Latest / Stereo Chemistry / C&EN Uncovered: PhD to CEO, how chemistry entrepreneurs are making the jump

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C&EN Uncovered: PhD to CEO, how chemistry entrepreneurs are making the jump · Stereo Chemistry

• 0:00
  Craig Bettenhausen: Welcome to CNN uncovered. I'm Craig
• 0:02
  Bettenhausen. Cn uncovered is a podcast series from stereo
• 0:06
  chemistry. In each episode, we'll take another look at a
• 0:08
  recent cover story in chemical and Engineering News, and hear
• 0:11
  from cn reporters about striking moments from the reporting,
• 0:14
  their biggest takeaways and what got left on the cutting room
• 0:16
  floor. In this episode, we're talking about making the jump
• 0:19
  from academia to the C suite in the 20th century, corporate
• 0:23
  powerhouses like Bell Labs and DuPont Central Research funded
• 0:26
  r&d from their balance sheets, creating a clear path for
• 0:29
  postdoc scientists to innovate beyond the university research
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  in 2024 with the decay of corporate labs, graduates were
• 0:35
  taking the commercial startup route more and more. In a story
• 0:38
  that appeared in the August 19 print issue CNN, today's guest
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  looked at several such startups, how the founders are making the
• 0:44
  transition from PhD to CEO, and the various routes they've taken
• 0:48
  to secure funding to continue their research. We'll put a link
• 0:50
  to the story in today's show notes. I'm here with CNN
• 0:53
  BUSINESS reporter Matt Bloys, who wrote the article, Hey,
• 0:56
  Matt.
• 0:56
  Matt Blois: Hey Craig.
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  Craig Bettenhausen: So Matt, for anyone that hasn't yet had a
• 1:03
  chance to read the article, can you give a brief recap of what
• 1:06
  it's
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  Matt Blois: about? Yeah, so like you said, it's, it's kind of
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  looking at this idea of people who take a technology that they
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  developed in either like a PhD or a postdoc, and then instead
• 1:17
  of going on to, like a big company or going on to try and
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  get a job at a university. They take their technology and they
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  found a startup, and then they'll become the CEO of that
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  startup. And so the way I told the story is I really followed
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  three specific people who were CEOs of early stage startups
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  based on technology that they worked on or that they developed
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  during a PhD or postdoc. I started talking to them about
• 1:39
  late last year, and I kind of stuck with them for, I think,
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  about six to eight months, and just checking in with them every
• 1:45
  couple months to see what's going on, and just just get a
• 1:48
  sense of what that early stage is like, and kind of what their
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  motivations were, how they're making this transformation from
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  scientist to CEO, and then trying to just sort of capture
• 1:57
  that whole journey.
• 1:59
  Craig Bettenhausen: How did you pick who to follow. I
• 2:00
  Matt Blois: wanted to find people who were willing to talk
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  to me for a long time, you know, because that was, that was the
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  thing I wanted to do, is I wanted to get a really honest
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  look at this, because it's a really tough journey. And so I,
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  you know, I give a lot of credit to the three people that I
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  talked to, which is Laura, stoy, Sid arson, Duran Athen, Andrew
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  Wang. I talked to them early on and said, Hey, I want to stick
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  with you for a while, like, I want to hear what it's really
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  like. I want you to be candid with me. And they were really
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  great about that. And so that was kind of what I was looking
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  for, is, you know, kind of probing to see, you know, are
• 2:29
  you gonna stick with me for months? Are you gonna be willing
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  to have multiple conversations I'm gonna take up a lot of your
• 2:33
  time, and are you gonna, you know, be willing to sort of tell
• 2:36
  me the truth about what's happening, not just sort of give
• 2:38
  me the glossy press release version. So I feel like they did
• 2:40
  a really good job of that. It was fun to talk to them so fun
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  Craig Bettenhausen: to talk to him. Yeah, this trend that we
• 2:44
  end up writing about a lot and seeing the end of venture
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  capital backed chemistry startups, it can be tricky,
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  because venture capital was kind of built around the software
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  boom, and that's not instant, but it's a lot faster than
• 2:55
  building factories. But that also wasn't the way that
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  chemistry innovation happened for a long time. Can you talk a
• 3:00
  little bit about that earlier model, with your bell labs, your
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  DuPont central research and how that worked,
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  Matt Blois: right, right? So there was, you know, in the 20th
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  century especially, you see these organizations. The one I
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  write about the most in this story is Bell Labs, but you have
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  other big corporations that have, like, really big research
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  departments with tons of scientists doing, you know, a
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  range of work, some of some of it, sort of fundamental basic
• 3:25
  science, but a lot of it sort of this, like translational piece,
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  where you pick up an idea that came out of academia, or that is
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  basic science, and you sort of turn that into some sort of
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  useful innovation in the 20th century at Bell Labs, you Had
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  you had Dupont, you had Ge, you had companies like Xerox, and
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  all these companies really came up with some really powerful
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  innovations, and sometimes not even within sort of the thing
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  that they're, you know, Bell Labs came up with all kinds of
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  stuff that was useful for things beyond telephones. The lead of
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  the story kind of deals with the transistor, which ended up being
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  sort of more of a computer technology that was sort of a
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  big success story in many ways, but there's some trade offs
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  there too. Because when you think about Bell Labs, one of
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  the reasons they did all of this research into basic science and
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  translational research was because they were basically
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  allowed to have a monopoly over the phone system. I don't know
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  how specifically sort of codified that was, but I think
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  the monopoly was allowed in part, I think in maybe in an
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  unwritten way, because they were generating so much useful
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  research, and, you know, the government didn't want to get in
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  the way of that. So a couple of things happened, you have, you
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  know, one, the government comes in and says, Okay, that's
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  probably enough monopolies. We're gonna bring you guys up.
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  You know, that's one thing. Another thing people have talked
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  about is just globalization. You know, part of that is maybe due
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  to communication technologies, the world becomes smaller.
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  You're having to compete with companies all over the world
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  that are doing different sorts of things. And so, you know,
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  there's, there's this argument that maybe you have to be more
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  careful with your balance sheet and betting on super risky ideas
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  becomes harder to justify. And so they've moved towards. Big
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  corporations have moved towards, let the startups develop
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  something, and then when it gets to a certain stage where it's
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  not so risky, we'll just acquire them. It's kind of the model
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  that a lot of the bigger corporations use now. And so
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  yeah, we've moved into more fragmented ecosystem, where you
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  have universities still doing sort of basic research. A lot of
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  startups sort of pick that up and run with it a lot of times
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  the venture capital money, and then if you get to a certain
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  point, if you're lucky, most of the time, these startups are
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  looking to be acquired, you know, get bought up, and then
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  that's sort of the bigger firms would be, the ones that sort of
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  commercialize it in a large scale way. So that's kind of
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  been how things have evolved, system wise, over the last 100
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  years. So,
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  Craig Bettenhausen: so is there a specific person or company
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  that you feel has led to this increasing trend of startup
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  chemistry companies.
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  Matt Blois: I wrote a lot about these training programs or like
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  accelerators. They're looking at this ecosystem where there's
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  tons of people with good ideas and who are graduating with
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  PhDs. They can't go get a job at Bell Labs and just tinker away
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  for the rest of their lives, and so many of them want to start
• 6:00
  businesses, but they don't know how to start a business. How to
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  start a business because they spent the last eight years
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  figuring out how to do chemistry. And so there's a
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  couple of organizations that are really devoted to training
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  people who have skills on technology and have really good
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  ideas to run a business and lead a business and do fundraising.
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  So some of the big ones I talked about in the story is there's a
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  fellowship program called activate, which basically does
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  some of this training, and then also essentially gives the
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  founders of these companies a salary for like, two years so
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  they can, you know, they can pay themselves. It's sort of startup
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  funding. Gives them two years to really prove out the technology
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  learn how to be a CEO. It is sort of like a training wheels
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  period. They typically end up in sort of a seed round, you know,
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  raising their first round of venture capital by the time
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  they're at the time they're at the end of that program. And
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  then there's other ones that are similar to that Breakthrough
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  Energy, which is a big for profit venture capital firm,
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  also has sort of a fellowship program that's sort of for
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  earlier stage founders to get them sort of out of the gate and
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  up and running. And then the other one I really like, too, is
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  there's a Department of Energy fellowship that puts
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  entrepreneurs, or people who want to be entrepreneurs, into a
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  national lab, and they sort of work hand in hand with
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  scientists at the National Lab to work on their technology, and
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  similarly, just sort of gives them, you know, they're funded
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  themselves for two years to sort of figure things out and learn
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  how to be the leader of a company and prove out their
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  technology and all that. And I think those types of programs
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  more than like a specific startup company, to me, that's
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  sort of like the quickest way to sort of understand this trend
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  and how people are viewing it, rather than a company, is these
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  training programs.
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  Craig Bettenhausen: In my, you know, fantasy of this podcast,
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  you know, investors are listening, I wonder, if you give
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  it just some sense of, you know, what the timeline is, from
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  making an investment in these early stage companies to the
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  exits that your real hardcore, like business office wants to
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  think about,
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  Matt Blois: yeah. I mean, it certainly depends on the
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  technology. It depends on your industry, but it's all slower
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  than software. Like, the most hardcore flex that you can do as
• 7:53
  a clean tech founder is to start your own software company. I
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  think, like, like, oh, software, yeah. One of the founders I
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  wrote about, Laura stoy. She was actually the co founder on a
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  software company, and it's something that, basically, it's
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  a software that helps the score competitions. They do like
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  science fairs, and they do like academic poster sessions. So
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  it's not like a huge, you know, it's not going to be Google or
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  anything, but it was, you know, you still had to write the code
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  and sell it to people. And, you know, when she was in grad
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  school, I think it was her, and I think her, now husband,
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  created this software, and, you know, started a whole company,
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  and it's still going. She still runs that company. On the side
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  of, like, this technology that she's developing is which has to
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  do with extracting rare earth elements from the ash from coal
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  fired power plants. And so she did a lot of, like, comparing,
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  you know, what happened with this software company I built
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  versus what do I think is going to happen with this clean tech
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  company that I built? The timelines are just so much
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  longer, and because they're longer timelines, it's harder to
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  see that far into the future too. I think there's so many
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  checkpoints that you have to make it through that can either
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  slow you down or divert you onto a different path. I mean, it can
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  take years, decades. It can be a really, really long time. I'm
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  sure you could look up the timelines from sort of
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  successful technologies of the past, but even ones that seem
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  commonplace to us today, that are like materials technologies,
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  it took a really long time for those things to really gain
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  traction. So it's, I think, all these new ones. It's no
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  different. If you're introducing a new chemistry or material
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  technology. It's a long time. So
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  Craig Bettenhausen: with Laura's story, specifically ravalia,
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  their initial funding came from Alabama Power, a public utility
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  with some of the big coal ash ponds, which is one of the
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  byproducts of just coal electrical generation. Is that
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  kind of thing available? Are those fits common? How can
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  Laura's story influenced some of the future entrepreneurs who are
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  looking for that perfect fit funding. Well,
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  Matt Blois: I think, like with her story, because there was
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  such a perfect fit funding was why she felt like, Okay, this is
• 9:51
  like, I should do this. I think she was patient. You know, she
• 9:55
  had this technique. She was sort of developed the technology
• 9:58
  during a PhD. Yeah, and, you know, didn't start a company
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  right away, because I think she was like, I want to get to a
• 10:04
  point where I feel like I've got, I've got the right fit. And
• 10:06
  so I think it was when that opportunity came up, shit,
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  that's the perfect thing. That's not, that's my signal to go for
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  this, you know. And I think people can get a lot into a lot
• 10:14
  of trouble if they're not sort of lined up with sort of the
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  right sorts of funding in a lot of different ways. Like, I think
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  Laura valued that partnership, because it was like she got to
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  go talk to people who were, you know, would be using this
• 10:27
  technology, and get a sense of like, what does this look like
• 10:30
  if you actually use it? What problems is it going to cause
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  you was, how is it going to make things better? How could I, you
• 10:35
  know, tweak it to make it even more useful? And I think that
• 10:37
  sort of feedback getting in and talking to customers one of the
• 10:41
  other companies. So Corin bio is sudarsan duarna company. So he's
• 10:47
  an agriculture technology company. The first product is
• 10:49
  microbes that go into the soil and they break down phosphorus,
• 10:53
  which makes it available to plants, and then farmers have to
• 10:55
  use less phosphorus, less pollution. Farmers are spending
• 10:58
  less money. So it could be really impactful technology. And
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  he has an interesting piece where he he ended up getting a
• 11:04
  fellowship that put him in New York, in New York City, and so
• 11:08
  their labs are in New York City. And he talked to me a lot about,
• 11:11
  you know, there's some real advantages to being in New York
• 11:13
  City, because you get connected with, you know, there's a
• 11:16
  million climate tech investors in New York City. When he goes
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  and meets with an investor, he just, you know, he's up the
• 11:21
  street, and talent wise, too. You know, biotech talent, New
• 11:24
  York City can be a good place to get scientists, and he's had a
• 11:26
  lot of success with that. But he is always on the road. Like,
• 11:29
  every time I called him, it was like, I'm in this part of the
• 11:31
  world. I'm in this I'm out in the Midwest. I'm, you know,
• 11:34
  meeting the farmers in Memphis. And I think that was a really
• 11:37
  important thing for him in a similar way, just like I got to
• 11:40
  get out there and get to where my customers are, the more you
• 11:43
  can sort of align your funding with people who care about what
• 11:46
  you're doing, is the better. So
• 11:48
  Craig Bettenhausen: the third company in your story is
• 11:50
  standard potential. And that's Andrew Wang, right? Yes. So what
• 11:54
  is he trying to do with standard potential?
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  Matt Blois: Standard potential was a really interesting one to
• 11:58
  follow. Their technology is they're trying to use sodium ion
• 12:01
  cathode materials to make batteries cheaper. And so most
• 12:05
  batteries that you see in an electric vehicle, and what
• 12:08
  standard potential is really focused on is more like
• 12:10
  stationary energy storage, like storing electricity from a
• 12:13
  windmill on the power grid, most of those batteries are going to
• 12:16
  be made with lithium. Lithium was, for a long time, very
• 12:21
  expensive, and the price was kind of going crazy. And people
• 12:23
  were really worried, how do we, you know, this is really going
• 12:26
  to affect our ability to produce enough batteries. It's going to
• 12:29
  make it so expensive. And so there's a lot of interest in,
• 12:31
  can we use sodium instead of lithium, which would be a lot
• 12:34
  cheaper. You basically are making these batteries out of
• 12:36
  soda ash, I think is kind of the ultimate starting material. And
• 12:39
  then the price of lithium totally tanked. And so the
• 12:43
  argument, you know, do we need a cheaper raw material gets weaker
• 12:46
  and weaker as time goes on? And so they had a really interesting
• 12:50
  it's Andrew, and then he has a co founder, RICHARD MAY, who's
• 12:53
  really involved too. It was really interesting to talk to
• 12:56
  them throughout sort of collapse of the lithium price as as
• 12:59
  they're saying. Okay, so what do we do now? You know, we think
• 13:01
  sodium ion could be this, really, you know, regardless of
• 13:04
  what the point I said, lithium is like, it's still a more
• 13:06
  abundant, cheaper technology that has some other advantages.
• 13:09
  It's safer in many ways. They made several pivots in the time
• 13:13
  that I was talking to them. You know, they pivoted to, okay, so
• 13:16
  one of the things that key things we had is additive that
• 13:20
  was going to extend the lifespan of our batteries. We could
• 13:22
  actually use that same additive in a lithium ion battery and
• 13:25
  extend the life of that. And that sort of protects you
• 13:28
  against sodium versus lithium, because you could use it either
• 13:31
  way. And they just kept plugging along. They kept working. And
• 13:35
  they actually just through the process of making a lot of
• 13:39
  batteries, came up with a new way to make sodium ion batteries
• 13:43
  that they thought would just be a lot cheaper, even though what
• 13:46
  they were doing before, and it has to do with the manufacturing
• 13:48
  process, rather than the raw materials that made it cheap
• 13:52
  enough that even though the price of lithium dropped, like
• 13:54
  we have this new way of doing it, and it's going to be even
• 13:57
  cheaper and even more impactful. And you know, as we sort of
• 14:00
  start to put batteries out on the electrical grid, like an
• 14:03
  important way of doing that. So, you know, it was really
• 14:05
  interesting to follow them as they sort of shifted and pivoted
• 14:08
  and figured out, okay, how do we sort of orient ourselves to
• 14:11
  adapt to, like, what the reality of the battery industry is right
• 14:14
  now?
• 14:15
  Craig Bettenhausen: So in some ways, getting a PhD is the act
• 14:17
  of becoming the world's foremost expert in one incredibly
• 14:21
  specific thing. It requires massive amounts of tenacity, the
• 14:24
  ability to keep going even though things aren't working,
• 14:27
  which is, as from that example, sometimes the opposite of the
• 14:31
  skill sets you need to be a CEO, where you need to be able to
• 14:34
  make decisions and pivot. So how do you bridge that gap as a PhD
• 14:39
  to CEO?
• 14:40
  Matt Blois: So so one of, one of my favorite people I talked to
• 14:43
  about this was Ray widecamp. He's the founder of a company
• 14:46
  called polyspectra, and they make resins that get used in 3d
• 14:50
  printers. And they're really they're really rugged. And he,
• 14:53
  he was a PhD to CEO. He did a PhD at Caltech, went straight
• 14:57
  and founded this company, got some funding through activate. I
• 15:00
  had a lot of success. Then I forget exactly when, but at some
• 15:03
  point, he started this email course where he said, You know,
• 15:05
  I'm going to help other people do the same thing. He had so
• 15:09
  many interesting ideas about this, like, how do you make this
• 15:12
  jump? And he had this quote in the story where he says, you
• 15:14
  know, there's so much you have to unlearn. You know, you're
• 15:17
  taught to do so many things in academia that end up being
• 15:20
  detrimental if you become a CEO. You know, the people who are
• 15:24
  successful at this, I think, are people who are not incredibly
• 15:27
  rigid, like they went into a PhD, and they learned a bunch of
• 15:30
  stuff, and they learned how to be a certain way there. You
• 15:32
  know, they learned how to, like, keep going after there's a
• 15:35
  million failures, and just go. And I think someone who can
• 15:40
  learn to do that and then turn around and learn to do something
• 15:44
  else. They've certainly shown the capacity to learn a new way
• 15:47
  to do things. And so I think there's an argument. I a couple
• 15:50
  of people made this argument to me, you know, if you figured out
• 15:53
  how to be the world's foremost expert in something you're good
• 15:55
  at learning like, as long as you can sort of be flexible and be
• 15:58
  willing to sort of undo some of the habits that you learned as
• 16:01
  as as you were trained to be a scientist, you probably are
• 16:05
  going to be pretty good at learning how to be a CEO. So in
• 16:09
  Craig Bettenhausen: some ways, your article is about that
• 16:12
  transition from PhD to CEO, and if we could talk a little bit
• 16:15
  more about the training resources that are available,
• 16:18
  because obviously there is a financial incentive through
• 16:21
  these venture capital funds and accelerators for people to do
• 16:24
  that, but how do they get the skills?
• 16:26
  Matt Blois: And actually, I want to talk about this on the
• 16:28
  podcast, because this is the one that blew my mind. Is the so NSF
• 16:33
  has National Science Foundation has has something called
• 16:35
  Innovation core, or I core. The whole point is, like there's
• 16:39
  basically helping people sort of recognize, you have the
• 16:41
  scientific idea, what are the possible commercialization
• 16:44
  opportunities around this? And the way they do this is by just
• 16:50
  forcing the scientists to talk do, like, tons and tons of
• 16:54
  interviews. I think the numbers that they have to do 100
• 16:57
  interviews over the course of like, eight weeks or seven
• 17:01
  weeks, or something like that, 100 it's supposed to force them
• 17:05
  to like, listen, rather than like pitch and rather than sort
• 17:08
  of like, explain. I talked to somebody at NSF about this, and
• 17:12
  she said, what we found is there's a real turning point,
• 17:14
  like the first 50 interviews, people don't quite know where
• 17:18
  they're going, and they're just a little bit overwhelmed by it.
• 17:20
  And then after you talk to 50 people like, people just sort of
• 17:24
  get the sense of like, it all sort of starts to coalesce. And
• 17:26
  they're like, I think I get it like, I think I know who I need
• 17:29
  to talk to next. And then sort of the second 50 interviews are
• 17:32
  really directed by that, and they're like, Okay, now I need
• 17:34
  to know who to talk to. And they sort of get on a roll. And I
• 17:37
  thought that was so I related to that as a reporter, because I
• 17:40
  like, sometimes you start a reporting process, you're like,
• 17:43
  what I don't really understand. Like, I don't know how to frame
• 17:47
  this. I can't quite pick out what the trend is. And then
• 17:50
  after you get through the middle of it, you're like, now I know
• 17:52
  what it is. Now I know who need to know who I talk to. But I
• 17:55
  just kind of blown away by that, that 100 interviews is just so
• 17:58
  many hats
• 18:02
  Craig Bettenhausen: beyond the obvious one, which is money and
• 18:04
  how to get enough of it to make your thing a reality. What are
• 18:07
  the biggest upsides into going the startup route versus
• 18:11
  continuing your research in the university lab, you know, trying
• 18:14
  to get a professorship and then have a, you know, be a PI
• 18:16
  somewhere. I
• 18:17
  Matt Blois: think it really depends on what you personally
• 18:20
  want and what your personal goals are, because that was some
• 18:23
  of the like, sort of business side of the research thing I
• 18:26
  looked at. It's like, it totally does not make sense financially
• 18:29
  to start, like a chemistry or material startup. I think it
• 18:33
  really comes down to, like, you know, why are people doing this?
• 18:35
  It's like, it's impact motivated, like people want to
• 18:38
  have the biggest impact. But that's not entirely it. So
• 18:41
  Andrew Wang talked to me, he said something really
• 18:43
  interesting to me that sort of upended the way I think about
• 18:45
  this. Because he was saying, like, yeah, we think about, you
• 18:48
  know, we want to go out there and have, like, a big impact on
• 18:50
  climate change. That's a huge part of why we're doing this.
• 18:52
  But he's like, but if I really wanted to, like, have the
• 18:55
  biggest possible impact on climate change as, like, a
• 18:57
  battery scientist, probably the best thing for me to do is,
• 19:00
  like, brush up on my Chinese. Like, go work at C, ATL, like
• 19:05
  one of the big, the biggest, huge battery manufacturers in
• 19:08
  China, and help them, you know, make their separator in the
• 19:11
  battery, like one micron thinner, which will make, like,
• 19:14
  all of the batteries they produce just that little much
• 19:17
  better. He's like, I bet if you added up the sort of, like,
• 19:19
  climate change, you know, CO two emission reduction potential,
• 19:23
  like, that's probably the route to the most impact is sort of
• 19:25
  like, make an incremental improvement to a already scaled
• 19:29
  technology. Like, he was just saying, I just like
• 19:33
  Unknown: the challenge of sort of transforming myself into a
• 19:36
  CEO. It's a huge challenge. I hesitate to say fun, but, but,
• 19:41
  you know, like, I think it's rewarding. Maybe rewarding is
• 19:43
  the right word. I think it's rewarding for people to, you
• 19:46
  know, take on something that is that seems really difficult. It
• 19:48
  requires you to, like, learn a lot really fast. It's fast
• 19:52
  paced. And, you know, I think that's really appealing to a lot
• 19:54
  of people, and certainly the people that are actually doing
• 19:57
  it. I think you have to want that. I think to be successful,
• 19:59
  you have. To, like, enjoy the rewards of just sort of bringing
• 20:04
  the most out of yourself, and like learning to do these things
• 20:06
  that you didn't know how to do before and really succeeding at
• 20:09
  it.
• 20:09
  Craig Bettenhausen: So stepping back to the 10,000 foot view,
• 20:12
  how does our current innovation system compare to the corporate
• 20:16
  lab model in terms of that ultimate goal of getting world
• 20:18
  changing technology out into the world. It
• 20:22
  Matt Blois: depends on who you talk to, and I certainly didn't
• 20:24
  talk to every business researcher in the world, but
• 20:27
  most people I talk to think we're worse at it now than we
• 20:30
  were before. I think for me, it's really hard to determine
• 20:33
  what metric to look like and also understand exactly what
• 20:38
  that metric means in terms of how innovation is happening, it
• 20:43
  feels like we are doing innovation really well, but then
• 20:46
  there are signs in the data that we're not doing it that well.
• 20:49
  The data is a little bit confusing. It's hard to know
• 20:51
  what metrics to use. I think there's a chance that we're not
• 20:53
  doing as well as we have done before. It might just be harder
• 20:56
  to do innovation than it used to be before. It might just be
• 20:58
  that, like the farther you get technologically, the harder it
• 21:02
  is to come up with something new. But I feel like people
• 21:04
  would have said that 100 years ago, like it always feels like
• 21:06
  we're high tech. No matter what point in time you are, it feels
• 21:09
  like you're high tech, and there's always more to go. So I
• 21:11
  don't know, regardless of whether we are doing it better
• 21:14
  than we were in the 20th century, or where we were doing
• 21:16
  it better now, we sort of are living with the system that we
• 21:18
  have. And that was another thing a lot of people told me it's
• 21:21
  like, you know, we're not going back to the corporate research
• 21:23
  model. Like, you know, I talked to some people that kind of
• 21:26
  favor that, and thought that that was really good. Even those
• 21:28
  people are like, those days are gone. So like, all we can do is
• 21:31
  just try to take what we have and do it better. But I think
• 21:34
  that's the way forward is, you know, look at what we're doing
• 21:37
  now and keep trying to improve it. Because regardless of
• 21:40
  whether what the reality is, whether we're doing it better,
• 21:42
  or whether doing worse, you could always do better, but you
• 21:45
  know, we always be better than we are doing.
• 21:48
  Craig Bettenhausen: There's a lot more to talk about here.
• 21:51
  Matt, thanks for diving deep with us on this. Yeah, yeah. It
• 21:54
  was super fun. Love talking about it. Listeners can find me
• 21:56
  on social media as at Craig of waffles. Matt, how can our
• 21:59
  listeners get in touch with you. Call me 805-233-1686, you don't
• 22:04
  hear very often anymore. Nicely done. You can find Matt's cover
• 22:08
  story about PhD students turned CEOs on CNNs website or in print
• 22:12
  in a double issue that came out August 19. We put a link in the
• 22:16
  show notes along with the episode credits. We'd love to
• 22:18
  know what you think of CNN uncovered. You can share your
• 22:20
  feedback with us by emailing cenfeedback@acs.org This has
• 22:26
  been CDN uncovered a series from cn stereochemistry. Stereo
• 22:30
  chemistry is the official podcast of chemical and
• 22:32
  Engineering News. Chemical and Engineering News is an
• 22:34
  independent news outlet published by the American
• 22:37
  Chemical Society.
• 22:37
  Unknown: Thanks for listening. Foreign