EP 17 — Free Form Fibers’ Shay Harrison on Strategic Partnerships and Cybersecurity in Advanced Materials
On this week's episode of the DIB Innovators podcast, David speaks with Shay Harrison, CEO at Free Form Fibers. Shay details the groundbreaking laser-driven chemical vapor technology that his company is pioneering, which aims to revolutionize the advanced materials industry.
Shay discusses the critical role of strategic partnerships and securing capital to scale such innovative technologies. He also shares insights into the importance of protecting intellectual property and managing cybersecurity risks in a highly competitive market, especially for companies that eventually want to scale up and/or work with government entities.
Topics discussed:
- The challenges and strategies involved in scaling cutting-edge technology within a startup environment.
- The importance of forming strategic partnerships to fuel growth and secure necessary resources.
- Insights into the process of securing capital to support the scaling of innovative technologies.
- Safeguarding intellectual property in a competitive market, especially for smaller companies and those looking to work with government entities like the DoD.
- The unique aspects of working in a startup and how diverse backgrounds contribute to its success.
- Current trends and future directions in the advanced materials sector.
Guest Quotes:
“So those Mach five and above vehicles, you know, nothing that's work that's on a commercial airline, commercial airplane, none of that will work in those types of hypersonic applications. And so we can make materials that truly there is no other way to make in a fiber format. And that's, you know, that's why we have a lot of involvement in the defense industry around making materials for, again, generally focused on hypersonic applications.”
“So if you think about a ceramic material like a dinner plate, if you drop that on the ground, what does it do? Shatters into a thousand pieces, right? That's not what you want for performance on a, you know, on a rocket, on an airplane engine and a nuclear power reactor. So what you do is to make it act more like a metal.”
“In a chip fab foundry, the size of their reactors are truly almost football field sized. Right. Our reactor size is the size of my fists, approximately. And so, once we figured it out, it took us a long time. We're not a software company. We're a hardware company. And hardware is hard. And it took us a while to figure out what was going on inside that reactor.”
“Since we've become more involved in the defense-related markets and applications, we've gone through a cybersecurity evaluation. And, for instance, when we brought our first production tools online, instead of managing our own IT, we brought in somebody who is here locally, here in upstate New York, who manages it for prisons and power generation power plants where you can't go offline.”
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