|
Interview by Ebanee Bond The entrepreneur community is quickly growing, especially with the extra time everyone has seen in the past year. We are able to slow down for a second and rethink our steps from our past and rethink our future. Learning never ends, and what better way to learn than to hear from I-Corps participants and local entrepreneurs Nathaniel Hawk, CEO and Founder of Xadite Perceptions and Xadite Quantum, and Alireza Bagheri, CEO and Founder of G-Angel, who spoke with UARF's EbaNee Bond about their own journey and experiences through entrepreneurship. What is your field of study and what inspired you to it? Alireza: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. So, my father is an electrician. I grew up with electrical tools around the house. As a kid, I used to fix my game consoles when I was 8 years old. My father encouraged us to study electrical engineering, and here I am. Nate: Electrical Engineering. My grandpa is an electrical engineer and his dad was a mechanical engineer. It’s weird, but engineers run back through our family. I think it’s kind of how our minds work; We take things apart and can learn how the systems work. When I was younger, when something broke like a computer or a lawn mower I would take it apart, figure out why it’s not working and fix it. What word/title would you use to describe yourself? Why? Nate: An applied researcher. I value fundamental research a lot, but now I really enjoy making practical products out of existing research. There’s soooo much research and a huge chunk that is untapped. Today, my day to day role is more like a Project Manager. Alireza: A problem-solver. When I see a problem, it gets me involved. What’s your day to day look like? Nate: I wear a lot of hats and I have a lot of interest in different things. I’ve tried to section it out into different days. Alireza: Wearing plenty hats too. There are days that I am writing a proposal for a grant or funding. Another time, I am writing codes for the prototype. Or, I am reading medical papers on the effect of Intravenous medications for different medical conditions. Or, I am preparing for a pitch or a technical presentation. Or, I am having a chat with potential customers. At the same time, I have responsibilities as a graduate teaching assistant too. And this list of tasks goes on and on. Sports and traveling is a part of my life too. I try different sports and I like competitive group sports like volleyball. I recently joined sailing and surfing club that’d be a new thing for me.  When you wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, how are you currently feeling about the day? Alireza: Sometimes I feel accomplished, sometimes defeated, sometimes hopeless, sometimes excited. Different sorts of feelings but I continue on. Nate, I saw you nodding your head when he said defeated… Nate: Honestly, I don’t even want to add anything to that! I think we’re completely on the same page there. It’s fun and scary at the same time. I was about to start a project that came with a lot of money and the scariest part is thinking, “If I do this and it fails, then what happens?” Like, I have no idea. Part of you wants to be like I can do this, but then the question is, can you? We’ll see... Alireza: I always believe that I can do it... it’s just a matter of time. What’s it like being a solopreneur? Nate: I worked for two years alone and when you’re trying to do everything by yourself, you feel you have to learn so much and give it 150%. It’s really exhausting and your overall progress is terrible. Alireza: It is hard to be a solopreneur. But sometimes there’s no option. I am lucky to meet Nate, Gopal, Kev, Elyse, Jim and many more who helped me in my startup. Nate, what’s it like now having a team? Nate: It’s awesome. The team at Xadite Perceptions is phenomenal, they inspire me each day we work together and I could not be more lucky to have them with me. Cole and Tom Sutyack are focused on the development of AI and signal processing algorithms for our systems. My brother Ben is focused on developing the user interfaces and user experience of the resulting data. I am focused on working with our customers to specify and develop the overall hardware, antennas, antenna arrays and algorithms for these systems. In the process of prototyping low cost waveguide antenna arrays for our passive radar systems, I have developed a metalized plastic solution that results in incredibly light weight high performance plastic waveguide antenna arrays. I believe this and future techniques will enable us to produce high performance waveguide antenna arrays for all sorts of radar systems in a number of industries. Now that I can delegate and have others help, collectively, we’re making like 10-100x more progress, but each of us are not having to put as much effort into it. It just makes sense but until you do it, your gut reaction is like, ‘I can do this, I can do this entire thing!’ But no, it’s not how you should do it. What does collaboration look like with each other? Nate: After I-Corps, we started talking about stuff and I told him his project was really interesting. I had a lot of availability and I offered to help him with a prototype of his automatic injection system if he would like to help me with customer discovery and product-market fit since his customer discovery was aaamazing in I-Corps! Haha. We were reaching out to some pretty high level people in the automotive industry, including the CEO of R&D in Mercedes. It’s been said that there are two types of people, lions and gazelles. I would say that with Ali and I working together, it’s like two lions. It sounds like it’s bad but it’s not. It’s a good thing because we’re constructively criticizing each other. We both have very different perspectives and we both feel strongly about what we’re working on. Alireza: Constructive and complementary. Nate is a talented engineer… I would say he’s bright and passionate about the technical part of the project. When I’m talking to him about a technical problem, he gets involved for some time, and he always comes up with a solution. I am focused more on the business side. I can see what problems we can solve with our technology and based on that we reach out to potential customers to form a business model or iterate. At the same time, we are both electrical engineers. When necessary we get on with the project and work on it together.  What’s it like balancing being a student and running a startup?
Alireza: It’s challenging. The best scenario is to work on your startup product as your thesis or dissertation topic in school. But the problem is you usually cannot have agility in thesis/dissertation topic, but you need agility in product development as a startup. Also there are requirements in school that not only doesn’t help you in your project but slows you down as a startup. My first masters’ thesis was related to my startup but after doing around 100 interviews, we found that there’s a bigger problem that we could solve so we pivoted the technology toward that problem but, I couldn’t pivot my research project to that topic. I wish there were more flexibility with that. What do you wish you knew as freshmen coming into school? Nate: My advice would be to take specific classes that you’re interested in. When it came to research, at first I just wanted to do research and then I wound up getting connected with Dr. Jutta Luettmer-Strathmann; I can’t even say how much she transformed me and that was all just through our research together. Then I started working on applying some of our electromagnetics research with Dr. Ryan Christopher Toonen and I just liked electromagnetics and the experiments a little more. I just kept making decisions that way. All of those experiences will change the way you do what you do. If you just take classes and maybe you don’t care about them and stuff like that, it’s going to prepare you to be that person. So then the question is, when you graduate and you didn’t like what you did, are you going to like that person? I think that’s where people get into trouble basically, but maybe that’s too much a generalization. Even as an electrical engineer it’s stressful and it’s much different from just the theory. It still kind of amplifies what you did in college. So if you didn’t like what you did in college, then it would amplify it so you’re really not going to like it, but if you did kind of like what you did in college, then it could amplify that. Alireza: The importance of networking and trying different projects. I would suggest spending most of the time finding what you are passionate about by trying different projects and solving different problems. Alireza, how do you think you find your passion? Alireza: I was given a book in 2010. It was about business and startups. And after finishing that I read more similar books. After two years of reading and learning about startups and marketing, I decided to start my first startup. I saw a problem that I felt I could fix it. As undergraduate students at the best university in the state I was living at, we had financial problems and I founded an online tutor request website to create jobs for my peer college students. We faced problems, and I could not continue in the startup. But for that time, I really enjoyed it. In 2016, I faced another problem in the healthcare that really bothered me. I didn’t know anything about the healthcare industry at that time, but I really felt that healthcare needs to be improved! Since 2016, I started reading about medical projects, startups, and biology and we come across the problem of accessibility and accuracy of venous access for drug infusion and blood sampling. IV access is performed over 1 billion times each year, and yet it is only available by a few trained personnel, and the accuracy depends on the person’s experience. We are developing a portable automated venipuncture to address this problem. It has not been an easy journey and there’s not been many rewards, but I feel that someone needs to solve this problem. And I enjoy trying to solve it. Their journey is not done yet. Look forward to next week for the second part of the interview to hear how these past I-Corps participants found funding and advice to new entrepreneurs. If their story inspires you to follow their path, join us this weekend for the spring where you can hear I-Corps Kick Off to hear local business ideas and learn about their process of becoming an entrepreneur.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
RSS Feed