recent LinkedIn post on the subject. While the prize is more focused on what Richard terms "Blue Ocean Technologies", we still have an interesting conversation around innovation challenges and ready-to-deploy carbon capture technologies. We discuss his experience at the CMC research institute, the quirky origin story of the underlying technology for Industrial Climate Solutions and how it then ended up with an Office of Navy Research contract with Sandia National Laboratories for filtering anthrax in extreme desert conditions, to where it is today. We discuss his advice to grad students and PhDs looking to understand industry pain points, and more more. 

More about Richard

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Fernando Gómez-Baquero leads Runway, the Startup Postdoc Program at the Jacobs Technion – Cornell Institute at Cornell tech.  The program is part business school, part research institution, and part startup incubator. It's led to the creation of numerous deep tech startups led by post-docs from all over the world. Fernando holds a Ph.D. in Nanoscale Science and Engineering from the University at Albany SUNY, and has been a co—founder and early technology lead at companies such as Besstech, NanoColombia, Innovate Prefabricate, Dendron Nanomed, Midstate, Revela Medical, and FlashCharge Batteries.

Check out this video about the program and click here to apply by February 15th for the next cohort. 

In this episode we talk his experience forming Besstech, the value of customer development, patenting tips, how to be Bob Langer, what advice they give post-docs at Runway, and much more. 

More about Fernando

Fernando's research has focused on advanced nanomaterials for energy storage applications, on the economic impact of pervasive nanotechnologies, and on tech entrepreneurship. He has more than 15 years of experience in the nanotechnology industry, starting with production and characterization of carbon nanotubes and developing of polymer/nanotube composite materials. He is a leader in the fabrication of nanoengineered electrodes for lithium-ion batteries using semiconductor processes and using nanotechnology to improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries. Dr. Gómez-Baquero has several publications in nanomaterials research and on the economic impact of nanotechnologies and number of patent applications in diverse applications of nanomaterials. Check out his Google Scholar profile.

Fernando is also a leading voice of the Day One Project, an initiative dedicated to democratizing the government policymaking process by working with new and expert voices across the science and technology community. The letter he authored advocating for the creation of a national fellowship for entrepreneurial scientists and engineers can be found here. 

Fernando is also a core instructor for The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps™), a program that uses experiential education to help researchers gain valuable insight into entrepreneurship, starting a business or industry requirements and challenges. 

Find Fernando on Twitter at @FerGomezBaquero

More about Runway

Based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Runway ushers recent PhDs in digital technology fields through a paradigm shift — from an academic mindset to an entrepreneurial outlook. Startup Postdocs arrive with ideas for unproven products and markets that require time and specialized guidance to develop. These startups demand more than a few months to launch. They need a bit of a “runway.” That’s why our program lasts 12–24 and incorporates academic and business mentorship. The Runway Startup Postdoc Program provides an impressive package valued at $277,000 that includes a salary, research budget, housing allowance, space and more in the first year. In addition, the Startup Postdoc receives significant benefits and perks and corporate support valued at $300,000.

Aaron Mandell has co-founded numerous companies at the nexus of energy and water, including: Altarock, WaterFX, Oasys Water, Coskata and GreatPoint Energy and Greatpoint Ventures. He is on the board of Quaise (millimeter wave drilling for geothermal) and Quidnet (energy storage). 

Aaron has taken numerous companies out of university research labs and formed them into successful operating companies. He's successfully applied for and been awarded large DOE / ARPA-E grants, has raised money from large venture firms like Khosla Ventures and even joined a Y-Combinator batch. 

In this episode we talk:

0:00 Bio / Intro 

01:50 Quaise technology overview and extracting it from MIT 

08:00 Traits of successful inventors 

10:30 Finding commercialization pathways and de-risking 

14:00 Value of Non-dilutive funding 

17:00 Difference between R&D and R&D towards commercialization 

20:00 Mistakes made and importance of timing 

22:00 Running out of water 

29:00 Advice to young entrepreneurs  

31:00 Advice to go after funding from federal agencies / VCs 

34:00 Sell and then build 

35:30 -Product-Market Fit in Hard Sciences / Why Aaron went to Y-Combinator /How to MVP 

42:00 Working with the professor/inventor of the technology 

43:00 Working with TTOs and Universities

47:30 Patents 

More about Aaron: 

Through his leadership, this portfolio is advancing new products in fields such as solar-powered water treatment, desalination, enhanced geothermal energy, coal gasification and alternative chemicals. Aaron was recently the CEO of Altarock, a leader in the development of next generation geothermal energy and is the cofounder and Chairman of WaterFX, a leading provider of solar desalination technology.

Prior to Altarock, Aaron served as CEO of Oasys Water where he led the company from laboratory prototype to implementation of the company’s produced water treatment system and as the founding CTO of GreatPoint Energy where he led the development of the company’s coal gasification process. Aaron has deep roots in the energy and water industries with a technical background in environmental engineering (B.S./M.S.) from the University of Vermont, where he focused on numerical modeling and groundwater hydrology.

Find Aaron on Twitter at @AaronMandell

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