‘I’m Just Excited to Keep Going’—Cohort 2018 Fellows on Paths to Impact
These three Cohort 2018 fellows took very different paths to Activate, and are working to impact very different industries. But for all of them, the past two years have been transformative.
From the earliest days of the fellowship, we focus on helping fellows build the knowledge and skills they need to succeed as founders, while staying true to their vision for the positive impact their technology can have on the world. After Cohort 2018 wrapped up the two-year program, celebrated with a Zoom dance party and pick-your-own mortarboard scavenger hunt, we sat down with three of those fellows to talk about their journeys to and through Activate, what comes next, and how their fellowships have influenced their trajectories.
The Seeker
Last year, around this time, Nishita Deka had real doubts about her decision to accept the fellowship and build the company she co-founded, Sonera Magnetics. She had joined Activate during the final throes of her Ph.D. work, and she was burned out.
“I was about to file my dissertation, and was getting ready to transition full time into this role of CEO, and I had a big moment of reflection,” she says. She talked it over with managing director Tom Boussie and CEO Ilan Gur, who asked her to think critically about whether building the company was moving, generally, in the direction she envisioned for her career.
So Deka took pen to paper and listed her career priorities: working on frontier technology with strong potential for societal impact; cultivating the culture of a small, dedicated and collaborative team and helping them discover their potential; and being in a role where soft skills are as important as technical skills. “I decided I definitely wanted to keep building,” she says.
Today, she and her Sonera Magnetics co-founder Dominic Labanowski are newly-minted Activate alumni with a freshly-inked investment deal, and a sharpened focus.
The co-founders are developing a magnetometer for brain-computer interface applications, and what they treasured most about the fellowship was the gift of time. Having two years to focus “gave me a lot of time to think about how I want to move out of the [fellowship] and bring our technology into existence,” says Deka. “It was time to think about how I wanted to build the company and how I wanted to build myself in a very deliberate way.”
During the fellowship Deka and Labanowski decided on a strategy that starts with focusing on consumer-facing products, but wanted to deploy that strategy with partners who also support their longer-term goal of applying their technology to neurodiagnostics. “So the time that the fellowship gave us meant we didn’t have to rush into a partnership with funders merely to obtain financial resources,” she says. “We ended up finding investors who I’m really excited about, because their values align with our values, and the company’s values.”
The Believer
Deka’s cohort peer Miguel Sierra Aznar, CEO of Noble Thermodynamics, had moved through a similar inflection point before plunging into his graduate studies. He was weighing a job offer from a major energy company against a more difficult--and less lucrative--path toward a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He took the academic path, with the longer-term goal of reaching for a tougher, arguably a monumental task: decarbonizing the electricity sector.
Aznar knew that an industry job would not have satisfied his ambition to forge a new path and fulfill his vision for a new, non-polluting approach to combustion—but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. He has struggled, both from personal losses and the toll that building a disruptive technology in the energy sector has taken on him. “The biggest qualities you need to foster are self-esteem and confidence. It’s not even always for yourself, it’s for convincing other people that your company has real potential,” he says.
A major shot of validation, however, came earlier this year. The Department of Energy and other institutions awarded Noble Thermodynamics a grant totalling $7.5 million in support of its Argon Power Cycle engine, which delivers emissions-free electricity from natural gas or hydrogen at an efficiency well above current power generation systems.
Winning the grant was “confirmation that my hard work is paying off, that our innovation has the potential to improve the way power is produced,” he says. “The DOE and other funders are saying ‘hey, we believe in what you are doing,’” he says.
For Aznar, the fellowship has acclimated him to constantly confronting new challenges—especially those related to the business, rather than technical, side of starting a company—as he works toward scaling up Noble’s technology out of the lab. “I love sitting at my desk and doing technical work—I’m really good at working on combustion stuff. But as a technical founder, you’re constantly outside your comfort zone, always asked to do new things outside of what you were trained for as scientists or engineers. It's a continuous learning process.”
The Activist
When they joined Cohort 2018, Jill Fuss and Steve Yannone had already committed to commercializing their work with heat- and acid-stable enzymes for industrial applications—they’d been bootstrapping CinderBio for six years and Yannone had left his research job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But joining the fellowship marked a distinct pivot for Fuss, when she left her LBNL job to become a full-time co-founder.
Fuss says she sometimes misses the freedom that research work offers. “There is something truly special about doing basic science and curiosity-based research that is really phenomenal. Plus, it drives so much innovation because you never know where it will lead,” she says.
“On the commercial side, you need to leave a lot of that behind. You don’t necessarily need to know why something works...just that it works.”
But for Fuss, entrepreneurship offers a more direct path to impact. “I was an activist before I was an entrepreneur and it took me becoming an entrepreneur before I realized that they’re really the same thing,” she says.
Fuss has taken direct action throughout her life, from launching her high school’s Earth Day celebration to starting a class at UC Berkeley called Life After Grad School to “let folks know there were paths they could do other than becoming professors,” she says. During her career as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Fuss advocated for backup care, lactation rooms, and paid parental leave as part of the Women Scientists and Engineers Council.
“I did those things because I recognized that institutions don’t just give us things, we have to ask for them,” she says. “It’s not malicious, it’s just that you have to do a little activism to bring it forward—it’s seeing a gap and saying this isn't right, I want to change it. It’s the same spirit that drives entrepreneurship: people saying ‘here is something that doesn't exist, I want to make it exist.’”
The Future
Fuss sees a throughline from the practical training she received through the fellowship curriculum to eventually selling CinderBio enzymes to the marketplace. “I think we’re now more sophisticated about what it takes to launch a product in the world because we’ve learned how to use real, tangible tools—things like techno economic analysis, and even basics like doing an operating budget,” says Fuss. “Other entrepreneurship programs I’ve done speak about tools in broad terms, but here we sat down and actually used them.”
Deka says she has been repeating the process of reflection on her path every few months “and that has helped me stay on track with what I feel like my overall goals are, how I want to live my life, and whether what I’m doing in my career lines up with that.” She’s enthusiastic about how Sonera Magnetics’ early work will inform its long-term goals. “We’re building a brain scanning system in a way that allows us to reach a really wide audience and have a lot of use cases,” she says.
Aznar is very busy building up the team at Noble Thermodynamics, fulfilling work on the DOE grant, and working on a path to market.
“I’m just excited to keep going,” he says.
Learn more about Cohort 2018: