I’m pretty sure I was invited to speak
today because my work at MIT for my PhD
and my work starting to silicon nano
technology companies is both interesting
important but I consider those
technologies to be just a small part of
the important lessons I’ve learned so
far on my career journey so I’ll tell
you about the two products from my
company but also at the end give you a
glimpse of what I consider some of the
more important lessons that I learned
along the way
so my first company was band gap
engineering and a band gap we developed
we were focused on solving the problem
that solar electricity in 2007 only
provided point two percent of
electricity generation in the world and
the reason why it was so small was solar
electricity was too expensive so the
team set out to fix that and what they
figured out was by nano texturing a
silicon surface they could improve the
efficiency of the solar cell so you
would get more power out under the same
sunlight conditions by nano texturing it
this really blew in the face of
conventional wisdom because one would
expect that texturing the surface would
increase the surface roughness and the
surface is very effective at combining
the carriers that absorb the sunlights
energy and releasing them into heat as
opposed to what you want to happen you
want the carriers to separate out and
create electrical current so one would
expect that more surface area would lead
to lower efficiency cells but what the
team found was that there are ways to
design the device such that the negative
effects of the Nano wires were minimized
and the positive effects were increased
and overall you got a significant
benefit by nano texturing the solar
cells so if you take two wafers and you
process them through that one through
the standard solar cell process and one
through the nanotechnology process the
nano solar cell would create
significantly more power when exposed to
sunlight so fast-forward ten years
and the price of solar cells have
dropped 10x so that means the solar
cells today cost us roughly 1/10 of what
they did in 2007 and as a direct result
of that now about 2.5 percent of
electricity is generated by solar cells
part of that drop in cost was due to the
fact that now 90% of the market uses
black silicon or nano textured solar
cells so the technology is called black
not because my last name is black but
because the surface looks very black
so my second company my current company
is a Vance silicon group an advanced
silicon group is using the same
nanotechnology that was used at event
band gap engineering but is also
applying it to biosensors and a lot of
the same material properties that make
it good for solar cells make it good for
biosensing so the process is very
inexpensive and solar this is
particularly important because you need
to cover football fields of areas of
solar panels to make a difference on the
electricity supply for biosensing it’s
important to have low cost because you
want people to use your sensor to more
often to make full use of it so this
process I showed you the wafer already
if you take a wafer and you put run our
process on it it costs less than five
cents to run the process and this
results in over a billion nano wires
on-site this on this wafer surface so
it’s very low cost in addition to being
low cost the process is controllable so
we can optimize it for different
applications and it also results in a
very large surface area to volume ratio
this is particularly important for
biosensing because what it means is that
you can detect very dilute quantities of
protein or DNA in a solution so there
are many applications to having a low
cost quantitative bio sensor one
application is applying it for cancer
diagnostics
so unfortunately statistics show that by
throughout our lifetime one in three of
us will have to deal with cancer but
there’s a lot of hope out there for
cancer treatment and a lot of that hope
resides in what’s known as targeted
treatment which targets specific
mutations and leaves the rest of the
cells alone the problem comes when
during the treatment period for a
patient that cancer mutates and the
mutated cells are no longer responsive
to the targeted treatment the doctors
often don’t know that the mutation has
occurred and at the end of the period of
the treatment period the patient’s
health continues to deteriorate at which
point the doctor sends the patients back
through a second biopsy and a second
round of treatment and unfortunately
that’s when the cost escalates and the
prognosis decreases it’d be so much
better if we can monitor the progress of
the treatment throughout the whole
treatment period and for example plot
the biomarkers indicate evoke answer and
watch them go down and ensure that there
aren’t other biomarkers of mutated
cancer going up and if there are the
doctor can alter the treatment plan and
improve patient outcome a lower cost
there’s other applications for low cost
diagnostics for example instead of just
stepping on a scale in the morning to
Midway yourself to get a sense of your
health what if we did a full-body scan
just by flushing the toilet so I’m very
proud of what bandgap accomplished and
reducing carbon emissions and lowering
solar prices and I’m very optimistic
about what a Vance silicon group is
doing and applying nanotech to improve
people’s health but that’s just part of
this story building a company is like
building a building and when you build a
building and you look at it what you see
is the facade and so the facade is what
the companies accomplished but what
gives the company its strength is its
infrastructure and there’s a lot of
infrastructure that’s required for a
successful company first and foremost is
the people of course she needs
stellar people and I’ve been very lucky
to always have wonderful people working
with me but in addition to the people
you need a good culture so that those
people can work together effectively so
for example full disclosure I’m pretty
good at coming up with ideas but not all
those ideas are always good ideas so
it’s important for me to work in a
culture where people are free to express
their opinion of the direction of the
company so in addition to the people in
the company it’s also important to have
a surrounding people helping you out so
I’ve been very lucky to have wonderful
mentors in my life that have helped me
throughout my career but in addition to
the mentors Boston where we’re located
is exceptionally good Innovation Center
where there’s a lot of resources for
entrepreneurs in this area and a lot of
entrepreneurs help each other out which
really contributes to everyone’s success
so all this is very important for
building a company but there’s one other
thing that I wanted to point out that
I’ve noticed has really helped my
companies and that’s having a very clear
vision that’s more important than the
company itself and in the case a bandgap
that vision was decreasing carbon
emissions from from non-renewable energy
sources and for a Vance silicon group
were focused on improving people’s
health so having that vision really
allows everyone to run to the same goal
and to really succeed at making that
goals possible so there’s a lot of
problems out there in the world that
need to be solved and we really need
everyone’s help to solve them so my
suggestion is to pick a problem that
you’re very passionate about and go
build your company [Applause]
today because my work at MIT for my PhD
and my work starting to silicon nano
technology companies is both interesting
important but I consider those
technologies to be just a small part of
the important lessons I’ve learned so
far on my career journey so I’ll tell
you about the two products from my
company but also at the end give you a
glimpse of what I consider some of the
more important lessons that I learned
along the way
so my first company was band gap
engineering and a band gap we developed
we were focused on solving the problem
that solar electricity in 2007 only
provided point two percent of
electricity generation in the world and
the reason why it was so small was solar
electricity was too expensive so the
team set out to fix that and what they
figured out was by nano texturing a
silicon surface they could improve the
efficiency of the solar cell so you
would get more power out under the same
sunlight conditions by nano texturing it
this really blew in the face of
conventional wisdom because one would
expect that texturing the surface would
increase the surface roughness and the
surface is very effective at combining
the carriers that absorb the sunlights
energy and releasing them into heat as
opposed to what you want to happen you
want the carriers to separate out and
create electrical current so one would
expect that more surface area would lead
to lower efficiency cells but what the
team found was that there are ways to
design the device such that the negative
effects of the Nano wires were minimized
and the positive effects were increased
and overall you got a significant
benefit by nano texturing the solar
cells so if you take two wafers and you
process them through that one through
the standard solar cell process and one
through the nanotechnology process the
nano solar cell would create
significantly more power when exposed to
sunlight so fast-forward ten years
and the price of solar cells have
dropped 10x so that means the solar
cells today cost us roughly 1/10 of what
they did in 2007 and as a direct result
of that now about 2.5 percent of
electricity is generated by solar cells
part of that drop in cost was due to the
fact that now 90% of the market uses
black silicon or nano textured solar
cells so the technology is called black
not because my last name is black but
because the surface looks very black
so my second company my current company
is a Vance silicon group an advanced
silicon group is using the same
nanotechnology that was used at event
band gap engineering but is also
applying it to biosensors and a lot of
the same material properties that make
it good for solar cells make it good for
biosensing so the process is very
inexpensive and solar this is
particularly important because you need
to cover football fields of areas of
solar panels to make a difference on the
electricity supply for biosensing it’s
important to have low cost because you
want people to use your sensor to more
often to make full use of it so this
process I showed you the wafer already
if you take a wafer and you put run our
process on it it costs less than five
cents to run the process and this
results in over a billion nano wires
on-site this on this wafer surface so
it’s very low cost in addition to being
low cost the process is controllable so
we can optimize it for different
applications and it also results in a
very large surface area to volume ratio
this is particularly important for
biosensing because what it means is that
you can detect very dilute quantities of
protein or DNA in a solution so there
are many applications to having a low
cost quantitative bio sensor one
application is applying it for cancer
diagnostics
so unfortunately statistics show that by
throughout our lifetime one in three of
us will have to deal with cancer but
there’s a lot of hope out there for
cancer treatment and a lot of that hope
resides in what’s known as targeted
treatment which targets specific
mutations and leaves the rest of the
cells alone the problem comes when
during the treatment period for a
patient that cancer mutates and the
mutated cells are no longer responsive
to the targeted treatment the doctors
often don’t know that the mutation has
occurred and at the end of the period of
the treatment period the patient’s
health continues to deteriorate at which
point the doctor sends the patients back
through a second biopsy and a second
round of treatment and unfortunately
that’s when the cost escalates and the
prognosis decreases it’d be so much
better if we can monitor the progress of
the treatment throughout the whole
treatment period and for example plot
the biomarkers indicate evoke answer and
watch them go down and ensure that there
aren’t other biomarkers of mutated
cancer going up and if there are the
doctor can alter the treatment plan and
improve patient outcome a lower cost
there’s other applications for low cost
diagnostics for example instead of just
stepping on a scale in the morning to
Midway yourself to get a sense of your
health what if we did a full-body scan
just by flushing the toilet so I’m very
proud of what bandgap accomplished and
reducing carbon emissions and lowering
solar prices and I’m very optimistic
about what a Vance silicon group is
doing and applying nanotech to improve
people’s health but that’s just part of
this story building a company is like
building a building and when you build a
building and you look at it what you see
is the facade and so the facade is what
the companies accomplished but what
gives the company its strength is its
infrastructure and there’s a lot of
infrastructure that’s required for a
successful company first and foremost is
the people of course she needs
stellar people and I’ve been very lucky
to always have wonderful people working
with me but in addition to the people
you need a good culture so that those
people can work together effectively so
for example full disclosure I’m pretty
good at coming up with ideas but not all
those ideas are always good ideas so
it’s important for me to work in a
culture where people are free to express
their opinion of the direction of the
company so in addition to the people in
the company it’s also important to have
a surrounding people helping you out so
I’ve been very lucky to have wonderful
mentors in my life that have helped me
throughout my career but in addition to
the mentors Boston where we’re located
is exceptionally good Innovation Center
where there’s a lot of resources for
entrepreneurs in this area and a lot of
entrepreneurs help each other out which
really contributes to everyone’s success
so all this is very important for
building a company but there’s one other
thing that I wanted to point out that
I’ve noticed has really helped my
companies and that’s having a very clear
vision that’s more important than the
company itself and in the case a bandgap
that vision was decreasing carbon
emissions from from non-renewable energy
sources and for a Vance silicon group
were focused on improving people’s
health so having that vision really
allows everyone to run to the same goal
and to really succeed at making that
goals possible so there’s a lot of
problems out there in the world that
need to be solved and we really need
everyone’s help to solve them so my
suggestion is to pick a problem that
you’re very passionate about and go
build your company [Applause]
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