What Does It Take to Win a Tech Pitch Competition? — Luis Estevez, AIMM
From running his family’s restaurant to getting an Ivy League PhD to fighting disease, Luis Estevez is the epitome of the American success story.
Luis Estevez, PhD, founder of AIMM, won the Early Risers Academy virtual pitch competition for its spring 2020 tech cohort. Held in conjunction with local startup advocacy and outreach group Launch Dayton, the 10-week pre-accelerator program helped a select group of inventors and engineers in and around Dayton, Ohio get a handle on all steps of getting a product to market.
AIMM specializes in antimicrobial coatings for porous materials that activate upon contact with water. Right now, though, the company has felt a call to action to fight COVID-19. For the moment, the company has pivoted to develop a self-disinfecting N95 respirator mask — an innovative upgrade to the masks that are so vital to the fight against the pandemic.
In addition to receiving $1,000 in winnings, Luis believes he also received something much more valuable for a tech founder: new skill sets and a well-connected network to tap into. We sat down with Dr. Estevez to learn more about his experience with the Early Risers Academy and why programs like it are vital to developing a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem in cities across the country.
What was your experience with the Early Risers Academy pre-accelerator program?
Overall, it was a great opportunity. I made incredibly valuable contacts and connections — one of whom, Eric Wagner (CEO of Converge Ventures) actually ended up on AIMM’s advisory board.We learned plenty of actionable, real-world lessons from the curriculum and learned from a great array of guest speakers.
The lessons filled in a lot of knowledge gaps that my training as a materials scientist hadn’t taught me, such as how to create a social media marketing campaign.
And in terms of my fellow students, we developed a close camaraderie and we all felt a real sense of kinship. Everyone was helping everyone and we’re still keeping contact. In fact, just today, a former classmate forwarded information on an SBIR that would be a good fit for AIMM.
What was the most valuable advice you received? How did it impact your business model?
As a scientist, I learned how vital it is to be able to pivot from an academic speaker to one who’s trying to interest entrepreneurs and VCs. In the academic world, the way you try to get across your expertise and abilities is by showing tons of data and not talking so much about the potential but about what the data says. You can hint at “we think this will be useful.” Yet without data, it doesn’t matter.
What I learned from the cohort is that when talking to investors, it’s enough to describe my background succinctly. A PhD from Cornell is enough. You don’t need to belabor the point. It’s way more important to talk about our path to market or whether there’s demand for the widget you’re trying to get funded.
This advice has come into play immediately. At the moment, I’m developing a pitch deck to justify the market need for AIMM’s inaugural product. Speaking of which, when we pivoted from water purification to self-disinfecting N95 masks, I realized from my classes that it’s not good enough to say “if a virus lands on these masks, the virus will be killed.” Without proof of customer demand, it means nothing.
To address this issue, I spoke with an operations executive with a large health system to gauge their interest level in a self-cleaning N95 mask. Once they confirmed their interest, that level of customer validation supporting market demand went into my pitch, greatly strengthening it in the process.
As a founder, why do you think programs like Launch Dayton are important?
It’s important to know your strengths and weaknesses so you can learn how to use them to your advantage. This accelerator program for early-stage tech startups is vital. I personally needed to know where I stood and how I compared to peers and colleagues. Do I have the right strengths? Am I trainable enough?
This program let me get critical feedback from peers who gave me candid feedback on what needed work. For example, I learned that when pricing, I need to do a bottom-up approach.
Overall, the program put me on firm footing to work within the entrepreneurial space and instilled in me the confidence to know what I needed to work to take my company to the next level.
Tell us about your company. What hurdles have you encountered?
AIMM is an early-stage startup tech company. We attach biocidal nanoparticles that kill viruses and bacteria to porous carbon-based materials such as polymer fiber cloths (ie: plastic). In the case of our N95 mask, this process creates a self-cleaning mask. In a future project, we are creating a new water filtration system — like a Brita on steroids — for use in areas with limited access to clean water. As a point-of-use water filter, the idea is that anyone could pour contaminated or non-potable water through our system, which purifies water and kills any viruses, harmful pathogens or microorganisms, resulting in immediate availability to clean, good-tasting drinking water.
Initially we started off with the water purification idea. But then COVID happened. Out came the call for products to help supply healthcare workers with PPE. I thought, “The chemistry is the same. N95 masks are made up of plastic polymer fibers, laid on top of each other like microscopic toothpicks. We can attach the biocidal nanoparticles to the outside of the masks so that any viruses in the spit or vapor get killed.”
We had our COVID-19 inspired pitch accepted by the NSF’s SBIR SEED program and are currently putting that together now.
What’s the current state of your product? How would you describe your journey to date?
Right now, the goal is to get funding to make the self-cleaning N95 mask. We have to go through an SBIR, get it prototyped and then, as our company grows, we can re-pivot to concentrate on water purification.
The biggest hurdle is time. It’s really difficult to leave my job and become a full-time entrepreneur. During the day, I work for the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI). Right now I’m working half time, trying to make a rechargeable battery for the surface of Venus, which allows me to keep my benefits. With my reduced schedule, I am able to move more quickly and with the precious remaining hours of my day, I’m trying to get as much done as possible — even without government funding.
Working at UDRI has given me the contacts within UD/UDRI to enable partnering with SBIR efforts. We’re working with a scientist at the University of Dayton whose expertise is in water treatment and who, incredibly, has all of the necessary equipment to test, inoculate, and help us develop proof of concept.
Tell us a little about where you came from, and what is your vision for your company 10 years from now?
I want to grow the company quickly at the outset. By producing self-disinfecting N95 masks, I see the opportunity to do quite a bit of good for society at large.
I started my schooling late. I was in my 20s, working in my family’s restaurant, which started on the ground floor in 1990. I was working like crazy every week and I helped take the restaurant to a point where we were doing really well financially. It was only then that I decided to go to college, because the idea of studying science and engineering was very attractive to me.
At 31, I moved to middle-of-nowhere Maine to become a mechanical engineer. Then, during the summer of my junior year to supplement my income, I took a high-paying internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where I was introduced to research. From there, I headed back to back to the woodsy reaches of the Northeast and got my PhD in material science from Cornell University.
It’s been a weird road. I know my path until now has been very unorthodox but the whole reason behind it is because ultimately, I want to make a positive impact on this earth. As I see it, engineering and science is the best way to do that.
At the outset, we will continue to pursue making self-disinfecting masks, scaling up, and hiring employees. In 10 years, I want to be in the developing world, instituting point-of-use drinking devices and put to an end the 800,000 deaths from dysentery and other waterborne diseases.
The over 2 billion people don’t have access to safely managed drinking water services, and climate change will make it all worse, bringing water stress to places where it wasn’t before.
That’s absurd. The good news is that we can fix it.
That’s the legacy I want to leave behind.
Talk about your potential competitors. What sets you apart?
If you look at the options for water treatment in the developing world, the biggest player to try to enter that market was Procter & Gamble, with its PUR filter. It’s highly effective, works well, and is really cheap. It was a financial non-success. It has, however, become a PR one, especially during typhoon season and other times when water purification is most difficult.
How it works is that you take contaminated water and push it through a cheesecloth. Then you put the water through a flocculant, a chemical that binds to organic materials. That gets poured out into another container. Then you take a chlorine tablet, which kills viruses and bacteria. The problem with PUR is that for one, there are way too many steps and two, the filtered water tastes bad because of the chlorine. No one wants to drink pool water.
With AIMM, we are aiming to create a single container that filters contaminated water in one simple step, without chlorine, and can be used anywhere, any time.
Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
I want to thank the people at Dayton TEC, including Ke, Eric, and Katie Hill, at Early Risers who have done a lot of heavy lifting and have been outstanding mentors. I would also like to thank Dr. Kenya Crosson at UD for being such a great collaborator. And my wife just plain rules.
A fun fact that I’m weirdly proud of: when I was doing my PhD, my fellow geeky grad students and I had a “giant head measuring contest,” which I handily won.
Finally, I’d love to tell people about the podcast that my friends and I run, called “What’s the PhDeal” where we attempt to demystify the scientific PhD process for the folks going through the rigors of pursuing a PhD, thinking about getting a doctorate — or even people just curious about what it’s all about! You can find us on iTunes and via RSS feed.
