On the Record with Elissa Ross, CoFounder & CEO of Metafold
Hometown: Toronto, ON.
Hobbies: There’s not a ton of time for hobbies as a startup founder, but I love to exercise, and whenever I have some free time, I always just move more – it’s an antidote to the rest of my job which is so cerebral.
3 words to describe yourself: disciplined (which I credit to my dance background), creative, and rational (maybe even hyperrational!)
What were you like as a child and how do you think that shaped who you are today?
Interestingly when I was young I was never particularly interested in math—I wanted to be an artist! I’m actually not that good with numbers, but I’m a strong visual person, and it’s that visual thinking that links mathematics and art. A common misconception about mathematics is that you need to be really good with numbers. Certainly it can help, but mathematics is a lot more about abstraction than it is about numbers.
Can you tell us more about that? How did you make the leap from art to math and how does that visual thinking come into play?
When I was in high school I had to do a science fair project. I wasn’t really an enthusiastic student at that point, so I decided to do my project on geometry because I wanted to create artistic outputs of math and science. When I started peeling back the layers of this topic on the mathematical side, my mind was blown by the beauty of mathematics. It opened up an aesthetic terrain that was outside of the artistic realm but inside the mathematical side. It was only after this project that I became interested in math. And, on that note, I think it’s important to say that the high school math curriculum is not inspiring. I don’t think I would have made this connection with mathematics without this experience—it made me think that math could be a viable thing to study.
What did you study in undergrad? What about in grad school?
I split my undergraduate degree between the two studies and concentrated in mathematics and fine art. I had to fight to do this at university because it was so out of the norm. After college graduation, I was deciding between pursuing an MS in math or an MFA, and I ultimately chose math because it seemed easier to pursue art as a hobby versus math as a hobby.
You didn’t list art as a hobby–do you have time to create anymore?
My artistic side comes out differently now. It’s not art as most people think of it—it’s not “fine art”. But I still create. Recently I've actually gotten into designing 3D printed jewelry in our app!
What’s your favorite art or mathematical concept that you’ve studied?
To be honest, it’s the same concept I studied during that high school science project: Penrose tiling. Penrose tilings were created by the physicist Roger Penrose, and it was originally a purely mathematical pursuit; it was even deemed “recreational mathematics” and was not considered serious math. It ended up being used by chemists, however, in the 1980s to explain the existence of a new kind of crystal – quasicrystals – with new diffraction patterns. Quasicrystals basically broke the existing theory of crystallography, and Penrose tilings were used to resolve that. The thing that’s so remarkable about Penrose tiling is that it touches on so many different areas of mathematics, scientific inquiry, and societal relevance.
One of the other things I love about Penrose tiling is that it shows you can have mathematical pursuits that are very theoretical and abstract but that nevertheless lead to important discoveries in the rest of science—discoveries that have real world impact. This is a theme I’ve carried throughout my career—this emphasis on abstract, fundamental research and how that translates into applications. So, it’s not necessarily that applications are driving solutions but that you take things that already exists and turn them into applications
In a way, this is what we’re doing with our software at Metafold. We take shapes that were invented mathematically but never used, and we make it possible for people to create physical structures that turn out to have incredible properties.
What led you to start Metafold? And what problem are you trying to solve?
After I finished my PhD in math, I started working as an industry consultant. I met my cofounder, Daniel, at a conference, and at the time he had started a consultancy (MESH Consultants) providing geometry expertise to architecture, engineering, and construction industries. This was a perfect fit for me, and I knew we had to work together. I joined him as employee #2! We took on a project that used a lot of 3D printing, and we hadn’t done very much 3D printing at that time. The client was a large organization making a consumer product with lattice geometry, and that project taught us a lot. It really blew our minds in terms of what’s possible with 3D printing, but, importantly, it also highlighted what was lacking. There was no software for engineers and innovators to access the geometry they were looking to exploit. We ended working with this client for years, and it really informed our understanding of the problem–that there existed an inability for digital tools to properly represent geometries.
At that point, Tom had joined our firm as a consultant, and he came in with expertise in 3D printing. The three of us really created the right combination to create Metafold: Daniel and I had math and consulting management experience, as well as knowledge of the problem space, Tom was an expert in 3D printing background.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you’ve identified as the problem you’re solving?
We’ve had digital tools for manufacturing for a while (Computer Aided Design – CAD), and they’ve naturally been geared towards supporting current manufacturing methods, such as injection molding or milling. However, the types of shapes that traditional CAD can create are quite limited with those methods. 3D printing, on the other hand, is a new manufacturing methodology that opens up this new arena of complex shapes. What was missing is digital and geometric support for those new shapes. If you try to make those shapes in existing CAD tools, the software will melt down. It will crash. These conventional tools can’t support these new shapes because of how those tools represent geometry. At Metafold, we set out to represent geometry in a new way to make it faster and easier to get these shapes on the computer and printed.
Can you walk us through what lattice structures are?
Lattices are typically repetitive structures, and there’s an infinite space of lattices. I think that the greatest opportunity for 3D printing is to exploit lattice structures.
For some background explanation, 3D printers usually spit out one material, and that material has certain properties, such as the amount of brittleness or compression. Are you printing something hard like steel? Or something squishy like elastomers? Going further, by varying the geometry, you can actually create more material properties. Think about a piece of paper. We all know that it’s floppy, not structural. But, if you fold the paper to make it an accordion structure, all of the sudden it can stand up. You’ve changed the geometry of the paper and given it new material properties. This is the fundamental idea of metamaterial (aka lattice). We change the small scale geometric properties to engineer the larger shape to have emergent behaviors. Lattices come in all different “flavors”, and that’s what we’re so excited to give access to through our application.
What’s so hard about lattices? Why were conventional tools not able to realize this?
The basic idea is that the typical CAD wants to represent the surface of every object. It does this through teeny, tiny triangles or polygons on the surface of the structure and then stitching them together to look smooth to our eye. The more detail your structure has, the more surface, the longer the list gets. This starts to create massive file sizes to represent the geometrics, and it becomes untenable to do any operation. Anytime you want to cut, intersect, or morph into a new shape, it’s impossible to do on a computer. The approach that we take is representing the geometry by equations. Instead of capturing the detail of the surface, we capture the fundamental math formula that represents the shape.
Now that you’ve explained to us a bit about yourself and how Metafold got started, I’d like to dive a bit more into what it’s like running the company. You recently posted on LinkedIn that fundraising was, and I quote, “bananas”. What sort of challenges did you face and what advice do you have for other founders?
That’s actually a phrase I use a lot! But fundraising was a challenge. I think it was most challenging for us because we are technical founders. When we initially went out to raise two years ago, we thought the tech would sell itself, and we didn’t think we needed to talk much about the business side. In fact, the first slidedeck I put together was almost all technology (not even product!). Over the months, those slides got whittled down until the final deck had almost nothing about our technology. So our original thought process was a bit misguided.
When you’re talking to investors, it’s not just about how you communicate the technology to them, it’s about building a business. It was “bananas” because there are so many questions you have to answer about your business. And in a startup, everything is changing all the time, and you have to crystallize that and communicate it effectively to investors. Ultimately, though, I found that speaking to investors made the business stronger. In my experience, investors tend to be sharp, forward-looking thinkers who ask great questions. If there's one piece of advice I would give to deep tech founders, it’s that you can fall in love with your tech but at the end of the day, you have to understand the business down to every cell in the spreadsheet. That’s the only thing that will move the needle on investment.
I was also cognizant during the process of being a female founder, although it’s impossible to know to what extent this affected our process. It has been established that women are more likely to be asked prevention questions versus promotion questions. I tried to move the questions to promotion questions when I could feel that shift happening.
Lastly, we were raising in what one person deemed to me “the worst week in the last decade” (aka after the SVB collapse), so that also made it bananas!
What has been your biggest or most unexpected challenge running Metafold?
I touched on this a little in the previous question, but honestly the biggest challenge has been converting incredible technology into a product that people will buy. It sounds so simple, and I thought it would be more simple going into this! But great technology doesn’t sell itself! And this links to a broader question about how new technologies and innovations are commercialized. I find that fascinating and hard.
Another exciting challenge is determining the correct market to go after first. 3D printing is gaining traction in a lot of different markets, and this is really interesting, but it can also be a distraction. We need to keep a narrow focus in order to develop the correct sales, marketing, and pitch materials.
Finally, we’re navigating the complexity that comes with growing. We’re still very small, but as you add people to the team, you add complexity. As the CEO, relationship management between teams, customers, and investors is at the heart of my role—I’ve been loving that part of it, but there are a lot of threads to attend to.
What excites you most about the work you’re doing?
Truly the thing I'm most excited about is seeing the innovation enablement with which we’re helping our customers. I am constantly blown away by the innovations people are designing in our software—customers are using 3D printing to make the world a better place.
As an example, we have a customer who is building a bioreactor. Their geometry grows human stem cells, but there was so much complexity in their process that they were stuck on the geometry. The fact that we were able to dramatically help them move the needle to get the bioreactor from prototype to commercialization is thrilling.
I also believe 3D printing has a lot to offer on the clean tech side, and I'm looking forward to enabling those applications.
As you look to the future, what are you most looking forward to?
I’m looking forward to having more clarity about the key markets and our key product offerings. We have some great signals so far, but we have to determine where the strongest peaks are so we can dive in.
I’m also pumped about our team. We recently added a super talented engineer who has a PhD in additive manufacturing – she’s awesome! I’m proud to be building a team in Canada and to take advantage of the talent stream here. There is demand for our product in our Canadian market, but it’s not the same as in the States, and I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to attract really great, local candidates. Hiring is hard, but at the end of the day we’re building a wonderful team, and the team culture is emerging in a beautiful way. We’re all centered around the mathematical underpinnings of the company—we all have a shared interest in first principle problem solving. We’re taking deep, fundamental ideas in math and research and bringing those to life, both in our own product and with customers’ products.
If you achieve everything you plan on achieving, what do you hope to be remembered for?
I was just reading a book where the author suggests writing your own eulogy because it can help define the person you want to be in real life. This is similar to the philosophy of the stoics – memento mori: keeping death close so that you live your life to the fullest. On a personal level, this is all about the relationships in your life. So, I think that if I can build a business and not crush my family on the way, that would be quite an accomplishment.
On the professional side, I would love to be remembered for innovation enablement. In the end, how did we (Metafold) or I (Elissa) enable innovation across different industries? How did we make mathematics more accessible and useful to people? In general, I like to evangelize the study of mathematics as a career. I always say yes to meeting with people who want to learn about my career, and I think math is such a great thing to study. It provides a framework for thinking about a multitude of topics. So I’d like to be remembered for being able to communicate math in a broader way than it is thought about—if I could change people's opinions about math, that would fill my bucket.
How would you describe your leadership style?
We’re in the early days, so I’m still feeling out my leadership style, but I tend to have a collaborative leadership style (although that doesn’t work in every context!) I’m a bit of a slow thinker; I try to collaborate and gather input while I’m thinking things through before making a decision. At the same time, we also have to be as efficient as possible. Clear communication is a high priority for me.
Any books, podcasts, or publications you ask your team to read?
We don’t have such a thing, but it’s a great idea! I’m going to make a reading list!
More generally, for people who are curious about math but not already well versed in our field, I would recommend Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking”. People often don’t understand what it means to think mathematically, but he communicates it pretty well.
And now for our final question: if you were stranded on a desert island, is there a book or movie you would take with you?
No, but I would take chocolate and brussel sprouts. Dark chocolate. Obviously.
Elissa Ross is a mathematician and the CEO of Toronto-based startup Metafold. Metafold makes an engineering design platform for additive manufacturing, with an emphasis on supporting engineers using metamaterials, lattices and microstructures at industrial scales. Elissa holds a PhD in discrete geometry (2011), and worked as an industrial geometry consultant for the 8 years prior to cofounding Metafold. Metafold is the result of observations made in the consulting context about the challenges and opportunities of 3D printing.
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