Meet The Disruptors: Nate Harding Of LUUM Lash On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
“Some things are just too hard” — This is a hard one for entrepreneurs because the number one skill we need is how to ignore all of the doom-sayers we encounter along the way. At some point though, you need to recognize when a pivot is in order.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nathaniel Harding.
Nathaniel Harding is Managing Partner of Cortado Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm investing in growth-driven technology companies. He is also Board Member for Antioch Energy. He is an accomplished senior executive, entrepreneur, technologist, thought leader, and community advocate. Nathaniel was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and a Most Admired CEO in Oklahoma by the Journal Record. Previously, he and his partner developed a midcontinent resource play which they sold in 2013 for $120M. His broad areas of expertise include operational strategy, financial modeling, statistical analysis, leveraging big data, connecting science with commercial strategy, energy, fundraising, and public speaking.
Nathaniel graduated cum laude from the University of Oklahoma with Russian Language and Mechanical Engineering degrees, and earned an MBA from Oklahoma City University. Before turning 30, he was selected to all three “40 under 40” outstanding achiever lists in the state. He is a decorated Air Force Captain and veteran of Afghanistan, where he was embedded with the US/NATO headquarters in collaboration with the Afghan government. Nathaniel has published in multiple industry publications in the US and China, the latter as part of his Beijing-based joint venture with major Chinese companies.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Hi, thank you for having me. I’m a career roboticist. My first job designing robots was at the famous Carnegie Mellon Field Robotics Center in 1989. I then worked for a spin off company there before coming out to UC Berkeley for grad school. I then did 10 years building an automation team at a local startup. We built machines that broke speed records in many fields. After that I co-founded Ekso Bionics (NASDAQ: EKSO) out of a lab back at Berkeley. We made wearable robots (human exoskeletons) that helped people re-learn how to walk after a stroke or spinal cord injury. People would literally cry at our demos. When I left, I was working on a list of possible ideas for my next business and happened to find out what an eyelash extension was from an advisor of mine. When he described to me how they were installed, I joked, “hey, that sounds like a great job for a robot!” Two days later, I remembered the conversation, and I went on YouTube to see it. My first thought was, “hey, that’s a PERFECT job for a robot.”
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
We were the first technologists to really look at the beauty salon and talk about automating a major service. To give you an idea, when we started, there were only 142 patents in the US Patent and Trademark Office’s database that had the word “eyelash” in the abstract. I could literally read every US patent involving eyelashes! In this green field for technologists, we believe we can use automation to transform the experience for the client, transform the job for the lash artist, and transform the economics for our partners.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
In a startup it seems like you’re always moving to a new location. At LUUM, our prototype machines are large and they take a long time to disassemble and reassemble when your moving. The last time we moved, just as we finished reassembling the machines, we realized that one of them was in a room that didn’t make sense. It was essentially in the wrong room with no way to get it out. We had a deadline coming up and the engineers had way too much work to do, so we decided to hire a contractor to cut a large hole in the wall, slide the machine through the hole, and rebuild the wall. Probably not the most efficient way to get it done, but it saved the engineers a bunch of work, we hit our deadline, and it gave us a great story.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I have had a ton of great mentors, even starting when I was just a kid trying to figure out how to build gadgets. Maybe the time I most needed one was right after I took Ekso public. I suddenly found myself leading a public micro-cap with a pretty large and difficult board. Through a friend I found a great corporate attorney, Michelle Basil, who really taught me a lot about public markets and how to navigate all the issues of disclosure and compliance, and how to manage a board as well. We went through a short-seller attack and the FDA reclassifying our product, so it wasn’t easy, but I think we did pretty well.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I prefer to work on robotics products like LUUM that augment a person’s productivity rather than replace them, but some people still insist that when we finally get out of the labor shortage in the eyelash extension market, automation (might) mean less jobs overall in the industry. Everybody has been worried about people losing jobs since the first waterwheel was hooked to a grist mill and they sent the oxen-tenders home because they weren’t needed anymore. As much as we all hate sending the oxen-tenders home, if we let this stop us, none of the progress we enjoy today could have happened. However, the pace of disruption is ever increasing, and an ever increasing number of people are faced with changing where they live or changing their career at least once in their adult life. In my experience, that is really hard for most people to do. Some friends and I fixed up a crappy pontoon boat and went down the Ohio River in 1990. Most of the factories in the towns along the river had been closed in the previous 10 years, and a lot of people had left, but a lot had stayed too. The question I kept asking myself (I was young), was why would anybody stay? I’ve followed the area over the years and the fact that it became ground zero of the opioid crisis didn’t surprise me a bit. What this taught me is that for a lot of us, it is really hard to leave a place we’ve grown up in. It’s downright terrifying and depressing. I think that to “do disruption right,” we need to address this with programs that don’t just try to push jobs into those areas (a good idea), but also try to help some people relocate and teach our kids that they should be prepared to relocate. If we’re going to continue to reap the rewards of disruption, I think we need to get better at dealing with the downsides.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“Ask your network” — I found out what an eyelash extension was by asking my network what they were working on, and what was hot. I found two of my co-founders by asking my network as well, and of course, asking your network is about the only way to raise private funds.
“Never sell past the close” — My friend Max told me that this was one of the rules of investment banking, and I wasn’t sure why at first. Since then I’ve seen many entrepreneurs keep pitching after the close, and sure enough, they accidently bring up things that become deal-breakers for the investor/customer.
“Some things are just too hard” — This is a hard one for entrepreneurs because the number one skill we need is how to ignore all of the doom-sayers we encounter along the way. At some point though, you need to recognize when a pivot is in order.
“I think Person X just needs to have some part of their argument acknowledged as correct” — Once you realize that “Person X” is everyone, you are really on to something.
“To keep someone, you have to be 90% sure that they are right for the job within 90 days” — A friend of mine told me that was her policy for new hires, and she was open about that with them. It sounds a little harsh, but I think it really makes sense. When someone doesn’t fit the job or the culture, you often try to move them around or change them, and I’ve never seen that really work out.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
I’ve always believed that what humans need most is a truly new clean energy source. There are a strangely large number of scientists in some top research institutions (and I’ll admit, some kooks too) saying that the “cold fusion hoax,” wasn’t a hoax at all, and that they’ve been able to reach break-even energy production with hundreds of thousands of dollars as opposed to the hundreds of billions we’ve spent on hot fusion. If they are correct, this has been the worst technology portfolio management disaster of all time. If I could make enough money on LUUM to self-fund some work on that, I’d try to jump in there and shake that world up. I’m no physicist, but I’m good at encouraging a team to think outside of the box.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
It’s funny, I’ve never been able to finish work and then read about work. I usually read really old stuff or contemporary things written about the past. Right now I’m reading something Xenophon wrote in the 5th century BC. As much as “the bad old days” were different than our own, there’s a lot of ways that they were the same, and it is surprising how appropriate some of the great writers’ advice about people still is today. Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, for example, teaches leaders to set up a meritocracy that awards usefulness over all things, to lead by example, show self-discipline, and to not distance themselves from their employees. Sounds pretty familiar, right? (by the way, Alexander the Great read Xenophon, did exactly what Xenophon recommended, and took over most of the known world)
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“He who laughs, lasts.” I heard that from punk rock star Henry Rollins, who said he heard it from David Lee Roth. That seemed like a strange path for great wisdom to come from, but boy I believe it. You’ve got to be able to keep it light. If you don’t, your health, and that of those around you, will suffer.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think as we all go scurrying into our own little social media rabbit holes, we’ve become incredibly easy to offend. In fact, sometimes it feels to me like people are starting to think it is a positive personality trait to get offended easily and often. It’s true that there are some people in the world who don’t mean well, but most of us all want to be good people and do the right thing. There’s a lot we certainly agree on, and we usually agree that the goal is to make the most people happy. I think usually we are just disagreeing on how to do that. So, I think we should practice trying to NOT get offended — especially when someone says something we disagree with.
How can our readers follow you online?
On my Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/lashinater
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Nate Harding Of LUUM Lash On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
