 |
Oct. 3, 2002 — Tom Cellucci has a very simple job description.
“He’s going to start bringing money in,” said his new boss, Jim Von Ehr, chief executive of Dallas-based Zyvex Corp.
Over the past year, Von Ehr has been shifting the company’s focus from the distant possibilities of molecular manufacturing to the practical realities of cash flow. Cellucci was brought in more than a month ago as chief marketing officer and vice president of products. And since then the company has hammered out five-year marketing and business plans while transitioning the company from a “technology push to a market pull.”
 |
Cellucci, who until recently was president and chief executive of Etec Inc., a MEMS company in West Peabody, Mass., is now busily hawking the hardware and software Zyvex has developed to others in the MEMS and nanotech field. The marketing chief is also pursuing plans to license some of the company’s intellectual products while another worker is devoting time to winning new grants.
“The culture at the company is changing,” Cellucci said. “The fact is we have made it clear within the company that we need to focus at least 80 percent of our efforts on more shorter-term goals that are more application specific while we maintain long-term research.”
None of that called for any layoffs, Cellucci said, but it did require him to take a few extra weeks to explain the process internally and get the company’s 54-member workforce to buy in to the new approach.
Coming up with a marketing plan for a nanotech company is no easy task, said Cellucci, who holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Rutgers University. “We can’t find a marketing report or go on the Web and find data on the nanotech industry,” he said. So he ended up culling through “literally thousands of pieces of data to form the basis of a strategic marketing plan.”
Cellucci said Zyvex is out to market its nano-manipulators as the company’s “first family of products.” The company also is looking to generate revenue by licensing its IP on carbon nanotube processing, a field where it already has scores of patents pending.
“I think it’s a wise strategy,” said Josh Wolfe, managing partner of Lux Capital. “Jim (Von Ehr)’s shown an ability to morph quickly. I think they’ve been very quick to shift toward those pockets of opportunity that have the highest probability of success.”
A recent move by Zyvex toward MEMS led them into a field that quickly became saturated, Wolfe said. By shifting again into capitalizing on the tools they’ve designed, the company not only starts making cash, but also strikes up new relationships that could potentially create profitable joint ventures.
“And,” Wolfe added, “I think it’s a great way to lower some of the burn rate.”
The shift marks a big change for Von Ehr, who has regaled listeners over the years with his dreams of molecular manufacturing, in which virtually anything may one day be constructed from the tiniest building blocks. These days, Von Ehr and most others in his company are much more focused on the task of assembling an income stream.
“A lot of this stuff you read in the trade journals about nanorobots doing this and that; while it’s worthwhile to discuss, we’re focusing on tools and research while at the same time keeping an eye on longer-term applications,” Cellucci said.
Cellucci defines long-term as eight years and beyond, a horizon that the company still has in its sights. Zyvex was given a matching $12.5 million grant from the National Institute of Science and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program to fund research aimed at creating prototype microscale assemblers and then bringing them down to nanoscale.
Zyvex originally set out on the program paired with Standard MEMS. But that company was recently forced out by financial turmoil. Von Ehr said that Honeywell officially took Standard MEMS’ place in the program and Zyvex has been working with Honeywell’s MEMS foundry near Seattle.
“The parts we’ve been getting back have been good quality parts,” said Von Ehr, visibly relieved at getting the program back on track.