[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by Melissa Sherman. She is the founding CEO of MOBILion. they do some stuff that I can barely pronounce, but I'm gonna say hello first.

Hello, Melissa. How are you?

[00:00:43] Melissa: Hello. I'm great. Thank you for having me today.

[00:00:45] Jay: this has been a long time in the making. I saw you at a panel, probably six months ago in Philadelphia. I was just telling you before the show legitimately impressed, just with you and with the company and just like your vision and it's just, it seems like you've got everything all buttoned up. you know, as we all know, underneath the hood, there's all sorts of stuff that's going on that may not be the case. But I do have a, a starting question for you. could you use mass spectrometry to determine the best cheese stick in Philadelphia?

[00:01:12] Melissa: yes. Depending on who, how you define best.

[00:01:16] Jay: Okay. I'll take that as an

answer. I'll take that as an That's fine. That's

[00:01:20] Melissa: The easier, less expensive way is just eat it. 

[00:01:23] Jay: I like that's the more fun way, probably. I don't know. I don't know if it's more fun. all right, so where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:01:32] Melissa: so I grew up in the great state of Wisconsin and so I would say, you know. Scrappy, hardworking Midwesterners that have an attraction to good people, is the way that I was born and bred. It makes it very difficult now being in the Philadelphia area, in Eagles country as a diehard tried and true Green Bay Packers football fan.

So yeah. Other than that, I'm a Wisconsinite that has been transported to Philly and surviving as best I can through sports seasons.

[00:02:00] Jay: Well, I love to hear that you're a diehard look, the fact that you're a diehard fan gives you enough respect in my book to not matter. Also, we have no rivalry with the Packers, so like the Packers are not, you know,

it's a, you know, whatever. I mean, obviously I'm a huge

Eagles fan, but like there's no, you know, there's no bad blood between us, so that's fine.

what made you move to Philadelphia?

[00:02:18] Melissa: so coming outta grad school, I got my first job out of grad school with DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware. So I've lived in kind of the Delaware, Pennsylvania border area, working for companies either in Pennsylvania or Delaware, ever since. So yeah, that was, yeah, about almost 25 years ago.

[00:02:37] Jay: Okay. what's the biggest kind of culture shock you saw between Wisconsin and Philadelphia? Greater Philadelphia region.

[00:02:46] Melissa: Yeah. well, my first culture shock probably has to do with the Packers game because when I moved here, I went to a pre-season Eagles Packers game thinking like football season starting, oh my gosh, the Packers have this preseason game. I went to the game. And people were so mean. People were so mean. The fans were so mean and they're throwing stuff at me and spitting on me and whatever.

And I'm like, oh, you know, we're not in Kansas anymore. We're not in Wisconsin 

[00:03:13] Jay: You're not, well if you're from Kansas these days, that'd be a different

sort of rivalry. I feel like it's gotten better. It has to have gotten better. Have you been

in any games since then? 

[00:03:22] Melissa: I don't go. I'm sorry. I don't go. I know my place. Like I go to other stadiums. I don't go to the Eagle 

[00:03:28] Jay: Lemme tell you something. Lemme let's just, let's set,

[00:03:30] Melissa: Let's digress for a 

[00:03:31] Jay: let's set this straight real

fast. we are a season ticket holder family. So if the Eagles are playing the Packers. I will take you as my guest and I will protect you

[00:03:41] Melissa: Awesome, awesome.

[00:03:42] Jay: end because we look, we have like, I mean, look, if you're not the Cowboys, we love you.

Right? Like any Cowboys fans, I can't, I couldn't bring

a Cowboys fan and protect them. But if you're a Packers fan,

we'll go and have a great time. I promise. I

[00:03:53] Melissa: And you have beat us the last few matchups. So the last 

[00:03:56] Jay: we're world champs. Like we're on top of the world right now. You know? Give us another year. Give us another year. You know, we'll be

fine. we'll be back to earth.

Alright. Tell me, and I want to, I would love just for the general audience who's not a polymer scientist or whatever the hell your crazy PhD is in, can you explain it like it's, you know, you're talking to a five or 10-year-old. What is it that you guys actually do?

[00:04:17] Melissa: Yep. So we make instruments that are used across multiple industries, meaning the pharmaceutical industry. food testing industry, environmental testing industry, drug testing industry. They use instruments to characterize or determine what things are made of or what is in certain samples that they're analyzing, whether it's food, water, soil, drugs, you name it.

And so these are instruments that are used usually by PhD, analytical chemist, scientists. and a variety of different industries and academics too, to do research. and so we make kind of next generation instruments that if you think about it in the simplest way, we say that we reveal what others leave unseen, meaning there's.

You know, last generation instruments that can see or detect or characterize only so far. And we break the boundaries of that and we characterize even further, deeper, faster, more accurately and more efficiently. So we see more stuff, whether it's good stuff, whether it's bad stuff, it's important stuff. So in the, you know, food industry, when there's food testing, they 

Test for toxins and they test for things that make people sick if they eat it. and so you wanna be able to do that the fastest, most accurate way. whether it's in the food industry, you know, we characterize, one of our examples is we have a customer that makes, plant-based Stevia sweeteners.

the artificial sweetener, stevia, and it's a plant-based material that they need to characterize because they'll grow the plants to engineer the growth conditions to be the sweetest it can possibly be. And so you want that to be accurate. If it's inaccurate, you're feeding your plants or growing your plants without the highest degree of accuracy and you're not getting the highest degree of sweetness.

So there are instruments that are needed to be able to characterize the plants to say, am I getting super sweet, medium sweet, low, sweet with certain molecules that are in the plants that contribute to that, sweetness flavor. So in the drug discovery world, it's both sides of the coin, meaning our instruments are used to characterize drugs for safety, efficacy, toxicity.

are they working in the right way? So. You know, by switching the chemistry of a drug, you can completely change the safety and efficacy profile. So you wanna get that right, right? You wanna get that characterization right, because you wanna optimize for safety and efficacy. On the other side of the drug delivery coin, you wanna characterize human biology because drugs are designed and developed to target certain mechanisms of human biology to interrupt disease or treat diseased cells or whatever it might 

[00:06:59] Jay: Right. 

[00:07:00] Melissa: So the more accurately you characterize human biological molecules, proteins, lipids, glycans, metabolites, the better you understand disease mechanisms, the better you can develop drugs to target those disease mechanisms. So there's just an area of, biological research that contributes to drug development and drug discovery.

So whatever the case may be, at the end of the day, you want the fastest, most accurate measurement. we get the most accurate results, and our instruments break the boundaries of analytical characterization to deliver kind of the fastest, best, deepest, most accurate characterization of critical molecules across the industries that I mentioned.

[00:07:44] Jay: So was there a problem that you guys came up with your devices to solve? was it just to be better or faster or was there an actual problem that you guys saw that you came up with the solution?

[00:07:54] Melissa: Yeah, so there's ano the kind of, the good thing for us is there are many problems to solve, and the, you know, generic industry agnostic problem to solve is, I have inaccurate measurements and therefore my Stevia sweetener is not as sweet as it could possibly be. Right. Or I have inaccurate measurements, so I think this drug is going to be efficacious, but when I get to a clinical trial, it failed, and now I've wasted a lot of time and money.

Wow. If I had characterized that drug more accurately to begin with, or if I had characterized the patient biology of the mechanism that I'm trying to address. Maybe I wouldn't have failed that clinical 

and that would've been successful and I would've gotten it to market, you know, a year faster and 10 billion less dollars spent if I hadn't blown that clinical trial.

So there are a number of problems to solve, but they're all variations of the same theme, which is inaccurate measurements lead to inaccuracies downstream, which leads to lost time, money, you know, And businesses not being built as quickly as they could be built.

[00:09:04] Jay: is there a limit to it eventually where like you're just like, it is as accurate as it can be?

[00:09:10] Melissa: Yeah, it's a good question because what is special about the core technology that we're developing is we can continuously improve it. So we're always learning and we're always seeing, right. And it's kind of the chicken and the egg situation. Like if you don't know what's there because you haven't had instruments to see it.

How do you know what's there? So it takes a lot of time and a lot of discovery with our first generation instrument we're revealing. Things that other people leave unseen, right? So we're revealing new molecules. Well, now the challenge is how do you make it even better? How do you make it even faster? How do you make it even deeper?

And our technology that fuels our product roadmap is a platform technology that we're kind of lucky to be able to have a number of combinations and permutations of continuous improvement. So for us as a company, we're just getting started and. You know, is there at some point there's probably a theoretical threshold where you see all the things, there's nothing more to 

[00:10:14] Jay: Right. 

[00:10:15] Melissa: but we're pretty far from that.

We're pretty far from that.

[00:10:19] Jay: so I mean, you mentioned like such diverse use cases and fields. How do you not get so spread thin trying

to solve these problems where you're like, you're worried about plants and you're worried about drug

efficacy, all these different, like, how do the hell do you manage all this stuff and like focus on any one thing?

[00:10:38] Melissa: Yeah, I would say it is a, we talk about it all the time. To have such incredible breadth of opportunity is a blessing and a curse, right? It's a blessing because if one of them doesn't work out perfectly, there's. 50 other behind it that, you know, we can go after and build a business around, but it can be a curse from an execution perspective and a focus perspective, right?

As a small venture backed company with limited funds, we can't do what big companies do and we can't go after all the things at once. We have to be very focused and say, you know, there's all these market applications out there. But we can only do one or two at a time, and we've gotta lock those up and then go to the next one or two, and then go to the next one or two.

Because if, you know, if you take a shotgun approach and you try to boil the ocean all at once, as a small company, it doesn't work. It doesn't work.

[00:11:30] Jay: So how did you go from working a job to starting this very well funded, very advanced technology. I mean, obviously you have a very diverse background. I think. Did I see something about fashion somewhere in your

background as too Yeah. So you like. I have a question about that later too, but just in general, how did you jump into this?

This

seems, I mean you, so you're so well spoken about the business side and the venture side and the medicine side and like how the hell do you manage? How did, where did you break in, I guess is the real question?

[00:12:00] Melissa: Yeah, to this. it's interesting. I mean, I think the first step is converting from a scientist to a business person. So I was a scientist by training. You know, you mentioned I have a PhD in polymer chemistry, which is just the chemistry of all things synthetically made. Plastics and biomolecules and things.

and when I was coming outta grad school as a female polymer scientist, there were a few of us. my first job was with DuPont, as I mentioned, which is what brought me to this part of the country. And it was in the textiles, fibers, fashion, apparel industry. So, not to be stereotypical, but fashion, is my passion.

And being a female, you know, and saying, okay, I can either go work for a tire company. In the fashion apparel industry or other things. I was picking textiles, fibers fashion all day long. that was a very easy decision for me and I loved it. it was absolutely fascinating and I was fortunate enough, it was really my career with DuPont that transformed me from a science geek to a business person.

And, you know, it's a big company that. values people that come in and understand the science, but have a mindset of what's the sake of science if you can't build a business and make money, right? I mean, at the end of the day, we all have to make money, right? And we all have to get a return on investment.

So science is great. But my passion, even before I went into grad school was how do you harness science to make money and build businesses? DuPont was a great company for me to start my career because they gave me the opportunity as a scientist and they, you know, I say they kind of gave me the MBA. The DuPont MBA, which is they taught me finance, they taught me, they sent me to classes, they had internal classes.

I became a Six Sigma black belt. it was basically them grooming me to convert from being a lab bench chemist scientist to being a business person. And I am forever grateful for that opportunity because my real passion is building businesses based on sciencey things. 

[00:14:03] Jay: How did you, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but how, like, so just to dig into that just for a second, like, was it instant? Were you like, oh, this is what I need to be doing? Like, you fell in love with doing business stuff and you're like, I want to go build the next, you know, billion dollar science based business or was it gradual as you kind of learned stuff over time?

[00:14:20] Melissa: no, I knew it. I knew it when I was in undergrad, so I was a chemistry major 'cause I just liked science and I had an internship at 3M.

[00:14:29] Jay: In college, and it was my kind of my boss mentor at 3M. And of course I was working in a lab, but I was working in a lab that, made polymer capsules that perfume oils were in, were inside of.

[00:14:42] Melissa: So think of scratch and sniff stickers, or think of perfume ads and magazines where you rip open the flap and the perfume fragrance comes out, it polymers shell with perfume oil on the inside. And I was like, this is the coolest thing. It's so sciencey, but it's so practical. And now I know how scratch and sniff stickers are made.

And so my exposure to the business application of science at 3M. What I saw was everybody at 3M, whether they were a marketer, business leader or lab director, all had PhDs. All of them did, and I didn't have a ton of guidance, and I didn't really know at the time what an MBA was, or that there were business degrees like.

I mean, obviously I knew there were business degrees in undergrad, but I didn't have a lot of guidance, put it that way. And so my 3M boss said. You know, you should really go get your PhD. And I was like, yeah, because I wanna do what that guy does. But he was a business person, but he had a PhD. So I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go get my PhD 'cause I wanna run a business like he does and I wanna run a business that's really cool.

Like this one is. So I got my PhD and then I realized like a few years into my PhD program, like I really wanna be a business person, but I was, you know. Way far in, and I was lucky in grad school I worked for a very business oriented advisor and we developed the polymer that was licensed by Boston Scientific for the inside coding of their drug eluding stent.

So again, very practical. Made a lot of money for the university from a licensing perspective. So again, it was how do you make money and build a business off of this really cool science? So I knew that leaving grad school, I don't wanna be in the lab, I wanna be a business person. And even when I was kind of picking what job I was gonna take, obviously given the opportunity to work in the fashion industry, was a no brainer.

But the second part of it was DuPont had made a commitment that if you show business acumen, they will move you from the lab and groom you and give you opportunities to run and lead businesses quickly than any other company kind of in the field at the time. So I knew it from undergrad. I just maybe took an unconventional path.

'cause I didn't realize there was such a thing as an MBA. Like in hindsight, maybe I should have gotten an MBA. But anyway, I have the MBA of life experience.

[00:17:04] Jay: of life. I love

that. I, also have the MBA of Life, and I think there's pros and cons to both. I prefer. Our method, just because it feels like when you're in the trenches after

kind of learning it in the trenches that like, it just, 

there's like an innate sense that you get, and I see other MBA driven

business folks that kind of panic or like don't have like their real life experience to fall back on.

So I can definitely appreciate that.

[00:17:30] Melissa: Yep. Yep. So, I don't know if I answered your question, how did I break in? I would say that's how I broke into business and then how I got connected to MOBILion. I'd worked in the fashion apparel industry, surgical products, industry leading businesses. and then I worked for an investment firm.

That was an early stage technology investment firm called IP Group. London headquartered at the time we worked for the US subsidiary. I mean, they still are London headquartered, but at the time they had a US subsidiary and MOBILion. we set off as part of IP group to scout early stage technologies to license from universities or US federal laboratories.

To build businesses around. so extracting technology from research institutes to build businesses around and help to productize and commercialize those technologies. So. I worked for IP Group and MOBILion was one of my portfolio companies. And when it became time to set MOBILion up as a company and hire A CEO, I left the investment company to be the CEO of MOBILion, the founding CEO of MOBILion.

So it was my job to. You know, set up the company, take it forward, take it from technology transfer from the laboratory where it was invented, which was a US federal Lab located in Washington State. so we had to set up the company, transfer the technology, do product development, and then ultimately commercialize our first product.

[00:18:59] Jay: So who was your first customer?

[00:19:02] Melissa: Yeah, our first customer, was NC State. an academic it right about the same time. It was interesting. We had an academic customer, a food industry customer, and a pharmaceutical customer kind of all right about at the same time, which shows the diversity, but we, which is. Counter to my need, our discussion around needing to focus.

but in our beta launch of our first product, we deliberately wanted to get the product in a variety of different industries as kind of beta, you know, pilot tests, because we wanted to test in real users' hands where did it have the most value, so that when we built our more scalable, let's say, commercial strategy, it would inform us as to how to focus.

And say like, who's getting the most out of this product? And that would inform how do you prioritize? How do you what, when you go to market, who what? What application segments do you prioritize for second and third, we needed that foundational information to inform our commercial strategy. So when we first launched our first few units, it was very deliberately across multiple industries and multiple use cases.

[00:20:13] Jay: So who is your customer now compared to then?

[00:20:17] Melissa: Yeah. So I would say in terms of these types of products, the customer base. First is usually academics and research institutions because they're early adopters of new technology and they like to discover like crazy. what comes after that is industry. So whether it's food, environmental testing, or pharmaceutical, academics typically come first and then industrial.

Companies come second. So I would say in the beginning it was a lot more academic, which is where you seed the market and then they publish and they talk about it at conferences, and then industry people say, oh wait, hey, so and so at, you know, NC State is using this instrument to better characterize.

Protein-based drugs. I need one of those. And then all of a sudden, Genentech has one, which Genentech has one. Right? So, and then the FDA and then the EPA and regulatory institutions that set standards in analytical measurement. And then ultimately industry customers. So I would say we evolved from academia.

Government, kind of regulatory agencies like the EPA and FDA, and then to industry customers. Now more so pharmaceutical, food and environmental testing.

[00:21:33] Jay: I feel like I could, I have like so many questions. we, I have a couple more though. and we're gonna, wrap it for, I feel like I need to have like five episodes with you just to talk through. 'cause I just love the genesis of where you've come from, kind of what you guys are doing.

[00:21:43] Melissa: Like, I wanna talk eventually about fun. we'll do a part two. I promise. Maybe after our Packers, Eagles game. Yeah.

[00:21:49] Jay: Who actually did play last year, by the way? in Brazil. We should have gone to that game. That would've been fun. That've been neutral sight.

[00:21:54] Melissa: They, yeah, and they also play, came together in the playoffs when I was at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference. So I had to watch the game in a Packer backer bar in San Francisco, which was actually one of the best experiences ever because our home means travel. Our these wisconsinites welcome you wherever you are.

[00:22:11] Jay: You got? I do. The Packers fans do travel. Why, why? Why don't we do this? I'm gonna ask you, a non-business related question. This is gonna be

the last question. We'll do that. We'll set it up and then I promise we are gonna do another one of these. 'cause

this was, I love talking to someone so dialed in on just business and what they're doing. non-business related, you know, non mass spectrometry. By the way, I had to practice saying mass

spectrometry like a million times before I did this. If you do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:22:42] Melissa: Oh, that's a good one. Oh, I would start a consumer products company

[00:22:47] Jay: A consumer

[00:22:48] Melissa: three. I have three companies in mind, but I don't wanna give my ideas 

[00:22:52] Jay: Don't give 'em away. Don't give 'em away. 

you would do con. Okay. Alright. Fair enough. I mean, your business through and through, I get it. Like you love it and I love that you love it and you can tell, like I said, I saw you on a panel and you were impressive. You're impressive today. I hope you know, the, a couple of these little things that we heard today kind of stand out. I want to do a couple of these episodes with you because, I think there's a lot to learn from somebody that's been in a bunch of different spaces. Kind of come at it from an unconventional kind of way. you're very impressive.

I have three daughters. I hope that they

get some shred.

Well, I have six kids total. Three and three, but I have three daughters and I hope. They have some shred of the entrepreneurial, you know, acumen that you do and go build something really cool. So congratulations on the success. We'll see each other in town. thank you for being on today.

And if you want to find out more about you with anything they heard today, how do they reach out to you directly? And then obviously how do we get, to MOBILion if they want to reach out to you guys.

[00:23:46] Melissa: Yeah, so MOBILion website, MOBILion systems.com. anyone can find me on LinkedIn, so Melissa Sherman, CEO of MOBILion, on LinkedIn and message me and I'm there.

[00:23:58] Jay: Beautiful. Melissa, you're fantastic. Enjoy the rest of your week and

we'll talk again soon. Right. Thanks

[00:24:03] Melissa: you. Take care. Thanks. Bye bye.