I read a handful of books this year, primarily on my Kindle (my current preferred medium since I can read it at night in bed with all the lights off and won’t wake any sleeping toddlers up). My tastes are generally pretty varied, and I usually try to alternate non-fiction and fiction to keep things from getting stale, but even that isn’t really a rule.
The books below are written down in the order that I read them in 2025. I did not include any books I did not finish, nor any book that I read this year that was not new to me (ie, a re-read). I’ve included a brief write-up and a score ranking. I did not include any discussion around plot on the off chance that you want to read the book. (I have, however, included Amazon links in case you want to buy one. You can see a bit more about the book there. They aren’t affiliate links, so I will not get paid either way).
The score is not based on anything scientific, but is simply an attempt to put a number around how much I enjoyed a specific book, or the impact that it had on me.
The rankings:
5 – Excellent, phenomenal, highly recommend
4 – Quite enjoyable and a lovely way to spend an afternoon or evening
3 – Worth the time, but probably wouldn’t need to read again
2 – Probably not worth the time to read the whole thing, but may have some redeeming qualities that you could enjoy if you are really intent on reading this book and finding them
1 – Did not enjoy, not worth the time, barely scraped through out of a strange misplaced sense of duty to not letting the book win
Hopefully this helps you find something new to read (or, selfishly, inspires you to send me something new that you think I would like to read).
Thoughts: This is the best business book I’ve ever read. I’ve given multiple copies of it away to people and am planning on buying more copies to continue that practice. Slootman was the CEO who took both ServiceNow and Snowflake public (and took Data Domain to a billion dollar exit too). A phenomenal playbook on how to get things done as an organization, and the importance of moving quickly with focus and intensity in the workplace. I’ve literally used multiple things from this book at my own job and it is shocking how much you can accomplish. Everyone who works for a living should read this book, especially if you want to be a leader in the workplace and to be on a winning team. The only downside is after reading it I watched every Frank Slootman interview on youtube and now my wife makes fun of me.
Thoughts: A classic for a reason. What a rollicking good time. The original swashbuckling adventure. The black spot. Long John Silver. Rum all over the place. Dudes shooting each other with muskets. Cutlasses flying. Poor Jim Hawkins holding his own among a rash of dastardly mutineering pirates. Buried treasure. It’s Treasure Island baby. What more do you want?
Thoughts: This was Frank Slootman’s thoughts after heading his first major company, Data Domain. A good read if you like Slootman, but just stick with Amp it Up – it’s way more fleshed out. You can probably bang this one out in an hour or two. Glad I read it and have it, but his later book is better.
Thoughts: Loved this book. This is the first book in a series of three by Scott Lynch. It’s essentially Oceans 11 set in a historic, stylized, fantastic Venice. I’ve always been a sucker for characters that are thinking like ten steps ahead in their little schemes and plans, and this book has that in spades (but also every once in a while the main character here gets caught and punished, and realizes that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, either). What fun. Great world building, fun characters, lovely capers. Prose can be a little clumsy but who cares. Great book if you’re into this sort of thing.
Thoughts: This is the second book in Scott Lynch’s series. This one is is like if Oceans 11 and Jack Sparrow had a baby. There are even some scenes in the book that the discerning reader will note seem to be directly from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Whatever. I loved those films and I enjoyed this book. Ending felt a little rug-pully and flat, but who cares. Would read this again. Fun read that just takes itself seriously enough to not feel like junk food. Hooray!
Thoughts: This book is a classic management book. Ultimately I liked it. It will be good to have on my shelf to refer to now and then. Some good thoughts on performing high leverage tasks, time management, etc. I liked this book but didn’t love it. Worth a read if you’re interested in this type of thing though.
Thoughts: A great, anecdote-driven meditation on the virtue of courage. I enjoyed it. Seems like something I would find in the airport or in a monthly subscription box for men. However, there really were some great thoughts in there and it did get me thinking about the idea of courage for a while, so I guess it did its job. I read this book because Frank Slootman mentioned it in an interview.
Thoughts: This is the third and final book in Scott Lynch’s series. There were some really neat elements to this book; the setting was fun and the main characters are now trying to rig a high stakes election. Great stuff. Who doesn’t love a good caper with both sides trying to stay two steps ahead of the other? Ultimately though, one of the central narratives of the main character’s romantic history with the antagonist dragged this whole thing down. You could tell the author was either going through, or just went through, a divorce. Glad I wrapped up the series, just wish it went out on a higher note.
Thoughts: This series is about a lady who owns a tea shop and solves murder mysteries. Formulaic but who cares. Banged this out in an afternoon. Lots of descriptions about scones and teas and interior decorating and lilac in the countryside and whatnot. Not gonna blow your socks off but again, I wanted to read a mystery solved by a lady who owned a tea shop and that is what I got. Tremendous. Can’t wait to read another one.
Thoughts: A guy named Tom Quigley who runs a biodiversity based venture fund called Superorganism gave me this recommendation in the comment section of a LinkedIn post. This book is wild. Extremely inventive and exceptionally sobering, it’s part madcap adventure, part ecological horror, part science fiction apocalypse, part financial market fiction(?) It’s essentially biodiversity banking and environmental destruction taken to a dystopic scifi extreme and is worth a read for anyone in the green adjacent space.
Thoughts: If you are going to raise a venture capital fund, read this book. A phenomenal resource that covers everything from legal and compliance to LP updates to fundraising and more. Easy to read too, which is always a plus when you’re reading what is essentially a cleverly done textbook. I immediately went out and bought a hard copy to have on my shelf as a reference guide for a project that shall be named later.
Thoughts: The first part of this book rocked. Ned Land is an all time character. Finding the mysterious submarine and attempting to harpoon it is fantastic. Really fun to read how an author in the 1870s explains how a submarine can breathe under water. You can really see Jules Verne’s mind at work here and why he is one of the fathers of science fiction. Unfortunately, and this is probably something that everyone went nuts for and loved in the 1870s, I don’t need to read just pages and pages of Professor Pierre Aronnax cataloguing random fish and seaweed and rocks that he sees outside the window of the Nautilus. This book is tremendous for what it is, and you can see why Jules Verne is so revered; it just has a few passages in there that might be a slog for a modern audience who already knows that different fish exist and that they live in the ocean.
Thoughts: Prose was miserable. Hyper violent. No idea how anyone grows old in this world if everyone in every village is getting brutally slaughtered all the time. Overly relied on some (terrible) faux-Norse stylistic language. Got great reviews, but I can only assume the reviewers were just the author and his friends.
I read this in one sitting at the San Francisco airport, waiting for my flight which had been significantly delayed. A beautifully written book. A phenomenal meditation on life and what it means to live it, as well as memory, duty, etc. A lovely narrator who is ultimately unreliable. I guess it won a Nobel prize. I can see why. Parts of this book stuck with me for a long time.
Thoughts: I really wanted to like this book more. The first half was wonderfully atmospheric, with some really interesting meditations on memory, exploration, etc. It really had lots of potential. The second half was essentially just an exposition dump that you could see coming from miles away. I feel like the author wasn’t sure if she wanted to explore a philosophical concept or write something plot driven, and ultimately chose to do both – and failed to do either satisfactorily. If she leaned hard towards one way she probably would have saved it. Tremendous idea and some really strong writing ultimately marred by just poor execution. If you want to read someone who’s written what this book should have been, just pick up some Italo Calvino.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of human-centric infrastructure. After going deep into Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns a few years ago, I’ve been really contemplating what a “better” city looks like – not just in terms of clean sidewalks and new buildings, but how cities can, through their design and infrastructure, intelligently improve how we live, work, and play with each other.
That’s why I was excited when I was able to sit down with Ari Isaak, the founder of Photometrics AI and Evari GIS Consulting. After talking to Ari, it’s clear that he isn’t just optimizing lights—he’s answering the question I’ve been wrestling with, how does a city optimally function, at the most granular level. From safety and sustainability to neighborhood identity and community resilience, Ari is exploring what it would mean for public infrastructure to meet us where we are, both in physical space and in real human need.
We talked about where he thinks resilience really comes from, what government gets wrong (and right), and how one light at a time, we can make our cities more human.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
I had to think a lot about this one – this is good!
I’ll tell you what, I’m not a fan of the idea of the self-made man. There’s a famous sculpture of “the self-made man” where he’s chiseling himself out of marble, and I don’t really think it’s that accurate.
I think our strength and resilience comes from the people around us, and that security net is what enables us to take risks and make decisions. If you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from, if you’re worried about the basics, it will be hard to take any sort of risk since that’s the top thing on your mind.
I think resilience comes from family, friends, and the world that you have around yourself that enables you to make it through any challenge that comes your way.
Pictured: The source of Ari’s resilience!
Resilience is born as a result of having the safety of a social sphere around you that lets you bounce back from challenges and risks more easily?
Yeah, whether it’s just taking risks in the first place, or overcoming challenges, or just having the ability to fail. You must have people that love you even after you fail! So I really think resilience comes from all of the people around you, who may not say it explicitly, but believe in you.
And would you say that you have that resilience safety net around you?
Oh, absolutely. When I started both companies, I couldn’t have done it without the support of my wife. She was going to experience either the benefits or the challenges right alongside me.
When we launched Evari GIS Consulting, she was a college professor in Irvine. She was commuting from San Diego to Irvine twice a week, and at the same time, I landed a small contract. That left us with a big question: Should I stay at my government job at the Port of San Diego, or should I go all in on the business?
We talked it over, and she said, “Go for it.” At the time, we didn’t have kids yet, and we were living in a one-bedroom place. In the end, it turned out to be a good bet—but none of it would have been possible without her support.
In a previous interview, Bill Simon said that it always seemed to be less risky to start his own company and bet on himself than to work for someone else – since he would have more control over his own career. Would you agree with that?
I generally agree with that. But I think the idea of becoming an entrepreneur is seen as more risky than it actually is. There’s this concept that losing a dollar hurts ten times more than the joy of making one. I think that holds a lot of people back.
We have safety nets—unemployment, family, personal savings, whatever—and while you don’t want to tap into the safety net, that security also enables me to invest in an idea that might not pay off for four or five years.
I also agree that there’s a false sense of security in having a job where someone else pays you. Unless you work for the government—but even in the government these days, that’s not necessarily secure.
You’re currently the founder of an AI startup, Photometrics AI – but you’ve previously founded another company, Evari GIS Consulting, Inc. Can you talk a little bit about your experience running your own company?
Evari GIS Consulting is a GIS consulting firm that found a niche in supporting street lighting conversions. When a major city wants to convert its streetlights to LED, they need to know where every light is and what type it is.
A lot of the time, these projects are funded through ESPC (Energy Savings Performance Contract) agreements. Essentially, the contractor guarantees the savings upfront—before the job is even done. It’s like getting a home remodel where the contractor guarantees your house will increase in value by $100,000. And then, the project is financed through that model.
To make it work, cities need detailed data: what streetlights are out there, their wattages, energy usage, things like that. That information allows them to calculate the new lighting plan and determine the energy savings. Our job is to collect that data. We’ve done this in cities across the U.S., including Honolulu, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Boston.
Beyond just meeting the financial requirements of these contracts, GIS data is critical for managing the construction process. Crews need to know exactly where each light is, which lights to load onto trucks, where to replace them, and a ton of other things. We’ve built entire systems to support this process, including capturing before-and-after photos as part of the audit and linking everything back into GIS data.
Evari GIS Consulting also uses AI to analyze these photos, helping cities better understand and manage their street lighting infrastructure.
There’s a better way to light our streets.
What drove you to start Photometrics AI?
When I was doing this work across the United States, I realized something and I’m just going to say it: they’re doing it wrong. There’s a part of this process that isn’t working, and I was in a unique position to fix it.
So right now, cities design what are called typical layouts—cookie-cutter lighting plans based on standardized guidelines for road design. These manuals dictate things like road width, bike lane dimensions, sidewalk placement, and the type and spacing of streetlights. The idea is that engineers can use these templates when designing new roads or developments.
But in reality, cities weren’t built this way. Many older streets don’t follow a standard pattern. In some areas, like North Park, we have a grid layout. In others, we see sort of dendritic street patterns with cul-de-sacs, and then there are major arterial roads and stroads.
The way lighting is currently designed follows these cookie-cutter templates rather than adapting to the actual street layout. Cities like San Diego, Phoenix, or Oakland are broken down into a handful of typical layouts—maybe 20 for a city with 100,000 streetlights. Then, using Excel, they extrapolate the lighting design for the entire city based on those few templates.
The problem is it misses critical details. It doesn’t account for whether a road curves left or right, whether a light is mounted on a mast arm, whether intersections don’t meet at right angles, or whether there’s only a sidewalk on one side of the street.
So my idea was to bring the lighting design process into GIS—so we can actually see where the light falls on the street. We built this tool within Evari GIS Consulting, called EvariLUX, and it’s now being used across the country. It was a huge investment five years ago, and it’s just now paying off.
Now, Photometrics AI takes this concept one step further. Today, many streetlights are connected to control systems. So the question becomes: How can we tap into those systems and get the lights to perform exactly the way we want?
I developed a patented concept called the Target Lighting Layer. It allows cities to specify exactly where they want light to go—down to precise illumination levels. For example, 7 lux on the street, 4 lux on the sidewalk, 1 lux on front yards, and 0 lux on the windows of your house.
Instead of running every light at 100% brightness, our system calculates the optimum dimming level for each one—maybe 85%, 72%, or whatever is needed to meet the lighting goal. Using GIS and AI, we calculate the exact dimming level for every light in the system, which results in about 25% energy savings.
But the benefits go beyond just energy savings. A city like San Diego spends $4 million a year on electricity just for streetlights. With our system, that could drop to $3 million. Even bigger savings come from maintenance—running lights at an optimal, lower level extends their lifespan, reducing failure rates and replacement costs. Most streetlights are designed to last 50,000 to 100,000 hours at full power. By running them at a lower wattage, we can significantly extend their lifespan.
Ultimately, our goal is to bring precision to an industry that has relied on rough approximations for too long. The standard approach of dimming all city lights by 30% after midnight is a step in the right direction, but it’s not truly data-driven. We use math and AI to calculate the optimal dimming level for every light, making street lighting smarter, more efficient, and more cost-effective.
And that’s what we’re doing.
And how has the industry received this so far?
It’s definitely an uphill push. There are a few key challenges. When you’re optimizing light levels, the question comes up—is there really a business here? Is lowering lighting levels really a venture-scale opportunity?
There are also obstacles when it comes to getting new rates from utilities, and then you have multiple players involved in the government space. It’s not just one department making the decisions. The people managing energy and utility bills aren’t the same as the ones maintaining the streets. The police, who are concerned with lighting’s role in crime prevention, are separate from transportation safety teams, who care about encouraging people to use crosswalks. It’s a mix of different priorities across multiple departments, which makes progress more challenging.
What we’re hoping to do is keep our costs low enough that the decision becomes obvious for any one of those stakeholders. We’ve worked to calculate the average direct financial benefit of implementing Photometrics AI for each of them, and our pricing will come in well below that threshold.
For example, if adjusting lighting levels could reduce crime by even 1%, that translates to about ten dollars per light per year in savings for the average local or state government. Our goal is to come in well below that—say, at two dollars per light per year. That way, the police department decision-maker we’re talking to sees an immediate benefit.
But then, they might need to check with the energy department, and then they might need to check with transportation safety, and so on. So yeah, it’s challenging, but we’re making the case as clear and compelling as possible.
It’s interesting you say that, though. It echoes your opening point about how resilience is community-oriented and not just one person in a vacuum. The product you’re selling can be painted that way, too! The benefits of street lighting are community oriented, and it sounds tough to sell and impress the benefits of improving street lighting to just one person in a silo.
I want to preface this by saying that I’m a capitalist. I believe in capitalism, I believe in making money, I believe in all of that. But I also believe it’s okay for us to work together on things that benefit everyone, and that doesn’t always have to be financially driven.
The classic example is the fire department. People used to have to buy fire insurance, and if you didn’t have it, the fire department wouldn’t come. So if Joe had fire insurance but Steve next door didn’t, and Steve’s house caught fire, the fire department would let it burn. But eventually, that fire would spread and take out Joe’s house too. At some point, people realized it just made more sense for everyone to pitch in and create a public fire department.
I have no problem with that. We can work together on things, and that’s okay.
There’s this attitude that working for the common good is somehow a bad thing, and I don’t understand it. We can improve street lighting across the entire U.S., and that’s not a bad thing.
Photometrics AI optimizes each streetlight for where it is, lighting the area correctly.
In a previous interview, I talked to Sam Dettman, who was running for a Trustee position in his city in Wisconsin. We talked about how resilience can be built into the way a city is designed – the character of the architecture, how roads and neighborhoods are designed, and even the interplay of the natural and urban environments can influence how we interact with our cities and communities, and can create a resilient environment. Would you agree with that? How does street lighting play into that?
So both answers are yes, in my opinion. We absolutely design and choose the neighborhoods we live in, the places we work, and the places we go out to dinner because those spaces make us feel a certain way and support the kind of activity we want to do there.
If you want to live on a street where your kids can play catch in the middle of the road, you move to that kind of neighborhood. Downtown Manhattan probably isn’t the right spot for that.
The infrastructure we build is purposefully designed to support our lives and to discourage behaviors we don’t want. Now, that doesn’t always work. Sometimes people want to do something badly enough that they’ll ignore what the infrastructure is telling them. So it’s not a perfect system, but it is one of our most powerful tools—and we should design our cities and our spaces to support the way we want to live.
Streetlights are a part of that. We should be using lighting to encourage the behaviors and activities we want to see—not with a one-size-fits-all solution, but in a way that’s dynamic and responsive.
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet about Photometrics AI is that, because it uses AI, it can figure these things out in seconds. Photometrics AI can quickly calculate the optimum lighting performance for a specific setting. That means we can do things like adjust lighting for Halloween. That doesn’t need to apply everywhere—maybe it only affects quiet, single-family neighborhoods where the parcel sizes make it good for trick-or-treating.
You’re probably not going to walk a mile between houses, so we know where those neighborhoods are—and we can use light to encourage that kind of activity. Our kids should be able to go out and trick-or-treat safely, and we should use lighting to support that. We should be treating the street like a place for walking kids, because for that night, it is.
That’s a good point.
I think a lot of people only notice when there’s an absence of street lights, or one is broken. If things are working, most people tend not to think about it. Can you talk about how you educate people on that streetlight improvements are actually necessary?
I’d say when I talk to people about Photometrics AI, a lot of them say, “Oh, I never even thought about that.” And I’m like, well, they’re everywhere. Streetlights are on every street. There’s about one streetlight for every two houses in the U.S.—so roughly one for every five people. They’re freaking everywhere, but people often confuse them with traffic signals.
I’ll hear things like, “Oh, I want the red light to go away. Isn’t there some sort of motion thing?” And I have to say, “That’s not what I do.”
Streetlights exist to bring a little bit of the day into the night, but people don’t really notice them unless they’re not doing what they’re supposed to. When a streetlight’s out—or on during the day, which happens constantly—that’s when people pay attention. And that’s part of the challenge I’m trying to solve.
Every single day, there are lights that are on when they should be off and off when they should be on. They’re too bright, shining into people’s windows while they’re trying to sleep, or they’re wasting energy lighting up front yards that don’t need it. What we need is much more precision in how street lighting is managed.
But to go back to your question—no, people really don’t think about this stuff much. When I go to investor events and explain what I’m working on, they’re like, “Wait, what? Streetlights? How’s that a business?” So I have to do a little bit of education. I explain there are different types of lights, we can dim them, we can place them more strategically. But yeah, it’s something most people just don’t pay attention to.
That sounds challenging, since you have to educate so many people on why this actually is a problem, and it’s a problem with infrastructure that people don’t often think about.
Yeah, and it takes a little while. I’m not selling a new energy drink.
It’s not hard to explain, but when I say I’m optimizing street lighting so it falls on the street and not in front yards, I don’t think it really clicks for most people. They don’t know what’s possible. They assume all lights are the same—like there are three kinds or something. But no, there are hundreds of different types. You can change their color, their distribution, you can dim them, and many are connected to control systems.
And when I talk to people who are already in the industry, they’re often pretty entrenched in the way things have always been done.
That’s why I think my best angle is to reach Public Works directors. They’re not as locked into traditional processes, and they actually have a broad understanding of how street lighting fits into the bigger picture. They know what maintenance costs look like, they know how much it costs to buy a new fixture, they understand the impact on crime, and how lighting affects transportation safety.
So that’s really who I want to work with. They have the right perspective and the authority to think holistically about lighting and how it can be done better.
What does the future of street lighting look like to you? The future of city design?
They should all work together! In our hyper-connected world, it’s completely unacceptable that government is still slow to adapt and build systems that function as seamlessly as, say, an iPhone.
An autonomous car should have everything it needs to get a person to their destination safely—whether that means streetlights illuminating properly or pedestrian systems ensuring people can cross the street safely. We must do a better job. In my mind, this really comes down to government. Government moves slowly, and utilities that manage streetlights also move slowly. But they have to work together much better. Private industry would never tolerate the kind of inefficiencies that are just accepted in government.
I’ll give you an example. At one point, I was talking to someone about street paving. He was in charge of digging up asbestos pipes, and I suggest coordination so that street paving happens after the asbestos pipe work is done—not two months before, only to dig it all up again.” And his response was, believe it or not, “You’re going to make my job harder.”
That’s exactly the problem. He was in a different department, working on his own timeline, with no regard for the bigger picture. And that kind of disjointed thinking is everywhere in government. We have to do better.
The future will belong to cities that make innovation a priority—those that move away from entrenched interests and start working with smaller, more agile innovators. Cities need partners who can orchestrate and facilitate activities in public spaces more effectively.
In terms of lighting, it should change based on when and where it’s needed. We need the right light in the right place at the right time. Halloween is one example, but what about during a major car crash? Could a 911 call trigger a change in street lighting? If emergency responders receive a dispatch code with a crash location, could the lighting automatically adjust to help them? Light could be critical when performing CPR or assisting an injured person, and while emergency vehicles have their own lighting, there’s no reason streetlights couldn’t dynamically adapt to provide additional support.
We’ve already transitioned from legacy technology to LEDs, and many of those LEDs are now on control systems. The next step is to evolve. We need to innovate and align street lighting with how we actually use it in the modern world.
What’s next for you? How could someone reading this blog potentially help you?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. You can reach out to me directly, but you can also contact your Public Works director or send a comment to your city or utility—whoever manages your streetlights—and say, “I think this guy is onto something.”
Maybe you’d really like it if the light didn’t shine in your window, and you think this approach could make sure that doesn’t happen across the entire city. Plus, you’ll save energy because right now, you’re spending money and energy to put light in someone’s window. So, can we not do that? Can we just not? He doesn’t want it.
So yeah, recommend that they reach out. I’d love to talk with anyone across the U.S. or even globally. We’re already having conversations with folks in Europe about this idea.
As for what I do every day…I read a blog post the other day that said, “If you’re a founder, you’re either building or selling. There’s nothing else.” And that really resonated with me.
I switch between those two things. I make sure our MVP is up and running, I create videos for LinkedIn to share what we’re doing, I reach out to Public Works directors I’ve worked with before, and I build partnerships with private companies that can help us get into multiple cities. That’s what I do all day, and I like it. It’s great.
I’m on my own right now. I don’t have a whole team, but it’s exciting. And hopefully, it works. I’m going to do my best.
What’s the best way for someone to contact you to learn more or follow up?
You can email me at ari@evarilabs.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there.
Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we go?
I just think that, in many ways, the government gets a bad rap. There are good people who show up every day, working in government, doing their best for the citizens. But they should embrace technology.
The GovTech space is notoriously difficult. There are VCs who won’t even talk to people trying to do business with the government. And the reality is, the government is never going to release an RFP for the product I’m selling, because I’m the only one selling it—it’s not a known entity. I understand the point of an RFP. At Evari GIS Consulting, I spend my life chasing those kinds of opportunities. But in many ways, the government needs to figure out how to cut through bureaucracy and try new things.
It should be completely acceptable for a city to say, “Hey, Ari, why don’t you test this out on a neighborhood or 20 lights in a quiet residential area? Let’s see if it works.” And if it doesn’t work, so what? What’s the worst-case scenario? The streetlights turn on 10 minutes early or turn off too soon? We already deal with streetlights that don’t work all the time! Government should be way more open to experimentation and failure—the same way private industry is.
With that said, this fear of failure is also one of the government’s biggest weaknesses. There’s this mentality of “nobody gets fired for buying Apple products.” So in many cases, governments default to hiring the biggest, most well-known firms for consulting contracts. But in reality, it’s often their subcontractors doing the actual work. The assumption is that hiring a familiar name ensures a better product, but I don’t think that’s really the case. And I actually think it’s time that the government moves away from that mindset.
It’s time to look for innovative, younger, smaller teams that are building new things.
I recently sat down with Alexandra Vidyuk, a venture capitalist, venture builder, and blogger passionate about a topic that has fascinated me since childhood – space!
Currently living in Singapore, but with professional experience in London and Hong Kong, I first found Alexandra through her weekly newsletter, Space Ambition, an 11,000+ subscriber strong weekly missive that highlights topics in the space, deep tech, and venture communities. If you’re interested in current space developments, it’s a must-read. She also runs a spacetech investment syndicate on AngelList, a venture builder Beyond Earth Tech Venture Builder, and is a venture partner at Aloniq.
We went in-depth on a number of topics, including her quest to show that space is more than just rockets, how she wants to bridge the gap between space entrepreneurs and investors, how space enables other industries, and, of course, how the work we do in space in this generation will build a more resilient future for humanity. Alexandra was an engaging interview, and it was a great opportunity to talk to and learn from someone who is truly reaching for the stars.
If you’d like to learn more, you can reach Alexandra on her LinkedIn.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience, whether it’s personal resilience, communal, societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
To me, resilience is the ability to continually adapt to new circumstances. I believe it is an essential quality for every entrepreneur and founder. They constantly face failures but rise again and persist. They learn from their mistakes and continue working, even if it means completely reinventing themselves.
This perspective might be influenced by my professional background, but I see resilience as a defining trait of successful founders and venture capitalists.
Alexandra Vidyuk, working to demystify the space industry.
You’re currently a venture partner atAloniq, a venture firm that invests in early stage deep technology as well run a spacetech investment syndicate on Angelist andBeyond Earth Tech Venture Builders. You also foundedSpace Ambition, which is an organization aimed at bridging the gap between space startups and investors. Can you give me a little background as to your career journey, and then what led you towards starting a space research and consulting firm?
Yes, sure!
As you mentioned, I am currently involved in several projects: a venture capital role, an investment syndicate, a venture builder, and Space Ambition, which includes a blog, media, and consultancy services. I’ve been engaged in these activities for about two years now.
I graduated with a degree in physics, but like many of my classmates, I initially pursued a career in banking. About ten years into my banking career, I had an epiphany and thought, “What am I doing here?” While banking is a great and intellectually stimulating job that I enjoyed throughout my twenties, it didn’t provide the impactful experience I was seeking.
I briefly ran a FinTech startup, which was rewarding in its own way, but I still felt I wasn’t making a significant difference. I wasn’t contributing to curing cancer, solving the energy crisis, or addressing climate change. Although bankers do contribute, their impact is often indirect and multilayered. I wanted to pursue something with a more direct and substantial impact.
As a child, I was passionate about space, science, and sci-fi movies. This passion led me to study physics with the dream of becoming a scientist. Over time, I realized I wanted to do something that aligned more closely with my childhood dreams. I wanted to combine my passion, education, and experience in finance and entrepreneurship, making deep tech and space a natural fit.
It’s an exciting time, as many investors are now shifting their investment theses towards deep tech, which requires unique expertise. There’s a growing belief that deep tech will drive the next big wave of startups and investments, spearheaded by a new generation of PhDs and postdocs who are seeking opportunities outside academia. This burgeoning field presents numerous opportunities, and I was eager to explore something in space.
I originally started my blog at the suggestion of a friend who noticed how much I read and thought I should write about it weekly. Initially, I was trying to get my footing and understand the existing research. I began summarizing my readings on space technology and deep tech in plain English, essentially creating executive summaries. Now, the blog has grown to over 11,000 subscribers on Substack, making it the largest blog for space tech investors.
My other projects emerged because I didn’t want to be a pure venture capitalist. Having been a founder myself, I knew that achieving success in that role often meant sacrificing other aspects of life. I sought a balance and found it in the venture builder model, which allows me to go deep on three to five projects in different areas while maintaining a broader scope.
One of my current projects, for example, involves laser beaming energy, which is highly technical. Another focuses on CO2 capture using algae, which addresses climate change. These diverse projects give me different perspectives and areas of focus, making my work both challenging and rewarding.
I still feel like I’m in transition and might be doing something different five years from now. But for now, this combination is perfect, and I am thoroughly enjoying my work.
So it’s almost nice being able to branch out and have different projects in sort of under arching this main umbrella, space and deep tech. By doing some of the venture builder and Space Ambition and things like that, you’re able to learn and get involved in multiple areas still under one roof, which you didn’t have before. Would that be right?
Yes, exactly! I think that’s the perfect summary.
“Space is not just an industry; it is an enabler for advancements across various sectors. This cross-industry impact is what excites me most about the potential of space exploration and technology.“
Cool. How in your opinion, would space contribute towards a more resilient future for humanity?
I really appreciate the growing recognition that the answers to some of Earth’s most pressing questions may lie in space. While Elon Musk’s idea of Mars as a Plan B for Earth is a bit of a PR statement, there are genuinely compelling examples of how space can address critical issues.
For instance, climate monitoring heavily relies on data from satellites to track greenhouse gases and emissions. Ground-level measurements alone are insufficient; satellites provide the comprehensive data needed to monitor our climate effectively.
Energy production is another area where space offers significant advantages. Semiconductors produced in space, due to zero gravity and the deep vacuum, are purer, longer, and consume 50% less energy. This innovation could help address the energy crisis. Similarly, space-based solar power projects are underway, with large solar stations in orbit collecting and either storing or transmitting energy back to Earth. These stations can harvest sunlight continuously without the interference of the atmosphere or clouds.
There are also opportunities to move toxic or energy-intensive production, such as data centers, into orbit. The conditions in space can be more favorable for certain processes, though this would require substantial engineering efforts.
Pharmaceutical research is particularly exciting. One of our current investments focuses on producing antibodies for cancer treatment in orbit. These complex protein molecules tend to collapse under Earth’s gravity, but in microgravity, they can grow larger, more symmetrical, and more complex. This means more effective antibodies, potentially transforming cancer treatment from hospital drips to at-home injections.
Space is not just an industry; it is an enabler for advancements across various sectors. This cross-industry impact is what excites me most about the potential of space exploration and technology.
I like that last point, that space is an enabler for other industries. That leads me to one of the questions I was most interested in – in the United States, when someone thinks about space, they are generally thinking about NASA or another government funded entity. However, it seems like we’re now seeing the private sector finally get involved and pouring capital into the space industry. Can you talk about the private sector’s role in the space industry going forward? Are there any unique use cases where the private sector is particularly poised to make a difference?
There are many misconceptions about space, and I believe we are not doing enough, PR-wise, to address them. While NASA remains a leading organization in the field, the landscape has significantly changed over the past decade. Ten years ago, nearly 99%, if not the entirety, of the space industry was government-funded. Today, only about 20% of the industry is funded by the government, reflecting a major shift towards private investment and commercial ventures.
Wow.
75% or 80% is funded through private organizations and private investors. So it’s actually a private industry now!
NASA is fundamentally a research organization focused on conducting experiments rather than executing business projects directly. Over the past 24 years, since the ISS was launched into orbit, around 3,000 experiments have been conducted there. These experiments cover a wide range of topics, including semiconductors and proteins. The results of these experiments are available in an open database, providing valuable insights into their outcomes.
When a skilled entrepreneur leverages these insights, assembles a capable team, conducts further research, and identifies viable use cases, a private company can emerge from this foundation.
I believe the opportunities in the space industry are now more accessible than ever. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is continuously driving down the cost of launching payloads into orbit. Currently, it costs about $1,700 per kilogram, but with the advent of Starship, this cost could drop to less than $100 per kilogram. This means that even children could potentially use their pocket money to send something into space!
This dramatic reduction in costs has fundamentally changed the business model and unit economics of space ventures. What was once difficult or unthinkable a decade ago is now feasible and can be economically viable. New products and business models are becoming more practical and attractive.
Moreover, the space industry is experiencing a shift similar to what the internet industry saw in the 1990s. Initially, engineers and programmers were the primary entrepreneurs, but soon others realized the potential to make money online. Generalist entrepreneurs entered the scene and began building internet companies. A similar trend is now happening in the space sector, with individuals from various backgrounds bringing fresh perspectives and innovative ideas. This influx of diverse talent is invigorating the industry, and I believe this trend will continue for the next couple of decades.
Alexandra Vidyuk and the Mars Rover
Let’s talk about some of the work you’ve done with some of these companies. Could you talk about any potential challenges that you’ve worked through, and any successes you’ve seen?
I’ll share some general issues I’ve observed. Previously, as a FinTech founder, I noticed that most of my peers and co-founders came from backgrounds in banking or finance. They were commercially driven, fluent in investor language, and aggressive in a positive sense. They excelled at networking and understood how to navigate the investor landscape.
In the space industry, however, many founders come from academia or engineering. They often lack the same level of commercial polish and investor communication skills, even though they are dealing with the same investors. Investors expect a clean presentation, an outstanding pitch, and a polished founder. A significant part of our daily work involves helping these founders refine their presentations and pitches. While it might seem like a small task to us, it can make a huge difference for them.
This issue ties back to resilience. During my fundraising days, I had a spreadsheet with 500 investors, including VCs and individual investors. Out of those 500, only three invested. You go through the entire list, contacting everyone, and in the end, you might get just a few term sheets. Many people give up at this stage. But by developing a mindset of persistence and determination, focusing on the 1% that work, you keep pushing forward. It requires immense self-awareness and resilience.
To address these challenges, we built the venture builder. Our goal is to make space technology more mainstream, turning it into a normal startup and investment case. We want to eliminate the notion that you need to be a rocket scientist or a billionaire to get involved. We bridge the gap between investors and startups, helping them meet in the middle.
Investors often look for polished presentations and immediate revenue, but most deep tech startups have zero revenue for the first five years. This scares off many traditional investors who ask, “Where is the traction?” My response is, “It takes three years to build a satellite!”
Changing this mindset is crucial. Many investors are eager to invest in deep tech and space tech but don’t fully understand what it entails. We are helping to educate them, sharing the vision that this is the next big wave of innovation and investment.
Right. Yeah, so investors need to be educated as well. So that’s the gap.
Yes, I think they should be somewhere in the middle.
You’ve talked a little bit about some of the space adjacent technologies that you’re excited about – for example superconductors and pharmaceutical development. Are there any other space technologies that you’re really excited about that you’re seeing, other than something like a rocket?
Earlier, I discussed space manufacturing, including the production of drugs, semiconductors, and other materials, as well as energy and climate-related applications. One particularly exciting area is Earth observation, which involves the use of satellite images. These images are now employed across a wide range of industries, including commodity trading, disaster recovery, insurance, and mortgages, among others. The breadth of their application is truly exciting.
Another fascinating prospect is mining on the moon and asteroids. This might sound like science fiction, but considering the depletion of Earth’s resources, it’s a concept we need to take seriously. As our economies and consumption continue to grow, we will eventually need to look beyond our planet to meet resource demands. I believe that seeking rare earth metals on asteroids and the moon will become necessary. While we are not ready for this yet, and significant developments may not occur for the next decade, the advent of stable and affordable technologies like Starship will gradually make this a major industry.
I often hear the prediction that the industry beyond Earth will surpass the one on our planet, and I believe this will indeed be the case.
Yeah.
And that would probably be driven by mining.
Cool. What advice would you give somebody who’s interested in a career in the space industry?
You should leverage your skills and network. Changing your entire career can be challenging. For example, transitioning from being an accountant for ten years to becoming a rocket scientist requires immense effort. However, space companies now need a variety of professionals beyond engineers and scientists—they require HR managers, accountants, PR experts, marketers, and more.
Look for recruiting agencies specializing in the space industry, as they hire a diverse range of professionals. Attending networking events, conferences, and webinars is an excellent way to stay informed about industry developments.
I work with many investors and startups, and it’s an exciting time to be involved in the space sector. Take the time to explore what’s happening, and you might discover a gap or an opportunity that aligns with your expertise. Be curious and proactive—there are still plenty of untapped opportunities in this emerging field.
“The space industry is experiencing a shift similar to what the internet industry saw in the 1990s.”
The United States and EU lead the charge in terms of an innovative startup economy and culture. Does that hold true with the space industry too? Or do you see other countries with a robust government funded space industry, like India or China, in the mix as well?
The startup industry is still predominantly led by the US, and the space sector is no exception. Many companies founded outside the US eventually need to establish US headquarters for joint ventures and other strategic reasons. The space industry is unique due to its strong ties to national security, prompting countries to develop their own satellite manufacturing and launch capabilities within their borders to avoid dependency on foreign entities. However, it’s challenging to create a large unicorn by serving only a small domestic market.
India is experiencing significant growth, boasting a wealth of engineering talent. The successful landing of a moon rover was a monumental achievement, which led to an influx of Indian subscribers to Space Ambition that same night.
Europe is also making strides, supported by the European Space Agency, which offers numerous incubators and grant programs to foster the local space ecosystem. Israel is another notable player with strong space technology capabilities. However, the majority of the activity remains centered in the US.
China presents an interesting case, with a more government-led approach. While the US is known for NASA’s role as a central hub and grant distributor, along with a robust network of private companies like SpaceX, China’s space sector is growing rapidly in its own way. Although I am not deeply familiar with the Chinese ecosystem, its rapid development is undeniable.
Sure. What’s next for you?
I’m happy where I am now; every day feels like a school day! I’m constantly learning and growing. Despite having been in the industry for only a couple of years, I still experience some imposter syndrome. I try to absorb as much information as possible while maintaining a fresh perspective to avoid bias.
The venture builder is my main focus for now, and I’m eager to see where it leads me. As part of the venture builder, we also run the investment syndicate, which I view as more of a democratization effort—a bit like a philanthropic project. It’s not about making immediate cash but about bringing space investment opportunities to a wider audience.
There wasn’t a dedicated space tech syndicate on AngelList yet, and I see this as a gap and an opportunity. I want to build something that fills this niche.
My ultimate goal is to contribute to the advancement of our civilization. I want to maximize my impact during my lifetime, leveraging my skills and energy. I’m not interested in creating an NFT collection or a fizzy water brand. Instead, I want to help develop technologies, whether as an investor, venture builder, or startup founder, that can propel us forward. We are responsible for what our generation can achieve. While we’re not ready to build a Mars mining company yet, we can certainly take steps that push us in that direction.
Right!
How do we maximize the impact of our generation today?
In a Jeff Bezos interview with Lex Fridman, he discusses building the general infrastructure for space. He compares it to building Amazon, where he benefited from existing infrastructure like the post office, the internet, and electricity. He simply added an online shop to sell books. Similarly, what we are doing now with space is laying the groundwork—developing launchers, robots, satellites, and non-return capsules. These foundational elements might be fully utilized by the next generation, but they are essential for future progress. Future generations will be able to build their business products on the infrastructure we are establishing today.
Currently, our focus is on Low Earth Orbit (LEO). There are numerous business opportunities in LEO. The next steps could involve mining on the moon and capturing helium, a resource that is extremely scarce on Earth but abundant on the moon. After that, the natural progression could be moving towards Mars.
For me, it all comes down to pushing the boundaries as much as possible. By developing the infrastructure and technologies today, we are paving the way for future advancements and possibilities in space exploration and utilization.
I like it. What’s the best way for somebody to get in touch if they’d like to learn more, or get involved with Space Ambition – or any of your other projects?
I’m very approachable! You can find me on LinkedIn. I always try to respond personally to everyone and am even open to having a call to see how I can help. I’m happy to review projects, answer questions, or provide guidance.
In terms of how others can contribute, I would love to see more talent, capital, and attention directed towards the space industry. If anyone is considering starting a space-related venture, we recently launched a program called Fellowship. This four-week program is designed for aspiring entrepreneurs, offering them ideas, advice, and connections. It helps participants choose the right idea, find co-founders, and get a solid start.
Additionally, we need to lower the barriers to entry for the space industry. There are numerous obstacles and misconceptions, often perpetuated by mainstream media. The space media, on the other hand, tends to be quite insular.
What we really need is great storytelling. I am eager to collaborate with others on this front. Let’s work together to share the exciting possibilities and opportunities in space.
It sounds like you want the space industry as a whole to be demystified.
Yes, demystified! I think that’s the perfect word.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Khai Minh Pham, a visionary at the intersection of life science and artificial intelligence. While AI has only recently entered the public conscious, Khai has been a trailblazer in the AI space, starting with growing and exiting a groundbreaking AI company, DataMind/RightPoint, in the early 2000s.
His latest company, ThinkingNode Life Science, is both truly innovative and terribly interesting – he’s working on revolutionizing the way we approach healthcare and drug development by running both through the lens of AI-generated digital cell clones.
We went in-depth on a number of subjects ranging from Philosophy to biology, covering topics like the types of knowledge, reasoning vs pattern recognition (and what that means for AI), how Khai started his first company without even a computer or money in France, and, in the end, how technology has the capacity to allow us to truly become more human.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
In the business world, people often say that entrepreneurs take more risks. I don’t see it that way – or, I guess I don’t see risk the same way as most people. If I did, I don’t think I would do anything! I’m not even sure that you have to do anything specific to be resilient – you just do things, and let other people qualify you as resilient. It’s more about the end result, and the process of getting to that end result, than anything specific that you’re doing.
I find that business, and entrepreneurship, is like a long journey. You take it one step at a time. You just have to be motivated to get to the very next step. And then, at the end, you look back and realize, wow, I’ve done all that?
Perhaps continuously finding that motivation to just get to that next step over and over is what you would call resilience.
Dr. Khai Minh Pham giving a talk about AI as part of the CTO Talks series.
You’ve had an interesting career journey – while a buzzword as of late, you’ve actually been at the forefront of AI for 30 years. In the 90s, you founded the company DataMind, which was an AI platform for the Fintech/CRM industry, and guided it to a $630 million exit. Can you talk about your journey as an entrepreneur?
My mom is Vietnamese, so I always say I didn’t have a choice on what I would be when I grew up – I had to be a physician!
I entered medical school in France, but in my second year of the program, I realized that there was no way that I could remember all of this information. I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t forget anything when I diagnose or treat a patient – but I wondered if AI could do it. But when I talked to the AI people, their explanations of what AI was actually capable of was not very satisfying – so I decided to work out for myself the way AI could solve my problem.
Most people in AI would design a formal system, and then try and fit the way we think into that system. I did the opposite. I had a problem, which was how to handle the different types of thinking that you find in medicine, and I worked to design a system that could reason. So, in the mornings, I would head to the hospital, but in the afternoons, I would go do computer science, and in the evening I would catch up on my medical studies. I was a real nerd already teaching AI and working for the company.
Once I did my PhD in AI, I started to publish in main peer-review systems, such as IEEE. It was frustrating since I realized that once I got my grants, that was it – there weren’t enough resources to develop the type of AI I actually wanted to develop. I decided then to start my first company in order to have get enough resources to do what I wanted to do. I didn’t have money, I didn’t have a computer. But I decided just to go for it since I had such a desire to do this research. It started simply because I wasn’t satisfied with what existed.
Wait a minute, so you started your first company without a computer?
Well, I didn’t have a computer and I didn’t have any money either! Actually, it was the other way around – I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t afford a computer!
So my first goal was to get a computer. At that time, Sony was providing workstations if you had an interesting project. I went in there, gave my pitch, and they gave me two! But then I had a different problem, because now I had two workstations but I didn’t have a desk. So I went to a meeting in France for entrepreneurs and I met a few of them. I told them that AI was going to be important one day – and if you give me a desk to work out of, I can explain to you what I’m doing and maybe it will be interesting and helpful for your business down the road. One of them eventually accepted, and I had a desk! So now I have a computer and a desk, but I don’t have people working with me – so I had to head to the bank!
Imagine walking into a French bank at the time to explain AI. Nobody knew what it was. But I believed in my passion so strongly and had such a great technology that eventually I walked out with a credit line, and I was able to hire an engineer and an assistant. I then took my savings and went to a big conference in Silicon Valley. There, I ended up meeting the President of Microsoft Europe. I told him that he had nothing left to prove at Microsoft and asked him to come join me! Again, I don’t think I’d have done things like that today!
Something I learned very quickly was that people at the top level of business have more freedom to do what they want, while the intermediate level has to produce – because a few months later that Microsoft exec was in my office and we were talking about the technology!
Then, one day, I was out to lunch and when I came back, my assistant said that I had missed a call from a “Mr. Gatess.” (with two s, since she is Portuguese and had not been in the computer business). I didn’t know who that was – but then I realized that it was actually “Mr. Gates!” She didn’t take his phone number down, so I was really hoping that he would call back – luckily, he did! So I had a meeting with Bill and we talked about AI and the tech.
The main thing that you realize when you work with a big corporation is that their time is not the same as your time. They have all the time in the world, and they want to use it to understand everything they can. After the meeting with Gates, he set up a meeting with the CTO of Microsoft at the time, Nathan Myhrvold. But I realized that I didn’t have the resources to do what they wanted yet, so I had to decline. They even offered me to join Microsoft and work on the research I wanted and wouldn’t need to think about the budget.
Then, somehow, IBM learned about my company and they wanted to invest. But they were too big for me. Then the VCs found out about my company, and that’s how I ended up really starting my own company in Silicon Valley. After that, everything went very quickly!
I learned too, just how important culture is. When I arrived, I didn’t speak English well at all. I had to translate everything that was said in every meeting into French in my mind. It was exhausting! The way people worked over here was different too – so I had to learn that as well.
So I don’t necessarily think that I’m resilient, but I just kept going and hanging in there. I was just so motivated by this project that it kept the engine going.
That’s an incredible story!
Well, now that I look back on it, I would never do it that way today! For example, when I started, I had never even heard of the term business plan! But I just never stopped. It was really based on an inner motivation. I don’t really feel resilient internally, but from an external viewpoint…maybe I am.
You’ve been at the forefront of AI for decades, at a time when most people are just becoming aware of AI and its capabilities. Can you talk about your own philosophy of AI learning and how that might differ from some of the major players, like ChatGPT?
We could spend hours and days talking about this!
The first thing you have to understand is the difference between data and knowledge. Humans don’t process data. We’re actually extremely bad at it! We process knowledge instead. Data is an isolated fact, but if you relate that fact to other facts, that becomes knowledge. And there are actually two steps for knowledge – information and knowledge. Things move from information to knowledge once it becomes an internal asset for your brain. For example, books are full of information. But that information becomes knowledge once you read, digest, and understand them. This is actually a very important distinction, because as soon as something becomes knowledge, then you can apply reasoning to it.
Most of the time when people talk about knowledge, they actually talk more about information that’s available – and there’s a lot of it. But that’s totally useless until someone acquires it and can reason with it. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that correlation is not causation. Correlation allows us to narrow down what’s going on, but causation is what we’re looking for. It’s what science is about, understanding cause and effect, right? For example, I can tell you that there’s a big correlation between people who see a doctor and people who die, but what does that mean?
In most of the AI that people focus on today, it’s about correlation. It’s based on statistical analysis that extracts patterns from large amounts of data.
Why we process data is to generate that knowledge, like I said earlier. Knowledge is the most powerful way to compress data because it lets us do reasoning afterwards.
So when people think about this, you have pattern recognition, which is data driven, and we have reasoning, which is knowledge driven. In AI, most of the AI today is Machine Learning (ML) – detecting and recognizing patterns. And it’s amazing what pattern recognition can do. It’s surprised a lot of people, including me, but it still doesn’t reason the way that humans reason. It’s missing an internal representation of the world that allows it to reason. It’s missing a mental model. ChatGPT makes associations of words, and the result is impressive when you read the results, but can present hallucinations because it doesn’t reason at all.
This last point is crucial. We don’t have access to the real world – we only see the world through our different mental models, and we have different types. The most powerful model, though, is our reasoning model. People studying science are essentially working to build reasoning models for their specific domains. So today, when we use machine learning for science applications, it’s fantastic because it can crunch so much data to narrow down and recognize patterns. But your ultimate goal should be to have a reasoning model at scale because no one can have all the available knowledge – except AI.
This brings us to what we do at ThinkingNode Life Science. We use distributed reasoning AI to generate reasoning models that we call reasoning networks. So we don’t generate text, or images, or videos like ChatGPT – we generate reasoning models for life science. We generate digital cell clones. Another important term is that we use “distributed reasoning,” meaning that we have more than one reasoning engine. For example, our AI reasons by analogy, by constraint, by case, by probability, and so on. If you only have one reasoning engine, if you’re centralized reasoning, it’s not possible to represent all these different types of reasoning. And this distributed reasoning AI is what I’ve been working on for decades now.
So we take our distributed reasoning AI and we use generative AI to generate these digital cell clones. We generate about 50 million additional data points for each digital clone using reason and not pattern recognition. Why do we do that? Well, most AI drug companies and pharma companies are focused on developing and designing new drugs. We don’t do anything related to that. We design and generate the digital cell clone of the patient or the disease to understand the impact of the drug on the cell. We are focused on cell response. I think that’s what matters most at the end of the day – the interaction between a drug and a cell. So we’re not in competition with any AI drug discovery company. We focus on biology, which is the cell – and how cells respond to drugs. We have a patent for digital cell differentiation that allows these cells to scale, and we use the gene expression data of the cell. We inject that into our human cell reasoning foundation model, and it differentiates the stem cells and things for us. So today, in about two hours, we can generate any type of human cell digitally.
Wow. So, just to restate this in a sentence, ThinkingNodeLife creates digital clones of human cells. You then use those clones, and artificial intelligence, to test and to explore drug interactions on the human body without using a live person. Is that correct?
Yes! It takes about 10 years and $2.6 billion to test a drug, and you still only have about a 4% chance of putting it on the market. There are lots of reasons why, but one of the main reasons is that there is no testing simulation.
In other industries, say the car or airplane industry, you don’t build the car or plane right away. You build a digital model and do simulations. We don’t have that in pharma.
The term clone is important here too – it’s not a digital twin. Digital twins, you have to build one by one. With our clones, it’s totally scalable since we digitally mimic the cell differentiation process. We have a foundation model, and differentiate based on that.
So it seems that ThinkingNodeLife has resilience baked into it – helping the healthcare and biotech spheres shorten drug times, understanding the interactions between cells, and allow companies to help people much faster than before. Can you talk more about how you help these companies build resilience in their workflows?
So we work with different types of companies. At a recent event at JP Morgan, we announced a strategic partnership with Debiopharm. It’s a Swiss pharma company, well established and well respected. They’re going to use our digital cell clone for cancer drug development. So this is one type of customer and partner – the biotech pharma that develops the drug.
With those companies, we can help them at the very beginning – finding new targets for the drug. Usually, this is done by the academics since it takes lots of time. Then, if you already have the drug, even before preclinical testing, we can simulate the drug’s impact on the human cell that you’re interested in. Then, if you’re already in phase 1 or phase 2 testing, we can use a patient’s data to generate their own clones to help companies select the next patient for their clinical trial.
And we can use all that to do different things. We can do drug comparison – comparing your drug to a competitor’s drug – which is normally pretty difficult, because you normally don’t have your competitor’s patient data. We can do drug repurposing and drug response prediction. Once you have all that, you can really help a company become first class, since we provide targets and can simulate all the phases for testing.
Then, we have a different type of company partner – AI drug companies. We don’t develop anything related to the drug, but we do know the cells that drug will impact – so there’s a complementarity there. We’re currently in discussions with a number of them.
We also work with CRO companies outsourcing the research for pharma biotech companies. We bring them Digital Cell Labs, so they can provide research services in preclinical or after clinical, so they can give more insight to their customers about the drug when it’s in development.
I think any company that develops a drug should do a simulation. And we help them do that.
That makes sense. So, you cut your teeth with your first company in Silicon Valley, but you recently moved to San Diego to be closer to our strong life sciences community. Can you talk about the differences between Silicon Valley and San Diego, especially for startups like yours?
Maybe it’s different today, but when I moved here about 10 years ago, Silicon Valley was much more focused on technology and San Diego was much more focused on science. I was lucky to work with the J. Craig Venter Institute down here, and this helped me really test my idea and work on different concepts. So this is a major pro, I think – the scientific community is extremely strong.
The other thing I found is that people are very collaborative in San Diego. I don’t know what it’s like today, but when I was up in Silicon Valley, it was very competitive. Here, we don’t hesitate to work together.
The last thing is that there are over 100 microbreweries! That’s a great part of San Diego.
Can you talk a little bit about the emerging field of digital biology? What is it? How do you see it contributing to building resilience in the fields of life sciences and healthcare?
Digital biology is a difficult definition, in the sense that as soon as you use a computer to understand biology, it can be considered to be digital biology. But what I have in mind is more about getting to a simulation of biology. There are different ways to do simulations, from mathematical models and so on. The one I’m focusing on is AI simulation, and, in particular, reasoning AI simulation.
This is an important concept but isn’t always easy to explain. It starts from realizing that we interact with the world only through our own mental models – only through our own reasoning model that we acquired at school, through our experiences, whatever. Our reasoning model is how we make sense of the world. Scientific education is essentially about building different reasoning models for different disciplines.
The approach that I have is not a pure mathematical simulation, for example, because humans don’t think through mathematical equations. We think through concepts. We think through conceptual mental models. And the way I approach digital biology is to generate the reasoning models for biology. One of the most important entities in biology is the cell – and that’s why we are focusing on providing and generating a reasoning foundation model of the cell.
What does this mean in terms of application? Well, today there are about 800 AI drug discovery companies, and designing drugs is very important. But what may be even more important at the end is the cell’s response to that drug.
In designing a drug, you try to see how the molecule you’ve designed binds to a target, which is usually a protein in or on the surface of the cell. This binding is very important. You see how well it binds, how specifically it binds.
Then, what’s important to us, is seeing the impact from this drug’s binding – you see the cell’s response. Typically digital biology is about simulating the binding itself in order to understand and design the drug. What we are focusing on is not about the drug – it’s about the cell’s response to the drug.
Interesting.
It’s a multidisciplinary team field, and it’s pretty involved – there are different aspects from computer biology, system biology, AI, and so on. The field is working on things like natural biological phenomena or synthesizing new artificial biological entities. In fact, ultimately, the far vision for our company is to simulate evolution.
Digital biology, the way I see it, gives us the technology to accelerate and even be active in the evolutionary process.
Let’s continue talking about how you see the future. While AI has been around for a while, it’s recently come to the forefront of public consciousness with the emergence of ChatGPT – and it’s changed a lot of people’s relationships with technology. What do you see for the field of AI going forward?
Well, first of all, we have to understand what the term “intelligence” means, since it’s artificial intelligence. I used to mention [Swiss psychologist] Jean Piaget’s definition – intelligence is not what you know, it’s what you do when you don’t know. And I’d add to that – getting to a rational outcome when you don’t know. Since, for example, ChatGPT will provide you an answer, but it cannot explain the why behind the answer. It has answers based on the association of words and not on the rational reasoning process that usually is based on causality and not correlation. It can give a very convincing explanation but ultimately can go wrong with hallucination. It’s not rational.
When we talk about AI, we have two understand two different aspects of it. Daniel Kahneman talks about these aspects in his famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The first aspect is System 1 thinking, or pattern recognition. It’s what you do when you recognize a face or a piece of music. It’s very fast. There’s no reasoning.
The second aspect is System 2 thinking. That’s slower. It’s when you have to think rationally, have some hypotheses, deduce things, and so on.
The AI that is known today by the public is pattern recognition, based on Big Data, and it’s amazing what can be done at scale. The other AI that you don’t hear much about is reasoning AI, and that’s because most of existing reasoning AI is based on just one reasoning engine. But there are different types of reasoning. It’s why I worked for decades on that topic, called distributed reasoning AI, where each piece of knowledge is a mini-reasoning engine in itself, and you throw those mini-engines into any logic you want.
The future of AI is the combination of the two types, as we are, right? We do pattern recognition and we do reasoning – but it’s very important that people realize that AI is not just machine learning. It’s not just pattern recognition. It’s not just ChatGPT. It’s much more than that. When we see what we can do with pattern recognition at scale, well, imagine what we can do with reasoning at scale.
Reasoning is important, too. It’s the way that humans make decisions. We don’t process data, we process knowledge. When you think about how AI can potentially interact with humans, yeah, it can be easy to interact with based on pattern recognition and lots of text, that’s certainly one way. But if we want to interact with AI and have it be close to how we think and reason, that’s reasoning AI.
While AI based on pattern recognition can generate cool images like the above, it is unable to reason.
What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals on developing a resilient mindset and making a meaningful impact in the world of AI and life sciences?
As I mentioned at the very beginning of the interview, I don’t know if it’s worth focusing on becoming resilient. What I mean is, resilience is a consequence – it’s a consequence of passion and a consequence of your actions. When you have a passion, you will be resilient. Your goal isn’t to become resilient, your goal was to achieve your passion – but resilience was found on the way.
So I don’t have any tips for resilience, but I have tips about being passionate. It’s about looking backward in your childhood, looking for what is meaningful, and focusing on that. Find your life’s purpose. Applying it to life science now, well, what can be more interesting than life itself? And when combined with AI, what’s more interesting than working on how we reason and understand? When you combine the two, it’s incredible. That’s why I’m so passionate about both. It’s how to understand reasoning, and applying that to improve life.
What’s next for ThinkingNodeLife, and how could somebody who’s reading this blog potentially help you?
We’re currently in the middle of Series A fundraising, and we’re looking for people who are passionate. It’s nice to be smart, but it’s not enough. I want people who are interested and are going to enjoy the journey, because, if you enjoy the journey, you can go very far. We’re looking for people who are open-minded, not people who only want to prove that they’re really smart. We want people who both really understand the mission and are on mission.
So, the next concrete step we’re taking is finding funding, but we’re also focused on finding customers. We have some events coming up, like at the BIO International Conference in June. We’re looking at partnerships too – we just partnered up with Debiopharm, a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland.
And finally, if you’re passionate about AI and life sciences, I’d be happy to meet.
What’s the best way for somebody to contact you, or your company, if they’d like to learn more?
People talk a lot about technology, and sometimes people focus too much on the technology side of things. I think what we need to focus on instead is how technology can allow us to be human. I almost don’t consider us to be human yet. When I see what’s going on in the world, we’re pre-human. How can we use our technology to allow us to have more time, to be less greedy, to create abundance?
And what do you think it means to be a human?
Well, that’s a huge question of course. People talk about consciousness and so on, but I think being human is thinking of others, not about yourself. Being human is the ability to contemplate, the ability to appreciate things. Being able to sit and contemplate the beauty of a tree, for example. Animals don’t have the luxury or capacity to do that – they can only think about survival.
Humans though, by thinking of others, have the ability to appreciate, to protect, to build. And leaning into these gifts is what makes us human.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ravi Chawla, a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Research, who is currently in the very early stages of forming ChakraTech (formerly known as WheelBio). This company is dedicated to using microbes to make completely and naturally degradable bioplastics from greenhouse gases, potentially solving the problem of plastic pollution! He recently took third place in a pitch competition through Aquillius, and will be utilizing their lab space as he forms his company.
Over the course of our wide-ranging conversation, we covered topics like the risks associated with forming a startup, pushing through difficulties with commercializing this product, and building a resilient industrial biotech scene in San Diego.
It was a fascinating conversation, and a great opportunity to talk to someone at the forefront of both science and business, working to get a brand-new, innovative company off the ground.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
That’s an interesting question!
The word resilience to me refers to the spirit of persevering in the presence of difficulty. To be resilient, therefore, means to prevail or succeed despite all the odds!
Resilience is a profound concept in philosophy and psychology, embodying a character marked by persistence in responding to challenges or hardships. Often, individuals are not immediately aware of their own resilience; it becomes apparent through their actions and reactions over time. I am deeply inspired by individuals who exhibit perseverance and courage. Their stories of overcoming adversity not only resonate with me, but also fuel my own aspirations and strengthen my own commitment to face challenges with similar bravery.
Achieving anything significant, particularly when it involves paradigm-shifting innovations, demands immense determination. And interestingly, resilience extends beyond personal tenacity; it is deeply rooted in the collective strength drawn from one’s support network and community. Therefore, it’s crucial to be in the company of people who offer unwavering support and encouragement during challenging times. This belief forms the cornerstone of my philosophy on resilience.
Overall, resilience is a harmonious interplay between personal commitment and communal support, underpinned by strategic thinking, persistent action, and reliable execution, all directed towards a common goal.
So seeing a vision, and then doing whatever it takes to get there.
Yes, by going full force!
I attended an Anglo-Vedic middle school in India, where I drew much inspiration from ancient Indian texts. I am often reminded of a powerful quote by the late 19th-century Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.”
This quote, which was inspired by a shloka from the Katha Upanishad, continues to resonate with me.
Ravi Chawla pitches ChakraTech’s innovative technology at San Diego Startup Week
Your background is an interesting one. You’re from a small town in India but became a chemical engineer. How has this background influenced your career?
Growing up in a small town was a formative experience for me. Limited opportunities translate into limited expectations and limited aspirations. My dad was just happy that I finished 10th grade.
When I finished 10th grade, my dad brought me a job he saw in the newspaper for a position as a constable. I was like, “do I look like someone who could do that? I’m the biggest nerd that exists!” But I, somehow, have always had a determination to challenge the status quo and defy the norm. Perhaps, I get this trait from my mom, who I’ve always thought to be both fearless and a force of nature, and has always been a tremendous source of inspiration for me! Anyway, this drive led me to successfully persuade my family to relocate to a larger city, Chandigarh, that opened the door to more educational opportunities.
After relocating to Chandigarh, I completed 12th grade and appeared for the engineering school entrance exams. My interests primarily lay in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. However, when someone suggested a career in chemical engineering, I was initially distraught. Even though I was preparing for engineering school, I had no understanding of what any of the engineering fields entailed. Among my peers, the prevailing belief was that chemical engineering involved extensive chemistry and rote memorization, with limited career prospects. This perception made me hesitant to pursue it.
By a fortunate coincidence, Panjab University in Chandigarh had an outstanding chemical engineering program. Financial constraints led me to choose this path over the then-popular computer science or other engineering majors. Thanks to the program’s affordability and the scholarships I received, I could pursue my education. Surprisingly, I fell in love with the chemical engineering curriculum and education. It quickly became apparent that this was my true calling. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it, and it continues to shape my approach to solving scientific and technical problems. In retrospect, my initial concerns were unfounded, as I stumbled upon my passion in a field I had chosen by chance!
In my opinion, “success” is a delicate balance between determination and destiny. One has to attempt to create their own destiny, but then let nature take its own course. It’s actually a philosophy from a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita – you only have the rights to your efforts, and not the rewards or fruits of it. I think that is something that fundamentally governs me. Give it your best attempt, and then everything else is out of your control.
Your biotech startup, ChakraTech, is still currently in stealth mode, but you have recently begun to pitch for fundraising, coming in third place at a recent pitch competition in San Diego. What can you tell me about your company so far?
We are in early stages of our journey, and I can tell you in very broad terms about what we are doing and how we got here.
The biggest thing that came out of the Industrial Revolution in the 20th century was the introduction of plastics. Plastics fundamentally changed the paradigm. It actually totally moved our society to where it is today – without them, we would not be here! Imagine life without milk containers, shoes, everything – everything has plastics.
However, what was a boon for the 20th century is a bane for the 21st century. They’ve served an incredible purpose, but the truth is, these plastics are accumulating in our environment at an incredible pace.
Growing up, my mom was always concerned about plastics entering our food chain through contact with food, and she preferred to use reusable containers made from materials such as steel, glass, and ceramic. It turns out her hunch was spot-on. Recent studies suggest that an average person is ingesting up to a credit card worth of microplastics every week! The full extent of how these micro- and nano-plastics affect our health and environment is still not completely understood, posing a concerning and largely unexplored risk.
What we do at ChakraTech is emulate ancient microbial processes to create biodegradable plastics. Over billions of years, certain microbes have figured out a way to make a degradable plastic, or polyester. It’s actually a fat reserve for them! Similar to how we get fat and have love handles, for bacteria, they’ll end up making their own version of fat reserves – bioplastics. These bioplastics degrade completely in a short time, typically a year or less, and have the power to totally change the 21st century.
Wow, that’s incredible. Is this a new discovery?
No, this polymer is not a new discovery. The earliest reported sighting of this bioplastic polymer was actually from 1890 in a German textbook! Efforts to commercialize it since 1980s have faltered, struggling to compete with the economics of petrochemical plastics. Yet, the potential for scientific and technological advancement is vast — a direction I planned to explore in academica as a tenure-track faculty member. When faculty search committees didn’t embrace this vision, I remained steadfast and decided to pursue this opportunity through my own startup venture.
Anyway, at ChakraTech, we are taking an innovative approach to make this bioplastic. To understand how, you need to understand what plastic is – a polymer is a chain of monomers, basic repeating units. How does a microbe or bacteria turn monomers into the polymers we want? They transform carbon from food source into “fat stores”. Historically, expensive carbon source such as vegetable oils have been used as carbon source, not only elevating expenses but also threatening food security in low-income countries. This approach renders the technology unaffordable and inaccessible to much of the world.
Well, what else could serve as a great source of carbon? Greenhouse gases. That’s where we come in – we’re going to take these microbes in giant vats, feed them greenhouse gases and get them to create bioplastics. What’s interesting about this is that it solves two problems at once. First, we can repurpose the carbon emissions, namely the excess carbon dioxide or methane that is emitted into the atmosphere, for manufacturing various types of materials and chemicals. Second, the bioplastics degrade naturally! This positions us to bridge two historically very different industry segments – biotech and cleantech/climatetech.
The reality is that plastics aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the carbon emissions for the foreseeable future. But perhaps our technology can help to solve two huge environmental challenges at once!
Marrying science and engineering, Ravi hopes to scale bioplastics in a cost-effective way.
And no one else is working on this?
Various companies, some for over a decade, have concentrated on solving different aspects of the technology and challenges. While they have achieved some progress, most of them are yet to realize their full potential. This, I believe, is largely due to an insufficient integration of science and engineering.
In my experience, the distinct training backgrounds of engineers and scientists often lead to communication barriers, which translates into insufficient technological advancement. Bridging this gap between basis sciences and engineering is therefore vital for effective collaboration on complex projects. Particularly in the case of bioplastics, biological systems don’t necessarily conform to engineering constraints in terms of scalability. This underscores the fundamental need for an integrated approach, combining process engineering with biology and chemistry, to develop bioplastics in a cost-effective manner.
Fascinating. I don’t know too much about microbes, but I’ve seen a few companies lately using microbes in incredible ways. One such company is up in Escondido, Aquacycl, and they use microbial fuel cells to treat wastewater. The microbes generate electricity and clean water as part of that process.
Is microbial engineering an emerging field? Or has the science simply progressed enough that companies can begin reaping the rewards from microbes in a cost-effective way at scale?
Microbial engineering and biomanufacturing have been around for some time, but they are far from a mature industry, and have a unique set of challenges – including a capital-intensive research and development budget. While still in its infancy compared to the petrochemical sector, it is the future of next generation of sustainable manufacturing!
If you really want to put a start date on it, things started when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. And if you want to be even looser with it, people have been fermenting things pretty much forever! The biotech industry, however, really took off in its current form in the late 1970s with the advent of molecular biology tools, notably when Genentech produced insulin using recombinant DNA technology.
There are different kinds of microbes. There are fungi, bacteria, archaea…and companies have been using them at scale for a while now. One of the well-established companies in this field, Genomatica, based in San Diego, utilizes E. coli to manufacture the precursors for nylon and various other products. The tools and the technology to scale them have actually been available for a while now!
So the tools exist, and companies are using them.
Yes, but there are still significant challenges.
Microbes are natural – they exist in nature. But how do you engineer them to perform their best? How do we get it to do what we want it to do, not what they want to do? We want them to produce the maximum amounts of our product, whatever that might be, not what the microbes wants to produce. Microbes have billions of years in their favor. It simply boils down to finding a way to get your microbes to do what you want them to do.
Yet another challenge has been to build a robust scale-up framework, so that the microbes behave in the same way at an industrial scale as they do in the lab.
Ravi works to scale the microbes from the lab to an industrial setting.
You mentioned the environmental pushback with plastics, and how a biodegradable plastic can help solve that problem. But there’s another issue with plastics, which is that they’re endocrine disruptors. Does bioplastic solve this problem?
Great question!
Honestly, I think that bioplastic is our best shot at solving this problem. Based on the 2018 EPA statistics, less than 8% of things get recycled. The plastic itself isn’t getting recycled like we think it is! Moreover, recycling itself generates microplastics, which end up in the soil or in the ocean. If you eat a fish that’s has consumed microplastics in the ocean, these microplastics will enter into your body. Same thing when you drink soda out of a plastic bottle. Plastics used in food packaging are a source of microplastic contamination, gradually leaching tiny particles into our food.
Our truly degradable bioplastics breaks down into its simplest, harmless form (technical term is monomers) in a relatively short time span and our bodies are able to tolerate this! It’s not like the plastic in a soda bottle which our bodies don’t make. Our bioplastics are biocompatible, since our bodies already make the base unit that make the bioplastic. Interestingly, there are already implants and sutures made out of this bioplastic since it’s not foreign to our body!
As an extremely early stage startup, you are prone to lots of risk. What are some obstacles you are currently navigating, and what are you doing to create resilience in this fledgling company?
That’s a good question! Transformative endeavors inherently carry risks, yet it is these very ventures that redefine our world.
In the realm of hardtech start-ups, we typically encounter three broad risk categories: scientific/technical, team/execution, and market dynamics.
Firstly, the bioplastics technology we’re focusing on, initially commercialized in the 1980s, has evolved significantly. Earlier, its adoption was limited due to high production costs. Our current objective is to refine this technology scientifically and technically to make it more cost-effective, thereby unlocking new opportunities.
Next, regarding team and execution, we’re consciously assembling an interdisciplinary team with deep expertise in science, engineering, material science, and business development. It’s essential to achieve a harmony between scientific rigor and robust business strategy.
Lastly, market risks can’t be overlooked. Past instances in this industry reveal that premature scaling in absence of market demand or acceptance can lead to failure. Over 40% of start-ups fail due to inadequate product-market fit, a trend even more frequent in our particular field. Hence, we’re prioritizing product development and forging key partnerships to ensure our product meets market needs.
What is next for you, personally, workwise, and otherwise?
I’m looking into transitioning into doing this full time – if you work on ideas part-time, the company will stay part-time.
There is burgeoning start-up scene in India, and I have considered moving back to India to pursue a startup related to bioplastics or other independent ideas. But there are currently other bottlenecks in India which would take longer to resolve. Certain tasks might take five years to accomplish there, tasks that would only require a year or two in the US, especially the research and development (R&D) part. Consequently, I’ve learned to exercise patience in these situations. US has an excellent ecosystem for supporting tech start-ups, so it is a great place to pursue innovation and works out favorably for us.
At this early ideation stage, our focus is on establishing a strong foundation that encompasses both technical and business aspects, as well as assembling an interdisciplinary team. We have an impressive global team of scientists and engineers working on this idea already. Friends and former colleagues in the US, Europe and India who have decades of professional science and engineering experience are helping us too. We are actively working to get advisors on-board with a diverse range of experience, spanning science and technology, government and international policy, business, and finance.
You mentioned deciding on the United States vs India for some of this, and have people all around the globe who want to help. Can you talk about why you’re in San Diego, and any pros or cons that you see in this community?
I think there’s a very big spirit of kindness and generosity in the greater San Diego area, which resonates deeply with me. Furthermore, people are really environment conscious and there is a great ecosystem to support the startups.
San Diego is one of the top three cities in the US to pursue startups, especially in technology and biotech sectors. However, it appears to me that compared to other major hubs such as the Bay Area, NYC, or Boston, we are still lagging in terms of the overall support and funding opportunities for hardtech startups. In addition, there are not many startups in the field of industrial biotech, but I am hoping the success of companies like Genomatica will pave the path for others to follow.
Well Ravi, I hope that you do succeed. What is the best way for someone to contact you if they’d like to learn more?
Thank you. You can find me on LinkedIn! I check it pretty often, so I will be responsive.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Patrick Firlik, the founder of Well Traveled, a healthier and more effective alternative to other immunity boosters like Airborne and Emergen-C. Resilience is all over this company – Patrick is a first time entrepreneur, learning the supplement space, bringing a new product to market, and using that product to build resilience in his customer base! A resilient mind is critical to entrepreneurship, and I enjoyed talking to Patrick about his journey.
In this interview, you’ll learn about the mindset you’ll need to just pull the trigger and start a company, how an idea for a product takes shape, and you’ll get a great primer on the world of naturally derived health supplements – and you’ll learn how most supplements aren’t always what they seem.
If you enjoyed this interview and you’d like to contact Patrick (or try Well Traveled!), you can contact him here.
I’m chiefly interested in the concept of resilience – personal, communal, and societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you and Well Traveled?
I’ll start by talking about the business. With Well Traveled, our whole value proposition centers on resilience. From a scientific standpoint, the product actually helps your immune system adapt more quickly and fend off infections better. In terms of lifestyle, it’s about building resilience against the various challenges encountered from frequent travel or just a busy life. Whether it’s physical fatigue, stress, germs – all sorts of things that can run you down.
You don’t even need to be traveling a lot – it can happen when you have a young kid going to daycare and picking up every bug, or when it’s cold and flu season like it is right now. There are so many things that can knock us off our game. So Well Traveled aims to help people withstand those pitfalls and be their best selves. It’s about resilience from a big picture view, so that you can thrive. That’s the business side of things, anyway.
Personally, I also think resilience is massively important in life. As an entrepreneur, I’ve had to stretch into new territory. As an entrepreneur, you have to learn to deal with “no” a lot! Retailers say no, potential partners say no. I didn’t have sales expertise before this, so building resilience through the process of “constant no” has been huge.
More broadly, as with all startups, it has ups and downs – you need to have resilience if you want to make it work. Honestly, I’d guess any truly successful company relied on resilience at key points to power through tough situations. And outside of work, resilience helps us weather difficult patches in relationships, personal crises, all kinds of life events that can really hit hard. But being resilient enables us to bounce back and make the absolute most of things.
Creating Well Traveled is a bit of a career switch for you. Can you talk about the process of becoming an entrepreneur?
I was a management consultant for seven years, and spent a lot of time traveling on the road to clients. I never really ever felt like I was my best on the road, and that’s where the idea for Well Traveled came from.
I had good routines at home for eating, sleeping, exercise, everything, but when you get on the road, those are hard to maintain. Your life gets disrupted too; you work late in the night, you’re stressed, and your immune system gets run down. You just get sick way too often!
I tried to take Emergen-C and Airborne, but I really hated how sugary and artificial they are. They’re not that much different than a multivitamin, really.
So I always had this idea in the back of my head like, there has to be a better alternative. Something cleaner, something more effective. And then, after seven years consulting, I knew it was time to leave and do something new, and I decided to just go for this!
I will say, though, in 2022, I worked on Well Traveled on nights and weekends while I was still doing consulting. I was working to get the foundation in place. Then, at the start of 2023, I went full time. So that’s how I “became an entrepreneur,” so to speak. It’s not a one size fits all process, but that’s how it happened to me.
Yum!
You didn’t have much of a background in supplement manufacturing. Can you talk about that process? What have you learned?
I actually don’t have any background in science or supplements!
When I came up with this idea and I decided I really want to test and pursue it, I did some research and I found a nutrition consultant who had few decades of experience in the vitamin and supplement space. He does personal consulting for businesses that are launching and growing. He was just absolutely instrumental in getting this off the ground because he helped me formulate it from a scientific standpoint – like what are the innovative new ingredients on the market that we should consider using? What are the dosages we should use?
He connected me to the ingredient suppliers, the manufacturer that I use, all of that. So I owe a lot to him. He was kind of really my connection into the industry and space.
What has been the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome? The biggest success you’ve celebrated?
I think it’s a challenging time for consumer packaged goods companies in general. Obviously, the economy’s not the greatest, and we have high inflation, so people aren’t buying stuff like they used to, especially if it’s something they see as discretionary.
Five years ago, it was also a bit easier for startups to raise money. I raised a little bit from family and friends to get started, but a lot of that was used on our first production run and getting the business set up, so we’ve been working with a pretty limited budget. And I’d say that’s been the biggest obstacle so far.
Luckily though, immunity is top of mind for consumers, especially after COVID. Immunity boosting products are expected to grow. Natural products are expected to grow. Travel’s on the rise. So there are some good tailwinds I would say.
Our biggest success, on the other hand, is getting an approval to get our product into Vitacost. Vitacost is owned by Kroger, and is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, online retailer of vitamins and supplements. And we’ve also gotten into a couple retailers in San Diego. But getting into a pretty big name brand like Vitacost is pretty big – and hopefully we can expand into getting into other brands, other physical stores, and beyond.
How are you working to build resilience into Well Traveled?
I think this kind of goes back to what I talked about in the beginning! Our slogan is, “Stay Well on the Road.” We’re all about helping travelers and other busy people be more resilient with their lives – overcoming environments that challenge their health, and making the most of it.
Part of the value proposition of Well Traveled is that there is no added sugar or artificial additives. Do you see Well Traveled as fitting in as part of an overall larger trend towards realistic supplements? Or is that space still being defined?
I think in general, consumers are looking for better, cleaner, healthier products. People are starting to become more aware and savvier about what is inside of different products. I think in general, consumers are looking for cleaner products with no added sugar and no artificial additives, and that’s what we are trying to provide, and I think that’s a good thing!
However, even though customers are getting wiser, I still find there’s a bit of education on things like synthetic vitamins versus real vitamins. Honestly, even I didn’t know this until I was working on this business, but I would say 99% of supplements out there, the vitamins are synthetically made in a lab! They derive these things using chemicals like petroleum because it’s cheaper to go that way, versus sourcing the vitamin C from an orange or cherry or something.
Most people don’t realize that – but your body does. Your body wants natural vitamins that are real, from whole foods, because the chemical structure actually makes it more easily absorbed by your body, in turn making it more effective. If you can’t absorb it, you can’t utilize it. So when you take a synthetically derived vitamin instead of a naturally derived one, the vitamin won’t be absorbed as well and some of it will be wasted, and I don’t think most people realize that!
I guess my point is, even though customers are getting smarter about where their food comes from, there is still some education to be done in the space – and I hope that over the next five or ten years, people will become more aware.
So, naturally derived supplements solve the poor absorption problem that most multivitamins have?
Absolutely. Synthetic is just harder to absorb. We talk actually talk a lot about plant-based, whole food-based vitamins, and how they are better than synthetic vitamins because of an absorption issue. There have been studies that indicate that synthetic vitamins might even be harmful to your health! There’s no conclusions about that, but there is some evidence that suggests that – so it’s definitely something to consider and be aware of if you’re a consumer.
For example, for certain types of commercially available magnesium supplements, your body won’t absorb about 90% of it. So if you’re taking a 1000mg pill of magnesium, you’re only going to get about 100mg of it! Your body will excrete the rest because it can’t break it down or process it! You’re not getting anywhere near what you think you’re getting, because it’s a really cheap, synthetic form.
Before I started this company, I didn’t really know a lot of this stuff. I just thought you buy a magnesium pill and it worked – but that’s not really the case. And I don’t think many consumers are truly aware of that yet.
We really worked hard to get away from that problem. For example, our Vitamin C is directly sourced from Acerola cherry. Our zinc comes from a guava leaf. Our bodies are built to break these down efficiently, much more than the synthetic varieties.
Interesting. So consumer education is a big part of what you’re trying to do. What other trends in your space do you see?
I think that people are starting to really realize more about the importance of gut health! Your gut is like your second brain – and 80% of your immune cells are in your gut! So we really wanted to create a product that would capitalize on this and support a healthy gut as well.
We use a prebiotic product called BeniCaros and a postbiotic called IMMUSE. They’re really interesting products – they’re both patented branded ingredients and have been clinically studied in a bunch of clinical trials. They’ve won awards for their effects on immune and gut health. They’re incredible, really. Normal vitamins and minerals can’t train your immune cells to be smarter and faster, but our prebiotic BeniCaros does. Not only does it help build healthy gut bacteria, but it actually teaches your immune cells to be faster, stronger, smarter, and more resilient. And I think customers are looking for something like this.
Similarly, IMMUSE activates parts of your immune system that coordinate all the other cells. It’s a really comprehensive way of supporting your immune system. So these are very cool breakthrough scientific discoveries in the last few years that are present in our ingredients, just based on the fact that we, and consumers, know that gut health is important – and most importantly, they make the product more effective.
Do you have any advice for people looking to start their own company?
Sure! I think the first would be simply that it’s going to seem daunting at first. There’s just a ton to do in order to bring a product to market and have it succeed. But I think that breaking down that process into tangible steps and starting slowly helps get you through the hardest part – and the hardest part is just getting started! So I’d recommend just thinking about the first few things that you need to do in order to advance your business, for your idea to take just the tiniest next step beyond being just an idea, and work at each step at a time. Slowly you’ll build momentum, like a ball rolling down a hill – you just have to start somewhere!
I also found it helpful to start and test my business on the side while I had a full-time job. Everyone’s situation is a little different, but if you have that luxury, even if it costs you some nights and weekends, it can really help you get over that initial hurdle. I don’t think in most situations you want to jump full time into something just because you have an idea. So it was nice that I kept my salary for a little while until I felt like there was enough traction to go full time with Well Traveled.
The last piece, I’d say, is just getting to the MVP – the minimum viable product. Build a prototype and test it out. Get feedback from your customers before you invest too much money or time into it. That part is huge too.
Patrick wanted to create a product that would help keep you at your best on the road.
What is your ultimate goal with this company?
My vision is to be more than just immune support!
Right now, we’re branded for travelers and we’re going after that niche, but anyone can take it! I think, just like Emergen-C, it’s not just a travel thing – people can and should take it at home or when they have the sniffles – really it’s for everything. So yes, ultimately I want to expand in the immunity category and be front of mind for people that aren’t just thinking of it for the travel use case.
However, the vision for the overall company is, I want to serve all the needs travelers. I’m not just thinking about immunity; I think there are things like energy, sleep, hydration, and other needs that travelers have, beyond just making sure that they aren’t sick. Down the road, I’d love to launch more products that fulfill those needs, and Well Traveled would become your go-to brand that someone thinks about when they’re packing and throwing their toiletries in their bag. Clean and science-based products that keep you feeling your best.
That’s obviously a much longer term play. We’re starting with immunity, which I think is the biggest pain point for a lot of people – and we’ll see what happens from there.
What are the best ways for people to learn more about, or get involved with, Well Traveled?
The second thing is that if you like our product and it resonates with you, we’re always looking for brand ambassadors to help promote it. You can sign up through a page on our website to receive cash commission for anyone that purchases the product using your code.
We want people who believe in the product and represent the brand well of course, but it could be a nice way to make a little bit of money if you think you have friends or family who would be interested. That’s something we encourage and are actively looking for.
Interested in becoming a brand ambassador for Well Traveled or talking more to Patrick Firlik? Contact him here.
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Mick Hammock 