Founder’s Lessons: Robert Devlin, CEO of Metalenz
By: Taylor Fang
Tags: Founders, Cameras, Startup Lessons, VC, Startup

Meet Rob Devlin

Interview edited for clarity and length.

“Focus on the technology, the vision, and the people. The rest will work itself out.”

Robert introduces himself

I’m Rob Devlin, founder and CEO of Metalenz. I did my PhD at Harvard in Applied Physics. I worked in nano-photonics, so making really, really small structures that can manipulate light. Specifically, I worked on metasurfaces with Professor Federico Capasso. Metasurfaces are flat optics that allow you to manipulate light without having any curvature to the device. Normal lenses have curvature that focus light and form an image. These metasurfaces do it with a completely planar form factor. We spun out Metalenz at the end of my PhD.

His background

My grandfather was a radio operator in World War II in the Navy. He didn’t have any kind of formal training. He joined the Navy at 18, fresh out of high school. After World War II, he never went to college, but he was an electrical engineer by training on the job. My grandparents watched me while my parents were working. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the basement with my grandfather. We would make shortwave radios together.

I remember putting together random, disparate components that didn’t seem like they would generate a voice or allow you to hear anything. But we turn it on, and all of a sudden we hear this completely foreign voice coming from seemingly nowhere. It was a realization that by studying and knowing each little component in the radio and what it did, you could hear things from across the world. You could bounce the radio signals off the ionosphere and hear radio signals from China or Russia.

That was a really cool experience: to see something very technical connect to the human side of things. You hear someone from across the world talking to you. It imprinted that science and engineering could immediately connect to a person on the other end.

You hear someone from across the world talking to you. It imprinted that science and engineering side could immediately connect to a person on the other end.

The other entrepreneurial experience was with my dad. He worked at a company called Flexitallic, which made gaskets. My dad didn’t go to college, but he worked his way up to be a global sales manager. I have a very vivid memory of walking through the factory floor and seeing these machines running, seeing people working on the machines, and knowing that this would be sold to someone across the world. My dad’s role was flying to Germany and Europe and trying to sell this product to people. I started seeing the interconnections: all the thoughts and different people contributing to this broader goal of selling something and making it successful.

Object that’s meaningful to him

I have on my desk the first set of lenses that we made with one of our high volume manufacturing partners. We make our lenses on a glass wafer rather than molding the lenses out of plastic. There’s basically a 12-inch diameter piece of glass and 10,000 of our lenses on that piece of glass.

Image credit: Metalenz

In a PhD, you’re very focused on your aspect of research. You have some collaboration with other people, but it’s not clear how that collaboration comes together to make something much bigger than your research. But this lens took the work of a ton of different people at Metalenz interacting with a ton of people from other companies.

This is why I especially love being at a startup. Very quickly, the seed of an idea grows way beyond yourself. You get to work with a bunch of amazing people to make something real. In my entire PhD, I made probably 100 different devices. But in one single shot, with the help of all these other people, we made 10,000 of these lenses.

Very quickly, the seed of an idea grows way beyond yourself. You get to work with a bunch of amazing people to make something real.

On choosing people to work with

I look for people who are very open to new ideas and discussion. Their ego doesn’t get in the way. Especially when you’re at a startup, it’s important that you can bring up new ideas without the worry that someone will push down that idea.

I also look for people who aren’t afraid to be wrong. When you’re doing something for the first time, you’re going to get it wrong a whole bunch of times. So it’s important to have a set of people around you who are willing to work in this open environment and not be scared of bringing up new ideas. They don’t want to be constantly the smartest person in the room, but they’re just open to debate and discussion without their ego or feelings getting in the way. They need to be able to step back. They don’t need to be right, they just want to get the problem right. In order to have something grow beyond yourself, that’s really critical.

His journey to Metalenz

My education was in a bit of everything. I did my bachelor’s in electrical engineering and a master’s in material science. Neither were focused on optics or optical materials. The thread that tied everything together was that I was very interested in nanofabrication, the science of making really small things. In my PhD, I decided that I wanted to do something different from what I had done previously. I liked the idea of having a broader base and background.

In flat optics, it requires you to know the materials and nanofabrication really well. It would also give me the opportunity to learn something new. So it wasn’t until my PhD that I hit on flat optics. It fit so well with my experience and I thought it was really cool, so I ran with it.

Key applications of Metalenz

Flat optics allows you to take forms of sensing normally thought of as too big, too complicated, or too expensive — mainly focused in scientific or medical labs — and shrink them down to a price point or form factor that can fit into every mobile phone in the world. Metasurfaces allow you to collect information that would normally take an entire table of optical devices from one single device.

Metalens Science Breakthrough Runner-up in 2016

For example, a spectrometer is something you’ll find in a lot of scientific, chemical, and medical labs. It tells you what chemicals are in medicine, a liquid, or an atmosphere. But it takes up a whole table. Metasurfaces allow you to take three or four different spectrometer optical functions and condense them in one single layer and one single device.

You can take forms of sensing which are very expensive and not broadly distributed throughout the world, and make them smaller, simpler, and cheaper. You can now put them into cell phones, so everyone is walking around with devices that were previously confined to a scientific or medical lab. That changes the set of information being accessed by everyone in the world.

You can now put them into cell phones, so everyone is walking around with devices that were previously confined to a scientific or medical lab.

For example, is the medicine you bought still going to work because it’s not expired? Are the chemicals correct? Or you can look at blood assays just with your cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone today, but not everyone has access to a medical lab. That’s what metasurfaces and flat optics are really enabling: a whole new form of sensing that you can distribute to the masses through cell phones.

His vision for Metalenz

Our vision is to give everyone access to entirely new forms of sensing. We want to proliferate forms of sensing that are normally esoteric or scientific, and allow everyone to have them in their pockets. We’re starting out with 3D sensing, which is pretty new to cell phones today. Apple’s Face ID is an instance of taking a new form of sensing and bringing it to small form factors. I see Metalenz putting new forms of information and sensing at everyone’s fingertips.

With the existing manufacturing infrastructure, you can manufacture metasurfaces at scale and it can be very cheap and pervasive. To me, it’s a really powerful concept of making sensing accessible and performing multiple functions in a single layer, especially when it comes to health.

This can also provide a new set of information for scientists to access as data. It gives a whole new view of the world. When cameras were first put in cell phones, you could suddenly see throughout the world and see different cultures and people. It’s the same idea with sensing.

His main challenge as CEO

The main challenge is “crossing the chasm.” You have this new technology, and people and investors have bought into your idea. But it’s a big challenge to go from having the idea to finding the best path to make sure the idea gets adopted. You need to look at specific markets and applications and develop relationships throughout the whole supply chain. You have to find the right path to get the idea launched and then also have the ability to grow to your full vision.

In research and academia, often what you’re trying to do is publish a paper. You have an idea, you do some research and collect results, they prove or disprove your hypothesis, you write a paper, and that’s the end. But trying to get something into an actual product is much more difficult. It requires you to interact with a whole lot more people, and find a set of people with very specific talents and roles. It’s not like a paper, where once you publish it you can move on. You need to keep growing, continuously improving, and realize the full vision.

Best advice he received

The best advice is to focus on the technology, the vision, and the people. The rest will work itself out. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re at a startup. You want to be successful commercially. You want to launch this product and potentially have an IPO or be acquired. Your investors want these things. They’re necessary and important to have long-term success and to get the product on the market. But if you’re focusing on that, it’s really easy to burn yourself out and get overly stressed. You probably won’t be successful if you’re focusing on “the ends.”

The technology, vision, and people are the most important things. If you’re not excited about what you’re doing and the technology, and instead you’re focusing on other things, it’s very easy to get burnt out.

His advice for founders

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You hear this all the time in school, “there are no stupid questions.” But essentially, when you’re starting a company, it’s a very new thing for you. You often feel a sense that because you’re the founder, you should know everything.

But the reality is that it’s very new for you and there are a lot of people who have done this already and are willing to help. They’re willing to give you guidance and answer your questions. So just ask as many questions as possible. It will help you learn quicker. No one is expecting you to know everything. You should know everything about your technology and your vision, but you don’t have to know everything about starting a company or what it takes to be successful in a startup.

On hobbies and personal time

Sometimes when you’re the founder of a startup, the startup is your entire life. It’s very much all-encompassing. But it’s really important for people at startups to have other hobbies that they can do to recharge.

One of my favorites is going hiking and getting out in nature, especially with family. It’s very easy to get wrapped up and not see the bigger picture, so this helps contextualize everything else. The other thing that I really like to do is cycling. I go for really long bike rides to disconnect for a while.

The startup story gets spun back to people in a way that you only ever see the big successes, the Elon Musks and people like that. And with them, you see just one aspect of the person, which is the technology. But I think it’s really important to have other aspects of your life that help to support you and that are lasting.

3 media recommendations

Book : God Created the Integers by Stephen Hawking . It’s one of my favorite books. It’s a collection of what Hawking sees as the most important mathematical advancements, from Euclid and Archimedes to Alan Turing. It’s really interesting to see how these very specific, pure mathematical pursuits often turned into things that influence everyone’s life. You read some random mathematical theorem and wonder how it ever connects to real life. But it ends up being one of the most important concepts in information theory, and our cell phones wouldn’t work without it. This book takes things that seem very disconnected and shows their impact on the real world .

: . It’s one of my favorite books. It’s a collection of what Hawking sees as the most important mathematical advancements, from Euclid and Archimedes to Alan Turing. It’s really interesting to see how these very specific, pure mathematical pursuits often turned into things that influence everyone’s life. You read some random mathematical theorem and wonder how it ever connects to real life. But it ends up being one of the most important concepts in information theory, and our cell phones wouldn’t work without it. This book . Documentary: The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley dir. by Alex Gibney. It’s a very deep look at Theranos. I really liked this documentary, because it helps ground you in doing something real and meaningful and not just getting caught up in the hype cycle. It helped inform me about what not to do. There were a lot of people saying “we have a problem that we need to address,” but their voices weren’t heard or were getting quashed. The founders just moved forward and didn’t listen.

When you’re at a startup, there are going to be a lot of problems that you need to solve. You need to be brutally honest with yourself in order to solve them and have a real impact in the end. This documentary showed me the importance of critically looking at everything to make sure you have an end product with real impact.