Transcript

Failure is experience and experience is learning: Sara Naseri at TEDxCopenhagen

[Music] [Music] hello everyone I am so excited to be here today up until I was 10 years old I insisted that my mom would leave my window open at night now I grew up in Denmark where it gets very very cold during winter so it was pretty ridiculous but I wanted the window to stay open because I believed in Peter Pan yes and I wanted him to come and take me to Never Never Land a place where if you believe hard enough you can even fly so let me show you how I made my project fly by believing and never giving up when I was 16 I invented a chemical compound with the aim to prevent against skin cancer caused by the solar U radiation right after high school my friend Emily and I founded a company and during the next two years we managed to achieve our proof of principle we filed two worldwide patent applications we raised venture capital and later we established our product development in Japan we even had an offer to sell our company for more than what most people earn during a lifetime but before talking more about this I want you to understand the problem we're trying to solve despite the fact that the sun is more than 150 million kilometers away human strongly feels it effect that's both the positive and the negative now most of us know the feeling of getting sunburned it really hurts what happens is that the U radiation penetrates deeply into the skin and releases energy and that absorbed energy is what is causing the sunburns skin cancer and in worst scenarios death to prevent entire planet from getting a sunburn the ozone layer protects Earth against most of the U radiation if the ozone layer had been perfect almost no harmful U radiation would reach Earth but it's not and this together with the lack of sufficient protection against the U radiation is causing severe damage to humans and materials all over the world and this is where our compound comes in so actually we started our project because we had a wish that we wanted to cure skin cancer but realizing that this is fairly complex our aim and driving force became to find a solution that could prevent it from being developed in the first place so we started investigating different sunscreen and after a while we could conclude that these do not protect sufficiently enough and they cannot be optimized so as a result we wanted to come up with a completely new concept for sun protection there just had to be a better way so the inspiration behind our final solution is the ozone layer we knew that the ozone layer is Getting Thinner and thinner and some places on Earth there's even holes in the ozone layer so our thought was why not take what's missing up there down to earth and create a personal ozone layer now this is Ozone it's a small molecule which consists of three oxygen atoms it has outstanding UV absorbing properties which is what we want to take advantage of but ozone down here it has two difficulties one that it is toxic and it is a gas so we need we needed to solve that first and to do this we had to come up with some kind of container molecule in which we could encapsulate the ozone so that it would stay in a carrier material and so that it wouldn't be in direct contact with the skin and this is when we came up with the idea to use this unique molecule in 2010 it was nominated the most beautiful molecule in the world so let me introduce to you the famous baky ball the discovery of this molecule is about the same age as I am but it was so significant that it actually won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996 so as you can see it is a round and spatial molecule and it consists of 60 carbon atoms which are represented by these black dots but why is this so interesting it's interesting because this unique structure makes it possible to chemically open it and encapsulate different molecules inside the buy ball is extremely inert and it has its own UV absorbing properties which made it an ideal container for the ozone molecule so our final solution effectively combines these two natural UV absorbing agents and together this combination which is the first in the world is expected to provide a 99.99% protection against all U radiation and it does it continuously now to give you an idea of the size you can place one million of these nanoscaled molecules on the tip of a needle so they are very very small in 2010 we achieved our proof of principle in cooporation with Yale University and later we decided to move our product development to Japan where we've been working with one of the leading chemical groups in our field so our final product is a powder which can be added into sun lotion but since U radiation doeses not only affect humans but almost everything it touches it can also be added into Plastics paints coating on cars and other materials where blocking The UU radiation is necessary our technology is protected through two worldwide patent applications which covers the compound the production method and the use of the compound in 14 different application areas so today I don't sleep with my window open anymore and I don't believe in Peter Pan but I do believe that if you're afraid of taking risks if you're afraid of failing afraid of stepping outside of your comfort zone you will be left on the ground while believing thinking positive daring will let you fly so with that mindset I want to tell you about some of the experiences and Lessons Learned I've had building my company and growing up as young entrepreneurs there are three big things which we are missing and that is experience a professional Network and capital three things which are all essential in order for a company to succeed so when we started our project we obviously didn't have any experience and the first time I presented our project in public was because we were encouraged to participate in this local High School science competition both Emily and I were Mega nerds a mega nerds so we took this challenge very seriously and so we would work day and night to write our report we read tons of scientifical articles to understand the professional field we were working with we even wrote the initial patent application describing all the technical details at the regional finals we presented our idea and it was spot on I mean we made the best presentation and we were able to answer all the jury's questions but to everyone's surprise we did not win which of course is a right as it is that's life you can't win every time but we wanted to know how we could improve so we went to the jury to ask them and this is when they told us us that they hadn't even considered our project for the competition because they did not believe that we had come up with our own idea and written our own report they told us to focus on our high school curriculum instead of thinking instead of thinking that we could change the world so we cried all the way back home home on the bus not because we didn't win but because we've been treated extremely unfair and that really hurts so this experience completely took away our belief that what we were spending all our time on was worth something and we were very close on just abandoning our Dream but we moved on and luckily we also got smarter we learned that working hard does not always equal success and that even though you fail the first time you might succeed the second time and it might be even bigger because 6 months later we won the Intel challenge for having the best business idea with the biggest potential in Western Europe so we learned thank you so we learned don't give up and don't fear failing failing is just experience and experience is learning now to our second missing component was our lack of professional connections when building a professional Network there's really two ways you can go about it you can either start bottom up which is less risky but it is slow and it's ineffective or you can start from the top I'm not really that patient so I choose to start from the top the top of the top but who should I call I thought that one of the Nobel Prize winners of the bucky ball might be a good pick so I picked up the phone and every day after school I would be sitting in the principal office calling him and he never picked up so actually I became quite good friends with his secretary and sometimes we would sit in small talk for quite some time exchanging weather information and stuff like that so not all my time was wasted but one day two months down the line he picked up and I was so surprised I could barely speak which is kind of rare for me so I told him about our idea and he put us in connection with some of the leading experts in our field top experts are experts just like you and me people just like you and me and my experience is that they do want to help you just have to ask for it so when building a professional Network don't go for B people don't even go for a go for A+ because because they have the keys to open the doors to the right Network which can potentially change everything but as we later learned not all people are there to help so at the end of our second year high school exams we experienced our first big media rush and with all the media attention came all the inquiries and we were soon approached by three gentlemen who were very interested in cooperating so we started negotiating the only advice we had on our side was our high school teacher we had no money to get a lawyer so we signed the contract thinking it was harmless this later proved to be one of our biggest mistakes eventually it did get resolved but it took a lot of time effort and money so we learned the lesson one of the issues with being a young entrepreneur is that you've come from a safe environment where the only adults you've been in contact with are your parents teachers and in general just adults who are all on your side so naturally your idea of adults is that they are very trustworthy but let's be honest [Applause] let's be honest not all of them are that is one of the things that we had to learn the hard way now we need a strong give it back culture it is extremely crucial that those who've had success or defeat are willing to sit down and share their experiences with those still striving for it and we did luckily meet people who were willing to help who got up from behind their desks and made a difference and to those I just really want to say thank you now to our third missing component was our lack of capital and I guess in discussions with entrepreneurs the lack of capital is an endless topic so some entrepreneurs might be trying to convey their idea but they find it is rejected while some other average idea is accepted I think the difference is in the way in which you communicate your value and get that message across there is tons of capital out there and the investors will invest when they see a project with potential we found that you need to make them fall in love with your team and with your idea we managed to raise venture capital from private investors and different funds it wasn't easy but it is possible so in the during the years of building my company I have been working on a very fine line between success and failure and believing is one of the things that made me move forward the fear of failure never really existed in my mind I guess that's the beauty of being young you just don't know any better as we grow up knowledge experience education it's Limitless you want to be realistic you don't want to waste time and you really develop this critical sense towards things that are outside what you're used to now while we all get older we don't have to give up the beauty of being young once in a while we should all go back to never Neverland the place where there is no fear of failing there's no no limitations where the crazy ideas Liv and where dreams get realized and we don't even need Peter Pan to go there so those of you who are still hoping you can't shut the window because it is all in your mindset and with that mindset that is when you're really able to make things fly so thank you for flying with me and thank you for your careful attention [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]