10.2021-Sense.nano-Welcoming-Remarks-Anthony -Bulovic

BRIAN ANTHONY: Now with that it's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker, who you also heard from yesterday, Vladimir Bulovic. Vladimir is a-- we have many luminaries of innovation at MIT, and Vladimir is one of them. And as the director of MIT.nano, the founding director of MIT.nano, he also had a previous hat, which was the Associate Dean of Innovation at MIT.

Today, he'll share with us some of his perspectives on the innovation ecosystem around MIT and in Massachusetts, and then also chair the panel discussion with our start-up companies. Vladimir, it's a great pleasure to have you join us back today, and I'll turn it over to you.

PROFESSOR VLADIMIR BULOVIC: Thank you, Brian. I'm very excited to be back. I'm very excited to see SENSE.nano 2021 edition be unrolling in such festive and awesome fashion. Innovation is the key to much of what MIT does. We naturally spin out ideas, and those ideas are as good as they can impact the world in positive ways. Indeed, our alumni, once they step out of MIT, have proven over and over again to be extremely capable in taking the best of our ideas, and rolling them out as highly impactful companies.

Let me share with you some very simple statistics that we have accrued. There are currently 30,000 companies that are active that are founded by MIT alumni. These are 30,000 presently existing companies. Those companies employ 4.6 million employees, they are worth about 1.29 trillion in annual revenue. And if they added up to a country, they would generate the GDP equivalent to the 10th largest economy in the world.

This an incredible impact from a very small space called MIT. With 130,000 alumni, many, many of which have chosen, as their path to impacting the world, is to spin out their ideas into technologies that are able to change the world. The MIT Innovation ecosystem is rich in many opportunities. Indeed, there are over 80 different centers, labs, organizations within the MIT campus that can hone your skills in developing your ideas. Is it the inspiration, or exploration, or fundamental knowledge, applications, and an acceleration of those ideas? All of those are covered.

This graph is beautifully picked out of the Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Martin Trust, that we have indeed been tremendously valuing here at MIT. Providing us guidance for many years in thinking through how to spin out ideas beyond the bounds of MIT campus. Launching them into entities like the engine, and with the support of MIT alumni. Innovation Initiative as an organization, indeed, corralled many of these great opportunities with MIT campus showing us such roadmaps.

MIT.nano is a part of that Innovation ecosystem, and it's very simple job is to translate these ideas into impact. MIT.nano is recently constructed and recently opened, but we have imagined it for many years. We have actually placed it to meet the following three criteria that are needed to boost innovation. One, bring people together of different disciplines. Two, make sure those people can easily encounter each other. And three, ensure that you provide the environment where they can engage each other.

So as we constructed MIT.nano, we designed it for these innovation criteria in mind. We placed it right to the heart of the campus, central to everything that's happening; steps away from any one of our present offices and labs; and outfitted with tools that are needed for all of us. The central position of it allowed us to bring current people of different disciplines together, allowed us to easily be able to encounter each other, and the wonder of the spaces inside of MIT.nano makes it so that you want to just talk to your neighbor and tell them exactly what you want to do within such a space.

And ask them the most important question at MIT, which is, what are you working on? It is that engagement that leads us to recognize ways to cross-pollinate disciplines, ways to work on the cusps of discipline so we can reinvent the world. MIT.nano is an extension of the great legacy of MIT campus, from the time it was constructed back in 1916 till today.

Every building is connected to every other, and one discipline blends into the other as you move through the corridors of MIT. Open access and broad reach was the key to MIT.nano design. And since we welcomed the first users in August 2019 just about two years ago, shared tools and spaces were open to all.

To date, there are over 500 users that step into MIT.nano in the course of a year. The doors to our central clean room open 1,400 times every week, to welcome yet another user and yet another user back and forth, as they get their work done. There are people from over 30 different departments, labs, and centers of MIT, and there are 20-plus companies and organizations external of MIT that step into our environment. MIT.nano is designed to welcome over 1,000 people, and we are growing astronomically every year. And I'm tremendously excited about the incredible number of opportunities that brings forward.

The MIT.nano space is really designed to assist launches of new technologies. So let me show you a very simple graphic that goes through the phases that the typical startup, maybe one that's working on high tech technologies, as those in bio world, medical world, might face. Sensing world.

There are, really, three valleys of death in the path of such a startup. The startup needs to go through a series of phases. The discovery, that typically happens in [INAUDIBLE] academia, transfer of that idea into a startup. The early development, where you're working towards a prototype. The advanced development, where you're working towards a scale up. And then the actual scale up phase, and eventually production. Hence, the very first challenge is the Valley of the Idea.

Finding the stakeholders that share your vision and are absolutely willing to support you, despite the fact that your journey is still far away from completion. Unfortunately, survivability over this crevice is only about 10%. The next valley is the Valley of Prototype. Gaining market traction without manufacturing, convincing the next set of investors that your prototype is all that's needed to demonstrate that a scale up is imminent.

Then, once the funding for the scale up does arrive, you need to actually develop it to the advanced development. And bridge the next, Valley of Scale. That proves bankability, and, indeed, opportunity to become public. This is either done by acquisition of the startup by established industry, or by the startup itself, becoming public, and indeed growing it to a big, multinational company.

So how can MIT.nano assist such journey? Well, in many ways. The way to put it is that the journey will take about 10 years, maybe a little more. It will require about $100 million. Indeed, without the existence of an existing foundry, an existing set of tools that someone else already has, the journey can be very expensive as you figure out how to scale the idea so that million people can hold it in their hands.

The result of it is that the early years, the ones that are most treacherous for the beginning of the idea, need to be bridged. Those are actually not the most expensive of ideas. The expensive ones is the last valley, the Valley of Scale. The first two can get done a lot faster if there is an opportunity to have access to existing shared facilities, and maybe there is a discounted use of tools and processes akin to the way that the state sandbox fund might be able to provide, at spaces like MIT.nano, and at other sandbox spaces across the state.

Opportunities to provide such funding attenuate those values, making them a little bit shallower crevices. And as a result, giving us a chance to launch more startups, bringing them up to the advanced development through the scale of stage. This is where the venture capital can step in. Indeed, in the United States, there are about $150 billion annually, plus some, invested by venture capitalists into ideas. Into ideas that are meant to scale.

However, for those venture capital investments to make financial sense to the limited partners and general partners of the funds, who are running their business of ensuring good returns on their investments, they need to see those investments mature in about five years, from the moment that investments are made. They may be tripling their value in due time. In order to do that, we need to develop a prototype.

We need to guide the startup through those first three valleys of death. And through that, bring the ideas that are mature enough and ready enough to be big time investments. So they can be scaled, proving bankability, and indeed, providing value to the world at large by reaching a million people plus with those greatest of ideas.

Well, the mission of MIT.nano is very simple. We need to build a better world. And today, you will have a chance to hear from three remarkable startups that, indeed, are growing their technologies. [INAUDIBLE] Technology will describe neural interface gesture control for robots. Stratagen Bio will provide you insights into novel tissue oxygen sensors to enable personalized care. And Leuko will provide you non-invasive, at-home, white blood cell monitoring capability.

It is remarkable what a simple academic idea can grow into if left in the hands of an MIT alumni. And these three co-founders of these three remarkable startup companies will tell you the stories, just about now, about how those transformational ideas can indeed scale. Please listen to that.