Just before Christmas this past year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a recommendation for Natalya Brikner, one of its aerospace engineers and doctoral students: If she wanted to get her ambitious start-up company off the ground, using the university’s own patents, it was time to drop out.
Ms. Brikner and several classmates had mulled the idea of a company, based on a breakthrough developed by her adviser, the head of MIT’s Space Propulsion Laboratory, for more than a year. Borrowing methods used to manufacture microchips, they had created minute, efficient engines the size of a few stacked pennies. These thrusters would allow satellites, which can run to the size of a bus, to shrink while retaining vital maneuverability. Nothing like them had existed before.
Ms. Brikner and her team had gone so far as to form a company and obtain a renewable option on MIT’s patents. But they couldn’t afford the $150,000 or so they’d need for the actual license—they were a company in name only. No investors. No office. No full-time employees. Their option was set to expire in about a month, and every few weeks, aerospace companies approached MIT’s Technology Licensing Office with lucrative offers for the patents. It was one of the hottest licenses the university had. But MIT held fast: In the university’s experience, lab ideas are more likely to succeed if fostered by their inventors. And if the start-up worked, as they rarely do, the university would very likely own a stake in it.
Ms. Brikner’s time was running out, though. David Sossen, the MIT licensing officer who had been advising her, didn’t see how she could finish her studies and get the company going. It would be two full-time jobs. A serial entrepreneur and an MIT graduate, he admired Ms. Brikner. But unless he saw more progress, he told the team, he wouldn’t renew the option.
Like many universities, MIT has encouraged its students and faculty members to form more start-ups. Over the past decade, according to one recent survey, the number of companies initiated by universities has almost doubled. For lucky ones, like MIT, the licenses provide real revenue. For all of them, the start-ups at least show a responsiveness to society’s needs: The public has invested in university research and will now reap the benefits. At the bottom of these initiatives, though, are students like Ms. Brikner, who now must balance two obligations to MIT: as student and licensee.
M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle
The tiny thruster is shown next to a quarter for scale. The students hope it will eventually help propel a new generation of small satellites orbiting the Earth.
Ms. Brikner went from Mr. Sossen to Paulo Lozano, her adviser and the lab’s director, a genial young physicist and engineer from Mexico City. Should she drop out? she asked. They debated for several hours. No, Mr. Lozano said. The company was not a sure bet; an MIT doctorate would last a lifetime. Though Mr. Lozano would probably get more licensing revenue if his patents went to an aerospace company, he had encouraged Ms. Brikner to form the start-up, and he would serve as its technical adviser. But her first priority should be research, he said. She could finish by May.
“It’s going to be pretty crazy,” Ms. Brikner said the day after she decided to stay in school. “You don’t drop out until you have to drop out, right? I’m not going to pre-emptively do it.”
This wasn’t Ms. Brikner’s first go at entrepreneurship. As a master’s student at Duke University, she had founded a start-up that failed spectacularly. This time she again had several classmates interested in helping her, including Louis Perna, the team’s expert in microscopic manufacturing. But Mr. Perna had his own worries: In the next month, he’d face the qualifying exam, which would decide his fate at MIT. Each year, half the lab’s students failed; that had already happened to Mr. Perna once. If he failed a second time, he was finished.
There were other problems. Ms. Brikner’s research was stalled. Mr. Lozano had asked her to lead a project with NASA using their thrusters, and a vital review was coming up. Ms. Brikner wasn’t speaking with another cofounder. And for all their promise, the thrusters hadn’t yet gone to space, and test-launch dates kept slipping.
Despite all this, after several weeks refining their business plan and guaranteeing that they’d start finding investors and office space, they won Mr. Sossen over. He renewed the option. They had six months left to buy the patent license.
In 2009 Mr. Perna, a tall, laid-back Floridian, graduated from MIT and never wanted to go back. School had been unrelenting; he wanted 9 to 5. He spent a couple years with a contractor for the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, developing risk models for rocket launches; how one mistake could cascade into losing the crew. Amid the models, he missed tangible work, like he had done for Mr. Lozano. He was soon back at MIT’s doctoral program in space propulsion.
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Louis Perna, the team’s microscopic-manufacturing expert, produces thruster frames from silicon slices, in a “clean” room. The job keeps him so busy that he failed to study adequately for his first round of qualifying exams at MIT; he failed the oral.
Mr. Perna spends much of his time in a white bunny suit—think 1990s Intel commercials—at a clean-room chip facility next to the propulsion lab. He churns out thruster frames from silicon slices, and it gets distracting. The previous year, he had been filling a large order and failed to study for his qualifying exam until the winter holidays. A month wasn’t enough to master rockets, electric thrusters, astrodynamics, and plasma physics. When he got to the oral exam—an hour in front of three professors—he was flustered, confused.
This time he started a few weeks earlier, reviewing lectures and flashcards on the “Child-Langmuir space charge limit.” He ran trial tests with other students; he made sure he was comfortable writing on a chalkboard. He slept only four hours a night. What would his life be like if he failed again? he wondered. Since he was a resident assistant at an MIT fraternity, he’d lose his housing. But he could always fall back on the start-up, he hoped.
Meanwhile, Ms. Brikner was learning how to pitch the company, which they were calling Electrospray Propulsion Systems LLC. It was a bad name, but they didn’t have anything better. She was too technical, like a scientist, Mr. Sossen said. Don’t lie, but be confident: Emphasize how soon the sky is going to be black with microsatellites, each small enough to fit in your hands. How all these CubeSats, as they’re known, are potential customers.
She had her last class, on science policy, that semester but spent most of her time in the lab, finishing a solution to a fundamental problem. Grants from the Pentagon had financed the first generation of the thrusters, but those engines would fire for only a few minutes before petering out.
It had been her job to figure out why, but typical frustrations kept getting in the way: Someone dumped the expired chemicals she had used to make miniature metallic tips for her experiments, for example, and for some reason identical replacement chemicals ruined her process. It took eight months to get the fabrication working again.
At the same time, she’d have NASA staff arriving soon to review the thrusters’ readiness for flight; if they failed, she’d lose a critical real-world test of their use on a CubeSat. Mr. Lozano knew it was a lot to ask Ms. Brikner to run the NASA effort, given her research and the start-up, but he did it with a purpose: dealing with program managers, production schedules—those were CEO skills.
The day of the exam, at the end of January, Mr. Perna woke up early and downed a diet Mountain Dew. Walking into the test room, he brought only a pencil, some paper, and a graphing calculator. He was confronted with two questions: One asked him to calculate a rocket’s exhaust force at various points around the nozzle. The second asked him how to efficiently take a spacecraft from Earth orbit to Jupiter, using nuclear- and solar-power systems. He had one hour to think about them.
The professors started with the rocket. His answer ran on. At one point, Mr. Perna recalls, an examiner asked him to clarify if a term in one equation should be used for another part of the rocket; Mr. Perna wasn’t certain, but his gut said it should. It was 50-50.
“Yes,” Mr. Perna said.
“OK, just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“Yeah, definitely,” he said.
Two days later, he got the news: He had passed.
Ms. Brikner missed a few days of sleep before the NASA meeting. (“That was the longest slide deck I’ve made in my life,” she said later.) The day of the review, the men arrived in boxy suits, and toured: vacuum chambers, the microelectromechanical systems facility, the levitation room on the fifth floor. They stopped at a hooded workbench. Here they were, the thrusters. “By golly, they’re small,” one reviewer said, looming over what looked like a set of expensive steampunk postage stamps.
The group packed into a room not much larger than a CubeSat. Electrical engines like this had been neglected until a decade ago, when the lab took them up, Mr. Lozano explained. The team walked the visitors through the thruster’s design: how it is fueled by charged liquid salts that pass through capillaries to coat a metal sheet pocked with a grid of 480 nanoscale points that resemble, on magnification, gray volcanoes tipped with porous glass. Given an electric charge, they erupt not with magma, but ion jets. It’s a tiny force, but efficient and modular: Want more thrust? Put four together. Want more satellite maneuverability? Put one on each side.
Ms. Brikner led much of the day, along with Mr. Perna and Fernando Mier-Hicks, their close collaborator in the lab. The reviewers probed and tugged, especially on the team’s computer control system, but there was never much doubt: They would go forward with the project. And here, they added, were many more action items for Ms. Brikner to address.
As leader of the company, Ms. Brikner had developed her speaking skills. She had even entered an elevator-pitch competition at the MIT Sloan Women In Management Conference. Her approach was simple: When she talked to strangers about her thrusters, and how they could power satellites that would provide Internet access to billions of people, that’s when they paid attention. “Just include what makes people’s eyes light up,” she said. She won, and she took the team out to dinner on her $1,000 award.
In February, with exams and the NASA review over, it seemed the students would have time for the start-up. They moved to a new company type, a C-corp, necessary for raising outside money. It was a good time to change names, and Ms. Brikner sent a flurry of ideas to Mr. Perna over chat. They settled on “Accion Systems,” a combination of ion and acceleration, and close to the Spanish for action. Ms. Brikner, a Harry Potter fan, liked it for another reason: “Accio” was a charm that caused objects to hurtle through the air.
The new company required them to divide equity among the founders—a “cap table,” in entrepreneur-speak—which they did over four hours one Thursday evening in late February.
Though his foreign status might limit his contributions, Mr. Mier-Hicks joined them as a cofounder. Another member of the lab, Tom Coles, who had worked on the LLC, had grown ill and halted his studies. They asked him to resign. More distressing: Last summer they learned that Chase Coffman, a lab member and cofounder, had tried to license the patents without the rest of the team. That bid failed, but he wouldn’t let the LLC expire without new shares in Accion. (Mr. Coffman declined to comment.) Ms. Brikner hadn’t spoken with him for months, but around this time, the lab moved their desks into the same room. It was awkward.
The lab seemed like it was being torn apart. It was “a very difficult position,” Mr. Lozano said later on. “Because I like all my students.” He had to avoid a conflict of interest. He was the technical adviser of Accion, a role he filled in the 20 percent of time MIT allowed him free work, but he was also their supervisor. “I couldn’t tell them what to do.” With lawyers involved in the dispute, it wouldn’t be settled quickly.
In late April, Ms. Brikner flew off to India. Mr. Lozano had been invited to a conference there on the use of small satellites for emergencies, like tsunamis, and he decided Ms. Brikner should go in his place.
It was an auspicious decision. The other attendees were older, vice presidents of multinational aerospace companies or lab directors. Accion, they agreed, had a promising product. Maybe they could work together?
During one meeting, near the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s southeast coast, they stopped everything and flipped on a video projector: India had a launch set to carry a large navigation satellite into orbit. Half a world from home, Ms. Brikner watched the rocket slip upward, out of the blue, and into the black.
By June, Ms. Brikner still hadn’t graduated.
M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle
By opting to remain a Ph.D. candidate while trying to get her company off the ground, Natalya Brikner has forfeited sleep and a social life. But “you don’t drop out until you have to drop out, right?”
Her working hours went from 8 a.m. till after midnight; Accion first, lab in the evening, odd hours stolen for food, a run, yoga. She had a dedicated vacuum chamber to speed her research, and she cranked Frank Sinatra as she pumped the chamber down to simulate the airlessness of space. She’d taken to audiobooks: How to Win Friends and Influence People; Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. She missed her boyfriend. At one point, they had talked about seeing each other more, even if it meant working on a couch, not a proper date. Four nights in a row he asked: “Are you coming over?” “No,” she replied. “I can’t leave the lab until 2 a.m.!” Never mind, she finally said. “I can’t do it. Maybe in August.”
One night in the lab, after inspecting needle tips via electron microscope, their edges popping on the screen like moonscape against midnight, she walked down the hall to a plastic bag with glove holes that she had rigged to a gas tank, in the shadow of a blue, truck-sized vacuum chamber. The $42 setup, meant to be temporary, had turned permanent. She filled the bag with carbon dioxide, and pipetted fuel onto the needle tip. She had to keep pressure steady in the bag when she removed her hands, so typically, she plunged her face into it.
“Paulo said I need a more dignified setup,” she said.
The coated tip would go into the vacuum chamber, monitored for electrical discharges. Ms. Brikner’s experimental work seemed about done, but she needed more results to confirm her hypothesis that air had been causing thruster short circuits. After 50 or 60 experiments, she had only three tests that worked. September graduation was unlikely; maybe December.
Accion had gained some time: moving the patent option to the C-corp gave them a few more months. But it didn’t remove the pressure: They still had no office, no sales, and CubeSats were taking off—without Accion’s thrusters. Google had just bought Skybox, a start-up that depended on microsatellites for its imaging, for $500-million. There was a Defense Department grant they hoped to win, but that wouldn’t start until 2015, and wouldn’t require manufacturing until 2017. Waiting until then would allow the competition to catch up, but it was tough to pitch a potential investor without some sense of their future market.
“It’s hard to go to someone and say: Well, one nutty scientist wants to send something to Pluto, and he may pay for that in 2016, so invest in us,” Ms. Brikner said. She didn’t see a way forward: “There’s all sorts of moving pieces, and today I feel like they’re moving away from each other.”
M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle
The students’ company is based on a breakthrough by Paulo Lozano (left), director of MIT’s Space Propulsion Lab. He persuaded Ms. Brikner not to risk her goal of earning a Ph.D. for the dream of launching a successful start-up.
Her team had applied to MIT’s Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator, a summer program, in its third year, meant to instill disciplined entrepreneurship in students. They were one of 15 teams admitted, all sharing space cut and pasted from Silicon Valley: The walls all glass and whiteboard, scribbling encouraged, and pale thin men—mostly men—perched behind laptops. Bill Aulet, MIT’s entrepreneurship guru, led the accelerator.
The students faced a series of 24 milestones: The first month, they’d research potential customers, then improve their products, and finally get started on fund raising. The accelerator would expose weaknesses before the students had a chance to go bankrupt. Each team could win up to $20,000, depending on its performance. The summer would culminate with a “demo day,” including a pitch to an audience of MIT students, alumni, and potential investors.
To Mr. Perna’s surprise, learning about potential customers simply meant calling them up and asking about their problems, even how much they were paying for a contract. “If we’re ever just sitting there,” Mr. Perna said, “wondering, ‘Oh, would someone want this, or why would they do that?’ Turns out you can just ask them.” Of all the ways the thrusters could be used, the customers sounded most interested in drag compensation: As satellites sashay the Earth, hints of atmosphere corrode their orbits until it all ends in a high-friction fireball. The thrusters, Mr. Perna told the potential buyers, could keep their satellites alive.
The summer would be the first time Mr. Perna had devoted himself full-time to Accion. He was still in the lab, too, ramping up production of thruster frames for the NASA project. He spent evenings in the fraternity, reading books Ms. Brikner had given him. Even though he was holding down two full-time commitments, he wanted to be certain he got enough sleep; he gets sick easily without rest. “Am I going to feel burned out by end of summer?” Mr. Perna said. “I hope not.”
While he had prepared himself to fail at the qualifying exam, success had changed his sights: He wanted his doctorate. Mr. Lozano wanted him to stay, too, even though that might mean another couple years before he could work full time at Accion. Ideally, if things started to come together for Accion sooner, he wanted to take two years off before returning to the program—an idea Mr. Lozano did not love.
M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle
Paulo Lozano is technical adviser to the students’ start-up company, but he is also their academic supervisor. His dual roles put him in a difficult spot when legal issues arose.
Ms. Brikner, for her part, did not think it plausible that Mr. Perna could work as her second-in-command in a part-time role for long. “Only time will tell if everyone has the commitment to make it happen,” she said at lunch one day, with Mr. Perna at her side. “Which isn’t exactly how you want it to feel going into this.”
“Natalya sees it as a rock and a hard place: A decision has to be made and there’s only two ways to go,” Mr. Perna said later that day. “I kind of still see it as a very nebulous future, of many possibilities.”
However these dual strains from MIT played out for Accion, the university would do fine: At the worst, others would buy up the licenses; at the best, they’d have several grateful, and wealthy, alumni who had put their stamp on the world. “It was very stressing for everyone,” Mr. Lozano said, but this was what the students wanted. Ms. Brikner saw the opportunity. Rare is the revolution that falls in your lap.
It could still end badly for the students. They could drop out, or miss opportunities afforded by an earlier graduation, while still missing out on the patents.
Although many universities have become bullish on start-ups, most will fail, says Walter D. Valdivia, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who has studied the trend. Every venture capitalist knows that it’s only one or two investments that cover the money spent on 100 new companies. But fail or succeed, these universities will no longer just be teaching students, Mr. Valdivia says. They will be producing entrepreneurs.
A week before demo day, at the end of the summer, Accion made history, at least for itself: It offered to hire a full-time lead engineer.
The skills accelerator had forced the students to finish lingering tasks. They had a strategy: Rather than singling out CubeSat startups or scientific missions, they’d focus on Big Aerospace. Those companies had the resources to help if the team got into trouble. The aerospace companies might be slower to launch their thrusters, but they wouldn’t vanish. And they were interested. “They just started coming to us with all these proposals,” Ms. Brikner said. Potential investors had also started calling—the accelerator acted as a vetting process.
The team had fully coalesced: After 13 months of wrangling, the students’ part-time lawyer finished the paperwork dissolving the LLC, giving Mr. Coffman a small stake of Accion. They had also come to accept that visas and U.S. weapons regulations would prevent Mr. Mier-Hicks, their labmate from Mexico, from being employed by Accion, though he could remain a founder. Out of the lab, only Ms. Brikner and Mr. Perna would make the leap to the start-up.
They began having team dinners, with wine. Defying eye rolls, Ms. Brikner had them play a game: “I Like. I Wish. I Wonder.” Mr. Lozano kept it anodyne, while Ms. Brikner talked about her happiness with their new task-tracking system. And Mr. Perna discussed how he would love to do engineering, not business development.
That was tough for Ms. Brikner to hear, that so much of what they had done this year seemed against his will. “The relationship and team stuff has really been the hardest part of all this,” Ms. Brikner said. “Not the rocket science.” She had begun to fray. “I’ve been failing and dropping balls, which is new,” she said. She’d completely forgotten about some phone calls. “I’m starting to feel it,” she said.
She was a third of the way through writing her dissertation, still hoping she might finally graduate in December. There had been no final decision on Mr. Perna’s fate; at the least, he could be a full-time student through the spring. But after that, Ms. Brikner would need someone who could do his job for Accion full time. “I hope it’s him,” she said, “but if it’s not, I’m going to have to hire someone else.”
Mr. Sossen, of MIT’s technology office, had sent her a draft of the license agreement. Ms. Brikner hoped to negotiate down some fees, but that seemed unlikely: MIT has been doing this for 150 years and doesn’t often change terms. Either way, with help from some early investors, Mr. Lozano’s seven patents would soon be theirs. Then the lab’s ion thrusters, which could now fire for 100 hours continuously, might finally get their chance in space.
But first, on Saturday, September 6, demo day, Ms. Brikner was one of the last students to present. The companies’ young CEOs had spent the past couple hours making TED-style appeals for how they would disrupt wind-turbine prospecting, car parking, and bicycle power meters. She waited off-curtain as the boosterish emcee sprang onstage, chatting them up: The last team took you into the cloud, he was saying, “but the next team is going to take you a little bit higher, into space.”
Ms. Brikner took a breath. She was the chief executive of a company with a commitment to sell three thrusters next year, and $500,000 in contracts coming in. She knew what to do.
It was time to make their eyes light up.