Q&A with Our Newest Managing Director, Tom Boussie
The Cyclotron Road team has grown significantly over the past year to support exciting new initiatives and partnerships. But our most recent hire fills a role that is essential to our core mission as a fellowship program for entrepreneurial scientists and engineers, the managing director for technology. This role acts as a chief mentoring officer — someone who can serve as a vital sounding board and guide to our fellows as they negotiate the demands of being a technical entrepreneur. This position requires someone who not only possesses technology and business chops in equal measure, but who also bears the battle scars from having nurtured a hard tech business from the ground up.
That’s why we were so pleased to have welcomed Tom Boussie to the team last month. Before joining Cyclotron Road, Tom was co-founder and SVP of corporate development at Rennovia, a privately-held company that developed catalytic process technologies for the production of bio-based specialty and commodity chemicals. Prior to co-founding Rennovia, he was a distinguished scientist at Symyx Technologies, a company that helped revolutionize the area of combinatorial materials science. I recently sat down with Tom for a wide-ranging conversation about his career path, the obstacles and opportunities our fellows face, and why he was compelled to join the team. Below is an abbreviated transcript.
Given that science and technology is what binds us here, let’s start there. Has chemistry always felt like a job or something that defines you?
Tom: Well, my relationship with chemistry has changed over the course of my career. It’s very abstract when you’re just learning it as an undergraduate student. That’s stage one. It becomes much more real, of course, in graduate school when, at stage two, you actually start to be a scientist and a chemist. It becomes something else when you go into industrial chemistry, where it’s no longer abstract research for knowledge acquisition, but rather applied chemistry to develop specific products to meet needs in the marketplace. That was the third stage for me. And then later, as I shifted to business, my relationship with chemistry changed yet again. That was much higher level–less about being on the ground doing chemistry than it was about trying to effect chemistry with a capital C, trying to change the way chemistry is done, industrially. So that’s obviously thinking about chemistry from a very different perspective.
So in the arc of my career, I’ve had four different stages. And now, at Cyclotron Road, perhaps a fifth stage, as an enabler or a mentor. I’m not doing the work of chemistry. It’s not even my job, it’s someone else’s job. But I’m trying to help them do it as well as they can.
And of course, all of the Cyclotron Road fellows are somewhere around steps three and four — though obviously not all of them in the science and application of chemistry.
Tom: Yes, but unfortunately, they have to do both step three and four — the trade and the business — at the same time. And do them well. They have to be both the technical leader, typically, as well as the business and more abstract thinker about what they’re doing and how it fits into what’s going on in their particular field, how they’re differentiated and all of that. And they’ve got two years to do it!
Tell me a little bit about your earlier career. What was special about Symyx?
Tom: It was just a very special place. It was definitely a combination of being well resourced — sort of a dot-com-boom version of science that venture capitalists and strategic partners threw a lot of money into — and a place to develop high throughput research technologies and apply them. I could not have asked for a better place to start my career. And for me the transition was also an introduction to interdisciplinary teamwork. It’s probably more commonplace now than it was back then but this was the first time I had to work in an integrated team that spans software developers, engineers, chemists, physicists… All of whom were critical to achieving the whole. I thrived in that environment.
You left Symyx to co-found Rennovia just as Symyx was reaching the end of its lifecycle. Did you find yourself wishing you had founded a company sooner? Or wishing that you had chosen a different path?
Tom: Only in retrospect did I think I should have done it earlier. But it was when the opportunity came from a timing perspective. It was an audacious plan now that I look back on it. But of course, it helps not to know anything. In fact, I greatly recommend not knowing anything. It gives you the confidence to say, “we’re going to found a chemicals company. We’re going to be the next DuPont, the next Dow Chemical.”
As you’re talking to the fellows at Cyclotron Road, and settling into your role as mentor, what do you see in them that you recognize from your early years as an entrepreneur?
Tom: Very little! They’re so much more impressive than I was! No, but I will say, I was not prepared to do what they’re doing at the stage of life that most of them are in. There’s no way I would have emerged from my Ph.D. and said, “I’m going to found a company.” It was inconceivable. But no one thought that, really. So perhaps that has changed, systemically, within the U.S. postgraduate ecosystem. That concept isn’t foreign anymore to students getting their Ph.D. in engineering, biology, chemistry, etc.
One of the things that struck me about your early days as a founder is you said if you’d known what you know now… I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but the benefit of that ignorance is that nothing stops you if you’re driven. So, how do you approach that as a mentor?
Tom: Well, I’m being a little facetious. It’s…if not naiveté then at least willful suspension of disbelief in order to found a company. But I have already spent enough time here to recognize that we would have benefited greatly from the resources Cyclotron Road provides. I’ve lived this, and I see that fellows are going to benefit from the kind of curriculum that is focused on hardening their business model, understanding the economics, maintaining control of their company for as long as possible. And that the object of exiting Cyclotron Road is not necessarily a $30 million Series A. That might happen, but if it does it’s only because that is the best course for your company.
This is what attracted me to this position. There are incubator programs, including SkyDeck here in Berkeley, and UC Berkeley offers resources. But at most programs that support tech entrepreneurs, the air gets sucked out of the room by the software. There is just a more natural fit because of the low capital requirements and the high demand for those sorts of products today. Biology has a lot of financing both on the pharma and biotech side. So we’ve staked out the corner of the room about which everyone else says, ugh, forget about that, it’s too hard. Timelines are too long; it’s too expensive. You can’t get a return.
So why pursue them?
Tom: Because a lot of fundamental advances in technology that affect everyone’s lives are in the hard sciences. And there have been mechanisms to bring those technologies to market in the past but industry has largely abdicated that activity.
A lot of our fellows are extremely altruistic, their primary motivation is improving the world they’ve inherited. But they also have to be coldly calculating about the challenges and bend the tactics of their companies to address market opportunities. I don’t want to be negative Nellie, either, I do think there are strategies and tactics that our cohorts can take to organically build their companies and refine their technologies and get where they want to be. We’re trying to help them figure out how to thread that needle.
