The Lifesaving Inventor, Joe Landolina - CEO & Co-founder of Cresilon, Inc

Joe Landolina, CEO and co-founder of Cresilon Inc., shared his journey from early chemistry experiments with his grandfather to creating a nine-figure medical device business. Joe's company developed a plant-based hemostatic gel that improves wound care and has saved over 50,000 pets' lives. Joe emphasized the importance of transparency, mentorship, and collaboration in building the business. Cresilon's success is attributed to a blend of experience and passion, and the company plans to extend its mission to human trauma care. Listen to his story and choose which action principle resonates with you today.

Action Principles

Pick one to do this week.

1. Experiment without expectations. New opportunities arise from taking risks. Those "happy little accidents" are great learning moments, too! ACTION: Experiment with something new this week and see what happens. It could be a different kind of social media post, a new product idea, or anything outside your normal routine.
2. Embrace a learning mindset. Take advantage of being a student or novice and ask for help from mentors. ACTION: Choose a question you have and ask someone who has experience for their input.
3. Create a diverse environment. Bring more diversity of thought and background to your team. ACTION: Connect with someone who has a different experience or background from you and build a genuine relationship.
4. Lead with transparency. A good leader embraces failure and concerns, viewing them as opportunities for growth. ACTION: Consider a recent failure and ask yourself what you learned from the experience. 

Guest Resources

Learn more about Joe's work at Cresilon.com and follow him on LinkedIn to stay connected.

Suggested LinkedIn Learning Course:

Discovering Your Strengths

Dave Crenshaw develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities, and organizations of every size. He has appeared in Time magazine, USA Today, FastCompany, and the BBC News. His courses on LinkedIn Learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. His five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is The Myth of Multitasking—a time management bestseller. As an author, speaker, and online instructor, Dave has transformed the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands around the world. DaveCrenshaw.com

Transcript

Joe Landolina: 0:00

When I learned how to walk, I was told by him, the best way to learn chemistry is to mix some things together, and if anything blows up, don't tell my parents. And so it gave me an incredibly early start into the world of chemistry.

Dave Crenshaw: 0:13

In this episode, you'll get to know Joe landolina, the lifesaving inventor, and you'll hear the story of how his scientific curiosity and being a fan of Batman led him to create a nine figure medical device business. I'm Dave Crenshaw, and this is my success Show. Welcome back, friends to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show. This is where I interview some of the most successful people I've met in my life's journeys, and I'm on a mission to find universal principles of success, things you can apply in your life right now to make you more successful. I started this show as sort of a legacy project. I wanted to create something that would help my children succeed. And as it's gone along, I realized you would like to learn along with them, so I've invited you to join us on the ride. If you're not familiar with me, I'm a best selling author. I speak around the world to Fortune 500 companies, and I've taught millions of people how to be successful through my online courses, particularly on LinkedIn. Learning with this show, I wanted to do something a little bit different, and I wanted to interview people who have multifaceted success, not just career or financial success, but but they're well rounded, and they have balance in their life. And by the way, if you know someone like that, someone who's highly successful and has multifaceted success, feel free to send your suggestion to us at guest at Dave crenshaw.com now, before we get into today's episode, I'd like you to do something, and this is for yourself. I would like you to listen for something you can do. So as you hear my guest story, I want you to be thinking about what's something I can do today, what's something I can do this week, not months from now, not a year from now, but right now. And my guest today was introduced to me by a previous guest, Mike Blumenfeld, who's a coach and consultant in New York City. And boy, when I heard Joe's story, I just had to have him on the show. He's got such a fascinating mind, such a such a brilliant business that he's created that's saving the lives right now of animals, and very soon in the near future, will be saving the lives of humans. Joe landolina is the CEO and co founder of cresolon Incorporated while experimenting with natural materials in the lab, he developed an adhesive, hemostatic gel composed of plant based polymers that could support the natural clotting process. Joe and his partner Isaac Miller founded the Brooklyn based medical device company cresolon Incorporated to refine and manufacture the gel technology he invented. Together, their goal is to improve wound care and advance the standard of medical treatment. Joe lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and their 90 pound German Shepherd. Joe, thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show. Of course, Dave, thank

Joe Landolina: 3:15

you so much for having me

Dave Crenshaw: 3:17

so we have a mutual friend, actually, someone else who's been on the show, who is Mike Blumenfeld. He's now 90 years old, and has been an amazing mentor for a lot of people. When I my son and I sat down with him, we were at a prison event, and afterward, we had a dinner, and he started telling me your story, and I was blown away by your story. It's truly remarkable. So I've been excited for quite a while to talk to you about this.

Joe Landolina: 3:44

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on and I'm so excited to be able to share the story here.

Dave Crenshaw: 3:49

My understanding it started when you were young you had access to a lab. Is that correct?

Joe Landolina: 3:54

Exactly? My childhood was a little bit unorthodox in that my grandfather was a pharmaceutical executive, and in retirement, he started a vineyard in upstate New York, and so he was one of the first commercial vineyards in New York State. And he learned lab safety. In the 60s. He fitted his lab out with equipment that he borrowed from his previous employer, and so it was a well overpowered lab. And when I learned how to walk, I was told by him, the best way to learn chemistry is to mix some things together, and if anything blows up, don't tell my parents. And so it gave me an incredibly early start into the world of chemistry, from the age of 1011, 12 years old.

Dave Crenshaw: 4:36

You know, that's interesting, as you say, that my grandfather was a doctor, and he was fascinated with chemistry, and I learned a lot of chemistry concepts from my grandfather. Now it didn't stick. I didn't do anything in that field, but my recollection from that was that I found it experienced so many amazing experiences with my grandfather, and I got really close to him. Through that is that your experience as well. I was super

Joe Landolina: 5:03

lucky. My parents were relatively young when they had me, and so I was raised basically by my four grandparents that were all still alive and incredibly active when I was a kid, and that includes my grandfather, and so he would pick me up every single morning to walk me to the school bus, and then he'd pick me up from the school bus when it came back at the end of the day, and bring me into the lab and play chess together and solve massive problems. And so, in a way, I was a bit of his experiment.

Dave Crenshaw: 5:31

He's teaching you how to experiment while using you as the experiment as well, exactly. So talk to me a little bit about what some of those early experiments were like, I mean, you say you just mix things together. That sounds a little Cavalier. It seems like, let's just throw stuff together. I'm assuming he also was teaching you safety at the same time. So

Joe Landolina: 5:54

you might be a little bit overestimating the way that I was taught chemistry. But that being said, a lot of it was just understanding how to mix things together, acids and bases and other types of early reactions. And as I got a little bit more adventurous with my chemical experiments and started to get the attention of my parents, they urged me to find safer chemistries. And in their mind, plant based chemistries were the safest and so interesting. I grew up on a bunch of property, and so with vineyard, they gave me a patch of land that I could grow things myself on. And so I bought a number of Eastern medicine books and herbal medicine books. And so a lot of my earliest exposure into chemistry was actually looking at traditional herbal recipes and things that you could grow or find in forage in nature, and then bring back into the lab and do extractions on and as I got a little bit older, that led to me eventually doing some summer research when I was 14 or 15 years old at Columbia University. That really solidified that. But in the early days, it was just what I had access to, so there really wasn't anything on the internet, and it was just university libraries and whatever you thought in encyclopedia,

Dave Crenshaw: 7:10

the interesting thing that you're saying there to me is you're talking about what foraging for the materials. So what does that look like? Like you're just picking up leaves and stuff, or was it more guided through the what you were learning in the books that you were studying?

Joe Landolina: 7:26

Well, so what's interesting is, I mean, I the thing that piqued my interest in the very beginning was that you can find certain compounds, like salicylic acid, which is the precursor to aspirin, is found, I believe, if I remember correctly, in a flower called Queen Anne's lace, which grows rampantly here in the Northeast, and it's that cluster of little, tiny white flowers that grow in fields. And so things like that were fascinating to me, that these modern innovations could be found growing in one's backyard. And so I went down a really deep rabbit hole of seeing what I could find in nature and seeing how I can extract and again, there's not much more that you can do or even verify that the experiments that I was doing were correct, but it was fascinating retracing the steps of scientists that had come beforehand

Dave Crenshaw: 8:12

and maybe educate me and my audience for a little bit. Most of the medicines that we have, most of the advancements that we have, are grounded in something that was found in nature. It's just more refined, right? It's getting distilled down to the essence that gives us only the medical result that we want. Is that correct? Exactly,

Joe Landolina: 8:34

an overwhelming number of drugs and medications started with some natural source,

Dave Crenshaw: 8:40

and you mentioned that you were studying at Columbia when you were 1415 so were you ahead of the curve in terms of what normally would happen for a child in high school studying?

Joe Landolina: 8:53

So I was lucky that I maybe it was the immense of problems in the chest from an early age, I ended up getting relatively advanced, and so I was a year ahead in high school, and was able to take what became a trilingual diploma in high school, so English and French and Spanish. But at the time, and I'm not sure if this program still runs, but Columbia had a summer research program that was dedicated specifically for high school students, and and I applied into that was accepted, and that was my first exposure into true tissue engineering.

Dave Crenshaw: 9:26

And you mentioned that your parents were supportive of this and your grandparents were involved. Were there any other mentors that you started to develop during this time that were guiding the experiments that you were doing and your interest in things?

Joe Landolina: 9:40

I was lucky that I had such an active group of parents and grandparents that they I was trying to follow in their footsteps. All of my grandparents and both of my parents are entrepreneurs, not in the pharmaceutical industry, except for my grandfather, who had left it, but still, they started their own businesses, and I'd seen them go through the trials and tribulations. Conversations of building something from the ground up. And then when I got into the academic world or into these research programs and seeing scientists solving real world problems, as a young kid, I always wanted to be a surgeon, and so at that age, I realized that I can make an impact by studying first the engineering of how we deliver these drugs or how we create these compounds that can affect human life or save a human life. So

Dave Crenshaw: 10:29

your parents were entrepreneurs. How were they teaching you what entrepreneurship was about? Because I know that's a big part of your career right now. Was it just through observation and their example that you learned entrepreneurial lessons, or were they actually teaching you principles and saying, you know, in the future, here's something to keep in mind. It was

Joe Landolina: 10:51

a bit of both. And so it was both through observation, allowing me to go and shadow them while they were doing what they were doing or going about their their day, but also allowing me to take on real projects within their businesses from a very young age, and it was incredibly helpful. So they had you working in the business. They had me working I was basically an unpaid intern, but everything from being able to be a boom mic operator on the set of a TV show being filmed to being able to price and market my own vintage of wine. I was very lucky growing up that I had the opportunity to dive into a lot of things that most people don't get access to until much later in life. That's

Dave Crenshaw: 11:34

fantastic that they were giving you those those opportunities to learn those things, and as you did that, did you become less and less interested in being a surgeon and a doctor, or were you still wanting to pursue that path as you started to proceed on to college? Let's say,

Joe Landolina: 11:53

oh, so I held on to that goal of being a surgeon until the very last possible moment. Okay,

Dave Crenshaw: 12:00

all right, and tell me if I'm wrong. I remember Mike telling me a story of a happy accident that occurred in the lab that sort of became the Alpha moment of cresolon. Is that accurate?

Joe Landolina: 12:15

It is. And so I'd completed my summer of research at Columbia, and the work that I was doing there was using an algae based scaffold to so basically, this structure made of algae that you can take stem cells and use that scaffold to help differentiate or convert the stem cells into a target tissue. And in this case, it was cartilage. And I thought that was the coolest thing that I've ever seen and having access to the lab that I had, I decided, You know what, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna make my own cartilage. And so I went out, we had two ponds that were in front of the vineyard, and I raked up a bunch of algae, and I did an extraction of polymers out of this, and I tried to put a scaffold together, and obviously it failed miserably. I came nowhere near what I was trying to do, but what I noticed at that point was that the material that I made, this gel, would stick to skin, and it wouldn't let go until I wanted it to. And one of the many jobs that my dad had was that he was a municipal police lieutenant and a paramedic in our community, and so I knew that stopping bleeding was a massive challenge, and that there wasn't really a great solution for that. And so I had this idea at that time, which was, what if you can use a material like the one that I had discovered to stabilize a patient as you move them from point A to point B? I wasn't thinking about actually creating a clot, but just more so plugging up a bullet wound to get that patient to a hospital where the patient could be triggered by a surgeon, and that became the precursor to this invention, but

Dave Crenshaw: 13:50

you weren't able to do really anything with it in that moment, or didn't know how to apply it in the beginning. Correct? My understanding was there was a moment in college where a teacher gave you an assignment that sort of moved things forward. Could you tell that story?

Joe Landolina: 14:07

Yeah, of course. I mean, so it was two things, one after another. And so during freshman orientation week, at the time, they took all of the engineers and they sent us up to Roscoe, New York. They called the New Student camping experience. And so they locked us in cabins to bond with them, with one another, because engineers, theoretically are going to make friends on their own,

Dave Crenshaw: 14:28

and we're gonna make you become friends. We're gonna put you in enclosed space. That's great, exactly.

Joe Landolina: 14:34

And so part of that was this a sign where they broke you up into groups and you had and they had you make a solution or something to help a superhero of your choosing. And my my group was assigned Batman, and I've been playing with this material. And so I thought, You know what? If you could use this as a way to ensnare a bad guy? And that got me thinking about other uses for it. And so when I got back to campus, there was a poster for a business plan. Competition. And in my mind, I wasn't looking to start a business. I was looking to finish my engineering degree, get into a good med school, become assertion. But I thought that having the opportunity to go through this program, if you got far enough in, they had what they called a mini MBA, and so you could take classes at the business school. And I thought that would help round me out, because at the time, I was an engineer's engineer, and so I could barely balance a checkbook, or much less put a P and L together. And so I entered with this idea, and I met my co founder, and I realized that ensnaring bad guys may not be exactly the biggest market. And so I reverted back to the original concept, which was stopping a bullet wound from bleeding, even though we didn't quite know how that would all come together. And we ended up winning at the engineering school, and we took second place at the business school, but that gave us just enough funding, just enough exposure, just enough context to realize that this was something worth pursuing.

Dave Crenshaw: 15:59

Well, I'm a simple man. You tell me a story that involves Batman, and instantly I like it. But from a practical standpoint, what I love is how you're bringing up your MBA, or that mini MBA, and how that sets you up for success, not just with the engineering side of things, but with the entrepreneurship side of things. How much in your future career, has that training helped? Has that MBA training helped with the things that you've been doing now? So

Joe Landolina: 16:30

just to be very clear, what they call a mini MBA was effectively a half semester of hyper condensed business classes designed to get entrepreneurs up over the hurdle. So just a taste of it, just a taste, but it was critical. I think that the skills that you learned there were incredibly important to understand, not only how to build the processes or the foundation onto which a business can be built, but also how to communicate that to whether it's investors, to customers, to the world in general. It helped pull me from the engineering world or the technical world alone, and into a more well rounded role.

Dave Crenshaw: 17:09

You know, I asked that question. For those who have listened to most of the episodes of this podcast, this is a recurring theme, is the background in business will help you in whatever it is that you're attempting to do. In fact, I had that conversation with my daughter last week. She's an excellent fiction writer. She's already written a novel and a half, and we were talking about school, and we say, I say to her, you can go to school. I'll help you with that, but you must study business as part of it. And I think the background that you had from your parents and that education that you picked up through your college years is incredibly influential in the success that you're having now. It really is okay. So you had that moment you won that business plan. There are a lot of great stories like that where someone wins a business plan competition and yet doesn't turn it into an actual business. So where did you go from there? How did things start to evolve into actually creating a company built around this technology?

Joe Landolina: 18:12

That's an absolutely great point. And so we exited that business plan competition with a wonderful idea, but no product. And so the product that we had, or the invention that we had wasn't yet proven. And so we had a really good idea, a really good hunch that it could work, but we hadn't gotten through those motions yet. And we were kids. I was 17 years old when I started this business. My co founder, Isaac, I think, was 19 or 20, and not to mention I was doing a combined bachelor's and master's program in engineering in four years, and I was still a freshman. And so we had a lot to go through in order to convert this from what was a really great idea that was able to win a business plan competition to something that could actually be used in a patient. And that that took from the founding of the business in 2010 to roughly 2015 when the product was quote, unquote, ready, it became this very interesting pathway of of iterating the product, because usually INMED device or in life sciences world, when you find a drug, or when you're looking for a product like this, you start what's called target first, right? And so if curing cancer is the objective, you look at some sort of pathway and you say, here's a receptor that I'm going to target, and I'm going to make drugs that fit that target. And you know what you're trying to do with this. We started with, we basically started with the material. We started with something that we had a really good hunch that it would do something better than anything else. And as we started testing it, we realized that 25% of the time it would do things that the world had never seen. The 75% of the time it would do nothing, and we had no idea why. Yeah. And so it was this almost inverted innovation curve where we had to learn about our own material in order to help improve

Dave Crenshaw: 20:07

it. So five years, that's a really long time to run a business, and I'm assuming you're generating no revenue during that time. So for those who are unfamiliar. How does that work? How do you keep the paying the bills while you're developing things? Were you using venture capital? Or where did that come from? The support for that

Joe Landolina: 20:32

so the beauty of that period of time was that it was almost entirely bootstrapped. So I graduated in 2014 and we raised our a round a month later. But during that initial phase, it was prize winnings and under $300,000 of angel investment, friends and family type money that we brought in that was mainly back ended into 20 the end of 2013 beginning of 2014 and so we were really scrappy. Effectively, I took out a student loan to help pay for an apartment that we were in. He did the same. We converted the kitchen into a lab, and very likely should not have done that, but we were doing research, and our living room became the office for our team, and we had lab space that was donated to us by a few friendly scientists who saw what we were doing and just wanted to be helpful, and so we were incredibly, incredibly scrappy in what we did.

Dave Crenshaw: 21:27

You know, there's a lot of value in those student years of being able to get help and assistance and support from people that you wouldn't normally get. I experienced the same thing, really, in my career, when I started as a business coach, and there were a few people who took pity on me or enjoyed the experience of mentoring someone who is young, and I think that's important to take advantage of that in those years while you still can, because when you're 3031, you already have your business. Not as many people are like here, let me just help you out and give give you lab equipment that doesn't happen like that exactly.

Joe Landolina: 22:04

It doesn't and so we were incredibly lucky that, as we were starting this, we had the safety net of being in school, because it wasn't like we had to leave our jobs to start this. And these types of innovations are in life sciences. It takes forever. I mean, even after 2015 It was another five years before we sold our first product. Wow,

Dave Crenshaw: 22:23

you mentioned your partner, Isaac. How did you two meet? How did you form that business partnership?

Joe Landolina: 22:29

So we met at a business plan or at the matchup for the stern Business Plan Competition at NYU. And Isaac, at the time, was a junior at NYU School of Business in international business, but we needed a CFO, and so he changed his major to finance, and the rest was history. Wow.

Dave Crenshaw: 22:47

So he discovered what he was going to do for a career as a result of that competition as well, in

Joe Landolina: 22:53

a way. And so it was. We gave a presentation there, and we had professors, we had doctors, we had lawyers come up to us and offer to help found the business. And then there was Isaac, who had no experience, but just had a passion for what we were doing. I realized that he, at the very least, knew as little as I did, but was as curious as I was, and so it was a really helpful partnership from the beginning.

Dave Crenshaw: 23:19

So talk to me about what didn't work during those years as you were developing the product. Because, I mean, you're saying four to five years to develop the product, then another five years before you sold the product. So let's talk about those nine to 10 years. What were mistakes that you made, lessons that you learned while you were developing this product,

Joe Landolina: 23:42

a lot of it came around just not knowing what we didn't know. And so on one hand, I'll say that that naivete helped move us forward. I think if you had told us as undergrads that this would be a 10 year process and that we'd need to raise into the nine figures of venture capital in order to get this over the finish line, we would have considered it impossible, and perhaps even given up on it. And so there's a strong benefit to taking it piece by piece. But the first challenge was getting the product to work, and that was difficult for me, because it was really, it was a solo challenge in a way, the way that our product works, not to go too technical, is that it shouldn't work. It's almost like mixing oil and water together and expecting them to stay emulsified or to stay together. And so I just assumed that I was a bad chemist, and that's where most of the innovation came from. Is that I just kept trying to mix two things together or do two things that were seemingly impossible, but in not realizing that, I found the solution there. But once we got the product at the end, there became the challenge of making it. And you just assume that there exist experts out in the world that can help you with that. And so the goal in 2014 In 2015 was to be a virtual company. And so if you the space that I'm calling in from today, this is our original site. It's an old 1930 schoolhouse that we found on Craigslist and we rented for just under $4,000 a month back in 2013 when we found it. And so this is not your typical biotech headquarters and and obviously we've graduated since then to larger and fancier facilities, but this site was never intended to hold more than five people. The goal here was to have a simple lab where we could do research, and we assumed that everything else would be done virtually. We would bring in consultants to help the regulatory process. We would bring in contract manufacturers to do the manufacturing contract labs, the testing, and then we'd just work with the distributor, or sell the business to a partner, and they would do all of the sales. And it turned out that what we had was so novel we couldn't do any of that. And so I remember, it was Christmas Eve, 2014 I was faced with this dilemma, which was, either shut the business down or try to do it ourselves, for for manufacturing, because there was no one in the world that had the expertise to do this manufacturing. Everyone told us it was impossible, and the only place that was open at that time was a clean room manufacturer out on the West Coast. And I called them, and I spent $14,000 on a clean room, and it showed up a few months later, and Crestline became what's now the only manufacturer of sterile products or of medical products in New York City. And so just to show a little, we know our manufacturing here was on the second floor. We have no elevator. And so I ordered this. I assumed that a clean room would come in boxes. It didn't. It came in a single crate the size of a Volkswagen, and we had to have an interviewee sit on the curb and make sure that none of our neighbors walked away with the copper wiring inside of our clean room while we disassembled it on Third Avenue in Brooklyn and carried it upstairs piece by piece. But that summer, we became a manufacturer. We started doing it ourselves.

Dave Crenshaw: 27:00

I love that again. That illustrates sort of that bootstrap mentality and that blissful ignorance about how hard things you're going to be, and you just keep going with it. So you graduated from college, you got funding. So in that case, where did that funding come from to move the company to a higher level.

Joe Landolina: 27:21

So that was also a bit unorthodox, which is that in my senior year of college, I filmed this video of the product working. It was maybe another example of being scrappy, and something that I tell to other entrepreneurs, which is, if you can visually show what your value proposition is for the world, as much as possible, we got that down to a 25 second GIF, no audio, no text, which is a steak that I bought from a butcher, fresh blood that I bought from a butcher and an aquarium pump, where we pumped it for the steak. You put the product on it, stops it instantly. And everyone can tell what we do and why it's important and why it's better than competition. And that video went viral. It had over 140 million views on it. Wow. We had about 15% of the US market in Animal Health try to buy the product at that point. And we had over 8000 investors reach out to invest in the business. And so Whoa, we were able to put together a really amazing cohort of investors in that a round that had some VCs in it, but they were primarily entrepreneurs themselves, and those investors ended up reinvesting throughout the life of the business. And so it wasn't always the easiest path, and in fact, it was maybe more difficult in a lot of ways, but we did it our own way, and we found people who truly understood, supported and were patient with the growth of the business, because everything in life sciences, but everything in entrepreneurship in particular, takes longer than you expect and costs a little bit more than you expect. I

Dave Crenshaw: 28:49

just want to briefly highlight that, which is the power of video, the power of showing what something can do. You could write a business plan, you could fill it up with pictures, and you can give a PowerPoint presentation, but there's nothing like actually seeing the product in action, seeing what you do in action. And I think too few businesses rely on video in a lot of different ways. They could use it to help grow the business, help sell better, and yet I still think, even in the YouTube era, it's underutilized to convince people I agree wholeheartedly. Okay, so let's start to move forward. You're starting to grow the company. You've got funding from these investors. How many employees did you have at the point when you first sold your first product. So

Joe Landolina: 29:43

the first sale was five years after that point, and so there was a big reset right in the middle. And so we raised funding, and then we realized that we were on the wrong track and had to go back to the drawing board. But at the time of first sale, we had maybe 65 and. Employees. Wow, but that's the hallmark of biotech, which is that everything has to be at scale in order to do anything.

Dave Crenshaw: 30:07

That would imply, to me, that there is a pretty strong risk tolerance in biotech. There's the understanding that, you know what, we're going to have to invest in this for five years or more before we start seeing money back. So I'm assuming that the people who are investing in this, the venture capitalist, they're very, very comfortable with a long timeline, correct?

Joe Landolina: 30:28

And one of the benefits that kresilon had to be frank, was that we had earlier access to revenue than most biotechs, because we used the animal health market or veterinary care as an early on ramp to revenue, and

Dave Crenshaw: 30:43

I'm assuming they also provided you with mentorship, with guidance, with consulting to help with that growth. What does that look like for someone who hasn't experienced it?

Joe Landolina: 30:52

So I think again, one of the biggest learnings there was that we expected that you can very easily find experts in your own field, and I think that the biggest lesson that we learned was that especially when you're doing something novel, there's no one that comes in with the playbook that applies directly to your business. And that was a big disappointment when we first learned it, but it also really helped us understand how important it is to have a team, to have a diversity of thought and ideas and backgrounds around you, where it's not just about having the most experienced individuals or the best consultants or the highest paid consultants. It's about having a blend of experience and a blend of passion and creativity and ability to understand that the playbook that you come out or come into a business with is not the playbook that you need to operate the business, and it's about working together and collaborating to write it yourself.

Dave Crenshaw: 31:49

Can you think of a story that illustrates that principle of the blend of experience and passion with the group that you had where you were able to achieve something that you could not have without that.

Joe Landolina: 32:03

So so that's how we got over this, this hurdle. And so when we built this manufacturing facility that was just above my office here, it was a 10 foot by 10 foot manufacturing site where everything was being done manually. And then we got inundated with orders from over 15% of the market, we had something like 4500 orders come in for a product, and we realized it was irresponsible to do what we said we were going to do out of this site. We had to go back to the drawing board. We had to raise more capital, and it was difficult, because our product looks like hummus in a syringe, and but it has to be made like a vaccine. And so there are lots of people who can make hummus and lots of people who can make vaccines. Can make vaccines, but no one that was maybe dumb enough to try to do them at the same time. And so everything had to be customized. And so we we assembled a team of, effectively, kids that came up with the business, or recent graduates who just were whip smart and curious and willing to put in the time, and we brought in individuals who had worked in industry, so someone who worked at a major healthcare company, overseeing their wound closure team and so very similar to what we do here at cre salon, and somebody who built one of the largest factories on the west coast for pharmaceuticals, and another person who operated the quality program for one of the largest vaccine manufacturing sites. And I think the most elucidating thing was that no one, no one person, had the solution for us. It was about collaboration, and the ideas that were had were always compromises between the most experienced people in the room, and those started with us right out of undergrad, because you need creative solutions, and you need those creative solutions to be realistic and vetted, and they need to fit in in the regulatory landscape, because at the end of the day, that's critical in life sciences. So actually, the woman who was the head of quality for the big vaccine plant, she retired, she was the first retirement from creslon, and she recently for Mike bloomfield's birthday party, came back into town and had the opportunity to see the plant. It was just so amazing to see that process, because we had no idea if this could work. And obviously those of us who hadn't worked in the industry were a bit more optimistic than the ones who had, but we got it done, and it was in collaboration.

Dave Crenshaw: 34:17

So you just mentioned Mike again. We mentioned him at the beginning, could you just talk to us a little bit about the role that Mike Blumenfeld played in your success as a mentor and someone to talk to throughout this maybe, maybe start with how you would meet, because I heard that story recently, like, how would you get together and have conversations with them? And what were those conversations like?

Joe Landolina: 34:40

Sure. And so first I just want to say that it's like I said before that, with consultants, with advisors. When a business grows this drastically, it's nearly impossible to have a single set of advisors or consultants that take the whole journey, or that last the whole journey, or become or stay relevant the whole journey. That's a great point. And the. Most amazing thing about Mike is that we met him during the NYU business plan competition in 2010 he was assigned to us. He was one of four mentors that were assigned to the business, and we hit it off. And following that competition, Mike and I started a cadence where every Wednesday morning we have breakfast together, and so we've done that for the better part of 14 years. Wow. And the thing with Mike is that he's a people driven leader, and the value in that is that people never change, right? That the fact that people come first in a business is the same if you're two people in a room, in a dorm room, starting a company, or if you're 100 people across multiple sites operating globally, it's still relevant. And so having mike there with both his wealth of experience, his brutal honesty, where I always joke that Mike knows exactly which question you don't want to answer at any given time, he asks that question for the sake of it, just to get you to confront the elephant in the room. And it's really amazing. And beyond that, what Mike has done selflessly has been over the years, as we've identified young talent within our organizations, we've given them coaching with Mike. And so Mike not only has met with me, but he's also coached about a dozen of our young leaders, a good number of which have stayed with cressel on and moved up. But there are others. And I mean, Mike's party a few weeks ago was a great testament to this, where we had ex kresilon employees that are now in leadership roles and other companies across the industry, across the world, fly into New York to come and celebrate Mike because of the coaching and mentorship and advisement that he gave to them during their time here at kreslo. That

Dave Crenshaw: 36:43

highlights something that I believe strongly in in my coaching and consulting, which is the true test of leadership is how well you create other leaders. And it sounds like Mike was successful with that, and that you're successful with that in creating other leaders. If they stay with your company, great, if they go to someone else's company, great. But that's such a powerful path to grow a business. Would you agree

Joe Landolina: 37:08

completely it's critical, and I think it gets overlooked too often. And the thing that I always say is that companies like or startups grow exponentially, or the expectation is that you grow exponentially, and people, by default, do not grow exponentially. But I believe it's the responsibility of a leader to afford the opportunity of exponential growth. And so if that employee opts in, you should load them up with as much development as you can, as many opportunities as you can, to be able to ride that wave. I mean, a great example of that is my my vice president of quality and regulatory started with us as an intern. He was the guy who lived across the hall from us in the dorms, and he's now coming on 11 or 12 years with the business, and he's put in the effort, and he's become a leader, making leaders of

Dave Crenshaw: 37:59

his own, the hardest part of any startup is the first sale is the first person to say, here's a check, here's my credit card, whatever it is, invoice me, I'm buying this. What was that first sale like? How did that come up? Come about.

Joe Landolina: 38:21

Oh, it's a hilarious story, because our first launch so after 2015 it took us another five years to commission the facility and get it into regulatory compliance. And so that meant that our launch date for vetted gel was october 2020. During, I think, was the delta wave of covid, so we were in the middle of effectively full lockdown. But as an essential business, we were operating, and our customers, as veterinary clinics, were also essential, and they were operating, but you couldn't get into the clinics. So our first sales happened in parking lots, in stairwells, over zoom calls. And so it was. It was dystopian in a way, but we got it done. That's

Dave Crenshaw: 39:02

crazy. I didn't even think about that. The timeline on that that that's when it occurred. Did it help that there was it a particular demand where there was higher demand for this, or was that just sort of coincidental to selling your product?

Joe Landolina: 39:18

I mean, that was one of the most interesting things as well is that we had huge pre order lists for vetted gel but sometimes, when life gets in the way, like a global pandemic, all of our customers are also business owners, and that's one of the that's one of my favorite things about the animal health industry, is that our average customer is a small business owner, and so if they're not in surgery, doing What they do, saving pets lives, they're not in business. And so understanding that, even if there's interest in the product, and they love the concept, converting that into an actual sale, to get the time, to get them to train and to change their behaviors when everything else is stripped away, and so that there are no more conferences. There's no more opening the front door and talking to the receptionist. First, it was a really interesting and unexpected challenge

Dave Crenshaw: 40:04

you mentioned so that this is saving pets lives. So is there a path, or have you already reached the path of it helping save human lives? Where are you at in that process? The

Joe Landolina: 40:14

veterinal product has been amazing to see. It's we just surpassed 50,000 pet lives saved in 30 countries across the world on that product line. So we received FDA clearance for human use last year. We also have another product which is designed for massive hemorrhage. So think military use, emergency medicine and trauma care, things like gunshot wounds, stabbings, motor vehicle accidents. The original idea that we started Batman, exactly. And so that product is not yet approved by FDA, but is pending approval, and we're gearing up for launch on that. And so that should be happening, hopefully relatively soon. If you

Dave Crenshaw: 40:57

don't mind me asking, if you're not comfortable with this question, we don't have to keep it, but what is the current valuation of crest salon? We're

Joe Landolina: 41:04

very proud to say that it's significant. It's well into the nine figures. Wow.

Dave Crenshaw: 41:08

That's amazing. I mean, really, to see that start of that path of your grandfather teaching you to mix things together, to well, you're mixing things together, and you've created such a beautiful business around it, that's fantastic. Congratulations. And you're just at the beginning of this process, right? We are, and you were fairly recently married. Is that right? Exactly? My

Joe Landolina: 41:31

wife and I were married about a year and a half ago, but we've been together for 12 years, and so it was really just a formality at the end of the day.

Dave Crenshaw: 41:39

Can you talk a little bit about how you two support each other in that relationship?

Joe Landolina: 41:45

So it's been a really amazing partnership. I'm incredibly lucky in that my wife is also an engineer. We met in school. She's also an operator that runs a relatively large business in the chemical industry. So it's been a really interesting support curve, where, as we've grown through our respective careers, we've been able to lean on one another as partners, and so it's been incredibly helpful. Where, being in the CEO chair, even having co founders and a leadership team and advisors and investors, it's helpful to have one singular person that you can count on as a partner at the end of the day, I have that in my wife. Could you give us just a

Dave Crenshaw: 42:27

little insight into how that works? Is it conversations that you're having with each other? Is it sometimes picking up the slack at home? What's on a practical standpoint? How does that work?

Joe Landolina: 42:36

So we're both engineers, and so everything ideally runs very efficiently. And so we have everything from we have a shared spreadsheet that goes through exactly where support is needed to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. We do formal check ins that we put on the calendar, which may sound way too corporate, but at the very least with I travel 200 nights a year. She travels 200 nights a year separately, and so making sure that we have time to focus on ourselves and make sure that we're doing what's needed to be done is incredibly important as well. And she always describes herself as both my biggest cheerleader and my biggest critic, which is that we can always count on one another to give honest, direct feedback, and that's important because that doesn't always come from the rest of our circles. Yeah, and

Dave Crenshaw: 43:24

that works for you, because I know sometimes people do not want that kind of brutal honesty from their spouse. In fact, I'd say that's pretty rare that you guys do that, but it works. I

Joe Landolina: 43:35

think at least in our case, it's necessary. We have to. It makes it a lot easier to operate with all of our cards on the table at any given time.

Dave Crenshaw: 43:44

What do you see ahead for the future, Joe? What's five years out for the business today, we're

Joe Landolina: 43:51

saving lives as our mission, but we're saving lives in the veterinary industry. We're very soon going to move and extend that mission into saving human lives, which is something we're incredibly excited about. And so looking over the next five years, there's a lot of growth ahead. With cre salon as a manufacturer, we have our own sales forces, and so there's a lot of growth to be done in order to support that mission, but having a product that is launched in trauma care, where we should be seeing this in ambulances, in military, in hospitals, in fire and police, so we can get product to those who need it most, and then eventually moving this into the into the or in humans. Oh, that's

Dave Crenshaw: 44:35

amazing. I'm thrilled. I mean, you're, you're clearly at the beginning of the curve of this business and where it's going to go five years, 10 years, I think that's going to be a really remarkable story and a fun ride for you and your team. So thank you for sharing that with us. So Joe, this is something we do at the end of every episode. I want to help someone who's listening to this be. Do something. I think it's easy to be inspired by your story and to be educated about what you've done. The real power comes from when someone takes action. So what I'm going to do now, Joe is I'm going to pull out three possible actions that stood out to me, something someone can do this week to make your success story a part of their success story. So I'm going to call out three specific actions, and then I'd like you at the end to share one of yours. Sound good, of course. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to go all the way back to the very, very beginning, about your grandfather saying, What's the best way to learn chemistry, mix things together. And I think that that is a great principle for any life and any career. Just try things. Just try experiments. Take some risks. If it doesn't work out, that's fine. So maybe, if you're listening to this and you're like, Hey, there's this idea that I've been thinking, I should try, just give it a try, and if it doesn't work, that's okay, because the process of experimentation has value. What you learn about yourself, what you learn about your career or your interest, is going to have value, even if that experiment doesn't work out, like Bob Ross said, you know, have happy little accidents. Joe, certainly, his whole business is built on sort of a happy accident, right? The next one that goes back to something we talked about early is take advantage of being a student, or if you're not a student, take advantage of being a novice, and ask for help. People will help you. People with more experience, with more knowledge, will be willing to mentor you if you ask for it and are humble about it. I think too many people are afraid to show that they lack the knowledge, when, in fact, showing that is helpful. And I don't think people are curious enough or ask enough questions, and they're missing out on the value of working with a mentor and getting help from someone. And then, more recently, you talked about how you've built a team of diversity of thought and background, where they're blending experience and passion, and how that's helped you overcome, perhaps a lack of knowledge or a lack of someone who has the expertise to help you, but you've found the truth. You've found the best path forward by having a team of people who have worked together to do that. And I would say to someone listening to this, how could you add a little bit more of diversity and thought and background to your team, or perhaps even to your life, and just say, hey, I want to associate with people who have backgrounds that are different than mine, and how that can lead you to finding a good answer. So just kind of spread out a little bit and meet some new people. So those are three actions from me, Joe. What's one that stands out to you? So

Joe Landolina: 48:05

one that's been incredibly helpful? We actually, we didn't speak about it today, but it's transparency, and especially transparency within your own team and within your own circles. And I, when I started, I thought that the CEO had to act as the filter to keep all of the craziness from the world and all of the ups and downs and volatility that we see in a business away from the team so the team can focus. And I one day, started admitting my own failures, admitting my own worries and concerns, and being transparent with people in my life about the things that were stressing me out of the things that I had outside of my own control. And I realized that it closed the gap between myself and the people in my circles, right? It allowed people to step in and help where they could help, when, otherwise I didn't even realize that they were capable of stepping in to help.

Dave Crenshaw: 48:52

Yeah, well, it means you're saying that too. I'm hearing the application as a leader, even when you're in charge, even when you're supposed to have all the answers, being candid and saying, maybe I don't have the answers, but you can help me find it exactly that's fantastic, Joe, this has been a delight to talk with you and to get to know you. And thank you so much. Hopefully, sometime the next time out, I'm out in New York, we can grab a bite together and meet in person. But thank you so much for being generous with your time. Of course, Dave, thank

Joe Landolina: 49:23

you so much for having me on it's great meeting as well. And

Dave Crenshaw: 49:25

if people want to continue to follow your journey, learn about salon. Where would you suggest they go?

Joe Landolina: 49:31

So our website, cresolon.com, has most updates about the business. They could also look me up on LinkedIn, or look the company up on LinkedIn at Joe. Adele to WordPress along Fantastic.

Dave Crenshaw: 49:43

Thank you Joe, and thank you everyone for listening. Remember, it's not just about the knowledge that you gained or the inspiration that you received. It's about the action that you take. So do one thing, do one thing today or this week, and you'll make Joe's. Success Story, a part of your success story. Thanks for listening.

Darci Crenshaw: 50:06

You've been listening to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show, hosted by my dad, Dave Crenshaw, and produced by invaluable incorporating research and assistant production by Victoria bidez, Sound Editing by Nick Wright, voiceover by me Darci Crenshaw, and the music is by Ryan Brady via Pon five licensing, please subscribe to the Dave Crenshaw success show on Apple podcasts Spotify, wherever you like to get your podcasts. If you have a suggestion for someone my dad might like to interview, please send it to guests at Dave crenshaw.com and please don't forget to leave us a five star review. See you next time you.