Marketing the Invisible: How Nanosys Continues to Bring Quantum Dots to MarketMarketing the Invisible: How Nanosys Continues to Bring Quantum Dots to Market

Marketing the Invisible: How Nanosys Continues to Bring Quantum Dots to Market Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. You’re doing well, I trust. 

Jeff White: I am indeed. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. 

Jeff White: The deep summer recording sessions. 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. Yeah. I’m really excited for today’s guest.

I think it’s interesting, first of all, a really interesting guest, really interesting company. And the topic is just one that I think a lot of a certain type of manufacturer, at least, struggles with. So I think it’s gonna be fun to peel this one back a bit. 

Jeff White: Yeah, for sure. I’m really pleased to welcome to The Kula Ring, Jeff Yurek, the Vice President of Marketing at Nanosys. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Jeff.
Jeff Yurek: Hi, guys. Great to be here.

Carman Pirie: Jeff, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. First off, let’s tell our listeners a bit about Nanosys and what you folks do there.

Jeff Yurek: Sure. Nanosys has been around for a little while. The company was founded in 2001 to pursue the commercialization of nanotechnology broadly. Actually, the founder, Larry Bach, had great relationships. He had a bunch of exits in the biotech world and great relationships with universities all over the world.

Nanotechnology was a hot topic, and he just pulled in all this great research and IP from some of the top researchers in the world and started to just pull the string of nanotechnology and see where it would go. The company did a lot of research for a number of years, developing all kinds of types of products.

Silicon nano wires for hemostatic bandages, to quantum dots for solar, for display memory projects, all kinds of things. No products though. So it was more of a research organization with very little product focus, which changed in 2008. CEO, Jason Hartlove, came on board and really focused the company down on a couple of products that had a real path to commercial success. And that was Quantum Dots and Battery. And pretty soon thereafter, we focused on quantum technology for displays. It felt like the closest thing to commercialization and a place where we could really add value. He really focused the company on developing solutions for industry. So a big change in strategy when he joined the company, I joined soon after in 2009.

And first product in 2013 was the Amazon Kindle Fire. We got our quantum technology designed into that. We were off to the races and then in 2023 we were acquired by a company called Showy Chemical in Japan. So we’re part of a much larger Japanese chemical company now, and still going strong.

Jeff White: Now, before we get into your background, which is also equally interesting, can you explain what a quantum dot is? Because I’ve been all over your website and I’ve done a bit of reading about it and it’s really cool. 

Jeff Yurek: Totally. That’s my job is to explain that. So hopefully I can do that for you. Quantum Dots is a really amazing nano material. It was discovered at Bell Labs in the early 1980s. This guy, Lou Bruce, actually just won a Nobel Prize for that discovery. And like a lot of cool things discovered by accident, he was working on something else and making these small particles, and he found that they could convert light energy into different colors. And the really special thing about quantum dots is it’s super tiny, true nanotechnology dozens of atoms literally between the size of a water molecule and a virus. So incredibly small. And when you make things that small you change the way they behave and they start to behave by a different set of rules; quantum mechanics comes into play. And basically what happens with the quantum dot is the size of the dot changes the color of light that it emits and we’re not used to that. Things that are in the world around us, bulk materials they reflect light and they are the color that they are. But with quantum dots, what happens is something called quantum confinement.

So a blue photon, which has got a lot of energy. Will hit a quantum dot and the quantum dot kind of burns off some of that energy. It’s like actually a semiconductor. It’s converting that energy and then it will emit a photon of a longer wavelength. So blue is short wavelength and very small. Quantum dots can make blue light. And as they get larger into green medium-sized quantum dot will emit a green photon. Big quantum dot will emit a red photon and so on. And so it gives you this amazing ability to tune a spectrum of light and emit very pure color at very specific wavelengths.

And so that’s turned out to be very useful for displays. A lot of people don’t know this, but the display you’re looking at right now if you’re looking at a display. Uses red, green, and blue mixes to make all the colors and so that was what we realized quantum dots could be very valuable for. Previously, you’d use something like a phosphor material. It’s a very broad color spectrum, very yellowish. And we could use quantum dots to make a precise red, green, and blue and really improve the color and brightness and efficiency of displays.

Carman Pirie: Jeff, there have been a number of times in the history of The Kula Ring when I’ve hoped that it would’ve been nice if we had video as a podcast. But I’m happy that we don’t in this instance, because our guest would’ve just seen me doing a dog watching tv look for the last minute. That’s absolutely fascinating. It’s just yeah… It’s so cool. How did you end up at Nanosys? Tell us a bit about your background. How did you end up there? 

Jeff Yurek: So it’s odd I can think a lot of people’s careers, it’s an odd journey that you go through to end up where you are and never would’ve seen this coming or pictured this.

I started my career actually in the music business. I went to school for music and I worked as a recording engineer and record producer in Boston, and a little bit in New York In the early 2000s, the height of the Napster difficulties and things like that. And it was a ton of fun. I loved doing that work. But I realized there was something wrong with that business. It was a very challenging time for that business. And so I thought, I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to business school and I’ll come back and work on the business side of music and help to solve some of the business model challenges the industry was facing at that time.

And I went to night school while working a night industry, which was an odd challenge. 

Jeff White: There’s no normal hours in production, No. 

Jeff Yurek: Exactly. Yeah you start work at 7:00 PM actually, and so whatever. But made that work and coming out of business school had an opportunity to come do an internship out actually at Nanosys in Silicon Valley.

I was living in Boston on the East coast at the time, and again, very focused on music and coming back into the music industry. But geez, going to Silicon Valley, working in a tech company Okay, I’ll do that for six months and I’ll come right back and I’ll have some cool experiences, but I’ll bring that back with me and I think one month in, I was totally in on Silicon Valley, the culture of it and the company and the technology and the story and just, and head over heels.

Carman Pirie: Look, one of the great Canadian folk singers, probably the greatest Canadian folk singer, Sam Rogers has a song called California where he laments about all of his friends leaving the East coast and falling in love with California, never coming back. Yeah, it sounds like you did something similar. And that was written long before Silicon Valley was a thing. Totally, 

Jeff Yurek: Yep. It’s the weather. It’s everything. It’s hard to beat 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. 

Jeff White: Carmen’s dog-watching TV moment was while you were trying to explain what this amazing thing Quantum Dots were and how the company arrived at this product.

But that’s also what you’ve been doing as the marketer at Nanosys, is explaining to people what this is and, perhaps even the people who might have been customers, potential customers of it didn’t know. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how you began to get this great story out there.

Carman Pirie: I might say, I might position it Jeff, like, how do you get awareness for something that is practically invisible and people don’t know what exists and it’s part of a bigger thing, et cetera.

Jeff Yurek: It’s true. There’s a bunch of different threads there. I think, a little bit of my audio background helped me a little bit in the early days.

I can remember just drinking from a fire hose of course, right away. And my office mate, this guy Zhang, and he’s a PhD from UC Berkeley and so brilliant. And they’re just constantly asking questions about what is this? How’s this work? But once I started to get a little bit of a feel for what was going on.

I noticed the engineers were talking a lot about efficiency. So because we only make red, green and blue light and not other colors, you don’t need to filter out these other colors. You don’t waste as much light, and that is a big benefit of the technology. It’s more efficient, you get more photons out for the same amount of energy and that kind of thing which matters for mobile devices and for everything. But I noticed the color saturation was better. There was more color. And I started to pull that thread and started to understand the standards for how color works in broadcast and displays, and saw that there was some opportunity to expand the range of color you could show, and there’s a lot of pushback at that time. People thought we had this color gamut. This is a standard for the range of colors of display can called Rec. 709. It was associated with HDTV and people thought that’s pretty good. And it was pretty good, right? We’re good, we got this, we don’t need anymore. But I had a little bit of experience as a creative professional on the music side and thinking Yeah, as a creative person you don’t wanna be restrained, by this palette of colors that’s so narrow, turned out to be only a third of the colors I can see, I try to imagine as an audio person, we’re pretty good at reproducing the full range of sound our ear can hear. And you know what if we could open that palette up and give that to creative professionals and let them tell stories with this broader range of color.

And so I started to just pull that string and learn about what those standards were and talk to people. And just started a blog about that. And that was very successful for us early on because other people were also thinking about this at the same time. And talking about how do you measure the color performance of display? What does that look like? Why does it matter? And yeah, we were able to get a lot of attention and many other people worked on this at the same time, but I think we were a small part of moving the needle on that and getting the industry thinking a more about this color dimension.

Carman Pirie: And Jeff, what year was that? 

Jeff Yurek: That would’ve been 2010, probably 2011 when we started that. 

Carman Pirie: Man, that was like the golden age in some ways of when blogs were interesting and, interesting people wrote them and other interesting people read them. 

Jeff Yurek: Yeah I remember being very inspired by people like Seth Godin back then.

And still just thinking, and this was also challenging internally because we’re a very high technology company, very secretive, right? We’re developing things at the cutting edge and telling my CEO I’m just gonna start writing a blog and giving away, for free, a lot of interesting things that we’re learning, and of course I wasn’t giving away the recipe for the material, but still just the idea of there’s a guy in here who’s just, writing stuff and sending it out into the world was a little antithetical to the kind of, R&D culture that we had. So…

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting, and you were reminding me of, I think Huma Cloud back, I don’t know if you remember the gapingvoid.com blog back in the day, the cartoons on the back of business cards, guy. 

Jeff Yurek: No, I don’t. That sounds cool. 

Carman Pirie: That was all part of that same kind of era with with Seth Godin. And he actually illustrated the cover of one of Seth’s books, but he had this notion about corporate blogging.

I think it was him and Scobel named it, I think, and it was like the idea of this porous membrane that these types of blogs and corporations at that time everybody was worried about how it gave people a look into the company and maybe you were showing too much. But then the reverse was also such a tremendous benefit as you got to see more of what was outside because of the act of kicking holes in that membrane. That separates a company from those they serve and from the world at a broader level. My guess is the act of being part of that… I’m taking a bit of a leap here, but did it help you understand the applica… how the technology could come to life commercially either quicker or better or…

Jeff Yurek: A million percent. It was I can’t overstate the value of it. Just one part of it was doing the work to understand things and using the blog as like a, was almost like I was doing that research anyway and I was trying to communicate those things internally anyway.

Look, we’re learning this about this color. Can we make a different red? Can we push this way? Can we do this right? And that two-way street. And so having the blog as a central kind of forcing function. Wanting to publish something interesting both internally and for me to learn and for the external community to react to.

And then we would get amazing incoming things because of it because we were talking about things and it wasn’t a big audience for this. And that was the other thing. It’s not like we thought we were ever go viral here, but there’s 25 people in the world who are interested in this.

But we really care about those people a lot, and I remember writing a one blog post about just thinking of places where wide color gamut would be interesting. And I talked about like a red lightsaber in a Star Wars movie. And you know how… because one of the things we kept getting pushback on is in the natural world, you might have too much color that’s more color than you would see in the natural world. And I’m like, who cares? Go beyond. What could you do beyond that? What kind of stories can you tell right. And I wrote this story about that, about a red light saber, what red should that be? Why should that be bounded by what we see around us? Make it crazy, right? And yeah, sure enough, somebody from Lucasfilm, reaches out, about these red light sabers, and next thing you know, he’s sharing information with me. Not secrets about Lucas or anything, but here’s how we think about color and we’re interested in this and we are working on this too. And so wow, that’s a great signal to get. And then, can you make us a demo? So we’re making, handmade display demos that have more color than normal displays and sharing them with them. And, I remember sharing it in a laptop with them and thinking, gee, I hope they like leave something on the laptop. Of course it came back wiped totally clean, but yeah, that’s just an amazing thing and that’s not a customer interaction.

We’re not gonna sell anything to them. But it was still so valuable to, to learn how they were thinking and work together on that 

Jeff White: man. Like when I started, went to school as a designer, I had an eight bit color monitor. Like one of the early, with a 256 colors. And then, we got 16 bit color and now there’s thousands of colors and then 24 bit color and yeah. That was the mid nineties. So the explosion and the rapidity in terms of the gamut that we’re able to show and the quality of the screens has progressed so much in the last, 30 years. It’s really quite insane.

Jeff Yurek: So much. And the cost have come down crazily also. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. How, we know from experience with clients and what people are talking about that, blogging doesn’t necessarily drive the same. If you started a blog today, you’re not gonna have the same results that you had when you started a blog in 2010. It’s not driving the same level of success that it once was, and all of that.

But my guess is that because you were an early adopter of this way of talking about your product and storytelling and connecting people to this technology, you’ve maybe not experienced the same level of decline. How have you thought about your blog over the years in terms of how you how you utilize that in 2025 versus 2010?

Jeff Yurek: Yeah, it’s definitely shifted over time. We’re not as much in the early halon days of just literally like the learning about things in real time. There’s still a lot to learn and I still do to try to keep up with it. Again, just for that reason of learning myself, keep pushing myself forward, keeping the internal team thinking about things and just again, that porous membrane, I think, I never thought of it that way, but I think that’s such an apt way to think about this.

But we have started to shift into a little different posture and you’ll see if you look on there now, we call it the point now and we have some sort of. Interviews with customers and we use it, perhaps how you guys use this podcast a little bit. Sometimes it’s not an active customer, but a potential customer or somebody we wanna learn about, a new market.

We’re starting to take quantum dots outside of displays. One of the cool things that’s happened is that focusing on the display market has allowed us to build up the capacity for making quantum dots, making them better, brighter, more resilient, lower cost, as we’ve done that. New markets are starting to become possible.

What if we can put them into the agriculture market, into greenhouses? What if we could put them into pigments and paints? And so one of the fun things about the blog now is exploring some of those new emerging areas and, reaching out to somebody at a company and interviewing them and trying to make it a promotional opportunity for them.

So we don’t, we try not to make it purely about us and our, and hey, come on and say, how great is Nanosys and how great really make it an opportunity for them to showcase themselves. But we think by doing that, we deepen those relationships and learn more, and then other people can see that and just keeps that flywheel going.

Carman Pirie: As you’re talking about those customer relationships, that brings me to the idea that one of the challenges with your types of technologies, you can’t always talk about where it comes to life. People aren’t always all that keen. To talk about who actually makes the magic in the component. I guess how have you navigated that as you try to evangelize this technology and get it out there and you desperately want to show that world leaders are adopting it? 

Jeff Yurek: It is it’s very challenging because, yeah, especially when we were more in startup phase and pre-acquisition. And, you’d have a major brand adopt your technology, and boy, you’ve just, you wanna let the world know about that. Why that’d be such a validation point. And it was often challenging to not be able to talk about those things or skirt around them. And you’d always be feeling a little bit anxious.

Are we saying a little too much here? What are they gonna say? What are their lawyers gonna say? But I think one of the things that’s helped us with that is going back to that blog and delivering valuable content. And because of that, in many cases, the brands have invited us in. And before the show, I was talking to you guys a little bit about there’s there’s two sides of the brand.

A lot of times we spend a lot of time with the engineering side getting designed and answering their questions about how the technology works, solving problems for them, but then I’m on the other side, the external communication side, and there’s been a lot of value we’ve been able to offer there as these guys go out and launch the TVs and, hey, the engineering side told us there’s this quantum stuff in there. What is it? And why does it matter? And in fact, in the early days, there’s a lot of skepticism from consumers. Cynicism, I would say, right? Oh, you put another logo on the box, right? Now you’re putting a Q on the box. Why do I care about this? You guys put some new thing on the box every year and it’s just a bunch of random stuff, right?

And, they found it very helpful to lean into a relationship with us and they would invite me out to product launches and and we’d go and go hands on with reporters and consumers and also retailers and help teach them, Hey, there’s something really going on here. And that was a lot of just.

Hands-on work and doing handheld demonstrations. We would bring a spectrometer and they could measure the TV and see the spectrum of light. We’d bring a vial of the quantum dots and actually, physically show them this is a real thing. And the brands found that so valuable and that’s something we were able to bring as kind of deep experts in the technology and help to tell that story.

Jeff White: Wait a vial, you mean the quantum dots are liquid? 

Jeff Yurek: They’re in a liquid. Yeah. It’s all solution-based material that we make. We make them in… it looks like a brewery, a big brewery, big steel tanks. It’s a truly amazing process. And this is one of my favorite little anecdotes to share actually.

So I’ll just go down this road here. We make them, the size is what determines the color, right? But they’re super tiny and so you’re growing them in this giant vat, gallons and gallons, a thousand litres plus. And you can’t just take your callipers out and measure them, right?

And so what we do is we shine blue light into the reactor as the dots are growing, and the color shifts as the dots grow. And when they get to the target color we stop the reaction. And so we’re able to make. Trillions and trillions of crystals that are all the same size, plus or minus a few atoms. And all at once. And it’s just, I dunno, miraculous and crazy process. 

Jeff White: That is so cool. 

Carman Pirie: It’s very cool technology and the fact that it looks like a brewery is even cooler. 

Jeff Yurek: We ship ’em in and beer kegs too.

Carman Pirie: I don’t wanna get too far past that, what I thought was incredibly instructive there, ’cause not everybody gets to market nanotechnology. That’s incredibly cool. Sometimes it’s a little more bland than that, but they do encounter that same challenge about not being able to talk about the fact that they’re part of, this aircraft or part of this thing. And so often that roadblock is encountered when they’re trying to produce case studies.

And it’s interesting to consider that case study, a case study by its nature is a very one-sided benefit. The person that’s writing the case study is going to be the one that gets the benefit out of it primarily everybody knows why you do case studies. That’s so you can get more customers, but I liked the fact that you, the way you approached it, because you think about if you haven’t owned media property, in your case it’s a blog that’s evolved over time, et cetera.

But podcasts and others, there’s marketers can think this through. What’s the owned media property that we can start or own to have today that is not just a get from our customers when we want to do a case study, but allows us to deliver them a bit of a give and can, not everybody’s going to play ball.

I’m sure that’s the same for your customers as well, but more will play ball if you’ve got a different game to play.

Jeff Yurek: So true. And yeah, and it was interesting, again, going back to my management too, it’s it’s hard to measure this classic marketing thing, right? What is the value of this?

We can’t charge the customer more for this, but we’re offering them an extra service. It’s an extra benefit that they’re getting to help them tell the story and market and reach a more customers. So yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting for our listeners to think about for their businesses and just how does that how does that translate?

There’s something pretty cool there, Jeff. Look, your business is one that’s incredibly innovative and progressive. And you happen to work in a part of the world that is also a bit on the edge technology-wise. Where are you seeing the world of marketing going? And don’t just gimme a Pat AI answer, I expect more from you Bay area guys.

There’s just, we do live in a very interesting time and the world of marketing and sales are shifting dramatically. What are you seeing in the next 12 to 24 months? 

Jeff Yurek: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I think, and I love by the way that you guys are creating this B2B marketing podcast, because I feel like the B2B world doesn’t always get that much love. And I always get that pushback even internally, right? Oh, we’re not a big brand. We don’t need to do these different things. But for us, I’m sure there are big changes in terms of how you think about SEO and how you think in terms of paid and things like that.

It’s just stuff we haven’t really thought a lot about. And you mentioned it earlier, we try to focus on creating content that’s valuable for our customers and for the end users. We try to really think about those audiences. And I think we just try to focus on old school stuff like that, and creating things and talking about things that are relevant to our users and to our customers.

And I think that’s the through line we just keep following. Even though as you say, if you started a new blog today, what would that really look like? But, again, we just, we know the audience is small. We’re not trying to reach a broad, huge audience. We’re trying to reach the right people, a very small group of people who are interested in very specific topics.

And so we just try to keep that as our North Star. But it does feel like a lot of things are shifting and changing out there. 

Carman Pirie: That’s instructive though, because so many manufacturers find themselves in incredibly niche categories and, the more niche that category is, the more, there may just not be a lot of other people talking about it because you don’t have to talk about it via maybe the most innovative channel.

You just need to be talking about it. 

Jeff Yurek: I think that to me, that’s been a lesson for us. And, early on, holding yourself and trying to imagine, we need to go viral. We need to have some huge outcome from this, right? And it’s no, that’s not the stakes here, right?

The stakes are reaching those few decision makers or the people who influence the decision makers, and getting our customers talking and thinking about these things. And just really focusing on that. And the tools are not as important to me. I would say, but again, it depends on your product. If you had a more consumer-facing product, I don’t know.

It’d be pretty challenging in some cases. But AI, we’re all using it in different ways, but it’s just another tool. I don’t know, I don’t know how many changes we’re not gonna see in creative that’s made by an AI that I can see in the near term. 

Jeff White: There’s still so much for you to talk about that is unique and wouldn’t necessarily even be available from a large language model because you’re the only ones doing it. So yeah, exactly, it creates an interesting position, actually. 

Carman Pirie: I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Jeff. I it’s it’s been fascinating to learn more about the company and how you think about the various marketing challenges that y’all encounter, just how you think about approaching the market.

I’m just curious, as we close, what’s the bit of advice that you’re going to give yourself 20 years ago that you wish you knew then that you know now? 

Jeff Yurek: Interesting, 20 years ago what I wish I knew then? 

Carman Pirie: I was I thought that your comment around your path through university. Okay.

I’m now, I’m gonna go back to business school. There’s some interesting thinking there and so many others, you end up in a place you didn’t expect. So I’m just curious. 

Jeff Yurek: I completely didn’t expect, and I think everybody experiences some imposter syndrome and that kind of thing.

And I certainly had that, coming out of a music background into a very high technology place and people are really smart. I think I would just remind myself to keep pulling the thread of curiosity and following your interests and not worrying too much about that stuff and being too intimidated. And again, just staying curious, and those are the things that have helped me the most. And, in the early days, it wasn’t always clear to me because it was so intimidating and overwhelming. Just reminding myself to follow that path. 

Jeff White: Carman is often fond of saying Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken, which I think we’ve stolen somebody else, but it’s certainly applicable in this situation. 

Jeff Yurek: Yeah, definitely. 

Carman Pirie: Jeff, a pleasure. Thank you so much. 

Jeff Yurek: Thank you, guys. This was great. 

Jeff White: Thank you.