Fireside Chat with John Finney from Isotropic Systems
Inspired by Roman nanotechnology, Isotropic Systems is changing the global connectivity and communications landscape. Founder and CEO John Finney joined the ATI Boeing Accelerator for a fireside chat where we talked about the early days of the business, receiving support from strategic investor Boeing HorizonX Global Ventures, and building in a diversity and inclusion strategy from day one.
We kicked off by learning more about John’s background. Having spent 25 years in the telecoms sector (with half of his time spent on ground base terrestrial communications), John brought Huawei into Europe for the first time and took them to their first billion in revenue. He then moved across into the satellite industry working at medium Earth orbit satellite constellation O3B, which stood for the “Other 3 billion” of the population of the world where broadband internet is not available. They went on to raise 1.5 billion USD and launch 12 MEO satellites around the world, before exiting to SES for 2.7 billion USD in 2016. By that time, the scientific research that he personally invested in was starting to become very interesting and so Isotropic was born.
How did the idea for Isotropic come about?
Curiosity and the Romans! During my time at O3B, I was told by many engineers in the satellite industry that trying to multiply the performance of existing antennas into one single device that could operate in such a way that it can connect to many satellites at once was impossible, at least at the level of performance that I was looking for. I thought to myself: why is it like that and what would it take to change that? I hired the best consultants in the world to help me find out. I made some personal investments to try and inform my thinking as to why that problem has never yet been solved with the current technology in the industry, and it made me appreciate that the only way to find the answer was to go outside of the industry and look for alternative technologies and potential technologies in emerging scientific fields.
I came across the Lycurgus Cup, an object that is essentially a glass vase that is gilded in gold, made by the Romans in the fourth century. What is amazing about this object is that if you shine a light through the front, it glows a magnificent ruby red, and if you shine a light through the back, it glows a brilliant olive green. Only in the last 20 years have we come to understand that the Romans, (we still don’t know how!), chemically shaped millions of silver and gold particles, each one about one-thousandth the size of a grain of salt, and each chemically shaped, squared and beveled at the edges then perfectly distributed within the glass vase so that the glass appears different colors as the light bounces off the metal within the glass. What you see as a result is essentially one degree of refraction on the visible light spectrum. It is essentially an optical illusion that’s carefully put together with the materials.
This triggered my interest because what you’re seeing with this is the ability to bend light using materials and that sent me off to go and talk to Corning — one of the world’s leading innovators in materials science. That led me to the scientific field of transformational optics, which the Lycurgus Cup helped pioneer and I ended up talking to professors all around the world that specialise in that scientific field. The lightbulb moment for me was if you can bend light using materials, surely you could bend radio in much the same way, and therefore, create an optical structure invisible to microwave that can bend radio in many different directions. In doing so, could we potentially connect to many satellites at once? Genuinely, the initial inspiration came from something that dates back to 400 AD. — it set off a process of discovery and here we are.
The question you have to ask yourself is: What does the world look like when it’s done? Does it fit? And is it still likely to be valuable? You have to think critically about that, because too many founders get hooked on their own idea in the ‘here and now’
In the early days, founders often find themselves at a crossroad trying to figure out which way to go, receiving different advice from different people. What is the best way to identify the best direction to go in?
As a founder, you have to be building something new that nobody has ever done before and nobody is going to give you a map. If I think back to that moment, and any moment where you start a new venture, I would say never underestimate the speed of innovation. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how great your idea is, you have to appreciate that there are likely many others that are innovating at the same rate or faster than you are. So what do you do with that? The trick is to figure out how long it will take your idea to fully develop, and you have to be realistic about that. If you take Isotropic, we’ll burn through roughly 100 to 130 million pounds to fully develop our products, set up manufacturing, before we receive the first dollar in revenue from a customer. That takes time, it takes several funding rounds and the achievement of an enormous amount of technical milestones so you have to be realistic about that. The question you have to ask yourself is, what does the world look like when it’s done? Does it fit? And is it still likely to be valuable? You have to think critically about that, because too many founders get hooked on their own idea in the ‘here and now’, on that day, it may well solve a massive problem. In reality, when it’s developed, much further out into the future, it’s then trying to fit into an entirely new world and your job as a founder is to make sure that your idea today, is still relevant at the speed of innovation by the time the product is ready. So, as cliché as it is, start with the end in mind.
What steps should founders take to successfully scale their business?
It all comes down to mental attitude. Essentially, startups are like young children. They are emerging, getting stronger, going into adolescence, and then adulthood before they figure out their place in life. At the beginning, you have nothing to pare back your ambition or your enthusiasm which is great. In reality, as you develop into adolescence, you start to think, what am I really good at? What do I enjoy? Who do I like to interact with? How am I going to fit in? That’s the process into adulthood, you go from a position of being able to do anything and everything to figuring out what you’re really good at and how to fit into the world around you, and the same thing happens to startups.
In the case of Isotropic, we started with the intention to bridge the digital divide. Through better understanding our highest value, over time and over funding rounds, you’re continuously asking yourself — where do I fit in the ecosystem? You stop using a narrative which says, in the early stage, we have an invention and it can solve the world’s problems on every level. You adapt to become much more focused on how you can make the most impact and you recognise the capabilities of the ecosystem, including your competition. The more you accept that this is what others are looking for in you, the better and stronger you become because you’re losing naivety and becoming very focused on the things that as a company, and with your technology, you are brilliant at. There are two types of founders in my view, one that recognises that that’s part of the journey and they embrace it; and there are other founders that don’t and they tend not to stick around because it tends to lead those companies towards a crisis.
This year Isotropic announced a 40 million USD investment from specialised space investors Orbital Ventures, UK Government’s Future Fund, and existing investors Boeing HorizonX Global Ventures, Space Angels, and Firmament Ventures. How has the Boeing HorizonX team in particular supported you on your journey so far? For our ATI Boeing Accelerator portfolio companies, how should they make the most of their relationship with Boeing?
To start with, I went to Boeing, because of their relevance to everything that we did. For me, they were a natural first choice and we’re incredibly lucky to get their support. Their leadership is specialised in defence platforms, satellite manufacturing, robotics, automation, and connected autonomous vehicles. I set out a vision that Isotropic can play a lead role in the world when it comes to connecting machines as well as people, which is also in Boeing’s wheelhouse. They understand what we are trying to do and how it can benefit them and others within the ecosystem. Their motivations are very clear, it’s trying to make the satellite and the space ecosystem stronger, and they believe that we play a key role in that.
Boeing is also a good example of active board involvement, from financing, production, access to supply chain, peer review, technical reviews to introductions to Phantom Works, business units, commercial aviation teams, and doors that frankly, a small company like Isotropic might never be able to open. It’s been a real honour to receive that type of support from Boeing, as is the case with all of the other investors on the board.
One of the things that has impressed me about Boeing is the way you get introduced to the right people at speed, you get connected in a professional way very quickly. All you need to do is ask and explain your motivations. Suddenly, you don’t feel as though you’re trying to navigate around a company that has 100,000 people or more but more like a company of 100 and getting straight to the people that matter. Of course, it’s down to the portfolio founders to spend time with their Boeing HorizonX board members or observers and tap into this unprecedented opportunity to be able to navigate around Boeing. Not necessarily to seek out new business but to ask for advice or get a peer review on a particular topic. Boeing’s resources are vast and the way that they allow portfolio companies to access these resources is incredibly special.
What has your approach to building partnerships been like? What would be your advice for early-stage founders that are still trying to get their foot in the door with certain customers?
Some of our introductions were made by Boeing, or by one or two of our other investors. For example, with the defence innovation unit project (where we’re designing our technology into the USS Zumwalt, where they have particularly advanced needs), our first engagement was met with a level of skepticism, rightly so because what we’re doing is radically different to what’s already out there. When you have someone like Boeing in the room with you to support you, suddenly, the penny drops and the client starts to realise what we have. Through that credibility, with Boeing willing to stand behind what we’re doing and present the technology to what is one of their most important customers, it is so valuable to have these opportunities.
With my background and the experience of the leadership team, our knowledge in the commercial space sector brings about new opportunities too. There are so many new satellite systems in construction now at different orbits like LEO, MEO, GEO, and HEO. This stems from entrepreneurs like Elon Musk removing the launch bottleneck in the sector. We used to be limited to three launch providers and now, a few things have changed. Launch vehicles are now reusable so it’s possible to launch thousands of satellites in an affordable way.
Today, satellites are made in days, not years, and the result of that is that the space sector has become much more accessible. All of these systems have been built in those four orbits totaling tens of thousands of satellites over the next three or four years, and not one of those satellite systems can talk to any other system from space. And that’s where we come in. We create a single antenna that can connect to all of those satellites at once, combine the best attributes of each and deliver that to the end customer, and it is because of that unique proposition, we are lucky — in the sense that many of those satellite operators are actively engaging with us because we’re working towards something that is absolutely what they need.
Isotropic started in 2013. How has the team grown since then? What would be your hiring advice for early-stage startups?
Hiring is always a challenge. Your company culture is based on the people that you bring along. Founders tend to have a typical mindset of getting the ball over the line, and actually, I think this is the reason why many founders don’t become the CEOs. In the beginning, that kind of thinking is absolutely the right thing and probably the only way that you can be successful. Then, all of a sudden, you have access to capital and you are scaling up and you need to adapt. You need to get into the process of listening and learning from your own team and accessing the enormous amount of experience that they bring along and through that, over time, the company gets stronger and stronger.
From a founder or a CEO point of view, you should think deeply about diversity and inclusion from day one. Diversity and inclusion is not something that you should retroactively put into your business, you should do it from day one. At Isotropic, we bring in outside specialists to help coach teams to become high-performance teams, and my advice is to try and create a platform for all of your employees to participate and engage in the things that matter to them, not necessarily what matters to you.
This is an area where I’m still continuously learning as a founder and where my colleagues are continuously teaching me. It’s a process of trying to make sure that you hire to have the highest possible engagement in the company so that when you do get those bumps in the road, when you face a higher challenge, you’re not on your own, which is what tends to happen with founders, you have this phenomenal strong team that can tackle anything that’s in front of them. It’s starting with the end in mind and thinking about the company that you want to be right from the very beginning. That means that every hiring decision that you make is very deliberate, thought out, and focuses on the bigger picture of when we’re really successful, and we’re much larger, what type of company do I really want to be operating? And working towards that.
You need to get into the process of listening and learning from your own team and accessing the enormous amount of experience that they bring along and through that, over time, the company gets stronger and stronger.
What are your next steps and what can we expect to see from Isotropic over the next two to three years?
We are delivering our first antenna products to SES and a few defence customers at the end of this year, and that goes into a very rigorous six-month cycle of field trials, demonstrations, and pilots. That takes us through to the summer of 2022, and that’s when we’ll launch our first product. We launch our products through the voice of our customers, I know it will be an industry wow moment and a massive achievement for the Isotropic team here that is working so hard to get that product out. We have development contracts with the US Navy, the US Army, SES, Inmarsat, and many others. In commercial and in defence, we have a lot of traction and a tonne of support. This is coming from those early customers that see our product reach the market, which is fantastic because it obviously indicates there’s a tonne of demand for what we’re doing.
As a founder, there’s nothing better than seeing our team work together to build up every component of this fantastic antenna that we’re building. I look forward to the day where we see it on trains, planes, coaches, and yachts and you can see people using this technology for the first time and doing things that they could never do before. We’re one year from product launch and we’re on track, despite everything that’s happened with COVID. The Isotropic team did such an amazing job of holding the line and managing to work remotely which honestly, blows me away how they have accomplished that given the circumstances. We’re massively excited to be involved in some of the biggest satellite network deployments the world’s ever seen.
Thanks to John for talking to our ATI Boeing Accelerator community about building and scaling Isotropic across sectors and sharing his advice for early-stage founders. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s next for the team and we’re excited for their commercial launch in 2022!
Follow Isotropic on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date with their work.
If you would like to contact the programme delivery team, our details are below:
Gabi Matic — gabi@metta.partners | linkedin.com/in/gabrielamatic
Wil Benton — wil@metta.partners | linkedin.com/in/fatkidonfire
Ksenia Kurileva — ksenia@metta.partners | linkedin.com/in/kseniakurileva
If you have questions for the ATI, please e-mail: nour.eid@ati.org.uk
