Those were a speaker’s opening words at a talk I attended several years ago. His startup had just been acquired by Google, but he was referring to himself and his co-founder six years earlier. His point was how incredibly little he and his partner knew about their market, their customers, their product-market fit, their strategy—just about everything—at the beginning.
This speaker’s frank (and eloquent!) self-description stuck with me and resurfaced last week as I reflect on Uniqarta’s past six months. We find ourselves at a very different place than what we envisioned at our founding two-and-a-half years ago. Then, our vision was to use our ultra-thin, flexible electronics technology to embed ultra-thin RFID chips within paper stock. We envisioned this being beneficial in applications such as product packaging, security documents, and other printed media.
I think this is still something we will address in the future. However, the past six months has taken us in a new direction—one focused more tightly on our core technology of assembling ultra-thin, flexible ICs onto flexible substrates. This change has been driven by a deeper understanding of potential markets. I have learned that it is too early for integrated RFID in consumer product packaging, but that there is a strong need for other types of flexible ICs in other applications. In fact, there is a whole emerging technology area called flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) that depends on the ability to integrate ultra-thin, flexible ICs with flexible substrates.
The U.S. government
is investing $75 million to drive FHE development as they considered it an important future manufacturing technology. The government has sponsored the founding of NextFlex—a FHE Manufacturing Innovation Institute—and Uniqarta is deeply involved. We are a founding member, I am on NextFlex’s Governing Council, and my co-founder Val Marinov chairs the Device Integration Technical Working Group. NextFlex is making their initial project awards this spring (Uniqarta is getting one as part of a UMass Amherst-led team) and has just announce their second project call.
Through our involvement, we have learned that we are the only company that is focused on the ultra-thin chip assembly problem. That’s a nice place to be! There are certainly others working on wafer thinning and other aspects of the problem, but we are the only company that can offer a complete assembly solution encompassing thinning, dicing, placement, and interconnection. As a result, we have received numerous inquiries from other NextFlex members for support on their projects.
Anyways, back to my original topic, this change of direction is nothing unusual for those experienced with startups. In fact, entrepreneurship educator Steve Blank defines a startup as “a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” I’ve emphasized “search” here as that truly represents what startups do and what we have been doing.
I’d like to wrap up here by acknowledging the LONG lapse since my last post. It’s tempting to say that I’ve been too busy to post, but that simply hasn’t been the case. The truth is that I hadn’t been motivated to post. I’m not sure why that is nor what the future may bring but that has been the situation. In any event, Uniqarta is doing well and I’ll provide a complete update in my next post…sooner than seven months from now. I promise!