At EF, we believe it matters what the most impactful people do with their lives -- and that the best way to scale your impact, if you have valuable technology, is to start a company.

The panel is made up of deep tech investors and a researcher-turned-founder, who will be sharing their advice and personal experiences on what it's like to transition from academia to entrepreneurship.

When: Thu, 26 Nov, 12.30pm

Where: Online meeting link - register to receive the link.

Moderator: Tanuja Rajah, Launch Manager, EF

Tanuja has a PhD in immunology and now works as a Launch Manager at Entrepreneur First. This means she personally works very closely with resident founders and teams throughout the programme, helping them connect to VCs and advisors and equipping them with the skills necessary to scale their business to get from EF-funded to seed-funded. She also has experience building her own startup before this.

Speakers:

Teik Guan, Venture Partner, EF

Teik Guan enjoys working in the niche area of cryptographic security design and integration, having implemented numerous successful projects and products such as CAs, smartcards (Javacard), HSMs, Authentication Servers, for banks, government agencies and enterprises. He also led DS3 for over a decade through organic growth to Series A to eventually being acquired by a MNC. Currently, he is also an angel investor in deep tech startups.

Arthur Wandzel, CTO, Nomi

Raised in a family of psychologists, Arthur grew up talking about human personality and how it develops over time. Throughout his academic journey, he sought out the question of "What am I?" through cognitive science and eventually artificial intelligence. Arthur completed his Master's at Brown University before landing in Singapore to investigate implementing object-based attention for autonomous vehicles with graph neural networks. Through the EF programme, he started Nomi—a personal AI assistant for safe driving—as an extension of his previous work. He believes the founder journey challenges the question of "What am I" daily through ego destruction and personal growth.

Akbar Vahidi, CTO, Allozymes

Akbar is a scientist-entrepreneur who got his PhD from NUS and has a decade of experience in enzyme technology and biocatalysis, delivered several industrial projects to big pharma, food and biofuel companies during his career in academia. He was the lead researcher in an interdisciplinary team that invented Allozymes’ technology for faster and cheaper enzyme development. Akbar then landed at EF and started Allozymes as co-founder and CTO, where he is excited to apply futuristic solutions to solve sustainable manufacturing problems by unlocking enzymes potential.