#026 - Connected lab - a startup bringing IoT to R&D environments, with Alok Tayi of TetraScience, USA

The Hardware Entrepreneur

I’ve had recently the chance to interview Alok Tayi, co-founder and CEO of TetraScience, a startup that was formed by MIT-Harvard graduates, based in Boston. This interview allowed me to connect with my past as scientist and therefore their work greatly resonated with me.

Their vision is to connect every scientific experiment and instrument to a single online dashboard. This means their work is related to IoT. But that’s not all. In order to have an even bigger impact, they do innovation related to the scientists’ workflow so scientists and researchers can have a higher added value.

Alok himself is scientist and entrepreneur; he has strong background in both. What we talked about is his (entrepreneurial) career before TetraScience, the situation when founding the company, including the Eureka moment He elaborated on the main part of the business model, why it’s attractive for labs of all sizes, how they validated their idea, how they came up with the price point. He talked also about product development, mistakes they made and their participation in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.

Enjoy this epic performance by Alok, giving a lot of details on their strategy, specifics about how they built their business.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• Earlier entrepreneurial initiatives before TetraScience and their connections with the present venture - [2:55]
• The mission of TetraScience - [5:55]
• The business model behind TetraScience - [7:10]
• Alok's Eureka moment and how he started the company – [9:30]
• The process of validating the idea - [12:36]
• How did the team decide on the price of the product? - [14:36]
• Strengths and previous experience that helped Alok - [18:35]
• What are the advantages of TetraScience in the context of IoT? - [22:53]
• Key hardware-related learning points during the development - [25:55]
• Mistakes that the team made while growing the company - [29:40]
• How did the startup benefit from participating in the Y Combinator accelerator? - [32:10]
• If he could time travel and go back in time, what notes would he give himself? – [34:40]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [35:16]
• Alok’s work-related habits – [35:58]
• Some observations in regard to cultural differences that Alok has made throughout his career – [37:58]
• What is the best way to reach Alok? – [39:40]