Conversation with Dr. Whitney Gaynor, from optics engineer to YC backed CEO of Sinovia Technologies

Highlights from the AMA with Dr. Whitney Gaynor on Elpha

Dr. Whitney Gaynor is currently the CEO and co-founder of materials science company Sinovia Technologies with backing from Y-Combinator (Winter ‘17), the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy.

Prior to starting Sinovia Technologies, Dr. Gaynor studied materials science at Stanford and MIT and had most recently been working as an optics engineer at Nanosys.

These are the highlights of her AMA on Elpha, where women in tech talk candidly online. You can check out the entirety of the conversation on Elpha.

Q: When did you start fundraising and do you have any pointers or resources for finding fundraising in the science startup space?

Whitney: I think that when to fundraise really depends on the type of company that you are building. For us, we are doing physical science / physical products. There are certain types of investors that are willing to take technical risks with a company, but I find that they are few and far between. So we went the government grant route for a long time while we worked to prove out our technology. We are actually still largely pre-revenue (unless you count small things!) but we have a large portion of our technology de-risked. So it really depends on how much technical risk you are beginning with.

I think that if you are building a marketplace, and have some initial traction, that applying to an accelerator like YC is a good place to start.

Accelerators can help you figure out how to find product-market fit, and how to grow so that you can raise additional seed or equity financing.

Q: How early on did you receive the grant (NSF SBIR) and what were your strategies for writing a grant proposal?

Whitney: The first SBIR grant that we received was back in 2012, and it really marked the beginning of our company. Back then we were two founders in a garage. I went back recently and read the proposal for that grant program, and I have to say that the standards are far higher now! Ha. SBIR programs do vary across agencies. In doing a few of them, I find that the NSF ones are the most broad. If you are working in the physical sciences and in some software fields, you can likely apply to an NSF SBIR program to do exactly what your company needs to do — to de-risk a certain key part of your technology in order to take it to market. For this reason (and some others) I would suggest applying to the NSF program above some of the others.

Other agencies, including the DOE, DOD, NIH, NASA, etc. put out SBIR funding notices that are very specific to the work they want to see done or a product that they wish to purchase. So unless your company is already building something like this, or it’s work that you are going to do anyway in the process of taking your technology to market, these grant programs may be a distraction, even though the money is good.

I think that the primary question is whether the program is work that you would be doing anyway, whether it could open up new market opportunities for you, or whether it is too far outside your goals.

Q: How do you recruit and hire scientists for your company?

Whitney: Since our team is still so small, the engineers that we’ve hired so far are people we’ve had previous connections and interactions with (we are a team of four full-timers right now). And being in materials science/electrical engineering/physics, we are fairly specialized.

Q: Do scientists you know who make the change seem to enjoy the transition into tech?

Whitney: There are opportunities in for physical science researchers in biotech, energy, failure analysis consulting, automotive, aerospace, and other fields, and in all these cases having an academic research background is beneficial. So it’s a transition, but it’s not as different as you might think. Most of the folks I know from academia worked in an industrial lab for a while and then started managing teams of scientists in those labs.

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