Like all great engineers, David started with Legos. That quickly grew into a fascination not just with mechanical building but with automation and software, which led him into the field of electrical engineering. David now operates as COO at NanoView Biosciences, which he co-founded, helping research and Academic institutions detect and characterize exosome nanoparticles & other extracellular vesicles.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Like all great engineers, David started with Legos. That quickly grew into a fascination not just with mechanical building but with automation and software, which led him into the field of electrical engineering. David now operates as COO at NanoView Biosciences, which he co-founded, helping research and Academic institutions detect and characterize exosome nanoparticles & other extracellular vesicles.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Our guest today is David Friedman, who is a biotech engineer and co founder, CEO and president at nano view Biosciences where they develop products that support research, translation and delivery of precision medicine. David has a PhD in electrical engineering from Boston University. David, welcome to the show. Aaron, it's a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm gonna start off with the the same question that I asked most of our guests. How did you decide to become an engineer?
David Freedman:Does anyone ever decide to be an engineer? You know, I think I just had a natural tendency to solve problems. It's the way I look at it. So and I think I also have a passion for automation. There's something rewarding about something that you don't have to spend all your time kind of manually doing and can build kind of processes and procedures to really streamline and scales, different processes. So yeah, always play with Legos, too. I think that's a requirement.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I think almost everyone that I've asked that question to his his mentioned something about playing with Legos. Yeah. Although, I admit, I was curious to know if you would mention that, because most of the people I talk with are mechanical engineers. And you are an electrical engineer. So it sounds like Legos. They they bridge the void between mechanical and electrical, somehow they must.
David Freedman:It was funny, you say that, because there's other mechanical engineers at my company, and they were talking about the same thing. They grew up playing Legos. And I feel like all engineers, that's just kind of a natural toy to play with. Yeah, that lets you explore your imagination,
Aaron Moncur:the gateway drug into imaginary. Okay, tell me a little bit more about automation, you mentioned really being into automation. And that's been like kind of a compelling reason for you to continue into an engineering role. Was there an experience or multiple experiences you had growing up where you saw automation, or you build some kind of automation, and you were like, Wow, I love this, I want to do something that lets me do more of this.
David Freedman:Yeah, I think there's a lot of times has happened. And for me, personally, it's usually a role. So I'm an electrical engineer by training. But I do a lot of software development as well. And I think that's where you really start seeing kind of automation. I mean, it's always a combination of mechanical electrical software. But truly seeing kind of the rapid prototyping you can do with software. And, you know, I started by, say, just parsing text through websites to really streamline processes. So I didn't have to manually go copy and paste, which still form automation, but copy and paste things into a form. I wrote scripts that would just go to a web pages, parse the text, and then be able to put it into a database so that I can go do something else. And so that that was always rewarding. But I was actually thinking about a time that happened in my undergrad, I worked in a program called Earth cam, we were supporting elementary and high school students to be able to take pictures from the International Space Station. And I was on a roll called the, I forgot what it stood for. But the moose, my job was to update the timetables every 45 minutes, every 90 minutes, or on different orbits. And we were doing that all we're calculating on a piece of paper and a whole form. And then we're going in and modifying the webpage so that we could do it all by hand was like this job just screams for automation, right? So we wrote a couple scripts. And then basically that job became the the cushy one where you could show up in the scope. Just make sure the script was running and you could enjoy the rest of the day.
Aaron Moncur:Did you ever watch the show last? Yes. You remember, every 90 minutes they had to like type of code in automation.
David Freedman:That was the best part of that show. What happened there? Yeah, I remember that very well. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that was a great show. One of my favorites. All right. So kind of early in your career. You worked at Nokia. And and you developed a test to qualify Nokia's audio quality against competitor phones. And I was curious, how did that qualification work? Like what tools did you use? And was there was there quantitative data or was it purely qualitative?
David Freedman:So that's so interesting, spinning off the automation part because, well, let me ask you a question for so What we did is it was really a very qualitative, I mean, there was a quantitative component. But what we did is we I actually had to go into a soundproof room, make calls on I think we're using the Sprint network of Verizon network with the Nokia phone, and then a competitive phone. And we had specific, very high quality audio system to play that back. And then I would record them and then build up a script that then I think employees would potentially other people would then rate which had better quality. So eventually, we did get a quantitative metric out of it, but it was all based on qualitative feedback. Guy, that's interesting. You mentioned Oh, kick spent a long time. So I think about that. Well, I actually was I won an award there for developing a script that automated the memory mapping in Excel. So like, that was actually a much more impactful part of being able to visualize all the memory of their phones in a Excel document. I think the quality of the phone was always like, well, we're pretty good. The phones about the same as the competing phone.
Aaron Moncur:I imagine the phone back then was a lot different than the phones we use today.
David Freedman:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, the bricks, if you remember them,
Aaron Moncur:the bricks? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think do you think the audio quality has changed much just on a standard phone call?
David Freedman:I think on the standard phone call, you'll never get above the four kilohertz limit that we typically have. But if you think about modern phones, I do on the iPhone. And I think you can do this on WhatsApp and other things, you do the FaceTime audio, and that quality is amazing. Every time I do it for the first time with someone, they they're blown away, like they feel like you're in the room with you compared to our traditional, you know, bandwidth limited telephone.
Aaron Moncur:And that's just because the data packets are going over different networks.
David Freedman:I think it's some bandwidth limitation that they established very early in the telephone air. I remember reading up on it, but I think they basically band limit audio to four kilo hertz, so they can keep the channel bandwidth down to a reasonable level. But I mean, even just the analog phone, that was how it was done yesterday. So yeah, but FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, all those the high quality audio, it's like, it blows you away. I
Aaron Moncur:think it's like a privileged listening. Yes, high quality audio. Right. Yeah. Wonderful. Definitely a privilege. Okay, so fast forward to your role at nano view biosciences, where you are both a CEO and president? Actually, I'm curious, how does your role differ between CEO and president? Um,
David Freedman:interesting question. So. So I founded it with my co founder about, I guess, is about five years ago as CEO, so founding CEO, as we grew and developed, we brought in experienced management, so chair waves, and now CEO. And with that transition, I became president. So my CEO responsibilities are really making sure that my team has everything they need to be successful. And I would say I'm mostly on the engineering side. So we do a lot of hardware, a lot of software, a lot of mechanical, optical engineering, and really, my teams manage that. On the president side, I think dealing more with kind of business decisions executive level about what's the right strategy for our new product development, when do we want to release this? What path do we want to go for? And so I think they're, they obviously overlap a little bit, but they kind of have distinct
Aaron Moncur:responsibilities. Okay, and have you found yourself gravitating towards, you know, more one role over the other? Or do you enjoy them equally?
David Freedman:That's a great question. I mean, I think I enjoy them both, for different reasons. I mean, I'm an engineer, you know, I'm, like we talked about I was born this way, however it is. So I, I do find, when I can carve out some time to do you know, a little bit of software or electronically works, that's always very rewarding. But I think at the maturity of the company in a lot of my responsibilities, more around them the management and in the strategy, so I enjoyed them both.
Aaron Moncur:Sure. Now, when when you're going to school to become an engineer. And even in your early career, was the plan always to start a company and step into more of a leadership role? Or was your you know, as far as you knew, you're just going to be the engineer. You were going to be writing the code and developing the electronics. How did that happen? Yeah,
David Freedman:I don't know that there was such a conscious decision. I think I was always passionate about startups and entrepreneurship. I got involved in my, my parents startup e homes.com, which was basically transforming how they did real estate at the time, moving it from traditional brick and mortar to online support. So I got a lot of exposure to startups around the 2000. So I was always hoping one of my goals was to be involved in a startup because you mentioned all my past experience. So when thing to never think about them. But I really enjoyed working in small companies, I found that, from my experience with working with large companies, I found that to be just more rewarding for me personally, but, but you can never take the engineer away from the pond or I'm not sure there's the same, but I really, you know, I love making something physically holding it or having software do something for me, and that that whole thing is just rewarding to me. So I wouldn't say it was a the goal, but it was something that I always envisioned and hoped would happen. And so really just the right opportunity came along, you got to take some risk to jump in. And I think that the rest became history.
Aaron Moncur:Excellent. It tell me a little bit more about that the right opportunity came along. How did you recognize that it was the right opportunity?
David Freedman:So that's also a great question. So I actually happened to be a postdoc working on the project, but really 10 gently. And really, this was around the time of Oh, no, that's why I became a postdoc, the 2008 crash. I really challenged them, the group in terms of what their next steps were. And I think they recognize that I brought a new, you know, unique perspective to translation of the technology. So what we had it at Boston University was a technology looking for a problem, right? We can visualize nanoparticles in a high throughput way, that it's really amazing technology. But where do you use that? Right? So there's a lot of good technologies for looking at particles, there's a lot of good ways to look at biological viruses, for example. And so we actually participate in a program called Innovation core Ichor, that the National Science Foundation sponsored. And really the carrot there was that if you participate in the program, your ability to get non dilutive grants through small business grants, goes up to x at least. But what I learned during that process is really how to be successful in translation of the technology. So really, how does an engineer become an entrepreneur? And the take home message is really short messages got to get outside the building, you got to talk to potential not not customer selling them things but potential users and understand why they why why they need automation, why do they need this problem solved? Why are they willing to kind of use this instead of the kind of crinkled standard. And so that process, I think, was truly transformative for me as a person, and has resonated for many years. And I always say that if I got a quarter for every recommendation, I would be a rich person, because I really recommend that innovation core program Ichor. For those people who are exploring it, I've never
Aaron Moncur:heard of Ichor, thanks for mentioning that. Tell me a little bit about you mentioned how important it was transformative for you to kind of put yourself into that, that the perspective of the customer and understand what the customer needs. Now, at a large company, they're probably probably marketing departments that do that for you. But at smaller companies, let's pretend that we're engineers at a smaller company, maybe it's a startup, maybe just a company that's not big enough to have their own marketing department. What are some tips for engineers? How can engineers put themselves in the shoes of the customer? How can an engineer get a really good understanding for what it is the customer actually needs?
David Freedman:Really great question. So I mean, the key part is getting outside the building, and really just putting yourself out there. So I think engineers maybe have a rap good or bad for wanting to you know, focus on what they're doing inside. And not necessarily calling people or twos kind of a potentially where the salesperson does a dirty word, like cold calling, right? So part of that process is at first you have to, you know, the first couple calls are really tough. I mean, we were supposed to do a lot of interviews in person, and we tried to do that. But we had to do over 100 interviews. And really, at some point, we given the Thanksgiving break and everything they started being phone calls and I just had a list of people I you know, thank God for all the internet tools that we have, like LinkedIn was amazing to find people. And then I would send them a, an email or instruction trying to explain to them I'm not looking to sell them anything. I'm really just trying to understand what they do on a day to day and just like you're doing with me, I think people enjoy talking about themselves. And so that they're always open to doing that. And then also as say, like a PhD. A lot of the people I was talking to are PhDs and so they can empathize with where I was in my career trajectory. And I think that also open opens the door. Another thing is getting referrals also helps and so really just the part I ended up really enjoying was the cold calling right I would Talk to them, I would explain where I was. And then I would sit back and listen and let them kind of go through what their day to day was. And it was so informative to learn because at the time, we were looking at, say, in vitro diagnostics, you know, running blood blood tests or other kind of biofluids. And you have this vision of how it works. And really, by talking to people by visiting labs, by just having all those interviews, you really learned that maybe you were right about some things, but you were probably wrong about a lot of other things. And it causes you to pivot and translate into something that I think can be truly powerful. So the basic research, I mean, there's no substitute for that.
Aaron Moncur:That's an opportunity. I think most engineers just don't have not that they couldn't have it, but it's just not a part of our paradigm, right, as engineers that, oh, we're gonna call cold call people and interview them and ask them questions. What a neat opportunity, or I don't know, experiment, it would be for an engineering team to be given the liberty and the the opportunity to just start calling people and talking with their customers, I think that would result in some probably pretty good results.
David Freedman:I think. I think it's incredibly rewarding. And I think, you know, as we've talked through it, and I've encouraged people on way, it's always been a positive feedback that they've learned so much. And they really do value those interactions.
Aaron Moncur:I like the phrase he used get outside the building that I'm going to maybe write that on the the whiteboard or something get outside the building. Yeah, it's engineers. It's so easy to just sit in your seat and pound away at the computer, right? That's like a stereotypical engineer introvert, I don't want to talk to people. I just want to be here my computer. I have to admit, I'm kind of like that myself. Okay. Tell us a little bit about what nano view Biosciences does. And I'm going to request that you use small words so that I can understand because this is a highly technical, complicated, not a niche, but the biosciences industry, I think myself and just a lot of people don't have a very good set of vocabulary.
David Freedman:Yeah, absolutely. And when we did I Corps, one of the requirements, and I'm gonna do my best today, but one of the requirements is to try to distill it down into a very simple statement about what you do or what you're trying to accomplish. Or fortunately, I still have to use the buzzwords like you can't there's no way to replace the nanoparticle. Okay, nanoparticle is a nanoparticle. So what DataView does is we're able to visualize and characterize nanoparticles in a high throughput way. Really better than any other technology. And maybe let me drive home with an example is what we tried to do is look at these small nanoparticles that circulated in all bio fluids, so blood, saliva, all those things. And I like to think of them as the Twitter of cells. So if you think of a cell, it's a certain size, it has all this machinery, but these are a million times smaller by volume, and all cells will just secrete these vesicles, these exosomes into these flow biofluids. And what they do is they transmit messages from one cell to another. So if you think of them, they're the Twitter of cells, because they're sending the small packets of information from one house interesting to another. I think that's a great analogy. And so what we do is we can directly look at these, which is a challenge in the field, and we can fully characterize them. And so basically, one of the end applications would be develop of a novel diagnostics. So we had some work looking at pancreatic cancer detection from blood, that would be an example where these might be useful. Another area is people are really excited about using these exosomes for therapeutic delivery. So because they're natural biomolecules. You can put therapeutic cargo inside of them. They're they're vesicles that contain a membrane so you can have things inside. And then they can also target specific cells or organs. They can be used as drug delivery mechanisms. And so the challenges because they're so small, it's very hard to develop these, characterize them and scale them for production. And that's where DataView fits in. We're able to streamline that process allow you to fully characterize your exosomes in a in kind of a simple workflow that is scalable, so that that's really what we do.
Aaron Moncur:So the exosome that is a the the nanoparticle
David Freedman:that is the Nano it's a biological nanoparticle. So again, I think of it like a mini mini cell and that the only thing it contains all the biomolecules you typically hear proteins, DNA, nucleic acids, fats and lipids. It doesn't have the machinery to replicate. So they're not viruses, but if you think of them like viruses, that would be a really good analogy. These viruses need cells to be able to replicate like we're in this Coronavirus right now you know they need cells, they don't last long outside the body exosomes. Similarly, they can deliver materials from one cell to another. Fascinating.
Aaron Moncur:Speaking of COVID-19 is none of you doing anything in that realm?
David Freedman:So the technology was actually originally developed for viruses. So part of this iCore process I described, we were looking at early detection at the time. We actually had a big project on Ebola, Lhasa, Marburg detection. So it was really a bio defense project. Right. This happened before the West African outbreak. What we found because we had a company at that time, is that we were not a good technology for the that outbreak in West Africa, which was a learning experience for us. And we pivoted into the exome space. But with we've been working on this in the background for last couple years. We have some exciting developments around viral detection as well. And so yeah, you could, you could see that we could look at Cronin Coronavirus detection, SARS, and Cove two, I think is the name detection with our platform.
Aaron Moncur:Interesting. We'll be excited to see if and what happens there. Pretty cool. All right, quick, quick break here. plug for the podcast and for our company pipeline design and engineering, where we work with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey custom test fixtures or automated equipment, to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. And you can find us at test fixture design.com. Alright, so David, you said that one of your life goals, or your life goals are at the intersection of startups and technology, especially as it relates to biology, software and hardware. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what what your life goals are. I mean, that's, that's a big question here, putting you on the spot a little bit. But can you talk a little bit about that?
David Freedman:Yeah, well, I think that's something is happening in any view. So I think, you know, like we talked about, I'm passionate about automation. So I like seeing processes that are challenging, like the current exome characterization. And now we're building a whole scalable workflow. And so an example of that is we have a an instrument, a box that we call it. And you know, what we've automated for example, as you put the chip in and to collect the data, and you you say, I want to scan this chip, and you walk away for two hours, right? So it's almost completely automated from that aspect. And then seeing this technology go into more and more labs is really empowering, right? I'm seeing now, publications come out where we're seeing new discoveries made that were enabled with the xOP platform. And so that journey is really what I'm excited about. And I think, you know, it'll culminate when we see a really translational medicine happen with the with the platform, and that might be in the form of diagnostics, or therapeutics, or even just a novel discovery around the space. And that that I think, will be kind of the the passion that I'm looking for.
Aaron Moncur:What walk me through the process for this EXO view platform. So the problem that one starts with is there's what some nanoparticle that that they want characterized. Exactly, yeah, so
David Freedman:there they are. So I like the pancreatic cancer example, because I think it's really grounding. So you think about that, so you may go in for your so just to be clear, we're not currently doing this, this is kind of our goal. So you would go in for your physical, you would take a blood blood sample, you may then take that blood sample, you'll typically spin it down to remove all the red blood cells. And then you would take that sample and put it on our XO view chip. So we have a microchip that's about one by one centimeter, when we put say, we would put a cancer specific exosome probe on there, and typically an antibody. And so you would put that sample the blood blood product on the chip, then you would incubate it, once you've completed the incubation. So that may take many hours, you will then wash the chip. So you some water like or salt, like a solution to wipe it clean to remove all that excess blood product, and then you'll dry the chips or instrument does take the chips dry. So you would pull it out of the solution, then you would put it in the instrument, you would select what chip it was, so they have unique numbers. And then you would click Scan chip, the instrument would then go through a process where it'll use Image registration to be able to automatically figure out where it is on the chip, what is on the chip, and then it'll it'll scan it using our kind of proprietary algorithm to collect the data, it will then automatically process the data so like you said, we look at these particles so it'll find all the particles it's really a microscope. I mean if you think about it, the the basically it's an imaging if you like can add a camera like that. And it will take all those images and analyze them to pull out all the different nanoparticles. And then, and then give you a report around that there's another piece of software that will then take all that output data and create all kinds of bar plots or whatever it is you're trying to understand about the data. Ultimately, you'd wanted to report a positive negative on on kind of a diagnostic test. And what
Aaron Moncur:technology is used to scan, the sample is this some kind of, I don't know, high magnification microscopy, or it were some kind of light spectrum,
David Freedman:all the above. So it's really a, it's a so what we've done is we've built a box that has an automated XYZ stage with high resolution nanometre level precision, with high magnification, and then we've modified the optics in such a way. So we use many colors of light. And we shape the light in a certain way. So that when it hits our chip, which also is a word, maybe the secret sauces, right, so what we have on the chip is a piece of silicon, just like your microchips, and then a thin layer of glass. And that that's really the secret sauce. Because what happens is, if you think about constructive and destructive interference, the light will reflect off the chip off the two different layers, and then they will constructively interfere. And what we get is enhanced signal. And what we do is we make things that are invisible, visible. And that's really what it all comes down to but but all the multispectral all that stuff happens. On the box.
Aaron Moncur:Wow, that's so interesting. So did you have to develop some of your own manufacturing processes, I mean, to get these like silicon wafers with a thin layer of glass on it
David Freedman:is so in terms of you think of your chip in your iPhone or in your computer, it's so simple compared to that. So it is just a silicon layer. So that sr 1960s technology and then growing a thermal layer of oxides with just a very thin, typically under 100 nanometers of glass. And that that process, we can do it any kind of cleanroom. Okay, university. So we have that process pretty well refined with 100% yield. And that part is, is pretty trivial. Getting into the details, we put that in chemistry down, so biochemistry antifouling layer, and then we attached through kind of a robotic process very small amounts of proteins of antibodies onto the chip so that that part is very specialized for us. But the chip manufacturing, we do have to optimize it, there was a lot of engineering for picking the thickness of glass, making it so that you can scale you can deal with the tolerances that not all required a lot of engineering and optimization.
Aaron Moncur:Very interesting. Alright, I'm going to back out a little from the highly technical discussion. And we kind of touched on this already, but I'll give you an opportunity to maybe expound upon it a little bit more. I'd love to hear what what is it that motivates you, like, you know, every morning, you you get out of bed and you go into work? And you do that your thing? What is it that drives you to keep doing that?
David Freedman:I will sort of pocket those into two things. So it was kind of the passion we just talked about all around automation. So there's always a enjoyment when you build something and successful if you've gone through the nights of trying to figure out why it doesn't work. And then you do get it working. That's always just rewarding. But then on a personal level, you know, my family, my new son, those things are what I'm working hard towards. And so those, those are really exciting and seeing, for example, my son grow and how he looks at the world and how he plays with his giant Legos. I think they're called mega blocks. It's just really that that is the most rewarding
Aaron Moncur:part indoctrinating him already. Yeah, yeah. And then I
David Freedman:would just add one last thing, which is I enjoy the team. I think the people you work with is really what makes your, your job enjoyable. Your career. And so I think that that's something I'm always excited to go to the office. I'm excited to see everyone get their updates, hear how they're doing their challenges, what they're trying to, and figure out and have discussions around that is really just that that was what makes it fun.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I love that you brought up the team. There's a book called What is it called Nine lies about work, I think, really interesting read. And one of the things that the authors two authors argue is that people don't really care what company they work for. What they do care about is the team that they work in. So 100% Yeah. What? Let's talk about time management. That seems to be a topic that people have a lot of opinions around. What are some tools that you use to manage your time effectively.
David Freedman:So that's it Another interesting question, and you probably have a lot of guests that don't give you better responses because I think my my, my ability to time manage comes around to, I'd say a couple of things. So I use email primarily as a way to organize what I need to get done. And I'm sure a lot of people do this, I start things and I unread things, depending on whether I need to respond to them later. I am very simple, I have a to do list, I have a yellow notebook. And I check things off as I get them done. And then maybe one of the other things I do is, and I've heard this, and this is pretty common, is something takes two minutes to do, you just do it right away, don't save it for later, get it done. And then you can focus on something else. And then I think the last point I'd make is, and you could say is a good thing or a bad thing. And my wife would probably say it's a bad thing. But I will get really focused on something and maybe spend, you know, the whole night working on it, you know, staying up too late to get it done, because I'm just so engrossed in it. But what I end up doing is getting it done building a great product, whatever it is, and then I get to ship it the next day. So I I don't feel good the next day, but I feel good about what I've accomplished. You know what I mean? You feel good
Aaron Moncur:in other ways. Yeah, yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so that leads me somewhere else. What this is, you know, kind of a weird question for an engineering podcast. But what, what are your sleep patterns? Like? That's a big topic these days? Sure.
David Freedman:If you asked me this, I guess 15 years ago, I'd say I'd be embarrassed to tell you my hours. So, you know, I had one point where I was up, staying up really late. And my wife would go to work super early, and we would cross paths at that point, which was awful. And I would say that sort of an unhealthy, you know, at the time, I thought it was very productive, but probably a little bit unhealthy. Since my son came in, and now we have, you know, daycare regimen and certain things. I'm on a strict, strict timeline, you know, I got to be home in time for dinner, gotta have have him in bed, got to get up early to be able to take him to daycare. So so I'm on a regular, you know, up at six 630 at work by eight and then home by 530.
Aaron Moncur:We'll go to sleep usually.
David Freedman:So I try to be in bed by 1111 o'clock, I
Aaron Moncur:would say you got seven, seven and a half hours there.
David Freedman:But if I'm working hard, I'll probably be up till midnight. Yeah, but that's a hard stop at midnight. And now I'm old enough to know, you got to turn off and it'll be there in the morning.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, it's interesting how kids really change a person's or a couple's routine, isn't it?
David Freedman:I think that's one of the major things they do is they they're a blessing. But your whole life changes, I would say,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, maybe maybe the the invention of children was was done in order to stabilize life. Because otherwise, like you said, We're staying up until two in the morning, you know, after 10 years of that we're just gonna kill ourselves. But then kids come into the picture. And you have to change.
David Freedman:Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Aaron Moncur:What are some, some? And I'm not asking about any like, you know, proprietary strategic partners or anything like that. But are there any vendors or suppliers that you use that you think other engineering teams might find valuable to know about? I'll give you an example. So from the mechanical side, I mean, everyone knows about mcmaster carr. So it's not really that valuable because everyone knows about them from from the mechanical. And that's like, that's the vendor to go to for hardware mechanic master car, we're always using them. But are there some vendors that that you found and have found a lot of value in that other engineering teams might also like to know about we all love
David Freedman:MasterCard, they just ship right away the website. So you know, I'm an electrical engineer by training. And so I use a company called advanced circuits vendor called advanced circuits out of Colorado. I really like their, the way they work with you as you're doing your design. If you have issues and they connect with you and they have a nice piece of software that lets you they call it design for manufacturing. It checks your your design before you before you actually fabricate it. So I think that that's a nice little tool. I bought I've used them for I guess about 15 years now I really like that. I also really like I materialise, I know there's a lot I know my company, we use other 3d printing shops, but I materialized has always had a soft spot in my heart because they can print materials and in any they can print 3d objects in many different materials. And they have been very impressed with With the results, that part is just been fun, I find the SolidWorks you know, 3d rendering almost like a game when you're designing things. And when you physically get an object back, it's just so cool. And they had this express printing, which you can prototype and get it back in the same week. If you don't have a 3d printers is pretty cool.
Aaron Moncur:Nice. Great. Thank you for sharing those. I have not heard of iron materialized, I'm gonna have to check them out.
David Freedman:Yeah, definitely check it out. I recommend a polyamide priority, you get you know, prints in two days, and you get it back. And you can have 20 objects if you need that in a couple of days.
Aaron Moncur:Very cool. What are what are some of the challenges that you face each day? You know, what, what's, uh, what's on your mind stressing you out? What are the problems that you're trying to solve?
David Freedman:So, you know, as the company's grown in a company's matured, it's different challenges. So I think, you know, always a lot of top of my mind is making sure that customers happy that we're giving them the best experience that they can have. And whether that means through over communication, or making sure that we're adding this new functionality to the system, or working with them on the new kind of special project or custom project, I think that that's really what I focus on day to day is, is really the customer experience. And typically that like it's filtered in into me, and then I have to make sure that the teams and the people I work with are managing that. And so that that's really what I work on. Or I'm thinking about every day,
Aaron Moncur:what are some things that Nana view does to facilitate a really positive customer experience.
David Freedman:So I think we tried to over communicate, I think the can, it's very difficult to over communicate too much. So making sure that they know what's going on. But the protocols are up to date that they're getting that constant update. I think we try to develop new material to help make things easier to use or understand better. I know we're doing a software development a big projects going on right now. And we're spending a lot of time making sure we're trying to make things as easy to use, you know, intuitive, I think is the key word there. And, and really that that's like getting us in the building, trying to get unbiased feedback on that. And that's a whole process. So those are what it's really kind of undermined demand.
Aaron Moncur:Well, David, this has been wonderful, I really appreciate you taking some time and just running us through, you know, what has gotten you here and sharing some insight and value with us. So thank you so much for being with us. Before we go. If people want to get a hold of you or have a narrow view, what's the best way to get in touch?
David Freedman:So for me personally, you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter, I think that would be a great way to connect with me. And Fernando view if you go to Nana view bio.com. So it's na n o vi, e w vi o.com, you can find us and you can reach out to us from there.
Aaron Moncur:And what are the who are the best customers like who? Why should I not? Why should I contact you? But what are the I don't know the industries or the customers that they can find the most value at nano view.
David Freedman:So you know, where we have the biggest impact is in kind of two spaces. It's academics, so people doing discovery, trying to understand these extracellular vesicles, these exosomes, so that's a big area that we focus on. You know, I'm an academic by training, I was a professor so I can I understand some of the challenges they're facing for grants and things like that. And then on the industry side, the there's two areas, which are the people developing diagnostics, exome based diagnostics, or viral based diagnostics, or exome, or bio based therapeutics. So really, in the biotech space, I would say is where we can make the biggest impact.
Aaron Moncur:All right. Well, David, thank you again for being on the show.
David Freedman:Aaron, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for being such a great host.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncure, founder of pipeline design, and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find the show. To learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design, visit us at test fixture design.com Thanks for listening