Capella Kerst

Well, what's your name? What are you building? Hello, my name is Capella Kerst, and I'm the founder and CEO of geCKo Materials, and I'm currently in this amazing cold plunge. How are you doing cold plunge right now? It's so refreshing. Really? Yes, it feels really good. You built for this? Yes, I take only cold showers, so this feels like a shower. What's geCKo Materials? What is that? We make a bio-inspired dry adhesive, so one-inch tiles can support 15 pounds vertically, six one-inch tiles can pull a car, and you can reuse it 120,000 times. Wait, so are you saying that I can stick something and rip it off? What's the secret to that? It's micro hairs, cold and sheer, extremely strong, just like the geCKo. And how did you, where did you make this yourself? Is this your research? This is my PhD that I sped out into a company. Why did you want to pursue a PhD? I just thought it would be fun to do a PhD, actually, and then I was really blessed, got into a really amazing lab, had research that was able to be commercialized, actually available, after patenting, a way to produce it at mass scale. What's that moment in your PhD that made you doubt that, hey, rather than continuing in the academia, you wanted to spin this off as a company? I always wanted to start a company since a very young age. I just pursued a PhD for the knowledge and the research sake. And is this your first company that you're building? This is my first company that I'm building. Nice. And how much traction? How do you measure success in this company? If we're helping customers save energy, time, and money, so we go and do customer visits in car manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers, and other robotic pick-and-place manufacturers, and we're helping improve a system of manufacturing lines in which the customer saves energy, time, and money. Working conditions are also better. And what is the biggest use case for geCKo Materials? Pick-and-place robots, semiconductors, and car manufacturers. How far can you go? Sorry, how far can I go? I'm on the International Space Station with geCKo Materials, which I'm sure is much colder than this, cold plunge. Wait, so you built something that went into space? Yes. How did you end up learning that? Very blessed. Again, in my research, we had a project that we were working on, and then that continued, and then there was another company that kind of took over the Astrobee project and used geCKo Materials. So what's your biggest plan for geCKo Materials? To scale, be in eventually any and every home store. Be like, hey, honey, pick up some geCKo Materials we ran out at home. And what's the hardest thing building geCKo Materials? I think just, excuse me, I'm Justin. What am I at? You're at two minutes and 40 seconds. Okay, well, I'll do three then. And then what's the hardest thing? I think just like, yeah, hiring amazing people has been really fun, but it is a time-consuming time. Especially hardware, deep tech in the Bay Area. Well, what's next for geCKo Materials? Okay, I did three minutes. Hiring more people. We're hiring sales and more engineers.