Welcome to the Zenithal Innovations website! I plan to write here from time-to-time – collect some of my thoughts, provide insights, and muse on current trends that I'm seeing. My plan is to make one update in this space per month. In a good month, it’s possible that I’ll make two.
I want to use this first post to talk about why I started this particular business, and what my plans are in the near-term.
I love innovation. I love to see science and technology progress. I love to see capabilities expand, and new things happen in the world, from something as small as a few lines of code, to a novel material that shifts established markets.
When I was a kid, and all my friends were out running around the neighborhood during the summer, I found myself at the library. This was pre-internet days, so the only place that you could soak up a lot of information in rural West Virginia was at the local library.
I must have spent days poring through the encyclopedias they had there. And no matter how long I spent reading, I always found myself looping back to the same topic – chemistry. I was enamored with how these little atomic building blocks could be assembled to make nearly anything that you could imagine.
Fast forward a few years: I picked up my PhD in chemical engineering, and started working in the semiconductor industry. It was Labor Day weekend of 2008. I was wearing a Tyvek bunny suit in the clean room, working on designing ALD & CVD deposition tools.
And I was absolutely miserable.
The work was predictable. R&D was done in shifts. We were adding 9’s to the end of process efficiencies; removing the number of defects per wafer from 10 to 8. And at the end of day, this work only changed wafer yield. It would have been a whole different story, if we were working on chips for the soon-to-be released iPhone, or working on a new chemistry for a hot market. There was no societal driver for the work that I did. And I ended up leaving the industry after one year.
I got involved in startups directly after that, and I have not looked back. Over the years I’ve gotten to work on big ideas, with big societal impact. I’ve done work in next-generation fuels, olefins production, and battery materials – all huge markets with huge promise, tempered by really hard problems. My preference is to work on projects to do with transitioning the world away from fossil fuels. I’m a big believer in leaving this place a little bit better than you found it.
With Zenithal Innovations, I’m hoping to work with groundbreaking startups (or empowered teams within incumbents) near the beginning of their development and deployment cycle. These would be companies typically in the late-seed or Series A-C stage.
At this size of company or team, ideas are talked about around a table or white board, and within days or weeks they can be rapidly-prototyped for testing. Long-standing assumptions can be challenged, and real change can be made in an industry. It’s an exciting time to be around.
These teams are usually filled with academic horsepower – a lot of fresh grads out of prestigious universities, full of ambition to affect change in the world. But they are usually short on experience. Everything they’ve built has fit neatly within a benchtop hood. They’re unaware of regulations and standards, or the previous failures of similar ventures in industry. So they reinvent the wheel over-and-over. In my experience, teams state that they never have the time to do the work correctly the first time, but somehow they always find the time to do the work twice. I want to help stop that cycle.
Over the years, I’ve built a lot of equipment and tested processes in a huge range of conditions. I’ve led builds for cryogenic distillation columns operating below -150°C and refractory-lined reactors with exit temperatures in excess of 1000°C. Each of these processes rely on specific temperatures, pressures, compositions, metallurgy choices, control systems, and safety systems. It’s a large number of variables and decisions, and if any one decision is made incorrectly, the entire process may not work at all.
My hope is to accelerate teams beyond the minefield of technology and chemicals selection for these first-of-its-kind processes. I want to steer teams toward established reference processes that operate successfully today. I want to help teams remove that hazardous or expensive chemical. I want to push teams to examine the make/buy decision for steps in their process – to vertically integrate or to outsource. I want teams to think critically about risk, and think creatively about how they can eliminate or substitute risks out of their process, rather than spend critical time trying to solve problems that don’t need solving.
I love innovation. And that’s why I started this consulting business. I want to focus my efforts on the parts of the work that I love best, by helping teams succeed.
Shoot me an email at jarod@zenithalinnovations.com if you’re interested in working with me or learning more.