Decision Making During Fear

DECISION MAKING DURING FEAR

Justin Evans

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

5/21/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPTION

there's something I think most most entrepreneurs need to really understand and that's how you your most important decisions are made at the moments that you are experiencing the most fear [Music] everybody welcome to another episode of the inventive journey I'm your host Devin Miller for those of you new to the podcast I am a serial entrepreneur as well as the founder and managing partner by intellectual property firm Miller IP law where we help startups and small businesses with patents trademarks and copyrights so today we have another great guest on the podcast that is going to talk about his and journey and currently he's working on some UV lighting to help to combat some of the köppen 19 or stuff that's going on but also what has a lot of experience and worked in the movie industry so quite an interesting journey so excited to have you on so this is Justin excited to have you on Justin good to meet you sir so maybe you know I'll let you introduce yourself because you'll do a much better job than I ever could but why don't you go ahead and just to introduce yourself and tell a little about your journey well my name is Justin Evans and I'm the founder and inventor at and from one incorporated for about the past year we've had a product at market called anthem one which is an LED lighting system that has interchangeable LED light cards and but as the pandemic as it became clear that the the pandemic was going to hit us shores and that we had a very serious problem on our hands our company did a very quick pivot and came up with this this guy here this is our first UVC light card so this is a light source that's that's how thin it is and this this light card outputs more UVC energy than any other device on the planet yeah and that's what our current focus is so maybe give and that's a great intro so maybe maybe now we jump back is that Jets cuts to the chase and gives everybody where you're at today but maybe give our back up so you did you've done it you started out in the movie industry I didn't and help to and I think has produced some of the movies including the one on the poster behind you and then he kind of decided to pivot and get more into the lighting so maybe rewinding almost to when you were in the movie industry what how did you or what that journey was and then how you got into lighting um so I went to NYU film school and dropped out halfway through my senior here they're still very disappointed about that and is looking forward to the day I go back and finish my degree someday right someday so and I bounced around Hollywood and and bounced from job to job working as art director and video game companies or as a cinematographer a camera operator and I got the opportunity to direct and be the cinematographer for my first feature film and about 2008 and spent the better part of a year prepping the movie and putting it together and finished it in in mid 2010 and it did great it was in 46 film festivals at one Best Picture 18 times it had a very small theatrical release but in the making of the movie we we found a massive bottleneck in in the making of media itself and it's all about the lights we were about three days no no no sorry let me back up about a week before we started shooting we realized that Terminator Salvation had blown a power transformer and it affected one third of the power grid for all of New Mexico the New Mexico's a big state most people don't realize it's the third largest state in the United States so it's not that it's just a lot of people affected yeah I mean this is this huge and and so it was causing rolling brownouts everywhere and we planned this movie for a location at an abandoned prison just outside Santa Fe that had a veil our and we were thrilled because every single circuit because this was used to be in former prison was 40 amperes 60 amp powered so we knew we could plug really really big lights into everything hole is prepped for this and now we've got rolling bound ran out to no power at all of our locations so we're scrambling to get our hands on you know a crystal sync generator about 60 60 kilowatt generator and determine your salvation is snapping them faster than my little team can get them so end up driving about 75 miles away to a little town called las Lomas pick up a generator is the only one that that's left we get it we managed to get it where we're shooting the movie every day I can feel my schedules slipping through my fingers and by day 10 we were three days behind schedule and for a little movie like that it's death you you could very well be in a position where you just can't finish the film and um and I'm not proud of this but I'm gonna be very honest person here I kicked a door off its hinges in front of one of my things let's let's look pretty good they're pretty hard kick yeah I I was I was pissed and and I turned to my investor and I said I don't want to be a filmmaker anymore talking about they said I don't want to do this these lights don't make any sense if Charlie Chaplin to walk walk onto this film set he wouldn't understand the red one digital camera that were using and he wouldn't understand a 50 inch television and the ability to edit in real time on a macbook all that would blow his mind but he'd look at the lights and he'd know how to use them and all his knowledge would still apply and that doesn't make any sense to me so when we finished the movie and it was on the festival circuit that that investor who also happened to be my attorney he said i'll give you a little bit of money let's get this out of your system mess around with whatever you want to mess around with and let's get back to making movies and the prototype that i came up with blew his mind he left his partnership at his law firm cashed out took a second mortgage on his house and gave me the capital to start the business so that we could invent what is and from one well he he was all in then he was a must have really believed in yet he was all in and and he's still our second and that's our second largest owner and when when our payday comes he deserves every bit of it because his kind of passion and belief is very very rare in investors and sobriety about understanding how money really works and how quickly he can burn through it he is also rare amongst investors and so if it weren't for him I wouldn't be here so thanks Angela Hey he deserves a lease of things if not nothing more that's Interrail investor I mean a lot of times when you get investors and I've worked with some great investors and ones that have absolutely been the ones that are in it for the long haul and over there with yet you got others that are going to say if this doesn't make me it's you know a return on investment within six months or a year they start to get mad and you lawsuits and get people angry and everything else you can get on both sides it's always much better to find those investors that are there with you for the long haul we have those investors too we had some tideland toxic investors that made this journey much more difficult and significantly less enjoyable but luckily there was a handful of really good ones that really understood what we were trying to invent and and we we ended up doing more than we intended to and so along the way the the critical change to our technology we were just trying to make a modern LED basely relight that was our original ambition of course we wanted to be best in class so that meant I had to sort of rescale myself as an engineer because of one of the things I found and I think a lot of entrepreneurs should know if they get into doing a hardware startup is that the engineers that will work for you as a freelancer are not the best they're the people that couldn't get a job at a real company and so there are they both so the time there's the rare diamond did the rough but yeah no I completely agree yeah maybe there's a seminar FIU I was not lucky enough to find any lot of things a lot of going through the sad to find that what diamond yes and and so in particular my experience has been American engineers tend to be extremely arrogant so we did much better with electrical engineers from from Eastern Europe and chemical engineers from anywhere in the world other than the United States ask freelancers if I can afford someone who works at Apple we wouldn't been to startup so and and but where most people get stuck is they expect the engineers to do all the work and engineers are not inventors and they're not supposed to be job is really to make sure that the invention is sound but it's not their job to invent the invention so so for me to be able to really pull this off a Tory skill myself and so that meant buying dozens of books on Amazon reading books on on Electrical Engineering watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos doing everything I could to get myself to a point where I could communicate effectively with mechanical electrical and firmware engineers and and that was a good part of the journey and and along through that process one question kept coming up question I kept asking which is why are LEDs permanently soldered and lights hmm the answer was always because that's how it's done and and what no one could quite articulate but it took me a while but I figured it out is that engineers have a tendency to do when they were taught in school which is what their instructors were taught which is what their instructors were taught and LEDs are still from from a conceptual standpoint seen as a component that goes on to a printed circuit board yep printed circuit boards don't come in and out of system so the permanent you screw them in or solder them in they stay permanently in so in a system so it's thought that that's what they taught me when I went to engineering school okay so so this bias means that someone is looking at an LED and thinking of it as as the equivalent is a resistor or a transformer right and and it's just a component that goes on the to a PCB but we were looking at the LED in a very different way we were seeing the LED is more like a ramp or a hard drive and we kept saying why on earth would we build a device that had obsolescence of 12 months we know the LEDs are improving on Annelle Moore's laws like a curve it's not quite as exponential as Moore's law but it's similar to it and we don't want our customer to buy a system in say January 2019 and then regret that they bought that in January 2020 because now all of our LEDs are 15 percent brighter and we thought were they having new wave lanes so they have different dyes and all of that that goes and I work I work with one of the startups I work with does a lot with LEDs on more of the upper spectrometer type thing for medical measurements so we could talk way longer than we need to auto all the LEDs and intricacies of it but that's solely what we focused on was then a way to make the LEDs come in and out of system and that's what this is all about so it turned out that the bias this this at its core is based on what's known as an LED co key and an LED Co B is is used in light bulbs across the world all sorts of instruments you're the company you just referred to might even use a small version of an LED COV we wanted to turn that LEDs he'll be though into an actual end-user product something that was sleek and sophisticated had an apple like feel to it and could come in and out of the system and so we're now patent-pending on the technology that makes that possible it meant moving the the positive and negative Junction from the front side of the LED shield e to the back changing the alert internal electronics and coming up with a method that would have this under both compression and conduction at the same time but that could D couple so that you could pull it in and out like a video card and once we have to interrupt just because you said my favorite word which is patent pending your patent so given that I have a patent attorney that's always what the perks made what is just the 30 second aside and I don't want to interrupt your story when you're at what's been your experience or how have you liked or disliked doing the patent process because I get inventors or on both sides and people that sometimes it's been a great process other time they've absolutely hated it um I think it's a fine process I think there are some flaws with his patent system I not thrilled that we've moved to a first-to-file methodology but i also understand the logic behind it I think that most inventors who are probably complaining about it need to see this like the equivalent of the SATs it's not a measurement of your actual intelligence but it is a measurement of your ability to it to explain what you can do so someone else can understand it and if you're not willing to play that game then maybe there's a problem with your communication strategy I don't have a problem with it I like as an example the first patent we did was a design pad and it was rejected on our initial application and it was my fault I was stupid I was insisting that certain lines on the illustration didn't mean what the patent office was interpreting it to me and they were being thick-headed they had every right to reject our design patterns and when I went to a phenomenal patent illustrator he was able to take the art that I had come up with clean it up do it right explain to me the symbolism of it and get us to reapply and get us approved within a couple weeks and and and I think that that humbling moment really opened my eyes to what it meant to apply for a utility patent and and to apply the same sort of humility to the system and and it doesn't I'm thrilled with the system but on the other hand if I don't think is that bad a system meter so well you're in the middle you're not hating it not quite loving it so someday when I actually would I work on your patents that's good then they'll get you over to love it yet but no that's that's a I just was curious because I said in most of the time it's not the attorney is I like how you almost put it it kind of to your point I want to say once of sometimes inventors take it as if I my patent gets rejected they almost take it as an affront to their invention right they reject they're saying my inventions not good enough and if they only understood how great my invention was they would make sure it certainly get his patent well it's really not the examiner's that doesn't dislike your like your invention most of time he could care less what you how you it's more of are you doing convincing him that what you're doing is different than what's there and if you can do that in the way that they want or they're used to then it goes to the process goes well and if you play it kind of you said they play by their rules they're you know put it in the format they like it will go much better if you don't then it's a it feels like you're kicking against a break so I like how you said that absolutely and and I think a lot of a lot of inventors they think the invention is make sense in their head they're done there's nothing else to be done there's so much that's the beginning of a journey and for me a lot of it was becoming comfortable with the kind of language that is associated with patenting intellectual property and getting to a point that I understood the difference between something that was clever and something that was novel and that I could come up with many a clever thing but that doesn't mean that any of those are patentable it needed to be novel and an understanding on it on a gut level the difference between something that's clever a novel and and how to specify what novel is because novel might might mean okay I'm trying to patent something and I'm patenting this iteration of it within this specific application only yeah and then I think the last thing is any inventor should know is even if you get your patents who the hell cares if you don't have the finances to defend it in court yep so all of this at the end of the day is just one one small step on a very lengthy journey no and I completely see I did too often the I did and we've got away off the tip I'd like to get back to original story but it's just what that I always a joy hence why I'm a patent attorney right that you know you get too many adventures oh I just get a patent that everybody's gonna be knocking down my door to get up to buy it or get a license and you know why why that I'm very rare occasion one out of a million type of thing does happen most of the time it's a part that goes in your business plan or part of the whole business it's important part just like having marketing and financing and everything else but you have to say that as a part of the business you don't build a path or a business around the patent rather a part as a part of it now that we've jumped way down into a tangent that I thoroughly enjoyed so now so one question I don't think we hit on is so give the maybe give an eye insight of how long were you working on this before you kind of got your first product you were you're getting pre Kovan we're getting ready to launch uh we I started the business in 2012 and we have a viable products until 2019 so it was a venire journey and and this gets to another part of what I think a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs particularly hard-wearing bettors don't understand you can have an invention but that is not yet a final product you can have a final product but that product hasn't been designed for mass manufacturing and you never product this design for mass manufacturing but you don't have the supply chain behind it to actually scale and so we had to do all of that so we not only did we invent the technology but then I Mandarin and I spent a tremendous amount of time I'm here to that's interesting sorry bullseye Beijing Lee on the end mean by mean by and by all right so we won't we won't too much Chinese because that nobody else will probably get what we're saying but yes I served a mission for my church in Taiwan for a couple years so I didn't go fight to China but I was in Taiwan which is both mandarins okay so so I built a global supply chain with factories in five countries yeah and so that meant about every three to four months I was going to Shenzhen or Taipei for you know two to three weeks at a time and and we had to do all of that to be able to build the technology and I think perhaps the most interesting part of the journey was that oftentimes the most joyful for me because what I would find is that what an American engineer who had never worked in a factory because they saw themselves as a white-collar worker and liked that they worked in an office but they work behind a desk behind a computer they never gotten their hands dirty and actually worked and say a CNC shop or a PCB manufacturer or they never stepped foot into an anodized and and so because of that their idea of what tolerances were were not based in reality yeah so we would go in there and we would find it went both ways what they would think would be easy was hard and what they thought was hard would be easy and so I spent a lot of time at our factories working as a day laborer and I would show up in tourgee torn jeans and a t-shirt and I say I'm here just to work and in fact I'll show you how I think I am most proud of so this is a sample piece of aluminum billet that I hand polished at a mold baking facility in Shenzhen I was apprentice encoder and she's an amazing person she makes maybe 850 dollars a month and absolutely loves her job and she taught me you know how to do wet sanding starting at 50 grit going all the way to that 2,000 grit sandpaper rotating directions to the point that we could get a mirror polish so that the insides of our molds were capable of ejecting polycarbonate lenses and if it were not for her education I would not understand molds one-tenth as well as I do it's it's her that that really got me to get the process how many days it takes how many humans does it take what can be robota sized what can be what parts just in art and you really do need to give an artist who really understands this stuff and and it was all of that kind of knowledge that I found was generally lacking amongst the engineers that I was working for aren't working with and as the part of the journey that I absolutely loved let's go so now jumping fork I think that's all very interesting conversation I love to see the the show-and-tell so to speak it's always fun to see what the things he worked on as you went through your thing so now jumping for so you went through all that work left the movie industry after producing your movie which I still have yet to see but I promise I'll see you to air help see it soon you can see the lights so alright I'll have to watch it it's a mark from a walking dead James Cromwell from God knows how many movies and chase more from The Punisher so that's a pretty good people are a lot of our hosts of people that went onto from your movie went on to make a lot of a lot of other cool little 1970 spy thriller about a KGB agent that's defecting to the United States but but once we once we realized within am from one that we had come up with a really easy way to get LEDs in and out of the system we realized we invented more than we'd intended the original goal was just so that you could pop it in and out like a video card or a ram and when the next set of LEDs would be 15% brighter you could pop it in and you're 200 watt system would still be 200 Watts 4.5 amps but instead of outputting say 20 mm woman's that would put out 25,000 we realized we could have a relationship with every led company on the world and that we started experimenting with what other kind of LEDs can we do and we came out with a light heart that's military-grade 940 nanometer infrared an agriculture card and theoretically we worked it out on paper medical grade sterilizing card and the only reason we didn't do the medical grade sterilizing card at first as if the LEDs were ridiculously expensive but this is a context a single little tiny LED you know one of these little guys and this this sucker has about 160 approximately on the surface for our daylight card our white card that looks just like daylight those LEDs are maybe five cents these are 15 dollars each and so so it was so expensive none of our investors believed in this every single one of them said it's a pipe dream I don't know why you're obsessed with this medical sterilization it's a very small industry we don't want you to pursue it and and when kovat hit I decided that I pay for it out of my own pocket my wife was my greatest supporter and we quickly put one of these into production thanks to our American Express card and thank you American Express for being an investor and thanking for my wife for believing in me and and to put this in the context are our nearest competitor is a mercury-vapor system that's about three and a half feet tall and it outputs 90 millijoules per square centimeter or a percent or square and I should say per minute want to repeat that 90 millijoules per centimeter squared per minute okay this outputs 2850 millijoules per second and so what what this does when you get that kind of potency this is the world's first mass volume sterilizer we can sterilize not a little tiny surface but an entire hospital theater movie theaters airplanes shopping malls restaurants everything in our world that were currently afraid to go back into we can now sterilize at a very short period of time with nothing more than a blast of nearly invisible light and and we're conducting additional studies as we speak we wouldn't make claims that they weren't backed up by tremendous and every research but we've been very lucky to partner with Temple University Mayo Clinic and George Mason University temple has already come out with their initial results and they found that from a 16 inch distance anthem one deactivated Zika virus in 15 seconds to a 3 log setting that means 99.9% of all the viruses were erratic created in 15 seconds and so it could be a tremendous game-changer and how we re sterilize PPE or EMT vehicles or elder care facilities the list goes on and on that's that's almost kind of the idea you could have kind of like metal detectors that you walk through in the airport you can almost have sterilization that you just if you're gonna go into the you know the elderly care facilities or the nursing homes or anything or into a shopping mall or that you just walk through that it kills at least everything on the surface doesn't kill it it you know inside of you if you're still sick but at least sterilizes everything that you bring in and out so that's really cool one thing I do want to jump back in on is just the we glossed over but I think that we talked a little bit before the for the podcast on was you had you know a pretty good amount of clients built up and you had some you know fairly named or you know named big names and everything else within the movie industry or at least lighting industry for filming on that and then you had kovetz come along that basically everybody started dropping out wiped it out and everything so how did you how did you react or how did you decide to pivot or how do you know what how did you deal with that it's devastating uh as of January of 2020 we our clients were so prestigious and they're their budgets for so that they wanted to buy from us that had we been able to collect on all those invoices we would have had nine months of operating expenses in the bank yeah within three weeks we went from having you know these invoices that would have had nine months of burn rate to having zero it was it was it was a cliff I'd never seen anything like it we had the Olympics we had the Final Four we had a fee Marburg we have ongoing clients like the Canadian military Ferrari Walt Disney World and every single one of these customers one by one said unfortunately because of co vat19 we're canceling our live events for this year you know it's we were just the point that Steven Soderbergh's gaffer was testing our lights to roll out on a your filling was gonna shame Detroit and then the movie was cancelled doesn't need the lights anymore and Ferrari wanted to light an entire fairway in Pebble Beach with a display of 50 Ferraris and we were working through the whole process of how we were going to do this on on battery power so there'd be no cables anywhere and suddenly the events canceled and the same with the Final Four and the same fee Olympics and so our our business was devastated overnight I don't know why I wasn't really focused on that what I was more focused on was the promise of what UVC could do because as everyone kept talking about kovat 19 kovat 19 Kovach 19 I knew that we'd always had this design sitting on the shelf that our investors did not believe in and that could I just dust it off we'd have something that could really be a weapon against Koated 19 and and I'm gonna be honest it's it's my wife that made it possible and there's something I think most most entrepreneurs need to really understand and that's how you your most important decisions are made at the moments that you were experiencing the most fear I'm facing bankruptcy we have no clients I still have to pay rent I still have to pay utilities and and my brain is is fixated on how all of our bank account has been drained hmm and it's my wife who says if we're gonna go bankrupt let's run at that wall as fast as we possibly can you need to dust off you VC and I quickly spoke with a couple of my engineers in Taiwan and the sticker shock was astounding and and my wife and I suddenly knew that we were gonna go from having zero debt to a tremendous amount of debt to get the first five of these made and she didn't even blink and that's that's the reason our business got saved her rationality is what saved us but that's an important partner to have on your team then yes so absurd thank you first of all goes to your lawyer that was here and thank you went to American Express and third one to your wife although the wife is the most important so we'll put that one first this is books and I think every entrepreneur needs to know it you're your first and foremost business partner is your family lay behind you on this journey because this is it's not a fun journey it's pain you're really saying to yourself how can I go on a to bed on a bed of nails every night if your family's not willing to go on that journey with you you're never gonna make it and Adam that I completely agree with I just got really lucky that I married very very well I was 22 I I'm right there with you I admit I married at 22 as well so we both married at the same age and we both got lucky with great wife so I have all I have a whole bunch of businesses I'm part of including my law firm and my wife has been number one cheerleader and been great and so I completely couldn't agree with you more they're the number one team member that you need on your team and you don't have it you're gonna you're setting yourself up for failure and if you have a great spouse on board it can make them complete difference so but we have run into to the end of the podcast there's way more things that I would love to talk about that we ever have type 2 which is always how I feel there's always so many interesting things we could dive into and you kind of already gave what would be the the number of advice you'd give for startup so we'll give that as the advice that startups are take but the other question I always do and we'll kind of end with is what was the number one or the biggest mistake your business mistake you made along your journey and the reason is is you always hear all the highlights right you get to hear the best things that people did I always made the right decision I pivoted and everything went perfectly and you're never going to hear the mistakes so what's the biggest mistake business mistake you made god I need so many the list the biggest business just the biggest business mistake I made we had a particularly wealthy and aggressive investor then we won get to market as fast as we possibly could mmm I allowed him to pressure me when the product was not quite ready yet and and he read some of the same books that everybody reads and he would paraphrase stuff that really applies to software companies like hey you know just get your Minimum Viable Product out the door I hate that term I hate it so much because it doesn't apply to hardware oh and even even in software and I because I worked with some software it's like minimally viable why not take the product the best product within the constraints that you have right so if you only have so much funding you only have so much time let's see the best product we have rather it always to me or more sounds like let's put out the crappiest product as quick as we can rather than the best yes and that whole attitude of you know run fast and and dunfin twice and we'll fix it as we go if anyone's familiar with the Wallace and Gromit short where Wallace is on top of the Train putting the train track down as the training is going over it that's what it ends up feeling like yeah if had slowed down for three months we would have saved ourselves a year of heartache because they tried to come out with the product of beginning at 2018 and while it technically worked there was so much more additional real-world testing we needed to do before the technology was really mature and we could have done that in a three-month time window and instead we spent a year chasing our own tail because I listed the bad advice from an investor who just wanted to make a quick buck that was probably the worst decision I made and when we when we corrected that and I could look I could look back at the choices I've made I knew that number one it was not in my character I like I am a perfectionist by nature and I like things to be well made and and number two I'm a scientist by Nature and I knew that we had not done enough testing and I had conned myself into thinking that he was right to come out with a premature that's that's the biggest mistake I made the second I think we pointed out days when we had raised money I paid and I didn't understand how much how quickly you're gonna burn through capital and I would hear from people one of the dumbest things I've ever heard is you know you're the CEO you should be making more than your engineers and I believed that the first days the company now once we got to about year two I realized my job is to make that capital last as long as it possibly can because capital is precious it's hard to raise and every single time you do you don't get the capital for free it comes with a personality attached and you may not get along with that personality and the more of these that you pile on the more people that you would never have hired to be an employee suddenly have an influence over the way that you're running your business and so your own best interest to pay yourself as little as possible so the capital is so your burn rate will be as long as possible and you can do your best job those are those be the two those are the two great mistakes but it sounds like you learned a ton a ton from them and it's ones that I've heard before and I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that so appreciate you sharing those well we have run out of time but I want to make sure before we end that you get that for whether it's people that want to buy your product want to get involved reach out to you investors angel about the right type of investors if you be whoever it is what is the best way to get involved with you to reach out to you or find out more about your company in your product customers who would like to purchase an amp the one can go to and from one calm and that's auntie HTM o ne calm and but we should specify that right now we are strictly focused on medical sterilization sales so we are current not taking any media cuts we are only working with hospitals and in governments to get this out to as many hospitals as we possibly can so that hospitals can restore lies their PPE in record time so so if there's any hospitals any doctors that are listening please reach out was the one calm and and we'd love to help you out perfect well I appreciate that I'll make sure to include that in the show notes as well hope that you can get the products and start to help to you sterilize and to use that to become combat what a lot of people are dealing with so that I very much appreciate sharing it's been a great time to have you on the show always get to the end of these and I wish I had more time because there's always so many bored but things that we could talk about but I appreciate you coming on for those of you that are listeners make sure to support him to support an anthem one and to go to there and share with those that are in need of the product if you're an inventor or working with a start-up or small business if you need help feel free to reach out to me I'm happy to help with patent your patents and trademarks or copyrights and want to be there along your inventive journey to make sure that we can support you in any way you can thanks for everybody for joining the episode until next time you English (auto-generated) Chat Replay is disabled for this Premi