Engineer Sam Hessenauer Rejoins Nanome to Launch Matryx

After Leadership Program with GE, we welcome back Sam

Sam Hessenauer graduated from UC San Diego in 2016 with a degree in Electrical Engineering with a concentration on Machine Learning and Control Systems. He served for 2015 as the Chief Financial Officer with Nanome while it was called NanoVR.

Sam will be returning to Nanome in a blockchain engineering role. We did some catching up with him, and where he’s been, and wanted to share with you some of Sam’s views on blockchain, virtual reality, Nanome and Matryx.

How did you get involved with Nanome?

SH: I met [Nanome founder] Steve [McCloskey] while playing rugby at UC San Diego. He was the rugby team captain.

Afterwards, while I was doing internships with robotics at the Port of Long Beach, he was telling me about this broad artistic idea he had for the merger of virtual reality and nanotechnology. He had procured lab space at UCSD NanoEngineering. When my internship came to an end, I finally had the free time to learn more.

I spent time with Steve and NanoVR (now called Nanome) and realized how awesome the idea was once I saw the grand vision.

What was your focus at that time?

SH: We needed to validate our idea. We had to see if this broad, interdisciplinary idea was a viable business model, and what our business model would look like in the future. We attended various incubators. We joined a UC San Francisco National Science Foundation-grade incubator with Simon Cowell-style judges, who aggressively trained startups on receiving interviews, holding client interviews, running a lean operation and understanding their business markets and role.

This inspired Steve and I to knock on the door of every biotechnology company within a 25 mile radius of our headquarters at UC San Diego until we had been to almost every wet lab. Through this process, we identified those organizations and roles which could truly benefit from what we have. Our scope had really narrowed after that.

We then attended Von-liebig center center. Our mentor there would become one of our advisors. We went through and did something similar as our experience in the previous incubators. [Nanome Chief Operating Officer] Keita [Funakawa] and I attended and graduated from the Basement incubator at UC San Diego, as well.

As a VR company two years ago, what was the tech like, and were there many developers in the space?

SH: We realized that, although there was a slew of commercial VR headsets being released, such as DK2 for Oculus, there was no pipeline for VR talent into our company. We decided to start a virtual reality club on campus. The remainder of the year I spent bootstrapping the club. We secured funding for the first dedicated VR club at a college in the country, which is still going strong at UC San Diego. It quickly exploded to 100+ people when we first started it. A lot of talent at Nanome has come from that club.

I was then offered a job by General Electric (GE) for the Software Development Leadership Program, which is a rotational six month program to refine skills and become a leader in software engineering . I was busy with what would become Nanome at that time, and was not looking for a job. I asked for more than I thought they would be willing to give, but they accepted my request- so I moved to the Bay Area.

What did you do during your time with GE?

SH: At first, I made a couple rotations as a full stack software engineer and a program manager for Mergers and Acquisitions. While serving in the latter capacity, organizational changes and family emergencies allowed me to take a role akin to Interim Director of M&A.

I then went into the software platform operations team which included feature release planning and execution for 800 engineers, all of whom were orchestrating dozens of products in their own groups. I worked on software life cycle, end of life services, and led the engineering partnership between GE and Microsoft Azure for integration of Office365, PowerBI, and Active Directory into GE’s industrial software platform.

I also served in a technology and investment role as a financial analyst. My role there was initially to support the team. I quickly became responsible for contributing to the entire future of the business model for the software arm of GE, GE Digital. Having the people who know the technology in the room to help guide the financial models ended up being critical, as the need for clarification on technical specifics was at an all time high. Then, I left GE to come back to San Diego.

Is that when you returned to Nanome?

SH: Yes. I realized that what drew me to the Bay Area was an immense opportunity with GE, and that was why I left Nanome. I knew coming back that there would not be another opportunity like I had before. So, what was truly stopping me from going back to the company I helped start and truly care about?

Steve, Keita, and I decided to explore a way of working together. The company by this time had much of the virtual reality software developed, and needed help in its blockchain engineering department. Fortunately, I have been in the blockchain space since 2011 and had already capitalized off of Bitcoin in 2013. I had some previous experience with that at GE doing a few blockchain projects on the side since I was able to work on certain projects of my choosing. I also had been practicing Solidity and learning Ethereum development for quite awhile.

Today, my focus is on guiding and implementing the blockchain development with the other engineers towards the long term vision.

What do you like about developing on blockchain?

SH: My favorite part of blockchain, specifically the Ethereum network, is how it’s a global open virtual machine. Ethereum is a turing-complete language so I can write full-fledged applications. I can write an application that is hosted and run by millions of nodes all over the world. The fact that it has 100% security, immutability, and so on make it truly an amazing feat.

A decentralized internet is definitely the future — Web 3.0.

What is your vision for Nanome’s blockchain endeavors with its decentralized collaboration platform, Matryx?

SH: We have the next 3–5 years planned out based on our impressions of where the technology is going. We are focused on building out our core platform around what will come forward from the future of the web 3.0 infrastructure. Because of this, we face a hindrance to our development cycle in terms of everything being fully decentralized tomorrow. This won’t happen until we see robust and decentralized implementations of infrastructure chains such as Storj or Filecoin, which serve as decentralized storage. It will take time for these core web3.0 infrastructure implementations to come to fruition.

This reality leads us to incorporating, for now, a certain few of industry-standard centralized services to fill in certain gaps in the Ethereum infrastructure. We will continue to integrate the future platform with decentralized products as they become available and economical. This is what gets us all the most excited.