Xu Simon (00:02):
So nice to see you, Natalie. Thank you.
Natalie Kuldell (00:04):
Thank you for joining this conversation. I usually just start them by asking if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself and saying a little bit about what you are currently working on, where and what and things like that.
Xu Simon (00:20):
All right. I’d be very happy to. All right. My name is Xu Simon, and I am Chief Technology Officer at a startup company in the Boston area. Now, the startup company is called Enozo Technologies, and Enozo is Ozone spelled backwards. And what the technology does is it creates ozone on demand. So it is a device that creates a strong oxidant. And a lot of what oxidants do is that they kill bacteria, germs, viruses and fungi. So what’s really cool about our technology is because ozone has a really short halflife, we call it guerilla warfare. So we make the ozone, it’s in water, you spray a stream and it goes in, it kills your germs, and then within 10 minutes it’s gone. So you don’t have to worry about your pets or your younger sibling, like getting into the chemicals. So it is a very effective antibacterial and and really safe for the environment and for plants, animals, and humans.
Natalie Kuldell (01:24):
So that’s the` technology. It’s such cool technology. Wow.
Xu Simon (01:29):
It’s a really cool technology, and I can tell you what I do for the company. So as Chief Technology Officer there, there are a lot of things that a chief technology officer can do, and I will tell you that I do all of them because it’s such a small company. So there’s there’s working in industry and then there’s working in a startup company, and they are there are some overlap about what is about what you can expect. And there are also some specifics about it. So a chief technology officer is in charge of the technology. And so getting the technology out there, often we will talk about patents. We will, we will file the patents. We work on the regulation of you know, if there is a technology, this is a this is technically a pesticide. So we work with the EPA, we work with the FDA on making sure that that everything is above board.
Xu Simon (02:18):
And we also do sales. And what I mean by sales is it can be technical sales. So a lot of times when you are selling this product out into the marketplace, people are wondering, Well, does it work? And my job is to say, “This is how it works.” So it works when you use it correctly. This is, these are the constraints. And this is how you know that it works. So within the, within the space that you’re used to working with, which is usually harsh chemicals that will disinfect, this is what’s different and this is what you can expect.
Natalie Kuldell (02:49):
It’s amazing.
Natalie Kuldell (02:51):
I was gonna say, it sounds like you have to draw on so many different talents. Like there’s legal, there’s technical expertise, there’s interpersonal and just, you know people-people communication. Do you liken them all? Like, am I right? Is that, is that part of your job? All of those aspects?
Xu Simon (03:11):
Yes. Oh, absolutely. And that is one of the things about the startup company versus other parts of industry. So a startup company, I think it’s very similar to going into academia. And academia is like becoming a professor or a researcher. And what’s important about these types of careers is that you are usually in a very small team, but so much has to get done. So you end up not really specializing very much. And you do use all of your skills. You are responsible for every little aspect of what happens. And one thing that you didn’t mention the interpersonal skills, it’s, it’s related, but there’s a lot of writing. Everything has to be documented. So there’s writing for the outside world, It’s part of sales. We write project proposals and then there’s writing for internal what was done, when, by whom, why, and who else needs to know. And there’s just a lot of writing and documentation, and it has to be clear. And it’s got to be concise, and it’s also got to be comprehensive. And so it’s really difficult to do that.
Natalie Kuldell (04:14):
It’s amazing. It, it sounds both incredibly challenging and wonderful because it sounds like every day is gonna be a little bit different, but it also sounds completely exhausting. So, how, how many, how many people are in this company and how long has this company been around?
Xu Simon (04:29):
There are 10 people in the company right now, and the company has been around for 11 years. So I still call it a startup company. It is a private company. What that means is that you cannot buy stocks in this company on the stock market. There are some advantages to that. That means that everything can be pretty closely held and management doesn’t necessarily have to report to outside stockholders. So then some unusual or risky decisions can be made and you can get a big payoff. As far as as just not being bored, there’s, it’s exhausting. It’s true, but there are so many different individual tasks that it never feels tedious. There’s always something new to do. There’s also always something that has to be done that’s gonna work with whatever energy I have now. And everything is really important. So there is a lot of flexibility for right no,. I’m tired, I want to write right now. I’ve had too much coffee. I wanna talk to somebody. All of those are possibilities.
Natalie Kuldell (05:33):
Wow. It sounds, it sounds great. And, and being able to motor your own boat and make those decisions is, is a really wonderful way to work. I, I can speak for myself. I know that that is, that is a great thing to be able to, you know, organize your day and, and figure out which are the priorities for you and what you’re best suited at that moment to, to get done. So but I, I have to ask, how do you get ready for a job like yours? It sounds scientific, it sounds legal, it sounds you know, human resource oriented. It sounds communication oriented. You must be incredibly cross-trained. So, what did you study to get to where you are?
Xu Simon (06:13):
You’re absolutely right. It is all of the above. So what what worked for me was to keep changing jobs. So I’ll be perfectly honest, my parents just that they were, you know, they’re older. They started a job. They stayed in that job, they retired in that job. They got great pensions. They grew within that job. I did none of that. I started a job. I thought it was interesting. I saw something else that was interesting. I jumped ship and I kept going in all sorts of different contexts. So sometimes when people look at that kind of career path they will say, “Wow, you can’t focus. You don’t know what you’re doing.” I saw it differently. What I saw it as is I had a very broad set of interests and I chased them all. And it ended up giving me a lot of creativity because I usually saw whatever problem I saw in one situation, I had seen it in a different situation, and I could draw on all of the resources for how that problem got solved.
Natalie Kuldell (07:13):
Yeah, that sounds so true. I, I think this notion of just hopping from lily pad to lily pad, as you move through your career path, it it, very rarely these days, it seems, you know, that you start on one shore and you directly go straight through on one path to the other. Yeah.
Xu Simon (07:32):
The one thing that I will point out about, so the short answer for how you do this is you just refuse to focus. That said, it really helps if there is some underlying thread throughout that is common, that you can really point to a a common goal. And for me, that is health. I am very, very interested in health, but health has so many different implications. Right now I’m working on health in the, in the realm of reducing germs.
Natalie Kuldell (08:01):
Mm-Hmm.
Xu Simon (08:01):
But there are so many ways to, to help health.
Natalie Kuldell (08:04):
It’s true. And so, so young people, you know, looking for their career path these days, if they have an interest in health as as you do, and, and have consistently had, a lot of them will think about, Well, maybe I should go to medical school, or maybe I should go to nursing or some direct patient related field. And especially if they’d like science, those are often the sort of directions that people will, will take. Is that how you got into what you were doing when you were in high school? We were like, I’m going pre-med. I’m, I’m gonna be a doctor. I’m gonna be a nurse.
Xu Simon (08:42):
Almost. So there, one thing that I knew about myself when I was in high school is I was very interested in health, but I did not like pain and suffering. So just the idea of taking my day to day, watching people who are suffering, some people can get over that and look at, well, what they’re actually doing as I am making this better. And for me, I couldn’t get myself out of that situation that I didn’t like. And I knew that I would just start spinning my wheels if that was my day to day. So I, very quickly, I thought about being, becoming a doctor for about five minutes. Very, very quickly talked myself out of that. Now, when I was in high school, I can tell you what inspired me to science, and it was an article. I grew up in Texas and the Houston Chronicle had a little write up on some science that was done.
Xu Simon (09:32):
And the, the science experiment was there were some researchers and they went to retirement communities. And what they did is they had either water, they had sweetened iced tea, or they had unsweetened iced tea as refreshments. And they would go and they would talk to residents in these retirement communities and record what stories got told. Then back in the office, they would correlate the stories with things that their family members remembered, and they would figure out just how many details were accurate and in fact, how detailed the stories were. The conclusion is that sweetened iced tea resulted in a better, more accurate stories than either of the other two groups. So it wasn’t the caffeine un unsweetened tea didn’t do it. Yeah. It was, it was the sugar that was, that was the variable. And what was so interesting about this is I was 12 years old at the time, and I looked at that and I thought, I like sugar.
Xu Simon (10:27):
Everybody’s telling me not to like sugar. I can point to this article and say, sugar is good for my brain, so shut up. I’m gonna eat some sugar. So it was very empowering. Now the thing about that is there are so many layers to that research. There’s ethnographic research, there’s qualitative research, there’s quantitative research. There are all sorts of things that you can do for you. How much sugar, is there a threshold? Is there a linear effect? They didn’t do any of that. But what got me interested is I wonder how sugar actually affects the brain to come up with better stories. So from that, I got interested in metabolism and I majored in biochemistry.
Natalie Kuldell (11:11):
Wow.
Xu Simon (11:12):
I didn’t major in English. English would’ve been just as good. Like there are stories you can have any background and contribute. I just happen to be motivated by metabolism.
Natalie Kuldell (11:24):
So interesting. That’s amazing. I I, I often think biochemistry is a great foundation for so many directions in science, because it is that overlap that that interdisciplinary piece between life science and direct just reaction kinetics and things like that. And, and there’s so much application space in biochemistry. So, so neat. And so where did you study biochemistry?
Xu Simon (11:49):
I went to Rice University in Houston. And I can tell you exactly why Texans when I was growing up and still now kind of think that Texas is its own country. So every scholarship I got required that I stay in Texas. So I went halfway half an hour down the street to my local college, which was Rice.
Natalie Kuldell (12:08):
Rice is such an excellent university. They have so many interesting programs, a very strong synthetic biology program as well right now. And just really smart people coming outta Rice, just like just like you. So that’s, that’s great. But now where did the business side of this all come in?
Xu Simon (12:26):
The business side came in because I saw a very big hole in my education. And what I mean is from Rice, I went directly into graduate school. I knew that I wanted to go very, very deep into a topic. So I graduated with a, as an undergraduate from Rice. And then I went straight into graduate school right here in Massachusetts at MIT. And one of the things that I noticed is most people do go straight from undergrad to graduate school, and they’re kind of lost with what they’re doing. And I was lost and I ended up switching labs and it was, it took a long time and there was a big mess. Yeah. And those people who had a little bit of business experience, first, the people who had two years of business experience graduated two years earlier than everyone else.
Xu Simon (13:18):
And I realized, oh, there’s something that they learned during those two years. I thought it was a waste of time. But in fact, what they did was they laid a foundation for how to work.
Natalie Kuldell (13:29):
Yeah.
Xu Simon (13:30):
So that was the first thing that I noticed. Now, the second thing that I noticed was I ended up accidentally getting a non-academic job. I was aiming for academia. So, and then in academia, in biochemistry, you get your PhD and then you do a postdoc, and then you become a professor. Sometimes you’ll do two postdocs. So I got my PhD I got my postdoc, and in the meantime I got married to somebody that I’m still married to, you know, after 18 years. And that’s an accomplishment. So I have to point that out. Um that’s some commitment. Now. he went to grad school as well and he did not enjoy grad school as much as I did.
Xu Simon (14:10):
And so we both graduated and he was just looking at what, what can I do with my skills that is not bench work. And he ended up going to Washington, DC for the AAAS fellowship. That’s the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They publish Science magazine. And what aaas does is they take PhD scientists and they put them into government offices. The idea being we need more scientific thinking in government so that government will work better. So he went, I stayed and did my postdoc. I was still in Boston. I was like, Wow, this is this is interesting. And we decided to commute for a year. We had a long distance marriage. That was not fun. And at some point I had to make a decision what is more important to me, my career or my marriage. And I will tell you that a lot of academics look at me and they say, Well, clearly your career, you can always commute. And I made a different choice. I followed the love of my life to Washington DC to do the same fellowship, because you have different cohorts every year. He navigated me through the application process. So I ended up getting a much better placement than he did because I just followed his directions. And I ended up working in a diplomatic office at the US Department of State. It was an anti-chemical weapons diplomatic office. They specifically hired me because of my chemistry background. They are working with chemists to secure chemicals abroad.
Natalie Kuldell (15:36):
Mm-Hmm.
Xu Simon (15:36):
Um so I thought that was super fun. But the other thing that I noticed is I was the only chemist in a diplomatic office. And so whenever there would be a clash between the subject matter experts and the diplomats, they would call me to mediate and I would say, Oh, that’s great. I know exactly what the scientists are thinking. They’re thinking that they’re constrained by the laws of physics and then the diploma-
Natalie Kuldell (16:00):
But they are
Xu Simon (16:03):
That’s dumb, nobody thinks like that. And my thought was, why in world did you hire me to translate if you’re not believing my translation. Right. And so I got very, very interested at that point, at the social dynamics, the power dynamics that are involved in actually translating good science. It’s not good enough to do good science. It has to be translated into the world to actually do good. Yeah. So that was the other hole in my education. I went back and got a business degree and filled that hole.
Natalie Kuldell (16:37):
Fascinating. and, and I think you’re, you’re so right because, you know, science that happens and isn’t communicated, how is that different from science? That didn’t happen. Like, in the end it hasn’t made impact.
Xu Simon (16:52):
But you might think. Right? So, so I’m, right now I’m very interested in communicating the science and that’s why my position now is really good for me because I’m taking the science. The engineers go and they do the work. They tell me about it. I tell the world about it.
Natalie Kuldell (17:07):
Yeah. That’s fabulous. I, I think there’s such a role for sort of bilingual or, you know, an ability to, to communicate across academic and, and nonacademic boundaries and things like that. So what a, what a perfect mix. It sounds like you are thriving and what a great story that I’m sure will inspire a lot of people. I I really appreciate you sharing it.
Xu Simon (17:32):
Thank you very much. I do feel like I’m thriving right now. I’m having a lot of fun. And I will also point out that not everything I have ever done was fun or felt like it was going to work.
Xu Simon (17:45):
If Anybody finds themselves in that situation that they’ve got plenty of company.
Natalie Kuldell (17:48):
Yeah. That’s, that’s a, that that is probably a good conversation to have as a follow up because yeah, I think when we write our narratives about our work, oftentimes it’s from success to success. Where in fact there are a lot of learnings from, from failures, public and private, that help us just make better decisions as we go forward. So Wow. Well I, I, I am so excited to see more of what you’ll do. And I, I can’t wait to see this product that you’re working on. It’s it sounds like a game changer.