Finding a less noxious way to sterilize medical devices is the goal of CL Tian, winner as MedTech Innovator ’22. She founded Phiex to commercialize a sterilant that allows devices to sterilize themselves in the presence of light. Industry is listening to this compelling founder.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces CL Tian
What Problem Phiex is Solving
"... The moat is how do you deliver it without using capital equipment, with plastic packaging material as the delivery system, and how do you deliver it when it's activated by light? Our materials, once they see ambient light, start to release a sterilant..."
“... I don't think I mentioned, but the amount of devices that are sterilized with this cancer-causing technology's half of the industry. That's 20 billion devices in the US a year. There's no alternative for most of those devices…”
CL Tian's Background
How CL Tian Came to the Issue of Sterilization
Message to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “A Better Way to Sterilize”
Guest: CL Tian
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty for its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups, which I'm involved, including a startup, came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces CL Tian
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversation with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we are very privileged to have with us a founder. Her name is CL Tian. Welcome, CL.
CL Tian: Thanks, Sal. Super excited to be here.
Sal Daher: For the transcriber, she goes by C-L. Tian is T-I-A-N, as in Nancy. She is the founder of a company called Phiex, P-H-I-E-X, and was introduced to me by my very good friend, Lila Kung, who is a listener to this podcast, an angel investor. She saw CL pitch at TBD Angels and was very impressed. Said, "You got to talk to her. She's just tremendous, and she's working in an area that's really important." Shout out to Lila Kung. CL, tell us what problem Phiex is solving.
What Problem Phiex is Solving
CL Tian: We are very excited about what we're working on, but if we zoom out a little bit to include all the listeners, imagine your loved one is going in for important surgery. As you can probably imagine, you'd want those devices that are used, those tools used during surgery, the catheters, whatnot, to be sterile before they are used. There's a sterilization process that happens, too, that is used with all medical devices prior to arriving at the hospital. This is not resterilization, but you want them sterile.
It just so happens that half of all devices are sterilized with one gas, and have been for decades, called ethylene oxide. Ethylene oxide, the EPA discovered in 2016 was a really impactful human carcinogen. The impact of all this and what that means is we have a multi-billion dollar medical device industry reliant on a technology that causes cancer in local communities, so since 2019, plants have shut down.
The EPA has come out this year and said about a quarter of all sterilization plants in the US flagging them as high cancer risk, and you have a major lawsuit that came out in September, $363 million, a verdict against one of the major suppliers. On the one hand, you have scared families in the local communities, and on the other, you have a whole industry that supports the health and well-being of our nation, and they're on a crash course.
What we do is we enable the manufacturing and sterilization of medical devices and replace this cancer-causing technology.
Sal Daher: Fascinating. How is it that you are replacing? Would you say the name of the chemical again?
CL Tian: Sure. We're replacing ethylene oxide or EO. It's a colorless gas that is a human carcinogen.
Sal Daher: Please explain self-sterilizing.
CL Tian: Self-sterilizing materials, a loaded word. Let me unpack that a bit. You obviously need a chemical sterilant to make these medical devices. We're replacing one chemical sterilant that's a carcinogen with one that is safe. What we do differently is we actually can deliver that sterilant with packaging material as delivery system, rather than what's currently being used, think large chambers, machines, big box machines.
What that means is now when you make medical devices, for the first time, a manufacturer can make it in the line where they're manufactured without capital equipment, and it's safe, and the sterilant is recognized by the FDA for medical device sterilization and been in use for about a hundred years in this country and around the world for its safety. EPA likes it as well, which is hugely important for the future of this industry.
Sal Daher: Okay. What is your moat, so to speak, your intellectual property in this sterilant?
"... The moat is how do you deliver it without using capital equipment, with plastic packaging material as the delivery system, and how do you deliver it when it's activated by light? Our materials, once they see ambient light, start to release a sterilant..."
CL Tian: Sure. The sterilant we produce has been around for years, which is great. It's not an unknown entity. We know it doesn't cause cancer. We know that it's safe enough to use in drinking water, produce, mouthwash, et cetera. The moat is how do you deliver it without using capital equipment, with plastic packaging material as the delivery system, and how do you deliver it when it's activated by light? Our materials, once they see ambient light, start to release a sterilant.
Sal Daher: What is the sterilant?
CL Tian: The sterilant is a high-purity dry chlorine dioxide gas.
Sal Daher: Chlorine dioxide gas, so one chlorine atom, two atoms of oxygen.
CL Tian: Exactly.
Sal Daher: In the presence of light, it ionizes, it becomes active.
CL Tian: The precursor chemistry that we include in the packaging, in the presence of ambient light reacts and releases chlorine dioxide.
Sal Daher: It releases the chlorine dioxide.
CL Tian: Because chlorine dioxide has been around for a long time, as I mentioned, we know a lot about it as a chemistry. The reason why it hasn't been used to solve this problem of medical device manufacturing is, previously, there was never a big enough stick, first of all, for the industry to change the supply chain. It's canon. Don't change the supply chain. Don't make any changes if it works.
Sal Daher: No, of course not. Tremendously expensive to change the supply chain, so if it's working, why mess with success?
CL Tian: Exactly. Unfortunately, we're in a position where the EPA is coming in and notifying the communities that there's a cancer risk, which we've seen the numbers. It would suggest that there is a very strong linkage. Then the lawsuits come in because that's part of the nature of what drives industry in America, is the ability to protect people.
Sal Daher: What is the innovation here that caused you to be the global winner of MedTech Innovator 2022? I should have mentioned that, that Phiex has been awarded global winner MedTech Innovator for 2022. Is it in the manufacturing process, where's the innovation, and is it patented, or is it protected by trade secrets?
CL Tian: Sure. We were very excited to be voted by a room of hundreds of medical device executives and leaders as the top one out of a global over a thousand companies.
Sal Daher: Hot dog.
CL Tian: Yes, we're very excited for the opportunity. Even more so, we are excited to be engaged in a conversation with the very folks we need to work with to solve this problem because actually, the reason I believe there's so much excitement behind this is the infrastructure of an entire industry is at risk right now. It was in the mouth of every CEO at that conference of major publicly traded medical device companies. If you can't sterilize medical devices, you cannot sell them to the hospitals.
Sal Daher: It's scary. It's like a problem with antibiotics, bacteria development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and not having enough new antibiotics. A lot of it has to do with misuse, but a lot of it also has to do with economic incentives and so forth, so this is that kind of an iceberg just under the surface of the water that's about the hit the Titanic.
CL Tian: Exactly. It already started. We had a preview of what would happen in 2019. Outside of Chicago, they found 10 times higher than expected cancer rates in local communities outside of a plant and ended up shutting down that plant. What had happened is it sent the entire industry in disarray. Every company from the smallest all the way to the largest names that we know were impacted. That was one plant. Now we have about a quarter of the entire industry in the crosshairs.
Sal Daher: Explain again the moat to prevent competitors from just copying your innovation. Is it trade secret? Is it patents?
CL Tian: The answer to this is, yes, all of the above.
Sal Daher: All of the above, okay.
“... I don't think I mentioned, but the amount of devices that are sterilized with this cancer-causing technology's half of the industry. That's 20 billion devices in the US a year. There's no alternative for most of those devices…”
CL Tian: It's not an inconsequential thing to generate chlorine dioxide gas at the purity levels we are so that they can be used with medical devices. In fact, the highest barrier for sterilization, I would say, is probably medical device, because not only do you have to achieve the kill rate, but it has to be compatible in terms of residuals or lack thereof for the body. It can't impact the materials for a long period of time, so in 2020, when we were launching, the world came to know about sterilization, disinfection, sanitation.
At the beginning, we often got asked, "What about these other technologies? Can't they be used?" The reality is the challenge is so high. Not only is it a chemistry compatibility material science issue, but it's also a logistics supply chain scalability problem. I don't think I mentioned, but the amount of devices that are sterilized with this cancer-causing technology's half of the industry. That's 20 billion devices in the US a year. There's no alternative for most of those devices.
Sal Daher: What is the competitive landscape? What are the other possible technologies that you've seen out there that could compete with yours?
CL Tian: We have a different view of the market. First of all, we see the market for providing the status quo ethylene oxide sterilization rapidly collapsing. There's been talks behind the scenes of senior leadership that the future of EO in the US is that there won't be one. It's only a matter of time. There's no one modality that can absorb 20 billion devices all at once.
In terms of there are other radiation, gamma radiation is one of the status quo sterilization modalities. Unfortunately, it just destroys polymers, destroys electronics. We cannot radiate those. That precludes a large number of devices. I'm sure you hear founders all the time pitching, "Oh, there's no competition." I won't go so far as to say, there's no other technologies that could solve a piece of this problem. I think the larger problem is how companies are trying to solve this is to put a different gas in the same third-party chamber offsite.
Sal Daher: What you're saying is there're gazillion solutions because they're really a gazillion problems, but one aspect of this is that wherever it is currently being solved with the release of a gas that kills bacteria, then maybe this has a chance to work there because it's a gas that's not carcinogenic?
CL Tian: That's the lowest barrier. There's vaporized hydrogen peroxide, nitrogen dioxide, chlorine dioxide. There's many sterilants out there that are known to kill bacteria. The problem is most of these will damage or not penetrate medical devices. Now you have the second layer. You cannot ask an entire industry to redevelop materials and devices based off of a new sterilization technology.
Sal Daher: What you're saying is your approach, your sterilant, and your design is one that you think has a pretty good chance of getting wide adoption because it conforms to the existing supply chain and workflows more closely than the potential competitors?
CL Tian: The exciting thing about our technology, and I don't say exciting like we are the only ones excited about it.
Sal Daher: Obviously, a thousand of these people in the room voting, that indicates that you're working on something.
CL Tian: Yes, they're excited because, one, is very compatible with devices currently sterilized with the cancer-causing status quo. Second, it actually quite disrupts the current workflow, but it disrupts it in a way that is more efficient for our industry. Longstanding, if you ask anyone in medical device, there's no love lost for sterilization because it always involves sending it out to a third-party facility, there's time lags, so we enable a medical device maker to sterilize where and when they manufacture, so now they have the control.
From the time savings, it's cost savings, and from their standpoint, it's a huge de-risking of their supply chain.
Sal Daher: It's built into the material, and all they have to do to activate it when it's in the wrapper, irradiate it, expose it to-
CL Tian: Ambient light. Exactly.
Sal Daher: Is it in the wrapping? Do they do it before wrapping? You probably don't -- That has to be worked out.
CL Tian: We're actually revenue-generating. We are working and implementing this with customers.
Sal Daher: Revenue. Oh, my.
CL Tian: Yes.
Sal Daher: That's really exciting.
CL Tian: It is very exciting. We have spent nothing on sales and marketing, and everything has been inbound and word of mouth. Half of our customers are publicly traded large major strategics.
Sal Daher: You have proof of concept projects with them, or what's the scale of your collaborations at present?
CL Tian: Sure. They're looking at starting to use this in commercially sold product next year.
Sal Daher: Wow. Already?
CL Tian: Yes.
Sal Daher: You're cooking with gas here, CL.
CL Tian: Indeed.
Sal Daher: That's why Lila was so excited.
CL Tian: Yes.
Sal Daher: She spent decades. She's got an amazing brain, my friend Lila Kung. What she did for Ericsson, she's the person they agreed on an acquisition, and she's the person that implemented the acquisition. There's nothing more complex. It's like brain surgery, putting together an acquisition of a company for Ericsson, the big telecom giant. She's always sending me note, "Oh, look at this development or that development." Shout out to Lila. I'd love to have Lila on the podcast, but she's a little bit shy. She'll chuckle at this.
[chuckles]
Anyway, you have traction, so you think you're basically going to be in production next year?
CL Tian: We've been manufacturing this year. Our partners are taking us to thousands of pounds per run of manufacturing starting next year. Right now, our customers, we have very clear timelines for having them file with the FDA to include the use of our technology in their products and also for the anticipated commercial use of our technology in their products.
Sal Daher: That is very, very impressive. Very impressive.
CL Tian: Thank you.
Sal Daher: Let's encapsulate this here. You have a sterilant. Now the existing most commonly used sterilant has been determined to be a carcinogen. There are places where production facilities have been shut down, there've been localized outbreaks of cancer that's attributed to this sterilant, ethylene oxide, so its days are numbered. The industry recognizes that. A room full of a thousand people in the industry confirmed that by voting you global winner in MedTech Innovator '22.
You have been working on a solution which is chlorine dioxide, which is a gas. The precursors are included in the material that the manufacturer of the particular medical device or medical part is going to be producing. Then the sterilization is triggered by exposure to ambient light, no radiation. A frequent use for sterilization is exposure to radiation, but that can destroy various types of materials. There are all kinds of problems. This is benign in that respect, but it kills bugs, but it doesn't destroy other types of material.
You are, right now, talking to several major players and expect your product to be in production next year. This is really exciting.
CL Tian: We're in a very fortunate place. Strong tailwinds.
Sal Daher: We talked about the startup, where you are, the problem you're solving. I thought the second half of the conversation, we could get into your professional and entrepreneurial journey, how you got to this point of starting a company. A person as talented as you could very easily just have an executive position in industry and earn very well and not have any sleepless nights or very few sleepless nights compared to what you have now.
I want to ask you about that coming up, but first, I want to ask the listeners to this podcast, if you're finding this conversation interesting, you can help promote it. The best way to do that is first to follow us on your podcasting app. The other thing you can do is to leave a written review, a rating. We love five-star ratings. The written review, you can be really candid. You can say things like, "Oh, geez, Sal cut off his guest just at the moment she was about to say something interesting, and he cut her off, and he said something stupid."
You can say all of that, but give us a five-star rating because that helps us with the algorithm. We're all playing with the algorithm to get this podcast heard by more people who are thinking of starting companies, by angels who might support a company like Phiex, and founders like CL Tian. Please do that, and follow us, rate us, and leave a written review.
Let's talk about-- I see that you studied in Wellesley College. You studied in Waseda University in Tokyo. How did that happen? Were you born in the US? When did you come to the US?
CL Tian's Background
CL Tian: Like yourself, I immigrated over, or as I like to joke, I was imported over at the age of five from China and grew up in Delaware. Both my folks were chemists, so DuPont and some of the chemical companies in the area. Came up to school and thought I'd do a couple years here working, and then I go to grad school like everyone else did.
Sal Daher: Then go to DuPont, go work at DuPont and chemistry.
CL Tian: Oh, goodness, I was an artist, actually. I was an artist. I was very interested in the humanities, and I was dead set on doing nothing related to chemistry.
Sal Daher: [chuckles] This is a little bit like John Adams. I think he used to write about he was waging war and fighting a war so that his children could live in a peaceful place and build things, so his grandchildren could be artists. You do the rough stuff so that your children and grandchildren get to do more and more refined and abstracted things. Parents chemists, and you became an artist. How did you go wrong?
CL Tian: [laughs]
Sal Daher: How did you end up doing this most practical of things?
CL Tian: It's a funny story because looking back, it somewhat makes sense, but from backwards forward, it just seems very, I had very different experiences. Right out of school, I was contending with, "How do I make the biggest impact?" I graduated with a degree in East Asian studies, studied in Tokyo, and the options on the table that were attractive to me were be a practitioner of some sort, go into policy, or become an academic.
I had this life-changing experience when I went to Japan, and I was there when the nuclear reactors blew as those experiences often cause a shift in how I perceive the world. I realized that I'm not guaranteed another moment. I suppose that sounds very cheesy, live for the present, but I could feel it in my bones. When I came back, I knew that what I wanted was to start a business to not only make an impact but to provide a future for my future family that allowed me the time and flexibility.
Sal Daher: That sense of urgency is present with a lot of immigrant founders. On one side, they realize the possibilities that exist in America where you're a little bit like Superman. You come from Krypton where gravity's very high, and here you have a lot less gravity. You can jump over buildings in a single bound than never thought about atrophy.
[laughter]
Superman might have atrophy from living in a low-gravity environment. At the same time, you had this experience with the Fukushima plant melting down. Actually, they released some chemical -- guess it was flooded. That broke your perception that the world was benign and so forth, and the terrible things can happen, and that we know not the day nor the hour that the end is upon us. Time is short. We'd better get our act together. That's what motivated you, and you started thinking about entrepreneurship at that moment?
CL Tian: I decided I wanted to start a business. Mind you, I took no business classes in college. I was quite shy and quiet, and I had no network. All I had, I was very keen and very stuck on the idea that I would start a business. I think as I've discovered over the course of the past 10-plus years of being an entrepreneur is as long as you're persistent enough, eventually, the world bends to your view and what you want to have happen.
I launched my first business at 24. We started as a marketing agency, and in the later years, we expanded to essentially commercialize novel technologies and services. I was the one calling folks, signing deals for technologies and services not yet completed for needs that they didn't know they needed.
Sal Daher: What a great training ground for what you're doing now. Your work in being a consultant and helping technology companies license their technology and so forth, it's like training ground for you in what you're doing now. I'm seeing a parallel here between what you're doing and another company that pitched at TBD Angels, AOA Diagnostics, AOA DX.
CL Tian: I love them. Oriana.
Sal Daher: Oriana Papin-Zoghbi, yes. She had a team that came from the pharma background. She wasn't a scientist, but she was familiar with that, an executive. She had this whole background, and she had the luxury of going out and looking for the diagnostic. What they're doing is a diagnostic for ovarian cancer, which is a terrible killer. Most ovarian cancers detected at Stage 4. By the time it's too late to do anything, it's confused with other-- It's a horrible thing.
If there could be an early diagnostic for ovarian cancer, it would be a huge breakthrough. She found an academic in Canada who had technology that looks very promising, and that's what she's developing. She had the luxury. She wasn't, happened so many times, an academic was tied to his or her work. It was like she had a luxury of choosing. Tell me about your process. How did you cotton onto this problem?
How CL Tian Came to the Issue of Sterilization
CL Tian: Sure. It's different type of story than I'm sure you've typically seen. Oriana is great. We were actually co-working together earlier this week. A wonderful local community here we have in Boston. What I was doing, Sal, at the company with a small team was we would have really smart inventors, scientists, innovators come and say, "I have this technology, and I need some more traction to either commercialize or raise the next round of capital."
I really got to cut my teeth on is this legitimate, and what process do we run to determine if it's a legitimate technology, whether this is a six-month to a year process, or it's going to be 10 years and $100 million. I worked with the former category. Early 2020, I got referred a client who happened to previously oversee global R&D for Baxter Healthcare, a major medical device maker in his previous life, and set up biomaterials program at DuPont incidentally.
He said, "I have this self-sterilizing materials program technology. What do you think about using it for a COVID application in China?" I almost turned it down, to be honest, because, as I said earlier, I was very keen to not be doing what my parents had done, but I looked at the opportunity and said, "If I can make a difference, I will do it."
We started in China, got a lot of interest from the Chinese FDA from strategic partners, and then the cases started to tick up at Boston. I remember calling him and saying, "We are not going to have any opportunity if we don't try and help with this pandemic that is unfolding." As we were running our process, speaking to folks in healthcare, I was blown away.
In all my years of doing business development as a service, I'd never seen the response that I got from the medical device industry, which is overwhelmingly, the strategics we talked to said, "Yes. Sure, we think it could be used for COVID containment. However, we might not be able to make devices in a couple years because of this problem."
Sal Daher: Oh, they explained to you that the problem wasn't COVID. It's this longer-term thing that was going on even before COVID, is the carcinogen?
CL Tian: Exactly. They were, obviously, very involved with the COVID response as a nation and galvanized for it. However, they said, "We think that this technology, or do you think this technology could be applied for medical device sterilization because really, no one is solving it." It's a highly specialized problem, it's a very high barrier to solving, and it's also a huge market opportunity, but you have to understand the industry innately to do that.
Sal Daher: Okay, market discovery. You had an inventor who had a theory. He had an original theory which this could be helpful for sterilization with COVID, and because you had contacts in industry and so forth, you started talking to people in the industry, you said, "Not really. That's not the area that's of interest. It's more sterilizing devices for everything. It's not just for COVID. Because the current sterilant is sunset-
CL Tian: Exactly.
Sal Daher: -we can't continue to use it." Fascinating. It reminds me, I'm on the board of a company called Savran Technologies, and they had a particular use case that they had developed, and when they started talking to strategic players, the strategic players, "Oh, it's very nice. It's very impressive." After that time, they had a paper published, and they saw very impressive results, that their technology was made a significant improvement in the ability to predict recurrence of terrible cancer and so forth.
They said, "Wait a second, but can we use your technology for capturing another type of rare cell which is a real interest for us?" This is the kind of learning that founders and inventors do when they actually interact with strategics. It's extremely important to have those early interactions with strategics, and not just start building castles in the sky, sandcastles, that are going to be eroded by the first wave that comes in because it's not based on real demand.
It's very hard for you sitting in a lab to know what there is going to be demand for in industry. This is a great story. Your background prepared you because you'd seen a lot of these inventions, and you'd worked with licensing them and so forth. You had contacts in industry with the strategic players. This is excellent way of discovering a technology that's promising.
CL Tian: Yes. Actually, I had no contacts in the industry, but over the years of running the business at my previous company, I learned how to quickly spin up trusted contacts in an industry in a real authentic way. Also, it was just when I looked at this problem, because at the time, he was still a client of the companies.
I said, "There are two things that are going to happen." I asked myself, "If I was living within this local community, where I just found out there was a plant emitting much higher rates than acceptable, how would I feel? Would I move my family knowingly close to that facility?" The answer was no. Having come up with chemists for parents, I can appreciate that sometimes, many times, we can use noxious chemicals, dangerous chemicals very safely and responsibly.
However, emotionally, we've already lost this battle. Then the second piece is the legal system, as you know, set up in America such that we can sue, and regulation might move slowly, but lawsuits do not.
Sal Daher: This is really tremendous. This makes me think, I've just a personal story here. I had an uncle, very dear to me, Uncle Sebastian. He was a brother to my mother so was just the delightful person who was a surgeon, buco-maxilo. He was a jaw surgeon, mouth surgeon, and he was a very fastidious guy. He was an excellent story -- a very funny guy. He was always a little bit sickly. He was very skinny, very thin, and so on. He was very fastidious and very clean, and everything is clean, and disinfecting his hands and all that stuff.
The poor guy, this is what being in a third-world country is like, he was in his little Renault Dauphine, like a little Renault 5. It looks like a car, but it's actually a toy. In Brazil, they used to joke that the axle is actually a big rubber band. It doesn't have an axle, that the wheels are held together with rubber band.
CL Tian: That's so funny.
Sal Daher: It's so funny. He was in an accident with that thing. He was hit by a truck and just thrown off the road, and he was rescued by luck. His headlight was pointing up and so on. They rescued him and took him to a local hospital, where he was operated on. He had a compound fracture in his leg, and they hadn't autoclaved the surgical tools in this little local hospital he was operated on, and he got a terrible case of hepatitis from that. His life was never the same again after that.
This most fastidious careful person in the world, a surgeon, a very observant of all the rules, and he himself was victimized by the fact that the system just didn't exist for sterilizing the surgical tools at the time. Later on, he died from this because he had a horrible hemorrhage caused by his hepatitis. His liver just burst, basically, and he died at age 38.
CL Tian: Oh, man.
Sal Daher: These affections, we are so lucky today to be in a world where these things can be controlled. In America, we're a developed world, very high standards and so forth, but we're just a few steps away from falling back because antibiotics might become ineffective, or a sterilant that's widely used, if you don't have that sterilant, they can cause cancer from the production phase of it in the local community, then you might have infections from surgeries.
CL Tian: You won't have any devices for those surgeries.
Sal Daher: True. Our wonderful life that we have, it's contingent, and a lot of things working well. I'm very happy to hear that we have entrepreneurs, like you, that are working really hard to come up with a next generation of sterilant. This just works in an amazing way. I just like the elegance of it, that it's contained in the material, and then exposure to ambient light releases the sterilant gas, and then it clears, and it's not a carcinogenic gas.
I'm sure it's not something what a breathe, might burn your nostrils or something, or your respiratory tract. It dissipates, but it doesn't cause further harm. This is a little bit like the AOA model of looking for, seeing a technology that is really compelling, and then interacting with strategics to see that there is demand for it. Very, very impressed with the work that you've done.
CL Tian, founder of Phiex, we've discussed the problem you're solving, how you're solving it, how far along you have, then we talked about your entrepreneurial journey, how you got to this, didn't want to be a chemist, you wanted to be an artist, you wanted to be a humanities person, and then here you are, saving humanity with the technology.
Is there anything at this point that you'd like to address to our audience that we haven't touched on of founders, people who are thinking about founding companies, of angel investors?
Message to the Audience
CL Tian: Sure. First of all, I just want to pay my thanks to the Boston startup ecosystem. When we decided to launch this at the beginning of Q2 2020, everyone thought we were insane. First of all, it's the pandemic. Second of all -- that just started. Second of all, you don't change supply chain. Now, two years later, everyone's saying, "Oh, your timing's impeccable. You guys are so smart. How do you know?"
The difference between April and now has been the community. First of all, thank you to TBD Angels for your continued support of Phiex, the greater community in Boston, and I think to founders. We talk about community being important, but actually, community's everything. It's the ones that put us in touch with our customers, our investors, and the fellow founders that we've come up together and learn from each other. Just very grateful to be part of this ecosystem.
Sal Daher: We human beings are very vain. We think we are so much smarter than ants, but we have to remember that each one of us is operating with just 8K of operating memory. We're capable of amazing things, but we need to focus on the right things and to be directed in that by interaction with other human beings who are also operating at 8K. We're all these human beings, we're tremendously capable of doing amazing things.
We have tremendous capacity of our brain, but it's coming in through that little keyhole of 8K of attention that we have at any given moment. Community is tremendously important, keeping us sane but also helping us understand what's important and what will work and what doesn't. Human beings cannot do anything on their own. This is a very important lesson for founders.
Founders have to be people doing or venturing where nobody has gone before, but they have to remember that they have to, at the same time, seek the support of others because the founders that are able to do that succeed much better. Since we're talking about that, do you want to talk a little bit about your team that you're working with and how your team came together?
CL Tian: Sure. I'm so grateful that we have such an amazing team. I called my client back in April and said, "Hey, listen, we've got to do this as a business." End of April, we incorporated, launched, I exited my previous company to partner and went full-time with Phiex. My CTO and inventor of the technology is the former head of global R&D for Baxter, was a CTO for Fortune 50. He's a material scientist by training. Really brilliant.
Sal Daher: Please give us his name and spell it.
CL Tian: Sumner, S-U-M-N-E-R, Barenberg, B-A-R-E-N-B-E-R-G.
Sal Daher: Sumner Barenberg. Sounds like the name of a chemist.
CL Tian: Yes.
[laughter]
Then our COO, Bob Robert Cameron, C-A-M-E-R-O-N, he has a corporate background, originally microbiologist by training, and oversaw manufacturing on five continents for Fortune 50, headed up regulatory. As we are a small and nimble team, right now, we have a CFO that's really helping us scale the business.
Sal Daher: Is that a full-time CFO or part-time CFO?
CL Tian: Part-time.
Sal Daher: Part-time. That makes sense for a company at your stage. Very good.
CL Tian: We're just very grateful to all of our manufacturing partners and testing partners. It's been a really great ecosystem that has helped us scale as quickly as we have.
Sal Daher: You're talking about how collaborative the Boston ecosystem is. The original pilgrims here, that comes from them, that ethos of collaboration because they were a little bit standoffish and a little bit snobbish. There's a bit of that in Boston also. Boston's not a fuzzy huggy place like California. California's much more open and so on. Boston's a little bit more standoffish and so forth, flinty New England types.
However, that is also coupled with the idea of collaboration. They may not be kind of palsy-walsy, but when they see that somebody needs help, they will walk across the street and give you a hand. The next time you see, they may not say hello, [laughs] but they give you a hand when you needed it. That's the little bit of the New England ethos, and that's what we see in Boston.
Most of these people who are in the Boston ecosystem are not necessarily from the area because Boston draws people from all over the world because of the universities, but there is that mentality of helpfulness that is just astonishing. I don't know that there's any startup ecosystem of the country that is as collaborative and as helpful as the one here in Boston. I think it really stands out for that, despite the reputation for being flinty New Englanders.
I guess it's here, too. Part of it, it's the weather. Sometimes we can't even identify each other because we're so bundled up in the cold.
CL Tian: I've been astounded by how helpful people are. Genuinely helpful. We are a little gruff and maybe a bit intellectually selective and arrogant at times-
Sal Daher: Sure. Yes, insular.
CL Tian: -but there's no one I'd rather count on than a New Englander, I'd say.
Sal Daher: It's a fascinating contradiction. It never ceases to amaze me. I'm a transplant New Englander, so I observe it from various angles. It's just a fascinating thing to me. CL Tian, founder, and CEO of Phiex, global winner of MedTech Innovator '22, thank you very much for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
CL Tian: Sal, it was a great pleasure.
Sal Daher: I'm Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.
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I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.
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