SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He 3D Prints Body Parts And Will Do $4m in 2016 with Erik Gatenholm of CellInk EP 241
18 Apr 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: How did Erik Gatenholm start his first biotech company at 18?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
I'm now at $20,000 per top.
Chapter 3: What was Erik's experience in successfully exiting a company?
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 4: Why did Erik decide to pursue a Master's degree after his first business?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 5: What inspired the creation of Cellink, the bio-ink company?
Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila. He is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business. For your chance to win 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning, simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Coming up tomorrow morning, Top Tribe, you're going to learn from veteran Matt Griffin.
Chapter 6: How does bio-printing work and what materials are used?
He's the CEO and he says business, not bullets, is the key to winning the Afghan war. Okay, top drive. Good morning. Good morning. Our guest today is Eric Gattenholm, and he started his first biotech company at the age of 18 and made an exit in 2014, at which point he decided to move back to Sweden and grab his master's degree.
Chapter 7: What are the revenue goals for Cellink in 2016?
In 2015, he started Cell Inc., one of the first 3D bioprinting companies in the world and the first bio ink company in the world. Today, they have more than $1 million in revenue in the last two months, and they've got customers all over the world in the pursuit of their main vision, to one day bioprint fully functional human organs for transplantation. Eric, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely. Let's do this. OK, so first things first. You were 18. You made an exit in 2014. Tell us about that biotech company first.
All right. So it was a it was a company based on a technology that was licensed out of Virginia Tech University.
Chapter 8: How does Erik plan to make bio-printing technology accessible?
I was a student at BT, started in 2008 in business management. And I decided to start a company around a technology where we developed medical devices based on bacterial cellulose, which is basically a novel material, a very innovative material that's been used for basically hundreds of years for desserts, actually, in the Philippines.
And now we decided to take it to the market for medical purposes.
Interesting. So that was when you were 18. You built it for how many years? I built it for seven years. Wow. Seven years. Okay. And then exited in 2014. Who'd you sell to and how was it valued?
So I was actually, the company still exists. I made an exit myself to the other shareholders. I was bought out. It was a decent exit. And I decided to, actually my mentors and I, we decided to, I need to go back. I need to go back, get my master's. The plan was to come back and continue with the business after two years. But then I got involved in this and it's just, this thing just blew up.
Got it. You're talking about selling.
Yeah.
Yes. Okay. So tell us real quick, because I think this is important. A lot of people think the only way founders can get exits is by selling their business, which obviously we know because we've done it. But the world really doesn't know that you can actually engineer an exit. Some people, when they raise a round of funding, they'll sell some of their shares and get a return.
Some people, they'll sell out to other shareholders. It sounds like what you did. So help us understand how much equity did you own in that original business? I own 51%. Okay, 51%. And did the other shareholders buy you out completely or did you just sell a little portion of it?
I sold a portion so they could take majority of it. I felt that this was basically required to take the business to the next step. The company was in a preclinical stage, meaning we had products already in preclinical development. We'd done some very, very fantastic tests, had awesome results, and we were ready to go into actual clinical. Did it have revenue or no? We were pre-revenue.
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