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Theodor Nielsen was kind enough to spend an hour chatting with me on Skype. Find out how important trade shows are to new start ups; what it's like to transition from university to running a start-up; the advantages of being in Denmark for a high tech start-up; and other first hand accounts of entrepreneurship.
Alex Farcet (Q): Can you describe what your company does?
Theodor Nielsen (A): Our company NIL Technology is working with a fabrication technology called nanoimprint lithography (NIL). NIL is a technique to produce nano-scale patterns on a surface, i.e. patterns with dimension in the sub-100 nm regime. NIL is a pressing type technology, where a structured stamp is imprinted (pressed) into a soft (typically) polymeric film on the surface to be patterned. Typically, the surface is a glass or Silicon wafer and the structures are being used in the semiconductor, optical, life science and hard disc industries
NIL Technology provides the stamps (or templates), the process, product development based on NIL and production of components by NIL
(Q): What kind of companies are your customers; and how did you get the first one?
(A): Our customers both private companies and universities. Most of them are currently working with NIL for research or product development purposes, but a few are testing NIL in production of products.
The day after we started our company we had given ourself the task to call at least one potential customer. We called a research group at Aarhus University and they ended up buying from us already 1-2 months later.
(Q): Was the product part of research you did for University? Did you patent it yourself, or with the university and were there any issues around that?
(A): The product was fabricated by our technology. Our technology is patented - but our customers have the right to the products they order from us.
The products we delivered were part of a research project - that is all I can say about that part.
(Q): What was it like to transition from being a student to running your company? You had one partner to start up with, right?
(A): Yes, from day one we have been two full time employed people in the company. Brian Bilenberg and I took a leave from our PhD studies at MIC - Department of Micro and Nanotechnology at DTU.
The transition was a big difference. It is hard to compare. One day you are a student being responsible for you own education and projects - the other day you are talking to world leading companies from all over.
(Q): You're obviously very high tech, but what is the balance between lab and business, for you personally? I mean time and focus wise.
(A): We of course have many new products and technologies which we like to develop - but our strategy was to start selling what is possible today.
Therefore, we had no lab work until we got the first order. Brian became CTO of the company and has been responsible for the production. I became CEO and is now rarely in the lab.
(Q): In what ways have your customers surprised you?
(A): We have been positively surprised by the high number of customers already being willing to buy our products. The number of companies already working with NIL or are considering starting up NIL activities is much higher than expected.
(Q): Do they ever have any unexpected demands or approach your products in ways you had not expected?
(A): Different companies within different market segments do not necessarily have the same specification. Some companies have had product specification we were not able to meet right away -so yes. At this stage I can not be more specific.
(Q): One area many start ups seem to struggle with is how to price their first products or services. When you were in dialog with the Aarhus researchers soon after you launched, how did you come to agree on pricing? And how do you price today?
(A): I will like to keep our pricing strategy to ourself - but I can say that it is not easy to find the right strategy. We are working together with a company (Toft Business Development) that are specialists in busines development and they have been giving us very valuable input regarding this question - input we did not have from our time at the university.
(Q): That brings the next question; have you brought in people to do finances (billing, etc.) and HR, IT and so on or have you outsourced?
(A): We are to a great extend outsourcing such tasks that are not focussed on our core business