Raymond Weitekamp Can’t Stop Inventing

Raymond Weitekamp’s 3D printing startup, polySpectra, is doing really well. The startup is making durable, light-weight products and components for industries ranging from healthcare to aerospace, and has an impressive list of Fortune 500 and government customers. And yet Ray, who was part of our inaugural cohort of fellows (2015-2017), is frustrated.

The problem is not his success, but the hefty non-disclosure agreements under which those ground-breaking products will reside for many years. That secrecy is making it difficult for polySpectra to achieve its mission. Here’s how Ray explains it:

“PolySpectra is four and half years old, we’ve done cool projects, and we have an amazing capability but all of our projects are locked away under NDA,” he says. “We have this tool and want to be able to offer it to the world and explain to people how useful it is. But I’m not allowed to share any examples.

A part for a polySpectra client, covered by an NDA.

And the only people who’ve been able to come visit the lab and see what we do are all VIPs. Bill Gates got a lab tour. Former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, he got a lab tour. That stuff was fun and exciting, but our founding mission was, and is, to create engineering-grade materials for additive manufacturing that are going to help designers, inventors, and engineers make their ideas real.”

Ray is a mission-driven founder who also has an insatiable appetite for creative outlets, and he’s using that drive to turn a couple of long-simmering projects—which at first blush seem tangential to his day job as CEO—into pathways for polySpectra to reorient around its founding mission.

The Make It Real Challenge
In August, polySpectra partnered with Wevolver, a community for and about knowledge-sharing among engineers, to launch the Make It Real 3D Printing Challenge. Anyone with an idea for a product, part, or concept, was encouraged to submit their idea, along with an STL file (essentially a blueprint for a stereolithographic printer) for a chance to win $25,000 worth of printing services from polySpectra. The eleven finalists pulled from the dozens of entries included parts for a sun-tracking robot for optimizing photovoltaic energy systems, a component for a wound treatment system from a NASA astronaut, Yvonne Cagle (who “got her IP back from NASA,” explains Ray), as well as a 15-year-old’s plans for a brain-controlled prosthetic limb (no kidding...and he was one of two 15-year-old entrants). 

“We want people with the best ideas to have access to our technology,” Ray says, in explaining why polySpectra co-launched the contest. PolySpectra printed the finalists’ designs and then iterated with them on tweaks that would make them more scalable. The goal is to use the technology to create the final products or components that entrants proposed, not prototypes of them, he says.

A few of the Make It Real inventors.

“Inventors need well-defined tools that can render their idea in a durable format that can then be the product instead of just being the thing that looks like their product [ a prototype],” he says.

Invent.FM
Earlier this month, Ray announced the winner of the Make It Real Challenge on Invent.FM, another project that he launched this year. “Inventors need tools, but they also need inspiration,” he explains. “And they need examples of other things [that folks have made] that are similar enough to what they’re doing to see that it’s possible.”

Thus far, Invent.FM consists of video podcasts. But Ray’s longer-term vision is to use Invent.FM as a platform and community for inspiring and connecting people pursuing their ideas that they believe can be made real.

Ray and Invent.FM guest Danielle Applestone

“We want to provide information and education, even on topics such as building a diverse team and entrepreneurship in deep tech,” he says. “Designers, inventors, engineers...they all create new physical things and the change we seek to make is to make invention easier, to democratize it. We’re not the heroes of the story, the customer is.”

To date, the Invent.FM video podcasts guests have included Danielle Applestone—who served as an executive in residence for Activate in 2018 before launching Daughters of Rosie—discussing her mission to address inequality in the workplace, and Anamaria Nino-Murcia, an executive coach who works with inventors-turned-startup-founders.

“I can see how in the first couple episodes, it might not be clear how Invent.FM is supportive of polySpectra, but it’s very much brand marketing,” he says.

Assembling the Components
Another project that predates both the Make It Real contest and Invent.FM is PhD to CEO, a resource to help scientists and engineers transform into entrepreneurs and leaders. If that sounds familiar to Activate’s mission...it is. But Ray says PhD to CEO isn’t something he plans to scale in service of polySpectra. Rather, it’s a side project that will remain just that.

“PhD to CEO is just my voice, and I am not interested in having investors or sponsors. But, he says, launching PhD to CEO—which offers guidance on the transition from academia to the private sector and even a webinar on how to apply for the Activate Fellowship—taught Ray a lot of skills he is now applying to Invent.FM, from digital marketing to copywriting.

“Something that’s become a mantra for our team, as we’ve grown, is ‘we have something awesome and it doesn’t matter unless people can see and capture the value from it,’” he says. “We’re ready to start telling a bigger story and getting out there, and it’s all connected back to this mission to support inventors.”