Title: Ilayda Samilgil '19

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[00:00:02,920] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome to Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. 

[00:00:10,880] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum where we will host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you. 

[00:00:23,640] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Joining us today is Ilayda Samilgil, CEO and co-founder of LLume Organic Robotics. Welcome Ilayda. 

[00:00:31,845] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Hi, thanks for having me. 

[00:00:36,490] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Excited to have you here today. Can you please start by telling us about your current work? 

[00:00:42,630] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: At LLume, we used to be called Organic Robotics, that's why we refer to both names still. But at LLume we make stretchable fiber optic sensors that we call light lace and integrate them into different form factors, different textiles to measure human performance metrics. Those range from anything from vitals like respiration to more biomechanics like motion capture and muscle fatigue. 

[00:01:07,910] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: We would love to hear more about how your product or what your company is trying to do, how it is distinct from anything else that's going on right now in the marketplace? 

[00:01:20,270] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Our stretchable fiber optics are soft and stretchable as you can tell from the name. But they can sense things without requiring skin contact. For example, our chest straps, you do not have to place them on your skin. You can wear them over your clothing. And it's really the only technology with that form factor that can measure the wave form of your respiration instead of just outputting a rate. So we can tell if you're breathing shallower or if you're breathing deeper. We can tell how long each breath cycle is, how long each duration and each exhalation is. Also our sensors are fiber optic based, they don't have a lot of the limitations that other electronics based sensors have. For example, we can sample at really high speeds. That's important when you're doing high speed motions like as a pitcher. If you're moving your shoulder really fast, you want to make sure that you are capturing information fast enough to get all the single data points instead downsampling like other products do. Also, we can use one pod, which has our battery to power multiple sensors. We can place that pod centrally, instead of having to place different pods all over the places you want to measure things. Let's say you have a shirt, you can put a pod all the way on the back and sense your arms, sense your hips, everything. Instead of having to put a pod on your elbow, on your shoulder, on your chest. It really makes it more comfortable for the user. No skin contact. More information than any other sensor can do, and it's less bulky than everything else. 

[00:03:10,630]TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Perfect, that was awesome. 

[00:03:13,090] CHRISTA DOWNEY: You started your company as an undergraduate, you're a few years out of school. And I think our audience would love to hear, how did you find yourself leading a company directly after undergrad? 

[00:03:26,630] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: The technology is something I was working on my senior year in the lab as an undergrad. And to be completely honest, I didn't think I'd be starting a company or joining a start up. When I graduated, I was looking for jobs for a while, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had a lot of question marks in terms of what kind of job or what kind of company I wanted to work for. The only thing I really knew and was set on was I wanted to make something innovative that can have an impact on people and something that I can touch and feel. I knew I didn't want to make cars, work on making cars or airplanes, larger things. I wanted to make something that can fit in my hands, but I also didn't want to, again, just work on my computer. I wanted to make something tangible. Those were the two things that I knew I was set on. But apart from that, I was very agnostic in terms of the opportunity or the type of product that I wanted to work on. I was looking for jobs for a while and the company was spin out and they were trying to apply these sensors to different applications. So I got in touch with my co founder who was again, figuring out different applications for the sensors and he asked me to join. I had a lot of doubts at first, not about the company, but about myself and whether I had what it takes to run a company. Because I was, again, just straight out of undergrad, it felt very risky. But then I thought if I don't do this now, if I tried to do this 20 years from now, it's going to be more difficult because I'll have a lot more responsibilities. It sounded like it's time to take the risk. And it checked the two boxes that I had. Something innovative, something tangible. And it was something I worked on before, so I finally said yes. And we started working on it in 3 and a half years, or maybe more still here. 

[00:05:29,230] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's such a unique company that you've got going here with what is involved in what you're making. So we were curious about what a typical day looks like for you. 

[00:05:41,170] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Yeah, we have a pretty large team now. We're almost around ten people. Half of us remote, half of us work in person. Each day looks different, especially on my end, because some days like today, I'm going to be on meetings literally all day. The meetings are sometimes with investors, sometimes with customers, sometimes with my other team members. Some days I'm just on the zoom all day. Some days I'm traveling to show the people what we're doing. Show customers what we're doing. Show investors what we're doing. Some days we're just working all together in the lab or in the office. We usually start our days at around nine. We'll have a full company meeting, just to catch up what everyone's going to do. People have questions or need help from each other. We facilitate that, make sure we have a plan for the day. Then we kick off the day by starting to work on things that we discussed that morning. And a lot of times there's a lot of zooms as well because like I said, half of our team is remote. People need to talk to each other pretty often. Usually there are a bunch of tests that we have to do every day. Sometimes that means just testing things to make sure they work. Sometimes it's more like validation or validation studies, or comparison studies with our devices compared to other devices. Sometimes it's just assembling things. But it's always innovative because there's always a problem and there's always like five solutions that can solve that. Then we have to make a plan of which solution do we start with first, which will get us to the end result first. It's hard to really say what each day looks like because it's always different. But I think that's what everyone likes. It's not for everyone, but for the people that are in our team, that's I think the main reason they like working with LLume or at LLume. 

[00:07:42,800] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Thinking about all of these teams and the atypical days that you tend to have along the way. I wanted to stretch out the vision a little bit here. What is the long term vision for your company? 

[00:07:56,170] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Right now, we have two products that we're working on, a chest strap and a shirt for measuring different biometrics in a different form factor. We're focused on professional athletes, but our long term goal is to have average consumer who cares about their health and wellness or their fitness, to be able to use the devices and still find value out of it as well. But in the long term, we see not only shirts and chest straps, but we see a line up of different form factors. So it could be shirts, socks, leggings, chest straps. Really anything that you can think of that uses our sensors, as a user, you have the option to say, I do more leg workout, so I'm going to start with the legging or I'm going to go swimming. So I need a swimsuit that has these sensors. But our long term goal is yeah, having a line up of different wearables that are all powered by our unique technology. 

[00:08:53,280] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I think the whole endeavor is just so fascinating. Thank you for outlining what that is. 

[00:09:00,220] CHRISTA DOWNEY: What is the most significant challenge you've faced in your work and how did you overcome it? 

[00:09:05,500] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: There are a few, and I think my answer probably changes every other month because something comes up. When we first started, it was finding the right team. And that's hard to do when you don't have a lot of investment in the company yet because not in terms of just financial reasons, but it's hard to convince someone that there is a potential for the company when there may not be a lot of investment yet. It was hard to filter out people who are in it for the  long term but who also meet the culture goals that we had. And obviously each company has a different culture and everyone has a different character. But finding a set of characteristics that we are looking for was difficult. Especially we started around the pandemic, it was all zoom. And for the first year or two, some people we've never met in person. There are still people in our team that I've never met each other in person even though they're on zoom all day. That was the first challenge. And then the other one was, I think, a little personal in that I did not feel as confident as I should be because it's not something I have done before. And it includes a lot of rejections and nos. That would be, let's say we apply to contracts, grants, pitch competitions, or pitch to investors. And there are more nos than yeses, that was pretty challenging to just keep going without losing hope or losing confidence in myself. Then once you get your first yes, the next yeses come a lot faster, then you go back to the cycle before where it's nos again. But after I got a couple of yeses, I think that's when I felt a lot more confident that people are also taking me seriously. Taking the company seriously. And see that I have what it takes to lead it and our team has what it takes to take this to the market. That was one of the other challenges. Then the other thing is just minor, and that I studied engineering. I obviously didn't have enough knowledge in how to do things like finance, accounting, HR, and it's not something really, a lot of startup founders talk about, that they have to do all that by themselves because they can't afford to hire, let's say an HR person or an accountant at first. At first, like few months. So learning those was challenging. Not because it was hard to learn, but because I didn't know what I had to learn. And I didn't really have any guidance on like someone telling me, you need to use this software to do accounting, you need to use this one to do HR, you need to do this to offer benefits and what those meant. Also because I didn't grow up here, I didn't exactly know what those looked like in terms of like retirement plans or health insurance. Those were very new to me because I didn't see my parents doing it because they don't live here. That was another challenge, but it gets better. 

[00:12:13,570] CHRISTA DOWNEY: What resources were you able to tap into that supported you in developing this knowledge about all these benefit packages and the accounting and HR, and then the leadership, how to be an effective leader and manage a team of ten people? What's your support network look like? 

[00:12:35,700] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: I think our advisors and the groups that were part of at Cornell, that were part of Praxis incubator. Our advisors and mentors through there as well as our independent advisors helped a lot. And how we found our advisors that are not part of the Praxis incubator was actually just looking at Cornell alumni through LinkedIn. And we would say, okay, we need an advisor, in let's say finance. We would just search for startup finance, Cornell alumni on LinkedIn pretty much everyone that I reach out to replied. I think Cornell really has that network where alumni want to help. Well, let's say older alumni, I want to help younger alumni. Or there's that network. Once we had that network of alumni advisors as well as our practice mentors, that really helped speed things up because they would be like, why don't you talk to this person who can tell you how to do this? Why don't you talk to that person who can maybe help you or guide you on what next steps you have to take on marketing or things like that? I would say, just like our advisors and mentors. 

[00:13:52,790] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Excellent. I have another question about that. You were doing research. You knew what type of work you wanted to do. As you thought about becoming an entrepreneur, what was the first step in sorting out what the resources were and getting involved in some way in that ecosystem here at Cornell? 

[00:14:16,320] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: My co-founder had some experience with the Cornell ecosystem, so he guided me through it. We did have to go through applications, like we had to apply to Praxis, but they were very helpful throughout the application process. They told us what we need to work on, what we need to fix, how we need to present ourselves. He had some experience with that. I actually, even though I didn't know that I was going to be an entrepreneur at the time, I did a minor entrepreneurship at Cornell. I was a little familiar with the ecosystem in terms of the programs that Cornell offers, as well as people who are involved with them. Because a lot of the instructors for my classes were actually involved in those ecosystems. They would talk a lot about the ecosystem at Ithaca, at Cornell, at Cornell Tech. So I would say I didn't just go 0-100 I had some background in terms of what everything looked like. 

[00:15:20,880] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I'm going to pull back out to the bigger picture. We were talking a few minutes ago about the company vision and impact. Let's loop that into even beyond your company vision, but how does your work contribute to a healthier, more equitable, or more sustainable world? 

[00:15:41,940] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Yeah, our devices, especially our chest wrap, which is going to be our first commercially launched product, can measure your breathing wave form and duration, and inhalations and acceleration. Controlling your breathing actually helps you decrease your blood pressure, decrease your stress level, improve your wellness. It's not something that you necessarily have to wear all the time, but you can wear it to learn how to do breath work and how to calm yourself. I think in the long term, people having access to not just meditation apps or wellness apps, but having a device that can actually give them feedback on how they can improve their breathing, which can really have a huge impact on your health and wellness is going to be really game changing. I would say that's the first one. Then the long term, our products have applications in health, medical, clinical applications too. It's not something we're focusing on right now because it's a lot more complicated than just making a sports or wellness product. But in the long term, I do see it having an impact that way too. Our devices, obviously we haven't decided on an exact pricing level yet. But it would be affordable enough for everyone, not everyone, but most people to be able to get a hold on and use, and try and improve their health. 

[00:17:11,530] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I think it's just such a fascinating premise. Helping people do their own breath work and getting both data and guidance at the same time. It's a lovely vision. What organizations or collaborators were important in developing this vision that you have? 

[00:17:31,450] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: We participated in a couple of different programs. Like I said, we are part of the incubator here that gives us access to a lot of vendors. We've also done some national programs like NSF's I-Corps Program, which helped us hone in on customer discovery. Understand not only the needs of the customer, but also just how to do market research. What the focus on, how to do analysis on customer acquisition costs, or cost of goods sold. Those metrics that I wasn't very familiar with before. That's another resource that we use a lot. We are also doing some studies with the Strength and Conditioning department here at Cornell. Just giving them some devices for them to test and provide us feedback with. Those I would say are the main ones. But there are definitely a lot more we participated than some accelerators around the area as well. In the earlier stages, we were looking more into partnering with larger companies. And then we decided to pause on that for a while and prove ourselves first and then maybe go back to those decisions. But we had a lot of interest from large companies as well, which was exciting and confidence building too, to see that, oh, like a company of thousands of people is interested in technology that we're working on that made us, I think, feel a lot more confident and excited about the product. 

[00:19:06,960] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Along those lines, While you have the audience, is there anything else you want us to know about your company? 

[00:19:12,700] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: I think one thing that sets us apart from majority of the wearable companies or arable device companies out there is that unlike others, we make our own sensors. So we can tune them to measure different things and we can play around with their sensitivity, their durability, and all that. Instead of buying an off the shelf sensor and only running our own unique signal processing algorithms, we do both. That's challenging because we do both hardware and software. But it also gives us a big advantage in that we can really tune in however we want because we make it from a non existent thing to a sensor, we make everything ourselves. I think that's one thing that people miss sometimes, is that we're more than just a wearable company. We make sensors that have an impact through wearables. 

[00:20:06,300] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's such fascinating work. Thank you for explaining that to those of us who are new. Now, where do you go that you find to be the most fruitful, to stay current on what's going on in other companies, or new inventions coming up in the patent office or wherever it is you go to get new information? 

[00:20:26,995] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: This might be a little controversial, but I use LinkedIn a lot. It's like my social media. I just love scrolling through it because I don't only see what people that I'm connected with post, but what they also click like on or they comment on. That way, I get to see a lot of different articles about what's coming out or people's opinions. People write like a whole page about what they thought about this specific technology. I really like going to LinkedIn for those. Then sometimes I check Twitter for that as well. Just different venture capitalists. It's also funny. Because it's a lot less formal than LinkedIn. It's also funny to scroll through that, and then when I really want specific information about different companies or how much they're raising, how many employees they have, or what patterns they have, I use Pitchbook for that. But my go-to is usually LinkedIn. 

[00:21:33,410] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Like you, I find LinkedIn to be very fruitful if you control your news feed well enough, right? 

[00:21:38,830] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Yeah. 

[00:21:41,070] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Let's rewind a little bit. Let's think about when you were a sophomore and deciding what you were going to do with your degree. What do you wish you knew when you were a sophomore that you now know? 

[00:21:54,920] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Yeah. I think back when I was a sophomore, I didn't know that there were so many startups around Ithaca that I could even intern as a sophomore. Actually, I know we're in May now for people who are watching it later, but we are about to have a student intern join us for the summer who's a sophomore. And we're really excited to have her work on a couple of different projects and also see how training goes for her, how much she likes it, and just learn from her while also teaching her. I didn't know at the time that it was really an option for sophomores. I think if I knew that, I would have liked to be part of a couple of startups. Not only to just learn the engineering side, but also see how a small organization is led, how chaotic it is, and how fun it is. That's one thing I wish I knew. Other than that, just being an international student, knowing that it is possible to start a company, there are some, obviously, rules behind that. Things you can do, things you can't do, but it is legally possible to do that. I think knowing that would be helpful, and also seeing other founders that are straight out of undergrad, like people in their early 20s, building companies, that are not just the over-hyped ones. You have these five that get to raise $100,000,000 And they're all over the news, but smaller ones that are local or there around the area that are trying to start something from scratch. I think seeing that would have helped see that it would be possible for me too. But yeah, those would be the three main things. 

[00:23:48,245] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Excellent. You're quite busy. This is all a lot, and you're doing it well. What do you do to relax, have fun, or re-energize? 

[00:24:00,470] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: I hang out with my dog a lot. When I'm tired, I just cuddle him and ask him to stay calm and then we just lay down. But I also like ice skating, which I don't do as often anymore. But whenever I do, I feel so much better just like skating on the rank. I do also jumps and stuff, But not necessarily doing those. But just feeling like I'm gliding through the ice makes me feel really relaxed. But yeah, those two I would say, and  I also read. Sometimes I'll go through periods where I read a lot of books and then I'll have a few months where I don't at all. It's kind of all over the place. There will be weeks I want to read a lot and I do that and I really enjoy it. And then weeks that I feel really lazy, even though I like reading that I don't do it often. But those would be the three main ones. 

[00:24:53,670] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I wanted to say really quickly, I have a dear and close relative and she loves to ice skate. Her job is very, very hectic and demanding, and every day she would leave and go ice skate because she said when you're ice skating, that's all you can be doing. You have to stay upright or else you're going to hurt yourself. And it's peaceful even if there's loud music. But it's very much a get out of your head and into your surroundings moment. And she recommends it every time we talk. I think that that's a lovely option. 

[00:25:31,440] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Yeah, I feel like if you want it, you can make it into a workout, and if you don't, you can make it into a relaxing thing. I usually like doing it as a relaxing hobby instead of a workout. But that part is also fun. 

[00:25:48,160] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I also love ice skating. I can't do the twists and turns but I love it. If you were not doing this work right now, what would you be doing? And which is closest to what you dreamed of when you were a child? 

[00:26:03,740] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: My dreams changed a lot when I was a child, but at least after college, what I wanted to do was something, like I said, something tangible, something innovative where I feel like my ideas matter. They may not always be the best ideas, but just having a say and feeling comfortable enough to say my opinions, that's what I would want to do. Maybe something in consumer electronics. I'm not sure, but I know that I would want probably a smaller company or a smaller team in a large company. And something tangible, something hardware, but with software components as well. But hopefully I don't have to find that out. 

[00:26:50,800] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Excellent, yes. I hope that this success that you've found in this work continues and that we can follow along and see this product all over the place and hear more about it. Maybe bring you back later to hear more. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:27:11,140] ILAYDA SAMILGIL: Thank you for having me. This was pretty fun. 

[00:27:16,900] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, rate, and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode, where we will be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable world.