Allan Appel Photo
David Pearlstone shows DECD deputy Gwendolyn Thames his company’s holographic imaging headset for surgical procedures.
Get us faster trains, more airplanes, less risk-averse large corporations, and most of all, better access to venture capital.
Start-up founders at New Haven’s hottest new business incubator gave Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz that holiday-season wish list Monday.
Bysiewicz, who has made promoting small businesses a priority of her tenure in office, popped in for fact-finding visit to DISTRICT, the innovation incubator and coworking space on James Street by the Mill River in Fair Haven.
Bysiewicz with Sara Nadel, whose data science company helps high volume employers better their hiring.
DISTRICT founder David Salinas hosted the event leading off with some impressive statistics: In the center’s first 18 months of operation 113 companies have pitched their flags there, from one-person dreamers to companies with 50 people.
In that same period of time those entrepreneurs have collectively raised $30 million in private capital. On any given day 600 to 1,000 people work, pass through, network, and collaborate on the campus.
Salinas told Bysiewicz, who was in attendance with Deputy Director of Economic and Community Development Gwendolyn Thames, that “entrepreneurs really need their voices heard.”
They proceeded to do exactly that.
Sara Nadel is the founder and chief science officer at StellarEmploy which does data and behavioral analysis for larger companies and tries to answer questions like what kinds of personalities help workers thrive at Dunkin Donuts as opposed to Burger King.
The coffee bar at District’s co-working space community lounge area.
She moved her company from Brooklyn to New Haven in part because she grew up in Branford. When Bysiewicz quizzed her further, she also said a child was on the way and, of importance to her backers, “hiring would be better in New Haven.”
Carson Miller, a recent DISTRICT arrival, is an early stage software developer. His product is called Buildbook. It’s designed, he said, to help people involved in residential construction manage the frenzied, often chaotic day-to-day business of contracts, blueprints, and documents, all on their mobile device. He’s part of a small team but he doesn’t expect to be so for long, he added.
The lieutenant governor asked where in Connecticut her interlocutors live. When Miller said he commutes to DISTRICT from Fairfield, a counter-rush hour drive, that struck a theme that was to emerge later: small companies’ needs for reliable and efficient transportation.
Kevin Rocco put that question more starkly to Bysiewicz when it was his turn to speak. He’s the founder of a start-up called Biorez, a company that makes regenerative implants for orthopedic surgery.
“We hired a brilliant intern,” Rocco related. The young man is a chemical engineer. It was great to have him on board the start-up. However there was one problem: the young man had a girlfriend in Chicago, and visiting there from New Haven was a significant hassle.
Carson Miller explaining his software idea, and his commute.
“We need a better transportation system, and New Haven needs a better airport,” Rocco said.
“Exactly right,” responded Bysiewicz. She referenced an infrastructure bill scheduled to come before the state legislature in January. “We need a regional airport. Maybe it’s Tweed, maybe Sikorsky.” She urged the entrepreneurs to vote yes and to contact their legislators.
That wasn’t quite enough for Salinas.
“Small entrepreneurs learn how to get things done,” he said. “Yet you look at the state, and they can’t get things done, and people get frustrated.” He asked Bysiewicz for her suggestions how DISTRICT folks can better navigate “the democracy bureaucracy.”
She recruited Salinas and others around the table for some upcoming conferences on these subjects andon increasing opportunities for minorities and also for girls and women in the sciences and the advanced technology jobs of the future.
Director Nadine Krause of the Holberton School, the innovative computer training academy for self-directed non-traditional students, said she hopes Bysiewicz can help lead the way in getting corporations to rewrite their job descriptions for tech jobs that might drop the B.A. requirement. That would expedite taking on her students who have the skill but might lack a pedigree.
“We’re trying to promote more women in the computing fields,” said Krause.
“We need to involve you,” Bysiewicz responded, as Connecticut awaits “a silver tsunami,” a wave of upcoming retirements among state tech employees.
Salinas tries the holographic headgear, post roundtable.
Not to be out-womanned, Salinas, who apologized for being sleepy (he was up for two hours in the middle of the night with his child), added this: “The robots are not taking the jobs. People are still required to program the robots. The problem is that it is men who are programming the robots, and they’ll make mistakes. We need women and girls. I’m an honorary woman.”
“You are both recruited,” said Bysiewicz.
Next up was David Pearlstone, an oncological surgeon. He has teamed up with Ted Dinsmore, whose company SphereGen has been taking the visual technology of gaming and adapting it for medical and hospital uses.
Pearlstone has spun off his product DICOM from SphereGen, specifically to take a cat-scan or an X‑ray and make a hologram of it so the surgeon, wearing space-suit-looking headgear, can see in real time and in three dimensions exactly what he or she’s operating on.
As a surgeon himself, Pearlstone said it’s a dream come true — if he can get the funding. The good news is that he and Dinsmore announced $2 million in seed funding. More is needed, and other kinds of nurturing as well.
It’s basically taking consumer technology and applying it to medical uses, he said.
Pearlstone: If you operate on a liver in three dimensions, why not see it in three dimensions.
Pearlstone and other participants around the table asked Bysiewicz to help get venture capitalists to focus outside of the Yale box. The lion’s share of New Haven’s venture capital and grant monies currently go to Yale-affiliated enterprises.
What can we do more to fill in the gaps? asked Gwendolyn Thames.
“It’d be nice,” replied Pearlstone, “if Connecticut venture capital people, with Connecticut roots, invest here” at DISTRICT.
Bysiewicz, who had been taking notes as well as carefully listening, pulled the meeting to a close after about an hour and a half.
“You all have my card. Let’s hear from you and let’s celebrate your success,” she said.
As the meeting broke up, Salinas and others lined up to test Pearlstone’s holographic medical technoogy, which, Pearlstone said, is going to be tested with animals in the coming weeks, and well may be in a hospital operating room next year.
Click on the video to watch an interview with Lt. Gov. Susasn Bysiewicz on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” about her first year in office.
@Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, "We need a regional airport. Maybe it's Tweed, maybe Sikorsky." Does anybody in Hartford have any knowledge of airports, I mean even a little bit? Both Gov Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz see both airports as equals when in fact they are very far apart in infrastructure. Tweed has a 5600 foot runway with 1000 foot overruns at both ends. Sikorsky has a 4700 foot runway with no room for overruns, Tweeds main runway is 150 feet wide,Sikorsky's main runway 100 feet wide. Sikorsky is closer to the water than Tweed. Sikorsky's elevation is lower than Tweeds and at times has flooded runways, Tweeds runway does not flood over. Tweed has a terminal, Sikorsky does not. Tweed is farther away from landing and departure patterns of the New York airports. Sikorsky also has steeper approach angles when landing.
Tweed has had weight restricted flights due to the runway being 5600 feet long, where would Sikorsky with its 4700 foot runway make a showing? Regional jets cannot operate off that short of a runway. It seems both elected officials want to please everybody and just have a Pollyanna response meant to be palatable to who ever is listening.
What should be a easy decision as to which airport scores higher on all counts, the Hartford delegation is incapable of making a decision even when presented with the facts. Its been many years since Sikorsky had airline service and the prop planes that provided that service are all gone.
Just look at the two fact sheets detailing both airports runway infrastructures and there can only be one definitive outcome, Tweed is in the best and only position to be the regional airport for Southern Connecticut.