Where did you grow up, and what sparked your interest in entrepreneurship?
I grew up in New Hyde Park, on Long Island. I started at MIT as a freshman in Electrical Engineering, and I left twelve years later as a postdoc, also in Electrical Engineering!
I had a couple of experiences during that time that were formative—as part of my master’s program, I worked at IBM in Yorktown Heights, NY and in Japan for a year and half of those 12 years. These were terrific experiences to have as a student. I worked on displays and electronics at IBM. It was so great to be in an environment where everyone was smarter than me! The facilities, the people, and resources were unlike anything I had experienced.
I joined the faculty at Columbia in 2005, but my wife wasn’t done with her residency, so I delayed that for a year and helped a classmate from MIT to start his company, QD Vision. It was a great lesson in how to create a startup—finding office space, securing office furniture—all the nitty gritty details. I got to see how you start a company up close. That’s when I got the entrepreneurship bug.
I started at Columbia in 2006 and I’ve been an engineering professor since then. My main job is research—I study a field that a lot of people rely on but maybe don’t think about. It’s called thin film electronics.
Most people, if they think about the engineering behind electronics, they think about silicon material that is made into crystals and cut into plates, from which we can make all kinds of devices. But another whole area of electronics that we use all the time is in displays—think of a big piece of glass with millions of transistors. That field is called thin film electronics—that’s what I work on. The biggest display markets for thin film technologies are things like TVs and smartphones—those all use thin film transistors to facilitate the individual elements that operate the devices. Or, for example, when you get an x-ray at urgent care, they are using a screen the size of the human body—that’s also relying upon thin film electronics. We’ve had six companies spun out of my lab; it’s always been a student or postdoc that has licensed the intellectual property and created the company. Some I’m more involved in than others, and five of those six are still operational.
Tell me about I-Corps at Columbia. What motivated you to become an I-Corps instructor?
I was a student in the first National I-Corps cohort! Back in 2012, the NSF put out the call to scientists, asking, do you want to commercialize? My colleague and I thought it sounded like a great opportunity. We signed up for the program having zero idea of what it would be, and we went out to California to participate. We were in cohort number one! Based on that experience and conducting 100 stakeholder interviews, we started a company, Lumiode. It’s still around, and it develops technologies for microLED displays—a new flavor of displays. I was really sold on it.
As I-Corps evolved and NSF created regional I-Corps Nodes, [Columbia Professor] Chris Wiggins was the PI here at Columbia. He’s well connected and has several software startups. He had asked me to participate in our cohorts and speak to participants. During the last renewal of the NYCRIN-Node, Chris asked me to take his place running the I-Corps and related programs in 2020. And now I’m the PI/co-PI for the New York NSF I-Corps Hub.
At Columbia I-Corps, we run a program that’s a four-session boot camp—we do one per quarter. It’s three weeks long with four sessions. We begin with an in-person event on the first or second day, which really helps to kick start the teams, and helps to answer questions and get them rolling. We go over all the elements of the business model canvas, such as determining your value proposition, how to interview people, what do the value chain and ecosystem look like. We do a lot of recruiting events and try to average about 15 teams per boot camp. More than that can be difficult to manage. We try to select teams that come into I-Corps prepared for the program. We also provide instructors for cohorts around the country.
What’s the latest on your other I-Corps companies?
I’ve participated in I-Corps three times, and each time it has led to founding a company. It’s a very effective program. In addition to Lumiode, the other two companies are also still moving forward. Lelantos, which develops gas sensors for environmental and air quality monitoring, has raised some funding both from strategic investors and a few angels. There is a team of three working full time with the company, and they're looking to hire two more soon. Tangible Robotics is developing high dexterity robotic hands based on technology developed in my lab and Matei Ciocarle's lab. Tangible is still in the early stages but is working on building a team and raising its first dilutive funding.
What question do you wish entrepreneurs asked?
Often teams wait too long because they feel like they must be further in their journey to participate. But you don't even need to have a complete team; it’s better not to wait too long to do a bootcamp.
Our bootcamp welcomes anyone, you don’t have to be a student at Columbia. Sometimes we get innovators from other schools because our schedule happens to work better for them. Our participants are mostly from Columbia because that’s where we are recruiting from. We recruit participants through on-campus events, mostly coffees or lunches where we can answer questions and chat. The last one we did was at the medical center. One of the leaders of the group had graduated from an I-Corps cohort and was excited to evangelize about it.
Some people really overthink the application process; they think they must have a product ready to go forward. But our bootcamp is about understanding the needs of your potential customer.
After learning about so many different customer markets, can you share a market or customer challenge that still requires a solution you’re hoping to see?
One of the things we see a lot of is, for example, the idea of offering a service that corrects your school assignments using Artificial Intelligence (AI)—that’s the value proposition. We hope they learn that how you do it is almost secondary. Maybe it is AI, if that enables you to do something more cheaply, then maybe that’s a good business plan. But the participants should forget about a trend like AI; the customer doesn’t care if it’s AI. The customer gets value by having their problem solved.
I think there’s enormous opportunity for solutions in affordable housing, childcare, education, and healthcare. Take affordable housing—we have a national crisis, in cities but outside of them as well. There’s a need to make the apartment rental system better and more efficient, and to manage mobility in cities. There are a lot of opportunity for financial services improvements. Small companies and startups can help with solutions.
What’s the biggest surprise you’ve experienced as an I-Corps instructor?
Sometimes the team comes in with a problem and it’s not clear whether there’s really the need, that there’s somewhere they can go. It’s impressive what they can dig up and uncover, they dig deep and meet people I would not have expected. That’s great. Sometimes it uncovers a closely related problem, and that’s what they pursue. A great example is from a team that was working on a carbon negative cement. While it seemed like easy win to help protect the environment, it was especially illuminating to learn that for some customers, the carbon negative material had to be cost-free, and others could pay a premium for it. The team also discovered that several possible customers had a budget available for sustainability, whereas for others that was a “nice to have,” and that had a large impact on how the product and a company would need to be structured.
What advice would you give to I-Corps participants?
Don’t wait too long to apply and participate, and don’t overthink your application! It’s better to get started and see where I-Corps can take you. I think it’s useful to speak with previous participants about their experience. That can help new teams to be more prepared when they start their customer discovery.
I also think it helps to go into the first session of I-Corps with a list of people that you want to interview, that you think might be customers, and vet those with the I-Corps team. You might learn enough to refine that list or make those interviews more useful. That can save time; instead of starting over with the next round, you can accelerate your process.
Can you share a recent accomplishment?
I’m very proud of the progress that all the students in my lab are making. I’m also very involved with the Society for Information Display, I’m the current president, and I’ll go to all six of their conferences this year. I really enjoy that; it’s great to see what’s going on. Recently, one of my students, Oliver Durnan, won a best paper prize at one of those conferences. That paper described research he had done in my lab. That was exciting—I’m proud of him.
What are you reading (or hoping to read soon)?
I don’t read a lot, but my wife is a big reader; at her suggestion I read Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. It’s about management and company culture. I was so impressed by it that I bought Kindle copies for all the students in my lab to download, and then we discussed it.
What do you do to relax?
I have four kids, and I love spending time with my family. I also love to bake—mostly bread. I bake bread every few days. I got into it as a postdoc. During Covid, when a lot of people got into baking, I was sharing my sourdough starter with everyone. Baking is always there for you, and my family loves our carbs!