-by Cindy Falteich
Spirit. It’s that resident moxie that fills inanimate spaces with a force of determination—of fortitude. Some people have an unnatural amount of spirit. They’re oddities. They transport you from the realism of existence to a realm of possibility.
Rajatesh Gudibande is one of those people. The fourth presenter at a Shark Tank-type event in Villanova called The Entrepreneurs Network, or TEN for short, he took the stage in jeans and an untidy blue button-down anchored to his torso by a worn t-shirt and started talking like a veteran scientist. His Indian accent only animated the excitement in his voice as he spoke off the cuff about the device he held in his hand.
A recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Rajatesh had immigrated to the U.S. to study. Say what you want about immigration—leaving the country of your home and moving around the globe to completely foreign soil takes balls. Immigrating to compete at an institution that boasts a 12% admittance rate takes nerves of steel.
Rajatesh never looked at it that way. That’s because he’s a member of that mutant dreamer corp called the entrepreneur. In other words, when it comes to spirit, he’s full of it.
While he pitched his gadget in front of a crowd of about 75, his excitement and jocularity struck me as an odd combination. For a geek. Or is it nerd? Whatever term typifies Bill Nye the Science Guy. Then again, Bill has a great sense of humor, too. I don’t know why I tend to think really smart people are serious.
I only knew when Rajatesh started speaking, I had to meet him.
When I sat down with Rajatesh and his business partner, Saurabh Radhakrishnan, at the Dreamit space a few weeks later, I felt out of my league. As founders of GraphWear Technologies, the process they’ve discovered applies the immeasurable qualities of a material called graphene that, when first isolated, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Yeah, that Nobel Prize.
“Playfulness is one of their hallmarks,” states the press release about graphene developers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at www.nobelprize.org. After spending almost three hours talking with Rajatesh and Saurabh about their discovery, I could reason that perhaps playfulness is a hallmark trait of successful geeks. Or is that nerds.
While we spoke, Rajatesh talked about the elusive graphene saying, “You have to play around with it.” He told me this while talking about their patent-pending process that cuts roughly 13 steps from the production of a usable graphene film. When he first started handling the material, he asked a grad student why they never tried to find another way to reduce the lengthy and costly process. He was told, “That’s the way we do it.” So Rajatesh started playing with it. As he says, “You just have to try.”
Try. That’s not easy to do when you’re attempting to make a one-molecule-thick graphene patch using carcinogenic solutions and a furnace run on pure methane gas, heating materials to 1080 degrees Celsius. For you coffee lovers, that’s way hotter than Starbucks.
The only comparison I could fathom was my husband’s forge. Using propane, he’s singed the facial hair from more than one customer’s brows and even (accidentally) torched the hoodie off a helper. Rajatesh and Saurabh laughed easily when I shared that story. It was a welcome change from having people look at me like I’m crazy.
It occurred to me that this was a characteristic we might share.
Don’t get me wrong. A propane forge is like an Easy Bake Oven compared to a pure methane inferno. This is a contraption that requires serious technical training. It’s not entrusted casually to undergrads and it’s definitely not a toy you’ll find in physics lab next to the Bunsen burner. In this heat, a microscopic layer of graphene adheres to a copper plate. Quite frankly, in that heat, I think anything would adhere to a copper plate.
I didn’t get to see the methane dragon, but I did get to meet with these trailblazers in the glass-walled office that houses an elite organization called Dreamit.
Dreamit
Dreamit was listed as one of the top ten startup accelerators in 2015 by Forbes Magazine. The mission of this global network is to “…help entrepreneurs make meaningful connections with investors, customers, and strategic partners.” Basically, they “…invest in early stage entrepreneurs at all levels to create breakthrough technology companies…” by providing them with “…resources, advisors, investors, strategic partners and customers looking for innovative solutions.”
I’m not sure whether to call them a non-profit, or the best kept secret around.
In 2015, Rajatesh and Saurabh were one of eight startup teams offered the opportunity to become a Dreamit venture. The curriculum comes with a $50,000 check, a seat on the Dreamit Roadshow, a place to stay and a desk in their bright open-air office.
Fortunately, the facility also offers lots of free coffee and tubs of snacks. While Rajatesh and Saurabh’s discovery has potential rewards, they are, for all practical purposes, homeless geniuses. And because their profitless development process requires limited facilities, they’ve been leant a lean space by their advisor under the condition that they don’t interrupt the work of his grad students. So to forge ahead as quickly as possible, Rajatesh works nights and Saurabh works days, squeezing under a solitary exhaust hood to perfect the device they hope will change the training strategy of athletes everywhere.
That’s just for starters. They’re smart in more than one way. Rajatesh and Saurabh chose to apply this device to athletic performance because it has commercial potential that, once proven effective, will net them pocket money so they can move into researching ways to change the face of health care.
Initially, that’s how Rajatesh was drawn to this technology.
Rajatesh
In India, Rajatesh was an average student in a middle-class family with a mother who was a homemaker and a father who was his inspiration. Of the 29 states that comprise India, the frequent moves by his parents gave him the opportunity to live in over 12. In these 12, he’s seen a lot of problems. Many in health care.
By 10th grade, he became interested in controlling electron motion. He would contemplate, for instance, how to control the speed at which a light bulb would light. As a result, he studied electronics and semiconductors but had the desire to control more things. Then in 2007, he enrolled as an undergraduate student in an institution in southern India—the most underdeveloped part of India, possibly in the world—because that’s where a college education was free.
As the old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” There are costs associated with a free education, too; in this case, the risk of developing malaria. Rajatesh only came down with it four times. One of those escalated into cerebral malaria, an often fatal consequence of malaria that occurs when parasite-filled blood cells block small vessels to the brain. Corresponding effects include swelling of the brain, coma and brain damage.
As if contracting malaria in southern India isn’t dangerous enough, it’s exacerbated by the lack of infrastructure. A trip to the hospital from the institution where Rajatesh was studying required an initial 20-minute ride via tanga, or bull cart. (Like a cart pulled by a cow. A real cow.) Then a transfer to a bus for a 3-hour commute to an ER in the nearest city. All of this was intensified by hauling a patient in a coma.
His parents were panicked. They begged him to find another place to “discover” new technologies. But what bothered Rajatesh most was that something as common in developing countries as malaria should be cured. This led him to an interest in medical research. Which lead him to the University of Pennsylvania and to Professor A.T. Charlie Johnson, the director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center. Rajatesh simply wanted to work with a group in a lab and a professor in nanotechnology to investigate applications in health care.
Rajatesh claims that since they had no resources in India, when he joined Dr. Johnson’s lab, he had an “empty head.” Even so, in two years, he’d found the solution to making a good graphene sensor, a process that started with a fellowship to find a method to detect benzene in drinking water, a problem that occurs as a result of fracking.
Benzene is one of the most basic molecules, which is why having a problem detecting it was so confusing to Rajatesh. Amazingly there was no way to detect trace concentrations of aromatics in water, and the sensor they believed to be the answer at the time was being created by adhering graphene to a polymer and then removing it. To Rajatesh, this didn’t feel right. With this method, the graphene didn’t have the sensitivity required to detect benzene in contaminated groundwater.
Through the fellowship, Rajatesh was able to develop the technology to produce a graphene sensor that he and business partner, Saurabh, are currently applying to athletics.
Saurabh
Saurabh’s journey into nanotechnology didn’t require a near-death experience. It was his uncle who almost died. As a reaction to gout medication, the man developed Stevens-Johnson syndrome. This is a disorder (or perhaps disaster) that starts with flu-like symptoms and is followed by a painful rash that spreads and blisters. Then the serious part starts: the top layer of the affected skin dies and sheds. For three to four months his uncle was in a coma, but eventually recovered. What bothered Saurabh about this affliction was the lack of a method for accurately identifying the condition of gout.
Growing up as the son of a software company owner, Saurabh resided in over nine countries in his childhood including Russia, Singapore, India and South Africa. By seventh grade, Saurabh and his family moved to New Mexico, eventually landing in California. As a result of witnessing his uncle’s condition, Saurabh was driven to study nanotechnology in high school, which led to interests in material science and engineering, carbon nanotubes, and eventually graphene— which brought him to the University of Pennsylvania. His interest was specifically in commercial orientations rather than academia or PhD work, so when he started working toward his masters, he chased the guys at Graphene Frontiers until he got an internship.
Graphene Frontiers just happened to be where Rajatesh was working after he graduated from Penn in 2014. Saurabh and Rajatesh soon became gym buddies.
And together they became obsessed with sweat.
The Science of Sweat
If you’re developing a patch that can be safely worn on the skin to collect data on the condition of the human body, you have to isolate a biological marker that can be measured. And that marker has to be carried in the equivalent of diluted and ultra-filtered blood, and collected without piercing the skin. Hence, sweat.
At the University of Cincinnati, they love sweat too. As per their website: “Researchers have understood the richness of the information carried in sweat for some 50 years, but they have been unable to take advantage of it because of the difficulty of collecting, transporting, and analyzing the samples.”
Many people know the value in breaking this code, but no one has created a cost- and time-effective way to create a sensor from a single molecule-thick graphene patch that’s as sensitive as Rajatesh and Saurabh’s. Perhaps that’s why they were approached for possible collaboration by Samsung. I asked why neither of them has been tailed by suited men in blacked out SUV’s.
Maybe I’ve seen too many Bond movies.
Believe it or not, the most difficult thing about completing their research is making sweat. It takes one hell of a workout to create actual drops as opposed to a stinky film. And where to collect it is another challenge. Rajatesh discovered that a patch is most effective when worn in the natural gutter for sweat: the small of the back. Confirm that for yourself over the next few days by sticking your hand down your waistband and let me know if people think you’re weird.
Because sweat is the carrier of biological markers, the application to the monitoring of athletic performance was surprisingly practical. Using graphene as the base material in a patch that measures these markers is facilitated by the fact that graphene is chemically inert. This means it’s chemical composition doesn’t change when exposed to other elements. It’s unalterable; impenetrable.
Plus, when an enzyme (a catalyst) is stuck onto the graphene (in a manner my mind can’t even conceive), the electrical response changes. It’s these changes in the electrical response that make graphene a great conductor of information about the bonding agent—which, in the case of athletic performance, is electrolytes from sweat. Add an algorithm that standardizes the difference between blood levels of electrolytes and sweat levels, and a chip to report the findings via a mobile app, and you’ve got a handy way to prevent muscle cramps in your multi-million-dollar athlete. Or to avoid pulling a hammy. Or to simply look cool at the gym.
So if applications in health care are their quest, why fool with commercial devices like this?
Because they know that product maturity is paramount to success. Rajatesh and Saurabh conceived of the simplest, most commercially viable application and zoned in. It’s no secret that money is needed to develop processes with medical value, so they’ll perfect their device, then sell the technology, then become legends.
I might have added that last part.
Beyond athletics, the challenge in applications in health care is how to make the skin sweat to get a measurement, especially when it’s not feasible to participate in calisthenics five times a day to gather glucose data or monitor your cardiac levels when you’re flat on your back in the ER. But devices to induce sweat are also in development, making the race to perfect the technology to measure the markers in sweat a head-to-head nail biter.
Yet Rajatesh and Saurabh remain paradoxically cool.
Maybe that’s because, in their attempt to gather sweat, they also discovered how important it is to stay hydrated. As recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, dehydration may even boost driver error. According to the article, “The error rate in the dehydrated state was comparable to driving with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08%, the legal limit in most U.S. states. Caveat: Driving simulation is not real driving. Women drivers weren’t tested.”
Everyone’s a comedian.
In keeping in tune with the usual impetus of an initial discovery, imagine what other body functions will be investigated as a by-product of dehydration. If all the processes in the body are systemic, the effects of dehydration aren’t isolated to the tissues in the brain that are demonstrating the most annoying affect first: headache. Before you know it, the guy who promoted the water cure won’t look like such a quack.
By the way, while practicing hydration, Rajatesh lost 27 pounds. I mentioned to them that the weight loss industry is a jolly green profit machine. Even Oprah has invested in it. Perhaps they’d be interested in a celebrity spokesperson?
Oh, yeah.
Rajatesh and Saurabh have a man crush on Kobe. He’s definitely a cool pick. But if the goal is to target seriously health-conscious people, I envisioned a different spokesperson. Someone who coupled workouts with weight loss like that guy who used to abuse me on T-25. They instantly knew I was talking about Shaun T, the workout guru who developed an intense 25-minute video workout series and then his more difficult method of torture—Insanity.
They knew it because they used it. If you want to collect data from sweat for research, you have to have a lot of sweat. What better way to make sweat then to work out, and what better way to create a lot of it then to let Shaun T mock you while you attempt to keep from dying?
By the way, Rajatesh and Saurabh would love an endorsement by the esteemed Shaun T. I’d just like to harness his enthusiasm. Talk about alternative energy solutions.
In the meantime, they’re spending all their time and energy on the belief that this material, which holds practical application potential that has eluded much of the tech community, will deliver.
Graphene
Let me properly introduce you. I’ll start with how we met.
While I browsed the Internet a few months ago, my attention was diverted to the side of the page by a pop-up ad. It boasted a documentary about Manoj Bhargava, a former monk who netted billions by creating 5-Hour Energy and who has vowed, according to the website www.billionsinchange.org, to give billions back to “…implement solutions to the most important global problems—water, energy and health.”
One of these solutions is the use of a graphene cable that would transmit heat from the mantle of the earth. As Manoj says, “(Graphene) is (a) hundred times better conductor then copper… it transfers heat really efficiently. If you put hundred degrees here you get a hundred on the other side instantly, and the middle is completely cool… whether you go ten feet or you go miles, you could bring up unlimited energy from deep underground to the surface, pollution free.”
That’s what I knew when I heard Rajatesh use the word “graphene” at the TEN meeting in a room filled with middle-aged and older investors, entrepreneurs and related professionals.
Then there was me. A writer.
This can be a terrifying situation or an empowering one. The only reason I was there was because of a Main Line Today-sponsored lecture given by motivational and inspirational speaker Lisa Buckingham, Executive VP and Chief HR Officer for Lincoln Financial Group. The point she made that resonated with me referred to the quest to improve your “game.” In this respect she said, “You have to start associating with people who are on the next level.”
That requires moving outside your comfort zone. That’s where I was while sitting in a room with people who have the know-how to create millions of dollars from simple ideas. Or in the case of Rajatesh and Saurabh, the know-how to create an amazing device from a simple idea that upon execution, could change the world.
Knowing about the billions that Manoj Bhargava will spend on innovations to do just that, all I thought when Rajatesh used the word “graphene” was, genius is standing right there.
The strongest material pound-for-pound ever discovered, graphene is thought to have the capacity to provide infinite solutions. According to Rajatesh, “Graphene is 7 million times thinner than one strand of human hair. A graphene sheet the size of a human hair could support an elephant.”
So why isn’t it everywhere?
Here’s the problem. Graphene can transmit information 200 times faster than silicon and could replace it in semiconductors if only they could figure out how to turn it off. With graphene there is no such thing as a band-gap. This means transmission can’t be turned off. However, because information in mobile communications is conducted continuously, the no-band-gap predicament has enormous applications to mobile devices.
What’s most extraordinary about the procedure Rajatesh and Saurabh are developing is that, like I mentioned, the graphene that’s being produced for the device is a single atomic layer thick. Which is why it’s studied in a field called nanotechnology by people called nanotechnologists. To emphasize the genius behind this, all of these terms have been used in a script on The Big Bang Theory.
Nanoscience and nanotechnology are, by definition, the study and application of extremely small things and can be used across all the other science fields, such as chemistry, biology, physics, materials science and engineering. I guess nanotechs find those other sciences too restrictive.
What’s difficult to conceive is that the only reason nanotechs know they’re working with a single layer of graphene as opposed to, let’s say chewing gum, is because the vibration of the substance as measured with a Raman spectroscopy is equal only to graphene. It’s like working with a ghost. They’re virtually paranormal specialists. Which is why they received the invitation to work as a team at Dreamit.
They’re in good company.
SeatGeek
Another Dreamit venture, SeatGeek, a ticket search engine founded by two Dartmouth grads, launched in 2009 at TechCrunch50. It was one of the top five companies from the conference and boasts numerous awards including PC Magazine’s “The Top 100 Web Sites of 2010.” It also claims Ashton Kutcher as an investor. And Mark Cuban, a member of the panel of the ABC/CNBC show Shark Tank who appears to have a passion for things that make money.
Passion
After talking with Rajatesh and Saurabh, it’s easy to tell that their research is their passion. As Saurabh says, “It’s all I talk about.” Basically, nanotechnology is his coffee table topic. It might not be “normal” to have a passion in substances you can’t see, but if not for people like this, some questions would never be posed and their answers never sought.
I saw the answers presented to a full house at TEN—a room of entrepreneurs, investors and advisors; intelligence, experience and opportunity. If I was looking for the next level up, I found it. It’s intimidating to sit next to greatness. But when I think of it as exciting, I can force myself to walk in and take a seat.
Which is what I did the day I wandered into Dreamit. Unescorted. And interviewed two guys who could someday be on the cover of a magazine.
Often I wonder what the world would be like if every interaction could be viewed as pure possibility. If every time you are in the company of others, you could harness the feeling that greatness is nearby. That genius is just a few seats away. That the potential for you to be your best was a lesson that was just about to start. Or that maybe the person in line behind you looks like a train wreck because he spent all night intently perfecting a process that will save the life of your first-born, and you haven’t yet met your spouse.
That’s potential.
It’s easy to read about world leaders like Manoj Bhargava, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But getting a glimpse of potential that day was like witnessing a singer with the Blackberry Booze band playing at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1974 who called himself Bruce Springsteen.
Bruce has spirit—that resident moxie that fills inanimate spaces with a force of determination; of fortitude. That’s how I felt about Rajatesh when he talked about GraphWear at TEN in Villanova. When you come across individuals like him and Saurabh, they transport you from the realism of existence to a realm of possibility.
It takes a genius to make it look easy.
The post A Brush with Greatness appeared first on Dreamit.