Ventures
Commercialisation has been part of my career since 2016
Entrepreneurship and commercialisation have been part of my career since before my PhD, spanning business ownership, direct sales, start-up operations and scientific technology translation.
🧭 The trajectory
From first business to scientific commercialisation
They are not equivalent in scale, but each one involved putting something in front of a customer and finding out whether it worked.
Biotechnology and business
A degree that put business management next to bioprocessing on purpose. The business half was the reason I chose it.
The formal trainingDanzarin
Buying dancers' old shoes, making them good again, and selling them to students who could not afford new ones.
The shoe businessRocket Internet
Entrepreneur in Residence at a start-up that was restarting from zero. Scrum Leader within a month, then full operational control.
What happened thereAlpha Gamma Solutions
Face-to-face customer acquisition, and leading my own sales team. Where I learned to sell in front of a person rather than in theory.
What that taught meI-Corps and commercialisation
Taking the same instinct back into the laboratory: interview the market before you build anything for it, then teach other scientists to do the same.
Training and workshopsNatural Red Pigments
Where all of it meets: a pathway I work on in the lab, and an open question about whether anybody would buy the result.
The current exploration👠 First business
Danzarin
Danzarin came out of my MSc in business management, and out of two complaints I kept hearing on opposite sides of the same dance floor. Students could not afford tango shoes. Dancers who had been at it for years had old pairs taking up space in the cupboard.
So I bought the old pairs, cleaned them up until they looked worth wearing again, and sold them to students at student milongas around the UK. It solved both halves of the problem at once, and it put me in front of my customers every weekend, which meant I could ask them directly what they would pay and why they had not bought a pair before.
Danzarin was a small business rather than a biotechnology venture, and it is important to me for a different reason. It was the first time I identified a problem that two groups of people had, built something that solved it for both, and sold it. The way I now think about cost, scale and who the buyer actually is started there.
🚀 Start-up operating experience
Rocket Internet SE, Shanghai
Entrepreneur in Residence, 2017 to 2018.
I joined a post-launch company that had hit a critical roadblock and was effectively restarting from zero. Within a month I was appointed Scrum Leader, and was then given full operational control: five-figure investment budgets and every hiring decision. I was mentored directly by the founder, a serial entrepreneur, and I ran the thing in English and Mandarin.
The outcome I am most pleased with is deeply unglamorous. By restructuring how the work was actually done, a team of six became one person supported by an outsourced team, with no loss of output.
What it taught me
How quickly a plan meets reality, how to hire, how to cut scope without cutting the point, and that the person closest to the work usually knows where the waste is.
🤝 Direct sales
Alpha Gamma Solutions
Account Manager at a Credico direct sales and marketing company, 2019 to 2020. This was not a start-up and not a company I founded, but it is where I developed the practical selling and customer skills I still rely on.
This was face-to-face customer acquisition: standing in front of people who had not asked to speak to me, making the case, and finding out immediately whether it landed. I went on to lead my own sales and marketing team.
The campaigns ran across two very different kinds of selling. Utilities and telecommunications, where the pitch is broadband, gas and electricity and the customer is weighing a switch on price and service. And charities, among them Marie Curie, Wood Green Animal Shelter, the National Deaf Children's Society and the Royal National Institute of Blind People, where there is no product at all and the case has to be made on its merits. Both teach the same lesson quickly: nobody owes you their attention, and an objection is usually information rather than a rejection.
These are the skills I use most often in commercialisation work. Every customer discovery interview I have run for the pigment project, every pitch and every conversation with a technology transfer office draws on them.
The transferable half
Selling and persuasion. Reading what a person actually cares about. Communicating value without jargon. Handling objections instead of talking over them. Leading a team doing the same.
The same job, different product
A charity campaign and a plant-derived ingredient are sold the same way: work out what the person in front of you needs, then say why this answers it.
🎓 Commercialisation experience
Formal training in commercialisation
NSF I-Corps
Customer discovery in its purest form: interview the market before you build anything for it. I ran the interviews for the pigment work across food, beauty and plant processing.
Innovation to Market / Discovery to Product
UW–Madison's programme on moving university research towards commercial use. The part most graduate training skips entirely.
MSc Biotechnology, Bioprocessing and Business Management
University of Warwick. I chose it for the business half as much as the science.
ASPB Business Development Working Group
An invitation-only group that meets monthly to work on how the American Society of Plant Biologists builds sustainable revenue: which professional development programmes are worth running, who they are for, and what they are worth.
I am the only early-career researcher on it. Commercial thinking applied to a scientific society rather than to a product.
Teaching other scientists to commercialise
I designed and facilitated Seeds to Harvest, a 90-minute workshop at the 2026 Phytochemical Society of North America annual meeting in Madison. It was one of three run that year to get plant scientists thinking about how to translate their own ideas, and it works through the questions that come first: is there a real problem, what is the solution, who is the market, and how would you find out.
I invited a speaker who had built a company around plant natural products, and brought in colleagues from the university technology transfer office to work with the participants.
Separately, I have written a guide for Plantae on building a start-up in the plant sciences.
Where this goes next
I am not setting up as an adviser to other people's ventures. What I would like is to hear from anyone who thinks this background, or the work on Natural Red Pigments, is relevant to something they are doing.
🔴 Venture exploration
Natural Red Pigments
An exploration of whether engineered soybean could become a production platform for natural red pigments. It is a commercialisation project rather than an incorporated company, and the honest answer to several of the questions below is still “we are finding out”.
The problem
A great deal of the red in the food supply comes from synthetic colourants, principally Red 40 (Allura Red AC). Natural alternatives exist, but a replacement only counts if it can be produced at a volume and cost a manufacturer can actually work with.
The technology
Betalains are the pigments that make beetroot red. We are engineering soybean to produce them in the seed, so the colour is harvested with the crop rather than extracted from a speciality plant grown specifically for the purpose. The underlying biochemistry is developed in the Maeda lab at UW–Madison.
Why soybean
Because the boring part is already solved. Soybean is planted, harvested, crushed and processed across the United States at a scale almost no speciality crop can match. A pigment made in soybean seed can move through infrastructure that exists today, and it is grown close to where it would be used.
Where it has got to
- StatusEarly-stage venture exploration. Not an incorporated company, and nothing here should be read as one.
- RecognitionWARF Award, 2025, for the natural pigment work. Award video ↗
- Customer discoveryCompleted as Entrepreneurial Lead on NSF I-Corps, interviewing across the food, beauty and plant processing sectors.
- FundingAn application to the NSF Translational Technology Partnership programme has been submitted. No decision has been made and no funds have been awarded.
What I do on it
I lead the customer discovery and the commercialisation thinking, and I work on the biology. The project was started by several of us together, and the pigment biochemistry is collaborative work at UW–Madison.
Still open
Yield, pigment stability through processing, extraction route, and whether the economics survive contact with a real formulator. Those are the questions the exploration exists to answer.