UAlbany News Podcast

Entrepreneurship Takeover Pt. 1 with Shawn Allan of Lithoz America

Episode Summary

For our first of a two-part series speaking with entrepreneurs, we brought Shawn Allan of Lithoz America to the show. Lithoz America, an Innovate 518-certified startup based in Troy, N.Y., provides technology for the 3D printing of high-performance and bioresorbable ceramics.

Episode Notes

For our first of a two-part series speaking with entrepreneurs, we brought Shawn Allan of Lithoz America to the show. The startup, an Innovate 518-certified company based in Troy, NY, provides technology for the 3D printing of high-performance and bioresorbable ceramics. Lithoz America worked with the UAlbany Innovation Center to establish operations in Upstate NY.

Innovate 518 is the Capital Region's Innovation Hot Spot and is a NYSTAR initiative by Empire State Development and managed by the University at Albany.

The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.

Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.

Episode Transcription

Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. I have with me Shawn Allan, the Vice President of Lithoz America in Troy, New York, a start-up that provides technology for the 3-D printing of high-performance ceramics.

Sarah O'Carroll:
Shawn, thank you so much for being here.

Shawn Allan:
Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Sarah O'Carroll:
Can you break down what high performance and bioresorbable ceramics, what those are and how they help businesses?

Shawn Allan:
Yes. Ceramics, as engineering and technical materials aren't very familiar to a lot of people, but they're really important materials. They're in all kinds of the products and devices that we use every day and a lot of times they're hidden behind the scenes so we don't usually see them, but they play really critical roles in applications. In our cars, the spark plug itself, the white part of the spark plug is a ceramic and that's a special material that can, that allows you to start your car. Same in our smart phones are full of different ceramic materials in the forms of different electronic components and even the special glass that covers the screens.

Sarah O'Carroll:
I'm looking at the samples that you brought with me and I know no one can see them, but I see what looks like teeth and even a tiny little chapel from Austria where your company is founded. Is that correct?

Shawn Allan:
Yeah, yup. There's a... so our company is based in Vienna, Austria, and one of our favorite demo pieces to make out a different materials is to display as the Stephen's [inaudible 00:01:41] Cathedral. So that's the national cathedral of Austria.

Sarah O'Carroll:
It's pretty incredible. It is about the size of a fingernail, but it's beautiful.

Shawn Allan:
Yeah. Yeah. And really high detail and it's one of the reasons why we make that as a demo piece too because it shows a lot of the really high detail and resolution that we can get with our process for making ceramics.

Sarah O'Carroll:
I'm curious to know why an Austrian company chooses Troy, New York to establish operations in the US. This was two years ago, it looks like. So what drew Lithos to the Capital Region?

Shawn Allan:
So Lithos was looking for someone to help them get started to create a subsidiary in the US. So they were already about 30 people companies, so still a fairly small company in 2017, but they were ready to branch out and launch into the US market. We got connected and after a lot of back and forth decided that we wanted to try to work together and they were looking at, of course, at different regions in the US and some that might be a little bit bigger areas that people might go to first. But I was already located here in Troy and said come check out the environment we have here. There's a lot of good resources for material science and just logistically it's a good area to be in. We are close to anywhere in the Northeast and good airport and everything. And so they came and checked out the area and really liked it and we decided to go ahead with setting up the company here.

Sarah O'Carroll:
And when do you know that, okay, it's now time to launch? It sounds like you could prepare forever or you could start early and crash and burn. So when do you know that it's time to really push something forward?

Shawn Allan:
Probably the one of the most important things is that you have a customer. So you can do a lot of planning for things and you have, there's a lot that you have to go through. You have to test out what your idea is that you're trying to get into business with. But I think the time when you know that you're ready to really start something is when you really know that you have a market for it. And maybe that's with a customer or two who's willing to help you get started.

Sarah O'Carroll:
You mentioned that you had told the people who were headquartered in Austria about Lithos and you shared about the different resources that are available in the Capital Region. What were some of those resources you told them about?

Shawn Allan:
Well, one of them is in our location. We're located in the Rensselaer Tech Park. So the previous company I was with, it was located there. And so I was really familiar with the resources that were there also with resources at RPI. And I also connected with the Innovate 518, and while at University of Albany in general, and we looked into options like START-UP NY and Innovate 518 and both UAlbany and RPI, the Center for Automation Technologies and Systems there, the CATS. They helped me get connected with Empire State Development and other resources in the area. So actually that was really helpful to be able to show that yeah, there's actually a really good network of support in the area for entrepreneurs and new companies and, but also a desire to bring in an established company to locate here. So...

Sarah O'Carroll:
And you mentioned that, you mentioned Innovate 518 and Lithos America is a Innovate 518 certified company. But I want to know what's the perhaps single most valuable aspect or asset or inducement that UAlbany has provided.

Shawn Allan:
So it's been really, really great being part of Innovate 518 and probably the single best thing has really been working with Bob Manasier, who's one of the business advisors for the companies in Innovate 518 and he's just been an excellent resource and it's so great to have a, somebody who can be sort of an external advisor on the business sides of things. So my background is technical and engineering and I mean, I've worked in the business areas of the previous companies I was in, but it helps so much to have some good advisors and that's really been a big asset of being part of the Innovate 518.

Sarah O'Carroll:
We have a lot of different entrepreneurs on campus and I know that you were a judge at the Capital Region semi-finals of the New York Business Plan Competition this past February, but would you have any advice that you might give to some aspiring entrepreneurs on campus?

Shawn Allan:
Yeah, I think the, probably one of the biggest pieces of advice I have is to get out and talk to people. So whether that's going to conferences, if you see something that you think is interesting, just just go talk to the people. If you can go to local events like the StartUp Tech Valley, that's another great place locally to be able to meet people on a monthly basis from all kinds of disciplines around the region here and all of those little networking opportunities can really add up. And you never really know who you meet might end up becoming a great connection or someone you end up working with later.

Sarah O'Carroll:
And would that same advice apply to entrepreneurs in the Capital Region? I'm curious to know if you have any other takeaways from your personal story that others might find useful in mapping out their own careers as an entrepreneur in this area.

Shawn Allan:
Well my path to becoming more entrepreneurial was from working, I worked in a small company for about 10 years as I mentioned. And while I was at that company, I had kind of a nice opportunity to be able to take on and be involved in some of the more business-side roles in the company, things like accounting and legal and insurance and these things that if you're... when you're just thinking about your own product or your own technology, those are not necessarily the issues that you're worrying about. But when you have to get a company started, having some kind of background in those areas can really help and take a lot of the pressure off. So for me, when it came around time to actually go through the motions of starting the business up, I was really lucky to have sort of a little bit of that experience behind me that I knew more or less what I needed to do to set up payroll and to set up actually the company, what did the company actually need and to register.

Shawn Allan:
And there's a quite a lot of a process involved in that which is kind of the official starting up of a company. And then at the same time you also have to care about of course what your product is in market and how to get your name out. But in my case with Lithos America, I was really lucky though of course that was bringing in an established company. So a lot of those pieces were already there and it was more having to set up the structure of the company. If you have to find a location that can be a little bit of an adventure itself, too. And then of course having to find people to work with. So it's great if you can work with people to get started and... but then it can be a little more challenging as you start to grow and you have to add new people and now you're going to be bringing people you may not know as well and you kind of learn how you have to, how you work together.

Shawn Allan:
And actually I attended a workshop last summer on kind of exactly that issue. It was an HR workshop that Innovate 518 put on. And that was really eye-opening because a lot of the situations that they were describing were even very similar to our company's case. So...

Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, it sounds like you've had a lot of great success with, Lithos and been able to bring over this international company. But I'd like to ask, what's one change you might want to see happen in the Capital Region? And I don't want this to sound like a trick question, but in terms of becoming a more palatable environment for startups and do you have any thoughts on how we might get there?

Shawn Allan:
Yeah, I feel like the Capital Region is a pretty friendly area for people trying to start up companies here. Perhaps in areas of assisting with sort of the actual startup process of the company and sometimes there's so much going on when you're starting your business up and trying to take care of the actual business that you might miss out on some opportunities for funding through some of the credits and things that are available that you just wouldn't know about until it's too late. That could... there might be a small amount of cash, but for a new company that can be pretty impactful.

Sarah O'Carroll:
So it sounds like being able to communicate better all the things that could really give someone a sort of toolkit to get started and connecting them to everybody, which I think these resources are trying to do.

Shawn Allan:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a tough challenge because there are a lot of different resources and connecting all the dots to that together does take some time. And it's work on the part of the person starting up the company. They have to, you've got to do your homework on that, too. So it can go... I think that can be an overwhelming stage though. But that's where I think connecting with the entrepreneur and innovation program at UAlbany or whether it's RPI or CEG, there's a lot of people around here that you can get connected with and get directed to someone that can help you sort these things out.

Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, very neat. And lastly, where can people find out more? Where can people learn more about Lithos?

Shawn Allan:
So one thing I didn't mention that Lithos does, one of the special things about Lithos is that we are actually using additive manufacturing or 3-D printing to produce ceramics, which is a really unique and special thing. There's not a lot of options for being able to do that. But we have a lot of information about about what we do and how our our systems work on our website. It's lithos.com. We have a lot of connections to news and different articles and videos about things, projects that we've been connected with including there was a recent TV show with Adam Savage from MythBusters. He just started a new series and there was a little Lithos connection in there with the Ironman suit that he had built. But also, yeah, a lot of technical resources on the page as well.

Sarah O'Carroll:
Shawn, thank you so much for being here.

Shawn Allan:
Yeah, thank you, Sarah. I appreciate it.

Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll and that was Shawn Allan, the Vice President of Lithos America in Troy, New York. On our next episode, we'll speak with the university's entrepreneur-in-residence, Bob Manasier as well as Anthony Lombardo, the president of Expex, a start-up focusing on cash management software. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu or you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanynews.