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Industry Ignited Podcast
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Industry Ignited Podcast
The Startup Mistake That Kills Great Technology | Ep. 87 [George Boyajian]
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Why do so many breakthrough technologies never make it into the real world? In this powerful conversation, Mussel Polymers CEO George Boyajian breaks down the hidden reasons most deep tech startups fail and what founders should be doing differently from day one. Drawing from decades of experience in university commercialization, venture creation, and advanced materials, George shares the exact framework his team used to review hundreds of technologies before selecting the one that became Muscle Polymers.
This episode explores everything from startup risk management and investor matchmaking to biomimicry, manufacturing scale-up, and the difference between creating a product versus building an actual business. George also explains how his company transformed a Navy-funded underwater adhesive into a platform technology with massive commercial potential across defense, medical, and industrial markets. Whether you're building a startup, investing in innovation, or working inside a university or R&D organization, this conversation offers an unfiltered look at what it really takes to turn science into successful companies.
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What if the real reason most breakthrough technologies never change the world isn't the science, but that nobody did the hard work of proving it was a business before they built a company around it? Welcome to Industry Ignited, the podcast where we explore the leaders driving transformation across industry, manufacturing, and innovation. I'm your host, Dr. Leanne Aguilar. And today I'm joined by George Boijan, CEO of Muscle Polymers, a leader in technology company creation and growth with more than 30 years of experience sourcing, de-risking, acquiring, and launching science-based ventures. George, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Leanne. It's nice to be here.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarWell, I'm excited to learn all about your business and innovation. I know we had a pre-call and I learned all about the many different possibilities and uses, and I mean many that are still to be discovered with your polymer. And uh, so let's dive in. Now let's start with your background. You said that your core obsession since childhood has been getting university research out into society because the current system is wildly inefficient. Where did that mission come from? And what did you see early on that made you determine to fix it?
SPEAKER_01I grew up during the Apollo era, which was sort of a heyday of technology development. And you know, during my lifetime, we went from slide rules to uh handheld calculators to PCs to cloud computing. You know, a lot of that came out of universities, a lot of that came out of the military, a lot of that came out of industry. But as I watched watching the space program and watching what came out of that, whether it be ballpoint pens or tang or whatever other things came out of that. And then once I got to the university and saw the billions of dollars that were going into research in universities, and it was pure research, not a lot of it was coming out in products. You could see that. And there was the ivory tower piece of it. When I got into the university, you know, people wanted to publish, but they weren't particularly interested in getting stuff out. That was the late 70s, early 80s. You know, tech transfer really wasn't a thing yet. There weren't many technology transfer programs, essentially none. You know, and uh as I got into the academy, got my PhD, I just saw how there was this real disconnect between what happened behind the ivy covered walls and what happened with people having products that would help them. So yeah, that was really pushing me, and I saw it from the inside the academy and decided to get out and try and make it a little bit better.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNow your path is unusual and compelling. Academic roots, then building first-of-a-kind ventures like a genetically engineered tree for environmental detox, followed by a university incubator role at Columbia. What did those early first ups teach you about what works and what absolutely breaks when science meets commercialization?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a good question. So, you know, and I started my first company in '95 after I left Penn. There wasn't a you know entrepreneurism was sort of a, you know, just beginning. You know, there were really not many things as incubators, as we're just starting. There weren't tech transfer offices. Uh so I think the some of the first things I learned was I was working with a bunch of Harvard MBAs and they just drilled business into me. You know, they basically said, yeah, the technology's good, but you really have to understand finance. You really need to understand accounting, IP law. So I took every single short course I could find. I read a bunch of Harvard Business School case studies. I read the the um the Wall Street Journal every day, every article for three years, two or three years, and just completely soaked myself in in business. I I knew what it took to be the best in the world at a very narrow area when I got my PhD. And I figured I need to put in that at least that much work to become a good business person. And um, you know, you can't do that in two years. I got better, but I didn't get great. So I think the the first thing is most academics who are who are going to start businesses just don't know enough about business. They think they're smart, which they are, and they think they're um, you know, they're the best in the world, but they're not the best in the world at at the business. They may be the best in the world at their technology. So I think there's a certain um naivete uh and arrogance combination that goes on. Um it's become less through time. I've been doing this for 30 years. In the beginning it was rampant. Today it's less so, but it's still out. So I think that's one of the biggest ones. The other, the other big problem to get, you know, on commercialization is people really just don't examine what it takes to be a business. You know, what generally when I talk to entrepreneurs, they they talk about all the technical harbors. They talk about first viable product and things like that. And that's now I say I'll give you all that, you know. In fact, I'll you can do it faster and cheaper. Now tell me what starts from there, right? And but they can't what they can't articulate is how their business will scale. Now, I have a very narrow my business model is build a company and sell it, not build a company and operate it as a lifestyle company from the rest of your career. Uh, you know, my my business model is get other people's money, put your own money in, get other people's money, and get them a return on your investment and exit and go do another one. It's not for everybody. Some people want to start companies and just run them for the rest of their lives, and that's a different model than generally I'm focusing on. Yeah. So yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarI think you make some really good points though, as far as people getting into business and knowing their trade really well, knowing how to do the thing or make the thing, or knowing the technology, like you said. Or especially if it's uh an academic, like a PhD, knowing their area of expertise really well. But running a business is a completely different animal. And I relate to that and feel like I always did I did things backwards and later went back and got my MBA later, went back and you know, did my my PhD in business because I was fascinated and curious. But running a business is is its own thing. And not only that, but leading people, right?
SPEAKER_01And it's the the leadership component and then I think the other part of it is, you know, it it running a tech business, and yeah, and my my focus is making things and getting them to market, you know, taking a technology and getting it to market, and realizing that you're actually going to end up running three entirely different businesses. Uh, and you might be it not be the right one. You know, one is a RD, you know, it's a science project that becomes an RD project. And then you make your first prototypes, and then you make it at scale and you operate a business. Those are you know three or four entirely different skill sets.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight.
SPEAKER_01Uh and it's not that you have to learn how to do one well, you have to learn to do all four well. As you, you know, that's all gonna happen over four or five years if you expect to uh stay with a company. But I don't think people really appreciate all the stages you go through and all the different skill sets and how that evolves.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. No, that's a good, a good point. And I think especially um, you know, 30 years ago, let's say, there was the access to resources and information on how to create a business and what makes it sustainable wasn't as accessible or available as it is today. So I think today with the internet and AI and virtual courses, it's easier to find out the information, but you still have to know that, yeah, there are those different parts of the business that you have to learn and now you Yeah, and now you have so many more people who've been through this.
SPEAKER_01Um, you know, I can hire uh people that that have built and exited companies and put them on my team. So now I've got a whole cadre of people that can can be part of a team and help me along get to the next level. 30 years ago that wasn't a case. And I you shouldn't delve in the past, you know, it's the old man telling, oh, back in the day. Yeah, you know, today it it's very different. But I still don't think people really understand that as well as they might for making things uh as opposed to software, the evolution of of the business skill set you need and how you need to switch out your team over the course of years. But when you're doing software, it's a little it's a little different. Right.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAnd but you also made another good point, which is start, you know, knowing your exit plan, knowing your business model before getting started. It's like, are you building a business to position it to sell, or are you going to run this business long term and then eventually, I mean, pass it on to the next generation? Or you know, what's your exit strategy? So creating that solid business model from the beginning, I think is super important as well. So you have direction and and goal in mind. And a lot of business owners don't put that in place from the beginning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we say work backwards. Start with what, you know, start with the exit and work backwards. So when we started, you know, muscle polymers not too long ago, we went through a long process of picking the right technology to start a business with. And uh one of the one of the things we did in that process was we went to people or companies that we would sell our company to in five to seven years. You know, we went to CEOs, CFOs, heads of strategic planning, and said, if we have a company that looks like this and has this product portfolio, would you be interested in buying that? You know, and then they have five and seven year strategic plans. Uh these big companies certainly do. And they might, well, we're really pivoting in this direction or this direction. This is the way we see the industry going. And then we could adjust accordingly if we needed to. Uh and we stay in and we stay in touch with them. So, you know, you don't want to build for something that the industry has no interest in, or you want to at least be sensitive to that. So when you have forks in the road, which which path do we go on? Oh, this one is more likely to get us to an exit. Right. You you have that information. And if people are saying, oh, yeah, we have no interest in that, or they tell you about a technology that's going to supersede your technology or go in an entirely different direction and obviate what you think is going to be a successful company, well, then you know to drop that. Drop that.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarOh, that's yeah, that's smart. That's a good strategy from the the start. Go and interview those that you might want to buy you someday and figure out what they're looking for.
SPEAKER_01I'll give you another example is when we were we had a really cool technology out of Princeton that that provided an endpoint for um uh kidney dialysis, and there was no clinical endpoint for kidney dialysis. And that was very valuable to companies like Davida and Frisanius, these uh these dialysis clinics. And we were talking, we were behind the scenes trying to find out what the FDA was doing on endpoints for dialysis, because we knew we had to, or Medicare and Medicaid were doing for endpoints for dialysis. And people knew that, and we were about to launch the company, and somebody said, Oh, you got to get on this call with the FDA, I think it was, or Medicaid. And uh, as it turns out, they had come up over the last few years, they had secret working groups coming up with a different endpoint for dialysis. And our company was poof, the need for it was gone the next day, and we were ready to launch. It was gonna it wasn't gonna be announced for another six or nine months. And we had deals with with the Vita and Frisenius to move forward, and that was that. You know, that it was written in stone, it was gonna be announced, we're gonna draft all the rules, and it was a different endpoint. Had we not been looking actively, we would have raised money, we would have had this technology with no outcome.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarOh, wow. Wasted all that time, money, effort, right? Yeah, no, that's a good example. Now, George, you built and exited a medical device company that used motion sensors to detect health issues early. What did that experience teach you about designing technology around a clear clinical outcome and a buyer with urgency?
SPEAKER_01So I think we were solving a problem that a lot that there was a need out there. If you have older parents living at home alone, they they could have the I've fallen and I can't get up button, which only works about 25% of the time because half the time they fall, they won't press it. And half of that time they can't press it, and they won't press it because it they think it makes them look helpless and then they'll get moved out of their house. Very strange.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarPsychological right reasons. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So you've got a you've got a technology that everybody uses, but it's only 25% effective, and that's the dirty little secret that nobody in the industry talks about. So we were trying to solve that problem. What it taught us was don't don't listen to the necessarily to the medical community, all right, or or the doctors. And and to this day, there's a lot of emphasis on measuring vital signs as an indicator of health. Let me tell you something. By the time your vital signs change, you're probably sick in bed. You're lying on the floor. Your vite, your body can maintain homeostasis really well, even when you're super sick. Um, you want to get it well before you're lying on the floor. So what we're looking at is functional health. And we went to gerontologists and nurses to find out what constituted functional health. And it was activities of daily living. It had nothing to do with vital science. So we tried to measure the things that mattered for elders living at home alone. Do you get out of bed? Can you dress yourself? Can you use the bathroom? Can you shower? Are you taking your meds? And we could do that all with motion sensors. And while the medical community didn't necessarily go, oh, great, the assisted living facilities and people with parents at homes and gerontologists loved it because it was what they were measuring. That's what you, you know, my parents are now 98, 94. And that's what we worry about. Are they getting out of the bed? Can they move around? They're not falling down in the bathroom. You know, are they taking their meds? If they're doing that, you know, that's going to tell you whether or not they're doing well or not.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01Not their blood pressure, not their pulse rate, not their breath. You know, none of that really matters. Because if all that looks good and they can't get out of bed in the morning, well, it doesn't matter.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. Yeah. So it's really about identifying the KPIs, really. It's these are the measurable outcomes that are the most important. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01It was the voice of the customers. Going out there was talking to the elders. It was talking to the people that ran the assisted living facilities. It was going out there and constantly refining the product so it gave them what they needed. So it's constant iteration with the clients. Um that's really what it came down to. And then we were also using state-of-the-art technology. We we used the first sort of mesh network, the Zigbee network out of TI. It was the first commercial application of that technology. We actually had to debug that stack, getting data out of the house before everybody had broadband. We actually had pull styling out of the house. We came up with some really clever hardware. So it was a hardware software solution, completely integrated. What we were doing was building to solve a problem. We weren't taking a technology and finding something that it would solve. It wasn't we were we had a hammer and we were looking for a nail. Yeah. We had a nail and we were trying to design design the best hammer for that.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. Well, and I think that's the best way to go. It's starting with the problem, because then you know if it's useful and you actually arrive at a solution and it's needed as well. You know, I think doing it the other way, you don't know if you even have a commercially viable product if the problem isn't there, right? Right. Right. Now you've navigated major inflection points, market crashes, pivots, and regulatory shifts that can kill a business overnight. How did those experiences shape your risk lens and your discipline around business viability versus cool technology?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, okay. Well, I think it's more of the discipline of running the business. Shepherd your cash very carefully. When you have an opportunity to raise cash, go get it and get more of it. Keep an eye on the markets. What you realize is no matter how well your business is running, no matter how good your product is, when the tide goes out, all the ships are stranded. If you're going to need capital and the markets crash, it doesn't matter how good you are, there will be no cash. It all dries up. Investors are I love investors and they're herd animals. And when then one goes running, they all go running. And then, you know, you've got a minimum, you know, 12 to 18 month cycle and sometimes two-year cycle before the money comes back. So it's about really hiring smart with people that can do a lot of different things, keeping your uh keeping your cash burn low, having a little bit in reserve at all times. Uh I fortunately haven't ever had to lay people off until I closed a company. So, you know, there's the you know, get rich slow and get rich quick. You know, uh there are very few things, a lot of people are focused on you know software that scales really fast. And I get that, but there are not a lot of things out there. And when you're making products, you're gonna be, you know, five, seven, eight years before you really get to an exit. And you've got to, you've just got to be patient. You gotta you know do the right things, do the fundamentals, make sure your technology is bulletproof, and you can keep your burn low during that interval. When you have an opportunity to get a deal closed, do it fast. Something might be coming down the road. Crazies might fly planes into buildings, you know, over over-leverage, you know, real estate that has nothing to do with you, and that will destroy your business. So you have to have enough to weather the storm, which you generally don't have the luxury to, but you have to move quickly. The only advantage little companies have over big companies is the ability to move quickly and um and and make decisions quickly. And uh and when you have an opportunity to get a deal done, close an investor, don't wait. You know, just get it done because tomorrow that person might be gone. That deal might be gone.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, now you make some really good points. And yeah, I think that's interesting that you know investors they they're pack animals like you're saying.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, uh it it it is what it is. I'm not gonna you know you know howl at the moon. The other thing is for for entrepreneurs, don't spend your time convincing people to invest in your company. Spend your time finding people, the people that want to invest in your company.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarThat believe in your technology.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that understand the problem, that understand the value proposition you're offering. When people say, I know I'm not interested, it's not gonna work for these reasons, say thank you for the quick decision and go spend your time finding somebody else. You don't have to convince them. Uh, you know, that that's not your job. Your your job is to go out and find people who share your vision who can add value to your company. You don't have to be right. You just you have to be persistent and uh and always looking for that that next opportunity.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. And I think that's a that's good advice. I mean, with employees, whether you're seeking any kind of partner with business, whether you're seeking clients or investors or you know, any other kind of shareholder, is looking for people who have alignment, who believe in your vision, who believe in your technology. Like you said, you you don't want to have to convince people because then it's a never-ending you know effort. So there are time, yeah.
SPEAKER_01There are times where you're in the middle of a close and you know they're interested, and they're just throwing up questions to see how you react, or or they they need to be convinced themselves. And that's when you use the disqualification close when they're close and you just simply say, You're right, this investment isn't for you. It's and you repeat back what they said. It's too risky for you, you know, the timelines are too long, you know, we're not focused. You're right, all that. You know, the uh I'll give you all that. You know, you know, have a nice day. And then and then they turn around and go, Oh, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. I think no, I don't I really don't mean those things. No, I think you've really got it. And then they talk themselves into it. So there are times to use the the disqualification quause. Um but that you know the that only comes to experience knowing when to use what technique with investors and such.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. Yeah, sometimes they're just double or checking, you know, I guess just yeah.
SPEAKER_01And nowadays and nowadays the other really amazing thing, uh, you know, old man talking here, you know, we were told 30 years ago, only talk to 10, maybe at the most, 20 different people to get investments, the venture capital groups and so on. Um nowadays, if you're not using Pitchbook or or Traxon or one of these huge databases out there, um, and you're not approaching thousands of people looking for money, uh you're not doing it right. You know, the the AI tools, these huge databases, and just the explosion of high net worth individuals, explosion of wealth, uh, the explosion of investment capital. 90% of companies fail, and people are still throwing money into this sector. You know, if if if you if this was a business school case and you didn't talk about that it's venture capital, you know, or something, you said, Oh, yeah, 90% of your investments will fail. People would look at you like, why are you in that business? It just doesn't make any sense. But fortunately, because of the amount of wealth and we've got a nation of entrepreneurs. This system still works. And there's more and more wealth out there. And I was just, you know, I was in Texas two weeks ago. I was in in uh South Florida last week. Just the pockets of smart investors that are out there now looking for early stage companies is remarkable. It's fantastic. And you just have to get out there and and refine your story, make your business good. Yeah, it's not all about the pitch deck. It's about a good business. You can find people out there. It's really amazing.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. So there's a lot more opportunity, I'm hearing, but you have to approach a lot more people. You have to get out there more and I get maybe more competition as well. Just more people.
SPEAKER_01I don't see it as competition. It's it's matchmaking. It really is matchmaking. It's finding people, you know, there are people out there that only want to do fintech. There are people out there that only want to do software. That's what they do. You know, we're in a peculiar space. We're material science in this company. This is not generally a venture capital business, and we can't really position it as material science. Some days I position it as dual-use technology, military and civilian. There's several new funds out there in that area we're talking to, as well as people that have come out of the military high net worth individuals. Sometimes we're positioned as, you know, biomedical because we have a lot of biomedical applications. So it's finding where you resonate with that investor.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. Yeah, that makes sense. Now you've said technology selection is the step few teams ever undertake, yet it's the most important one. Walk us through your framework. What are the criteria that determine whether something is a business and not just a science project?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so if you go to wardenchem.com, you'll see all of our all of our criteria there. And we looked at 800 different technologies and we had 10 10 criteria it had to fit. I don't know that I'll remember them all now, but uh things like does it fill an unmet need? And it's just not now, but also looking forward in the future. Does it fit a fundamental unmet need? Would this business scale? Does the professor have a prototype? We needed to see prototypes actually see that the stuff worked. Can you manufacture it at the right price? Does it have strong intellectual property? I want an unfair advantage. I do not want to compete on trade secret or on price. I want very strong IP with a long lifetime ahead. And can I get all the rights that I need of that IP? Do you know the exit before you start? So have you talked to people that that might buy your company? And then is the professor insane? Um is one of my things. Because or or you know, I should probably add to that, do they have the potential to go insane? Uh, you know, so we we show up in person, we talk to people, we break bread with them, we meet, if we can, we'll even meet their families and friends, uh, because you're gonna be doing business with this person a long time. And if they go nuts, and we've had three or four deals go south because people have gotten greedy at the closing, they have delusions of grandeur, you know, they don't understand the amount of work that's involved, even though you've tried to educate them through that. And that can really blow up a lot of things. So you want to determine that early. And you have to look at a lot of technologies. Oh, do we have the expertise to run this company too? Do we have the expertise or can we gather the expertise, uh, compete for the expertise uh to make this business successful? Uh so we look at it from the exit to the operation, you know, going backwards uh to sales, operations, and all the way down to IP and founders. You know, we're working all the way backwards through all of those to make sure that we've got a winning team. And even then, it's gonna be hard.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNo guarantees. It's still risky, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But it what it will, it'll give you a better um chance because there are a lot of things that are outside your control, but you know you have you'll you'll dodge a lot of the pitfalls, you know, founding pitfalls, you'll dodge the middle stage pitfalls of IP, and then you'll dodge maybe the end pitfalls that you don't have an exit, right? So you're trying to avoid that all those, any one of those at any time, you know, could blow you up. So you're trying to identify what those might be. And then you want to make sure that you actually have something that people want to buy, uh, you know, obviously.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAnd you and your team systematically reviewed 800 technologies, narrowed to 40, optioned a dozen, and spent 18 months de-risking before choosing a few to launch. What did that process reveal about how universities and founders misjudged market readiness and commercialization timeliness?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I don't think they misjudge it. I think they know that they don't know. The university tech transfer officers have gotten really sophisticated and they know that they don't know. They they want to understand more about the tech, the opportunity, the market opportunities for these technologies. You got to remember these these tech at the bigger schools, these tech transfer officers are seeing hundreds of technologies a year. They've got a small budget about how to parse it out. Sometimes they parse out their their uh patent budget to keep a professor. I call some of these, some of these offices are faculty retention officers. They're there to keep the faculty happy, not necessarily to license technologies. Um one of the ways we got the options, we we would get options for free. We actually didn't pay for the option. We would tell the university, we're gonna spend three, four, five months doing a market study, we're gonna write a business plan for this, or the beginnings of a business plan. And if at some point we say it's no longer good for us, we will hand you the report and we will walk away. So, you know, we're doing $30,000, $40,000 worth of market research and study and business planning. And if we walk away, we hand that to them and they then can see the entire opportunity laid out by an entrepreneur. They're getting a business plan. And they really like that idea because maybe they can parse that out and then use that to sell their technology to somebody else. So we were generous. They would give us an option. So we when we spent the work, we know that it wouldn't go off to somebody else. And at the end, if we didn't pursue it, they got something for that. They got something in return. And that was a good deal for both parties. So I think they university tech transfer offices are pretty sophisticated. They have realistic views of what deals need to look like. Now, there are exceptions to that, but they're much, you know, they've really evolved to be pretty professional. Occasionally they might be unrealistic, and then you know, if you can't do a good deal, you walk away. There are other things to do. Right.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01The professors, on the other hand, yeah, they're completely out of their skulls. You know, they, you know, they they heard generally they heard about somebody who got rich off of technology, and they think theirs is, you know, really big. And they didn't understand. They all they heard was so-and-so got rich off the technology, right? And uh they didn't understand what that might have entailed, or the 95 others that didn't make it, and that's the one that did. So they immediately think that that they'll do the same. So there's a you know, there's a wide range of professor mindsets that are out there. They're not as necessarily as sophisticated as the tech transfer offices. Tech transfer offices, that's all they do all day. Professors are in their lab trying to keep their keep their lab going and trying to get right grants and get get money, more money for their uh for their labs. Um but you know, they're they're you know, you find the right professor, you find a good one. You know, our our guy's fantastic, John Wilbur, he's fantastic. Love working with him. But we've had others we've run into and we've walked away from deals because the professors went nuts.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. No, like you said, that human factor that you don't expect will be an issue comes up because of, you know, different they get greedy or they get unrealistic about what you know.
SPEAKER_01I think it's unrealistic. The greediness is is secondary. They're unrealistic. And uh the other thing is you've got to show up with these tech transfer offices. You've got to sit in the room, you've got to go into the professor's labs and talk to them. Uh a lot of everybody's trying to do things over the you know, like we are, you know, uh video conference. And no, you got to show up. One of the reasons we got deals done is we were in the labs. Those technologies have been sitting there for a while and nobody touched them. And you know, one time we asked one university office, hey, why do we get this? They said, You're the only people that showed up. Really? Yeah. Everybody else tried to do it on the phone. They never met the professor, they never went into the labs. We took two or three trips out there. Yeah. Um, you gotta remember, you're gonna spend five years of your life and five, seven years away from your family. You've got to really spend a lot of time choosing right. It it sucks to close a company. I've done it once. It sucks, it's painful, it's a death. Right. You know, you grieve, it's uh it takes a long time to recover. It's hard. So you you should be spending a lot of time in making that decision because it's the next five years of your life. Right, right. And and the other thing I was gonna mention is is the tech transfer offices are funny because you go in, we went into one university, there were four or five technologies we were interested in, and we put the technology disclosures on the table. He said, We're interested in these four or five. And we said, which which of the professors are crazy? And they they laughed and they just take two of the two of the five, they just said, Yeah, don't even bother. You know, they knew. They knew exactly what were the what we were asking, and then they knew exactly the risk we were talking about. They know. Wow. Yeah. And so we, okay, we didn't even bother looking at those.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. So muscle polymers started with a Navy-funded Purdue technology originally aimed at underwater bonding for submarines, and you've now identified a massive range of applications. What was the this is the one moment that convinced you that this polymer platform could be as big as Teflon or Gore-Tex?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a good question. So it was something that we sort of, my business partner, he's our chief science officer, Eric Anderson, and he he just you know devours technical material, patents, and and scientific papers, like you know, very few other people can. And as we began to dive into our class of chemistry, catacol chemistry, he began to read some of the literature around that uh during our due diligence. And then we began to realize, or he began to you know, tell me, I just read an article that says catechol polymers can grow bone on on implants. And I'm like, Yeah, right, Eric. You know, you know, we know that 35% of scientific literature is, you know, is can't be reproduced. That's a nice way of putting it. And I said, if if that's the case, we hit the lottery, but let's not look at that later. We're only focused on this. And then he said, Oh, there's this and there's this. And then we began to realize that there was a um that there was a class of chemistry out there that this applied to. And then we found, you know, not one article that we could grow bone on on um implants, but five or ten or fifteen. And now you're beginning to go, oh, it's reproducible.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight.
SPEAKER_01So it was, you know, it came along. Um, that was pre-AI. Now we probably would have known that in the first hour of research. We wouldn't have known that now. Um we wouldn't, it wouldn't have taken so long. So yeah, yeah, I remember the first time telling him, yeah, whatever. That's not true. That's just ridiculous. Nothing does that. And then, you know, three months later it was like, he goes, wait a second, there's something here. And that was sort of an aha moment for us. That's a two-edged sword because it's a distraction from, you know, you got to focus, but you know, you want to diversify to reduce your risk. That entered knowing how many potential applications there were for our technology. We had to devise a business plan, an operation plan, unlike pretty much any other for any other business I've ever been involved with or I've ever heard of. Right. You know, you do it, you know, these technology platforms like this, these material platforms come along once every generation. Yeah, they're very rare. So when you get a hold of one, it's challenging, you know, has its own set of challenges.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, absolutely. I mean, with so many opportunities for applications, I mean, how do you decide what to focus on first and how to direct that business plan?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's a little bit of figure it out as you go because you're learning so much stuff in your technology development. You know, you're always adjusting your strategy. But the first things first was make it reproducible at scale. You know, that that's what we spend a lot of our time on because we had to go down that route so we'd have a business. And then at the same time, we were evaluating literally hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. And we would pick an area, and then we had a set of criteria of things like um, you know, it was a again, it there was a scoring done uh of things like how long will it take us to make it? What are our margins going to look like? Is there an exit in this area? Because they're each application is basically its own business.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Can we get a partner? What are the regulatory hurdles? What are the other hurdles to get to market? Or are we displacing another technology? So we really focused on here, we we focused on the highest impact areas where the next best alternative really didn't exist. There really was no solution to the problem, and that had low volumes of material, right? And where people would write checks. Those are the three biggest ones, right? Um, you know, low volume, high margin is biomedical, but the challenge there is long regulatory timelines. However, the mouth is a separate place than the rest of the body. The FDA has very much shorter timelines for medical devices in the mouth. You can get stuff through there in a year. So we start with the low regulatory hurdles, low volume, high margin, solve a problem, nobody else can. That's where we went and biomedical. We kept the military because the military was funding. They have an unmet need. There is no underwater adhesive. There's no mill spec for an underwater adhesive. It doesn't exist because there are no underheat, no underwater adhesives that works. There's no mill spec for it. So, you know, we're we're solving a problem that no one's been able to solve before. And somebody's writing checks to do that. So we'll focus on that one as well. So that's sort of the process we went through.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarUh yeah, right. Yeah, like you said, they're entirely different businesses and so, yeah, different verticals that you can enter and approach and and so just developing criteria around where to focus your efforts and what's going to be commercially viable.
SPEAKER_01And I think investors, because you're always thinking about how investors are going to take this, there was we had to refine the story so it didn't look like we were not focused. Investors are used to one-trick ponies, right? You do one thing, you get your minimally viable product, you work on your product, you work on your market, product market fit, and you just go, go, go, go, go, and you go down this line. We have things that can do a hundred different things. And what I you know tried to do was position it, look, this is a strength. You know, you're one of the reasons all these companies fail is they do one thing. And if it doesn't work, or somebody comes in and out competes them, that's really hard for them to recover from, right? Yeah, if they cut off, if the military military said, hey, we're not going forward, well, we got to buy a medical application, we've got a civilian application, uh cosmetic application. We can just pivot the same knowledge, the same manufacturing, the same low-cost manufacturing at scale manufacturing can be applied to these four other industries. So none of your dollars are wasted. We're still capable aftergoing all these other industries, even if one gets blocked out. Diversification is important. Everybody, you know, everybody's plan fails at some point, and you've you've got to be able to adapt. Ours had built-in adaptability.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. So for our listeners who aren't familiar with muscle polymers, tell us a little bit about your technology.
SPEAKER_01Oh, sure. So there's a fundamental problem with materials. They don't stick when wet. You know, you can't paint a house when it's raining outside. You know, you can't glue things together underwater. But it turns out blue muscles figured out how to do that a million years ago. They stick out their foot, the mollusk, it sticks out its foot under water and it secretes a glue that cures instantly under water. And a professor at Purdue looked at that muscle foot protein, which is a very large molecule, and he found one very specific part of it that actually did the gluing, and he made a 100% synthetic version of that glue. And that wet bonding adhesive can be used to glue tiles to the outside of submarines that defeat sonar. Uh, the tiles defeat sonar. And that is something, you know, stealth for the Navy is very important. And it's been a pressing issue for them for some time. So that's one area. But there are really no adhesive approved for inside the human body. This material can actually glue through blood. It can glue to all sorts of different tissues in the human body, is a is a very wet place. And dental adhesives, we all know, fail miserably. I mean, if you have a cap, it pops off every two to three years. It's an annuity for the dentist because they use adhesives that by design essentially fail. They absorb water and they fail. Ours lasts five times longer in the mouth, independently verified. So just like Teflon was super slippery and nothing stuck to Teflon, um, ours is super sticky and it sticks to everything. It sticks to metals, it sticks to wood, it sticks to biological tissues, it's you know, it sticks to plastics. We can glue Teflon together. So you know, Teflon's super slippery, ours is super sticky. And super sticky substances have a lot of use in the world. And uh that's that's sort of the the uh polymer, and we can make it at scale, and that's that's sort of what our business is. We figured out how to make it at scale at the right price, and now we've proven out a whole bunch of uh you know, verticals that we can go after and products we can go after.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. So now it's just like yeah, where to focus on or what to focus on first and and uh where to take it so it's it's most profitable or useful.
SPEAKER_01It's the challenge our business now is uh you know, you learn something in every business. You know, my first business I learned the sales cycle is something you've got to understand. And you know, my first business failed because the sales cycle was too long and the professors went insane. It was a good combination there. Uh and yeah, for an entrepreneur, you can't have a five-year sales cycle. You've got to get to revenue a little bit faster than that. In this business, what we learned was we can make products and we can test them quickly, and we can show, hey, this works. The qualification for some of these products can take three, four, five, seven years. Not regulatory, just qualifying the product, all the tests. They don't have accelerated aging tests in some of these industries. So they put something in a spray chamber and they leave it there for four or five years to see if it lasts, you know.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, so you you sit there and you twiddle your thumbs. Well, we don't twiddle our thumbs. We're going after seven other different applications while they're doing that. But that's that's the challenge that I don't think we fully uh appreciated when we started the company. But that's why we have near-term, medium-term, and long-term products. We have a nice mix in our products.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarLike you mentioned, diversity.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, diversification, diversification in terms of regulatory risk, diversification in terms of adapt adoption risk, uh, diversification in terms, yeah. So yeah, it's all sorts of market risk, price points, everything.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNow you've drawn a sharp distinction between biomimicry as inspiration versus biomimicry as a business thesis. How do you tell that story so it's compelling, but still grounded in real commercialization and not just a beautiful narrative?
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, I mean, I like biomimicry. We have a nice prize here from for biomimicry, and we know we were selected a ray of hope prize in 2021. Biomimicry is a great place to get inspiration to solve problems. It's not a business model. You know, people, I'm really excited by biomimicry. I want to do biomimicry. There is no business in biomimicry. People are out there to solve problems. Um, go look to nature as one possible place to find something to solve a problem. But take a chemical system out of nature and reproduce it and take it to scale. That's going to take a decade. You know, it's a long time. Physical things like physical things out of nature might go a little bit faster. I get a lot of uh notes from college students. I want to go into biomimicry. I don't understand what that means. You know, you want to be a uh uh an evolutionary biologist, okay, be an evolutionary biologist. But uh as business, it's just a place to go look, like there are a hundred other places to look. It it's not a business model.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, it's a resource, it's uh yeah, it's an opportunity for a possible place for solutions, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. But but there are there are investors that might want to invest in biomimicry. So, you know, you might find them. There are probably a couple dozen out there that are, oh, I'm looking for biomimicry companies. You know, that's a they're not looking for businesses that'll be successful. They're just fascinated by a biomimicry and they want to invest in that area. I don't think that's really an investment area. It's not a business.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYou've achieved something founders dream about. You move from a lab scale material that was effectively impossible economically to something manufacturable, dropping costs dramatically and scaling production. What were the key technical and operational unlocks that made stable, scalable catechol polymers commercially viable?
SPEAKER_01Well, during our due diligence, you know, we solved How the professor made it. It was patented. To his credit, Professor Wilker made something that no one had ever made before. He made a biomimetic. He found this. First off, he had to figure out what to copy. And then he wanted to make one of them. He was not interested in making an industrial version. So he under, you know, he's a good chemist and he figured out how to take a series of chemical reactions and make what he wanted. But he never did it with the mindset of I want to make tons of this stuff. And that that's the way most professors work. They want to make one and they're going to go do the next thing. So when we saw this process, it was a little finicky, it was a little touchy at certain spots. We got some chemical engineers to go look at this process. And they said, Oh, you know, we can do this this way, we can do this this way, we can do this this way, we can eliminate those steps entirely. And these are the steps we're going to eliminate. So the trick was, I think he did a six or eight-step process. We got it down, and one of the steps was at minus 20 centigrade, and we got it to a three-step process that you do at room temperature. So you eliminate steps and you do it all at room temperature. And we figured out some ways to save reagents at certain reaction steps. We made some of the reaction steps more efficient. And we were constantly refining the process. Not too much because our margins are so high. It's not a problem you need to solve now. We shouldn't be driving the price down another 10% when our margins are already 90%. It doesn't really, you get to 91%. Well, you know, it really doesn't matter. Spend your time, you know, proving out new new applications. So, you know, it was really reducing the number of steps, increasing the efficiency of the steps, making them happen at room temperature. Those are sort of the standards for making chemical processes work more efficiently. The other thing is we really wanted to use standard unit processes. So every time we remove the step, we didn't want to have any special equipment. We wanted to use equipment that people use in current chemical plants. And uh, we've been very successful at that. We have really good chemical engineers to do that. Right, yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNow, George, you're working on a book about this entire process because you believe 90 to 95 percent of university startups shouldn't exist as companies. If you could change one thing about how innovation ecosystems work, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'd I'd have them read my book once it's done.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarUm Yeah, well, tell us a little bit about it.
SPEAKER_01I think I think it's that working backwards approach is having realistic expectations of what it takes to be a business, not be a product. There are a lot of companies don't fail because people don't raise money, and companies don't fail necessarily because people don't work hard. People work hard, they raise money, they make products, they get sales, but they don't get enough of it. It's really having the entrepreneur focus on the business aspect at the end. Start at the end and work backwards is what I'd say. Really, if all of you the stuff that's in your, you know, right in your windshield right now, assume you will solve all of those problems. Start there and then figure out whether or not you have a business. And and people are always focused on the stuff that's right in front of them, obviously, because that's what they have to get done. But those aren't those aren't the things that are necessarily going to decide whether or not you have a business or not. I'd really have them start. Assume everything you think you can do, you can do technically. Assume you can make the product you think you can make, and then make it 50% better. Start there and then start your study of your opportunity at that point and see whether or not you've got a business. That's and and that's that's not where their expertise lies. That's not where their experience lies. That's not why they're getting into the business most of the time. They're getting into the business because they learned the technology and they don't get look much beyond the first one that they make, and they think everybody wants it. And it's much more start at the point where every single technical challenge is complete. You can make it at the right price, you can make it at scale. Now, do you have a business in five years? And I don't know that all of them know how to evaluate whether or not they have a business.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYou're right. So is that what your book will help with? Is that evaluation?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what it's about. It's going through those 10 steps. Um, I'm going to have some call-outs called George's rants, I think. There'll be some in there where I where I bark at certain sectors of the economy and the ecosystem. But yeah, I think that it gives them a perspective of the business challenges. Don't look at your technology as just one tiny part in this. You're creating a business. You're not creating a product. Creating a product is not creating a business. Creating a widget is not creating a business. You really have to look at what the business challenges are. And yeah, that's what I'd like to get them to look at, and I'd like the investors to look at it too. Why should angel investors um be losing at the rate they are? Right. I I had some very experienced West Coast investors, and this was amazing to me. I I think it was three of them that I spoke to. I didn't tell them what the technology was we had selected. I just told them about the process. I said, we had these 10 criteria. This is these were the criteria and why we had them. We looked at 800 technologies, reduced it to 40, reduced it to 12, de-risk them eight, you know, over the course of 18 months. Three of them said, I'm in, I'm investing. I said, I didn't tell you what the product is. And I they said, it doesn't matter because nobody does what you did. Right. You know, yeah, that that's what we do when we get a hundred different things. We have to go through that process for each company that comes to us. You already did it, and you picked the best one. Nobody does has that kind of rigor or that that kind of process. So what what am I going to tell you you're wrong? Because I'm going to do the same thing. You you did it already. And they they literally wrote checks and they say, okay, now tell me what the business is. Like, oh my, cool. All right. But at the same time, that's the way the system works right now. People get excited by technologies, and that moves them forward. And look, technology development is not a straight line. There's all sorts of excitement, randomness, luck that sways the trials and tribulations and pathways of new companies. I don't want to discourage inventors. Inventors are always going to invent. That's the one type of entrepreneur. But people that want to run tech businesses and are excited by technologies, and you've got a skill set to run a company, go out there and find the best opportunity. When you're an investor, go out there and find the best company, not the best technology. And that's sort of what I want to get is there's a there's a generation now of experienced entrepreneurs, and they've got a skill set that can translate from technology to technology, from industry to industry. And you know, this is an opportunity now for experienced entrepreneurs to go find really cool technologies. The technologists don't have to start the companies. The entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs can find the best opportunities and seize them and run with them. So, you know, it's it's a real switch, you know, potential switch in the ecosystem now. Right. And imagine if we got, even if we doubled the success rate from 10% to 20%, how amazing that would be. It changes the economy. It really would. So I think it's important. I think it's just such an exciting time with AI, how much more efficient we can be with AI. I used to get paid to write business plans, and I'd you know, I'd say, how long would it take me to write the business plan? I'd say, it's gonna take me about eight to ten weeks to write a good business plan for you. Now with AI, I write business, you know, internal business plans in an afternoon, and they're better than what I did in eight, eight, ten weeks before. It's sunny. And so that really gives you the opportunity. There's no excuse not to do that kind of homework before you start a company because you can get it done in an hour, right? Or two or three hours. Now, your experience, you know, you have to have experience, but you can talk to so many people now. The systems are so powerful. The system should be more efficient.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarI totally get it. So your book is basically your playbook for evaluating opportunities that will guide investors or people considering starting a business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's for entrepreneurs, tech transfer offices, investors of all ilks, angels offices, future capital, you know. Uh it it look, there are a lot of good business books out there. You know, this will be, you know, hopefully one of many, but um, there's some really good ones out there. Everybody's got their perspective. I want short, sweet, pithy, hopefully entertaining, but irreverent. That's what I'm sort of trying to figure out.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarWell, we'll keep an eye out for it. So for leaders listening, manufacturing execs, corporate innovation teams, investors who want to partner with universities or source new technologies, what are the three pr practical questions they should ask to avoid funding science projects and instead back roll businesses?
SPEAKER_01Well, when you're working with universities, they're going to they're the university is going to want you to fund a science project. So you know that going in. You have to know the laws and specific rules about working with not-for-profits like universities. And you have to have realistic expectations going in. So that's one big thing. The universities want to publish, and you might not want them to publish, so you have to understand how to you know walk that fine line between getting the IP protected and the professor being able to publish about it. You have to understand who's going to own the IP. So I think you you really have to understand the IP and the disclosure requirements. That's a big one. And then you have to know exactly at what point you're going to take it and what your plans are for it. You have the very specific endpoint of what you're looking for. That line between basic research and applied research and what they call translational research. Some universities have specific funds for that. And it's best to go with an experienced university that's done it before, that has translational, a translational component to their program. I think they're good places to go for that. And if you're going to put up your money, it's not going to look like any other contract you've done. It's going to be different. And you have to have realistic expectations on your timelines. When you put people in a project in your corporation, that's all they do. You know, the professor and his lab have got 10 projects. Not all of them are funded. They're trying to get funding, they're trying to write papers, they're teaching, they've got graduate students, they've got obligations to the university to sit on committees. The pace of innovation is slow. They don't work to a goal. They're following their nose. You know, they're they're looking for exciting discoveries on something they can publish, and that continues to make them a thought leader in their world. And uh they're not going to work like you work. And then for the univers from the university side, I don't think universities fully appreciate the the professors don't always appreciate the timelines and the and the accountability that lies on the on the corporate side. There's real accountability there, there's timelines, there are results. Um, and they happen quickly. And so they don't, they're not going to understand necessarily what you do unless they've done it before. So that that that that's the other side of the coin. I don't think that, maybe not so much the problem now, but if a professor is working for the first time with a with a corporation, I don't think professors fully appreciate how smart the people are on the corporate side, technically and business-wise, and how many resources they've got. Professors are the best in the world at what they do, and they think that, you know, because they're the best in the world, nobody can be the best in the world, right? And they don't realize just how smart the people on the you know in the corporate world and just how much they get done, and they don't really understand the challenges that it takes to get a product to market to build a business. You know, they just say it it's a black box to them. You know, their technology comes in and the company's making billions of dollars. They think it was all because of what went in, right? Not what went on in the black box. They just saw that their technology went in one end of the black box and the corporation's making a lot of money on the other end. And that box, but that black box had nothing to do with what came out the other end. That's where most of the most of what occurred happened in that black box.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarWhere the misunderstandings and all that just, yeah, they don't see everything else that happens. Now, I guess my final question is how should an entrepreneur or corporation decide whether to partner with the university and professors versus bring RD in-house or work with like a separate RD firm?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so what professors generally have is their goal is to be the best of the world in a very narrow area. And if you need that very narrow specific area, and that's the only place you can get it, that's why you go partner with that professor. If they have strong IP, if they have knowledge, if they have capabilities and instrumentation and tools in their lab that nobody else in the world has, then you go partner with them. It's the only place you can get it. That's what you're looking for is that unique quality, that unique skill set, the unique knowledge set they have. If you can get that anywhere else, yeah, you should be working with that professor. You're going there for that very specific knowledge-based skill set that nobody else in the world can do. And that's why you go there.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAwesome. Well, George, thank you for joining me. I love how you bring both rigor and realism to innovation because you're not just celebrating technology, you're talking about the hard truth because commercialization, like you said, it's a discipline, and building a company starts long before the product exists. It starts with selecting the right technology, improving it can become a business. Now, for listeners who want to learn more about muscle polymers, how can they reach out?
SPEAKER_01Oh, they can reach out. Um, I think it's well, it's info at muscle polymers, or I think it's let's bond at musclepolymers.com. You can email us uh there. Go to our website at www.musclepolymers.com. We also have a product called CTAC. You can go to uh ctac.com. Uh yeah, reach out, reach out through LinkedIn however you like. If you have any interesting technologies we should take a look at, um, you know, send them our way.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarExcellent. And what what about your book? What's the timeline on, or do you have a timeline on publication?
SPEAKER_01I've got a company. Running this company keeps getting in the way of finishing the book. But I I you know, in my last three months, it's really been it's really come to the fore. So I'm gonna try to finish it here in the next. Well, I'd like to get it done by the end of the year. I've got it, I've got a pretty good start. But keep me posted, yeah. I I I will. The working title of the book is Your Baby Is Ugly.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarUm, I love that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I'm we'll see whether or not that that continues through. I think it will. I'm really excited about it. I'm but you know, the most important thing is get muscle polymers going, get it best to exits here in the next 24 to 36 months, get get my employees in really good shape, you know, get a return for the investors, get a return for myself and my team, and get get these products out there where they're helping people. And we're right at that point now. We're we're bringing out a whole bunch of products, really excited about it. It's a really good time to be out there.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarVery exciting. Yeah, please, please keep me posted and yeah, I'm excited for you. Okay, stay in touch.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Leanne.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarThank you. And and for our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to Industry Ignited and tune in to the next episode because these conversations are about what it really takes to move innovation from lab benches to real world impact. Until next time, stay bold, stay curious, and keep igniting industry.