Startup Meetup Archives

Printing (3D) Life with Danny Cabrera

Danny Cabrera, CEO of BioBots

Danny Cabrera is clearly enjoying the whirlwind ride of bioengineering. He’s a few minutes late this morning, completely excusable considering he’s ducked out of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City to make the drive to Walnut St. Labs on a few hours of sleep.

It’s all to support BioBots, his Philly-based life science startup company. “We exist in the space between hardware and software,” says Danny. “We build bioprinters, devices that build three-dimensional living tissues.”

Origins
Danny went to community college in Miami before transferring to Penn to study computer science and biology, areas that combine two of his passions. “Building tools to engineer life is exciting.”

At Penn, he linked up with a professor as well as a fellow Miami community college student. While the prof was immersed in 3D tissue engineering using non-3D printing methods, Danny’s friend was working in his dorm room on a device that would extrude living tissues.

Together, Danny and his buddy spent Sundays working on the device. They won a $5,000 prize and decided to use their winnings to continue their work over the summer recess, setting up shop in an apartment on top of a bar.

BioBots
“To create tissue, a solution of three things is needed: an initiator substance, a polymer, and cells.
One of the reasons BioBots is exciting is because our $5,000 device offers an alternative to the large, half million dollar bioprinters currently on the market.”

One of BioBots’ uses is building mini organs that can be used to test drugs, offering a humane alternative to animal-based research. “Another use is to build miniature tumors. By taking cells from patients, a researcher can biopsy a patient’s tumors, and figure out what kills the tumors without killing the other tissues.”

Getting the Word Out
Danny wasted no time in contacting all his connections in the engineering world. “I was blasting out 20-50 calls and emails a day. We got a new professor involved. Just a month after we had the device working, we sold it to that professor.”

Their efforts got the attention of some other Penn profs who walked them through how financing a company works, and suggested an accelerator. Ultimately, Danny and his team got hooked up with DreamIt Health Philly, which connected them to the resources they needed. “We got $50K, legal services, lab space, office space for 6 months, and mentors. By the end of January, we had sold 25 of them.”

The Future
In Danny’s mind, “things that come out of a printer will never be implantable. The device squirts cells out in the geometry you need, but there are a lot of steps needed to turn those cells into complex systems. We’re trying to take what your body needs 15 to 20 years to do and do it in a month.”

Although Danny and his team outsource the metal parts for the BioBots, everything else is done in house. “We want to build the machines, not the organs. Organs are too specific and time/cost intensive. BioBots gives users the edge to design their own organs.”

How Tech Startups Make a Difference in the Nonprofit Space w/Paul Keogan

Paul Keogan, Principal and Founder of BackOffice Thinking

@pkeogan
@BackOfficeThink

Paul Keogan’s got quite a collection of baseball cards left over from his first entrepreneurial enterprise.

Back in high school, he and two friends started a company to sell baseball cards. “We got giant cases of cards, sorted and put them into sets, and then sent the sets out to people who’d ordered them. We marked them up 30%. I probably made about $15. And I still have like 50,000 baseball cards.”

Today, the principal and founder of BackOffice Thinking shares the journey he’s been on since those baseball card days.

Origins
Paul started out at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, majoring in chemical engineering. “My roommate had a crazy idea in the entrepreneurship class we were taking. It was the mid 1980s, and he thought we should start assembling personal computers for people. Around the same time, Michael Dell did the exact same thing. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Why would anyone want to build PCs?’ It just goes to prove you never really know what idea is going to take off.”

After school, Paul moved through DuPont and then ARCO Chemical, ultimately leaving the chemical engineering world when he had a big-company epiphany. “No matter what I did at that company, it didn’t really matter. It didn’t change the stock price, it didn’t change anything. Unless you’re making decisions, you don’t matter.”

Denis started Fusion Technologies, and Paul joined later on. Fusion Technologies is a technology consulting firm primarily serving financial services firms and software companies. During Paul’s tenure, the bootstrapped venture grew 100% a year almost every year.

After eight years, though, it was time to move on. They sold the company in 2006.

BackOffice Thinking
Founded in 2006, BackOffice Thinking works with midsize nonprofits throughout the U.S. They help nonprofit clients with everything from customer/constituent relationship management (CRM) support to social media strategy and business intelligence. Additionally they provide free services to nonprofits like the Chester County Community Foundation, the Volunteer English Program, and Longwood Gardens. With BackOffice’s help, Longwood is launching a new, improved website in a month.

“Working in a consulting space with the nonprofit world has been so fulfilling. I’ve been able to work with all types of nonprofits, from faith-based to environmental and grass roots. If I was CFO or CIO at a big company, I think I’d get bored.”

What He Does. And Doesn’t Do.
Paul doesn’t code anymore. “I don’t do design either. If you see anything I’ve designed,you’d know why,” he says. “It’s embarrassing.” Instead, he focuses on creating connections. “If I can get clients to connect with each other, that’s a home run. For instance, I have two clients going through some hard changes in their organizations. Having them talk to each other is important.”

He also creates connections within BackOffice Thinking. “We have 14 people in our back office, all with a heart for nonprofits. In this sector, you have to be a good technologist, but you also have to love the nonprofit space. I spend my time learning about new tech strategy, working with executive directors at our client sites, and helping our organization deliver the best solutions we can.”

Failures
Paul’s endeavors haven’t all been successful. Take startup Luminent Solutions, for example: “We were going to do online-based advice for people. It’s a space dominated by psychics, with something like 80% of online advice dollars going to psychics.”

The business didn’t take off, but Paul was hopeful for the technology side of things. “We had good technology. We almost had AT&T purchase our technology, but then the person we were working with left the company and the new person couldn’t care less about it.”

Lessons Learned
On partners:
“In the past, we hired partners more interested in getting cash than growing the business. Today, I would never partner with someone who needs to make a significant amount of money right now. That pressure forces you to make different decisions.”

On diversity of ideas:
At Wharton, Paul learned the power of diversity. “At Wharton, I couldn’t believe who was in class with me. It’s the engineer mindset–how could these non-engineer people be smart enough to be in this class? But I learned those people are thinking of things you never thought of.”

On getting involved:
“If you’re in the tech space today and not working with a nonprofit, you need to get involved.”

Dave Mann on Learning to Resist Shiny Objects

Dave Mann, Founder of VisualCMS

www.sector43.com
@MannD

Right now, Dave Mann’s coveted “shiny object” is a red and white RV nicknamed “the Beast.”

The giant vehicle will carry him and his family on adventures all over the country. A part of Dave’s evolution toward semi-retirement, the Beast perfectly embodies his family-centric balance of freedom and innovation. It’s the next stop on a journey that spans philosophy, retail, consulting, and more.

Origins
Dave started his consulting career in 1996, but not until after he experienced a job in retail over the Christmas holidays which made him realize the retail industry wasn’t for him. His English major/Philosophy minor degree, although “perfect for arguing both sides of a point with myself,” wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be. So he jumped into consulting, becoming an MVP for Microsoft’s SharePoint platform at the just the right time, watching the technology explode exponentially soon after joining the space. Today, Dave is one of only 215 SharePoint MVPs in the world.

The grind of the consulting lifestyle began to wear on him, though. “With consulting, If you don’t work any hours, you don’t get any dollars. I didn’t want to do that anymore.” It was time for a change, so Dave sat down and put together a 3-year plan.

In the Startup World
For the first part of Dave’s plan, he decided to build a marketing channel that would leverage his SharePoint knowledge. Enter “Office 365 Concierge,” a weekly newsletter covering all the developments surrounding the cloud-based Office 365 platform. He hired a contractor to write and categorize content, after which Dave would review and publish the newsletter.

The second part of the plan included developing some training videos and starting to work on a new product. Things were moving along as intended….until the app that Dave had designed to generate his newsletter started capturing its own attention.

VisualCMS
Dave’s newsletter publishing app creates HTML that can be published to WordPress. Information is stored on Trello cards (online index cards) that can be managed visually by dragging and dropping from one list to another.

“Someone approached me about selling it. I thought, ‘Do I make it a SaaS application? Might people want to buy it?'” It became a shiny object that distracted him from his original plan. “The problem was that it was completely outside my wheelhouse. I had zero credibility in the space.”

But the diversion was tempting. “I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I move from one interesting thing to another. It’s been my biggest problem in the startup space.”

Must. Resist. Shiny. Object.
Dave had an epiphany. “The mailing list was only supposed to be a marketing channel. VisualCMS was only ever intended to be a prototype. I would run it when I needed to and it would do its thing. It took me maybe 20 minutes to make the newsletter. I would put an RSS mail feed from mail chimp and send it out to my mailing list.”

He sold the usage rights to a company that manages content in the Office 365 space. “I still own the code and I get some advertising income from the newsletter. But it keeps my name out there.”

The plan is working. “At the end of January 2015, I had 23 subscribers. In the middle of April, I had 7,412. And that’s just from jumping into bed with this company.That number is what convinced me I was making the right decision.”

Remember the End Game
Dave says the moral of the story is to know when to pivot, and know when a “shiny object” is distracting you from your original purpose.

“I don’t want to work so damn hard. I don’t expect any of my products to be my single source of income. I want to have 3 to 4 smallish products, little plugins for Office 365. Each one brings in an ok amount of money, and I’m good. I don’t need to have that one huge single product.”

Today, Dave’s working on an umbrella product (code name: Blackburn), an “intranet in a box for small to medium businesses. A family of products that will allow small-medium businesses to spin up their intranet quickly.”

He’s also self publishing some ebooks and creating software products and packages, as well as speaking and teaching. “Everything is repurposed,reused, and recycled. I do things one or one and a half times, but I get multiple uses out of them.”

Bitcoin Panel Discussion

Four bitcoin enthusiasts weigh in on the current stage of bitcoin evolution during a collaborative panel discussion.

The Panelists
Ryan Findley, founder of Neomind Labs, a Philly-based custom software company focusing on Ruby on Rails development. “We accept bitcoin as payment, but so far no one has taken us up on that.”

Andrew Schwabe, CEO and founder of new startup Formatic. “We want to find out why people don’t hit the submit button on your form.” Andrew has bought, held, and sold lots of bitcoin over the years but emphasizes, “Today is about us expressing our opinions. Nothing we say is buying, selling, or legal advice.”

Patrick Millar currently works with startups after serving as CTO at Chatham Financial. “My experience in the financial industry taught me about the annoying little things that have big implications.”

Jonathon Beschen, founder of FaceCrunch, a digital advertising platform, and a partner at SparkNET Technologies. “I’ve watched bitcoin in Hacker News from the beginning. Even though it took 2 years of studying it before I grasped what it can do, I purchased it early on.”

Bitcoin 101: What is it?
Patrick: “What is money, period? Bitcoin is an invented currency, not tied to anything underlying, like the state or gold. It has no value other than that people are using it, but can be used as a medium of exchange. How do you value it? It’s worthless, yet it has value.”

Jonathon: “The founding premise is that it solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. How do you facilitate a trustless interaction between 2 parties? With the current system, you have to trust the bank or state that backs the currency.”

Andrew: “It wants to be currency, but in my mind it’s a science experiment. If you put your trust in the government that has that money, for example, and that government decides ‘we’ll just print more money,’ then that affects everybody.”

Ryan: “Bitcoin is unique in that there is a fixed supply. There will only be 21 million bitcoins, ever, but it is infinitely divisible.”

Benefits of Bitcoin
Jonathon: “You have a ledger available that is totally transparent. It has a publicly auditable trail of every transaction. Even though originally, it was supposed to be completely anonymous, that audit trail helps keep regulators honest.”

Patrick: “In the developed world, bitcoin becomes a competitor to Visa and Mastercard. Since bitcoin doesn’t charge anyone a 3% transaction fee, companies that accept it are excited because it’s an immediate 3% addition to their bottom line. In the developing world, bitcoin can allow a young female farmer to be paid and to have control over what she is paid. That, in turn, has huge economic impacts to the developed world too.”

Ryan: “By using bitcoin’s marketing change tip, you can give someone a tip based on something they said on Twitter or get access to news stories.”

Jonathon: “With micro transactions, if everyone subscribes to driverless cars, you could say ‘I need an express lane,” and all the driverless cars that don’t need the express lane would get out of the way. Your fridge could buy milk for you buying bitcoin.”

Patrick: “There are privacy concerns with having people knowing where you are driving using trackable technologies like EZPass. With a bitcoin pass, payment and privacy could be guaranteed. It’s highly secure.”

The Block Chain
Andrew: “Block chain is like the old-world ledger books. Two different columns, with each volume of that book being a block. Inside a ledger is a list of transactions that are sequential . The value is cryptographically, computationally, very hard to fabricate, because of all the CPU effort required to build the block. Everybody has a copy of the entire ledger, so it can be proven.”

Ryan: “The process transactions are created by happen in blocks. Each transaction is linked to the one before it. The latest one has to have a value that depends on the prior ones. With mining, you take the transactions, put them in a block to do a computation and put a value on it. Mining takes hardware and makes valid blocks. The network pays people for mining, and through the process of creating new blocks, you get paid in bitcoin.”

Patrick: “You’re bundling transactions in a block, and there’s a race to get the bundle approved, which is correlated to processing power. But there is also an element of chance. The more horsepower you throw at it, the better your chance of winning a race.”

Ryan: “In 2011, I was using a GPU graphics card with limited success. At one point, I had 4 graphics cards. Today, you need to build custom hardware.”

Jonathon: “The algorithm becomes more difficult as more power is applied to it. Specially made units can barely do the computations. So now there are networks and pools of people contributing their processing power in ‘mining guilds’ to harness the shared processing power.”

Summing up
Andrew: “Like I said, it’s a science experiment, not a revolution. But a surprising science experiment. It’s not going to be a dominant currency. It takes too long to process transactions and the spend for CPUs is huge. But I think the underlying block chain technology is probably where the gold is, long term.”

Leveraging the Fantasy Market w/ John Walters of StockJock

John Walters, Founder of StockJock

@PlayStockJock
@WaltopiaNow
@sirchristian

“We want to be the Flintstones vitamins of stock market games.”

John Walters is bringing the thrill of fantasy sports leagues to the stock market. The Villanova grad started off at First National Bank, where he learned first hand about the problems confronting small businesses. Today, he’s a Senior Living Balance Sheet Specialist at eMoney Advisor, as well as the founder of StockJock, an online fantasy stock trading game.

Although finance consumes his professional life these days, his path to entrepreneurship started out in a much, well, sweeter way.

The Origins
“Crepes are the ticket.”

Needing an infusion of cash, John took a semester off from studying at Villanova to work at a bank. “That was the first time I ever had a chunk of money in my pocket. I thought I’d use that $2500 to buy a bass amp.” The universe had different plans, though. A buddy of his was working at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire and noticed that the crepe stall was killing it. “He called me up and said ‘listen man, we gotta make crepes,’” John says. “‘Crepes are the ticket.’”

Three months later, John and his friend started Main Line Crepe Company, selling their crepes at festivals and catering events. “We did the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival, and we were in the black after that first time. Everything was going fantastic.”

Then, a couple weekends later, the two friends ended up at a bluegrass festival at Lake Wallenpaupack, an event populated with bluegrass fans, but not necessarily crepe aficionados. “We slept in a tent. It was a great musical experience, but that kind of trumped what we were trying to sell. It gave us perspective on our business.”

“When you think about finding your drive, although it’s personal, you have to realize what you have to do every day to reach the goals you have.” The duo realized that crepes weren’t in their long-term future, but the endeavor prepared John for his next venture.

StockJock
“We’re bringing Wall Street to Main Street.”

Like fantasy sports leagues, StockJock involves building a roster. Once users pay the entry fee, they proceed to set their stock picks. StockJock pulls data from Yahoo, and at the end of the day, users find out how they did compared to their competitors. John says, “StockJock gives people a foot in the door to learn about the volatility of the market and how the economy works.”

StockJock went to Philly Startup Weekend, where John and his team earned second place. “That second place kind of bugged us, but it showed us that we’d begun to validate our idea.”

“We are changing the way stock games work. We’re introducing people to what it is about the market they’re trying to get into.”

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