Most Recent Newsletter Archives

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” — Jack Welch

Today’s itinerary:

A return to Detroit
Making plastic without fossil fuel
A takeoff for 3D metal-printing
AI to help match kidney donors
Fueling the Future
Name that Flyover City!

September 17, 2020

FLYOVER LEADERSHIP

Meet a startup leader from Detroit

Image courtesy of Assembler Labs

Assembler Labs is a Detroit startup studio that partners with founders to lead and spin out businesses, raise independent capital, and grow. To date, it has spun out three businesses: Equal Health, which creates employer direct primary care programs; Motion, which marries an online calendar with a task list; and Clearcut, which helps startups reach product/market fit faster.

Flyover Future talked with co-founder Ian Sefferman to learn more about the business and his own startup experience.

What’s your Michigan connection?

Sefferman: I’m a Midwesterner at heart, grew up in Detroit. Like many if not most people of my generation who went into technology, I started heading west pretty much immediately. I ended up first as an intern in 2005 in Seattle at Amazon.

How did you end up creating a startup?

Sefferman: At the beginning of 2009, the iPhone had come out, the App Store had just launched, Android was sort of this glimmer in the sky. I’ve always wanted to do a startup since I was like 12 years old. It felt like a really good time. I promptly made every mistake a first-time founder can possibly make. The only way I can explain it is we somehow survived long enough to figure it out.

That startup was MobileDevHQ, right?

Sefferman: We (and co-founder Patrick Haig) ended up building an enterprise stats product for mobile marketers. We invented a category that we called App Store optimization. It was sort of like SEO but for the App Store. We ended up being the fastest growing private company in the state of Washington. We grew that business to about $75 million in (annual recurring revenue) with about 350 employees over the next three years. We sold the business to another company in Seattle called Tune.

So why did you come back to Michigan and create a startup studio?

Sefferman: My wife and I had always had a dream to get back to Michigan. Patrick and I were thinking about what would be next. We started validating some new startup ideas. One after another, we invalidated those ideas. But in the process we learned that we loved the process of invalidating those ideas, of going zero to 1, getting punched in the face every single day.

What have you learned about Michigan entrepreneurs?

Sefferman: The talent in MI is unbelievable; I was really just blown away by it. But they simply didn’t have any startup experience. They were amazing engineers or incredible domain experts with lots of deep, deep knowledge but not a lot of understanding of how to work with a product and engineering team to build something from scratch.

How have things gone with Assembler Labs?

Sefferman: We’ve spun out now three businesses. We followed with financing for the two businesses that have been spun out for more than a couple of weeks. All in all, we’ve found great founders, and we really believe we can do this on a bigger scale.

Share this story!

FLYOVER U

Making plastic without fossil fuels?

Scientists at The Ohio State University have discovered a chemical process that could lead to a way to make plastics without using fossil fuels. The process involves metabolizing sulfur to cause bacteria to create ethylene, the source of plastics that typically comes from oil or natural gas.

Experts have known since the 60s that there’s a great future in plastics. And they’ve also known that bacteria can create ethylene when combined with oxygen. But there’s one little problem: Oxygen combined with ethylene tends to blow everything around it to smithereens. The newly discovered bacteria trick makes it easy and safe.

Share this story!

Runway mat, heal thyself!

Among the questions we are about to answer are: Air Force jets land on mats? And those mats are made of metal? And they can be printed? And they can reconfigure themselves? The answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes. An Indiana company has landed a $1 million grant to develop 3D printing tech for a runway mat for the U.S. Air Force.

A Purdue University engineering professor named Pablo Zavattieri is working with the Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies, known as ITAMCO, to develop the 3D metal-printing tech. A mat is great for planes to land on because it keeps debris on the runway from getting in the way.

But that’s not even the crazy part. The crazy part is that the ITAMCO mats can change from one stable configuration to another one and back again. The tech uses a material called Phase Transforming Cellular Material. That means the mats have a longer life span because the runway mat "could potentially heal itself,” Zavattieri said.

Share this story!

Kidney transplant network to get boost from AI

Here’s a brilliant application for artificial intelligence: streamlining the way doctors match people who need kidney transplants with donor kidneys. Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology are deploying AI to improve the kidney transplant network to speed up the system and improve patient outcomes.

The Missouri S&T team is working with transplant experts at Saint Louis University Hospital to get a handle on the massive amounts of data involved with kidney transplants. It’s a big challenge because tens of thousands of people are always waiting for a kidney and matches aren’t always easy to make.

The research is still in an early stage, but a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation is getting the ball rolling toward finding the optimal data architecture for an AI model.

Share this story!

FUELING THE FUTURE

Elevate Nexus, a program launched by Indy’s Elevate Ventures to provide “resources and thought leadership” to higher-education institutions, communities, and entrepreneurs in Indiana, has awarded $164,000 in grants to 19 organizations.

Construction tech startup MSUITE, based in Cedar Rapids, has announced completion of a $4 million seed funding round led by Next Level Ventures and Stanley Ventures, with participation by tech consultant U.S. CAD. MSUITE.

T3D Therapeutics has received a $740,000 grant from the Alzheimer’s Association and its partner Bill Gates. The RTP life science startup is working on a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and has developed a drug candidate that’s expected to begin a Phase 2 clinical trial next year.

Aspinity has announced that it has raised $5.3 million in Series A funding. The Pittsburgh company has developed analog integrated circuitry that can significantly reduce the power requirements for always-on sensing applications.

Nodis, headquartered in Columbus, has closed a $500K Pre Series A funding round. The round was led by IDG Capital, with participation by Get2Volume. Nodis expects to raise Series A funds by the end of 2020.

Share this story!

NAME THAT FLYOVER CITY!

It's time for our favorite trivia game!

Test your Flyover geographic knowledge with these three "stumpers." There are no prizes (except for bragging rights).

The first ever shopping cart was invented in this city in 1937.
In the early 20th century, this city was controlled by political boss Tom Pendergast.
Although British-American Benjamin Henry Latrobe's major work was overseeing construction of the United States Capitol, one of his best surviving domestic designs is located in this city.