Science

Most technology startups involve some amount of engineering risk. Can we build it at scale? Can we build it for $X by our launch date? Can we refine the product to be attractive before we run out of money? There is a ton of material from the lean/agile world on how to approach these challenges. I’ve read it all. Frankly, while much of this advice has been useful to me in my transition from PhD to CEO - the existing literature just wasn’t very applicable to the very early stages of polySpectra. »

Last November I spent a full week in the basement of a masonic temple in Manhattan, an oddly appropriate venue for a workshop about risk. The Real World Risk Institute was founded as a hedge against a very specific real life risk - the possibility that author and risk expert Nassim Taleb might lose (or quit) his part-time position as a professor at NYU. Tired of the bureaucracy? Why not start your own institute? »

We are launching polySpectra’s first product at the Cyclotron Road Demo Day next week, and I couldn’t have made a bigger mistake. On Sunday I felt a little bit ‘low energy’, but at the time it was barely noticeable. On Monday morning I was really tired, but it was Monday morning. I told my team I’d be fine after another cup of coffee. By Monday afternoon I realized it was not getting better and I needed to go home and lie down. »

I started materialsGIRL because I couldn’t find an online community to discuss materials science. This seemed like a huge ‘unmet need’ to me, but ultimately I failed to build a critical mass. Here is the welcome message on materialsGIRL for context: Welcome to materialsGIRL - a community enthusiastic about making materials. We encourage anyone interested in learning about materials to join, regardless of your education, background, discipline or specialty. GIRL stands for Group Interaction Reinforces Learning - we hope to develop tools to promote scientific understanding, collaboration & discourse. »

The key to successful stereolithography (SLA)1 3D printing lies at the intersection of chemistry, hardware and software. The photopolymer recipe, the optics of the printer, and the print settings are all interdependent. If you make a big change to one, you will likely need to tweak the other two. Despite the fact that SLA printing is now fully democratized (there is a Kickstarter running right now for (yet another) $150 SLA printer), there is not much useful information online about how to ‘dial-in’ a reliable SLA printing process. »