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Industry Ignited Podcast
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Industry Ignited Podcast
The Next Generation of Sensor Technology That Could Change the World | Ep. 110 [Louis Ross]
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Innovation isn't just about creating something new. It's about developing technology that solves real problems and can make a lasting impact. In this episode of Industry Ignited, Dr. Leeanne Aguilar welcomes Louis Ross, CEO of MEI Micro, for an insightful conversation about entrepreneurship, advanced engineering, and the future of precision sensing technology. Louis explains how his company is developing navigation-grade MEMS sensors that deliver exceptional accuracy in remarkably small devices, opening opportunities across autonomous vehicles, aerospace, defense, medical wearables, and robotics. He also reveals why moving beyond traditional research and development methods and focusing on scalable manufacturing can make the difference between a promising invention and a commercially successful technology.
The conversation also explores the mindset required to become a successful innovator and entrepreneur. Drawing from his international experience, particularly in Japan, Louis highlights the value of cultural understanding, mentorship, humility, and learning from different perspectives. He discusses the risks of overdependence on artificial intelligence, the importance of developing independent thinking skills, and why future leaders must continue reading, researching, and challenging themselves to learn. From building a startup with limited resources to preparing for the next generation of technological breakthroughs, this episode offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs, engineers, business leaders, and anyone passionate about innovation. Tune in to Industry Ignited and discover how curiosity, resilience, and strategic thinking can turn ambitious ideas into industry-changing solutions.
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What if the smallest sensors in the world could unlock the biggest breakthroughs in autonomy, defense, and next generation navigation? Welcome to Industry Ignited. I'm Dr. Leanne Aguilar, and today I'm joined by Lewis Ross, CEO of MEI Micro, a pioneer in navigation grade MEMS inertial sensor technology, transforming how machines move, navigate, and operate in complex environments. Lewis, welcome to the show. Great. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Now, Lewis, your career spans investment banking, emergent tech strategy, and deep tech commercialization. What inspired your shift from finance into advanced men's technology?
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, actually, I wanted to uh be a maker. I wanted to actually build something. And so that made me uh seriously consider kind of leaving uh the advisory or banking side, transaction side, where I was an investor. And I wanted to kind of have a deeper understanding also of the subject matter. And uh you couldn't couldn't do better by actually starting from the ground up and uh working uh my way into a position where you know I was responsible for actually building the technology.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAnd so you were you working in a space where you were seeing technology being built, and then you said that's interesting, I'd like to be involved in that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was I was actually when I was a graduate student, uh, my thesis paper related to semiconductors and financing the semiconductor industries in the US and Japan. Okay. So I had a uh, you know, intense interest in technology and space. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. That didn't work out, but closest thing is to uh kind of work in the technology field and especially with uh technology that applies to space, right? So I had a model rocket collection when I was growing up, so that would kind of pique my interest in space, but of course anything related to space, related to technology or advanced technology development.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, and you mentioned you you spent significant time in Japan and worked across global markets. How did that international experience shape your approach to innovation and technology commercialization?
SPEAKER_00Maybe realize that technology development is global. And when you have emerging technologies, you could have developments in one country where people are working on a particular approach to technology. And halfway across the world, they could be doing the same thing, but because they're in a different culture, they approach it differently. And I think that's where you get a lot of innovation. Sometimes it happens simultaneously, maybe in different geographical regions, but because the of the different cultures are going to have a different approach and some things they'll be better at than others. Right.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarWell, that makes sense. So, right, it just expands your view of or understanding of the technology in ways to problem solve when it comes to that space, just seeing the different approaches. Early in your career, you made a conscious decision to learn everything you didn't know. How did that mindset influence your trajectory into building cutting-edge technology companies?
SPEAKER_00I think it by constantly what I call updating my software or understanding of what's going on, especially from a different perspective. And I said, Well, that's funny. Why didn't I know about this? And I just have a in general curious nature. And I also have to be interested in something, and it has to, you know, kind of be a challenge. And I'm kind of I gravitate towards that. So when I get too comfortable and I'm I'm looking for the next challenge, and I think uh that also has a lot to do with people that are not just builders but they're trying to innovate, doing something that's completely different. You can't follow the herd all the time. Usually the herd's not going to bring you to something that's very, very different. It's gonna bring you to something that's socially acceptable and uh that might not be the most innovative thing.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarOh, that's true. So can you give any specific examples of things that are or something that was different in Japan, like you said, that opened up your your eyes to shift your mindset?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I would say that the how they engage or how they communicate. So the best analogy that I can give is say uh a koei pond, you know, the koei fish, uh Japanese. So if you look in Japan, Japan is like a koe pond that on the surface it's very silent, nothing's moving. But if you look really closely, you'll see the fish swimming around in every direction. Usually on the American side, they will look at the pond on the surface only and say, well, that's a calm pond going on there. But actually, there's a lot. So you have to be more sensitive to things that are not immediately in front of you that's explained in detail. And um, that means you have to, for lack of a better word, be very considerate to the other side and try to experience from their perspective what's going on. And um, in order to do that, you have to know the context of the situation. Not everything's explained to you. So one frustrating thing in Japan is most of the time they will not explain a lot of things to you that in the States you would get probably more detail than you really need.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, right. And so what do they do, they expect you to dig deeper than actually, if you're not Japanese, they don't expect it at all.
SPEAKER_00And then they will say something like, Yeah, as expected, they don't know. So uh when you do know, you don't want to show off either. You want to basically communicate and act and talk as as they do, which should be a lot maybe uh less detailed. So there's an interesting study when I was first in Japan, they realized that 38% of the time the Japanese didn't understand what the other one was saying. Because if you didn't understand the context, you really didn't know what was going on. So you have to learn that and you do it indirectly, not by pointed direct questions. And you have to be comfortable with being in that gray zone. Whereas I would say in the US, people were a lot more comfortable with this is black and black and good, bad, and not being able to kind of look at the nuance, uh nuances or things that they can't see. So that approach really can uh expand your learning horizon and help you update what you think you know, but you still need to learn.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. So interesting. Okay, so we're a lot more direct here. Yeah, I'm hearing you can approach things from a lot more uh just a completely different point of view or or way of being, even. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, the US actually is uh is is unique in that sense in the world. So I didn't realize that until I until I went overseas and lived as an expat, you know, actually lived, not just to uh like as a tourist. Right. Yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, because I think it's not until you actually live there and spent a significant amount of time in a different culture that you can actually understand those nuances, really get to know and at a deeper level, like you said, how it actually works, how they actually think. Because I think until you do, it's really uh you don't really know, right? Until you you do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but then I would say again, this is this is not knocking, knocking us, but some of the most difficult people to train to be expats actually from the US. Because we've been number one for so long in a lot of different things, you just assume that everybody uh does does things the same way we do. And that's the exact opposite, they don't. And you might see something that's familiar and you think you understand it because it's familiar to you, but actually it isn't. You know, and in Japan, you see a lot of that because you might see a McDonald's, but when you go on the McDonald's and you watch people, how they work, what they serve, it's it's different, it's very different.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, interesting. Wow. So you've emphasized understanding technology from the founder's perspective. What were the biggest lessons you learned transitioning from advisor and investor to operator and builder?
SPEAKER_00There's a lot. I mean, you learn first that being a founder, trying to run a startup and survive, that you're playing a long game, it's not so glamorous in a lot of ways because you you have to live off the land a lot, especially if you have uh funding that that's limited, you have a limited runway to reach a milestone. So you really have to think uh how much can I do with as few few uh resources as possible, as opposed to just having a lot and wasting it. So, and especially if you have to do it overseas. When I was overseas, I couldn't speak the language, I had to survive, and that makes you think differently as well. So I think you need to um have that mentality. And so I'd say like live off the land. Uh, you have to have a big skin in the game. So, you know, you're gonna be using your own resources a lot. I mean, if I uh make an investment in a company, I want to see that. What's the skin in the game by the founder? They burn their ships behind them. You know, there's no way out that they have to like either succeed or they're gonna fail. And if they fail, they're gonna experience some of that uh pain as well. Just um you're doing things on your resources, not just other people's money. I mean, when people do fund you, you're a steward of uh what they're providing to you, right? So you have an obligation to be a steward of uh the resources they gave you and to uh create a return over time. And um, you have to constantly you know update them on the progress and everything. So that's also time consuming that takes a lot of time, just that by itself. I learned to be a lot more detail oriented and to anticipate problems and then create a strategy in order to be able to make the right decision when uh things change. So, you know, you have a situations that are never static, right? Especially when you're dealing with a startup. Right. You you need to kind of be aware of that and have a plan. As soon as you get punched in the face, as they say, you you better be able to know what to do after that and not get shook up by it. So I know some people, myself and my co-founder, we worked at really big companies and uh we were kind of trained. And sometimes if you're in a big company environment and you're thrown into a startup, you don't know really know how to react to like failure or constant no's. You have trouble with that, and um and you might not do as well because of it.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. Yeah, but suddenly you have skin, skin in the game, like you mentioned, and suddenly things mean something different, and you don't maybe have the access to the you know large number of resources that you did in a different environment. So you mentioned that you said something interesting about learning to anticipate problems. How did you do that? What skills were involved in anticipating problems?
SPEAKER_00I think you have to have uh broad knowledge about a lot of topics and you have to be able to drill down deep in a number of them. So, not not being a jack of all trades, but you got to be situationally aware of what's going on on the periphery of what you're focused on. So if I'm focused on MEMS microsystems, that's a type of semiconductor technology, I need to understand the semiconductor industry, the supply chain, right? I need to understand applications, what is what is our technology and product going to be used for? I need to get very detailed in my understanding of that. And um, and then I'll be able to see uh a roadmap. I'll be able to determine when I see a pattern, I recognize that as relevant or irrelevant, and then I take action on it. I adjust my strategy to make sure I achieve the objectives that I that I have, and I build in a flexibility as as well. Right.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, good approach. And how much did your finance background, I guess, guide that process?
SPEAKER_00Well, it helped a lot. Um it helped a lot because it made me realize that before you go to professional investors, you want to try to build up as much value as you can in order to preserve independence. If you're very confident in your business plan and what you're developing, but you want to make sure you maintain control uh for as long as you as you need to in order to do that. And, you know, when we started, I knew that the business model they had in mind at that time probably wasn't gonna be understood by a lot of VCs and professional investors just because I came from that background. Right. So I realized I'm gonna I'd have to get through certain parts of the development before I actually started to expose my uh friends and uh colleagues about this idea that I had and how how we would actually develop a business from this key enabling technology once we have actually developed the platform. And uh there was a lot of risk involved initially for that. So I wanted to de-risk the investment before I went to professional investors.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight. And so when you say maintaining control for as long as possible, that means uh getting investors for as long as possible.
SPEAKER_00Because once you No, it depends on investors, right? So you you you have to be aligned with the investor. Number one. Number two, if you are say you're working dealing with angels, they have to believe in you as you know, a manager and a founder, that they're entrusting you and they are betting on your skill set. And they are not going to take too much of your time out of the work you need to do versus just reporting to them. And especially if they are, you know, uh not adding a lot of value, which means, you know, if they're not helping you with customers, if they're not supporting you in developing your technology and developing uh funding sources, which are gonna which may be needed, and um, they're paying armchair quarterback and and they're being disruptive, that that's not gonna help you. The investment will cost a lot more in the future that could actually put you in a difficult situation and maybe you won't be able to survive. So you got to be really careful who you bring on as investors, but at the same time, you gotta have something that's of significant value where you're gonna have a number of people that want to work with you, that want to, you know, fund you and and they see the exit, they see how they're how they're going to earn from their investment, right? Without hurting the value of the company or what the founders want to do and and their vision.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. So when I mean, developing technology like you have, how important is it for the investors to really understand that technology at a deep level?
SPEAKER_00Well, actually, when we started, they really relied on the founders, their background, and their vision. And I had uh a former colleague of mine, a senpai, a senior, one of my mentors, and um, you know, I I brought the situation to him and and he decided to invest. And he just said, well, you know, Lewis, I'm just gonna assume that my investment's gone. And, you know, I I I believe in you and everything, but I really don't understand the technology that much. But I do know if you're successful, this will, this technology will be in everything over time. Um it's exciting from that perspective. So I have enough money to, you know, just take the risk and invest in a very early stage that they were really relying on us to know the technology and understand and be able to develop and build it. And we had a good combination as far as founders are concerned, because we had different skill sets. It got to the point where I ended up sort of being a quasi-engineer, just working with engineers for long enough to be able to understand the technology to the point where I could actually contribute to the innovation side. Um that includes, you know, developing new patents, for example. You know, you want to patent something that you could make that the industry needs and that it's unique and nobody else is doing ideally. So you have more barriers to entry. And um, as an investor, you're concerned about that. How can you de-risk the investment? But also, what are your emotes or your barriers to entry? And how long can you maintain them? Yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAnd it sounds like they were really investing in you too. They saw you and your team and the skills that you brought.
SPEAKER_00And yeah, that was primarily they were investing in us. They were investing in us, our background, um, and our approach. So when we first started, especially when you're developing a new type of semiconductor, and not only that, but process technology to make the semiconductor, to make the device, then there's a lot of risk involved. And MAMS is a specialized semiconductor. So you're gonna go through a period of anywhere from at least three to five to six years. Can they actually make it? Can they actually patent what they're making? Who else is doing this? Do they have a freedom of use? So even if they patent something, are they gonna get sued? There's a lot of things to consider as an investor. I was focused on de-risking as much as I could. So I kept, I was wearing different hats, one as an you know, inventor, builder, developer, and the other as an investor. If I was investing in this company, what would I expect them to do? Yeah, that makes sense.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNow, speaking of the technology, MEI Micro is the first to develop navigation grade MEMS motion sensing systems. For those less familiar, what makes this breakthrough so significant compared to traditional sensor technologies?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so when we say navigation grade, we mean navigation grade chip scale multi-axis uh devices that could be built in large uh volume commercial foundries. So we are providing the performance of devices like a ring laser gyro, fiber optic gyro. These are different technologies to make an inertial measurement unit, which includes accelerometers and gyros. We, our approach, we developed at a commercial foundry for the first time, which allows us to make the devices very small and of very high accuracy. And that accuracy is compatible to devices that are tens of thousands of dollars, actually. And we would be able to make them at a fraction of the size and the cost. So that was in general. I won't get too technical, but in general, that that was the uh that was the breakthrough. So it allowed us to provide for these really high-end use cases applications where they could afford to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the uh inertial sensor. That would be aerospace, commercial space, defense. Uh so you have a limited volume and you had process technology that had low yield, and that's why they're so expensive, and you had to build a special package for these things. And what we managed to do was use a process that could be used to manufacture devices that are not only a lot smaller, but you still have that very high accuracy. And that was a something completely new, like our three-axis accelerometer samples we're shipping right now, navigation grade. We are we are by far and clear the industry leader when it comes to that accuracy. And under different conditions, especially including temperature. So these are things that could affect you know the performance. So we we we have uh test results that shows that we are we still maintain that that accuracy, that performance. So essentially that's that's what we you know managed to do. So we could market our technology to both the high end and the lower end. Lower end, you have to have very low cost uh cost per unit. Right. You have to be able to have very small size, seven by seven or ten by ten millimeters. Our first chip is seven by seven millimeters, but we could even shrink that to three by three millimeters. It's very, very small.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. So you mentioned that you made that decision early on to bypass the traditional lab to fab model and build directly in a commercial foundry. What drove that decision and how did it change your tr trajectory?
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, most of the uh dead bodies in on our space always are trying to go from a lab to a fab. So you're in a lab, say a well-known university lab, and you build a couple of devices and in a lab environment and you pick one or two metrics that like lowest noise, which would is helps to define the accuracy. And uh you could replicate that in the lab only. But when you actually go to a manufacturing facility and you have to make tens of thousands or millions of these units, it's just not possible based on that approach or that technology that you developed in the lab. So this is a big problem. It's an under-reported problem because there's for some reason people started to equate innovation coming out of the universities. And that's usually not the case. It's an experienced, experienced people who have been in companies for years. They also may have PhDs. They were at university getting their PhDs, and they went out and started working the companies. My my colleague went through that, got his PhD, worked at a large company called Texas Instruments, and he worked on the first U.S. government-funded MEMS uh program called the Digital Light Processing Chip, which he developed with Larry Hornbeck, uh the inventor, and he built those first devices. He was brought up uh in the corporate environment where you actually had to build a product. Took them 15 years to develop that technology at TI. So at that time, US companies had central research groups where they could work on these long-term projects, and then they stopped doing that in the 80s, 90s, and then more and more universities started to market themselves as you know centers of RD where the companies could outsource their RD to the university, and they need not do that. Yeah, and that was never a good idea. And that that I would say that's the reason why we have fallen behind in certain areas. You have to have manufacturing. So now you have all this onshoring of manufacturing, including semiconductors, where you know you have trained people at the corporate level, push the technology, push the innovation. And the universities will go back to doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is training people on some basic level or up to PhD, where then they could go and work at a company and be trained to focus on the right stuff that's manufacturable that could actually lead to a product, not what we call never-ending negative TRL technology readiness level that's never going to go beyond two or three or four because they can't find anyone to actually mass produce uh what they built in the lab.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. So it's not easily transferable into a real world environment.
SPEAKER_00And so, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNew problems to solve, or you end up at square one, you know, basically with an idea, but it's not commercial.
SPEAKER_00There's just a big disconnect between that world and the industry. So if you look at a place like Japan, they don't have that problem because at the university, They're brought into the company and they're trained mostly at the company. And actually, when they could be a freshman, sophomore, junior, and they may be interacting informally with the company, and they're they're being basically prepped to be recruited way way before they they graduate, especially in the engineering field. And when they join a company, they stay there for most of their career. There's not a lot of moving around. And this is a huge advantage that they have on one hand. On the other hand, uh, they have less startups as a result because we have more startups. So we have one of the biggest assets that we have as a country, especially when it comes to innovating, is confidence. So we have the confidence to go and take the risk and go out and try to start a company. A lot of countries, they actually don't have that culturally. And uh that's why we still have a lot of leading companies and some of the top startups in the particular area, and we kind of lead the world and and then everybody catches up. It's it's because of that.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarInteresting. So confidence, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. So your technology enables sensors that are dramatically more accurate and cost efficient, like you mentioned. What new applications become possible when you reduce costs and increase performance?
SPEAKER_00Well, well, now you could use it, uh, you could afford to put that accuracy in a lot of different applications. So you could have wearables, for example, that could be 80 to 100 times more accurate now. And when you apply AI and machine learning, that brings your sensor fusion to a completely different level. You can do medical grade predictive analytics, for example. You could determine ailments or uh conditions years in advance by doing a lot more what we call um testing or when you have when you have trials for medical devices or drug development. If you could reduce the cost of doing trials, where you don't need a patient to come into a hospital, for example, or a clinic, and you could do it remotely through a wearable, that that's a pretty big deal. You know, you you reduce the cost of drug development, you increase the uh likelihood where you could have more data and more accurate data for your sensor fusion, your algorithms, your software, your your AI and machine learning. So in a sensor is an edge device, it's an IoT device that collects data. So in our case, when you when you collect data from an edge device, say medical device, it needs to be as accurate as possible, right? And the most expensive data that you're gonna collect off an edge device or IoT device is the inertial data by far. It's the most expensive. So you're gonna use MEMS technology to collect the data. It's gonna be accelerometer, gyro, pressure sensor, time of flight sensor. Um, and then you got to process that into actionable intelligence, not just a bunch of data you don't know what to do with. So, yeah, by being more accurate, uh you're gonna be able to do that faster, more efficient. You won't need the cloud. You can make decisions at the edge. So you could determine whether or not it's worth sending to the cloud, for example. Awesome.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYou've built a strong intellectual property portfolio as a strategic moat. How important is IP strategy in deep tech? And how should founders think about protecting and scaling their innovations?
SPEAKER_00It's very important, especially now. The uh current government is a lot more pro-inventor, a pro-patent holder. And that's significant if you want to innovate and protect your product. You want to have moats, and IP is a big moat. IP is more than just patents, it's trade secrets, know-how, it's trademarks, copyrights. Those are all important. So we we had a very detailed IP strategy from the beginning. Uh, we're fortunate enough to get together with a uh a top uh lawyer, IP lawyer, who's uh very well known IP and semiconductors and a few other applications areas that we knew we were gonna focus on. And so we're constantly filing patents, we're filing continuations to maintain the amount of time where we have that protection of our core technology. And because of that, we can work with applications developers and subject matter experts on new IP families. And that just makes us more attractive to work with uh and to you know be a licensee of uh technology. Something that founders really have to consider. Sometimes they don't. You know, I would say, for example, overseas, maybe in Europe, they're not as in tune to that. I know in Canada, it's if you look at their IP and intellectual property and uh patent filings in OE OECD, they're relatively low. And um, that just exposes you to more competition. These days, smaller companies that do have an attractive patent portfolio, uh, there are options for them to uh have to protect their IP rights from big companies that may infringe. Uh, there's uh patent litigation financing that's become a um a growing asset class all in of itself, where investors invest in strong patent portfolios, protecting that, those interests, and then they um they receive a return for doing that. So I would urge founders to find some good advisors to help you with that, including people that have gone through it. And uh then we'll just you know, just have a discussion so you could at least get a starting point. Right because I think more and more you know investors are gonna be looking for that. Otherwise, you know, you're gonna be investing in one of you know nine or ten companies that are all doing the same thing and they're in a foot race.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, uh you see that a lot in Silicon Valley, where you know they're using uh off-the-shelf sensors, they're all they they're the same quality level, same accuracy level, and they're competing on software. Who has better software? And there's a lot of companies doing that because there's many different ways to to do that software part.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, right. Yeah, interesting. So really, so companies should create an IP strategy from the beginning, which I'm hearing, and that IP strategy will create um or a diverse portfolio and it will also create or reduce risk, I guess, for investors. And so it's strategic really all the way all the way around on multi-levels.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right. And it it depends on what you're doing. In our space, it's very important. And some others, trade secrets might be more important where maybe you're better off not filing a patent and keeping it as a trade secret. So it depends on what you're doing. In our space, it's very important.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNow you've navigated the complexities of scaling a deep tech company across multiple countries. What are the biggest commercialization challenges when it bringing advanced hardware technologies to market?
SPEAKER_00Uh when well, when you scale up, you want to bring in people at a pace that is not too fast because you want to make sure that when you bring them on, they're gonna they're gonna stay there for a significant significant period of time. And that could be difficult, um, especially if you have differences in you know culture or differences just between different uh groups of uh people, you know, different ages. I think one thing that we've been able to do is we have different age categories and and they listen and respect each other. When I was younger, I tried to learn as much as I could. I assumed I didn't know much, and I was correct. If I was graduating college right now, I would really focus on trying to find good mentors because there's a lot fewer now because of the cultural change and cultural shift and learning as much as I can, making sure they get what they need because they're taking care of me and I'm, you know, I'm learning from them. And then I may get tapped to do a lot uh more work and get more responsibility. What you don't want to do is with no experience, show up and say, Hey, I'm here to make your company a number one company. It's like, well, no, you're you're there to get trained. Yeah, I mean, you're coming, you're a blank slate. You really don't know much. You gotta accept that. You know, and I I've seen the most successful people that I've seen were like that. And I think there's there's another thing to learn from, like, say, a culture like uh Japan. The Japanese are that they're always in that mode, even if they're much more experienced people. They have this humble, you know, I need to understand and learn first, and there's no ego involved at all. And it allows them to be really creative a lot more than we were led to understand. Some things that really help to illustrate that would be, well, two areas I always bring up. One is anime, which people are very familiar with. You look at anime and you see how creative they are with that. Another one is fashion. So, you know, I I spent time in New York City. I lived there for nine years. There's a fashion institute there, talked to some of the students who who were from overseas, and I said, What gives you your inspiration? How do you how do people come up with new designs? Everything and they say, Oh, well, they just copy everything from Japan. Wow, interesting. Oh, why is that? Yeah. And I said, Well, the girls that are in Harajiku, they're wearing different clothes and and they'll try anything. And whereas in the States, if you do that and a famous person's not doing it, then you may just get criticized to the point where you you're afraid to try anything. And and I said, Wow, that makes a lot of sense. And so you would be surprised at how much you think originally in the US, but it didn't. It was just brought over and put in a different package.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. Yeah. Cause I guess on the other side of confidence is is the insecurity, right?
SPEAKER_00So it's like I tell you the worst thing is to be really confident and really not have the skill set. Yeah, yeah. And so if you're competitive in sports, but you don't realize how hard you have to work to be like a top, you know, person in that area, there's that disconnect. You know, I will be frank and say I I've seen that increase in the US over the past couple of decades or the past two decades. That is not a good thing. We will lose the ability to innovate if that's the case. So you can't, I'm always very wary of I'm very confident I know what to do. And then the media, like, oh no, they they really don't know what to do. Yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarThat uh that is a fake it, fake it till you make it kind of uh you know, mentality.
SPEAKER_00I mean, think about when you say something like that, what's the usual reaction in general? It's laughing about it, right? Actually, it's probably not that funny when you think about it. It's boy, like I my reaction is oh man, that's not good. Right. And it might be a nervous laugh, but you know, people have to realize that if there's no more seed corn, like you really don't have people innovating because the incentive structure is not there. Uh things are not based on merit. Merit's important. If you don't have that in those incentives, people would just say, but why should I even bother doing that? Because I'm not going to get a chance.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight.
SPEAKER_00Like if I'm working really hard and I am best at what I'm doing and I don't get that shot, why even like try? So that that's a problem that you have in societies that like Soviet Union or countries that are more kind of socialist in in nature. Like I not to be political. Sure. Yeah. I mean, Japan, again, I you know, throw Japan in. In a lot of ways, Japan is socialism in a suit, but they work extremely hard. So they're very considerate of the maintaining the culture and maintaining harmony, not being selfish, not being narcissic, always in learning mode, right? But they are very, very innovative at the same time.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, that's fascinating.
SPEAKER_00So it's a good combination. So of course they have other issues, but if you go there and you see the result, depending on your age, if you're older than 50, I guess, and you go to Japan, you'll say, Oh, this is how it used to be in the States. But if not, you'll say, Wow, this is so, this is really, I haven't seen a lot of this stuff. Yeah, I haven't seen a society function like that.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarSo now I'm excited to go. I know my my son just moved to Japan a month and a half ago. And um, he's he's in his early 20s and and he was living in New York, New York City before that. And like you, you gave the same contrast. He loved New York City, and and I guess Japan's like twice or Tokyo's twice as big. But he's like, it's basically all the good parts of New York City, but and you take out like the bad things like the rats and the noise and the dirtiness and the you know the the um you know problems, you basically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And and you know what, it's just how it is. Like if if I'm making this comparison, sometimes people say, Oh, you know, you're in love with Japan and everything. I said, Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just reporting what I see and I experience.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, just experience.
SPEAKER_00That's just how it is. I'm gonna call a spade a spade. That's how I was brought up. Um, I think if you're uh in a startup, your founder, better be able to do that. You better be able to call a spade a spade. You have to, you you cannot try to build a company based on a fictional world you've you've made up where you're happy in all the time.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarRight.
SPEAKER_00You cannot you can't do that. You gotta you gotta come face to face with this different reality. So your son, I I was in New York too, and I was constantly going back and forth. So definitely quit quiz him and ask questions because he'll he'll probably go through stages. First went to Japan my first year or two, that definitely my first year was the worst of my life. It was terrible. I I hated everything. I was like, oh, this is I don't understand anything. Why do they do what they do? No one is understanding me or listening to me. Uh, this is strange. Why do they do it this way? They should do it that way. I was, you know, really, you know, confused.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, culture shock, I guess.
SPEAKER_00And yeah, just yeah, the culture shock and just a confusion because they don't they don't explain things.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarInteresting.
SPEAKER_00And you think you know something, and then like, wow, I was way off. Oh boy. And um, you know, that's you become fluent in Japanese in two months, and then you realize, like, boy, I don't know anything. But but when everyone's telling you, oh, your Japanese is so great because you say two or three words. Yeah. You know, if you're caught overconfident, you think like, oh, I could speak Japanese now. Right.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarThere's more beneath the surface, like you said, there's that whole context and the understanding part. And you might know the words and get the words, but you don't understand the deeper meaning of and then the culture part of it. Yeah. And before I move on to the next question, I wanted to go back to something you're you're mentioning about mentors. And you said that mentors aren't as available as they used to be, but they're super important. Uh tell me a little bit more about that. And this and how can people find mentors, especially in this age where there's so much everything's virtual and even education is virtual? How do you find a mentor? Because those relationships, like you said, I think are um vital in Yeah, it's hard.
SPEAKER_00And that this is why uh your son going to Japan, I think is important for like a younger generation in the US. When I was growing up, I always thought the old timers, like my dad, my uncles, and my aunts, they were just so much more interesting, funnier. Uh I I and we were a lot like more quiet, less engaging, didn't know as many jokes and stories. And and I said, Man, that's not good. I said, I wish I could, I wish I had that skill set. And now it's much, much worse because of technology, where you could just be immersed in the technology and you're doing a lot of your communication only through the technology and not person-to-person. Right.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarLike the texting or Snapchats or the WhatsApp. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's right. So here's the problem. Increasingly, you got to be globalized, you got to understand different cultures. These cultures, especially in Asia and especially in Japan, it's very person-to-person oriented. And there's a special way of communicating that way. If you cannot do that, if you're constantly like doing it through texting and things, you're not going to fare well in that environment. You're just not. And you got to understand that and say, okay, then what do I do? Well, watch, mimic, copy, learn. And then over time, your software changes. And I could tell you, like, if you have that skill set and then you have not just a language, but understanding the culture. The culture is more important than the language, by the way. I would, I would argue. Once you have that, when you come back to the US, for example, you have you're in a completely different league now. And you're going to be a lot more trainable, employable. You'll have more ideas for your to do your own thing if you want to. You know, if you want to start a company, you'll have a lot more. I mean, that's why immigrants do so well from certain places. They because uh they're just focused on the important stuff. They're not focused on looks and this, the cultural competition of how to explain it. Like when I came back to the States, I had a reverse culture shock. Like, for example, if you really want to understand the culture, you gotta know what television shows are important. Because back home, I mean, in the States, a lot of way they'll communicate is like through, oh, I watched this movie or that television show. Oh, you don't know about that song. Exactly. You don't know about that sitcom. Uh and it's like might say, hey, they read the same book, not like watch the same sitcom. And right increasingly, US uh mass media stuff is not that as nearly as popular as it used to be. Like when I went overseas the first time as a student, it was much more popular back then. It is not the case now. So yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarI think now there's so much of it. And not only that, there's multiple streaming services and there's content being created all over the world. And so, right, it's just the volume of content. I mean, now it's there's so many shows, it's like who who watched what? It's not like it used to be when there were three or four main television stations and you have limited choices, so everyone was watching the same show.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, difficult. So, you know, one other thing I would say that like if you're you're younger, you're looking for a mentor, like in Asia, or in like in Japan. I you keep going back to Japan because I'm there all the time, but um, you know, they have a Kohi Senpai relationship. So Senpai is a senior, kohi is a junior. Even if you're older by a couple of months, they'll call you senpai. Oh wow. Okay, that that yes, I mean it's interesting, right? Even if the uh girls do the same thing, they'll say, Oh, my senpai, and they're referring to some older like girl. So they have that respect for the age difference, and that's still kind of built in the culture. But and they get together, they go out, and one thing that the younger generation does is they update the software of the older people, and then the older people remind the younger people this is the appropriate way to do things. And so there's that interaction that goes on that I think is really interesting that allows for a larger unit to function fairly efficiently. Another thing that they do is they call ringishawl. So if you go to a Japanese company, like uh we deal with a lot of Japanese companies, and then uh and I also work with US companies that they need help in Japan. So they hear about me and they ask me, you know, can you help? And um they'll say, okay, well, we're startup and we're we want to work with Japanese companies. So how do I talk to the decision maker? What do I say and what do I send them and everything? And I said, Well, there is the there is no decision maker. I said, Well, the CEO, you know, how do we get no that you got to, he has lieutenants, he has the people that are gonna do the execution, they're a bunch of them. And they're gonna all see an idea and they're all gonna determine should we support this or not. And if not, they won't tell you why. You got to figure that out. So it's a time, it takes a lot longer to get an okay, but once they agree, it's done by clockwork and it's the most reliable supply chain you you may have.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarOh, interesting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So in other cultures, you know, they're really quick to do something and really quick to stop. Uh-huh. So it they're really excited and oh, let's do it. And then next week it's finished.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. One thing goes wrong and and right, it's it's out the door. There's no commitment. There's no commitment.
SPEAKER_00You know, in Japan, the commitment is really important. And if you're not used to that and you've been conditioned not to be dependable, not to be focused on something and see it through until the end, then it's gonna be much more difficult to have good relationships and strong relationships. That's number one. Number two, if you feel that I'm not being treated appropriately, because I always hear this kind of back up, I deserve more, all that stuff. Um, there's also disconnect there. So expectations in Japan are much, much, much, much, much higher. Yeah. Where you're gonna be doing stuff and say they don't appreciate it and they're treating me so badly. And it's like, no, you're not reaching the level that they expect from other Japanese or even from foreigners. Like foreigners, they give you a lot more leeway. They'll I call it the get out of jail free card, gaijin get out of jail free card to ask your son about that. So if you get in trouble, they'll because you're foreigner, they'll say, Shogunai, you know, it's it can't be helped because a foreigner doesn't know what he's doing. So don't let him go. But if your Japanese gets really good, they they may start talking to you like they have the same expectation. And that's I try to stay out of that orbit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because if you if you're not born into it, it's really the standards is really hot too high.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, sounds fascinating. But I think it goes back to what you're saying, is it like they don't have the ego like like we do? It's not not all about them and all that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean they they they have egos, but it's different. It it comes at different times, it's for different things, and you might be surprised as to why. But there's no logic. So they have their own logic. You have to learn this different logic. So we we make these assumptions, and I I always cringe when I hear it. It's like, well, you know, everybody feels the same way about that, right? It's like, no, they don't.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNo, that's an assumption, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they absolutely don't. You're you'll start hearing a lot of that from your son the longer he stays there, the more he speaks Japanese, and the more he uh understands the culture, you know, he'll he'll reach the boy, what's this? I mean, this doesn't make any sense. Uh-huh. It's not logical what they're doing. So you got to learn the different logic and why. And when you do that, you become really more valuable. You know, so going back to your question about finding mentors and everything, if you show that, hey, you know, I work hard, I'm trainable. Um, yeah, I don't know much now, but because I'm trainable and I work hard, I'll learn fast and I'll show you that. And then you just do it. You don't talk about it, you do it. You don't say, hey, I've been here for six months, so why aren't I vice president? Yeah. I mean, there are people in Japan that have 10 years more experience in a company and they would never dream of talking that way. Right. Yeah. So you got to be appealable to a lot, a lot of different people, I think, in the world, because there's a very strong likelihood if you're really successful, you're gonna be global, you're gonna be able to, you know, do business in multiple countries. And um and, you know, to me, that's like the new American prototype founder business person. So Yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarNow the inertial sensor market spans everything from consumer devices to defense and aerospace. How do you strategically position MEI micro across these vastly different market segments?
SPEAKER_00Uh well, what our our core technology, we call it, it's like a chassis, and you could build a different type of sports car frame on that chassis. And um, so what we build for that's gonna go into a space, uh into space on a satellite, that same core technology we would put in a medical device or a wearable. So we would have different software, maybe different package, maybe a different integrated circuit, but our mems for the most part is the same technology. So with the when we get different ideas, we we meet with different subject matter experts, and and then we realize, oh wow, we could probably build something for that. Or we could tweak our technology, and actually that's probably a new patent. Um, that might be a new product just by interacting with people who really know their stuff for the application side. Yeah. And then when we show them what we can do, they say, wow, I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know. So can you make a sensor that's gonna do X, Y, and Z for me? And yeah, uh, yeah, we could probably do that. And then that leads to suddenly you know a whole whole new project. You know, we have one um this month in a couple weeks. If you're familiar with uh F1 racing, race car driving. Right, yeah, for me. We're working with uh uh our devices are gonna be in uh several team cars of uh 24-hour race in Nur Nรผrbering in Germany. Cool. And um where we're going to be taking uh data from these very specialized um race cars. Uh they are they're they're in between you had four floor uh Formula One where the cars look the same, but these cars are um souped up versions of like production cars. You know, that's uh Mercedes and Audi and Ferrari and uh GM are gonna be racing. Being on that high performance vehicle, um using our accuracy to develop new metrics to evaluate these cars is gonna lead to new insights and maybe new technology and products that would be eventually being you know regular production cars over time.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAnd you also mentioned that your technology is foundational to systems like drones and autonomous platforms. How critical is navigation grade sensing in a world increasingly reliant on autonomy and GPS-denied environments? It's absolutely critical.
SPEAKER_00And that's why we've gotten so much attention of what we're what we're doing. The higher grade your sensor, the longer you can do what they call dead reckoning. So even if you get GPS jammed or spoofed, you'll still be able to know the position. So it's really important because you have natural interference and you also have purposeful interference. So this happens in uh during a war, but actually it's even more important, we would say in commercial, because a commercial, you know, there may be reasons that things are being spoofed or jammed, or there's just natural interference. Uh, if you look at Japan, testing navigation systems in Japan is important because it has so many obstacles and barriers like footbridges and tunnels. I mean, things that you you won't see in the US anywhere because the cities are a lot smaller. New York, by the way, is at least three times smaller than Tokyo. No, it's that much smaller. Yeah, New York's very, very small compared to Tokyo. I mean, Tokyo, there's there's like three, what, three or four New Yorks in Tokyo? Okay. And Shibuya. Yeah, diff just different areas of Tokyo. Yeah. So you're dealing with a lot more interference, a lot, you know, there's a lot more taller buildings, um, there are more footbridges because there's a lot more walking. Right. Wow. Um, so you gotta deal with that. And so you're gonna you're gonna have a different solution for your navigation platform. Um, another thing that's critical about RTEC is that if you put our sensors on an image sensor, like a camera or a sonar or radar, a LIDAR, um, to get three-dimensional images, you can improve your platform stabilization of your image sensor and you get a higher resolution image, which is really critical for uh machine learning and AI, because you're trying to pick anomalies out of this data and you want to have the highest accuracy as possible.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarCool. So looking ahead, how do you see MEMS and inertial sensing evolving over the next decade? And what industries do you think will be most transformed by it?
SPEAKER_00Uh well, they're they're gonna be in everything, just about everything. And collecting data. I mean, all of these data farms or these uh server farms they're building is because they're basically um, you know, collecting data. Now, some of that data I think is not gonna be collected, doesn't need to be collected because there's no need to do that. I think they're gonna be oversaturated. They really were never gonna have the capacity to collect all that they're saying. It just takes too much power. You're gonna need something like 100 nuclear power plants to you know just to keep up. It's it's not quite possible. But the higher accuracy data you use, the less you'll need to come up with your predictive analytics. And so we're really we want to reduce the cost of like healthcare. More remote healthcare, telemedicine, where you don't need expensive uh procedures. You could change eating habits or exercise habits based on this data that you're getting, you're collecting. So I think that's gonna be more prioritized, uh, safety systems and automobiles, for example, where the sensors help to automatize the car. It becomes a robot, right? And if the driver doesn't pay attention, doesn't notice something, the system does and it it reacts faster, maybe not to full autonomy, but pretty close to it. Right. Yeah, so better sensors enables that. Uh just a whole, I mean, I could I could go on and on.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarA lot of different stuff.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we talk about it every day and we love it. You know, in space, going back to younger viewers, you know, what should I do? What should I specialize in? The space economy really is kind of the future for, you know, if I was in my 20s and I would I would go into engineering, try to work at a place like a SpaceX or startup, just get into that field. Yeah. Because I think it's gonna be, you know, next automotive industry, next internet, um, absolutely something that is gonna transpire over the next you know decade or two. As soon as they mine the first asteroid and they find uh you know some important you know mineral there or moon colony. Uh-huh. It's just really cool, exciting stuff. It's innovative technologies very needed, um, right. You know, including ours. Uh, we're gonna help enable it. And um, you know, another area is maritime is the ocean. So the ocean's even more accessible, but there's still a lot of it that we haven't explored. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah, so unmanned vehicles in both cases are gonna be really important. And so robotics, autonomy, navigation for these particular areas are gonna be really, you know, I think exciting.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah, like he says, very exciting and lots of new frontiers to be explored. So, Lewis, final question for entrepreneurs entering deep tech or advanced engineering fields, what advice would you give about balancing innovation, risk, and long-term vision?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think you got to get really deep on all the above. I mean, as much as you can. Um, I think you gotta read instead of scroll. You really gotta do some deep dive reading and you gotta move away from scrolling. And um, there's one trap for you if you're just starting out, is the use of AI. You want to stay away from that trap because if you depend on AI, you're not gonna be using your cognitive function as much. Right. And it actually can contribute to conditions like Alzheimer's. We have stakeholders that are say, are you looking at Alzheimer's because there's gonna be an epidemic of it in the future? I say, well, you know, yes, uh, we got different reasons. I have personal reasons if family members have been affected, and the younger generation, they're more and more dependent on, you know, AI to just spit out, here, do this, you know, here, here, do that. Uh, and you're not writing your original stuff, you're not reading the entire book. I would be very old school and do the reading, do the research, learn how to write, and you would be extremely valuable just because of that. And you would avoid being uh pigeonholed into one place or the other. Right.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00So that you want to balance, that's a good way to go back to answer your question. That's how you could balance.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarThat's really good advice. I mean, I think AI has its place and it helps and makes things faster in a lot of regards, and automating certain things that don't require a lot of the brain power, but at the same time, your brain is a muscle. If you don't use it, it's gonna you know atrophy, basically, you know. And yeah, so right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. You know, learning another language is really helps with the plasticity, your cognitive uh function. And um younger people have to be more aware of it than than older people. I think it's gonna be so on one hand, you have access to all this great stuff, right? But you got to know how to curate that. Like what's really important out of all that AI stuff. And that's how you're gonna be innovative. You're not if you're gonna sample everything. If all your music's sampled from old music, I mean, there's nothing new there. Exactly.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAnd that's what AI doesn't do. It doesn't create new from nothing, it just takes it resamples and it remixes and all that, right, from what's already existing, but it's not creative. That's what our brains are designed for, and we've got to work them out in order to be truly innovative. But it's like if we're not using our brains regularly, they're not gonna be as creative and innovative as they could be, and we won't reach our full potential cognitively.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, that's right. You you'll just start to become like Pavlov's dog. You know, you're gonna react to the stimulus accordingly, and that's it, because you don't know what else to do. And uh I have to say, people notice that. Like I could see that happening, like real time with with younger people, and and they they gotta snap out of it. And you know, everybody does actually. Right. Including um, it doesn't matter really what age you are, I think. It really does. I think that I might be if you're Gen X, you had to become digital at a young age for the first time. Like we were that's a that generation was in between that that handover, the change. And um, so they kind of they're really aware of it. Whereas if you're maybe a lot older, I would say if you're a lot older, they don't understand the information that you can acquire very easily as a teen is much more than one thing you're used to. Right. It's hard for them to kind of get that. But do you know what's relevant and important out of all that information you have access to? Yeah. That comes with experience. So and I just I'll give you one because I was just talking to a lawyer recently. Um, uh a senior partner telling me that they have banned associates for the first three years of using AI. They're not allowed to use AI.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarWell, that's smart. I mean, there's been you know uh lawsuits already over you know attorneys using AI and because of the hallucinations and it not referencing like a correct case study and all that. I mean, that makes sense. The lawyers need to really understand the the history and the and the case law and the and the laws themselves, not just rely on AI to interpret, you know, the yeah, and so think about this.
SPEAKER_00So if you are doing old school reading and writing and and you're pretty young, you'll be able to curate from all that AI. You'll be able to pick out what's important. And so if you're more senior person, if you find someone like that, they'll be really valuable. That that's the kind of person you're gonna say, hey, I want to help put this person on a track, a fast track, where they're gonna be able to handle important stuff sooner. They could be they'll be dependable and we'll continue to help them. And that would be a good use of my quote mentor time, right? Right. Yeah.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarYeah. Right. Well, Lewis, thank you so much for joining me. How can listeners learn more about you and MEI Micro?
SPEAKER_00Well, you could keep checking our website, mei-micro.com. Uh, Google us on the news. Uh, we've been in stealth mode, but we're coming out of it this year, so you'll see more and more. But definitely um the website and my name and the company's name and Googling it, you'll you'll have some stuff come up and you could follow us like that.
Dr. Leeanne AguilarAll right. Well, definitely very exciting. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to Industry Ignited. Be sure to subscribe and join us for the next episode. Until next time, stay bold, stay curious, and keep igniting industry.