The Inventivity Pod

James Di Virgilio talks to Daniel Barousse, the founder of Slice, a company that makes components for 3D printers that help improve their performance. Daniel and his co-founder Chris Montgomery literally started in a garage, tinkering their way to solutions to problems they encountered with 3D printers at work. In just over a year of existence, Slice is now distributing its product in 12 countries.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

For Radio Cade, I’m James de Virgilio. My guest today is Daniel Barousse. He is the CEO and co-founder of Slice Engineering. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Barousse: 0:48

Thanks for having me.

James Di Virgilio: 0:49

Now, it says on your website and elsewhere, that what you do is you supercharge 3D printer technology. What does that actually mean?

Daniel Barousse: 0:58

We’re a manufacturer we design and manufacture components for 3D printers. Your PC has an Intel sticker on it. More than likely Intel makes the chip that goes inside of your computer, your , for your PC. So we’re doing similar things for 3D printers. We’re making components for 3D printers, specifically ones that help to improve the performance either with higher temperature materials or more capable engineering grade materials, or allow you to print faster, better resolution, things like that.

James Di Virgilio: 1:25

Well, let’s talk about 3D printers for a second. This is a topic that confuses and confounds me. Cause when I think of 3D printer, I still think of like trying to print something out and now comes a sheet of paper with things on it. It’s called a printer, but what really is a 3D printer? What is it capable of? Is the sky the limit here? I mean, what is this device that you’re improving?

Daniel Barousse: 1:45

So one of the cool things about 3D printing is that you mentioned limits. Essentially the limit is sort of your imagination. Anything you can design on a computer with CAD, you can pretty much 3D print and turn into a physical object. So that’s really the appeal, especially for like a DIY consumer type person. They’ve made me have an idea of, Oh, I want to create a new product or I want to just make a bracket for something in my garage. If you can think of it and design it in a computer, you can pull the real object in your hand within a few hours. So that’s pretty amazing in terms of what it is. If you imagine plastic being on a spool, like a spool of thread, and then that plastic being fed through a hot glue gun, the hot glue gun would melt the plastic and then squirted out onto what’s called the build plate or like a sheet of paper, basically where the object is being created. And instead of doing it in two dimensions, it builds it in three. So the build plate goes down or the hot glue gun it’s called the hot end goes up and builds layer upon layer until you come out with a 3D object at the end.

James Di Virgilio: 2:45

So if I want to print a bumper for a car, this can be done?

Daniel Barousse: 2:49

That can be done. Yep.

James Di Virgilio: 2:50

And how does Slice improve my 3D printing of a car’s bumper? Sure. So we could allow you to print it out, have a better material, for example. So if you like the water bottles that are sitting in front of us, those are made of a plastic called PETG. If you wanted to print a PETG bumper, it’s a lower temperature plastic, it’s kind of easy to do. It’s not the best material for your bumper. If you run into somebody else with your PETG bumper, it’s not gonna survive the impact. So you want to use a higher temperature and engineering grade plastic that can survive the impact. So you can print it . Can you 3D print metal objects?

Daniel Barousse: 3:24

Yes. With an asterisk . So we can print metals that are embedded into a plastic carrier. So if you imagine metal as a pure metal and a fine particle form, being embedded into that same spool of plastic, that plastic thread, and you could print that plastic thread and then put your final object into what’s called a centering oven, and what it does is it evaporates the plastic and leaves behind the metal that was printed. So you do have a metal object at the end, but you’re not directly manipulating metal. If that makes sense,

James Di Virgilio: 3:56

It does make sense. And let’s talk about how we got to this point of your story. Obviously you’re an expert in 3D printing. Your company helps to assist and supercharge these processes once upon a time that wasn’t the case. So you went to school at UF?

Daniel Barousse: 4:09

I did. Yeah.

James Di Virgilio: 4:10

You have a degree in mechanical engineering, and then what happened from there?

Daniel Barousse: 4:14

A couple Internships in different types of industries. I worked in aerospace for a little bit and worked in power generation for a little bit, but I was doing a bunch of research in biomechanics atF while I was an undergrad and I decided from those disparate experiences, I was going to try and pursue something in the medical arena cause I wanted to make an impact and help people. So I ended up staying in Gainesville. I worked for Progress Park. If you’re familiar with the area, RTI Surgical is up there as well as Oxygen. So I worked for both of those companies for about six years. And during that experience I ran into, or I met the gentleman who became my co-founder, same as Chris Montgomery and his family has been in the area for a really long time. We basically encountered some problems with 3D printing. We were using it at work and we encountered some problems that we couldn’t solve or nobody that we talked to could solve. So Chris said, well, I bet you , I could figure out a way to fix this. And we went back to his garage and he came up with a great idea that we then launched into a company.

James Di Virgilio: 5:06

So had you done extensive research to see if anyone else had solved this problem already and come to the point to where definitively there was no solution?

Daniel Barousse: 5:14

Yeah we had phone calls with companies in Germany, the UK, had email traffic going back and forth with people all over the world to try and find somebody to solve this.

James Di Virgilio: 5:23

And no one could. So then you decide to solve it, create a prototype in the garage, take the prototype where?

Daniel Barousse: 5:30

So we built the first prototypes in the garage. And then there was a local company here, a little machine shop that built six of them for us. So we could test more. And then we found a manufacturer here in the U.S. That built first pre-production. Once we built like 40 ish of them and went to a trade show, sold out in a couple of hours. So we were like, okay, validated the concept that there was a need for this, that it wasn’t just us that recognized, Hey, we have this weird problem that nobody else does. This is a real problem that other people have as well.

James Di Virgilio: 5:56

And so at this show, you weren’t necessarily sure how many people were going to have this problem and unbeknownst to you, they’re saying, Oh, this is the exact solution that I need. Now from there, did you take on investor funding? Is this a self funded company? How did you wind up financing the next level of production for these pieces?

Daniel Barousse: 6:13

It’s all been bootstrapped so far. So myself, Chris, who I mentioned, and we have a third partner and three of us have basically funded it from our savings and revenue coming in.

James Di Virgilio: 6:21

And how old is Slice now?

Daniel Barousse: 6:23

We, launched, I guess, publicly in March, 2018. So just a little over a year and a half.

James Di Virgilio: 6:29

And you’re in multiple countries, correct?

Daniel Barousse: 6:30

We are yeah. We have distributors in 12 countries, I believe.

James Di Virgilio: 6:34

What does it look like in the next five years for Slice? What problems are you trying to solve? Or are you at the curve where you’re trying to say, we need to continue to produce this prototype or what we have, or are you at a next level already saying, we can do this and now make this that much better? Where are you in that curve?

Daniel Barousse: 6:48

So we’ve already launched a second generation version of the first product that we built. The first one we launched was sort of like our flagship model and we’ve built a less expensive version. That’s more targeted at a desktop market as opposed to an industrial market. We just had a successful Kickstarter campaign for that, that finished up on the 1st of January of this year. And we’re continuing to look at the future for other future product developments. There’s multiple types of 3D printing and we’re in one right now. So we’ve been focused on that and we will have more innovations coming out this year and in the following years in that realm, but we’re also looking at other types of 3D printing. And how can we expand into those in a way that is value added, right? Where we’re coming up with a new innovation in the market that nobody else is doing.

James Di Virgilio: 7:27

And how does slice get it’s customers? Are you actively marketing? Do they find you because it’s this niche situation where they need to solve this problem? How does that happen?

Daniel Barousse: 7:36

So we do a lot of trade shows and that’s the way we get mostly our industrial customers is through trade shows, but we’re also doing marketing. We were on Facebook and Google ads. We reach out to people that we find on forums. We’ve established an online presence that allows us to extend our reach. And that’s probably the biggest struggle in growing a business of any kind is how do you expand your customer base? And so that’s something we ask ourselves every single day.

James Di Virgilio: 8:00

And your customer is really anyone who’s using the 3D printer. It’s not just a large industrial operation. If you’re at home printing things and you need to solve this problem or have this certain capability, your product solves that.

Daniel Barousse: 8:12

Yep absolutely. Yeah. So we have customers that have a $800 , small 3D printer in their garage. And then we also have customers that have a massive operation, a room and array of three D printers that are printing either prototype parts or even production parts for a specific application.

James Di Virgilio: 8:27

Okay. Now, so far, your story seems exceptionally smooth. Start a company, get a prototype, go to a trade show , sell out. Have there been any difficult moments in the journey of Slice?

Daniel Barousse: 8:37

I think everything looks smooth from the outside. Looking in always. It’s easy to look at an entrepreneur Ford and say, Oh, his journey was smooth. He started with the model A and everything was great. And boom model T and now it’s a 300 something billion dollar company, but the reality is takes a lot of time. It’s a lot of sleepless nights for the first half of Slices existence. I was working two jobs. So I was working on Slice nights and weekends. And during the day I had my nine to five normal engineering job. And that takes a toll. That’s hard. That’s not easy when everybody else is like, Hey, let’s go out and have a good time. And you’re like, I haven’t seen my friends in a month, but I’m going to keep working. There’s a lot of personal sacrifices there. My wife is extremely understanding and wonderful. I have a son now, so he’s too young to quite understand yet what’s going on. But someday there will be a story of like, Hey, I worked a lot of hours before you were born so that I could hopefully work fewer once he’s able to understand, and I can be home on time.

James Di Virgilio: 9:34

What’s the hardest part about being a co-founder? So your organization has several people in it. There’s benefits. I know in fact, we’re going to talk later about some teamwork, but what’s the hardest thing about being a co-founder.

Daniel Barousse: 9:44

There’s a lot of frontload Would work in the sense that you need to pick the right person to be a co-founder. If you’re not going to do something on your own, you need to find the right team. I have this bowling pin in my office that is for winning a bowling tournament. I’m a terrible bowler, but I picked the right people to be on my team because I knew if I pick these guys, I could win the tournament. And so we picked the right people and we won. So I’ve got that in my office to remind me every day that if I pick the right people, even if I’m not the best at something, if I was trying to be the best at everything, I’d probably be not good at anything. So picking the right people to be on your team is huge. And then maintaining the relationship. A partnership is like a marriage. You’ve got to have a conversation and you’ve got to talk. You’ve got to make sure you’re on the same page, spent time together that isn’t just, Hey, we need to get these 10 tasks done. But also remember that they’re a person, they have feelings. They have issues that they’re dealing with they’re in their own life. And I think being cognizant of that goes a really long way towards making things smooth,

James Di Virgilio: 10:39

Do you have any special guidelines as co- founders, like communication rules maybe where we say, Hey, look, if stuff is difficult, we’re always gonna make sure we talk about it first. Or we’re not going to let bitterness or resentment creep , and we’re going to have conversations. Do you have any sort of overarching mission or philosophy for how we would communicate as co-founders?

Daniel Barousse: 10:56

So you mentioned bitterness. That’s a huge one, right? So if you let resentment bitterness set, it causes a huge issue. So one of our ground rules is if we’re offended at something, we have to one not communicated via chat or text or something like that. But it has to be either a phone call or in face to face and be able to say, Hey, this ticked me off when you did this, let’s talk about it. Why did you do this? Maybe I’m being insensitive. Or maybe I just misunderstood what the other person said, that’s common, right? So, yeah, that’s our main ground rules . Like you’re not allowed to pull something over somebody’s head and just not talk about it. You have to talk about it. So spill the beans all the time. That’s that’s, that’s the main ground rule.

James Di Virgilio: 11:34

That’s very wise. Let’s talk about your childhood. So you grew up or born in New Orleans and then you went somewhere far, far away. Where was it that you went?

Daniel Barousse: 11:43

My family moved to Siberia, very far away.

James Di Virgilio: 11:46

Very, very far away . How did you wind up in Siberia? I’ve been to Russia and even amongst the Russians, you don’t really go to Siberia, but you in fact grew up there.

Daniel Barousse: 11:54

So my parents are missionaries, so they planted churches and started orphanages in drug rehab facilities in various places. They still do that. Now to this day, when I was a child, specifically, we were going to Siberia. There was a huge need after the iron curtain came down for services like that, there’s a massive, even to this day, a drug and alcoholism problem in Russia, and in Siberia, in particular. So they went where the need was most. And we spent about 10 years in a city called Irkutsk, which is near the deepest Lake in the world called Lake Baikal, which is an absolutely stunning, beautiful place. If you ever have the opportunity to go to the middle of nowhere in Siberia.

James Di Virgilio: 12:35

And what was it like as a child there. And did you have neighbors? Did you have a community of friends? What was it like growing up as an American deep in the heart of Russia?

Daniel Barousse: 12:42

Generally try to not tell people you’re an American. Uh , I had the benefit of having grown up there from an early age. I didn’t have an accent. So I was able to communicate as if I was another Russian. My parents did not have the same benefit. So they kind of stood out quite a bit elementary and middle school kids are more vicious maybe than adults. I think when an adult Russian met an adult American in the early nineties, it was like, Oh, this is such an amazing anomaly. This is cool. I want to have a conversation. Whereas a Russian kid was more like, you’re my enemy. So there were a lot of interesting adventures. I certainly made friends there. You still have Russian friends. I went to a Russian school for awhile and that was complicated. I don’t like bullies. Let’s just say that.

James Di Virgilio: 13:21

Are there any experiences from your time in Siberia that you feel have positively impacted who you are today ?

Daniel Barousse: 13:27

Absolutely. I think growing up in another place, one , you get an appreciation for what we have here in the States. If we think from the fact that you can go to the store and there’s always bread on the shelf to, the fact that there are things like traffic rules that people obey. And if you get in an accident, if you’ve seen any Russian dash cam videos on YouTube, that you sort of know what Russian roads are like, and it was worse in the nineties, there’s a lot of things to be very, very thankful for. And I think having an attitude of thankfulness, no matter what the circumstances are, is something very positive that came out of that. And just having a cultural experience outside of one’s own is pretty cool.

James Di Virgilio: 14:03

Yeah. I’m sure that totally changed how you saw the world around you coming from there. And then coming back to America, now putting your co-founder and CEO hat back on, what are some words of wisdom you could give to aspiring entrepreneurs or people that are early in the curve. Maybe this is during the first six months of their Slice story. What are some words of wisdom?

Daniel Barousse: 14:22

Again, going back to the team, find the right people to be on your team. It’s very seldom that somebody says, okay, this was a solo journey. Maybe there’s some situations of that, but generally it’s always a team effort, right? To get something off the ground, whether you’ve got the packaging guy, who’s shipping out orders, you can’t do the job without him. And you want to make sure that you’re packing your guy’s the right guy. So having the right people on your team is extremely critical. Especially going back to the co- founder discussion, if you have the right co-founders, it can mean the world. And if you have the wrong ones, your business is probably gonna fail. Having people that you can trust is a really big deal. And then I think the other part of it is just having the tenacity to keep going. Sometimes it feels like, okay, we didn’t hit our targets for revenue, or we didn’t hit our targets for sales, or like we’re having some big issue with Amazon or any sort of those issues can shut down a business if not addressed properly and quickly. If you don’t have the resilience to last through that, then you’re not going to make it. I had lunch with a local entrepreneur here recently. And he gave me a stat and he said, 80% of businesses fail in the first year. And then of those 20% that survive another three quarters of them fail within the first five years. What makes you think you’re going to survive? I’m an optimist maybe. And he said, well, you are not only an optimist. You have to be a gladiator. So if you think about coming into the business realm is like, all right, I’m walking into the arena. And no matter what the circumstances are, I’m going to walk out of here alive Russell Crowe style. You think that changes your perspective of how you can survive.

James Di Virgilio: 15:45

Alright one last question. I love the gladiator, by the way, one of my, one of my favorites. If you could go back to 2017, your current self could give one piece of advice to the Daniel in 2017, what would it be?

Daniel Barousse: 15:57

Hmm, that’s a great question. Only one, huh ? So many things. I think it would have to be gilaround marketing and having a more complete marketing strategy going into it rather than we sort of figured things out as we went along. And I’m not sure that there’s a great way to fully know your market when you’re first starting off. But if there is a way to have a more complete marketing strategy from the get go, I think that would have gone a really long way from getting the jumps in revenue that we have to maybe five or 10X that because of better marketing, getting the word out there.

James Di Virgilio: 16:32

Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today. It was very enlightening to learn, not only about 3D printing, but also Siberia and your story. Good words of wisdom for fellow entrepreneurs. Thanks for coming.

Daniel Barousse: 16:41

Thanks James. For having me.

James Di Virgilio: 16:42

He is Daniel Barousse, the CEO and co-founder of Slice Engineering. And I am James Di Virgilio and for Radio Cade signing off.

Outro: 16:49

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. This podcast episodes hose was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Harold Fethe is the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface, a software tool to make rating employees more accurate and faster than traditional methods. Employees get to pick five colleagues who then rank the rated employees according to how they perform compared to other colleagues. Harold, an anthropologist by training, is also an accomplished jazz guitarist.  “I use music analogies all the time,” he says. "Music is a phenomenon that has teamwork, underlying patterns with which you have to be competent, aesthetic decisions, and fairness.”  

Harold Fethe is the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface, a software tool to make rating employees more accurate and faster than traditional methods. Employees get to pick five colleagues who then rank the rated employees according to how they perform compared to other colleagues. Harold, an anthropologist by training, is also an accomplished jazz guitarist.  “I use music analogies all the time,” he says. “Music is a phenomenon that has teamwork, underlying patterns with which you have to be competent, aesthetic decisions, and fairness.”  

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:37

Measuring employee performance. It’s hard to do, or is it? I’m your host Richard Miles and today on Radio Cade , I’ll be talking to Harold Fethe who has great experience in S and P 500 companies, also a founding principle at MindSolve Technologies and the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface. Welcome to the show Harold.

Harold Fethe: 0:55

Thank you. Good to see you.

Richard Miles: 0:57

So Harold , for a long time, listeners who have listened to every single one of the episodes, some of them may say, Hey, I’ve heard this before. And so I should mention to our listeners that this in fact is a companion episode to my interview last August with Jeff Lyons , another founding member of MindSolve. And I’m sure your accounts won’t vary by one I owe it to Harold. You’re going to completely corroborate each other’s stories.

Harold Fethe: 1:21

Jeff and I can argue about whether it’s a nice day.

Richard Miles: 1:24

He said you could provide an alibi. He didn’t, you can say what that was in reference to.

Harold Fethe: 1:28

I love Jeff, we couldn’t be better buddies. And thank you for that tee up.

Richard Miles: 1:31

So I encourage our listeners to go back and listen to that episode. It was a fun conversation August of 2019, entitled “Better Employee Evaluations” with Jeff Lyons . And if you don’t like this episode, you’re just not a lot of fun . I can’t really help you as a listener, but anyway, Harold, let’s get right into it. And let’s start by talking about your invention of the Visual 360 Interface. If I were a brand new employee at your company or one of your former companies, and you were trying to explain it to me, what does it do? And how does it make your life and my life easier?

Harold Fethe: 2:00

Okay. So I’m going to speak to you that way. So I’m going to say, Richard, you just got here and you’re going to be working closely with people. And when it comes time to do the performance measurement, you’ll pick five or so people who work closely with you to evaluate your performance and you will be chosen by some people and you will evaluate their performance. And this is how we gather a consensus view because we’re a very teamwork, dependent teamwork oriented organization. If people aren’t collaborating faster than the competition, we’re in trouble. And so this is how we make our performance measurement harmonious with the culture and with the mission. And you get a chance to make input to people that you work with and they get a chance to make input about you.

Richard Miles: 2:45

Harold, let me clarify for a second . I think I got that, but if I’m a brand new employee, do I get to pick any five people or do you give me guidelines on who are those five people?

Harold Fethe: 2:54

You pick your five people and the safety valve. Cause that really was a good question is that your supervisor gets a look at your list and then they get a couple of edits. If they feel that the emphasizing something or emphasizing something too much. We didn’t see a lot of editing in the years in which we ran this system. And so it felt really fair and it served its purpose pretty well to have a check view by the supervisor, but a free choice by the employee themselves.

Richard Miles: 3:21

It’s a little bit like jury selection, a peremptory challenge, right? The prosecutor can threat that jury out. So let’s get a handle on the timeframe. This was developed in the?

Harold Fethe: 3:29

It was developed in the late 1990s and MindSolve, ran with that as our primary product offering through about 2006, when Sum Total acquired the company and took Jeff and Dan with them.

Richard Miles: 3:42

It’s a piece of software, right? So this is not a paper exercise?

Harold Fethe: 3:46

Every employee had a best top or laptop computer in the company. And you would just go in your email and you would get a link and you click on that link and you would open up to your rating session. And what you would see on the screen would be the characteristic on which you were evaluating your colleague. So I’ll take a real one, results. What were this person’s results in the last year? And the app would deal you four or five names, one at a time. And all you need to do was hang that name up on the left margin at the height of performance that you thought that person did. And then you get the next name and you put that person in comparison to the scale, but also in comparison to the other person’s performance. And that brings in a fairness element because most people don’t want to hurt another person. When they’re asked to evaluate, it’s an unnatural chore to ask people to do, but balancing that is they feel a need to be fair. And so when you see five of your colleagues all on screen at the same time, you really want to be fair to the ones who honestly are doing the best job you’ve got kind of like this wish to be lenient and help everybody. And then you’ve got this fairness thing saying, yeah, but I just really know that these people’s performance levels are not the same on this characteristic of results or on this characteristic of decision quality on this characteristic of problem solving. And that’s how it all comes along and gives people a sense of ownership.

Richard Miles: 5:11

And internal accountability, I imagine. Right? Cause like you said, you can’t just say, all my colleagues are great in every way. It forces you to make some trade offs.

Harold Fethe: 5:18

One particular group tried that. That’s called a rating circle. By the way, they figure it out. They say , we’ll all just give each other 25’s, which is the highest possible score. You know what you just did. You put everybody at the 50th percentile and it’s a dead ringer when we got those things back in HR, I just go, Hey listen, Mr. Area Director. I don’t think you’re really in the spirit of this. I see what you did, but we got no information and you’re still,

Richard Miles: 5:43

Hurting the people probably .

Harold Fethe: 5:44

Yeah, that’s right.

Richard Miles: 5:45

So by the way you describe it here , I’m guessing this works best for companies if at least a certain size, right? If, cause he only got like four employees and this wouldn’t really make sense. Right?

Harold Fethe: 5:55

Yes of course that’s right. It was driven the complexity of the company’s mission because we had a thousand employees or so, but we had five different technologies each with three or four candidate drug products in development. That’s a lot of complexity and the teamwork and collaboration goes logarithmic to that. And so we just needed help sorting out in this very complex network of endeavor and you had to go close to the person, that’s the best way to get the best information.

Richard Miles: 6:24

This is something I told Jeff on the podcast with him. I started my career with the army, not a small organization right? And they had officer evaluations. They ran into this difficulty because over time it was traditional written paper evaluation. What are their strengths? And what are their achievements, all that sort of stuff. Of course over time, there really was only one. Well mostly one type of evaluation. This person is the next George Patton and immediately promote them and they’re ready to storm the beaches. Occasionally it’s like this person’s next Benedict Arnold. They should be, you know , escorted out . But most of them were like, they’re fine. So the army figured out this is not doing anybody any favors. And they came up and I remember it very clearly after you filled out all this stuff at the very end, obviously somebody thought we’re going to put a rating pyramid on here. And it forced everyone to say, this is the top 5% of officers I’ve ever worked with and so on and so on, but even better when a step further. And this is obviously what is motivating your system is that you could keep track of the rating of a rating officer so that if he gave every single officer top 5%, They’d say like,

Harold Fethe: 7:26

You’re not fulfilling the assignment we gave you to distribute your scores .

Richard Miles: 7:30

I always thought that was a brilliant system. I’m glad that somebody turned this into an actual,

Harold Fethe: 7:34

Yeah. And that’s called forced ranking. Proportional ranking. And this did it, but with a visual interface, because when people are trying to describe comparisons, they talk with their hands all the time and up is always better. And so we said, let’s just put the names. This is what I thought would get rid of all the complexity of the predecessor. And when we started getting good statisticians, looking at it, we saw that we had plenty of data to provide reliability. And so it was just easier. And I’ll mention when we did the first test of this screen design, we hold people for comments. And most common thing I heard is it took me about a fifth of the amount of time because it’s so intuitive. People go slowly when they don’t trust the interface. And , and one of my favorite of all time career highlights was when someone said this thing is as easy and intuitive to use as a refrigerator.

Richard Miles: 8:24

That’s great feedback. One of the things we talked a lot about on the show is how do you get great ideas to market? And then as you know, and most inventors entrepreneurs know most good ideas do not sell themselves. Somebody has to be out there making the pitch to investors. And so on. Tell us the circumstances of how did you take the Vision 360 Interface idea and translate that into a company were you working at a larger company? Were you on your own. I mean, you had a lot of different experiences.

Harold Fethe: 8:53

I was at an S and P 500 with a thousand employees, very highly profitable. And we had a CEO change and the performance appraisal method that was ranking, the old CEO kinda got grumpy about it. And I thought, okay, part of the complaint was it’s so tedious and takes a lot of time. So I thought if we’re going to keep this method, which is very rigorous about figuring out who’s doing a better job, we’re going to have to make it a lot easier for people to work with. So I designed the interface and I had a little chili cook off between our own internal IT department and Jeff and Dan and Charles who flew out to California to bid on the job. And our internal IT department was just finding every reason in the world why this programming task was not traditional. They didn’t like it. They were too busy. HR didn’t have high priority. And Jeff and Dan and Charles were just all over. It’s like, yes, we can do everything you’re asking us for. And we’ll show you how to get a whole lot more internal controls and things like that into it. And they had just reprogrammed a lot of their stuff for bank quality programming. And Dan had the intellectual courage to say, we need to do everything that we have up to the quality of a bank ATM that we just learned how to do. And so they rewrote all their code. I’m going , that’s all the integrity you could ever ask for. And so that’s how it got written in the first place, just for AUSA , which was this little thousand person company. We ran it for a couple of years. Jeff and Dan graduated, Jeff Lyons and Dan Buccabell, I’m sorry. Yeah, they were Charles Stedham was the founder and Jeff and Dan were his interns who were graduating. And he had said, if you guys want to go off into the job market, I’m not going to try to hold you back. But if you want to start a company together, I’ll get with you and we’ll figure out how to keep working together and do a venture. So all this was in the timing that they had this contract programming job from me. And they started looking at various, according to Dan anyway, who made the pitch to me, they started looking at various options to go into a software business. And they thought that this app that they had designed for AUSA and its crew of persnickety, highly scientifically literate, numerous demanding employees was a good entry into the marketplace of performance measurement. So they asked if we would do a licensing deal and God bless our entrepreneurial CEO. I went to my Friday executive meeting and said, here’s what we want to do. I would like one day a month, which is 5% of my time to do this, in addition to running the human resources function for the company. And he said, go for it. And I said, okay, I’ll come back in three or four months and let you know how it’s going. And he said, no, just go do it. You could not ask for more than that out of your CEO. And so we did

Richard Miles: 11:39

Harold, did you have a software background at this point? Is that,

Harold Fethe: 11:41

No, no I’m an anthropology by training.

Richard Miles: 11:45

Okay. I was going to say, so what made you think, or what gave you the courage, I guess, to decide that this was the thing to do? You’re basically,

Harold Fethe: 11:54

I’m very intellectually arrogant . I really spent a lot of time hanging out with cognitive stuff. How do you intake information? What do you do with it and how do people confuse themselves? Okay. And studying other cultures and how their worldview affects performance on westernized tests and all of the disconnects in that variety of,

Richard Miles: 12:17

So you’re really more of an expert in performance evaluation, testing, human psychology. That was yours , right ?

Harold Fethe: 12:22

Yes. That was it.

Richard Miles: 12:23

So you weren’t a tech guy?

Harold Fethe: 12:25

I wrote one simple little program when I was a lab tech. That’s it.

Richard Miles: 12:28

And so tell me then about the life of MindSolve was the name of the company that you jointly formed. What happened to MindSolve? What was the duration of that?

Harold Fethe: 12:36

Well, we wrote up a licensing agreement and I spent one day a month with the MindSolve guys and they went out and started marketing this to other companies. And the first companies tended to be in Silicon Valley. We had Netflix as a client. We had Protein Design Labs, which is the source of a lot of Genentech’s products. They were a client. We had the Foxwood Casinos and things like that. We had some marquee clients in the early going and Dan figured out that we were in like 180 of the countries of the world with Raiders giving feedback to people elsewhere in the world about their performance, even though they weren’t co-located, they worked together. So that company just grew organically. When we got a few seed crystals from referrals, just as the thing that was originally designed to be for an executive bonus program. And the executive said, this is a good system. I want it for my department. And we didn’t even really have to sell it in the beginning in the company because they’d seen it. And they were much happier with their bonus allocation methods and they wanted it for their own departments. And all we had to do is a little cleanup at the end because it actually kind of sold itself from seeing a cycle of it versus that executive bonus meeting. People would spend all day and they’d come back and they’d be ready to quit. The company. These vice presidents had been so acrimonious. We just fixed it the first time they did it with the comparison based rating. They were back by 10:30 in the morning. And nobody was mad,

Richard Miles: 14:02

So MindSolve started with, it sounds like about four or five employees, how large did it get?

Harold Fethe: 14:06

It, got to maybe 50 employees when Sum Total acquired us.

Richard Miles: 14:10

And did you find being the top dog or one of the top dogs, right? Was that a different experience than being the HR guy? Did you see things differently in terms of managing, evaluating, employees ?

Harold Fethe: 14:21

I didn’t come up an HR track. They asked me to start and found an HR department, but I never thought of myself that way. In the first place I kept telling my CEO, I’m a general manager and I’m happy to hold this HR position and help be the guardian of the culture. That’s what they told me my job was. But if you got more stuff, I’m up for it. So I never really experienced it as a change because I was used to making management and I was used to coaching all the managers on their management decisions. And so, no, it really wasn’t a qualitative shift or quantitative either actually.

Richard Miles: 14:52

So Harold, like a lot of creative people, you actually have at least one second life. And that is as a jazz guitarist. That’s the one I know about, you know , very accomplished jazz guitarist with at least one album to your name that I know of it, you probably have more. You’ve also played with a lot of great musicians over the last few years here in Florida and elsewhere. And I’m guessing that running a tech company is exactly like playing guitar in a dimly lit bar, right? I mean, there’s basically not a real difference or are there similarities? What are the differences ?

Harold Fethe: 15:22

That’s a good question. I love that question. I used music analogies in my management development with people reporting to me and elsewhere in the company all the time, because music is a phenomenon that has teamwork. It has underlying patterns with which you have to be competent. It has individual skills with which you have to be competent to stay in that particular level with your band. It has vague problems. Like what is a good solo that’s musical that moves along that keeps you in sync with the band. It has aesthetic decisions and it’s got fairness involved in the teamwork. So really truly it’s another one of those things where it sounds different, but the process I would go through to get to a good answer felt pretty comparable to me.

Richard Miles: 16:10

I listened to a podcast a while back the subject of the podcast was essentially how computers are not necessarily computers, but the fact that you can have perfect time on recordings. Some musicians really didn’t like, because they said, and I don’t know if I fully understood the concept. They said, actually, there’s something one of them called lived time. And what the musician meant by that is there’s no such thing as perfect time what the band is playing, that’s the time. But what I took from that, I thought it was a great paradigm because in real life, right, you are constantly adjusting to somebody else’s speed. And in a very literal sense, as a musician, you’re listening, they’re listening to you. And the speed of the piece ends up being what everyone else adjusted to. It’s not a perfect time, right?

Harold Fethe: 16:51

That is a great observation. I’ll recommend to you. A man named Rick Beato has stuff on YouTube for free. He’s a fine musician. He took a track from a Justin Bieber album. That was an automated computerized drum track that he sinked up with one of the most soulful drummers Bernard Purdie Purdie. And he allows you to hear just the drum track from the Bieber album, with the same rhythmic pattern. And then you hear Bernard and you listen to Bieber and yes, there is no mistake cause then computer. And then it clicks over to Purdie and he starts squirming around in your seat and Patting and your foot. And all of a sudden the music got you and carried you somewhere. And that’s,

Richard Miles: 17:32

Right. Cause it’s more an expression of the soul, you know , it’s not , not a computer . Yeah . Tell me a little bit about the music world. You’re probably a little bit like me and a lot of people don’t know what the hell you do, right? Because you do a lot of different things. And so you can have it lots of different worlds. So people aren’t quite sure is this guy, an inventor, is he a musician? Is he an entrepreneur as well ? So you go to a different place as a musician?

Harold Fethe: 17:56

Well, I had to write a third person autobiography where you interview yourself. When I started with fretboard journal, a guitar magazine, and I thought, okay, this is my chance to say something ornery about this whole subject. And so I put in my own behalf, he believes that lack of focus is the key to a happy life. So with that thought, I write songs now I never did until 2011. And then I got one plate on car talk because I grew up in a used car lot with my dad. And I wrote music for a Lord, Byron poem, a 12 line poem from 1819. And it put me in a mood that went with the sort of harmony that Duke Ellington and Harry Warren and those great melancholy Balladeers of the mid 20th century were able to do. And I thought I can build a landing strip in 2019 for this 1819 poem. I bet you, it was sounded like it all should go together. That was an interesting project. It took me three months and about four passes to get it all to work well, once I realized that Lord Byron was the boss and the melody had to serve Lord Byron’s lyric and the harmony had to serve the melody. I was trying all things in parallel in the beginning. And once I got it straight, I’m happy with it. And I’m often not happy with stuff I do, but that was fun. I play gigs in the downtown San Jose jazz scene. I do experimental stuff with a music major, a woman singer and guitarist. And we do all kinds of repertoire that we almost hardly ever disagree. So the great thing about music is there are so many things you can hang out with and they all kind of cross fertilize one another. And as long as you’re practicing and able to execute on your instrument, it all informs the process of being a musician.

Richard Miles: 19:35

So Harold inventors and entrepreneurs and creative people often tend to have very interesting backgrounds, very interesting childhoods. And I can’t let escape the fact that you said you grew up on a car lot with your dad. So I sense there’s a story behind that. So why don’t you elaborate on that? What was life like for you as a kid? Where were you raised? What were your parents like?

Harold Fethe: 19:54

I was raised in Jacksonville, Florida. My father went through a process of being a rebellious kid who got drafted into World War II, who went through a screening test and went straight to officer’s school cause he had high native intellect and he came home and was a very devoted, creative, inventive, father. And he had a handful with me because if they had ADD tests, I would have cleared the bar by three feet. I just was highly distractible , but he kept me focused to deal with the school system. And I did score high on standardized tests and I was the youngest kid ever to win the spelling bee in the fourth grade, I beat fourth graders, fifth graders, sixth graders, seventh graders. And I never lost again. And I aged out of the system. So Harold is a nerdy name, but I thought, well, maybe I can tote the load as this. And so I just kind of identified with being a nerd and my dad got a kick out of it. And I loved hanging around, down on the used car lot because it was real life. It was people making decisions and the salesman or trying to get the person to make an impulsive decision and a person doesn’t know what to do. And there’s all kinds of humor about the contest. And I also wanted to write a song from the car salesman’s point of view. Cause everybody has all kind of jabs and elbows for the used car sales when they’ve dealt with who were nasty people and some of them are, but some of them are just good natured guys who can get you off the fence on the day. They’d rather you get off the fence instead of giving you another three weeks to buy it from somebody else. I mean, really, I can’t even begin to say where it begins and ends my father’s interest and patience in getting this kid, keep me off the guardrail , show me the fun of work and keep me working on something.

Richard Miles: 21:32

Great story, Harold. And you are really a creative person. I’ve seen a lot of creative folks on this show, but you’re sort of on the 10 of 10 scale, we didn’t even get a chance to talk about the movies that are the documentaries have been involved with. And I think that can easily be a whole nother show about some very good musicians in Florida and elsewhere, but thanks very much for coming on Radio Cade .

Harold Fethe: 21:52

Thanks for the invitation. I love the Cade operation and I’m happy to help anytime I can.

Richard Miles: 21:56

Thank you. For Radio Cade, Richard Miles signing off.

Outro: 22:00

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood, Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy columns and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Is food just food, or is there a power behind the experience of eating that can bring people together? Hirofumi Leung, the Founder of Dragonfly Restaurant Group, creates restaurants that push Japenese cuisine beyond sushi, creating authentic connections and shared moments. Hiro shares his secrets for how he created one of Florida's best restaurants. 

Is food just food, or is there a power behind the experience of eating that can bring people together? Hirofumi Leung, the Founder of Dragonfly Restaurant Group, creates restaurants that push Japenese cuisine beyond sushi, creating authentic connections and shared moments. Hiro shares his secrets for how he created one of Florida’s best restaurants. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Food. Does it talk back to you? Is it an experience or is it just something that we eat? For Radio Cade I’m James Di Virgilio. My guest today is Hirofumi Leung. He is the founder of the Dragonfly Restaurant Group locations, Gainesville, Orlando, Miami. Hiro, welcome to the show.

Hirofumi Leung: 0:56

Hey, thank you, James. Uh , yeah, I actually love what you just said. Food talking back to you.

James Di Virgilio: 1:00

I stole it from you, which is a good opener because as we were discussing before the show, food, as you envision, it has a lot more to do with just something on your plate that you are eating. Some people view food as just performance material. It’s bland. I don’t need it. I just want it to fuel my body. You on the other hand, see it very differently.

Hirofumi Leung: 1:19

Absolutely. I’m growing up in Asia. My parents were always in my family were always about food. I come from a culture where family meal really meant putting food in the center of the table. And we deliberately, instead of eating individual meals in front of you, we would put food in the middle of the table. And in order for you to get your food, you had to reach over and ask people and create these interactions and meaningful conversations. And so from an early age on food really met a connection with people rather than the food that you’re eating, but it helped the food tastes good.

James Di Virgilio: 1:50

So you grew up in a culture around food, and then you’re in Gainesville, Florida. And now you started a restaurant that primarily focused on Asian cuisine, raw foods, raw materials at the time. Was there such an offering in Gainesville?

Hirofumi Leung: 2:05

No, not really. There was just the average restaurant. When I first started, I was going to school at University of Florida and , uh , like many people who didn’t have a lot of money to go to. You had to go work part time. So I was working at a part time restaurant and it was very transactional. You serve tables and you bring food out and you say goodbye. And that was it. I actually had a business plan exercise from my class and I put together a whole experiential component of that business presented to the business owner. And at the time she just ran her restaurant for 10 years as a mom and pop. She just told me, Hey, you’re I really appreciate you doing this, but I’m actually not trying to add on extra work. And so I put it back on the shelf and collected dust for a couple more years until I had the energy or a life changing moment when I was unemployed and said, Hey, look, I either go do something or continue on this path of just chilling out and just hanging out on my brother’s couch. So we actually that business plan and took it to where we’re at today.

James Di Virgilio: 3:01

And a large part of that plan of course, was experience. I remember going to Dragonfly very early on, and it was one of the first restaurants in Gainesville, which now has a very different restaurant scene, I think in large part, thanks to your efforts where it did feel like from start to finish this was a food experience and it also happened to be obviously incredibly delicious. Did a lot of that inspiration come from what you mentioned here at the top of the show came from your childhood experiences with food, how you saw it and viewed it? Was there something innate within you that gave you this desire? Where did this come from?

Hirofumi Leung: 3:33

For me to sit here and say that everything was designed and strategically planned out, I would probably be lying to you. I think a lot of the things I’ve done my past 21 years of running this business has been lots of trial and failures. And I believe a lot of innovators or people that are creative, come up with a billion, different ideas and experimentation before they land on one. For me, it was just a path of like taking on this journey of just going through many iterations and then seeing which one sticks as of today, I’ve had my failures, I’ve closed down restaurants, but truthfully, those are the ones who I actually sit down and learn the most from. But what it is, is like in the course of 20 plus years, I’ve come to understand because of the trends and the needs of the market is changing. That experiential component is so important. So I’m trying to embed that even more through what we’ve done in the past. And here’s a great way to look at it. At a restaurant I tell my servers and my staff, my chefs, and my managers, especially that good service is bad for business. And what I mean by that is if you provide just average service, you get greeted at the hostess station. Your menus are clean. You get greeted within a reasonable amount of time, like say 60 seconds for us as our minimum greet time standards, then they take the order. Then the food’s delivered and then the food tastes pretty good. Then your checks drop, then you say goodbye. All those just kind of get your foot in the door to play the game. But if you continually just do that, you’re not memorable. And in order to have somebody remember the experience, all those touch points, you have to figure out a way to go above and beyond just a transaction. And I coach my team all the time that, Hey , it’s not always possible, but whenever you have an opportunity to really connect with somebody on an emotional level, that’s how you create loyalty. That’s how you get people to come back. And the best way I’ve always mentioned this to get there is whenever somebody screws up, whenever we make a mistake, that’s actually the most opportune time to connect with somebody. It’s almost like an invitation for you to connect with somebody fairly easily, or if somebody has like a life changing moment, if you’re part of that, that’s an also another way to emotionally connect with them on an experiential basis. So at the end of the day, food, doesn’t talk to you as an opening, but food has the ability to talk to you. If you can figure out a way to make it come alive emotionally,

James Di Virgilio: 5:54

And you talk about the connection point of food, I’m thinking of a story as your telling me your story. I went to Japan, I was behind Shibboleth, which is the main area in Tokyo. And we’re walking down the street and our goal was to just walk into a restaurant and eat there, hopefully where there were no Americans and no English speaking and we found such a street, which was not hard to do. We walked in, no one spoke any English. And there was a lot of gesturing and pointing. And we sat down at the bar and it was an amazingly cool, like so many things are in Japan, little restaurant, I think it’s couture and handmade. And through a series of pointing and hand gesturing, they figured out that we were asking them to make us whatever they wanted and we would eat it. And what ensued was like a two hour, 10 course meal of some of the most insane foods I’ve ever seen and eaten. And there was this connection. We took a picture at the end . There was no words that were able to be spoken between anyone there. But there was this immense memory, from that from that meal. And that is like, you’re saying the food itself, wasn’t talking to me, but it’s such a poignant memory. And the food was delicious. That helped, but it was really a lot more of the cultural experience of both parties, having an exchange, understanding each other and using food as the medium to provide for that. And it’s an art obviously much like yours is. And I think anyone who’s traveled to Asia sees the art that is infused in so many things. So for you creating an experience, I often think of that experience in Shibboleth. And I think, man, that’s, that’s such a difficult thing to do from the look of the restaurant, to the feel of how everyone treated you to the way that napkins are folded, every little detail has to be right. How did you learn how to create these experiences? Where did that come from?

Hirofumi Leung: 7:23

That’s a tough question. You know, as I mentioned earlier, I wish it was just, you know , I had a strategic plan and saying, Hey, this is what you do, but I think experiences teaches you so much more. And as I learn and go back to school, I realized, okay, some of the things I have been doing is strategically accidentally plan . It was culturally growing up in Japan and Hong Kong, my father and my mother, Asian parents, typically, they’re not really into verbal affection or they’re not the ones say, I love you all the time. But they were like into actions and every single little details and everything that they would do for us just meant so much more. It’s like, for example, my dad would always take us shopping for dinner and he would let us pick our own ingredients. And then he would create something in the kitchen based off of what we created. So my brother and I would just go crazy and ham on like, all right , let’s give the weirdest things to see what dad would come up with, but those are his love language and just brings back memories. And I felt like if I connected that well with my dad, that way I can figure out a way to connect with my guests, if I can create that. But more importantly, it’s the culture of hospitality. And I’ve always told this to my staff in the U.S. that to serve somebody is an honor. And I think it’s very hard to grasp because in America, if you’re a server you’re kind of seen as a servant. And it’s almost like in order of royalty, you’re at the bottom of the totem pole. But in my country, if someone is given an opportunity to serve somebody, it’s really an honor and we take true joy and pride, and it’s the authenticity that was ingrained in me. And luckily I just fell into the hospitality industry and I just do what I do. And it’ll just work out

James Di Virgilio: 9:04

Such a different way to view it. As you mentioned, as an American, you are so right, serving someone feels like you failed in your path at life, which is certainly not true. I think we all serve somebody, especially if you view your purpose and job correctly. But that is interesting because there’s a purpose behind serving someone. If you view it as a dignified, honorable pursuit, and so many restaurants fail, and yet you have had this one that’s been here now for 21 years, right? And it’s a high end concept. It was something that didn’t really have a comparable restaurant here in town. So that’s even riskier. Why do so many restaurants fail in your opinion and what has allowed Dragonfly in Gainesville to succeed for so long?

Hirofumi Leung: 9:46

That’s a great question. Actually, if I tell it on the radio, I know then I might go out of business, right? Cause everybody will be doing it. But truth be told, I would actually like to see more of this in Gainesville, but as much as we’re talking about the interaction with our guests, truly it all starts with the interaction with the owners and the employees. I think we have to demonstrate as owners how that hospitality service or that serving is an honor mentality should be portrayed. For example, we have a pyramid at our restaurant where we always say, Hey, at the top of the totem pole is each other. We take great care of each other, no matter what, first and foremost, and number two is our guests. And then number three is our suppliers. And at the bottom of this pyramid are the owners. And we’ve lived by this mantra for over 20 years. We believe that if the owners show the employees, what service looks like and what taking care of each other looks like, then they’ll obviously take care of the guests. And if the guests are taken care of at that level on my suppliers, which are very important, the people that provide us with the food. Cause I mean, they’re incredibly important when I serve raw fish, you know, it better be the freshest and the best quality out there. So if I take really good care of my suppliers, by giving them Christmas cards or writing holiday cards about their kids or going out to golf with those guys, it just connects in a way where, when they’re selecting our food, we’re going to get the best too . So shareholders they’ll benefit after all this. At the end of the day, they shouldn’t be walking in there and acting like they own the place. Literally they do, but really you have to be at the bottom. You’re the last person. Cause you’re going to collect if all of the above succeeds. So,

James Di Virgilio: 11:20

Servant, servant based leadership, how do you create a menu? Dragonfly has such a diverse menu. You start off here 20 plus years ago and you haven’t started a restaurant yet you have a business plan and an idea. How do you go about starting a menu from scratch.

Hirofumi Leung: 11:34

One word feedback.

James Di Virgilio: 11:36

So you start making things and you get people to test them?

Hirofumi Leung: 11:40

Yeah twenty years ago, I think I had over 50 items on my menu. There was only one item that survived in Gainesville. It’s about feedback. I guess , feedback people. Tell me what they like, what they don’t like the employee feedback recently, we’ve instituted, what’s called seasonal omekase where all my employees, because we ran out of ideas and my chef and I are saying, Matt, Ray, you need to come up with better things. And he’s like, I’m trying, I’m trying. So what we decided to do is wait a minute, we’ve got over 200 plus employees. Why don’t we give them an opportunity to come up with their own interpretation of what our food could look like? And so every season we have an audition and my executive chef I and the general managers sit down and we actually critique and give them the feedback. And the best ones usually makes it on the menu seasonally. And those are usually like the best sold. And it’s amazing how, not only does it create more ideas, but our employees are so much more engaged. I mean, we continually push the envelope if we do this for the bar too. And our bartenders have won national bar competitions throughout this exercise. And so it’s really, really cool. And not only that, but back to the engagement component, just a real quick story. I have a server. This person was a busser. Four years ago, five years ago, he really wanted to work for us. So he started working hard. Then he became a server. Then he became a head server making pretty good money because as a server in this town, you make good tips, but he had a bigger agenda. So he took a huge pay cut to work at the bottom of the kitchen cause he really wanted to cook. So back to that creativity, he actually submitted a dish and it actually made it to our seasonal menu. And it’s actually one of our top sellers. And so it’s really this path of expanding the employees talent and culturally, just in growing our people and giving back the servant leadership type of thing. The culture that’s going on has really blossomed to where it’s at today. So there isn’t like one specific secret sauce.

James Di Virgilio: 13:32

There’s not, but you overcame I think a feedback and it’s easy if you’re designing a prototype for something and you can get tons of feedback in the market, it’s kind of impersonal. But when I think of food feedback, it almost feels like, Ooh , don’t tell the truth. When someone asks you how something is, they don’t really want to know.

Hirofumi Leung: 13:48

Oh you’re so right.

James Di Virgilio: 13:48

How do you overcome that? How do you teach your staff to overcome that? How did you yourself overcome that? When you’re making these meals, you’re putting your heart and soul into, and you’re really saying, I need you to give me legitimate feedback. How do you separate the gut shot of someone saying this isn’t that good Hiro. How are you able to get to that point where you can handle the feedback and then be able to take it and use it.

Hirofumi Leung: 14:07

James, when I first came to America, I thought people loved feedback. And so , okay. You know, why was I in for a huge shock. I’m like, man , I got to keep my mouth shut. People actually don’t take feedback too well in this country. So that’s all I got growing up. You need to work hard. You need to do this better. You need to do that. And I actually took that as a good side of that. And I think in this country, or even in this school, we tend to soften the blow too much. And we don’t hear that because here’s what it comes down to. And I’ve realized. And you know , throughout the years I’ve sharpened my tools on how to give feedback. And I realized that it’s actually an art in Asia I wish they can learn a little bit more about this because all my gosh, they’re too blunt. Here, I think we need to be a little less political. But once again, it’s a fine line. And I tell my employees and my team that does a difference feedback. You can take it personal or you can take your professional and they have to see it as a professional line. But in order for you to get there, the feedback giver has to build trust. And that trust is extremely hard to build and it takes time and it takes vulnerability. It takes closeness, it takes friendships. It takes being on the same page and aligned on your goals. So one of the busiest thing that I’m working on is trying to teach my team that feedback. Isn’t a bad thing. When people are doing amazing things, I actually try to give them just as much feedback as the bad things. So they can learn to take that. You know what, wait a minute feedback. Isn’t a bad thing. And imagine for your learning to play golf and you pay a lot of money for your coach and he’s giving you feedback and all you’re doing sitting there telling him why that’s not right. You’re not going to become a great player and that’s with all the athletes. So, number one, if you can start to see feedback as a good, important component, I think is extremely helpful. Number two, you have to learn to become a feedback addict. Don’t give me more feedback. Tell me what James, how was this podcast ended? I stutter too much. I think those are just extremely important to really becoming a part of who you become. And if you become a feedback addict, it’s extremely helpful. And thirdly, I tell my team and I tell myself this, that we’re terrible at taking feedback and someone’s giving you feedback. What’s the thing that we do most when we’re listening, we don’t listen. And we were just thinking in our head why it’s not true. Versus honestly, opening your hearts and listening and then saying, thank you for the feedback. That’s it. Thank you for the feedback. And so those are the three things that I try to teach my team when we talked about feedback and it’s a journey, but a thing that I’m working on the most and for the guests, for the customers, like you said 9 times out of 10 people, don’t like confrontation. You know, I’m not perfect. I serve over 6,000 to 8,000 guests a week. If I’m 99% perfect, which I’m not 1% failure. Let’s just say 10% failure out of 6,000 is 600 guests that are unhappy a week. So I can randomly go through any guests. I bet you, I can find something that they’re not happy about. And that’s once again, feedback. And what I do is when I go to the table, I don’t ask was everything good or was everything great. What I do is I stopped by and I do my best to ask. Is there anything I can do better today that usually opens the line.

James Di Virgilio: 17:06

You talk a lot about the servant model of leadership. To me, that’s actually a very biblical concept for those people that believe in that it’s upside down kingdom, this start by modeling servanthood. And you’ve described that flow very nicely. And then even asking for that kind of feedback, it’s disarming, you would expect, Oh look, there’s Hiro he owns the restaurant, he’s coming over here to say hello. And then to have you ask that question, I’m sure disarms a lot of people in they’re thinking, Oh , wait a minute. Well actually there was this thing. And then how you take that, of course is actually building a bond. If you receive the feedback, well, people will say, wow, this person really does care about getting something better. And that is an unusual trade because as you mentioned, it’s very hard to discipline ourselves to get to that point. And your upbringing coupled with your experiences coming here and being more blunt, I think has led you to navigate that very well. Now, when you start Dragonfly early on, were there any moments that were really difficult that you thought maybe this won’t work or times were tough or was it just start and smooth sailing to where you are today?

Hirofumi Leung: 17:58

You know what? Every moment for the past 20 years, it’s a constant increase of comfort and discomfort, comfort, and discomfort. And I’ve learned to realize that it’s part of the game. It’s part of what we do as entrepreneurs. And as a matter of fact, I’ve come to the point where if it’s too comfortable, I feel uncomfortable. And I actually go out and try to create chaos. My employees probably know that about me. And so I think I’d take this from my personal coach, workout coach, you always put me through it a little bit more of intensity and a little bit more of uncomfortness. And every week he did that, I start seeing results from when I started to like a year later. And I realized that there’s that perfect zone of uncomfort zone that you have to be in, so back to your question every day and every week, every month has been and is still a challenge. And if it’s not, I look for things to figure out what I can work on that’s uncomfortable.

James Di Virgilio: 18:51

Now you had mentioned you’ve had some failures and there have been some restaurants that didn’t make it. And you’ve learned from those mistakes when you were going through it in the middle of it, and you recognize that this is not going to work. How do you prevent that from really affecting your confidence level with the next venture that you take on?

Hirofumi Leung: 19:11

You’re absolutely right about the confidence level. I do my best when I’m going through a business failure or a business decision, I tell myself that it’s not personal and I do the best I can to elevate myself and try to zoom out and see the whole picture versus like being zoomed in and feeling the pain. And I think distancing yourself is probably an exercise that Google has taught me or Google map. You got to zoom out a little bit once in a while to figure out that you’re going in the right direction. But then you got to zoom in to make sure you’re not making the wrong turns, but truth be told it’s extremely hard. You know , I had a business for eight years and from year five to year eight, I was fighting it persistently trying to make it work. And I realized I got emotionally involved and I was too zoomed in and I started making one bad decision after another, after another lots of money, lots of time, lots of energy, lots of hair. So I’ll give this credit to my wife. She was seeing all this from the outside. She’s a very logical type A person. And she’s like, you snap out of this. She was my muse to get me out of the thinking and saying, I need to do something different. And so having a friend to help you distance yourself, looking from the outside, taking feedback, having enough humility to not be emotionally invested, those are some of the experiences that I’ve gained to really try to teach myself. I’m just constantly still making mistakes. And it’s not about making a mistake. A mentor of mine told me once Hiro, some people make mistakes, but some people learn. And so I like to be on that side of the coin.

James Di Virgilio: 20:38

And there’s so much process to your story, which makes sense. That’s a very artistic way to look at something as process improvement through process, the end result will take care itself, if I get the process, right? I’m hearing a lot of that in your story, a lot about people, you did something that we haven’t talked a lot about yet that I think we’ll kind of narrow out towards the end here on. You brought a raw fish concept to the center of the state of Florida. And we haven’t given that any real due praise and your restaurant has won many, many awards throughout time as being one of the best restaurants in the state of Florida, for what it does in the center of Florida. How in the world did you accomplish bringing something that is known with being so fresh and so immediate to the center of a state? How did you pull that off?

Hirofumi Leung: 21:20

Well, the credit really is to my employees. We think it’s about the fish, but as we can probably hear from this conversation today, it’s nothing about the fish. The fish is just a product and it’s just the inanimate product. And as we mentioned in the opening statement, how do you make fish talk to you? How do you make a raw fish that’s dead talk to you. I believe it’s through all the experiences that we’ve gained. And we’ve, you know, all the things that we just talked about today and for the entrepreneurs that just think that it’s about their product, that they’ve worked so hard on. They have a reality check coming to them because it’s absolutely not about that. Literally we made phone calls 20 years ago and no one wants to deliver any fresh fish to Gainesville and my partners and I said, let’s prove that Gainesville is worthy of being on the map. And so once we opened up here, we’re waiting these big towns deliberately to test out and see if we can survive in larger cities with our culture, our systems and our people.

James Di Virgilio: 22:11

And what’s neat about that is I’m pretty sure the plethora of fresh fish and sushi restaurants that exist in Gainesville is totally do in part of you being the first one to make that happen. There’s so many neat things about your story. Obviously the humility that comes through the people, the process, I think I know the answer to this question. I’m going to ask you anyway, when you’re advising young entrepreneurs, whether they’re restaurant entrepreneurs or others, it sounds like your message is pretty consistent. If I’m trying to develop a prototype or something for health, or I’m starting a sushi restaurant, people are at the core of this endeavor. And it sounds like that’s something that’s central to your story of entrepreneurship is you can get the products , right? You can have all these things, right. But if you’re not mastering the people side, both your customer and your employees and your co founders , it’s not going to work,

Hirofumi Leung: 22:56

James, thanks for circling it back to that. Absolutely. In my restaurant, I tell my team that my success hundred percent depends on your success. And when I talk to my employees, I truly mean that if they’re not successful, I can’t do what I’m doing. It’s basics. They’re the ones that drive our businesses, our employees and our team are the ones that dictate if we roll in the same direction or not. And so I get up every morning and that’s what I think of not raw fish.

James Di Virgilio: 23:22

Hiro, thank you so much for being on Radio Cade today. Your stories have been inspirational. They’ve been upside down in terms of thinking and like so many other very successful entrepreneurs and visionaries we’ve had on this program. Almost all of them have learned through feedback and yours, I think might be the most poignant because food is the most sensitive. And so to hear your story of feedback, that’s something I can echo as a fellow entrepreneur. That is something to pay good good attention to, thank you for the time. Thank you for the words of wisdom.

Hirofumi Leung: 23:49

Oh, absolutely. Thank you for inviting me.

James Di Virgilio: 23:51

And for Radio Cade I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 23:55

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. This podcast episodes host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Cannabis and hemp. For years those substances operated in the shadows, and today they are at the center of a growing multibillion-dollar industry. How do you know what’s in them, and if they do the things they are supposed to do? Richard Miles interviews Adam Christensen, CEO of Botanica Testing, a company that tests cannabidiol and hemp.        

Cannabis and hemp. For years those substances operated in the shadows, and today they are at the center of a growing multibillion-dollar industry. How do you know what’s in them, and if they do the things they are supposed to do? Richard Miles interviews Adam Christensen, CEO of Botanica Testing, a company that tests cannabidiol and hemp. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade and podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:31

Cannabis and hemp. For years, those substances operated in the shadows today. They’re at the center of a rapidly growing multibillion-dollar industry. How do we know what’s in them? And if they do the things they’re claimed to do, I’m your host, Richard Miles. And today on Radio Cade, I have Adam Christensen, CEO of Botanica Testing a company that tests CBD and hemp. Welcome to Radio Cade, Adam.

Adam Christensen: 0:59

Thanks. I’m happy to be here.

Richard Miles: 1:01

Adam, I’d like to start with basic definitions and explanations of how things actually work. I don’t want to assume that all of our listeners sort of know everything there is to know about CBD and hemp. So why don’t we talk about what is the difference between cannabis and hemp? A lot of people think they know, but they don’t. So they use it interchangeably for marijuana. Why don’t you give us a little basic chemistry lesson and tell us what are the main differences?

Adam Christensen: 1:23

So when it comes to plants, we have these things called chemo types, which is basically what are the main compounds in our plants. And so you have plants like lavender oil or peppermint or Rosemary. And now there are about five different kinds of Rosemary plant variations out there that are commercially sold. When it comes to cannabis, there’s about seven or eight different main chemo types that we’re talking about. But one that most people know and is becoming very popular is the difference between hemp and marijuana. And so when we talk about chemo types or the main compound in these plants, we’re talking about two different compounds. One would be THC, and the other would be CBD now for the plants that you would associate with college or your downtime, those would be the high THC varieties, which are psychoactive. And so that would be the association that you get with being high. Now, in most of these plants, they started off as an acid form. And when the heat or time are introduced, that’s when they convert over and they lose the acid part of the compounds. And so they go from THCA to THC, which is why, when you are smoking marijuana, you need to light it. So you introduce heat and then you get the psychoactive effects. Now in the products that we test, we are testing the chemo type of CBD, which is a non-psychoactive compound, which has been found to be helpful with a variety of conditions, as well as symptoms. And so for CBD, when you introduce heat, it goes from CBDA to CBD. And so those are the products now that are becoming widely available on the market, simply because they don’t have any psychoactive effects. And the levels of THC in them are negligible so that you could technically smoke hemp all day long and never feel the high effect .

Richard Miles: 3:17

Thank you. That’s very clear. So there’s folks out there buying CBD oils, thinking they’re going to high are wasting their money.

Adam Christensen: 3:23

You know , when CBD plant varieties were first introduced, one of the first varieties known was hippies disappointment. And so that is what it is.

Richard Miles: 3:32

It is what it is. So we’re not talking about an insignificant potential market here. According to Forbes, it could reach 16 billion by 2025, if five years from now. And the claimed potential uses for CBD products are pain relief. Anti-inflammation something to address epilepsy and seizures and addiction treatment. So Adam, if you could give us a snapshot of the market for medicinal or the uses for CBD and hemp, are there still regulations or regulatory environment that’s holding that back? I know of course it varies by States , but what’s sort of the big picture, right?

Adam Christensen: 4:04

No, I’ve seen studies that say that it could be as big as 12 billion in the next few years, I’ve seen some say 16, I’ve seen studies all over the place, but right now we are seeing CBD introduced in gummies rice, Krispie, treats, coffee, soap candles, basically everything you can possibly imagine. But the problem is there is no regulation on any of these products. And so we have products out there on the market that could be dangerous, or they could be perfectly safe, but we have no idea. A little over two years ago in Illinois, there was three people that died in about 300 more that had internal bleeding because of CBD products. They took off the shelves that were at the time, the newspapers reported laced with rat poison. Well , we actually think it was, was just high arsenic levels, which a simple, heavy metal test would have detected, and this wouldn’t have happened, but right now, nationally, and even in most state levels, there are no actual regulations on what needs to be tested for. So for instance, with romaine lettuce, if there’s a salmonella outbreak that gets pulled off the shelves immediately, there’s a national freakout , but those food products go through heavily regulated and tested regimes when it comes to the CBD market, when it comes to the e-cigarette market, when it comes to a lot of these other products and product markets that are fairly new, there is no actual mandated testing. And the same goes for the medical marijuana market right now. It’s been three years since regulations were supposed to be introduced into the medical marijuana market, where three years later, and there are still no regulations on the book that says these need to be checked for pesticides, heavy metals, residual, solvents, and other contaminants that at the end of the day, you’re giving to sick patients. And if those things are introduced to somebody with a weak immune system, it could kill them. And so if we’re going to be taking some of these things as medicine, for instance, medical marijuana, we need to know that number one, it’s safe and number two, what it actually is going to be good for. And so what really needs to happen is there needs to be strong regulations on contaminants in these products, as well as clinical trials to determine what the best dosages are for and how much each person should take and what they should take and in what concentration. And so right now we don’t know any of those things, but these products have been out in the market for years. And we’re starting to see, especially with the e-cigarette industry, this kind of same phenomenon where they have been out there on the market. People are getting sick and dying, but we don’t know why.

Richard Miles: 6:31

So that leads us to, it sounds like a business model, right? A space where there’s not something that should be there. Somebody, it eventually thinks I need to create a business. So tell us about Botanica Testing. I understand you have another company who came up with the idea, how hard was to get going, who your clients, that sort of thing. How did you get these things launched?

Adam Christensen: 6:51

So I was actually at a university up in Virginia when we were approached by a company down here in Florida and they came to us and they said, here is a peppermint essential oil that we bought from India. We just had to pull $60,000 worth of it off the market because it was fake. And we had no idea. And they basically came and said, we need to know if this is real. We need to know whether or not we’re spending our money wisely and whether or not fraud is being committed so we can make good business decisions. And so me and the students and the professors that were at the university, we started testing for them for about a year and near the end of that, I started to realize that maybe this isn’t just one company, maybe this is bigger than just this one company. And that if fraud, like this is being committed against this company is probably being committed against a lot of companies. And so I entered a business competition. I actually didn’t know I had entered it. One of my professors put me into the business competition. And then I got an email,

Richard Miles: 7:44

Clearly studying chemistry at the time.

Adam Christensen: 7:45

I was studying biology and chemistry at the time. And I get an email that says, Hey, you just want a thousand dollars to go start a business.

Richard Miles: 7:53

And you thought it was spam, right? Obviously.

Adam Christensen: 7:55

I emailed the professor back. I was like, number one, what is this? Number two, I didn’t enter a business competition and number three, thanks but I’m pretty sure I’m going to go study dolphins in Hawaii. So I don’t know if this is the way I want to go. I gave it some thought and realized that it might be something that would be a great stepping stone and something that I couldn’t just let go by. And so I drove from Virginia Beach to Indiana to Tampa, picked up a buddy. We drove out to California all the way to North Dakota and back searching for incubators, different business systems that I could start my business. And it would be a great system to be able to be in, to be able to grow it where there are other entrepreneurs and other people starting businesses and just kind of a collaborative feeling. And so traveling all across the country, I stopped, I worked as a lumberjack in Arkansas for a couple months. I worked as a counselor out in California to make enough money to make it to North Dakota. Then we worked there a little bit. Then we drove all the way back. So basically by the end of that summer trip, I had about $3,000 that I said, you know, I’m going to use this to try to start a business on the way to Gainesville, Florida, because the innovation hub was there. There was a Sid Martin incubator system and said in the innovation hub, which is in downtown Gainesville. And that was the one that I wanted to be at. And I thought that was the one that’s going to give me the best opportunity to be able to start this business. And so on the way from North Dakota, I’m calling apartment complexes down here, trying to see if there’s openings basically packed up my entire life and moved from Virginia down to Florida to start this company.

Richard Miles: 9:30

I gotta ask Adam, were your parents horrified at this or did they kind of trust you that you knew what you’re doing?

Adam Christensen: 9:35

My mom has always said that I am the most bullheaded person she’s ever met, and I am willing to do things and take risks that no one else will and she doesn’t understand why she was just happy that I was able to find a place to live, that I had enough money to have food every day. And that I

Richard Miles: 9:53

Being a good mom, she was thinking about the basics here.

Adam Christensen: 9:55

The way that she looks at it is if I don’t call home, that’s a good thing because it means nothing has happened.

Richard Miles: 10:01

So you entered this or your professor entered the business competition for you. Was your original business or his business plan, or the idea had it already zeroed in, on CBD and hemp, or was it more product testing for a variety of different products?

Adam Christensen: 10:14

Yeah, originally this was never in the picture originally. It was, we’re going to test about 120, 130 different types of plants to see if they’re real, to plant oils, to see if they’re real. And as that’s going along, I keep getting contacted by hemp growers and other people in the industry that say, Hey, we have this oil and we need to test it. We need to see a lot of things about it. Can you do it? And my response was, well , we test 120 other plants. So we might as well add one more. Well, as we started to look through this, and as I met my now business partner, whose name is Dan Morgan, he’s got a PhD in analytical chemistry and worked in big pharma for 25 years.

Richard Miles: 10:51

Was this your buddy out in California? Or is this,

Adam Christensen: 10:54

This is somebody who lived here in Gainesville, who I was introduced to by some other company owners actually here in Gainesville that are pretty well known. So I was introduced to him. We sat down and we talked and we realized that this was a pretty big opportunity that we didn’t want to miss.

Richard Miles: 11:08

Who was your first hire then once you decided , okay, I need to start a business. Did you hire another chemist or did you turn to the business side to help you structure that ?

Adam Christensen: 11:17

So the first people that I really got involved with were Jody Johnson and Karie Baso over at the mass spec department at UF. And one of the main reasons I came to Florida was because of the university system and the amount of amenities and perks that they offer. And so my first hire was actually another student to be able to create the website, start doing marketing and starting to actually go get customers. It went all right. He didn’t last very long. My second hire was with me for a little bit more than a year. His name was Vic . He is an old British chemist who really just enjoyed talking to people and working more on the business side and the sales side and loved having him around. He got to the point where he was about ready to retire as well. And so at that point, we were expanding with Botanica. And so we started to hire a lot of lab technicians and people to work in the office and so we were up to about seven eight right now, total employees.

Richard Miles: 12:15

So tell me what about the scalability of this? Let’s say you double or triple the number of clients you have in the next year or two, how many more people are you going to have to hire to keep this going?

Adam Christensen: 12:24

So right now, every year we’ve been doubling as far as revenue goes per year. And so I’ve had the first business up for about three years and the second one for a little bit more than a year and overall we’ve doubled every year. And so right now we are sustainable with the number that we have as we keep growing, though, we’re going to have to bring on some more chemists, obviously some more lab technicians and more than likely some more people in our sales department.

Richard Miles: 12:49

Tell me about the second company I know about Botanica Testing, but what is your second company?

Adam Christensen: 12:53

EVS is the one that does testing on natural products on essential oils. And so that was the first company that we started. Botanica Testing was the second company that we started.

Richard Miles: 13:02

And Botanica focuses on what just hemp?

Adam Christensen: 13:04

It focuses on hemp and CBD products.

Richard Miles: 13:07

Okay. Um, you’re , you’re thinking of starting a third project, so to speak. And we were talking about this earlier on, and for those folks, not from Florida, the Congressman from this district, Ted Yoho announced recently that he’s not going to seek another term and so there’ll be an open congressional seat in November. So the punchline is you’re going to be running for the congressional seat correct?

Adam Christensen: 13:26

Yes. So I am actually running in the democratic primary at the moment. What we’re working on is just getting on the ballot, getting the 5,000 signatures from any registered voter just to get on the ballot.

Richard Miles: 13:35

So this sounds an awful lot, like starting a new start up , right?

Adam Christensen: 13:39

This is, that’s exactly how I’m thinking about it. That what’s the first thing you do? You have the idea, right? You create a product to something that you think could change people’s lives, and then you go out and you market it, you set up the website, you find people that could help you.

Richard Miles: 13:53

It sounds like you get a certain thrill out of doing that. Clearly, Adam, it’s kind of energizes you, have you ever run for office before? Is this?

Adam Christensen: 13:59

No. And this is not something that was in the plan, to be honest with you, to me, starting a company, starting a business, being able to grow something that’s your own is just exciting. And at the same time, if you’re making other people’s lives better, that’s what you want. And so for me, my first company, what were we doing? We were catching fraud. We were making sure that companies didn’t get screwed and we were making sure that you weren’t getting ripped off the same thing with the CBD industry. We’re trying to make sure that companies are being able to put out the best product, that there is somebody as a mediator, as a referee that says, this is what you’re saying. It is, this is what it actually is. And here’s how you can fix it. And so for me, I think it’s the perfect segue. I see the issues in my community. I see solutions that would work really well to be able to grow our small businesses, grow our community and help workers and help the people here. And we just need somebody to step in and propose those and have the passion to fight for it. Just like any other small business or startup.

Richard Miles: 14:57

Well, I got to wish you luck out of my known a couple people who’ve run. And the situation that we have here in open seat is probably the most competitive because lots of people jump in and unlike, running against an incumbent where you have a fixed target, your competition essentially is all the other folks who are throwing in, but that’s incredible and admirable as well. And it’s got to take a lot of energy. Adam let’s close or near closing the, the episode with one of my favorite questions. And that’s basically, what were you like as a kid, we’ve already heard what your mother thought of you as a child and you yourself described yourself as kind of hyperactive and always getting into trouble. So without putting yourself in any legal jeopardy or campaign jeopardy, Adam, if you could share with us examples of what were you like as a kid and why were you getting in trouble?

Adam Christensen: 15:39

You know, I’m someone who, when I believe in something I’m going to follow through with it, no matter who’s in the way. And so one of the main reasons I was constantly getting into trouble when I was little was because I would see something that I thought should be better or could be better. I would see something that could fix it and I would do it. I wouldn’t ask permission. Sometimes it is better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask permission. And that was the way I approach things. And it ticked off a lot of people.

Richard Miles: 16:03

Except for your third grade teacher, right?

Adam Christensen: 16:06

Yes. Sometimes they don’t enjoy when you bring up

Richard Miles: 16:10

Entrepreneurial journey, right? No .

Adam Christensen: 16:12

And so I asked why every day, all the time about everything, if something was away , that I didn’t quite understand or thought it could be better, I would ask why it was that way. Not with this idea of, I want to know every little thing about it, but why do we think this is a good idea? Why do we think that’s the way it should be? Is there a better way to do something? And so for me, I was in trouble all the time because when somebody would say, well, it’s just because I would say, well, why? Explain to me the reasoning behind it so I can get behind that idea. And if somebody was able to explain the reasoning to me, then I’m like, all right , cool. We move on. But most of the time my parents were just like, no, it’s because we said it now go run around the house three times until you’re tired so you’re no longer have energy. And so they would literally send me outside to run around the house until I was tired enough to come back inside.

Richard Miles: 16:59

Do you remember a time where you were drawn to the natural sciences, biology and chemistry? Did that develop when in middle school, high school or when did you know that’s kind of what you wanted to do, if at all?

Adam Christensen: 17:10

So that wasn’t in the cards either. I mean, to be honest with you, my high school chemistry course, I think I got a C I hated it. My biology, that’s the worst grade I got in high school as well. And I said, I would never take another science course in my entire life again, until I got to college. And when I walked into the advisor’s room, they said, what do you want to do? And I said, I don’t know. What’s the hardest thing that you offer right now, just so I can see if I could do it. And they said, it’s going to be our premed biology program. I said, okay, let’s see if I can get through that for a semester. And so the first courses were biology and chemistry, and I’m very thankful that I was able to through those because they taught me how to think critically. They taught me how to learn, how to study, how to look at the world around me and see the connections and the things that actually make it work as opposed to, well, this is the way it is because, well, why? And so when you get into chemistry and biology, it’s how the world works and why it works. And the things that make it work. And for me, I was fascinated by it. After that point, obviously hated it before. But once I actually had to put in the work, loved it.

Richard Miles: 18:17

So you are highly unusual, Adam cause 99 out of 100 students that go in to their counselor at college, they ask, how can I get out of biology and chemistry and mapped me out the path? So this sets up my last question. You’re a fairly young guy. Of course, the older you get, everyone else looks younger to you, but you’ve already had a good half lifetime of experience here. And I imagine you were probably asked from time to time by other folks trying to do the same thing, start their own companies or students or mentoring advice. What’s sort of the thing that you say, well, you definitely should do this. And then you definitely shouldn’t do this. Do you have it crystallized in your mind that there’s nuggets of wisdom that you tell somebody an earlier version of yourself that wants to do something similar?

Adam Christensen: 18:56

Yeah, so I get asked the question. What’s the most important thing that you can do when you do a startup and my first and only answer every single time is get a puppy. And the reason I say that is it forces you to go home. And when you get home, you have something that is jumping on you, excited to see you. Because what I learned very quickly is if you don’t have something like that, if you don’t have a solid base, if you don’t have something to go home to number one, you won’t go home. You will work yourself into the ground. Number two, you will have burnout very quickly. And that’s the thing that kills most entrepreneurs. And most startups is just burnout, where you work so hard, you care about something so much. And it’s all you think about for so long,

Richard Miles: 19:41

And you lose perspective.

Adam Christensen: 19:43

You just can’t do it anymore.You lose the drive and the love that you have to continue doing what you love. And so when you get a puppy, you have to go home.

Richard Miles: 19:50

You win the prize for most distinct advice. I mean that fits on a bumper sticker or a tee shirt. It’s perfect. What about on the other side? Are there things you say to people don’t ever do this, or this was a bad decision? I wish I regret it or anything like that so far?

Adam Christensen: 20:04

No, to be honest with you. I think the thing that makes most startups succeed is the fact that you’re not afraid to make a mistake, but if you do make a mistake, you don’t make it again, right?

Richard Miles: 20:15

Figure out why you made it.

Adam Christensen: 20:16

Most companies that I see, they make a mistake and they learn from it. They get better or you keep making the same mistake over and over. And you’re no longer in business. My favorite client, one of my favorite people in the world right now is actually 82 years old. I’ve called her the crazy lady from Tennessee for the entirety of that I’ve known her name’s Marge. The first time that I did a sample for her, I screwed up epically, probably the worst mistake of my career, but I had to go to her and I had to explain why it happened, how I was going to fix it. How are we going to make it would never happen again. And I don’t know why she gave me another chance, but she did. And she is probably one of my favorite people in the world. We actually did a road trip last Christmas together on the way up for me to visit my family. And so for me, sometimes mistakes are just opportunities to grow. And at the same time, sometimes mistakes are the things that are going to really make the journey worth it. Because they’re the things you remember the most because they matter.

Richard Miles: 21:14

Yeah. I’ve always thought the mistakes and Epic failures teach you way more than successes because they’re seared in your memory and you go over them over and over again until you tease out, why did I make mistake? And how do I avoid it? Whereas success often tends to have the opposite effect. You Pat yourself on the back, maybe a little bit too much, you take a little bit too much credit for the success and you don’t learn what were the dynamics that went into that. But the failure by golly, no one else is going to claim it for you. And you’re the one to disentangle how do I not do that again?

Adam Christensen: 21:41

Yeah no, I’ve been going through that a lot lately because I, for fun in my free time, which I don’t have very much. I coach college and high school soccer. And last year I coached at the rock high school on the West side of Gainesville. We went undefeated 15 and 0, won a state championship. And I thought, I’m going to take a challenge. I’m going to go right down the road. I’m going to join Oak Hall’s program. I’m going to try to coach them. And this season has not gone. How I’ve planned it. I’m starting three eighth graders, sometimes a sixth grader on the varsity team. And we’ve only won two games this year. At the same time, I’ve seen improvement in drive that makes me extremely proud despite the fact that we may not be winning every game, but at least people that have never played the game before I am seeing what it takes, to be able to take somebody with no experience or who’s very young and make them somebody who is formidable, who could actually play against people better than them. I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m a little bit of a perfectionist. If I do something it needs to be done with excellence. And I think that you kind of have to have that drive when you start a company or it really, if you want to do anything, well, you have to care about it enough that you’re going to do everything you possibly can to do it perfectly.

Richard Miles: 22:52

Adam I look forward to having you back on the show at some point to give us an update on what’s going on and wish you all the best.

Adam Christensen: 22:56

Thanks.

Richard Miles: 22:57

I am Richard Miles.

Outro: 23:00

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood , Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak . The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Technology and farming always have mixed well in the United States, but in many other countries, particularly in the underdeveloped world, it’s a different story. Why does it matter, and what can be done about it? Richard Miles interviews Gbola Adesogan, Director of the Livestock Systems Innovation Lab at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS). 

Technology and farming always have mixed well in the United States, but in many other countries, particularly in the underdeveloped world, it’s a different story. Why does it matter, and what can be done about it? Richard Miles interviews Gbola Adesogan, Director of the Livestock Systems Innovation Lab at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS). 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

Technology and farming always has mixed well in the United States, but in many other countries, particularly in the underdeveloped world, it’s a different story. Why does it matter and what can be done about it? I’m your host, Richard Miles, and today on radio Cade, I’m pleased to welcome Gbola Adesogan, a professor at the University of Florida and director of the livestock systems innovation lab at the university’s Institute of food and agricultural sciences, otherwise known as IFAS. Welcome to Radio Cade, Gbola.

Gbola Adesogan: 1:05

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 1:06

So, Gbola, you develop technologies that improve livestock production in eight African and Asian countries, and this is paid for in part by the U.S. government. So I think the first thing we need to explain to our listeners is why is a university in North central Florida working on improving agricultural technologies in African nation ?

Gbola Adesogan: 1:25

Okay, thank you for that question. And thank you for this opportunity. I think we’re all aware about a growing global population, the problems of poverty and hunger, and in many countries, what many of us may not be aware of is the problem of hidden hunger, which is when people lack certain nutrients in their diets that prevent them from reaching their potential. And this malnutrition deficiency or stunting is something which is prevalent in many developing countries. And we have come to realize the research has shown that a deficiency of these certain key nutrients causes lifelong problems. It’s Tom’s physical development, as well as cognitive development. So children are less able to do well in school. Their test scores are much lower. Their IQs are much lower and more susceptible to diseases and so on. And we have come to realize that the nutrients which are missing in the diets of those children, which caused this problem are present in livestock products. And we have a longstanding department of animal sciences and a community at UF, a community of researchers who have experience in developing technologies that can help to prevent this problem, improve livestock production, improve the supply of these missing nutrients in the diet. So we, as a team of , uh , several faculty across different units at the University of Florida, most of us from IFAS, collectively submitted a proposal to manage this livestock systems innovation lab, which has at its core, a vision to sustainably intensify livestock production, so that we can improve the nutrition, the health, the incomes, and the livelihoods of the poor in these eight countries.

Richard Miles: 3:14

If we could define livestock, is it just large animals are talking about or does go all the way down to say chickens?

Gbola Adesogan: 3:19

Yes, it does include small animals. So chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats, and cattle, and even Buffalo in Nepali in one of our countries.

Richard Miles: 3:30

So if I understand the concept, as you explain it Gbola, but it’s not necessarily that people are not getting enough calories and they’re literally starving, they may be getting enough calories, but they’re not getting enough nutrients. And that’s because they’re only eating presumably one thing, one crop, and they’re getting no protein. Do I have that right?

Gbola Adesogan: 3:48

Yes, you do. It’s that in most rural areas in the countries where we work and in many developing countries, the diets of the poor and the vulnerable are usually starch base . So it could be yams or potatoes or pasta or rice. And they may have some vegetables with that, but they lack the main nutrients that are needed for preventing this cognitive problem that occurs as a result of stunting. And those would be things like zinc, vitamin B12, which is only present in animal products, iron IOD, a vitamin a on a number of others. And what is advantage yours from a livestock product standpoint is that they contain those nutrients. And in many cases, the livestock products are the only readily bioavailable sources of those nutrients. So something like B12, you can only get from animal sources, iron, you can get from spinach and other plant sources, but it’s not as bioavailable. And so for the small brains of infants, you need an dense and readily bioavailable source of these nutrients.

Richard Miles: 4:56

Let’s talk a little bit about the broader concept of food security, which is something I think most people in United States or developed countries don’t really understand that because it’s rare, except in hurricane comes through that you can’t go to the store at any time of the day and basically get the food that you need or want for a reasonable price. But in other countries, that’s not the case at all. As you’ve illustrated, you simply can’t get certain types of food, but if over time, certain parts of the population cannot get over the long period, these type of nutrients, what happens to the stability of society or even the government. Can you explore that concept of food security a little bit?

Gbola Adesogan: 5:31

Yeah. So if we, first of all, look at food security is broader there’s provision of food to address hunger. And then there’s hidden hunger as well. And the lack of the nutrients, this taunting itself not only affects the cognitive development of children and their physical development so that they never achieved their high potential. And these are things that are very difficult to reverse. In fact, someone said , says condemns children to a lifetime of underperformance and underachievement. In many of these countries, a child who does not perform well in school has a far lower chance of holding down or even getting a good job. And so their ability to care for the community is reduced substantially. And these are extended family systems where there’s a lot of dependency on an individual. So the negative effects spiral beyond the individual, into the community. Now with hunger itself, when communities lack the essential nutrients or lack access to food that can cause really, really terrible problems in some of the areas of the world, some of the terrorism problems , some of the migration problems that are occurring are relation to food access and food affordability, and people are migrating sometimes simply because they want to be able to provide for their family.

Richard Miles: 6:52

So really this is a very insidious problem in that in the one instance, if there’s literally no food at all, then people may riot or move. But in what you’re talking about with the hidden hunger problem, it can be such that the real effects for the real dangers appear actually later as a cohort, age cohort goes up. And as you said, they’ve been stunted because they didn’t have, for instance, B12 and their entire lives, they’re not going to be as productive as they could have been.

Gbola Adesogan: 7:19

That’s correct studies that I’ve shown that IQ’s intelligence quotient of children who are stunted is far less, sometimes five points, less, much higher than that. And then there’s a study that was done by World Bank Researchers that showed that if the workforce of a nation is made up of people who are stunted in childhood, the economic productivity of that nation is going to be reduced by 7% on average. But for African and Asian countries, the average value is 10% for certain African countries. The value is as high as 16%. So this is not just an individual problem or a societal problem is a national problem. And these are countries where poverty is very high and there’s a great need for economic development to provide jobs and so on and so forth. So that’s stunting has ripple effects that just go on and on and on .

Richard Miles: 8:11

But one of the reasons that the United States government is interested in this type of developing partnerships is that it seems like as a country, there are cultural system becomes more sophisticated, not coincidentally. They tend to start buying more agricultural products or technologies from the United States for a country that is getting new systems in place. What sort of trade or economic relationships do they develop with say suppliers in the United States? What sort of products are they now starting to import from the U.S. that they weren’t importing before?

Gbola Adesogan: 8:39

So there are several benefits that are accrued to the U.S. from these partnerships. And examples are sometimes some of our projects involve trying to tackle diseases like in Uganda and Kenya, we’re working on PPR or Pesta Patura now, which is a viral disease of sheep and goats that started from ivory coast and spread throughout Africa. A lot of the middle East, that nation, thankfully, it’s not here yet. And so we’re testing a Thermo stable vaccine for containing the disease. So that whole disease prevention aspect is something that our lab is working on as well as several other labs. Now, to answer your specific question, the soybean association of the U.S. has partnered with the soybean innovation lab for instance, and they are helping with supplying soybean to countries where soybean is needed. There are companies in the U S that are also developing new varieties of fodder or forages for animal feed that are drought tolerant, that the grain can be used for human food consumption. And then the straw can be used for animal consumption. And in certain cases, the whole plant can be fed to animals. So there are companies that are also involved at many of the big companies, big ad companies. We have how foundations that are also involved in these countries. The U.S. Sorghum Association has worked with the sorghum and millet innovation lab to help improve the capacity, to provide improved varieties in different countries across the world as well.

Richard Miles: 10:07

So you’ve mentioned several times these innovation labs and indeed you’re the director of the livestock systems innovation lab. What do you think are some of the more interesting and successful projects that these innovation labs have done in these countries? If you could give us a few examples of what ideas did they come up that materially or dramatically improved the system in the country, in which they’re working,

Gbola Adesogan: 10:28

I’ll give some examples of some of our work. Then I’ll talk about maybe a couple of other labs. And we in the livestock lab are funded by both USCID and the Gates foundation, but feed the future is a much broader initiative. It’s an across government initiative that was started in 2009 during the Obama administration and enacted into law with strong bipartisan support. And it’s been reauthorized twice since then, last time being last year with very strong bipartisan support as well. And these labs try and address issues of poverty and hunger in the developing world. And they use agricultural led economic growth as one of the methods of alleviating the problems in this country. And also trying to enhance the resilience of the individuals. Now, some specific technologies that have been developed that we have developed , i’ll give maybe two or three examples. One of them was a smartphone app for formulating balanced rations or livestock for cows and Buffalo in Nepal. So this app allows us to match the nutrient needs of cattle with what the diet is supplying . So we are able to determine how much corn, how much soybean, how much vitamins and so on to mix into a ration for a cow. And that avoids a lot of wastage. And it means that meeting the nutrient needs of the cow and 94% of those who tried this in Nepal, saw that the milk production from their cows was improved. Another example from Nepal, we tried some technologies for reducing mastitis. Mastitis is when the utter of the cow gets inflamed. So bacteria get into the teat canal and release a toxin, and that can reduce milk production severely, and it can also pose a food safety hazard. It makes the milk less suitable for processing and so on. And so we deployed some technologies which are commonly used here in the U.S. in Nepal. And we reduce mastitis in Buffalo from 78 to 18%. So the prevalence was very drastically reduced. And one of our partners Heifer International is now scaling that to thousands of farmers in Nepal. Other labs have also developed several innovations. In fact, I think there are about 900 technologies that have been developed by these Feed the Future innovation labs. And another example that has been successful is developmental a moisture testing device, which is very useful. And this was done by the post-harvest innovation lab in partnership with some colleagues in garner and a young man named Ceci , Mr. Ceci in Ghana, he won to one of the MIT on the 35 innovator awards last year. And he got that award because of his work with this lab. And this moisture meter is very, very useful for determining how much moisture is in green samples. And if we store greens with too much moisture, then they become moldy and they can produce the toxin, which is carcinogenic. So these technologies can have really beneficial effects in many parts of the world. Mr. Ceci has now established a company, and he’s now selling some of these moisture meters. And he got that knowledge through his interaction with the post-harvest innovation lab at Kansas State University.

Richard Miles: 13:44

That’s amazing the success rates that you were citing and the adoption rates, this technology is really pretty spectacular. How is it that these innovation labs are so successful in getting the farmers in these countries to adopt the new technology? Because I think there’s this preconception or stereotypes , certainly United States say, well, all the tech savvy people are the ones who work in the high tech firms and the people who are still in the agricultural sector or more traditional, but in this case, and certainly I know in the United States, farmers are actually the ones who are very early adopters of new technologies because they see these results in your experience, working in the countries, you’ve worked in, how exactly do you connect with the farmers on the ground and say, here’s a new process, whether it’s a smartphone app or another thing you really should use it is the reaction skeptical is enthusiastic? What do they say?

Gbola Adesogan: 14:30

So in the developing world, you have the same type of range of perceptions about new technology. As we have here, you have the early adopters, you have those who are very slow to take on anything new, but I think it’s a question of looking at the whole process of behavior change as something to be approached strategically and carefully. And I would also say that it’s not something that we’ve nailed down within the livestock innovation lab. We continue to work on this, but understanding the context is very important. Understanding the social cultural context in many of these countries, women play a very vital role in livestock within agricultural practice and production and involving the women is often critical to the success of technologies. Understanding the context is very important on working alongside the farmers, understanding their needs, first of all, and then try to figure out what matters to them. So I’ll give one more example. One of my colleagues here at UF, Sarah McCune, led one of our 45 projects in Burkina Faso in West Africa in the area they raise poultry, but egg consumption is very low, particularly among children. So what she was trying to do was to increase egg consumption by children and she used education. So she had a control group of villages, where there was no intervention. She had another group where there was training on the importance of eggs in the diet, the nutritional benefits of consuming eggs. And then there was also a training on raising poultry properly. So that was the educational intervention, but the full intervention was that educational intervention plus gifting of chickens to the families. Now, what was unique was that she not only gifted chickens, but she elicited the help of village elders and ask the village elders to talk to the parents and get them to commit, to feeding one egg a day to a child. And that was successful. So at the end of the 10 month study, what we found is those children on the control group was still eating no eggs. Those in the education group, the partial intervention, they were now eating two eggs a week. Those in the full intervention were eating six eggs a week, a tremendous breakthrough, and this made the national news in Burkina Faso. And what was very striking was that the children in the control group got more malnourished. Monitoring scores, including on the weight and wasting worsened and wasting is associated with childhood mortality. But in the full intervention group, those calls were decreased. And people who visited the children in the different villages said, you could tell immediately where you go to a full intervention village because the children were more active and playful and it looked bright and so on and so forth. And that was just from giving them an egg a day.

Richard Miles: 17:16

So for a researcher, this is like a dream come true, get all the results you want from your various control group and full on intervention and so on. Well , let’s talk a little bit about you now. Uh , personally, you have somewhat of an advantage, as you’d said, understanding the cultural context cause you yourself are from Nigeria. And so you obviously have a strong personal connection to your work, particularly in that region. So, I understand your father was a chemistry teacher. Your mother was a nursing instructor, tell us a little bit, and our listeners, what your childhood was like and what led you ultimately to animal science.

Gbola Adesogan: 17:46

So I had somewhat of a privileged upbringing because my parents were both educators in Nigeria. And so I had a great childhood. It was probably quite similar to a middle class childhood here in the U.S, But this specific influences that led me to animal science is kind of interesting. My best friend in elementary school was from Germany. His dad was a visiting professor from Germany who came to spend some time in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan where my dad worked. And because this young person Mark was my best friend, we hung out a lot together. And every now and again, his dad would take us to the farm, to the animal science farm. And we would see the animals and look at what he was doing and so on and so forth. And I think that with maybe an innate love for animals is what drove me to the animal science career. And in 2013, when I learned about stunting and I learned about the fact that animal products contain the nutrients that are lacking in fact was a specific presentation. I listened to one in which someone presented some information from a research project published in American journal where feeding just a little bit of meat to children in Kenya, increased their test scores, average over five school semesters and all school subjects improve their test scores by 45% that got my attention, just the thought that improving the diet or these children could improve their lives and therefore improve society, improve the country as a whole. That is a very strong motivating factor for me, as well as my faith. I’m a Christian. And so this all really dovetails with the teachings of Jesus.

Richard Miles: 19:26

That’s fascinating Gbola. What is next for you? And do you have research projects, new ones that you intend to embark on, or have you thought about other areas in what you’d like to do in terms of an intervention what’s next for you?

Gbola Adesogan: 19:37

So we’re now in the fifth year of a five year project from USCID. The Gates project goes on for another two years after this. So we’re now working with USCID on our next tension and early indications are that we will be able to get one. So we are gearing up for the next five years. We’re thinking about how can we continue to do innovative work, develop new technologies? How can we make sure we have even greater impacts? So yesterday for instance, we had a discussion with some of the folks at USCID about engaging the private sector strategies for even more effective engagement of the private sector, because we don’t want to just do research. That shows something is beneficial, but the true test of the success of our work is to what extent is it adopted? And to what extent does it have long lasting and sustainable impacts? So that’s something we’re gearing up on with strategizing on. We have a lot of faculty across UF who work with us and they are really the secret of our success. And we’ve had discussions on this already this year and we continue to do so.

Richard Miles: 20:44

Well. I have to admit to a little bit of envy because I spent most of my career in foreign affairs. Some of it doing development work and some of the countries I was in. And I got to tell you, a lot of people put a lot of effort into designing certain programs of democracy, building and education, and rarely if ever do they get the results that you’re talking about working in solving the problems of hidden hunger and so on and really profound. It’s hard to see how these won’t help these countries longterm, because if what you’re describing is successful. And as you said, it’s sustainable over the longterm , talking about a benefit and a gain for really everyone. It’s not just that kid who got the B12 and they needed, it’s the entire society that benefits from more productive individual and stable society and so on. So I really commend you on your work. Look forward to having you back on the show at some point to give us an update on what’s going on and wish you all the best.

Gbola Adesogan: 21:31

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Richard Miles: 21:33

I am Richard Miles .

Outro: 21:35

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

In 1969, Professor Larry Hench developed a glass that can grow with bones. His close friend and colleague, David Greenspan, helped Professor Hench develop the material into BioGlass, a product that is used in orthopedic and dental bone graft materials. David, a native of Brooklyn, wanted to be a drummer but turned to glass blowing instead. His big insight into entrepreneurship? “Never lie to yourself.” *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2018.*