Executive Muscles and Scar Tissue
Sharing my experience as an EIR at Cyclotron Road
I started my first venture-backed company — a robotics startup — in 2013. Our first funding was a DARPA grant that was canceled about 2.8 years and $8M too soon. But we made it work. We brought on our first contract manufacturing partner too soon. But we made it work. The entire business was pointed at what we thought was a promising market, but we were too early, and so we had to iterate on our product several times. Again, we made it work. I sold the business in 2017 and agreed to stay on as CEO for an additional year.
Running that company for five years, I never slowed down long enough to reflect on what was happening to me. I lived in survival mode. When I stepped down last June, I was pretty sure all I could handle was sleeping.
It wasn’t until I became an executive-in-residence (EIR) that I realized the value of all the executive-level muscle and scar tissue I had built along the way. While I don’t think there are any shortcuts to this type of education, here are a few insights from my time as founder that crystallized during my time at Cyclotron Road.
There is no right answer
When I got to the Bay Area, I was scientist with a freshly minted materials science Ph.D. and didn’t understand — or respect — the differences between sales, marketing, business development, and branding. Now, I’m a businessperson. I readily gave up my identity as the most technical person in the room. I can’t even remember the last time I made a decision that relied on the graduate degree I worked so hard to get.
“The number one thing I had to get comfortable with was making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information.”
As a scientist, I learned to be exact, to be certain, and to be precise. If I had stayed that way, my startup would have failed immediately. The number one thing I had to get comfortable with was making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information. This is the first and most painful thing that successful technical founders go through. I can tell when people are stuck in that indecisive place. They keep trying to optimize. They keep digging for that perfect report or market data that will make everything seem less scary, but it never comes, and they burn precious runway and bandwidth while avoiding a decision. To be a successful founder, you have to learn to harness the physical signal in your body that tells you when a pathway becomes good enough, rather than relying on perfect data.
To put it another way, you can’t run a business on intellect alone. I had to learn to trust my hunches and all those feelings that there aren’t words to describe. The most fun part of working at Cyclotron Road was pushing people to leverage their emotions more. Your feelings, the tension in your body, the temperature in the room — leveraging these non-thinking signals is a superpower. The more technical people are, the more practice and encouragement they need to tap into those feelings and learn to trust them. The body has so much wisdom, and during my time as EIR, I realized that I’d been relying heavily on it for years without even noticing.
“There’s no truth inside these walls”
The first professional I hired for marketing taught me something important: “there’s no truth inside these walls.” It means that your team can talk amongst itself all day about your product or strategy or business model, but until you go out there in the world and talk with real customers, market experts, and investors, you’re just guessing. For most scientists, talking with the outside world about their work is a new experience.
“If you can’t answer, ‘what is this?’ in three sentences, you have a problem.”
When I was in graduate school, I worked on fundamental chemistry of materials for lithium ion batteries for six years before I ever talked to a real company about licensing what I had made. This is the norm for an academic researcher. The distance between you and the end user of your technology is very large when you’re a researcher. If you can’t answer, “what is this?” in three sentences, you have a problem. There’s no free pass just because your thing is technical. Answering that question should be a daily exercise.
Cyclotron Road fellows have an edge because they are always around someone from the outside world — in fact, the outside world comes to them every week, through a lunch-speaker program. Having one-on-one meetings with these visitors, who come from all sides of the science-entrepreneur ecosystem, helps fellows hone their messages and understand their markets.
Being part of a network is important
The transition to businessperson wasn’t easy and every painful lesson was necessary. That’s why places like Cyclotron Road are important. It’s better to go through hard transitions in life with great people by your side, especially if those people are in a network that will benefit your company.
Startup success is 60% network, 30% execution, and 10% idea. You need the network to find all your key hires, first customers, future investors, and experts who teach you things faster than you can learn on your own. With a network, you get to stand on the shoulders of others to reach your goal. Execution is about discipline and saying no. Ideas are cheap.
“The shift from Ph.D. to startup founder isn’t for the weak-hearted, and has little to do with learning the mechanics of business and everything to do with how long you can keep your shit together.”
Cyclotron Road is the most welcoming and supportive network of hard-tech startups I’ve come across. It also has an awesome team to help accelerate the progress of its companies. The most important thing, though, is that it feels good to be there. You are family from day one, and the network is open for you to access. The shift from Ph.D. to startup founder isn’t for the weak-hearted, and has little to do with learning the mechanics of business and everything to do with how long you can keep your shit together. Being in the right network helps you survive much longer.
My next company: Daughters of Rosie
The last thing I realized during my time as EIR was just how much energy I still have. It didn’t take long after leaving my last company before I was able to handle a lot more than sleeping. It was great to be surrounded by new companies at Cyclotron Road and to catch the entrepreneurial bug again. I thought about taking a corporate job and having a boss. I even interviewed to see what was out there, but ultimately I’m a founder and CEO at heart. I learned fundamental business lessons with my last company, made an irreversible transition out of science, and I feel good about it.
So I decided to found a new company. Daughters of Rosie is the first professional network that supports working-class women by putting them in teams and getting them manufacturing jobs. Out of the three companies I’ve co-founded, this is the first one based upon my idea, and this time I have the muscles and scar tissue to knock it out of the park.
