Latest / Lab to Market Leadership with Chris Reichhelm / Defining the Right Problem | Henrik Hagemann from Puraffinity

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Defining the Right Problem | Henrik Hagemann from Puraffinity · Lab to Market Leadership with Chris Reichhelm

0:00
Henrik Hagemann: It was way more valuable to pick the right problem to work on, than to spend lots of effort getting the technology progressed for the wrong problem.
0:10
Chris Reichhelm: Welcome to the Lab to Market Leadership podcast.
0:13
Chris Reichhelm: Too many advanced science and engineering companies fail to deliver their innovations from the lab to the market.
0:20
Chris Reichhelm: We're on a mission to change that.
0:22
Chris Reichhelm: My name is Chris Reichhelm, and I'm the founder and CEO of Deep Tech Leaders.
0:27
Chris Reichhelm: Each week we speak with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, And policy makers about what it takes to succeed on the lab to market journey.
0:37
Chris Reichhelm: Join us.
0:40
Chris Reichhelm: If you are building a deep tech, hard tech, frontier tech, advanced science and engineering business, you need to be listening to today's podcast and I'll tell you why.
0:51
Chris Reichhelm: Because you don't want to end up like the myriad of other businesses out there with no commercial traction or an interesting platform technology that just won't scale.
1:01
Chris Reichhelm: These problems, which we see again and again and again, you probably have seen them too, come back to the start of the lab to market journey.
1:11
Chris Reichhelm: And in particular, the ability to isolate the problem that your company will ultimately solve.
1:20
Chris Reichhelm: I'm not just talking about the market that you'll serve.
1:23
Chris Reichhelm: I'm talking about the problem your company will solve.
1:28
Chris Reichhelm: What process will you go through to identify and clearly define that problem.
1:36
Chris Reichhelm: How many meetings will you have?
1:37
Chris Reichhelm: What kind of research will supplement those meetings?
1:40
Chris Reichhelm: How will you draw the dots and make the connections you need to to come up with the right solution?
1:47
Chris Reichhelm: Joining me today is Henrik Hagemann, who's the founder and CEO of an advanced materials company called Pureaffinity.
1:54
Chris Reichhelm: They're developing adsorbent material that filters out PFAS, fluorinated chemicals, forever chemicals from industrial water streams.
2:03
Chris Reichhelm: And Henrik is going to talk about the remarkable journey his company has been on to define the problem they're ultimately focused on solving.
2:13
Chris Reichhelm: I hope you enjoy.
2:19
Chris Reichhelm: Henrik, I am so pleased that I'm getting to have this particular discussion with you.
2:27
Chris Reichhelm: The many companies that I've met and advised over the years, yours stands out, actually, for a couple of reasons, and one, because I think of the journey your company has been on to define the problem that you guys are addressing, and two, because of the strength and quality of the problem itself.
2:52
Chris Reichhelm: I think there are so many lessons here.
2:55
Chris Reichhelm: for listeners of this podcast.
2:56
Chris Reichhelm: So thank you so much for being with me today.
3:00
Chris Reichhelm: I'm very excited to be here.
3:02
Chris Reichhelm: And I, yeah, I'm going to have to get you at some point to say the comment you gave to my team about what I was like after the session you ran at Enterprise Hub.
3:14
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
3:14
Chris Reichhelm: Oh, cool.
3:15
Chris Reichhelm: I'll, I'll send it.
3:16
Chris Reichhelm: Exactly.
3:18
Chris Reichhelm: You have a remarkable background.
3:21
Chris Reichhelm: You have, uh, you know, you're an immigrant, you're from Denmark, you have a, uh, a master's from Imperial College, uh, You have lived and trained as a Shaolin monk, and you have cycled from China to Denmark in, I think, something like 87 days from memory.
3:42
Chris Reichhelm: Um, you know, you clearly embraced challenge.
3:46
Chris Reichhelm: Was becoming an entrepreneur always on the cards for you?
3:53
Chris Reichhelm: I think, I think it's an interesting one.
3:55
Chris Reichhelm: Just looking back and zooming out a little bit.
3:58
Chris Reichhelm: I, as a younger, younger kid, I remember thinking I would like to work in something bigger than me when I got older.
4:07
Chris Reichhelm: And I used to think of it as, because it's Denmark, people don't build large ventures.
4:13
Chris Reichhelm: They, they build small companies.
4:15
Chris Reichhelm: I was thinking, Oh, maybe I would be self employed.
4:18
Chris Reichhelm: And that was kind of my initial idea around it.
4:22
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, I didn't even know you could build proper institutions like large companies, uh, from, from scratch.
4:29
Chris Reichhelm: That wasn't in the mindset at all.
4:32
Chris Reichhelm: No, nobody does it.
4:34
Chris Reichhelm: That's interesting.
4:36
Chris Reichhelm: And we think about the European affliction, almost the, you know, the, you know, the conservative approach, the, the fear, the approach to risk.
4:46
Chris Reichhelm: And you felt that at an early age.
4:49
Chris Reichhelm: Definitely.
4:50
Chris Reichhelm: Even being the, you know, I, I've done the things like the cycling that are more risk taking, but even in that category, it just doesn't show up as an option.
4:59
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, that's interesting.
5:00
Chris Reichhelm: But you set up, you still set up a business and you set up what would become Pure Affinity in 2015.
5:10
Chris Reichhelm: How many of there were you in the early days?
5:14
Chris Reichhelm: It's an interesting question as well.
5:16
Chris Reichhelm: We, we were quite a big science team.
5:18
Chris Reichhelm: So many of these ventures that start with science, they're quite a lot in the beginning.
5:22
Chris Reichhelm: So we were 11 of us.
5:24
Chris Reichhelm: One of them was our supervisor.
5:27
Chris Reichhelm: And I was one of the 10 who had been selected for the science and engineering team.
5:32
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, out of that group, most of them, most of us, were to do PhDs.
5:37
Chris Reichhelm: And so actually, after the calling of who wants to do this full time, we only became two.
5:44
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
5:46
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
5:46
Chris Reichhelm: So it was you and one other.
5:49
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
5:49
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
5:50
Chris Reichhelm: And, and I was, I was not even that keen on setting it up in the beginning.
5:55
Chris Reichhelm: I thought I was going to do my PhD first to, you know, get the accreditation and sort of become the scientific or engineering lead.
6:03
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
6:05
Chris Reichhelm: And there was my, my co founder who was pushing saying like, no, like, what, my weight, you know, there were people saying maybe there is something here, uh, this, this smells like good timing.
6:16
Chris Reichhelm: And what was the inspiration for it?
6:19
Chris Reichhelm: You know, had you guys been working on something?
6:22
Chris Reichhelm: Had you been developing something in that team?
6:25
Chris Reichhelm: Was there something else?
6:26
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
6:27
Chris Reichhelm: That's a great question as well.
6:28
Chris Reichhelm: We, we dug in really deep to what, what large issues there were.
6:34
Chris Reichhelm: So we were given this kind of whiteboard room over the summer at Imperial and asked from nine to six to brainstorm ideas of where we would apply these kinds of new scientific endeavors.
6:48
Chris Reichhelm: In our case, it was synthetic biology, but you could choose your tool if you wanted to.
6:53
Chris Reichhelm: And there were several themes that came up.
6:56
Chris Reichhelm: One of them was the clean water for all.
7:00
Chris Reichhelm: And we didn't, we didn't want to do this kind of, you know, the stereotypical Imperial College comes with solutions for the rest of the world.
7:10
Chris Reichhelm: And so we really dug into it and saw that actually there were some contaminants in water that much.
7:18
Chris Reichhelm: More than others, mm, screw us.
7:21
Chris Reichhelm: So they contaminate way more water than other contaminants.
7:26
Chris Reichhelm: A bit like our power law distribution that we were used to seeing in engineering classes, science classes.
7:31
Chris Reichhelm: And so we, we had that early idea of take the personalized medicine approach, the targeted vaccine approach that we're used to in biotech and moving it into the environmental space, the environmental applications.
7:46
Chris Reichhelm: We then single out these little bad boys that are the worst and impact us the most.
7:52
Chris Reichhelm: These bad boys being the contaminants within the water.
7:55
Chris Reichhelm: Yes.
7:55
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
7:56
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
7:57
Chris Reichhelm: And.
7:58
Chris Reichhelm: What was the, what was behind the selection of these contaminants?
8:04
Chris Reichhelm: Ah, that's also interesting.
8:06
Chris Reichhelm: It was actually the, it was partly the engineer in us and, and in me who was looking at the chart of size of contaminants versus what technologies can tackle them.
8:17
Chris Reichhelm: And everything that's below, you know, nanograms size, or around a nanogram size, most of it is not that toxic.
8:27
Chris Reichhelm: You know, it's an ion.
8:28
Chris Reichhelm: You need ions in your body.
8:30
Chris Reichhelm: But there are these synthetic chemicals that we have invented as humans that are around that size and that are toxic.
8:38
Chris Reichhelm: And we saw either you can increase the pressure massively, and so increase the energy utilization significantly by orders of magnitude, to get rid of them, or you could look at what if we only singled out the ones that are unharmful, Uh, because otherwise you, you increase the carbon footprint significantly just to polish the apple.
9:01
Chris Reichhelm: There's a lot of polishing of the apple in this scientific world and you're just wasting energy and resources.
9:09
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, that's interesting.
9:11
Chris Reichhelm: What came first?
9:13
Chris Reichhelm: Did you have a technology platform that you had already semi established or developed?
9:21
Chris Reichhelm: And then you, and then were you looking for the applications?
9:25
Chris Reichhelm: Or was it, let's kind of blue sky this and think of the industry we want to serve and the problem we want to solve, and then we'll build something for that.
9:32
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, this was another thing for that competition.
9:35
Chris Reichhelm: There were lots of academic groups that entered this synthetic biology competition with a technology and then tried to say, oh, let's use it for this to win this competition.
9:44
Chris Reichhelm: And the different thing about the Imperial approach was, let's put these undergrads, who have no idea what they're doing, they're completely fresh, and let's ask them to develop a new technology, bottom up, and see if it even might work.
9:59
Chris Reichhelm: Um, so we, we sat in that, yeah, that room in, in July, 20, 40, 2014.
10:07
Chris Reichhelm: My God, it's been a while.
10:09
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
10:09
Chris Reichhelm: With no technology.
10:11
Chris Reichhelm: And we knew we had to present at MIT in November to compete against 250 universities with something.
10:19
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
10:19
Chris Reichhelm: So this is a competition you're competing.
10:21
Chris Reichhelm: It's going to culminate with MIT.
10:24
Chris Reichhelm: And you've got to have something there.
10:26
Chris Reichhelm: And so in that timeframe, you, you, you zero in on the, on the problem you want to solve, and then on the approach you're going to take, what skills, it was just the two of you still at this time.
10:40
Chris Reichhelm: Yes.
10:41
Chris Reichhelm: No, this was the 10, 11 of us.
10:43
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
10:43
Chris Reichhelm: Now you have 10 or 11.
10:44
Chris Reichhelm: Oh, right.
10:45
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
10:46
Chris Reichhelm: So, um, okay, okay, so this is before it whittled down to two.
10:51
Chris Reichhelm: I see.
10:52
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
10:53
Chris Reichhelm: And, and what, these are Imperial students, so what kind of skills and experience are on the team?
11:01
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, that was another interesting approach.
11:03
Chris Reichhelm: I was just talking to the, the president yesterday at this, uh, conference.
11:07
Chris Reichhelm: about how they've always been good at bringing disciplines together and always focusing on bringing different disciplines to focus on a problem space.
11:16
Chris Reichhelm: And so they actually selected us 10 students from a group of maybe 150 students from across the faculty of engineering, science, natural science.
11:26
Chris Reichhelm: Everything from sort of, uh, biochemistry to bioengineering, uh, they would have basically 50 50 engineers and scientists in the final team.
11:37
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and I was one of the engineers, my co founder was one of the scientists.
11:42
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and you would definitely get tension between the different types.
11:45
Chris Reichhelm: Some would be like computational engineers, and they had no idea about the lab.
11:50
Chris Reichhelm: And some would be very biology leaning biochemists who have no idea about the computational side, and you have to get them speaking the same language.
12:01
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, that's interesting.
12:03
Chris Reichhelm: That's really interesting, especially at these early days.
12:06
Chris Reichhelm: And was it helpful?
12:08
Chris Reichhelm: I think it's a great pressure cooker, uh, for some of these startups to, to go through.
12:13
Chris Reichhelm: We, we had it as a pressure cooker.
12:15
Chris Reichhelm: It was very taxing for some of the teams.
12:17
Chris Reichhelm: Some of them needed months out after this, this four month sprint.
12:22
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, but it really builds bonds and it forces you to collaborate.
12:27
Chris Reichhelm: You cannot just sit back and be like, Oh, this is going to be okay.
12:30
Chris Reichhelm: I have three years for this.
12:32
Chris Reichhelm: So what happens with the competition?
12:34
Chris Reichhelm: Do you guys win it?
12:35
Chris Reichhelm: No, we came second and we're so disappointed.
12:42
Chris Reichhelm: So people, people now say, Oh, you know, you've got the paper out of it and you've got the, I don't know, the company out of it.
12:49
Chris Reichhelm: And they say you, you've done great with it, but we still, we lost the first place, if you ask any of us.
12:56
Chris Reichhelm: So it's a sort of chip on the shoulder.
12:59
Chris Reichhelm: One of the people in this space.
13:01
Chris Reichhelm: Likes to say, chips on the shoulders, put chips in the pocket, so you kind of, you have something to prove.
13:10
Chris Reichhelm: People still laugh about it because we, we did win something.
13:13
Chris Reichhelm: So we won the industry track.
13:15
Chris Reichhelm: We had like several areas that we are recognized for.
13:19
Chris Reichhelm: Um, and so although we came second, we, we helped to define some of the competition moving forward.
13:25
Chris Reichhelm: So our focus on the internationalism of the competition, which was really about the diversity of the judges and the teams.
13:32
Chris Reichhelm: We were 50 50, male female for our team, uh, basically showed that more diverse teams outperformed less diverse or more homogeneous teams.
13:42
Chris Reichhelm: And the competition took that forward as a recommendation for the way people design teams and how they sort of enter this big competition.
13:51
Chris Reichhelm: So we got some initial industrial interests where they were like, Oh, this kind of, this feels a little bit like when they came up and first started developing antibodies, you know, it feels like really a lot of white space, lots of contaminants you could go for.
14:18
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, we would love to have you come and present, uh, at these conferences or at these, uh, UN events.
14:24
Chris Reichhelm: We even had to decline some of it because we didn't have the bandwidth.
14:29
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, but there was that point.
14:30
Chris Reichhelm: There were only two of you because I think the rest had dropped out.
14:33
Chris Reichhelm: Was that right?
14:34
Chris Reichhelm: At the competition, we were all there, but going out from it, it whittled down to two.
14:39
Chris Reichhelm: And it was an interesting whittling down.
14:42
Chris Reichhelm: First, we were six who were part time, because there was a part time, uh, pre accelerator, and then another pressure cooker happened, and we whittled down to four, and then we whittled from four to two, and it was like, okay, last people standing.
14:59
Chris Reichhelm: So, tell me a little bit about the path you went on post MIT competition, now it's just the two of you.
15:07
Chris Reichhelm: You're getting invitations to go and present.
15:09
Chris Reichhelm: You've worked up something, an approach, and you've got a market and a problem to solve in mind.
15:15
Chris Reichhelm: What happens then?
15:17
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, we, we got the first, uh, sort of grant from a synthetic biology commercialization engine here in the UK.
15:26
Chris Reichhelm: And, uh, it had a few clauses.
15:29
Chris Reichhelm: One of the clauses was they wanted me to do it full time instead of the PhD.
15:34
Chris Reichhelm: So I eventually caved after a few months of saying, no, I can't do that.
15:39
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and then the other part was this difficult, challenging period of going to talk to customers.
15:46
Chris Reichhelm: Um, so they were pushing this program where you have, even if you're a science based company, you have to go and talk to 10, uh, for 10 weeks to talk to more than a hundred customers to learn about who, who are you going to sell to?
16:00
Chris Reichhelm: What's the value chain?
16:01
Chris Reichhelm: How's this going to, to operate at scale?
16:04
Chris Reichhelm: This is 100 companies, not 100 individuals, you have to speak to 100 individuals, could you have a few individuals at the same company?
16:16
Chris Reichhelm: You could try, but it's unlikely, it's more likely to be several different ones.
16:22
Chris Reichhelm: That's remarkable.
16:24
Chris Reichhelm: Is that a common, so that was a feature of the program you were on.
16:30
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
16:30
Chris Reichhelm: And it was quite, it's quite cool.
16:32
Chris Reichhelm: So it's, it's run by the Americans.
16:34
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, so the NSF I Corps really pushed this.
16:37
Chris Reichhelm: It comes from the godfather of, of startups, Steve Blank and his academic sort of collaborator, Jerry something.
16:47
Chris Reichhelm: And the year before us, our cohort, Steve Blank actually came and.
16:52
Chris Reichhelm: taught part of the course.
16:53
Chris Reichhelm: So the people at, at this, uh, SynBio commercialization engine, they definitely were well connected within this space.
17:02
Chris Reichhelm: It was quite impressive.
17:03
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, it was nuts for most of us.
17:06
Chris Reichhelm: We were like, how are we going to talk to so many customers, present our findings every week, uh, and then sort of, you know, know more about what kind of scientific stuff we need to do, because we're pushing on the scientific barrel at the same time as the commercialization was getting a push of this program.
17:25
Chris Reichhelm: And what was, so you're putting pressure to develop the science faster, I guess to develop to, to more clearly define your technology approach.
17:35
Chris Reichhelm: And at the same point, you're applying pressure to figure out exactly what the market wants, and what market, and, and ultimately the problem you're trying to solve.
17:46
Chris Reichhelm: What was guiding your technology or scientific approach at the time?
17:51
Chris Reichhelm: Did you have inspiration from somewhere else?
17:56
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, I think this, this points to one of the key trade offs.
17:59
Chris Reichhelm: Honestly, when I look back at it, it was very hard to do both.
18:03
Chris Reichhelm: And I think what, what we gained the most from was we had some technology start by doing the competition.
18:10
Chris Reichhelm: So we have a little bit of a proof of concept that we could move to capture different contaminants in water more selectively.
18:18
Chris Reichhelm: But the main issue we had was really what problem to work on.
18:23
Chris Reichhelm: It was way more valuable to pick the right problem to work on, than to spend lots of effort getting the technology progressed for the wrong problem.
18:33
Chris Reichhelm: And so we, we realized that trade off during the time and we, we put our foot off the pedal slightly for the scientific effort.
18:41
Chris Reichhelm: in order to more clearly define the problem.
18:45
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
18:46
Chris Reichhelm: I get that.
18:47
Chris Reichhelm: So you decide to slow down the scientific push in order to more clearly define the market and the problem that you're trying to solve.
19:00
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
19:01
Chris Reichhelm: And I, we even had to, so we did that, you know, painful process for 10 weeks.
19:07
Chris Reichhelm: And I got to say the first time we did it.
19:10
Chris Reichhelm: We kind of struggled, we didn't get easily to a hundred customer interviews.
19:16
Chris Reichhelm: Some of the backstory that most people don't know is we, we actually did it twice.
19:20
Chris Reichhelm: So we did it once in 2015, uh, to find out, okay, we are going to do water treatment.
19:26
Chris Reichhelm: Because there's a lot of other applications we could go for.
19:30
Chris Reichhelm: We had seen, you know, we had presented jackets that were fluorescent with bio based leather that you could make with our technology and it had gone to the Victoria and Albert and some people got excited about it.
19:42
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, we had presented other applications that we could do, uh, but we ended up honing in on this, let's do the water application.
19:50
Chris Reichhelm: And then in 2016, we did the whole thing again for 10 weeks.
19:55
Chris Reichhelm: That time we, we hit 117 customer interviews.
19:59
Chris Reichhelm: And I felt a lot more comfortable, sort of, with the pain of talking to customers and learning and teasing out what are the wants, what are the needs, what are the challenges.
20:12
Chris Reichhelm: Tell me a little, 117 meetings, that's, that's, that's something else to define the problem.
20:19
Chris Reichhelm: I think that's remarkable.
20:20
Chris Reichhelm: Tell me a little bit about the process you used.
20:24
Chris Reichhelm: You know, when you're in these meetings, what are you doing?
20:26
Chris Reichhelm: You having just random discussions?
20:28
Chris Reichhelm: Tell me a little bit about the nature of the engagement.
20:32
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, I would definitely, I'll talk about the mistakes I made and how I had to correct for them.
20:37
Chris Reichhelm: So I, I, in the beginning it was very much like, Oh, we've developed this thing.
20:41
Chris Reichhelm: Let's talk about that space.
20:44
Chris Reichhelm: And, you know, people get excited, they get carried away with the technology or with the new sort of promise land that this, this leap can bring the customer or the end user into.
20:56
Chris Reichhelm: Um, so we learned by sort of by error that it's much more valuable.
21:02
Chris Reichhelm: You get much better data if you focus on their workflow.
21:05
Chris Reichhelm: There is this kind of book called The Mom Test, where you basically have the end user, the customer, talk about what their problems are.
21:14
Chris Reichhelm: Hopefully one of them out of 10 problems is something to do with the space you're interested in.
21:20
Chris Reichhelm: But sometimes none of them are, and you just, you know, you just sit there and listen for an hour to problems that you have no vested interest in yet.
21:30
Chris Reichhelm: You're almost like a therapist early on, you're almost like a therapist.
21:34
Chris Reichhelm: Tell me about your problems and they start going through stuff.
21:37
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
21:38
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
21:38
Chris Reichhelm: It's also one of the few things you can get senior people to actually talk because otherwise they're like, Oh my God, I'm being sold at again.
21:45
Chris Reichhelm: I'm just going to call this short.
21:47
Chris Reichhelm: I'm not interested.
21:48
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
21:48
Chris Reichhelm: So do you, and do you have a particular agenda?
21:54
Chris Reichhelm: Is this, you know, you're, I'm assuming in terms of format, you're meeting these people face to face, you're having a conversation.
22:02
Chris Reichhelm: There was a big push to get out of the building.
22:04
Chris Reichhelm: So you had to like go seek them out, go find them on the shop floor, go like seek them out in the environment.
22:10
Chris Reichhelm: If they go to conferences, you go to that conference, you try and find them.
22:14
Chris Reichhelm: So you can see their body language, how they respond when they talk to you.
22:19
Chris Reichhelm: And these are companies that would be potential customers or partners for your company.
22:25
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, many of them.
22:26
Chris Reichhelm: So there might be a textile manufacturer, there might be an oil and gas company where we really have to hustle, like cold email, cold message, go through the network, go through the university.
22:36
Chris Reichhelm: Oh, I'm just a lowly little student at this university.
22:39
Chris Reichhelm: Please.
22:39
Chris Reichhelm: Can we like talk to you?
22:41
Chris Reichhelm: great industrial mind about some of our projects.
22:44
Chris Reichhelm: I get it.
22:45
Chris Reichhelm: And so at this stage, it's still fairly broad industrially for you.
22:48
Chris Reichhelm: You're not speaking with 100 water companies at this point, or companies around the value chain.
22:55
Chris Reichhelm: We're trying to talk to the water people within these different companies.
23:00
Chris Reichhelm: and learn about what challenges they had, uh, and really map out what's genuine data versus someone trying to be nice.
23:09
Chris Reichhelm: And there's so many niceties in the UK, and even within the scientific space, where people are like, oh, that's a cool little, like, technological innovation.
23:19
Chris Reichhelm: Maybe I'll, you know, support it a little bit down the line, or I can give you a letter of support for a grant application if, if you want to get a little bit more support from a funding agency.
23:32
Chris Reichhelm: And it's, it's just, it's not genuine data.
23:35
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
23:36
Chris Reichhelm: How, so over the course of these engagements and discussions that you're having with them, how does your approach to getting this information from them change?
23:49
Chris Reichhelm: It really moves into that, that kind of, get them talking about the wider space, what are the problems they have, and then using questions like, tell, this sounds interesting, this, you made this comment, so you, you'll see me in the interview notes, I take a lot of notes, it's because I can use then back their words, I'll be, sorption media, the Belgians will talk about sorption media, Well, tell me more about what you're doing within that space.
24:16
Chris Reichhelm: What are your considerations?
24:18
Chris Reichhelm: And so you gradually want to steer them down to talk about their wants and needs within a space that's maybe relevant to you.
24:26
Chris Reichhelm: Hopefully for some of them, I will say in the beginning, I just left thinking, I know a lot about this, this bin collectors day to day, but I haven't really gained much, you know, for the startup.
24:38
Chris Reichhelm: I've got to go again.
24:40
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
24:40
Chris Reichhelm: Thanks a lot.
24:41
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, but at some point you start getting some of that data that you can use and what is that when you start to collect some of that data that's more useful, what does that, what does that reveal to you?
24:57
Chris Reichhelm: You know, what do you come away with having learned from this process?
25:03
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, this, this really started to get interesting.
25:05
Chris Reichhelm: So about five, six weeks into it, we started seeing some patterns.
25:10
Chris Reichhelm: We started seeing the large, uh, textile manufacturers, big textile tier one companies, talk about the heavy metals a little bit, but they had this, this challenge around some waterproofing agents that were harder to tackle.
25:25
Chris Reichhelm: And I made a note.
25:26
Chris Reichhelm: And then we spoke to some of the oil and gas companies and we really hustled our way to go on site with them and spend half a day with their head of environmental remediation group.
25:37
Chris Reichhelm: And they, they spent a lot of time with us on the heavy metals because they do have projects, but towards the end, they said, Oh, actually we have this, this other challenge, which is to do with the flame retardants from the oil and gas sites.
25:51
Chris Reichhelm: And if you can, if you can come up with a problem with a solution for that, just call me and I'll get it the same day.
25:57
Chris Reichhelm: I'll take it the same day.
25:59
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and we, we didn't really know what it was.
26:01
Chris Reichhelm: We just, again, made a note, went back, then we went and talked to one of the big airports here in London, and they talked about this, these firefighting foam drills that they've had.
26:14
Chris Reichhelm: And we're like, okay, like, tell us about it again, that test, like understand the market.
26:19
Chris Reichhelm: And they, they talked about how they really can't get rid of this agent they use in the firefighting form.
26:25
Chris Reichhelm: And they have to collect up all the water before they discharge it to treat first.
26:31
Chris Reichhelm: And I was like, okay, just make a note of it.
26:34
Chris Reichhelm: And then we were going through like, in these round tables, I remember like vividly at the basement of Imperial.
26:40
Chris Reichhelm: And we just starting to see these kind of red threads.
26:45
Chris Reichhelm: where maybe, maybe these reagents have something in common, like this side note, you know, the end of the conversation piece, uh, and we started looking at the bottom up chemistry of it, like the science, and there is commonality, there seems to be a fluoride bond.
27:01
Chris Reichhelm: did to a carbon.
27:02
Chris Reichhelm: And so we said, okay, you know, I wonder what that is.
27:05
Chris Reichhelm: You know, we're used to it being called lots of things, halogenated, something organics, maybe, uh, weren't quite sure.
27:13
Chris Reichhelm: And so we started, we did some bottom up research.
27:16
Chris Reichhelm: And I think this is often overload, like you go and do your own sec, Secondary research as well as this primary, uh, and that was where this picture behind me comes from.
27:26
Chris Reichhelm: So, so this thing is the Baikal Lake, the largest lake, uh, in the world by volume.
27:34
Chris Reichhelm: It's in Siberia, and what they had found at that time, this is early 2016, was that there was a freshwater seal.
27:41
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, that had started to accumulate some of these carbon fluorine bonded, uh, compounds in their liver.
27:48
Chris Reichhelm: And just, I remember seeing this, it was very academic, nowhere near a newspaper, just academic papers.
27:55
Chris Reichhelm: I remember thinking, wow, you know, like this is the largest volume of water.
28:01
Chris Reichhelm: It's 1.
28:01
Chris Reichhelm: 5 kilometers deep.
28:03
Chris Reichhelm: There's no industry there.
28:04
Chris Reichhelm: There's one factory in all of that, that, and it's a paper and pulp factory.
28:09
Chris Reichhelm: It's not a big one.
28:10
Chris Reichhelm: And so I, I just started then looking through, it came up in Arctic foxes as well.
28:16
Chris Reichhelm: It came up in like polar chemistries building up in certain organs.
28:22
Chris Reichhelm: And then, then once I saw that with the seals, I was like, shit, if this is the same chemistry in these different large industries, if it's gotten to that place, it cannot be, you know, the researchers with their Gore Tex clothing that's sort of shedding enough for the seal, because the seal really avoids human contact as well.
28:45
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, so that the thesis was very early on, like just rip.
28:50
Chris Reichhelm: Maybe, what if we have infiltrated the water cycle?
28:54
Chris Reichhelm: What if it's gone out for the last many, many years with these big industries and it's actually infiltrated clouds and these big freshwater volumes we have?
29:07
Chris Reichhelm: Wow, then I, yeah, then I started smelling like, it's like a heat seeking missile.
29:11
Chris Reichhelm: We were like, wow, we went and talked to our mentor from this Climate Accelerator Program about our findings, about our customer discovery, and And he, he went and closed the door, this was at Imperial, and he said, shit kids, like, if this is real, you could have a massive opportunity ahead of you.
29:32
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
29:34
Chris Reichhelm: And the, now this is 2016, you're discovering this?
29:39
Chris Reichhelm: And so this is pre Darkwater?
29:44
Chris Reichhelm: Pre Darkwater.
29:45
Chris Reichhelm: It's the year that the lawsuit happens.
29:47
Chris Reichhelm: So while we're doing this customer discovery, the lawsuit got settled for And Henrik, just for the benefit of our listeners, can you just, you know, briefly outline, you know, describe what happened with Darkwater?
30:00
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, yeah, it's a crazy case.
30:02
Chris Reichhelm: So I'm a farm boy, I'm a countryside boy, so it rings close to home.
30:07
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, there was basically a Teflon manufacturing plant where it discharged these, uh, carbon fluorine chemistries called PFAS for a long period of time.
30:17
Chris Reichhelm: It creates some foam, uh, but there weren't really regulations around it.
30:22
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and it took a long time before the local farmers saw the cows getting ill and then say, maybe there's something wrong with the water.
30:31
Chris Reichhelm: And then 15 years, 15, 16, 17 years of one lawyer trying to prove that the waters related to the disease.
30:39
Chris Reichhelm: And then, uh, basically fighting his way to get a, the largest epidemiological study of the time conducted with the villagers who have been unwilling experimenters in this experiment to see the toxicity of of the PFAS chemicals, uh, and then.
30:57
Chris Reichhelm: Basically that study showing a probable link, which is a very close to a proven link, probable link to six disease and those six diseases then being the basis for settlement, a large settlement, 670 million.
31:14
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, but it was wild.
31:16
Chris Reichhelm: You know, the lawyer almost had a seizure because of the pressure.
31:20
Chris Reichhelm: No, no salary, you know, for his deals for 10 plus years.
31:25
Chris Reichhelm: Wow.
31:26
Chris Reichhelm: And there was a movie, of course, with Mark Ruffalo and, uh, and that became very popular and we've had.
31:32
Chris Reichhelm: Subsequent lawsuits against different companies, uh, since then.
31:38
Chris Reichhelm: And this, so then this problem starts to crystallize and are you then starting to think, actually, this is what we need to be focusing on.
31:49
Chris Reichhelm: We need to somehow be tuning whatever we're doing towards preventing this from getting into the water supply.
31:58
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, it's, it's that spot on.
32:00
Chris Reichhelm: We, we had to go back to our thesis and say, Oh, we thought, you know, arsenic was the most toxic in water and heavy metals, but actually I need to add a new column to that toxicity versus contaminant bar.
32:12
Chris Reichhelm: And it's way higher than the others.
32:15
Chris Reichhelm: So we, we reject the entire company is, I guess it's typical to call it a pivot.
32:20
Chris Reichhelm: It's one of the pivotal moments to pivot.
32:24
Chris Reichhelm: So we, we pivoted into the PFAS space without making a big fuss about it actually.
32:29
Chris Reichhelm: So I think that's one of the other, other things in our world.
32:33
Chris Reichhelm: If you want to be the one who gets to be ahead of the curve, sometimes you pivot, sort of, not that we didn't talk about it.
32:41
Chris Reichhelm: We told people we're doing these carbon fluorine chemistries.
32:44
Chris Reichhelm: They didn't have a name yet.
32:46
Chris Reichhelm: We called them like PFCs or something else.
32:49
Chris Reichhelm: But we didn't bang the drum to say, Oh, PFAS is going to be the biggest thing ever.
32:54
Chris Reichhelm: And everyone should be developing scientific things to tackle them.
32:59
Chris Reichhelm: Was there at the time any.
33:01
Chris Reichhelm: Legislation was, you know, you know, did it look like there was a legislative agenda for this stuff coming down the pipe at the time that you guys made your decision to pivot?
33:15
Chris Reichhelm: There was some in the US, uh, but it was a health advisory, so it wasn't legally enforced.
33:23
Chris Reichhelm: And, well, For the EU, there were some guidelines around reducing it, but those guidelines were like, nobody were taking them that seriously.
33:35
Chris Reichhelm: There were lots of classifications in the EU, like, oh, we should have good river waters.
33:41
Chris Reichhelm: And we've missed a goal so many times.
33:44
Chris Reichhelm: Sure, sure.
33:46
Chris Reichhelm: So let me, let me just recap real quick.
33:48
Chris Reichhelm: You, you, in order to uncover and I guess fully flesh out the problem that you guys want to address, you engage in these face to face meetings, these 100 meetings.
34:01
Chris Reichhelm: I guess, times two, with, uh, with companies in the market to, to understand the problems they're having.
34:11
Chris Reichhelm: And we're calling that primary research, engaging directly with these kinds of companies, you're taking them through, your questioning gets sharper over time.
34:20
Chris Reichhelm: You're also then engaging in additional research, which is, I guess, what we've called secondary research.
34:29
Chris Reichhelm: And what kind of stuff are you doing?
34:30
Chris Reichhelm: You know, what's the nature of that secondary research that you guys did?
34:35
Chris Reichhelm: I think the interesting part there is like combining your own thesis with data you get from the market.
34:42
Chris Reichhelm: And so if we had gone and asked the market, Oh, what do you want?
34:46
Chris Reichhelm: They wouldn't have said what we were developing.
34:49
Chris Reichhelm: We really had to go and look critically at what are some of the pitfalls for developing solutions into this space.
34:57
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and then also make our own thesis, like no one was banging the drum that PFAS had infiltrated the water cycle that, that took another seven years before it came out by the Swedes in 2023.
35:10
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, we had to say, we think it could have infiltrated at least parts of the water cycle.
35:17
Chris Reichhelm: It's sufficiently that we think there's going to be a market growing and increasing.
35:21
Chris Reichhelm: And then for the, the treatment side, Oh my God, we had so many issues in the beginning because we, we learned from this kind of, uh, bottom up perspective that membranes, they can tackle PFAS.
35:34
Chris Reichhelm: We had a membrane to begin with, uh, that's a, you know, excellent choice from an engineer's perspective.
35:40
Chris Reichhelm: It's super fun.
35:41
Chris Reichhelm: It's cool.
35:41
Chris Reichhelm: It's a membrane.
35:43
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, but the end users kept having challenges with them fouling and the pressure required.
35:49
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, there's a lot of energy that goes into operating them, uh, and there's not a lot of infrastructure that's set up to operate membranes.
35:57
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, it's quite a, a sort of complicated advanced treatment technology, uh.
36:03
Chris Reichhelm: And so we, we learn from these scathing reviews where people would take an academic paper, pick it apart and say, well, there are all these issues with this academic paper.
36:14
Chris Reichhelm: And we'd be like, Oh, that academic paper is quite similar to what we would publish if we used our current technology.
36:21
Chris Reichhelm: And so we go and talk to those who would like pick apart the academic papers as well as read the reviews to then really say, okay.
36:29
Chris Reichhelm: How can we overcome some of those tech pitfalls before we develop the technology?
36:36
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
36:38
Chris Reichhelm: Before you developed The media that you have today, you were looking at this in the secondary research, uncovering, reading some of the comments to these academic papers to realize our, our idea, our hypothesis of a solution looks a lot like theirs.
36:59
Chris Reichhelm: and they're ripping it apart.
37:00
Chris Reichhelm: It doesn't work.
37:01
Chris Reichhelm: So maybe we don't go down that line.
37:04
Chris Reichhelm: And, and then you go and you have followup discussions with them to really boil it down and understand, I guess, the true nature of their company and how far they extend.
37:14
Chris Reichhelm: And ultimately that, I guess, the combination of those two things, the primary and the secondary research, then you let have an impact on the development of your ultimate technology approach.
37:25
Chris Reichhelm: But as you said, you didn't let it dictate it totally, because had you let the customer.
37:31
Chris Reichhelm: You know, then you're just taking a customer order, and it gets back to that old Henry Ford quote, I'd ask the customer what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.
37:40
Chris Reichhelm: So you've got to, you know, I think that's where the innovation piece comes in.
37:43
Chris Reichhelm: You've got to make that jump, understand the nature of the problem well enough, but then maybe think two or three moves ahead as to what might be required and take a punt.
37:55
Chris Reichhelm: And also trying to combine the different worlds.
37:58
Chris Reichhelm: So on one hand you have the industrial world in its own little bubble.
38:01
Chris Reichhelm: On the other hand, you have the academic space and over here you have the, I don't know, the greens, the green piece and the government regulatory bodies.
38:09
Chris Reichhelm: Trying to combine, what is the common thread?
38:11
Chris Reichhelm: How can we weave these together?
38:13
Chris Reichhelm: Um, and there are definitely issues like, I remember reading this review of, uh, adsorbent media for tackling surfactants, and PFAS is ultimately a surfactant.
38:24
Chris Reichhelm: So I really went back to years and years, uh, of research within surfactants and, One of the big pitfalls was that it behaves non linearly.
38:33
Chris Reichhelm: It's not just a linear behavior like an ion or a simple organic.
38:38
Chris Reichhelm: It changes into this weird structure called a micelle, which is basically like a little round bubble where the polar bed is poking out towards the water and the tails go in towards the center.
38:50
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, so it'd be like an oil droplet.
38:52
Chris Reichhelm: And then after it gets that shape, it gets a new shape, completely third configuration Uh, it, it doesn't sort of neatly follow the rules of, uh, treatment.
39:04
Chris Reichhelm: And so many of the papers that this reviewer had seen would just test in a static test, like in a basically little bottle or a little falcon tube.
39:14
Chris Reichhelm: And that static test didn't sort of translate to the continuous flow at all.
39:19
Chris Reichhelm: There was just no correlation between the performance.
39:22
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
39:23
Chris Reichhelm: Okay.
39:23
Chris Reichhelm: That's it.
39:24
Chris Reichhelm: So thereby increasing the challenge for you.
39:27
Chris Reichhelm: Yes.
39:29
Chris Reichhelm: That's going to work in those, in those variable and almost unpredictable situations.
39:37
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
39:37
Chris Reichhelm: Um, how long did it take you to complete your research?
39:41
Chris Reichhelm: And when did you know you were done?
39:43
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, that's a good question.
39:45
Chris Reichhelm: So we thought we were done way before we were actually done.
39:49
Chris Reichhelm: That's one lesson learned.
39:51
Chris Reichhelm: So we went and we, we spent the first four years grant funded because we didn't want to raise venture funding until we knew what market and that we had some proof of concept.
40:01
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
40:01
Chris Reichhelm: for that market that we were going to go for.
40:04
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, so in 2016, we really focused on PFAS only for the research.
40:09
Chris Reichhelm: In 2019, we raised, uh, our first venture around a series seed based on having proof of concept.
40:17
Chris Reichhelm: So we had superior data within a big mistake, a batch for better performance.
40:23
Chris Reichhelm: So better kinetics.
40:25
Chris Reichhelm: So we can capture it faster and better capacity.
40:28
Chris Reichhelm: We can capture more of it.
40:29
Chris Reichhelm: And then proof of concept, early proof of concept for also reusing our material.
40:34
Chris Reichhelm: And those three things were really what we said, okay, that's the research done, mistake, mistake, by the way.
40:40
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, it then took from 2019 to 2023 to get third party validated, uh, best in class performance for those three, uh, features.
40:52
Chris Reichhelm: So, faster kinetics, better capacity and reusability, uh, that's a long time.
40:59
Chris Reichhelm: So from 2019 to 2023, uh, it was not just, Oh, let's take it to a sort of, we went out in 2019.
41:07
Chris Reichhelm: Again, I, Yeah.
41:08
Chris Reichhelm: Not many people know this.
41:10
Chris Reichhelm: We tested it with third parties and they said, Oh, it's not that good.
41:14
Chris Reichhelm: And it wasn't because of the technology approach.
41:17
Chris Reichhelm: It was because of other issues to do with our sort of, uh, yeah, well, our raw substrate that we were using.
41:25
Chris Reichhelm: And so we had to rethink some of the extra parameters that are needed to succeed.
41:29
Chris Reichhelm: In the beginning, we had just said, Oh, it's performance.
41:32
Chris Reichhelm: There you go.
41:32
Chris Reichhelm: It's done.
41:33
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, but there's also stability.
41:36
Chris Reichhelm: There's safety.
41:36
Chris Reichhelm: There's manufacturability.
41:39
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and, and those come in and actually killed us while they extended the research period from 2019 to 2023.
41:48
Chris Reichhelm: That's, that's interesting and, and unfortunately very common.
41:54
Chris Reichhelm: Those metrics that you highlighted though, the faster kinetics, the being able to, uh, the, uh, the greater capacity, uh, and then the reusability, uh, the regeneration, how, where did you get those from?
42:08
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
42:09
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
42:10
Chris Reichhelm: So we, we know the focus on those.
42:13
Chris Reichhelm: That was, again, that was back from the combination of the, that was more to do with the secondary research, I would say.
42:19
Chris Reichhelm: So it's really looking at how have people captured surfactants in the past, or how have they tackled other contaminants in water and what are the killer, the killer features that really feed into that calculation.
42:32
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, for us, those three features all boiled into the total cost of ownership, which is basically because water is undervalued.
42:41
Chris Reichhelm: And you can either try and bang your head against that wall or find technological advances that just fundamentally changes your total cost of, uh, ownership.
42:52
Chris Reichhelm: So if you can make it a lot cheaper, that's how SpaceX is making space exploration cheaper by reusing rockets.
42:59
Chris Reichhelm: You can just outperform your customers or your competitors.
43:05
Chris Reichhelm: So that regeneration piece, that reusability piece.
43:09
Chris Reichhelm: becomes fundamental, and we hear that a lot too, as an impact for the overall commercial proposition.
43:16
Chris Reichhelm: The, um, how, when did customers, or potential customers, start taking it really seriously?
43:25
Chris Reichhelm: Start looking at your proposition.
43:28
Chris Reichhelm: really seriously.
43:31
Chris Reichhelm: I would say in 2016, it was still early days.
43:34
Chris Reichhelm: You had the oil and gas company was saying, Oh, we would like to get this.
43:39
Chris Reichhelm: Then we developed something.
43:40
Chris Reichhelm: And in 2019, I would say people started taking it much more seriously.
43:44
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, the lawsuit had sort of settled.
43:46
Chris Reichhelm: It had set off some considerations, uh, in the US market, especially.
43:51
Chris Reichhelm: And so we had third party industrial companies come towards us.
43:57
Chris Reichhelm: We had the largest environmental services company in North America, that's private, come to Europe looking for solutions.
44:05
Chris Reichhelm: And they were looking for solutions for PFAS specifically, nothing else.
44:09
Chris Reichhelm: Just that.
44:10
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and they, they luckily came to Imperial, Serendipity, I guess you can say, and we, we became their first non US investment, even though they've invested for 90 plus years.
44:23
Chris Reichhelm: in material science.
44:25
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, right.
44:26
Chris Reichhelm: And so they were looking seriously and they were one of the front runners.
44:30
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, took a while then from that point to us getting the third party validation, which really, this was another lesson that internally we had to be comfortable that we're going to ship out product.
44:44
Chris Reichhelm: And outperform competitors, not just ship out product and hope we get some data and, you know, that's going to be valuable and maybe it will work and, or maybe it won't, because that can really damage your reputation.
44:56
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, so you had to, you had to know that it was going to be much better than what was out there already.
45:05
Chris Reichhelm: For that water matrix, yes.
45:08
Chris Reichhelm: That's interesting.
45:08
Chris Reichhelm: How, how competitive was it?
45:11
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, in the beginning, uh, you were up against the big incumbents.
45:15
Chris Reichhelm: So people would have a knee jerk response to just take some activated carbon, which is literally carbon derived product.
45:22
Chris Reichhelm: and dump it in the tank and then call it job done, uh, or they would take the, uh, incumbent, uh, petroleum derived ion exchange, uh, and use it from the large, uh, tier one companies.
45:37
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, this, this was a repurposed product.
45:40
Chris Reichhelm: So it's what the water industry has done for a long time.
45:42
Chris Reichhelm: They see a problem, take something off the shelf, repurpose it for this thing.
45:46
Chris Reichhelm: hope that it works after some testing, or that at least one of the 5 10 products on the shelf will work for it, and then just sell that product.
45:55
Chris Reichhelm: Don't develop something new, just use something that's getting repurposed.
45:58
Chris Reichhelm: A bit like how you repurpose drugs that are approved in the pharma space.
46:03
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:05
Chris Reichhelm: If, as you look back, and we come forward to the present day, if you were to set up a new company and do it all over again, what would you do differently?
46:23
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, I love that question.
46:25
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, I sometimes think of me as building small companies within a larger company with what we're doing now.
46:31
Chris Reichhelm: Um, so I think I would start with the, this kind of, Combined primary and secondary research.
46:38
Chris Reichhelm: So go and talk to the customers.
46:40
Chris Reichhelm: Don't take what they say as like the Holy Grail.
46:43
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, they're not gonna get everything right.
46:46
Chris Reichhelm: And they're not going to suggest the best solution, but talk to them about the problem state, uh, the problem state statement.
46:54
Chris Reichhelm: Just really hone in.
46:55
Chris Reichhelm: Like, what does their day look like?
46:56
Chris Reichhelm: What bothers them?
46:57
Chris Reichhelm: What's the friction?
46:58
Chris Reichhelm: What's the real issues they have?
47:00
Chris Reichhelm: Is it that they're getting pressure from their customers, from regulators, from others?
47:05
Chris Reichhelm: What happens?
47:06
Chris Reichhelm: And then, take that, but also take a step back.
47:10
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, we, we sort of need, needed to combine that secondary research to really get our insights.
47:16
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and that's, maybe it's because I'm leaning into my nerdy side as well.
47:20
Chris Reichhelm: Like, I, I love a super academic paper, and then trying to draw the link to what a customer just said, who's an operator, who's never seen that academic paper.
47:30
Chris Reichhelm: I would combine that with a sort of stage approach.
47:34
Chris Reichhelm: We now call it something like a stage state.
47:36
Chris Reichhelm: It's not super, uh, large corporate, but there are some, some overlaps to, you know, large corporates can be quite good at adding structure to what, what is the search process.
47:46
Chris Reichhelm: I think it's any sort of new scientific endeavor is really a search process.
47:51
Chris Reichhelm: where you're going around like a heat seeking missile trying to find the problem statement and then trying to find the tech fit with something you have capability to develop.
48:02
Chris Reichhelm: Would you, would you set up that process or set out on that process before you even had technology?
48:12
Chris Reichhelm: I would set up on some, some of it before I had technology developed for it.
48:16
Chris Reichhelm: It gets quite theoretical at that point because it's like everything I do now is water related and we have some tech stack.
48:23
Chris Reichhelm: So maybe, Alternatively, maybe I would work with an academic group who have developed some push.
48:30
Chris Reichhelm: There's a lot of tech push out there, and frankly, a lot of it has a lot of potential, but it's not getting out to the taxpayers who have funded that research.
48:42
Chris Reichhelm: And so you could sort of stand on the shoulders of giants if you tap into some of that technology that's already been developed.
48:49
Chris Reichhelm: And then see if you want to solve within that problem space.
48:54
Chris Reichhelm: And in your view, what's preventing that, what's preventing the value from being realized there?
49:01
Chris Reichhelm: Are they not engaging in this kind of process that you've just outlined?
49:04
Chris Reichhelm: The primary and the secondary research, is that just not happening?
49:09
Chris Reichhelm: I think the big, people would say different things.
49:11
Chris Reichhelm: In the UK, people always say it's money.
49:13
Chris Reichhelm: But for me, honestly, it's more to do with talent.
49:16
Chris Reichhelm: It's, it's this kind of, do we have the people who are interested in making that leap and do we provide them the tools and the systems and the processes for, for learning that skill?
49:28
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, it's very different.
49:30
Chris Reichhelm: Now the, the academic world, you need to get measured by your metrics on your papers and like, how collaborations?
49:38
Chris Reichhelm: This is ambiguous.
49:39
Chris Reichhelm: There's a search phase to it.
49:41
Chris Reichhelm: It's not very prestigious in the beginning.
49:43
Chris Reichhelm: People ask you what you do and you're like, uh, you know, I work as a tutor on the side because I don't get any money from this thing I'm trying to commercialize.
49:51
Chris Reichhelm: And they're like, okay, why don't you take a job, you know, that's paid and you work less.
49:57
Chris Reichhelm: So it's a weird gap in the market, in my view.
50:02
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, there's a, uh, an upscaling and maturing of the ecosystem where, you know, now people can say, Oh, I'm a founder and in, in some parts of the UK, people say, Oh, all right, of course you're scrappy right now.
50:16
Chris Reichhelm: But ten years ago, you would say you're a founder and people would be like, a founder of what?
50:20
Chris Reichhelm: Or like, what does that mean?
50:23
Chris Reichhelm: We don't have that maturity yet of the ecosystem.
50:27
Chris Reichhelm: And that skill perhaps as a, as a, as a leader or the management skill to understand what's required at that very early stage, which is, as you've just so well, so beautifully articulated.
50:41
Chris Reichhelm: getting out there and speaking to people.
50:43
Chris Reichhelm: What I find so interesting is that the answers didn't come from the obvious questions you were asking.
50:52
Chris Reichhelm: Not that your questions were obvious.
50:53
Chris Reichhelm: I'm sure they were sophisticated.
50:56
Chris Reichhelm: They almost count, they almost came about from the asides.
51:01
Chris Reichhelm: The walk back from the office to the door, you know, or the, let's grab a coffee.
51:07
Chris Reichhelm: Oh shit, man, if you could do something about PFAS, Christ.
51:10
Chris Reichhelm: That's such a, that's such an ache for us.
51:12
Chris Reichhelm: We're, we're, we're really struggling with those foams over there.
51:15
Chris Reichhelm: If you got, if you know anyone who's doing that, let us know.
51:19
Chris Reichhelm: The, the, you know, those kinds of, you know, off the cuff remarks, almost forgotten remarks can often be where so much of the gold is.
51:29
Chris Reichhelm: Mm.
51:30
Chris Reichhelm: And that's, again, it's, it's genuine data.
51:32
Chris Reichhelm: It's not something you were forced.
51:34
Chris Reichhelm: It was just, you've created a bit of a space, had a bit of a discussion and then they're like, okay, oh, by the way, I'll head off now.
51:41
Chris Reichhelm: But if you could do that thing, call me.
51:43
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
51:43
Chris Reichhelm: Because I fucking need that thing.
51:45
Chris Reichhelm: My boss is breathing down my neck.
51:47
Chris Reichhelm: Exactly.
51:48
Chris Reichhelm: Exactly.
51:49
Chris Reichhelm: One last question, Henrik, something I'm curious about.
51:53
Chris Reichhelm: The, the nature of the problem.
51:56
Chris Reichhelm: I mentioned at the outset of our discussion that I've always been impressed with the.
51:59
Chris Reichhelm: most of the quality of the problem that you're solving.
52:03
Chris Reichhelm: And, you know, we have a situation where, because today of EU legislation and US legislation, which is now banning PFAS over the next two or three years in massive numbers.
52:19
Chris Reichhelm: So companies, unless they want to be sued or fined, have to do something about this now, they have to.
52:28
Chris Reichhelm: And so that makes your market.
52:30
Chris Reichhelm: Thank you.
52:31
Chris Reichhelm: You go to industrial companies and you mentioned to them, if you don't do this, you guys are going to be in trouble.
52:38
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, they're listening and for novel technology, new platforms, new ways of doing things.
52:45
Chris Reichhelm: It's very difficult to get listened to by big corporates, but when the problem is acute enough, when it hurts enough, when it acts as a threat, companies start listening.
52:59
Chris Reichhelm: Is that your experience?
53:02
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah, I think it's really honing in on that.
53:06
Chris Reichhelm: difference between nice to have and must have.
53:10
Chris Reichhelm: And I think part of it is also being humble enough around not servicing all of the must haves.
53:18
Chris Reichhelm: In this space, it's very easy to get drawn in by the customer and being like, Oh, if you must have water treatment, I'll become a water treatment solution provider.
53:27
Chris Reichhelm: I'll do everything for you.
53:28
Chris Reichhelm: I'll do pipes and pumps and valves.
53:30
Chris Reichhelm: It's so exciting.
53:32
Chris Reichhelm: But it's kind of, it's being honest about what can you be the best in the world at.
53:36
Chris Reichhelm: And yeah, we could learn how to operate a water treatment vessel, okay, but people have spent 70 years developing that with weapons grade engineering, really done a lot of effort on it.
53:47
Chris Reichhelm: And so it's, it's being sort of looking yourself in the mirror and being, okay, they will probably be able to do quite well over there.
53:55
Chris Reichhelm: And secondly, it's also quite commoditized.
53:58
Chris Reichhelm: It's very much just built.
54:00
Chris Reichhelm: competing on price.
54:02
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, and so we had to take a step back and say, okay, what can we be the best in the world at?
54:08
Chris Reichhelm: And it turned out to be quite niche.
54:10
Chris Reichhelm: It's tackling these very specific contaminants in water with new materials for it, not just an off the shelf product.
54:18
Chris Reichhelm: Uh, that was a bit of hard work and some of the team wanted to do the full solution.
54:24
Chris Reichhelm: So we had to have difficult conversations around, okay, If you want to do full solutions, we, we love you as an employee.
54:31
Chris Reichhelm: We love you as like a team member, but maybe you should go and do it somewhere else.
54:35
Chris Reichhelm: And those difficult conversations, people often shy away from, and you end up with a company who's trying to do everything because you don't want to have that uncomfortable.
54:45
Chris Reichhelm: Actually, we maybe need to break up and, and sort of.
54:49
Chris Reichhelm: Go different, uh, come go to different companies that I had to do that for some of the team still, still good terms now, but it was not an easy time.
54:59
Chris Reichhelm: My wife remembers it.
55:01
Chris Reichhelm: She was like, well, all the tech issues, you're okay.
55:04
Chris Reichhelm: But those kind of uncomfortable conversations with people in the trenches that you care a lot about, that's where you really have to pull yourself in and stand up.
55:15
Chris Reichhelm: And focus though.
55:17
Chris Reichhelm: And ultimately focus.
55:18
Chris Reichhelm: Man, because, you know, that's what it's about.
55:20
Chris Reichhelm: And I guess it gets back to, why do you know, why do we exist?
55:25
Chris Reichhelm: Why does this come to exist?
55:27
Chris Reichhelm: And if we're not, you know, we're, you know, if we exist to solve this problem, then we must be ruthless or we must do what it takes at least to solve the problem and everyone must be committed to solving the problem.
55:40
Chris Reichhelm: And that means we're not going to solve a lot of other problems that are worthy, but we're not going to solve them because we're just going to solve this one.
55:46
Chris Reichhelm: They're cool problems, but they're not our problems.
55:48
Chris Reichhelm: It's that kind of good to great book reference where you sit down with the team, draw the hedgehog of like, what can we be the best at?
55:56
Chris Reichhelm: Like what's needed from the market?
55:58
Chris Reichhelm: And then I remember leaving that session being like, shit, I'm going to have to talk to three of my team members.
56:03
Chris Reichhelm: One wants to do only this kind of technology, which is not what we're going to stick to.
56:08
Chris Reichhelm: One wants to be a water solution provider.
56:10
Chris Reichhelm: That's not what we're going to stick to.
56:12
Chris Reichhelm: And I had to sort of help them get on to, to another, another startup or another company.
56:17
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
56:18
Chris Reichhelm: Yeah.
56:19
Chris Reichhelm: Henrik, this has been super interesting and, uh, I've learned a lot.
56:24
Chris Reichhelm: Um, I, uh, I always do when we speak.
56:27
Chris Reichhelm: So thank you so much for, for joining me today.
56:31
Chris Reichhelm: Ah, it's a pleasure.
56:33
Chris Reichhelm: Thanks for having me, Chris.
56:34
Chris Reichhelm: You've been listening to the Lab to Market Leadership Podcast, brought to you by Deep Tech Leaders.
56:40
Chris Reichhelm: This podcast has been produced by Beauxhaus.
56:43
Chris Reichhelm: You can find out more about us on LinkedIn, Spotify, apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.