One of China’s largest online retailers, JD.com, visited the Cornell Tech campus in Manhattan April 24-25 and presented a challenge to 117 Chinese and American MBA students who gathered for two days of international collaboration.
The question posed to students was, “How can technology improve JD.com’s position in China’s e-commerce industry by 2020?”
They convened at the second annual hackathon, with students from the Cornell-Tsinghua MBA/FMBA program working with students from the Johnson Cornell Tech MBA program.
The students were split into 20 teams, each of which set out to explore how new applications of technology could help the online powerhouse. The proposals ranged from creating linkages between JD.com and a social networking platform to creating an online system to determine price sensitivity among Chinese consumers.
The winning solution was the creation of an online negotiating tool, called Joy Bot, through which consumers can have access to goods at lower prices. The online robot would also allow JD.com to glean more information about its customers’ preferences, informing their dynamic pricing model.
Among the nine judges were JD.com senior algorithm engineer Huang Weinan and Jerry Lou, CEO and managing partner of Everpine Capital, whose companies sponsored the event.
“We’ve got a lot of ideas here worth polishing,” said Weinan. “Some were very impressive.”
Lou urged the students to continue finding creative ways to help define 21st-century commerce.
“Keep using your bold impulses and young hearts to create new business models,” he said. “Keep doing it for 20 years, and incredible things will happen for you.”
For Johnson Cornell Tech MBA students like David Cheng ’17, who designed Joy Bot, it was a chance to put to use the skills he’d honed in his year at Cornell Tech. Input from the Chinese finance MBA students helped him tailor the application for the Chinese market.
“They had the domain knowledge and helped with the cultural translation,” said Cheng. “These two days were the capstone of my Cornell experience.”
Cornell-Tsinghua student Kan Ding, who collaborated on the team with Cheng, thought the robot built by Cheng had real potential in the Asian market.
“It’s essential to get more information about the customer,” she said.
Yaru Chen, academic dean for China initiatives at Johnson, said she looked forward to the 2018 hackathon, when the students will convene at Cornell Tech’s new campus, scheduled to open in September.
“This is our startup,” said Chen. “And next year we’re going to be even bigger with our new home on the Roosevelt Island campus.”
This article originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
At just under two miles long and 787 feet wide, Roosevelt Island is a pedestrian paradise with fantastic views of the Manhattan skyline, miles of wide sidewalks, and plenty of parks to traverse. It’s also home to several forward-thinking projects from the 20th century and now the transformative Cornell Tech campus.
The history and people of Roosevelt island are the perfect complement to the university’s goals of being tech driven, outward facing, and community oriented.
“We were big advocates for the Roosevelt Island site for Cornell Tech because it was within walking distance to mass transit and had reasonable transportation time to major hubs within the city,” said Colin Koop, New York design director at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).
Familiar Yet Unknown
Koop frames Roosevelt Island as something of a paradox — a visually familiar part of the New York City landscape, yet historically frequented only by those with long term healthcare needs; a stone’s throw from the glittering metropolis, the place is yet an island unto itself.
In the pre-World War II period up until the 1950s, Roosevelt Island was a place where few went. The land was the location of the Goldwater Hospital, a revolutionary building for its time, as it was designed for chronically ill patients. Furthermore, for many the island became a symbol of modern medicine, where potential patients weren’t turned away because they couldn’t afford care.
The Island Revisited
In the 1960s, Roosevelt Island entered into a second phase: the staging ground for a modern utopian movement. But the sense of isolation remained — this wave of inhabitants would be similarly cut off from the life of the city, from whose unpleasantries, like crime and pollution, they sought escape.
“The remnants from very different eras are still a part of the island,” said Koop. “It was a challenge to take these two different pieces of history and think of Cornell Tech as the third step in that, with the idea that the campus would be open and welcoming to the city and tap into its energy.”
Because the land on the island is so open and walkable, the third phase revolves around the idea that Cornell Tech’s campus should both preserve, and extend, that experience with its design—and thereby give anyone who wants to explore an invitation to do so.
“The end result is essentially an anti-quad campus,” said Koop. “The public can come into the buildings for lunch or to use a meeting space, and then when they’re finished they can walk through the school’s park.”
Building for the Future
To create such an open and inviting space, SOM reestablished a central “spine,” or pathway, allowing the public to uninterruptedly walk the length of the island. The firm also opened a network of green space that extends out to the water’s edge and allows pedestrians to flow inward toward that central spine — quite the opposite of a walled courtyard.
“The entire space has a flow to it, just like the school itself [where] there aren’t traditional departments or rigid classes,” said Koop. “The school is integrated with the city’s businesses and functions like a research lab. It’s not a typical university — the campus reflects that.”
Plus, as the template for an innovative campus, the design has far-reaching implications, according to Koop. In partnership with the city, Cornell Tech committed to making a percentage of the campus a privately owned public space.
“I’m not aware of any other university doing that, at least in the United States,” said Koop. “Though, many other universities are now visiting and taking note. It was a pleasant surprise to see New York City, Cornell, and SOM cooperate for the greater good.”
Technology is transforming the media industry and, while television isn’t dead, the way we distribute and consume it is rapidly changing.
If there’s anyone who knows about television’s transformation it’s John Martin, the chairman and chief executive officer of Turner, a Time Warner company which encompasses a portfolio of news, entertainment, kids, and sports networks as well as businesses including CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, and Turner Sports.
Turner’s technological transformation is one of Martin’s primary focal points as CEO. “We are transforming the company from being a traditional ad-supported basic network cable company that cared about getting reach and maximizing viewership to, all of a sudden, the metrics that really matter being fan engagement and number of fans,” John Martin said at CornellTech@Bloomberg led by Scarlett Fu, the anchor of Bloomberg Markets.
“We need fans, not viewers, and at the hub we are underscoring that sensibility with technology.”
Martin is ensuring that Turner is at the forefront of innovation. He has partnered with and invested in cutting-edge content, digital media, advertising startups and technology solutions including IBM Watson, Bleacher Report, NextVR, Mashable, Refinery29, Bustle, and FanDuel.
Watch the full conversation:
Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation:
Fan engagement is essential
In order to capitalize on fan engagement, it was essential to overhaul the content management systems at Turner. When Martin started as CEO in 2014, in the United States alone, there were 29 content management systems that couldn’t interact and were lacking data. In three and a half years, Turner has been able to develop the technology to move traditional broadcast TV, content libraries, and apps up to the Cloud, enabling them to “reach fans in new and innovative and different ways.”
“We can’t think of ourselves as a TV network company anymore. We are a fan engagement company so wherever our fans are, whether they are on mobile or iPads, whether they are in South Korea or London or in Dallas, we need to be able to reach them in a seamless way,” said Martin.
“That’s been a really fun part of the job, which is to make significant investments in using technology to support everything else we are doing in creating premium content,” Martin added.
Personalized content is coming
Turner will soon be able to use technology to serve individualized content based on people’s preferences. “Personalized networking is going to completely transform how people enjoy media. It takes on demand to a whole new level,” Martin said, “The content you watch will be increasingly customized to you.”
Martin gave the example of Spotify, highlighting that Turner wants to bring that level of customization to video. As the technology evolves, people will be able to create content lists, archive it, put it in libraries, and access it whenever and wherever they want. If people don’t want to do it on an on demand basis, they can be served different live linear streams.
Consumer experience is critical
There has been a long-standing argument over whether content or distribution is king. Martin argues that it’s neither and that the ideal trifecta is content, distribution, and consumer experience.
Turner is a premium content company so it’s crucial to tell great stories and create great content, but Martin understands that technology can be a tool for creating and distributing content. “I would like Turner to be known more and more as a company hiring the best and the brightest technologists,” he said noting the importance of hiring people who can bring product experience.
Device-specific programming is necessary
Martin watches an increasing amount of media on his phone and he’s not alone. The amount of mobile views is growing significantly and Martin thinks it will be one of the most exciting areas of growth in the media.
As mobile usage continues to grow, it’s crucial to develop content tailored to where your audience will consume it. “It’s not CNN TV, CNN on mobile, and CNN digital, it’s the CNN brand that is expressed differently to optimize itself on various devices,” Martin explained.
Turner has dedicated people that work on each of the social media platforms, mobile, and the app. “We need people with those separate expertise because the way my daughter watches CNN on Snapchat is different than how someone watches it on TV,” says Martin.
Martin also thinks that artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality are three huge opportunities to use technology to transform how we consume media. For example, Turner recently sold virtual reality tickets to “March Madness” and they have created content for E-Sports, CNN, and gaming. “At the end of the day, it’s about the experience,” Martin said, noting that virtual reality will be a game changer as long as media companies create valuable experiences.
As a teenager, Alexander was fascinated by data and mathematical models. His interests led him to pursue a degree in Operations Research at Cornell. During a summer research job, Alexander worked with Cornell assistant professor Dr. Jamol Pender on projects in queuing theory, or the study of human behavior when waiting in lines. More specifically, they looked at the non-stationary arrival processes of customers and how those processes impact queue lengths and customer waiting times.
“Those projects helped me understand what research was all about, and were different than anything I had experienced in my undergraduate coursework,” said Alexander. “I enjoyed the autonomy of the data analysis work I did for him.”
This hands-on experience working with Pender at Cornell eventually led him to pursuing a master’s degree in ORIE at Cornell Tech, where he could gain more experience in applied operations research.
“At Cornell Tech, I’m able to concentrate fully on solving problems with data,” said Alexander. Computer science classes like machine learning and data science have helped him apply his previous studies in operations to new projects.
“Data represents a world of opportunity in so many areas,” said Alexander. “I like being at the intersection of business and technology, and eventually I might come back to Cornell Tech to get my MBA.”
Building off of his work in queuing theory with Pender, Alexander has continued to explore how it might be paired with finance technology, hospital networks, or retail. “By playing with historical data, I can start to build an exploratory analysis of how to solve a business problem,” said Alexander. This could mean modeling how products move off the shelves in a retail setting, or trying to predict which way stock prices will move.
During an internship at a major consulting firm, Alexander worked on forensic data analytics because it spoke to his operations research background.
Though data-related questions are the bulk of Alexander’s studies, he has enjoyed the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial skills in classes like Startup Studio, where he and students from other programs work in teams to develop real products.
“My teammates and I are working on a hardware solution to turn a phone to a computing solution,” said Alexander. “The idea behind our product is to fill the gap between students who don’t have access to computers but might have a smartphone.”
Alexander is hoping the product could be used to expand digital literacy within the school districts the team has visited. “It’s outside of operations research, but it’s fun to think about product narratives and how a product might fit with a customer’s needs.”
Alexander’s variety of experience made him realize that there’s a large demand for professionals who can apply business acumen and data analysis to a number of situations.
“Eventually, I’d like to be able to come at different problems from a consulting perspective,”said Alexander. “Working with such diverse groups of people across several industries has made me see that I can apply data-driven ideas to almost any aspect of a business.”
Wilson Pham ’19 was among Cornell students, faculty and volunteers at an April 21-23 makeathon in New York City to help improve the lives of 17 people with disabilities.
Hunched over tables at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, students from Cornell Engineering, Weill Cornell Medicine and Computing and Information Science went to work with white boards, laptops, sewing machines, lathes and other tools to produce designs that will be available for free on the internet. Many of the teams were advised on site by people who have disabilities.
Ami Stuart ’10, Entrepreneurship at Cornell tech events manager, said, “This weekend was an amazing example of what can happen when the expertise and diverse skill sets of our programs come together for truly interdisciplinary collaboration.”
Jesse Winter/Provided. Niti Parikh, creative lead for Cornell Tech’s Maker Lab, left, speaks with Nij Suri at the makeathon in New York City.
Susanne Bruyère, director of the Yang-Tan Institute, said, “We hope that this is the beginning of a number of radical collaborations we can spawn across our resources for future technology and disability initiatives.”
Pham and his team refined many concepts and built numerous models before finalizing an elbow brace device for Nij Suri, 27, a New York City resident who has limited motion on the right side of his body and is not able to extend his right arm fully when lifting weights.
Team Jacked attached tension bands to the brace that created enough force and allowed Suri to straighten his arm to complete a movement. The team also designed a glove that allows Suri a better grip for handling weights.
The makeathon produced free, downloadable designs with “the power to help anyone,” Suri said.
Pham teammates Maddie Jacks ’19, and Brian Realbuto ’17 said the project allowed them to merge their areas of study with their athletic interests. Jacks was on her high school’s rowing team, and Realbuto wrestles for Cornell.
“You realize how quickly you have to adapt,” Realbuto said.
Another Cornell team that included Xuechun “Bob” Qian ’20, built an app for jazz musician Anthony Moran, a resident of Roosevelt Island, where Cornell Tech opens in September.
A stroke left his right side paralyzed and him unable to play drums, but the app allows Moran to re-create six drum sounds from a smartphone.
Jesse Winter/Provided. Cornell engineering students speak with jazz musician Anthony Moran, right.
“We want him to be able to create jazz music again,” Zhong said.
Niti Parikh, creative lead for Cornell Tech’s Maker Lab and a mentor at the makeathon, said the event served as a model for how rapid prototyping can be taught to the diverse student population of Cornell Tech, which will have a state-of-the-art facility at The Bridge building on the new Roosevelt Island campus.
Volunteer team mentors included Sam Dix ’13, who does product design for Ernst & Young and who studied and researched disability through courses offered at the ILR School. Helping people with disabilities is a “cause very close to my heart.”
The Cornell event was the 21st event TOM has brought to 10 countries. TOM spokesman David Levine said, “The best part of working with Cornell is the high pool of diverse talent and experience from a range of makers.”
People are social creatures. When we bump into one another in shared office or learning spaces, we are inclined to chat. The so-called water cooler effect shows us that. But, what happens when you push that concept beyond merely gathering to gossip? What happens when buildings are actively designed to maximize the exchange of ideas, to foster innovation, and to forge surprising connections?
The results are creative collisions points, and Cornell Tech’s new Roosevelt Island campus is bursting with them. From open learning areas inspired by artists’ studios to stairwells that encourage lingering and interaction — this is architecture that blurs the function of spaces and sparks innovation.
Kent Kleinman, former Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, has been closely involved in the development of the new campus.
According to Kleinman, the architecture will create opportunities for students across disciplines to rub shoulders. It is designed to stimulate ideas, projects, and connections. People can see one another’s work. They can overhear — and contribute to — conversations.
Students write on walls to facilitate the ideation and development products.
“That’s the architectural invention of creative collisions, that you create architecture that allows these accidental ad hoc kind of meetings of minds and people to happen,” he said.
Take the learning spaces, for example. Under older teaching methods, one person stood in the front of a room and other people listened. It is a highly structured and hierarchical relationship, says Kleinman. In the new campus that will be blown apart. The spaces draw inspiration from artists’ studios, where groups work collaboratively and can critique one another’s work.
When the new campus was being designed, the team explored how these kinds of spaces functioned and looked at how such concepts could be applied to Cornell Tech’s needs. They asked questions such as: how do studios work? What kind of spaces qualify as jury space? What kind of surfaces? What kind of furniture?
The result is learning spaces which are open, flexible, and full of daylight. There are surfaces which are designed to be appealing to the touch.
From writing on the walls to moving furniture, learning spaces aren’t just vacant spaces for students to work on computers.
These design choices also reflect the innovative teaching styles at Cornell Tech. It also mirrors the interdisciplinary language used by staff, which might draw on a range of fields, including art education.
“Twenty years ago, if you’d gone to an engineering school and said you wanted to teach like the artists, they would have looked at you like you were from Mars,” said Kleinman.
The creative collisions extend beyond teaching areas and into other parts of the building. In turn, the function of spaces becomes fluid. Wide corridors and staircases are flooded with natural light; some with river views. They are designed to be appealing places to stop, to talk, and to listen. They can be adopted for informal seminars and spontaneous interactions.
“You can have a conversation there, or you can sit and sketch outside, or you can sit with your laptop on your lap when you’re in the sunlight,” said Kleinman.
This blurring of function means that people do not have to be formally invited to be in a place, or to be part of a conversation. You might overhear something, linger in the space and join in.
Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss are the team behind Weiss/Manfredi, the firm selected to design The Bridge — a corporate co-location where tech companies will work side-by-side with researchers, allowing a free flow from innovation to markets. The Bridge is one of three buildings slated to open in 2017 during the initial phase of the Roosevelt Island campus.
Manfredi and Weiss believe that the premise that architecture can spark collaboration is a radical one, and that it anticipates the future of building design.
“Innovation is no longer a solitary pursuit. Rather, it occurs at the interstices between different specializations and, in fact, the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines,” the pair explain.
Weiss/Manfredi designed The Bridge as a network of connected spaces. It introduces “programmatic juxtapositions, spatial transparencies, and interwoven circulation routes.” All of which increase chance encounters between different groups and disciplines.
For example, a lecture hall adjacent to a lobby allows passersby to observe events taking place inside, and generously scaled stairs connect multiple levels and increase floor to floor exchanges.
“River-to-river views throughout the building enhance the sense of peripheral vision for all of the building’s occupants, and create a sense of visual continuity and community,” they say.
View of the East River from inside the Bloomberg Center
These different elements work together to maximize opportunity for collaboration, but they try not to force it. And this, says Dean Kleinman, is fundamental.
Creative collisions are not about forcing people to use the space in a set way or forcing them to interact. It is more akin to a theatre, he says, where the architecture becomes a kind of a stage.
“It’s full of props, it suggests certain kinds of action, it invites players to inhabit that stage and use the props in interesting ways but it doesn’t force that,” says Kleinman. “It simply opens up that opportunity.”
Across Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus, the stage has been set. It is now up to the people who will inhabit these spaces to interact, to innovate and to collaborate.
Nowadays, we expect same day shipping of our Amazon purchases and we complain if our pizza delivery is lukewarm. But behind every overnighted package and midnight pizza order, there is a complex system of logistics that makes everything happen.
Sumida studied mathematics at Yale before deciding to apply her theoretical skills to real-world situations through ORIE. She describes operations research as “model- and data-driven decision-making in complex environments.” It has applications anywhere you have resources or systems that you want to allocate or run more efficiently, she says.
Dynamic Resource Allocation
Sumida’s current interests lie in city logistics, umbrella term used to describe transportation and related resource allocation challenges in urban environments. She is working with Professor Huseyin Topaloglu on ‘dynamic resource allocation’ problems.
Retailers who operate same day shipping, such as Amazon, have had to make radical changes to how their inventory is processed and shipped. Previously, companies like USPS or UPS or Fedex could take several days to move a product from an inventory store to a customer. That now needs to happen within hours.
This leads to challenges in terms of physically moving units, but also in planning how they are moved. Under old systems, schedule planning might take place overnight and a delivery worker could follow a route over an entire day.
“Now, you have a really dynamic system where orders are coming in throughout the day, and you have to tell workers in real time to go and satisfy that order,” explains Sumida.
Sumida’s research aim is to find a cost-effective solution that assigns orders to workers using the least amount of resources, while still satisfying customer expectation. In an Amazon warehouse, for example, this means deciding which orders should be propelled at what time, and doing so as they are coming in.
She expects her end solution to be a practical suggestion on how to implement this type of dynamic dispatching, “It will be some sort of algorithm or policy that minimizes cost while still satisfying all the demands,” she says.
Fare-Locking
Sumida has already tackled the issue of fare-locking, an operations research problem facing airlines. Many companies now give customers the option of locking in a fare instead of purchasing it outright. This means that companies have to allocate that seat to that person while the fare is locked. As this could be for one or two weeks it creates a difficulty, explains Sumida.
“You have to keep these seats on reserve, and then they might come back and the customer might not actually buy the ticket, so there’s tension or uncertainty in the status of this ticket.”
Sumida’s solution was to create a fare-setting policy that accounts for the fact that some customers will lock the fare instead of buying it, while others will both lock the fare and buy the ticket. By allowing for the probability of both scenarios, “it allows the airlines to actually plan for that and set the prices accordingly.”
Sumida’s background in theoretical mathematics provides the backbone for the policies, algorithms and techniques she develops to address these logistical conundrums. “Part of operations research is coming up with mathematical tools to better solve those optimization problems,” she says.
Real-World Experience and Applications
Sumida’s work within city logistics and fare-locking has been shaped by interning for companies that face operations research challenges on a day-to-day basis. She helped a faucet manufacturing company in Boston streamline their production, and she worked with a clothing retail company to improve their systems for allocating inventory.
Last summer, while Sumida was based at Cornell Tech, she worked with Homer Logistics — a New York company that handles deliveries for restaurants.
“They pool all of the incoming orders for all of the restaurants that they service, and then they have a fleet of dispatchers who go and satisfy those orders,” she explains. “It saves the restaurant money because they don’t actually have to hire their own delivery.”
Her experience at Homer Logistics gave her a solid view of how dispatching and city logistics work in practice. It also showed her how challenging the problems can be, and this deep understanding inspired her current work on dynamic resource allocation.
For Sumida, establishing industry links and being able to work closely with Professor Topaloglu, are enormous benefits of being part of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and Cornell Tech.
“I love the atmosphere, but I also love the excitement of working on real-world problems,” she says. “I can use my background, still do some more theoretical work, but it’s all in view of applications, of how it can be used in the real world.”
Looking to expand on her computer science skills and also start a software company, Nwamaka had been accepted into four of the top graduate programs in the country.
Cornell Tech ended up being her top choice because of its “extreme focus on entrepreneurship.”
“My experience at Cornell Tech was eye opening and nothing short of amazing,” said Nwamaka. “We had a tremendous amount of exposure to New York’s tech scene. We delved into iterative approach to product design and development. I created several applications including a blockchain app for JP Morgan, a mobile app and machine learning solutions. Cornell Tech encouraged cross-functional groups where computer science students worked closely with MBA students.”
As it turns out Nwamaka ended up founding her start-up software company with Johnson Cornell Tech MBA student Ian Falou and fellow computer science master’s student Nicolas Joseph. Gitlinks was a Cornell Tech Startup Award winner and is a flourishing company helping to provide safeguards against open source threats. Nwamaka is overseeing engineering and software development. “I am keen on guiding our technology choices and user experience design. Our company is doing great, our progress and journey thus far has been truly amazing.”
Before co-founding GitLinks, Nwamaka founded a marketplace business that she grew to profitability and also worked as a software manager and engineer at Chevron. She is the inventor on two technology patents and plans to create amazing tech products in the future. “The ability to create is fulfilling,” she said. “Cornell Tech allowed me to do that. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
In a recent Reuters article it was announced that Fidelity Investments’ Fidelity Labs will join the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3) in its research on blockchain. The IC3 group is based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and includes researchers from Cornell Tech, Cornell, UC Berkeley, Technion and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Fidelity Investments Inc has become the first financial institution to join the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts, a group of academic institutions and technology companies looking to develop blockchain-based technology.
Fidelity Labs, the innovation arm of asset manager Fidelity, will be a member of IC3 along with Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Technion, IBM Corp and Intel Corp, the company said in a statement.
The Boston-based fund manager will collaborate with the group to develop blockchain programs to help make financial systems more efficient and secure.
If there’s one thing that casts a long shadow over all medical startups, it’s the dilemma of never knowing whether it’s time to scale-up or to pause and research.
This was the topic of Emmanuel Dumont’s recent talk at Cornell Tech. As the founder and CEO of Shade, a medical wearable startup, Dumont knows a thing or two about this quandary.
As part of the inaugural cohort of Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Dumont received both financial and mentoring support to create the device. Shade produces a UV radiation detection technology thirty times more accurate than anything on the market. The Oreo-sized tool is beautiful, matte, and worn on the body like a badge.
The device is a powerful tool for those with light-sensitive conditions like lupus for whom UV radiation can be deadly.
Shade works by tracking the amount of sunlight wearers receive and alerting them when they approach a daily limit. It also connects directly to an app which allows users to better manage their exposure, giving them a degree of freedom that many have never had before.
Inspiration for the product came from “the realization that sunscreen and guesswork doesn’t work [for these users],” Dumont said. While it can reduce exposure, it doesn’t help these patients whose biggest concern is knowing when they are approaching their daily exposure limit. Plagued by fear of over-exposure, many simply choose not to go outside.
Dumont realized that he was onto something when he showed his UV radiation detection technology to Dr. Alana Levine, a rheumatologist for New York Physicians Group who works with lupus patients, and she told him that it would be extremely useful to them.
While pursuing a large commercial opportunity, Shade has always put a special emphasis in having its technology validated by opinion leaders in dermatology.
Finding the business-medicine balance
Not all entrepreneurs are willing to wait and the urge to scale quickly may lead them to release too early or to launch in the wrong market. As Dumont pointed out, investors and partners can create immense pressure for health entrepreneurs to move too fast and get hurt along the way.
“That’s the big problem with the traditional tech mindset in the medical world: they focus first on scale,” he said. “When you move fast and break things, it’s not a big deal in the consumer world: who cares if swiping right or left does not work perfectly? In the medical world, a faulty product can have devastating consequences: Think about pacemakers.”
Dumont, with both a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Columbia University and a background in investment banking, is uniquely positioned to see both sides: he understands the scientist’s need for proof and the business person’s desire to grow and turn a profit.
During his time at the Runway Startup Postdoc program, he received plenty of support in learning to walk this balance. Part research institution, part incubator, it served as a bridge between the business and medical worlds with professors who are also entrepreneurs. According to Fast Company, this environment helps by “teaching scientists and engineers to think like entrepreneurs,” and vice versa.
“The Jacobs Institute … showed a very entrepreneur-friendly attitude” Dumont said, and he credits it with helping him find that business-medicine balance and propelling him forward.
To test, or not to test
Now, well into Shade’s second year, Dumont had a few recommendations for health entrepreneurs to determine when it’s time to scale and when it’s time to test.
“Be patient, because there is no second chance from losing the trust of your potential customers in the medical world, as Theranos’ series of scandals has shown,” Dumont said. “Understand what clinical impact you want your product to have because it will drive the studies you will be required to do by FDA and which regulatory pathway your product will be subject to.”
In general, the bigger your clinical impact is, the larger your commercial opportunity becomes. It’s the difference between a vitamin (no clinical impact) and a pain killer (measurable clinical impact).
“Recently, the growing interest of the tech community for healthcare has led to products that are either not addressing a problem or that are being marketed and sold to consumers without the (required) authorization of the FDA,” he warned.
He shared countless examples of these troublesome products: glucose meters that failed to find an audience in type 2 diabetes; blood pressure apps that provide dangerously inaccurate measurements; companies being investigated by regulators; fitness trackers whose clinical efficacy is shown to be non-existent, corroborating the dropout rate in their use after six months.
Dumont’s advice to health entrepreneurs is “because healthcare provides large commercial opportunities with high barriers to entry — surround yourself with people with white hair; talk to physicians and patients; and be honest and diligent about the claims you make.”
