Interviewee
Mostafa ElSayed, ,Co-founder & CEO at Automata, a London based startup, providing automation solutions to the life sciences industry. By using their technologies, laboratories of all sizes can have access to automation, which is not only cost effective, but assists in streamlining the workflow.
Transcript
Mostafa ElSayed: So my name is Mostafa, I'm the Co-founder and CEO here at Automata. Like you said, we're an automation based, an automation startup based in London. And I think the usual way I introduce myself is that I, I'm not an engineer, I don't have a robotics background and I don't have a life sciences background, so feel free to log off if you want at this point. But basically I'm, I'm, I'm trained as an architect, specifically an architect in the design tradition. And I worked in a company here in London called Zhai Architect. Some of your listeners might have heard of, you know, comparable something like Frank Gary on the West Coast.
It's kind of known for its non-standard architecture, let's call it that. And I think what a lot of people don't know is that architecture these days, like a lot of industries on the progressive end, is primarily the interaction between design and technology, right? Like how do you marry your core subject and matter expertise and accelerate that and scale that through the adoption of technology? And that, that's kind of what I did in my previous career as an architect, which is we were kind of the in-house computational team to that office working on the kind of incredible architecture they produce and figuring out primarily how to design and how to build it through software tools.
And that was kind of our first interaction as me and my co-founder with robotics, right? Because advanced fabrication these days is all about automation. And you know, just quickly out, I remember the first time I used the robot, it was 2012. I don't know if you or any of your listeners had this experience when you use a piece of technology that blows your mind, like I remember 2009, the first time I used an iPhone, my friend had one and I was able to flick through the numbers on the alarm app. That blew my mind, right? I'm like, oh my God, what is this? And using a robot is not that, right? It was a fundamentally disappointing experience, an incredibly dangerous piece of technology, incredibly difficult to use and program and you know, for something which you feel is this, you know, high tech piece of the future. I think that's how most of us, when you hear the word robots, it's actually just a dumb piece of metal around some gear boxes. And it's a product that is designed for a very small group of people who know how to use them and nobody else. And that was our kind of first interaction with robotics from where our frustrations and ambitions for Automata were born.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow, this is a really interesting story. What would you say it was the main challenge in order to create a company? Especially in the industry.
Mostafa ElSayed: Yeah, so starting at Automata was not an exercise where we had this, you know, sometimes companies have this idea that companies are founded on technological or market insights, right? Like you either have a deep market insight like, oh, I can disrupt this go to market, or I can disrupt this value chain. Others are built on technological insights. You see this a lot in the biotech industry, right? Like, I have a new way to develop this therapy and I wanna build a company around this auto automato is Neither of those automato is founded on a relationship, right? Like me and my co-founder, we understand that we work well together and we're frustrated by our previous careers primarily defined by our frustration defined by how slow things were moving and the kind of impact we were having in the world was really low. So that was the beginning of an Automata.
We were starting to work on robotics on the side, so it felt like the natural thing to work on. But the main challenge to get opt automato with work is that today it is easy to describe a lot of us, and maybe you've talked to other robotics founders, you start robotics companies thinking that the universality of your technology is a silver bullet, right? Like it can do, it's a robot. It's actually your Achilles heel, right? Because if you're familiar with this idea of product market fit, you can't take a product to market for everybody, right? There's a few companies who have the privilege of doing something like that and they tend to be generational and rare and you know, I think it's, anyway, the wrong model to employ for robotics. You know, I think my opinion of robotics has completely changed in the last seven years. I've been doing this because I think the future of robotics is specific, not universal actually. And we had to learn this the hard way, right? It took us multiple years and we can talk about that learning that look, if we sell to everyone and we did that for a while, you actually sell to no one, if that makes sense.
Be passionate, be seduced by your tech, but don't let it blind you to the realities of trying to make this tech useful in a market. Balance those two things.
Elisa Muñoz: It does, totally. I wanted to ask you if you can talk maybe a little bit about the Automata LINQ.
Mostafa ElSayed: Yeah. So Automata LINQ is our newest product. It's a kind of hardware software services platform that we're bringing to the life sciences we have been bringing for the last couple of years, which is our answer to this idea of like, the future of automation is specific, right? And you know what I mean by that is like, as you can see behind me, our previous products used to be these robotic arms and our new products are entire automation platforms. So, you know, the way to think about it is if you walk into a life sciences facility or specifically a lab, what you see today is nearly similar to what you would've seen 60 years ago, 50 years ago, which is a scientist standing at a bench doing an experiment.
And that is what we want to change, right? These people are incredibly skilled, they should be doing other things that are more valuable to their time, especially considering the kind of massive pain points in the life sciences today. Like, you know, the life sciences touch every aspect of our lives now. It's the food we eat, it's the drugs we take, it's the therapies we hope for, it's the materials we use in our products. It's all touched by the life sciences now and at the heart of the life sciences, a lot of that innovation is still a lab, right? It's a bunch of people in a lab trying to create these breakthroughs. And we should be using these people better than moving liquid from machine A to machine B. And that is what our platform does. It's a kind of harder platform designed around the bench, but it's a bench designed for automation first, not humans first, if that makes sense. So think about the lab operative as a robot, and it's a software product that allows you to program your experiment rather than program a robot. And that's what I mean by specific automation. Like end users of robotics should not worry about the robot, they should worry about what they want to get done with the robot and we take care of everything else, right? There's this idea that everyone will learn how to program a robot, I think is problematic in the short term adoption of, of, of automation. And so, that, that is what link is, it's this kind of hardware software platform designed around an automation bench, which allows you to completely automate your experimentation.
Elisa Muñoz: It does make sense. Thank you so much for putting it down to earth. And I mean, you mentioned how the day-to-day as CEO is, right? But talking to different CEOs and founders in the industry, most of them are really involved in the procurement process. And I think this is really interesting because especially in the hardware industry during and after the pandemic, this has been a challenge. You know, like supply chain issues and everything. How was that at Automata?
Mostafa ElSayed: Yeah, it was hard of course, like anyone else, I won't paint a picture that we had some silver bullet here. It was difficult, right? Like supply chains were biting us and you know, when you had this demanding customer on the other side of the line who had a really important project, like, you know, one of our big projects that you can see online is at the time of literally at the middle of Covid, we were building this massive facility for the N H S here, which is the, the central health authority here in the UK to massively automate some covid testing and like timelines was everything, right? We were trying to take them from 10,000 tests a day to a hundred thousand tests a day, which we ended up doing. But supply chain was a problem. But also at the same time, this supply chain is a clear example of manufacturability, which is one of the first hurdles for hardware companies.
You see a lot of hardware companies die at that hurdle, right? Many will not make it. And then generally after they make that, they generally die at product market fit, which is a really interesting cycle for hardware companies. But of what I'm talking about, about hiring incredible people, right? In this case, our head of manufacturing who came into Automata had a clear vision of how we would build this product and was able to articulate it and build a team around it and, you know, massively challenged me and sometimes to a lot of friction, right? Because like I was, I hired him, I was like, we're gonna launch this robot in a year after the two weeks he came to me, he's like, look, we can do this, but it'll take two years.
It's not gonna take a year. Right? And you have to listen to that experience sometimes. And also he is like, we're not gonna build it the way you think we're gonna build it, we're gonna build it like this. And he was able to articulate it in a very clear way. In this case he's like, we're not gonna build this robot like you build a car, we're gonna build like a bm, we're gonna build it like you build a washing machine. And I was like, what does that mean? And able to break that down as a clear manufacturing strategy is like if you look at how white goods are manufactured, it's all about ownership of the documentation, clear relationships with your subcontract chain that allows you to hit scale versus if you build it like the way you build a German car, it's all about tight toing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Which is sometimes the downfall of engineering founders, right? The engineer to perfection. And then this thing is only manufacturable in a certain supply chain and a certain contract structure. And you know, that is sometimes to their downfall. And for us, you know, at Automata implemented the strategy of like, we are the s o P owners, right? If that makes sense. The standard operating procedure owner, we'll never manufacture, we have a we and we build incredibly clear versions of that. So our subcontract chain knows how to build it. And we ran a data optimized manufacturing process where down to the hour we knew where our contractors were, was struggling with components, putting components together, and that's where we pointed our engineering resource to go fix that design. So, and all of that was that higher, right? Like this is what D F M means and this is what D F M means at Automata. And you know, for me, once I heard that and understood that you just step back, right? And like, okay, this guy knows what he is doing, it's aligned to what Automata needs to do. I know how to guardrail this and you know, you let that person take over.
Elisa Muñoz: Well thank you so much for sharing. And I found it really interesting because most of the engineers, they either have an actual system in order to organize all the procurement or they or they use Google spreadsheets, I think both of them are really useful. But it totally depends on the organization.
Mostafa ElSayed: We've done both, right? We, we are and the company on Google's sheets for a while, that gets dangerous quick, but that's a whole other conversation.
Elisa Muñoz: Yeah, totally. And last, but not least, do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or CEOs starting on this path?
Mostafa ElSayed: Yeah, look, the lesson of Automata is the, is the lesson of focus, right? Like, you know, be passionate, be seduced by your tech, but don't let it blind you to the realities of trying to make this tech useful in a market. And, you know, balance those two things, right? Like use that passion to build the best team you can build, but at the same time, use that focus to drive that product into a market that truly uses it. And truly, like, again, something I didn't say is like something we believe here at Optus, automation is only viable at scale. It only has an impact, right? It's not good enough to say, I've sold two robots to a factory. Like who cares, right? Like if you walk into a factory and there's a hundred people, a thousand people doing something and two robots in the corner, that's usually what you see. What impact did you have, right? Like you've, you've not achieved much. So again, this idea of allowing that focus to drive it in a way that is useful and has impact so that people adopt it at a scale that matters. It is my advice to anyone starting a company in this space.
Elisa Muñoz: That’s great. Thank you so much Mostafa for being here today!
Mostafa ElSayed: It was a pleasure too.
