From Fertilizers to Future Tech: Exploring New Frontiers with Mark Whittaker

Pat talks to a seasoned entrepreneur and founder of multiple biotech ventures, Mark Whittaker. They delve into the journey of founding companies like Flywheel Conversion and Twin Cities Biotech Consulting. The guest shares experiences from a 20-year stint at Biotechne, detailing roles from protein research to process engineering and the transition into managing an analytical core facility. The conversation also touches on entrepreneurial failures, innovative side projects like insect-based fertilizer, and the intricacies of the burgeoning cannabis industry. Additionally, there's an in-depth look at the future impact of AI in the biotech field, with a focus on its current capabilities and limitations. The guest provides valuable advice for new graduates entering the life sciences industry, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous learning.

00:00 Introduction and Entrepreneurial Journey
00:26 Early Career and Biotechnology Ventures
02:23 Innovative Projects and Side Hustles
07:37 Challenges and Failures in Business
08:25 Cannabis Industry Insights
11:27 Amino Acids and Analytical Services
17:48 Reflections on Business and COVID-19
22:43 Future of AI in the Industry

Transcript

[00:00:00] Patrick: I'm always very excited to talk to a fellow entrepreneur, , cause I think we can relate.

[00:00:06] Mark: failed, right?

[00:00:07] Patrick: Well, I was just going to say that, , we, we can relate on that level where it's the pain of going through businesses,

[00:00:14] Patrick: , I started Northstar last year, but , truthfully, this is not my first business venture. But that's normal. That's powerful curse. That's how you learn and, and you grow. And it only takes one to make it big. Right.

[00:00:25] Mark: Yep, exactly.

[00:00:26] Patrick: I'm gonna get into sort of your entrepreneurship.

[00:00:29] Patrick: I see you're co-founder of AB by Analytical founder of Flywheel Biocon Conversion. We'd love to know what that is. And owner of Twin Cities Biotech Consulting. So,

[00:00:39] Mark: the, , these are all kind of like starter, low operations things that are kind of sliding along 

[00:00:45] Patrick: 20 years of Bionic, I think you, you were in a lab for, most of that period, right?

[00:00:50] Mark: When I was at biotechny, I started out in protein research and development and eventually became the administrative manager of research and development. A position opened in the process engineering group to manage that department, and at that point they were focused on risk assessments, analysis, looking at why products were failing in the field. So I took over management of that department and really during that time focused a lot of the department on analytical studies looking in depth at our field failures to understand why they feel failed, what was going on structurally. We were able to receive funding to build out to a pretty much state of the art analytical facility, and that eventually spun out as a core facility that served all of the biotechny sites, as well as several other corporations, assisted sales in promoting sales values, and, , kind of promoting the company. I moved to the Scientific Research Consortium, which is DBA, the DBA is aminoacids. com. I think about four years ago. I was part of a transition plan for the founder and CEO of a company moving into retirement. That connection was because at Biotechni, we were, customers of aminoacids.

[00:02:15] Mark: com. we did some of our outsourced analysis through this company. And so I moved there about four years ago. I've had a lot of Call a side gigs that are interesting to me. I was involved in a startup called Blue Water Farms that was looking at first developing an aquaculture method for growing walleye. They developed interest in developing animal feeds, or fish feeds, actually. And from there, we started a small operation growing insects

[00:02:46] .

[00:02:46] Mark: Developing insect meal as a feed. The specific insect we were looking at was, specifically yellow mealworm. But during that time, we really got interested in soldier fly.

[00:02:56] Mark: So soldier fly is a really robust insect that will eat almost anything and convert it into fertilizer.

[00:03:05] Patrick: really?

[00:03:06] Mark: We started doing some preliminary projects with them. A major grocery distributorship in the Twin Cities that serves about five. State area is interested in building a facility to upcycle their produce waste.

[00:03:20] Mark: I'm involved with that group trying to develop a strategy to do that. , of course, anything you throw out in a grocery is, is 100 percent waste and has lost revenue. And they're interested in seeing if there's a way that they can take that waste. all groceries have significant waste and turning it into a value added product.

[00:03:40] Patrick: As in what keeping on a fertilizer angle? 

[00:03:42] Mark: Well, there's two dimensions. One is the actual larvae of the black soldier fly, which is one of the chicken feeds you can get. It's it's an extremely robust chicken feed. A good chicken should be eating insects their larvae are a great feed for chickens. In addition, the waste product is really, really great agricultural fertilizer. I'm gotten really interested in the whole idea of upcycling insect waste into fertilizer, especially now with Minnesota

[00:04:15] Mark: And looking at robust organic fertilizers that permissible for growing cannabis plants in aquaponics

[00:04:21] Patrick: I don't want to bring this up at the, maybe at the detriment of my country being a Canadian, but you've heard recently, with the tariffs with the potash,

[00:04:29] Mark: yes 

[00:04:30] Patrick: Actually Canada instilling tariffs around that. And I didn't realize that, American farmers.

[00:04:36] Patrick: I think 90 percent of them use potash

[00:04:39] Mark: yes,

[00:04:39] Patrick: of fertilizer.

[00:04:40] Mark: it's a huge detriment to American farmers particularly in high intensity agriculture like corn and soybean. Losing that potash stream is, is extremely damaging.

[00:04:51] Patrick: . So I know.

[00:04:52] Mark: no replacement for it.

[00:04:54] Patrick: Not even a solid what's it called? Black solid

[00:04:56] Mark: Black

[00:04:56] Mark: , that's

[00:04:56] Patrick: soldier fly

[00:04:58] Mark: , that's not going to be a viable option for farmers that are, , growing 10, 000 or 100, 000 acres. The value in these fertilizers are really going to be in greenhouse operations.

[00:05:09] Patrick: , I guess it'd be hard to scale up 

[00:05:11] Mark: this industry is actually in existence in western Minnesota and the Dakotas. A company called Chapel Farms has begun building Black Soldier Fly grow facilities adjacent to the corn ethanol plants.

[00:05:25] Mark: .

[00:05:25] Mark: they're taking the the DDGS, that's the dry distillers grain the, the byproducts of corn. fermentation. That's a huge market in the United States, but it's very low value. It sells for dollars a ton. And so these companies are looking at ways of upcycling that waste into higher value fertilizers, for example.

[00:05:49] Patrick: To the advantage of Canada, I guess potash is still needed So,

[00:05:51] Mark: Oh, it is.

[00:05:52] Patrick: know, that's that's good news for us

[00:05:54] Patrick: What drives you, Mark, to do all these side hustles?

[00:05:58] Mark: I got a from a friend of mine yesterday from Psychology Today someone had done a study on personalities of highly intelligent people. And I'm not saying that I'm highly intelligent, but I have the personality thereof. And the characteristic of that is an exuberance for trying things. that's very much how I am. I love doing new things. I admit I get bored easily.

[00:06:25] Mark: I don't want to do the same thing constantly day in and day out. And I kind of thrive on the polymath approach to life.

[00:06:35] Patrick: Even at your 20 year stint at Biotechni, you've had many roles within Biotechni. 

[00:06:39] Mark: It made building my career difficult, but then became kind of a driving force in my career, I was on that organization that did corporate training and developing educational content. And one of the things that I learned as a student many years ago is that I'm a very bad classroom student. Textbook education, lectures, they don't sit well. I'm very much a kinetic learner. I'm a hands on learner. And that's what I do. It's been guidance for most of my career. .

[00:07:12] Patrick: , we're kindred spirits in that sense. Do you find, is it a part of your personality to try new things? Do you think it's Not being afraid to fail type thing, knowing that you will.

[00:07:25] Mark: I mean, there is a part of that. Yes, we, most ventures have failed, but the reality is that every time I do one of those ventures, I learned something new and I feel like I get better. And that's really important. , the biggest failure we've had recently was that we were in the running to build a testing lab to serve the Minnesota cannabis industry. My partner and I chose to leave that effort. As an aside, we had the funding lined up. We had the business plan. We had the interest and we had the support. it came down to our concern about the state and how the state was operating the venture. And how that would create.

[00:08:04] Mark: A significant business risk. Just in how they were structuring it. And we decided that again, this will not was not a business. We could bootstrap the costs are significant.

[00:08:15] Patrick: Sure.

[00:08:16] Mark: significant debt. And we decided we didn't want to take on that level of risk I did not really want to lose my home in the event of

[00:08:24] Patrick: . Understandably. .

[00:08:25] Mark: When you think about people growing cannabis, I'll tell you a little story. You picture kind of the a dude personality

[00:08:36] Patrick: Well, it's not like that anymore. I'm sure.

[00:08:37] Mark: it's

[00:08:38] Mark: .

[00:08:38] Mark: it these people are amazingly creative and vocal and just interesting smart people And it's been a pleasure and I I still talk to them.

[00:08:50] Mark: I still work with them , we have crossover interests my experience building labs and working in regulated industries I went to a conference. Maybe two years ago related to cannabis startup. I was speaking to a group that were growers and on first outset, appearance, they hit all of the buttons for being, crap, 

[00:09:11] Patrick: Hey dude. Kind of guy. .

[00:09:12] Mark: but

[00:09:13] Mark: ,

[00:09:13] Mark: to them and they had solid business plans. They had done . deep six sigma analysis on failure approaches. They had just a profound understanding of the industry. They were able to talk in depth on business ventures and business approaches and philosophies of business and It showed me that again, you can't judge a book by its cover. There are some tremendously intelligent in this industry. The hey dude group isn't really what is going on right now.

[00:09:46] Patrick: great to see that industry evolve. I don't know about Minnesota, but in Canada, a couple years ago, when it first broke out, it was kind of a gong show, and the hey dudes were everywhere trying to start up their labs. Actually, I was going to ask you, do how different it is from Canada?

[00:10:03] Patrick: Because recreational cannabis shops now, I mean, especially if you walk downtown Toronto, there seems to be one on every second street corner.

[00:10:11] Mark: It's going to be governed by the state. Because cannabis is still illegal in the United States. It's and it's still a schedule one drug so the consequence of it being a schedule one drug is nothing can cross the state border

[00:10:25] Mark: .

[00:10:25] Mark: every industry is state specific and every industry is operating under state guidelines Overnight if the federal government decided to shut it down, they could just order it

[00:10:35] Patrick: Mm hmm.

[00:10:35] Mark: is, but they've chosen to not enforce federal regulations. So it's a state driven industry, and so states are going to be tightly regulated. They're only going to allow a certain number of dispensaries or manufacturing sites or growth sites within certain municipal areas. In Minnesota, it appears that the individual municipalities will be allowed to block, structures and there they have the power to regulate where these businesses are going to be located. You go to a state like Michigan and Michigan has an abundance of dispensaries. I was driving through Michigan last fall and I was riding through some very small towns, , sub 2000 people, and there would be multiple dispensaries located next door to each other.

[00:11:20] Patrick: . Yep. That's almost kind of like how it is here. And it's spread not only downtown now, it's spread to the suburbia.

[00:11:27] Patrick: So tell me about your recent adventure here with amino acids. com. How's that going?

[00:11:32] Mark: It is great. I describe it as a boutique analytical firm. We're a small company. We focus on a few core areas. But we have a broad customer base.

[00:11:41] Mark: Our customers range everywhere from biofuels and biodiesel to food. The cell culture based meats industry has been really valuable to us. All the way to biopharma. Our company was built out of physiological diagnostics. We really started out doing clinical studies. But now a lot of our business is in the area of biopharma, cell culture media, cell growth. That's actually where the food industry came in, the cell culture based foods. . 

[00:12:13] Patrick: And you supply the world right now? Or you're sticking with North America? Mm hmm. Mm

[00:12:19] Mark: active customers and they are they range anywhere from clustered in the united states a lot based in california, and the east coast. Customers in the uk singapore we have some business in china, although the regulations that recently on biotechnology between the U.

[00:12:36] Mark: S. and China has harmed that industry or that,

[00:12:41] Patrick: hmm.

[00:12:41] Mark: business sector.

[00:12:43] Patrick: . . . I mean, you seem to have been mainly focused on the scientific side of things throughout your whole career. Mark, was there a relationship Left field moment in your path

[00:12:54] Mark: There

[00:12:54] Patrick: you could talk about. . . That's I'm interested.

[00:12:56] Mark: A couple of things. One is really understanding business flow. into again, this was a small company and it had never done a lot of cost analysis cost of goods sold. So when I came in, that was one of my first exercises was to figure out how to do that

[00:13:14] Patrick: Mm hmm. Mm hmm

[00:13:15] Mark: at looking at our pricing tier and adjusting some pricing, things that maybe we were charging a little bit too much for, things that we weren't charging enough and kind of normalizing our prices. Another thing that has been different for me is The whole marketing thing. When I would go to scientific meetings in the past, I would Be there for the science

[00:13:35] Patrick: Yep

[00:13:36] Mark: now when I go into scientific meetings. I am there to sell product sell services and And that's that is really a a big transition. It's a totally different philosophy It's changed the type of meetings that I go to Yes, I go to some true scientific meetings But I also go to a lot of b2b type meetings and so it's changed how I think a lot. When I would go to a scientific meeting and we'd be talking about, Oh, we need this and that. I'd be like, Oh , how can we do that? , that would be, Oh , I just have to do this, this and this.

[00:14:06] Mark: And now my first question is, Ah, can I do this and still make a profit?

[00:14:11] Patrick: Right. Totally different angle for the business for sure , are you enjoying because I know a lot of people wouldn't be caught dead selling in sales Are you is this something you're learning that to enjoy?

[00:14:22] Mark: I'm not a particularly social person. I'm I'm a little bit of a an introvert. And so I have to force myself when I go to meetings. I was joking with some of my team yesterday that I booked to arrive the day before and leave the day after. , a lot of people arrive the morning of and fly out that evening.

[00:14:42] Mark: .

[00:14:42] Mark: because I need a little bit of time to curl up in a ball. under a blanket and recover

[00:14:48] .

[00:14:48] Mark: Social involvement.

[00:14:50] Mark: I've learned how to fake it till you make it. I, I've definitely learned how to fake it.

[00:14:57] Patrick: . Well, I mean, you've been in the industry and in the business for so long that, , you have a lot of credibility and I think when customers see that,

[00:15:04] Mark: I started to know people

[00:15:06] Patrick: yes,

[00:15:07] Mark: a lot. You, you go into a meeting and you start talking to someone and you realize that you have common connections because I've been in this industry for 30 years. And you may not necessarily know someone at the meeting, but , someone that knows someone at the meeting.

[00:15:19] Patrick: yes. That is almost just as important as credibility is knowing the people that know who you're talking to. That's, that's a big one.

[00:15:28] Mark: and it's always been viewpoint is if you can't do it correctly and you can't do it well, you shouldn't do it. And so that goes into what I feel is my credibility, that I am trusted, that I will give you an honest opinion whether I think we can do it. And if we think we can do it and then we start failing and we realize we're in trouble, I'll give you an honest assessment that, no, we're not going to be able to do this, let me help you find someone.

[00:15:51] Patrick: , I think you nailed it. , at the end of the day, all customers want is authenticity, honesty. , if you try to kind of deceive him in any way, and just to get that first sale, you might get that first sale, but guess what? You're not going to get another one.

[00:16:05] Mark: not going to

[00:16:06] Patrick: You're not going to get another one.

[00:16:08] Mark: your first sale is usually a loss leader. By the time it takes you to understand the customer's needs and get a data report that's suitable to them. I mean, you really don't make money on the first sale. You

[00:16:19] Patrick: , you're right.

[00:16:20] Mark: ups.

[00:16:21] Patrick: . And typically the first sale, depending on what you're selling, if it's, if it's not instruments, it's probably like a really small. Try a sample trial sale anyway, so

[00:16:29] Mark: sending for us again. We're a testing lab. They're sending us, they're sending us small, a couple of small samples to see if it works. You can't survive as a business by one offs. You need to return customers.

[00:16:41] Patrick: Is that how your amino acids outcome is trying to differentiate yourselves? It's just the quality of the work and the results and

[00:16:47] Mark: what we do. We have

[00:16:48] Patrick: service.

[00:16:49] Mark: we have customers that have been faithful to us for over 30 years and customers that treat us as part of their company. That's really important to us. We're troubleshooting for one of my clients right now some data that didn't make sense.

[00:17:03] Mark: And I sent him an email this weekend, , very honest, , here's where I think something might have gone wrong.

[00:17:09] Patrick: Mm hmm.

[00:17:09] Mark: really prove it. And, , these are just some hypotheses and what we've done to make sure that the data is solid. customer came back and then he said we absolutely trust your judgment because, , your company is the most solid that we've ever worked with.

[00:17:23] Patrick: Awesome.

[00:17:24] Mark: We provide quality work we provide it as quickly as possible. 

[00:17:28] Mark: We may not be as fast as some customers. We're not the cheapest in the industry. We constantly shop our competitors and we try to be in the same ballpark, but we're not the cheapest. And that's intentional. We can't check off those other boxes and be the cheapest.

[00:17:42] Patrick: , I mean that old saying, , you get what you pay for Rings true, no matter what industry you're in. And I think that's something missing in the corporate world today is that it's more of a short term thinking right now versus understanding the long game, especially if you're a publicly traded company.

[00:17:59] Patrick: You're judged on the quarter, , now it's just insane. Now,

[00:18:03] Mark: One of

[00:18:04] Mark: ,

[00:18:04] Mark: of the first things that I said to my employees during the COVID boom, because almost every company in the biotech sector just had exploding sales

[00:18:15] Patrick: absolutely.

[00:18:17] Mark: was that we're not going to pay attention to the COVID trend. We're going to take our sales, our expected sales growth, immediately pre COVID and extrapolate it through. Because we know that the Covid is, we, the Covid bump was a blip this, on the radar, and I think that's a, , we see a lot of companies after a lot of large biotech companies after Covid struggling and stumbling because they couldn't. sustain the COVID level sales. And , yes, there's a lot of pressure when you're a publicly traded company, but I felt that one of the failures in the industry was that not enough executives said to shareholders and investors, look, this is an aberration. We're not going to treat this as the baseline. things are going to go down, sales are going to go down, and we're going to readjust. I really do believe that while it would have been a negative message up front I think that some of these companies would have weathered COVID better had they just been honest with their investor, and the investors knew this, they just chose not to recognize it if they would have been honest to their investors and say, don't plan on 60 percent growth year over year. That's not going to happen,

[00:19:36] Patrick: Seems like common sense, doesn't it? But , , I've been talking to people in the industry and even just as sales targets. The expectation is COVID, , that the COVID sales or shortly, , below that. But still it's not.

[00:19:51] Mark: it's, it's not a realizable goal.

[00:19:53] Mark: .

[00:19:53] Mark: and I mean, honestly, the, economic cost of COVID nor should we ever want it to be the, the, the goal. And if a company is recording. 8 percent growth or 9 percent growth year over year. That's great. That's great.

[00:20:09] Mark: That's wonderful. Boom years they're not sustainable.

[00:20:12] Patrick: Couldn't agree with you more. What are you betting on us getting another, COVID 

[00:20:16] Mark: My personal

[00:20:17] Patrick: the future?

[00:20:19] Mark: It's almost a certainty.

[00:20:20] Mark: And I don't think it's all gonna be all that far out. I'm particularly concerned about bird flu because of how easily spread it is and how we have seen it hop to either agricultural animals cows, for example, or hop to humans. It seems to evolve quickly. All of the flu viruses have very high rates of mutation. And concerned that it may come from that direction. , 

[00:20:44] Patrick: I think humanity has learned our lesson in terms of generating quality vaccines much faster now. I think it's even, it's probably even better than,

[00:20:53] Mark: I'm not sure if we've learned our lesson on that. 

[00:20:55] Patrick: No 

[00:20:58] Patrick: , well that was one of The the better odds but I where I was going is that as humans I know in terms of like the corporate world and the executive expectations , we probably haven't learned from covid. We're probably going to fall back into our ways of expectation 

[00:21:12] Mark: I think that very often we are I really hate drawing the analogy because of the political implications on it. But I think that in a lot of ways, humanity acts en masse like sheep You'll have individual thinkers who will try to steer the game, but for the most part people are going to respond and their response is going to be not predictable, but usually irrational 

[00:21:33] Patrick: . , absolutely. And when it does strike, I'm sure that it's going to act differently than, COVID, right? That virus is, so it's going to be a whole other new challenge.

[00:21:42] Mark: It is.

[00:21:43] Patrick: Do you have something that you can share? Let's just say someone trying to get into the life science industry or the scientific community now, fresh after grad school, do you have any advice or something that you've learned over the years that you can tell that person?

[00:21:58] Mark: Listen just listen and listen. I don't care if you just finished a PhD with a Nobel laureate and you're entering the biotech industry, you don't know what you're doing.

[00:22:11] Patrick: .

[00:22:11] Patrick: Yeah.

[00:22:12] Mark: Uh, And listen to those people who, Listen to those people who have a bachelor's degree but have been in the industry for 30, 40 years. They know the feel for the industry and just absolutely listen to what's going on, absorb as much as you can. And it goes right back into the the basic concept of evolutionary biology, adapt or die. Assess your situation, adapt to that situation. It's okay to have opinions, and it's okay to try to steer a course, but Be prepared to adapt.

[00:22:43] Patrick: Do you think that the game has changed with AI now for the next 10 years in our industry? What are your thoughts around that?

[00:22:48] Mark: I am cautious with ai, a few weeks ago Elon Musk was quoted as saying that has assimilated the entire depth of human knowledge. I don't disagree with that. I really think that the ability for the AI to scan and accumulate information, that's probably fairly correct. The challenge though, is that AI doesn't know how to think. If you've if you've ever posed questions in AI and asked it to to derive something for you, it makes a lot of mistakes and you need to be a judicial user. It also, and this has been well characterized, it hallucinates. One of the more fun things to do in AI is to pose a question where you introduce a lie

[00:23:34] Mark: .

[00:23:34] Mark: not true, have AI talk about it, and then interrogate asking about something that would involve knowledge of that question.

[00:23:42] Mark: And your AI algorithm is probably going to return that as truth.

[00:23:46] Mark: Do I think that AI is bad? I don't. I think actually AI is going to be the future of a lot of our industry. I'm actually in a collaboration right now with a company called MFX. technologies and Ptolemy Biosciences. They're both based in the UK and we're helping them develop AI models for optimizing cell culture for RT therapies. 

[00:24:10] Patrick: Wow.

[00:24:11] Mark: and so there's definite applications, I don't want to say it's not fit for use or, or ready for their A game, but it's, got to be monitored and it's got to be driven. A. I. As a child right now, it's an infant and it needs to learn and the people that are utilizing and driving A. I. Have to be part of that process.

[00:24:35] Patrick: , I think the key word in your statement there, it can't think yet is the word yet. And you got to think, , how it's gonna look like 50 years from now. , where kids are growing up with AI. I mean, in my opinion, the university or the way we teach kids now colleges and universities has got to drastically change.

[00:24:55] Patrick: I feel it's like already behind, ? The more that the students are incorporating AI in their thought process, the better, the more advantageous

[00:25:03] Mark: even even here and you hear about students who are failing classes for using A. I. And writing their papers. My opinion, there is no with using A. I. If you are using A. I. As guidance. I could sit here for hours building a framework for a protocol or a public statement or something, I can go into AI and tell it what I want and it'll generate a terrible document. a good outline,

[00:25:33] Patrick: mm-hmm

[00:25:34] Mark: . .

[00:25:34] Mark: I take the outline. I

[00:25:36] Patrick: Mm-hmm

[00:25:37] Mark: hit the five points that I needed to cover. I didn't consider this completely, but here are my really my most important points. I'm going to take this outline and I'm going to build my document now. And I can generate that document in a quarter of the time now because I'm using another tool to help me design it. Now, if I were to take the actual document it created, it would be a laughingstock, but I can use it as a tool. I

[00:26:02] Patrick: That's what it comes down to. . Speaking to a fellow person that loves to try new things and is adventurous in that sense I get the sense that you're optimistic about ai. And that it's gonna do good for us at the end of the day

[00:26:14] Mark: I'm apprehensive now because I think that we're probably jumping the gun on some things. I personally will not get into an AI driven car. But but the,

[00:26:25] Patrick: yet

[00:26:26] Mark: the, the idea of AI air traffic control scares the crap out of me. But

[00:26:32] Patrick: And

[00:26:34] Mark: future. 

[00:26:35] Patrick: the future is bright. Let's just leave it at that on a positive note.