Transforming research instincts into a successful business

SOPHIE ROSA:

Hi, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the Future You: Transforming Research Instincts into a Successful Business.

My name is Sophie Rosa and I'm the manager of stakeholder relations and outreach at the Canada Foundation for Innovation or, as we typically call it, the CFI.

First, I would like to mention that the CFI respectfully recognizes and acknowledges the traditional relationship that the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis across Canada have with the land all Canadians share.

Before we get started, I want to tell you just a little bit about the CFI and why we are doing this webinar series.

The CFI is a funding organization that invests in research labs, equipment, and facilities on campuses across the country. This includes everything from DNA sequencers and electron microscopes to larger scale infrastructures like ocean tracking networks and research vessels.

So far we have funded more than 13,000 projects over 28 years.

You can imagine that many of the research projects you can think of in Canada probably use infrastructure we have funded.

The investments we make help us attract top researchers to Canada and equip them to be global leaders in their fields. Access to cutting edge research labs and tools allowed them to respond to emerging challenges like the pandemic, food security, climate change and so much more.

Why are we doing these webinars? Well, the labs we support also serve as incubators, leading to bold entrepreneurial ventures. They are spaces where undergrads and grad students conduct research, meet mentors and work to evolve their research ideas into thriving businesses. In fact, each of the panelists we have with us today have spent time working in a CFI-funded lab.

As an organization, of course, we recognize the value of these opportunities and we hope to inspire students like you to do the same.

We will be leaving as much time as possible for panelists to answer your questions so if you're thinking of one in particular, as you listen to the discussion, please write it in the Q&A section. The icon is at the bottom of your screen. And we will try to get to as many of these as possible during the time we have.

Now, over to our moderator. Jon French. Jon is the Director of University of Toronto Entrepreneurship, where he is responsible for supporting and championing all entrepreneurship initiatives across the university's three campuses. So he's very well positioned to lead this discussion today with our four young entrepreneurs.

Without further ado, over to you, Jon.

JON FRENCH:

Terrific. Thank you, Sophie. And good afternoon or good morning, I guess, depending on which part of the country you're in, to everyone. As Sophie mentioned, I have the pleasure of leading the Entrepreneurship ecosystem at the University of Toronto where we have 12 innovation hubs or campus accelerators.

As an example, we've got a deep tech accelerator called U-test, we have a wet lab incubator called Spin Up. And when I heard about the opportunity to moderate this panel, I jumped at it because quite often we'll find that entrepreneurs, students, researchers, faculty either won't know where to go on campus or what resources to plug into. Or they're guilty of doing it too late in the game.

And so, we have four incredible entrepreneurs/panelists to speak to you today to give you some advice, to inspire you and to help point you in the right direction. And as Sophie mentioned, there will be an opportunity for Q&As so make sure that you drop those questions into the Q&A box.

I'm going to briefly introduce our four panelists and then ask them to share a little bit about their entrepreneurial journey. And so, thrilled to have, first off, Brock Schuman joining us, who's the CEO of Azor Biotech in Victoria, BC. Azor leverages AI and high throughput robotics to design microRNA targeting small molecules. Welcome, Brock.

We have Harsh Rathod, also from Victoria, BC, who's the co-founder and CEO of Niricson. Niricson is one of the province's fastest growing startups serving clients like BC Hydro, Ontario Power Generation and major airports in six countries to ensure the safety of bridges, dams, and other critical infrastructure.

Welcome, Harsh.

We have Kritika Tyagi, who is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, a U of T alumni, and the co-founder of Erthos® based out of Toronto, where she merges her expertise in ecology and plant biology with manufacturing tech to innovate biomaterials.

Welcome, Kritika.

And last but not least, we have Ravi Kempaiah, who is the CEO at Zen Energy based out of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Zen Energy is innovating and commercializing long-lasting batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Welcome, Ravi, and thanks for representing the East Coast.

I'm going to hand it over to each of our entrepreneurs to share a brief overview of their entrepreneurial journey and I'll ask each of you to focus on where and what you studied. Tell us a little bit about your company and the impact it's having on the sector or on the customers that you served and also for the audience. What inspired you to take what you were working on kind of as a research project and turn it into a company?

Brock, you're up first. Take it away.

BROCK SCHUMAN:

All right. Well, thank you very much, Jon. I'm Brock and I got my PhD at the University of Victoria. It's a small university.



My PhD was in biochemistry where I studied structural biology and you know, I'd always been interested in the practical applications of biochemistry, especially drug development so I went on to do a series of postdocs in Toronto.



This included for some startup companies as well as some research hospitals. And that kind of helped foster this interest in leading my own entrepreneurial journey. So, my postdocs kind of culminated in looking at microRNA as biomarkers of disease states. And I thought, well, they seem like they should be able to be really good drug targets as well.



And looking into how other people were trying to target them with small molecules I felt that I could do a lot better. And I think that's probably the origin story of a lot of entrepreneurs, its thinking that you have the kind of unique skill set to address a problem.



So I started from there and I had no real business background. I was one of the people who joined on to the University of Toronto business and life science applications too late. So I got a taste of the resources that were available but probably would have benefited from joining them earlier. And yeah, I started doing the practical things first, seeing if I thought I could write an API to use AI.



My first funding, so I think that'll be a lot of questions for a lot of people, I first started getting funding to do practical things through NRC-IRAP, which is a great program, one of the easier ones to apply.

It was a learning journey. And I can't say I've mastered it, learning how to separate funders.



If you're looking for non-dilutive funding, separating funders from their money—I’ve been successful but wouldn't say I'm an expert and it was a big learning journey. A big part of the problem I felt was that you are no longer, because I was a confident public speaker to educate, but that's not really what you're trying to do when you're trying to get funding.



Anyway, it was a bit of a transition and Azor is doing really well now. We've got funding for some really high throughput robotics that we're giving back to the community. We're bringing it in to the University of Victoria. I think that's good for now. Thanks.



JON:



Terrific. Great start. Thank you, Brock. And before I turn it over to you, Harsh, I'm just noticing questions already popping up in the Q&A, which is great. And whether it's through the course of the chat or towards the end, either myself or the CFI team will be able to share some of the resources that get highlighted. I think Brock was mentioning the IRAP program, which is one of many excellent ones. Okay, Harsh, over to you to tell us your story.



HARSH RATHOD:



Awesome. Thank you, Jon. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Harsh Rathod, CEO and co-founder of Niricson. I was born and raised in India, came to Canada in 2014 to do my master's thesis.

I spent about a year in Canada then in 2015, I actually got a great opportunity to work on a really cool project where the idea was combining robotics and computer vision to solve some of the infrastructure inspection related problems.



For those who don't understand the whole inspection aspect, I'll just give you a high-level overview. You know you're seeing all these large bridges, dams, nuclear power plants, airstrips, buildings around you and the inspection of these assets is really done with old methodology. Civil engineers or technicians go out there in the field with pen, paper, and hammer and then go out there and try to identify all the distresses.



They map everything with pen and paper, draw literally on the paper and then put that whole thing into the report form. Then again every couple of years, these reports actually are changing. And then they try to compare the reports.



In addition, actually, they also go with a hammer and then they try to tap the concrete surface with the hammer and then try to listen to the sound. Based on the sound difference with the subjective trained human ears, they'll be able to tell whether there's any issues or not.



So what I wanted to do as part of my PhD, which lasted about four and a half years. The idea was, okay, can we actually try to eliminate the human component from the beginning and then really focus on the human component in the analysis part. So, utilize robotics and computer vision to actually automate and digitize end-to-end condition assessment.



Drones will automatically fly and capture the multi-layer data and we invented a technology where the drone is actually doing the tapping and capturing the sounding data. We superimpose this data set onto each other and create a deterioration model and see how it's tracking. So now it's objective it's much more safer. It's more cost effective, much more faster, and it's scalable.



Right after I got out of my PhD program, I actually approached one of the customers in BC and pitched this idea and we got the PO right off the bat. And then I actually graduated with the PO almost and we deployed the technology and we got really good results. We compared the technology with the manual traditional method. And after the success, we started expanding into other parts of Canada, spanning the United States, Australia, New Zealand, India and now in the UK. In fact, I'm in Scotland right now, expanding into Scotland.



Then we actually got really good traction in the bridge market and also airfield market. So right now, we are about 47 people around the globe running the operation in about six countries.

I have a lot of things to share but we'll dive into different components later in the webinar.



JON:



Terrific. Thanks, Harsh. I'm glad you mentioned the size of your team and that you're distributed, that was going to be one of my questions as well.

Next up, Kritika, tell us a little bit about yourself and the Erthos® journey.



KRITIKA TYAGI:



Hi, everyone. My name is Kritika and I'm the head of product and co-founder at Erthos®.



My journey actually began as a plant biology student at the University of Toronto where my co-founder Nuha, who has a background in business, and I met while working at a social entrepreneurship club called Enactus. So it was actually there where we came across a World Economic Forum report that said that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by weight.



This was around the year of 2016 when we were really starting to see the boom of e-commerce and all of the packaging that was coming in with each product that we were purchasing. So we decided that we really wanted to challenge that statistic and do something about it.



Erthos® actually began as a project that was focused on leveraging plant-based materials to replace packaging, things like packing peanuts. And we were lucky enough to be connected with the incredible folks at U of T Entrepreneurship who not only guided us but connected us to vital resources that allowed us to grow from a simple research project to an incorporated startup.



In about 2018, we actually went through the CDL, the Creative Destruction Lab program, where we met our first investor. And we decided to leverage our first pre-seed funding to buy one-way tickets to Asia, where we set up endless meetings with manufacturers and plastic companies to really understand why plant-based materials weren't being more adopted in the supply chain.



We spent a year learning about how it’s not the actual application that’s the problem, but rather the plastic inputs themselves. That's really where we made our first pivot. We began leveraging our ingredients database to start designing unique blends to replace plastic resins for different single and multi-use plastic applications.



Unlike other bioplastics our materials were actually functional and more importantly compatible with the existing plastic infrastructure. So instead of us having to reinvent the wheel, we were actually able to work hand in hand with manufacturers to replace these toxic chemicals and plastics in their supply chain.



Since then, we've had a few successful projects. One of which was actually with AB InBev with their Budweiser line, where we launched the world's first compostable keg cap in India. And since then, we've actually been doing custom projects with major CPGs.



Today, Erthos® is a post-Series A company where we're leveraging our almost decade of research to develop internal machine learning algorithms which allow us to expedite our research processes. This has allowed us to design and deliver novel formulation blends to CPGs in record time. We've shortened timeframes of as long as 18 months of research and development to about six to eight months.

Throughout this journey, we've had incredible advocates such as Jon, who've not only cheered on Erthos® throughout our growth, but have been incredibly supportive in pushing plant-based solutions to the forefront. And we're on a mission to prove that Bio-based materials can truly replace harmful toxic plastics at scale.



And I'm just really excited to be here and speak more about our journey today.



JON:



Thank you, Kritika, and for the kind words, I honestly didn't ask her to say that. For everybody watching you can already see one of the theme across the first three panelists, and that's leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to do good, whether it's drug discovery, new materials, leveraging computer vision when looking at dams and runways, et cetera. So it might be a theme that we come back to as the conversation evolves.



And now I'll hand it over to Ravi to tell us about Zen Energy and your story.



RAVI KEMPAIAH:



Thanks. Thanks, Jon. Hi, everyone. It's great to be here and good afternoon to everyone who is on the other side.



My journey started, I grew up in India and then I moved to Canada in 2010 to work on my master's at the University of Waterloo, where I studied nanotechnology. And then I spent about 10 years working in the US for my other master's in research and PhD. What really led me, you know throughout this journey of 10, 12 years, I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. I always thought I would be a faculty or a professor or researcher somewhere.



And what really led me to this journey was my experience in the US. I was in Maryland, I was at Purdue and then Chicago and public transport was pretty bad in many of these places and you are almost, as a student, handicapped to go anywhere. Either you have to take an uber and back and there was not enough Ubers, so I was looking for an alternative.



As a student, I could not afford a car, so I started it, looking at alternatives. Then I came across electric bicycles. This was back in 2013, the very early days. This led to my journey into electric mobility. I got my first electric bicycle and then I started building electric bicycles. I realized, wow, the batteries and electric mobility is really catching on.



I moved to Canada and again in 2021 for my postdoc at Dalhousie University, working with Professor Jeff Dahn. I'm not sure many know this, Dalhousie University is the only university in the world to have an exclusive partnership with Tesla and it is considered the battery mecca.



I got to work with this really visionary professor called Jeff Dahn, and he supported this product and the technology. We came up with an idea, why not start making electric bicycles and then see how we can support the bigger market?



So that's how the journey started. When I came to Canada, I had no idea how to register a company. How to go through this whole process of fundraising. So I was fortunate to be part of some of the programs, whether it's Creative Destruction Lab or Lab to Market. Lab to Market is a great program that any aspiring entrepreneur could make use of. CVL is another great program. You learn a lot from these programs. That's how I learned some of the fundamentals.



Then you just get into the whole process. You start understanding how to really build the product, fundraise. Zen Energy is now, we started as an electric bicycle manufacturing company, now we're focused on manufacturing battery packs for electric mobility, whether it is mopeds, motorcycles, three-wheelers in Asia or drones.



We have about seven members in Dartmouth and then we're setting up R&D and manufacturing in India, high volume manufacturing. They will be manufacturing batteries for all the electric scooters, electric bicycles that you see in Canada as well as the US market.



The goal is to make these batteries last. And if these batteries can last eight years most people will switch to electric vehicles or electric mopeds or motorcycles in other countries. That's the real goal. How can we make this last 10 years so more people can switch and then we can reduce the carbon footprint.



We also are deploying battery packs into swap stations in high density areas in Asia, Delhi, Bombay, where you can swap the battery in 30 seconds. So again, as Jon said, we are now leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning prediction models to understand how we can improve the lifetime of these batteries.



So happy to be part of this panel and share my journey and look forward to it. Thank you.



JON:



Thanks, Ravi. How big is your team right now?



RAVI:



About seven members in Canada and then another eight members in India right now.



JON:



Beautiful. Thank you. And thanks to the CFI team. I was going to say, you've heard some additional programs being mentioned for those of you that are listening, trying to figure out where to turn for support, commercializing research that you might be working on.



The lab to market program, which has connections to Dalhousie, TMU, SFU, and then also the Creative Destruction Lab, which started out of Rotman at the University of Toronto, but now has streams and chapters across the country and other parts of the world, including the Rockies, in Vancouver, in Halifax at Dalhousie, in Montreal with HEC and really unique streams focused on deep tech, whether that's advanced materials, space, several streams in the healthcare space, artificial intelligence, quantum. So great resources to check out.



I'm going to go back to Harsh, you kind of mentioned the pivotal moment or the inspiration a little bit in your intro but can you talk a little bit more about that pivotal moment and also where you turned as an innovator for support from either the university or others that were right around you?



HARSH:



Thank you. I was a couple of years into my PhD and I think I figured out at that time that, okay, what the framework looked like in terms of how to capture the data and how to actually turn this data into meaningful information for structural engineers.



I knew that I'm going somewhere, but at that time I was still not sure that this is going in the commercialization direction, right?



There was an incident that happened back home in India where a bridge failure happened, some of my family members used to travel across that bridge pretty much every other day. On that day, they were fortunate that they actually didn't travel, but there were 28 other people who died. I was actually really shocked when I saw the news and I was trying to connect with my family members. Afterwards I kind of realized that, yes, even though my family wasn't part of that but other people who died.



I think if you look at it, every year there are some disasters happening and I think, most importantly that this disaster is not just limited to India.



I think aging infrastructure problem is now almost getting to kind of a 23:22 major to the earth or you know major to the countries because most of the infrastructure was built in the 60s and 70s. So kind of going into the end of their lifespan, particularly if you look at the United States and of course, some of the European infrastructure.



So I thought that there was a great opportunity for us to do something here and given the fact that I already made significant progress and I think Canada was probably the best country to start this journey from because I think there's just too many opportunities that I could see at that time and I was, okay, let's really start leveraging this moment and the fire that I had at that time and convert that into some sort of contracts and investment.



So I was a geeky researcher, I had no idea how to talk with investors, right? That’s where I felt that the university's incubator program supported me a lot. I had no idea.



Some of the basic stuff, probably Jerome is listening here, I would just go to Jerome the Director of Coast Capital Innovation Centre at the University of Victoria fantastic person and ask some stupid question.



He's an engineer so he understands what the engineer thinks about. I had no idea what a cap table was and some of the investors initially asked me, hey do you have a cap table?



So, I'm checking on Google because as a researcher that’s what you do—what the heck is a cap table?



So some of those basic things I had to learn because, who teaches cap table to an engineer?



I had to figure out everything on my own, but the university helped quite a bit.



I also realized that the university alone can't do this. We have to go outside and get outside support. The Creative Destruction Lab was another support introduced by the university. I was able to go through the CDL program and I got a couple of investors who actually invested in our first round. That was also a huge moment for us.



But, you know, Jon, you probably can appreciate this because a lot of entrepreneurs come to you.

Every day there are punches right on your face and you really need to handle those punches. I had a lot of punches every day, I’m still getting a lot of punches but I think when you are on a mission to solve something you can take those punches.



There are a lot of great things also happening that motivates you along the way, but there will always be punches that we have to remember but the punches make you really strong when you are on a mission for something and you can take those.



Yeah, I'll limit it to this. I can keep talking, but I'll let others talk.



JON:



Thanks, Harsh. And I can see that Jerome is on the call. So hi, Jerome. Thanks for joining us and for all you do for the ecosystem as well.



I'm going to shift to Brock for a second. Brock, in your comments, you talked a bit about the early days, having access to some of the equipment and Sophie talked about some of the lab equipment that CFI makes accessible. How was that helpful?



What did you have access to? And was there pain, when all of a sudden it might not have been there in the same way and is there any sort of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs that are thinking about access to physical spaces, equipment, labs, et cetera?



BROCK: Yes, I think this is extremely applicable to any life science, if you wanted to set up a fully operational lab, you need about half a million dollars to set everything up. So, it was great when I was a postdoc and had access to all these great resources. A lot of them you can get through just outsourcing. There are lots of labs in Canada and abroad that you can do it through. Sometimes you can't leverage that as well as you can having your own material and equipment.



It was a learning experience too, in that a lot of the high throughput robotics that we were using was hands-on so I could see areas where there was a lot of room for improvement for our own robotics that we started bringing in. Make sure to take full advantage of the resources available to you.



This was something that made it more difficult for me because I wasn't an academic spinoff. If you are an academic spinoff, you'll usually still have access to a lot of those resources.



And there are a lot of resources in Canada that I'm not intimately familiar with that can help support academic spinoffs.



But it's something to keep in mind moving forward that you'll have to have those partners who can do the stuff you can't as a startup.



JON:



Well said. Kritika, similar question to you, but are you able to maybe share a bit about the early days of Erthos® and what you had access to, and then also the evolution to the facility that you have now and what that process was like.



KRITIKA:



Yes, very similar story to what Brock shared. When we were in our research days, it was a very unique position where we were working on more of a hypothesis validation mode to understand, can plant-based materials even be used to replace traditional plastics?



When we incorporated and actually started working more on an industry pace, we realized that we were short on resources. We were short on time and things were a lot faster paced and more demanding. A lot of the work that we ended up doing in the early days was understanding how we can be more creative and make the most of the situation we were in.



In the very beginning of our story, we actually started looking for more strategic partnerships, folks who could really step in and support us from a resource perspective. We actually ended up working with Lambton College. They had a CFI funded lab, which is where a lot of our research really blossomed. We were able to team up with their biomaterials manufacturing team to start to understand and work out how we can make plant-based materials really scale.



Unfortunately, moving out of research mode also meant that we were on our own when it came to major expenses and buying custom equipment to manufacture plant-based materials was totally out of the question for us in the first year and a half of our operating journey. When we first started working with Lambton College, we were pretty limited to using what they had available at the time, which were traditional plastic extruders.



We were starting to see so many challenges just pile up in terms of trying to make these materials work. Sometimes our starches, for instance, would burn or degrade before they would even make it out of the machinery. We were finding ourselves at a crossroad, we could either be disheartened or we could use this as an opportunity to be creative. We decided to keep going and to try and figure out how we can scale these biomaterials on existing plastic manufacturing lines.



I'm not going to lie, it was definitely an uphill battle and there were times when Nuha my co-founder would be elbows deep in our mixture trying to figure out how to make our blends work and we were staying up all night trying to figure out how to successfully get even one good trial run.



Ultimately it did pay off. Today our materials have perfect compatibility to traditional manufacturing equipment lines. We were able to really scale and build materials that act as a true drop-in replacement to traditional plastics.



It's all because we faced these challenges and constraints early on in our startup journey. I would say it also really helped us with a mindset shift where we now try to look at challenges through a creative lens and always try to see how we can make it work for us.



I would say it's definitely played a role in our growth and our journey to where we are today because it allowed us to really understand what kind of resources were even available to startups, where we knew that we didn't have to do a lot of it alone.



Some of the opportunities were mentioned by Brock. We also worked with NSERC looking at funding like SR&ED. Really making the most of what the startup landscape in Canada looks like and the opportunities available to us and understanding that we had a lot of support in that journey very early on.



JON:



Perfect. Not to put you on the spot, but are you comfortable explaining what SR&ED is to anybody who's hearing about it for the first time?



KRITIKA:



Yes, SR&ED actually a wonderful program that I would highly recommend to any founder that's eligible. Essentially what it does is give you tax credits for any of the research work that you’re doing. There's a lot of research work happening all the time at Erthos® and what it allows us to do is actually get tax credits for the hours that we've spent on doing research and development. In a way, it allows us to get some of that money that we've spent on doing research back to reinvest back into all of the research work that we're doing.



JON:



Perfect. Thank you. And last question before going to Ravi. How big is the Erthos® team now and where is everyone located?



KRITIKA:



We're all located in Mississauga. We ended up coming back to Canada from Asia the weekend before borders closed for COVID. We realized we wanted to set up our headquarters here, so we have a state-of-the-art facility in Mississauga. It's very close to the airport, so very convenient.



Today, we have a team of just under 20 individuals. It's a split between R&D engineers, material scientists, polymer scientists and some creative, wonderful folks on the business and operational side of things.



JON:



Fantastic. Thank you. And excited to hear that you've been able to do it in Mississauga and build it out in Canada. I know for entrepreneurs that are looking to commercialize research sometimes that's the case and sometimes there's a physical footprint or work that's done outside of the country.



So, for Ravi and Harsh, the same question around your journey, but Ravi, you talked about being able to tap into the domain expertise on batteries at Dalhousie and the equipment that's there. What were you able to leverage in the early days? Now what are you using when it comes to accessing equipment and labs? What's happening in Canada versus other parts of the world?



RAVI:



There are pockets in Canada that are extremely good, truly world-class. If you are in one of those pockets, whether it's in Ontario, BC or the East Coast, you can really get to the global markets. Ultimately, every startup that starts in Canada has to compete at the global level.



Programs like NRC, SRAD, SR&ED, and then Lab2Market, CDL are all great, but the real challenge is still scale. Scale beyond and then really hit the global standards and compete against those companies.

What I see is that the geopolitical situation in the world is now forcing onshoring and then creating resiliency within the countries. We are fortunate to be able to build upon this battery hub in Canada.



There's going to be a Canadian Battery Innovation Centre at Dalhousie University, and we're going to be part of that. We leveraged a lot of the research facilities and the know-how from Dalhousie to build our products and now we are in the US market and we've been getting into the Asian market.



The innovation that the Canadian ecosystem can churn out is really key because you have great universities, University of Waterloo, Toronto, McGill, and so on and so forth. If you're able to latch on to a very practical problem then the innovation ecosystem is fantastic and especially the support system available in Canada compared to the Bay Area.



You have so many programs, whether it's NRC, local provincial governments, SR&ED and so on and so forth. For the first two years at least, you can leverage on those and then use the facilities at universities to build your innovative product and then go to the market where you can really demonstrate a competitive advantage.



How do I see Canada being a leader in the clean energy space? Canada is really punching above its weight when it comes to clean energy technology. With so many electric vehicles coming into the market, I see a big opportunity for Canada to leverage the electronic industry, machine learning, manufacturing, all that it’s doing.



So all this coming together, and the confluence of this can really put Canada on a global map. There are pockets. It's not that Canada is absolutely fantastic with everything but, if you find that niche where you can really excel, then you have a fantastic ecosystem here.



Using universities and this startup ecosystem—Lab2Market, CDL, NRC—then going to the global market. That's where I see a pathway to being able to compete in the global markets.



JON:



Very well laid out. Harsh, we'll go to you in case there's some other points that you want to make and then we'll jump into some of the questions that have been shared.



HARSH:



Jon, I think Ravi covered it really well, maybe we can preserve this time.



JON:



Beautiful. All right. Thanks to the faculty member who shared a question in the Q&A. We'll keep it open to all four of the panelists in case you've got any recommendations. What suggestions for university-based faculty do you have with regards to training and inspiring trainees and grad students so that they can make the leap to a startup if they want to?



Brock, you had one comment with regards to Mitacs, so I'm going to start with you, but then we'll go around the circle.



BROCK:



I neglected to mention Mitacs earlier, but that was one program that's applicable throughout Canada and it's pretty easy to get if you fall into the criteria. They have some business development training programs that are offered along with it. Another thing is they'll pay for half of a postdoc. I think Mitacs is a really great program and it’s the one I'm most familiar with.



I know that there are similar ones through the NRC. I can't recall what they're called, but there are other similar ones, especially for paying for trainees.



RAVI:



Terrific. Great point, Brock. In fact, I was a Mitacs postdoc myself and it was a huge, huge support for my company. It’s a great program to tackle.



JON:



Thanks both. Harsh.



HARSH:



One thing that I want to mention is great faculty members leading research with grad students or even PhD and postdoc students and one of the things that probably needs to be streamlined further is actually the IP arrangement because I had faced some issues during my work.



A lot of times the IP is joint and your professor is owning the IP or maybe some of the other students who are working on the research project are owning some of the IP, whether it's patented, filed or not or filed for patent or not. If one of the students or multiple students are wanting to co-found a business then the IP becomes a little messy.



I don't know how much is streamlined but I think perhaps the university can really help to streamline this. Some of the things were helpful for me but I also had to go through some tough conversations. It’s never an easy conversation when we are dealing with IP.



This is something that I thought I should highlight because I've had a whole bunch of students, in the last couple of years, reach out to me asking the similar question about IP—I don't know who owns the IP. We did the research work together, should I just start my work on my own, how does it work? How do I get the license from the university? How do I negotiate with the university?



Those are not the recipes, that are written. I think that's where perhaps the incubator comes into play, CDL comes into play. There are, of course, some of the accelerator programs that are out there that definitely can help with that, but I think it would be great to have it streamlined a little bit.



JON:



It's an excellent point, Harsh. Before going to you, Kritika on the first question, do you, or does anyone else have any other advice or experience with interacting with your IP or the tech transfer office at your university? Do you have advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, whether they be students or faculty researchers.



Okay. Kritika, anything to add on how to advise and inspire the faculty to get their grad students involved in company creation?



KRITIKA:



I think I want to echo a lot of what Harsh said, IP definitely is a really important piece. Something that we did from the very beginning was work with academic institutions under grants because those really help you streamline IP clauses in terms of who owns which piece of IP. It allowed us to be very clear on IP ownership from the very beginning.



Something that I would really encourage that I saw happen quite a bit at U of T was engaging with the resources that are available on campus around entrepreneurship. I think there's a lot of information that isn't readily available and I think Harsh kind of mentioned that around what is a cap table and I don't know how to build a cap table.



All of these are challenges that I'm sure everyone at this panel has faced, where we've had to go out and figure out this information, not recognizing that a lot of this information is provided through some of the resources at the university.



We realized that when we became a part of U of T Entrepreneurship where there's a resource hub that you can go into to understand IP requirements, to understand how to build your fundraising pitch decks, everything from the smallest minutia all the way to really understanding how to organize your business. As grad students, that resource isn't always readily available.



I would say to pair these resources along with the research content that's happening because that way these students can also understand real world applicability of a lot of the work that they're doing and maybe going into some of their research work with that knowledge in mind or in hand.



So, I would kind of push more towards that resource side of things.



JON:



Excellent. To put a bow on the intellectual property conversation, I think I successfully dropped in a link in the chat to U of T's IP education program, which is accessible online to anyone, not just U of T students.



The first level is around basic IP literacy, just realizing the value of what you create, when it might make sense to reach out to the experts in the IPO, which is our Innovations and Partnerships Office or a tech transfer office, topics to learn around the university inventions policy, et cetera. I encourage people to take a look at that and also connect with that equivalent group at your home institution.



Now to shift gears a little bit, everybody knows that mentorship is critical to success for an entrepreneur. I'm going to put each of you on the spot and ask if you can highlight one mentor or an advisor. You can position them how you want and who they are, whether by name or by general profile, and how they added value either to your company or to you as a founder on your journey. Also feel free to add any advice for entrepreneurs that are looking to find or build relationships with mentors or domain experts as well. Brock, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to go first.



BROCK:



Okay. I'll say even from a postdoc level I was always trying to collect as many mentors as possible. Which is, I think, a good strategy but, I'm going to answer in a non-conventional way.



Even though I've had good mentorship, especially from my PhD supervisor, I'm going to say that the greatest mentor in the success of my company has been a really good client that I got who was okay with me being inexperienced. Brent Loshney who runs a company doing synthetic chemistry, he was good and he was okay with me being naive. He led me to some other clients in his network.

You know, there's a large element of serendipity around success, I think. I met him at a Life Science BC Christmas party—he liked a joke I told. A lot of times in the early stages a big part of it is selling yourself so be friendly, go to networking events.

JON:

Now I want to know what the joke was, but we won't put you on the spot.

BROCK:

It had to do with stereochemistry, you really had to be there. It's pretty niche.

JON:

Excellent. Thank you. Ravi, same question over to you.

RAVI:

You know, a great teacher is invaluable in this journey because there are so many hurdles and sometimes you don't know what you don't know. With the challenges of fundraising, the challenges of pitching and product market fit, that is a huge thing. It's one thing to raise money and then another thing to hit the product market fit and be profitable.

So, a good mentor is extremely valuable, and you need somebody who is honest and rooted in reality. You want somebody who's direct but at the same time compassionate and supportive. Canadians are sometimes too nice You want somebody who can help you navigate this tough journey as an entrepreneur in the first six years.

I was fortunate to work with Dr. Jeff Dahn, an extremely fantastic scientist. He's 65 or 66 right now and every day he's in the office from 7:30 to 4:30, sitting next to postdocs writing papers. You have to rub shoulders with the very best to understand what it really takes to be a profitable company. I would place a huge bet on some of these.

Another thing is, in Canada because of all the support systems that you have you also find a lot of consultants willing to offer you advice and leverage some of these programs. You need to understand what really gets you to product market fit but you have to still make your own decisions.

So a good mentor in this to help you scale beyond series B and go to IPO is an extremely valuable asset. If you're lucky, you will get it.

I hope everyone is lucky and gets that. 

JON:

Same question to you, Harsh. Thank you, Ravi.

HARSH:

I think for me, I’ve had multiple mentors over my last 10 years through different phases of my life. If you look at initially just doing my PhD, my professor was a great mentor, really inspired me to think outside of box and be bold and always supported me. From the teaching side and you know being a professor and fantastic mentor.

Then of course moving into a different phase of my life, trying to commercialize this, multiple mentors came. I named Jerome, one of the top ones on my list. He would just listen to me. I think sometimes you just need somebody to listen to all your frustrations. He would do that all day long. You need that kind of mentor who can actually just listen to you and understand your emotions and all that you're going through.

I would say that my board is really good. They are super smart people, from Stanford and Harvard and successful businesses, Mackenzie 10 years. I felt like I have a lot of stuff to learn from them. They've got quite a bit of experience.

One of the board members is already going through IPO and all of that and I'm still catching up in my learning. Some of my team members came from great companies like Intel. One of my team members is from Tesla. Even I was surprised when he joined Niricson, and he said, “I would like to join because what you guys are doing is just super cool and something that Tesla is not doing”.

Of course, it requires a deeper discussion to analyze this particular aspect to what he is saying, but it’s a huge inspiration. I'm learning a lot from him on some of the decisions he makes and I'm trying to see how I can make those kinds of decisions, how I can frame my decision metrics and how I can evaluate some of the thoughts that I'm having.

CDL and your family members, are also great mentors to you. I definitely consider them as mentors in my journey. They're just shaping different aspects of myself. I think of not just one mentor but so many.

JON:

Thanks, Harsh. I was just going to say excellent point on talent and attracting individuals from other larger companies that can add value as mentors and advisors. We could do a whole separate webinar on the talent piece and competing with top talent, but I'm keeping an eye on the time. Kritika over to you for a mentor or advisor that's had an impact.

KRITIKA:

I actually went through this mentorship program early on when we were solely focused on designing resins and I came across a couple of different mentors. I quickly realized mentorship is a little bit like dating, where you have to find the right mentor that works for you. What I mean by that is, you're learning from this individual, but you're also using them oftentimes as a soundboard.

As a founder, there are so many decisions we have to make and these decisions aren't made in silos. They impact the organization and the individuals that make up your team so they can be pretty heavy—some of the decisions that you have to make. It's so important to have the right mentor, one that you can pick up the phone and message and ask all of the questions to either get a sanity check or figure out how they went about the journey that you're currently at the very nascent stages of.

I actually worked with Dr. Chun-Yip Pang. He works at Clariant and he was incredibly helpful in helping me feel more comfortable in being a decision maker. And I think that's so key, especially at the very beginning of building your company because I've had to make so many decisions and being confident and comfortable with making those was definitely a key skill that I picked up from him.

I would say as founders, when you're looking for mentors think about what it is that you really want to get out of that mentorship. This is an individual that's offering their time to support your growth journey and the best thing that you can do for yourself and that individual is figure out what it is you want to get out of it and make sure that you ask a ton of questions. 

I did that quite a bit and it ended up being incredibly helpful. We still work with mentors and advisors and like Harsh said, they're going to be with you at different parts of your journey. They're going to shape different facets of you, both personally, as a founder and a leader.

I would say it never stops; you'll always look at places to find the right type of mentorship so always keep an eye on what it is that you really want to get out of that relationship. These relationships will last with you forever and they don't really leave your life after the mentorship is over.

JON:

Kritika, you mentioned that identifying the right mentor can be a little bit like dating. I've heard the same reference made for identifying the right investors.

We're getting to the top of the hour but, I want to give everybody an opportunity in 30 seconds to give a piece of advice or a cautionary tale around raising funding—when, why, how? So Kritika, I'll put you on the spot to go first this time—30 seconds on fundraising.

KRITIKA:

I think fundraising is always an interesting time. Once you fundraise, you're always fundraising. I would say, with every investor you meet, figure out what their investment thesis is and make sure that you're able to really position your startup within that thesis.

I think that's the key advice that I would say to every founder. It's something that we learned very early on, especially in our series A journey where a lot of VCs have a very strict thesis in terms of how they invest in companies and a lot of times it's not immediately clear. So, ask the right questions, really understand what it is.

If you don't see yourself fitting in that investment thesis, then maybe it's not the right relationship for you but, positioning yourself within that investment thesis is really going to make for a more successful series of conversations with whichever investor you're speaking with.

JON:

Love it. And the rule is as I go around the panel, you can't repeat what the person before you said. So, if you're going last, it's the trickiest. Harsh, you're up next.

HARSH:

I think I would suggest to focus on the customers, investors will follow. I think most of the founders get hung up in the investor cycle and keep focusing on the investors too much. I would advise to focus on the customer and the product. If the revenue is going in the direction that you want to take you will find the right investor. Of course, Kritika mentioned quite a bit of great stuff but I see the emphasis on the customers.

JON:

Excellent. I totally agree. Brock.

BROCK:

I did things wrong, in that I started pitching to some pretty big people long before I had any idea what investors wanted. I also took too long to consent to give away shares in the company to people who knew what investors wanted and were experienced in pitching to them. That's my take.

JON:

Good points. And last but not least, Ravi.

RAVI:

I actually echo what Harsh said. If you find the product market fit, then everything follows. But until you find that product market fit, you have to leverage the great ecosystem Canada has.

Whether it's Lab2Market, CDL, accelerators, Mitacs, use it until you hit the product market fit and always, benchmark yourself against the global companies. It's sometimes easy get stuck in our local ecosystem and say, okay, we had raised so much.

But until you start hitting revenue that can break even, that’s really the benchmark. What is the best money? It is customer's money.

JON:

Excellent.

HARSH:

Jon, just to add quickly, 10 seconds here, I think most of the people probably are not aware of the business plan competitions that so many universities in North America offer. They give out $5,000, $10,000. That could be your first money, non-dilutive funding. It is like a cash gift that is non-taxable so you can utilize that to hire your first intern.

In fact, it actually comes with great free mentorship along the way. I pitched to so many competitions, I lost many, but I also won many. I raised about $70,000 winning the competitions all while studying. I was learning about cap tables while studying and also making money to pay my intern. How great is that?

Jon: Exactly.

And most of those competitions at universities are non-dilutive. U of T is about to have our big $100,000 pitch competition in March. So, excellent point because they're scattered throughout North America.

We're going to end by giving you an opportunity to share a piece of advice to potential entrepreneurs on the call. This is scary. This is overwhelming. This is daunting, but it's also very rewarding and all four of you are examples of entrepreneurs who are making a real impact. So, the question is, What advice do you have for someone who's thinking about taking the leap?

JON:

Harsh will stick with you to go first.

HARSH:

Just do it. Don't think overthink, just do it.

JON: The Nike response. I like it. Ravi.

RAVI:

If you really know what it took to scale to IPO, you may never start. And that's definitely my case. So, I would say, as Harsh said, do it and you will learn a lot. It's a really rewarding process. So try it out. If you win, you'll build a great company. If not, you will come up with an excellent experience.

HARSH:

People think that they have something to lose, but they don't. They may only figure that out after years pass but, they literally had nothing to lose, only to gain.

When you think about the future, you ask this question, what if I have something to lose? It's not the case.

JON:

Well said. Brock?

BROCK: Yeah, it's rewarding if you're in a position where you can put some time and effort towards doing it. It's very rewarding and if you have an idea that you think is going to make you a lot of money, might as well try it out while you can.

The best is to do it when you're young and you can travel around lots.

JON:

Thanks, Brock. And Kritika. Bring us home.

KRITIKA:

I would say figure out what you're passionate about. It's a rewarding journey, but it's really hard. And if you're not passionate about it, it can burn you out quickly. Figure out what it is you love, what you're passionate about. Find your own voice, it's key to be able to speak to why you and why you're the right person to be building what you're building.

Find your voice, find your passion. I would highly recommend this journey to anyone that loves what they do and thinks they have an idea.

JON:

Excellent. Thank you so much. Thanks to all four of our panelists. I love this conversation and I’m sure we could easily go for another hour. Thank you for sharing your time and wisdom with everybody today. For those of you that have tuned in, thank you for spending an hour with us.

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