A return to Detroit | Making plastic without fossil fuel | Takeoff for 3D metal-printing
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” — Jack Welch
Today’s itinerary:
September 17, 2020
Fast Future LEADERSHIP
Meet a startup leader from Detroit Image courtesy of Assembler Labs
Assembler Labs is a Detroit startup studio that partners with founders to lead and spin out businesses, raise independent capital, and grow. To date, it has spun out three businesses: Equal Health, which creates employer direct primary care programs; Motion, which marries an online calendar with a task list; and Clearcut, which helps startups reach product/market fit faster.
Fast Future talked with co-founder Ian Sefferman to learn more about the business and his own startup experience.
What’s your Michigan connection?
Sefferman: I’m a Midwesterner at heart, grew up in Detroit. Like many if not most people of my generation who went into technology, I started heading west pretty much immediately. I ended up first as an intern in 2005 in Seattle at Amazon.
How did you end up creating a startup?
Sefferman: At the beginning of 2009, the iPhone had come out, the App Store had just launched, Android was sort of this glimmer in the sky. I’ve always wanted to do a startup since I was like 12 years old. It felt like a really good time. I promptly made every mistake a first-time founder can possibly make. The only way I can explain it is we somehow survived long enough to figure it out.
That startup was MobileDevHQ, right?
Sefferman: We (and co-founder Patrick Haig) ended up building an enterprise stats product for mobile marketers. We invented a category that we called App Store optimization. It was sort of like SEO but for the App Store. We ended up being the fastest growing private company in the state of Washington. We grew that business to about $75 million in (annual recurring revenue) with about 350 employees over the next three years. We sold the business to another company in Seattle called Tune.
So why did you come back to Michigan and create a startup studio?
Sefferman: My wife and I had always had a dream to get back to Michigan. Patrick and I were thinking about what would be next. We started validating some new startup ideas. One after another, we invalidated those ideas. But in the process we learned that we loved the process of invalidating those ideas, of going zero to 1, getting punched in the face every single day.
What have you learned about Michigan entrepreneurs?
Sefferman: The talent in MI is unbelievable; I was really just blown away by it. But they simply didn’t have any startup experience. They were amazing engineers or incredible domain experts with lots of deep, deep knowledge but not a lot of understanding of how to work with a product and engineering team to build something from scratch.
How have things gone with Assembler Labs?
Sefferman: We’ve spun out now three businesses. We followed with financing for the two businesses that have been spun out for more than a couple of weeks. All in all, we’ve found great founders, and we really believe we can do this on a bigger scale. Share this story!
Fast Future U
Making plastic without fossil fuels? Scientists at The Ohio State University have discovered a chemical process that could lead to a way to make plastics without using fossil fuels. The process involves metabolizing sulfur to cause bacteria to create ethylene, the source of plastics that typically comes from oil or natural gas.
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Runway mat, heal thyself! Among the questions we are about to answer are: Air Force jets land on mats? And those mats are made of metal? And they can be printed? And they can reconfigure themselves? The answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes. An Indiana company has landed a $1 million grant to develop 3D printing tech for a runway mat for the U.S. Air Force.
A Purdue University engineering professor named Pablo Zavattieri is working with the Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies, known as ITAMCO, to develop the 3D metal-printing tech. A mat is great for planes to land on because it keeps debris on the runway from getting in the way.
But that’s not even the crazy part. The crazy part is that the ITAMCO mats can change from one stable configuration to another one and back again. The tech uses a material called Phase Transforming Cellular Material. That means the mats have a longer life span because the runway mat "could potentially heal itself,” Zavattieri said. Share this story!
Kidney transplant network to get boost from AI Here’s a brilliant application for artificial intelligence: streamlining the way doctors match people who need kidney transplants with donor kidneys. Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology are deploying AI to improve the kidney transplant network to speed up the system and improve patient outcomes.
The research is still in an early stage, but a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation is getting the ball rolling toward finding the optimal data architecture for an AI model. Share this story!
FUELING THE FUTURE
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