'If Not Us, Who?': Megan Leslie and Julian Mulia

A bit of a double header for y'all this week, I sat down with Co-Founders of NanoTess, CEO Megan Leslie and COO Julian Mulia to figure out what all they have going on. 

NanoTess is a social enterprise (in the truest sense) that works to improve patient's and families of through their nanotech that addresses open wounds. They carry stakeholder input and perspective through every decision they make, and have in turn created a really inspiring organization here in Calgary.

Who is Megan?

I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of NanoTess. I have two degrees, in mechanical engineering and finance. I primarily worked in management consulting for people-focused problem-solving; working primarily with Fortune 500 companies on any problem that impacted people. Some projects were more technical in nature and others were more business, but the main underlying theme was always people and workforce talent. 

I’m a believer in non-linear career paths and how if you’re intentional with finding interconnected learnings, it can be a powerful thing. Especially moving into entrepreneurship. Concepts that I learned in my Oil and Gas engineering experience have helped me here with setting up manufacturing, same with my experience at KPMG and financial control. 

You take findings from where you’ve been on to the next, but do you feel like there’s a connecting theme or story?

For me it’s all about people, that was my centering thread and that’s what led me to my last position before this in management consulting. I realized through my experiences in different industries that I loved learning, but the questions I loved asking were about interactions and impact on people. I saw that through being exposed to different teams and leadership styles, and how I and others could be influenced by the different leadership we had, both positively and negatively. 

What was the shift like for you moving into a startup? 

I think there are a lot of skills and capabilities I hadn’t given acknowledgment to, things I didn’t even realize I was taught and had developed, the biggest being stakeholder management. At NanoTess, everyone external to our company is a critical stakeholder so we are challenge ourselves to engage each of our stakeholders in a meaningful way to move projects forward with good budgets, good relationships, and within good timelines. My Co-Founder Julian has a background in management consulting, we take a very similar approach. If we’re working on a project with an international company, we’re gathering inputs and have frequent touchpoints to get and give information to make sure every voice is heard. At the end of the project, you don’t just give them the test reports, you give them a synthesized version of ‘Where do we go from here?’. It's a hard thing to know why you should care, we give them the 'so what'. We make it easy to care. 

It’s just many consulting projects within the daily activities of a startup. 

What is the so what or the why for you?

Global human impact. It’s exciting working in biotech and health because you solve a problem that’s limb or even life-threatening. At its core, it’s something that people are losing significant quality of life or passing away from. The 'why' is how we move as effectively as we can through the necessary milestones so we can reach and support those people. 

It's almost like there’s a duty to do this if you’re able to, for the betterment of people.

A big theme that I’ve been experiencing lately, there’s a bit of a fad around the concept of Social Enterprise. I believe in the concept – we’ve always referred to NanoTess as a social enterprise – but what I’ve started to experience is that it’s more than naming yourself one. It’s more than ‘we solve a health challenge, therefore, we’re a social enterprise’. It’s about the how behind it. It’s more than we do good by healing people, we do good through product design so that any level of cognizant ability can use the product. We do good by partnering with underrepresented communities so that no one is left behind. We’re designing the product to minimize the environmental footprint. It’s more intentional than just ‘we’ve solved the problem’. It’s the bigger picture, the greater good. The downstream ripple effects have to be considered.

The idea of Social Enterprise is important, it’s an incredible tool. Especially with the new generation, they’re really focused on impact and purpose. And if you as an organization don’t have a purpose, it’s hard to attract the talent of the future. 

I think Calgary seems to hold this well, but for you, why here?

It’s an emerging market for the biotech space. There has to be an ecosystem to support the startup, but the fact that Calgary has an emerging ecosystem but without the ‘one of many’ mindset that Toronto seems to have. I think we have the ability in Calgary to get more attention because there are just fewer companies. We can forge a path for new startups to follow and can get them mentorship. 

For me as an outsider, I look at the medical space and it feels gigantic and slow-moving, how do you navigate this as a startup? 

I believe in prioritization. Different then focus, prioritization of opportunity shows focus towards a goal, but allows you to be creative with how you reach goals. When I hear prioritize, I think of ‘what is the bigger opportunity’ and how that gets me to where I need to go. You still have the target you’re running towards, but the path may be non-linear. 

For example, while we were waiting for regulatory approvals, we were talking with multinational companies for R&D to build new projects. Those projects funded us and built up a database of what our products can do, and that made us more powerful and bolstered the strength of the company. 

In all honesty, I think it went really fast. We had our approvals and were selling within two years. We had our manufacturing facility set up for international export within those two years. That led to contracts with provincial and national organizations to help commercialize and sell across the country. We’ve done it fast, but it is prioritizing your effort into the thing that will make it go fast. You have to create opportunity while you’re waiting for the things you cannot change.

When I think of MedTech, I think of hope. Do you think this too?

I also get hopeful. There’s a lot of roadblocks and challenges you face, we as an organization have had to be intentional to ensure those stories with our customers are shared throughout our team because that’s what keeps us focused. We get maybe a half-dozen really powerful stories a week, all through word of mouth, just people who want to tell us they’ve had a positive experience. We share these stories with the team, it helps the engineering intern who is working in the lab, and it helps the marketing team tell their stories, and the partner success person to continue to work with the late-adopting customer. Continuing to push and advocate the stories, hope overcomes the frustration of the speed. 

How do you stay sane? How do you find the balance?

We talk about it a lot within the organization. We’re providing products, and by providing products we’re in the field with the doctors, nurses, and patients. It’s a little bit similar to how healthcare professionals can become maybe numb or immune after seeing suffering all the time. A similar thing happens to our external facing team. It’s a big thing in our organization to not turn off the empathy, rather we have to reposition it to fuel us. That’s what keeps us going. Disconnecting is something that I’ve not learned how to do, I love what I do. There’s a balance between getting the rest we need to function and loving what you do. And I just love to do it.

It takes a certain person.

It’s the right problem over the right person, I think. If I were doing something different, I would always be passionate and eager to learn, but would I give my heart and soul to it if it didn’t have a human impact? It’s more than a business here, you’re changing lives. We’ve seen the ripple effect of chronic health conditions and how they can impact those close to them – if we can help at that point of incidence, we know we’re helping them and the family and the relationship.

You improve the quality of life for everyone connected.

An example, we’re using the product in a hospice setting, end-of-life care. And the comments we’re getting is that our technology is providing a noticeable benefit. Families of patients say to the hospice staff how grateful they are that something that they can noticeably see is being eased. The healthcare staff in return are so grateful for the product because they're providing that. It provides comfort, it’s ‘did you create peace of mind?’. That’s the true why, we’ve lived it. We’ve seen people close to us suffering when we hear the stories, we internalize that into what we wish we could’ve felt. That’s why I never feel like I work a day. 

How do you learn how to make this?

It’s one of the many hats I had to wear. When you think about what a founder has to do, you’re negotiating a contract with an international buyer, putting in responses for international patents, leading a team and making sure they’re supported, and then you’re strategizing a pitch for a finance round. And that’s all-in-one day. I don’t think you can learn each skill immediately, it’s learning how to ask the right questions so you can have the gut check of whether this is going right or this is not. It’s instinctually, ‘I don’t know, but I can figure it out’ and make the decision with what we know at the time and that’s the best you’re going to be able to do. Just don’t let it paralyze you. Ultimately, it’s relying on others. It’s not Google-able, it’s not on YouTube, you have to leverage the org. We’ve created an environment where we can get input along with our own personal judgment to make decisions. 

It's like creating a pool of talent to work together and using each other to find direction. 

I take that theme so deeply in our organization, we call it strength-based skills. If I love building PowerPoints, I would be better suited for it. If I hate phone calls but Julian loves them, he’ll do it. We don’t all have to be good at everything, but we have to recognize what each of us brings, and how we can stack the blocks so we’re optimally performing as a team.

Everyone individually can showcase their strength. The thing you enjoy and why you’re good at it, hopefully, you find the leader who acknowledges the benefit of running an org like that. 

There’s nothing more exciting to me than spending a day in the lab using our tube-filling machine because you see the outputs, it’s tangible. We throw all of our new employees into the production facility because when they’re grabbing samples, they know how much effort it takes to make those samples. And the other way around, even those that are happy just being in the lab should spend a day walking around a client site so they see what they’re doing it for. 

*Enter Julian*

Who is Julian?

Julian: If I go way back, I’m originally from Mexico, born in Mexico City. I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to come to Calgary. They gave me the pamphlet with the green grass and I thought ‘It doesn’t look like this most of the time’. I graduated from the University of Calgary twice, chemical engineering, then my masters. From there, my career started in Oil and Gas, then I moved to management consulting.

From there, a big pivoting happened when I lost both of my parents in a very short time. And that reshifted my focus, we were doing all this innovation for others, how can we focus on ourselves and the people we love? We worked really hard to develop NanoTess and started it in 2020. 

Three years from then, we’re in hospitals saving people. We always tell the team to leave no one behind. 

In a way then, NanoTess was built from self-reflection. 

J: Yes, with me being from Mexico, it’s really hard to bring your parents to Canada. With that in mind, the best healthcare in Mexico is not public, so we had to make really tough decisions like paying for really expensive but life-saving treatment that may not work, and there goes all our savings. I went through at a really early age what it means to be impacted by healthcare. And it’s a reality millions of people go through every day. It really struck us. Even in Canada, there are a lot of gaps. We have a public system, but there are vulnerable groups, it’s a problem here too. The social enterprise became our core, let’s actually focus on what works for people. 

We do things differently, when we go to hospitals they always say ‘You show up differently than other big businesses’. That’s the cool part about innovation, I’m not a doctor, I’ve seen other industries and have adopted best practices we can bring in. 

Megan: When we started the company it was ‘if not us, then who?’. We were in the right spot for it at the time. 

J: And it’s the idea that if you do good, it’s inherently good business. We’ve spent zero dollars on marketing and the reason for that is our patients refer our product to their friends. 

To backtrack a bit for my understanding, how does the product work?

J: We specialize in making catalysts. A catalyst is a material that facilitates chemical reactions. They optimize certain environments so that whatever needs to happen happens. They're everywhere, catalytic converters, yeast even. We took that concept and brought it to biology.

 So our catalyst, when deployed in the environment, acts as an orchestrator. If you think about playing a symphony, with a chronic wound, nobody is in sync, no one knows what to do, people are playing at the wrong time. With the orchestrator, they’re not playing and instrument directly, but they get things on track so it starts sounding like it should. We do that in the system of the wound. 

 We have three main claims: actively promotes and supports wound healing, reduce inflammation, and providean antimicrobial effect within the technology’s protective matrix barrier.

The quality-of-life disruption is huge, the longest wound we’ve seen was open for nine years.

M: It’s surprising how many members of our team have started telling their families what they do, and how many of them have reached out to say they suffer from this and are asking if they can access it. 

What are y’all proud of?

J: I think it’s our whole company's focus on the people being affected. Startups are hard. If you focus on things like economic growth or raising money, it fades quickly. There has to be further depth, for us it’s that person that comes back and says thank you. The organization as a whole understands this. We’ve made tough decisions where the healthcare system or investors will try to push us the other way, but we’ve stayed true to doing good. 

M: I’m proud that it’s bigger than us. I’m proud of the work and dedication the entire team puts in, proud of every stakeholder that has become a NanoHero (part of our community). At the end of the day, we’re delivering a high-quality product that is actually solving a problem. And we’ve done it in record time without sacrificing safety, quality, and research. 

J: There’s a lot of noise as you create a company, you’ll be pulled in different directions, but you have to hold to your values and your core. That’s what keeps you going in the right direction. 

Do you think that being stubborn has kept this going your way?

M: I’ve never personally liked being told ‘That’s the way it’s always been done’ or ‘No you can’t’. You have to add the extra words, the ‘for now’, or the ‘yet’. That’s what’s kept me personally going.

J: You can’t be stubborn because you won’t be broken, it’s more like water. In a river, there’s a rock, it’s not moving, but every day we’re eroding it till the change happens. That’s the reality of startups. You have to be persistent and flexible through the startup journey. 

M: I like that too. The river may be going in one direction but by being persistent we may open up little streams that feed into big bodies of water of opportunity. If you’re stubborn you’re not learning, if you’re persistent you’re learning while pushing in the right direction.

The direction may change but the values stay the same.

J: There’s value in a no and the why behind the no. Looking at the motivation behind people where they are coming from, and how to meet them in the middle. When we were telling our story, it was like if we had the cure for cancer, it would still be one of the hardest journeys to get it to the right patient. It has nothing to do with the technology. The innovator and the entrepreneur are completely different people but you need both to get it into the right hands. 

What comes in 2024? 

J: For me, it’s focusing on what’s personal to us. It breaks my heart that someone who maybe just moved here as an immigrant, trying to figure out an unknown system, may not even know they have to get a family doctor. It can take months, if you have a diabetic ulcer, months are the difference between saving your foot and amputation. We’re focusing on closing the gaps. It’s getting in front of the problem.

M: 2023 was all about getting over the blockers, 2024 is about awareness. The field is open, we can start running. Hopefully, it also means we can also provide support internationally. 

Thank you Megan and Julian.

Writer and Photographer | Sam Doty