The TV comedy-drama series ‘The Bear’ takes you into the inner world of a cooking prodigy, Chef Carmen, and his endeavour to build a restaurant. The show closely follows his journey, and those of the people around him, through the ups and downs of making manifest something you’re deeply passionate about. For Carmen, success is a priority, yet all he seems to come up against is failure and roadblocks. Through the chaos, passion, bad reviews, limited budgets, and unexpected gems, he discovers that supportive people and adaptability are key to bringing dreams to life.
For as long as he can remember, Arthur has loved building, and he is very good at it. This passion translated into a Bachelor of Engineering, becoming a founding member of Nutromics’ engineering team, and today being an Automation Engineer at Nutromics.
Reflecting on this, Arthur said “I’ve long been driven by a desire to create meaningful change in the world, alongside a deep curiosity about how things work. Biomedical engineering represents the ideal intersection of that purpose and my natural strengths”.
Arthur’s journey at Nutromics started five years ago, as a graduate hire straight from university. Since then, he has experienced immense growth, failure, and challenges that have transformed him from a purely passion-driven engineer, to a deliberate, precise, and purpose driven one.
First pancakes and prototypes
When Carmen first takes over his brother’s sandwich shop, he realises that there is potential for something bigger. He had always worked in Michelin star restaurants and has a dream to convert this humble store in Chicago into one. For the people around him, this dream is insanely ambitious. Arthur had a similar realisation about Nutromics during his interviews.
“When I started my interview process with Nutromics, I didn’t realise it was a startup because the company had a much bigger appetite than what you’d expect. However, when I realized where the company was at, I was excited because this seemed like a golden opportunity, and not one that a grad would usually have access to”, said Arthur.
Arthur was the third hire in the engineering team. He worked with Mikel Larson, the Manager of Engineering, to do almost everything: from setting up a lab space to starting work on a prototype.
“In the early days I looked at work with the same lens as university. So, for me building a prototype felt similar to a more complex design project. It was familiar but exciting. We had a starting point, an idea of what we wanted, and then we built the way forward”, he commented.
Arthur took the opportunity and ran with it but learnt very soon that failure was going to be an unavoidable part of this journey.
“I had a lot of freedom and autonomy to figure out ways to answer key questions we had about the device. Some of these I definitely failed or didn’t do right. However, each of those points was a learning opportunity for me”, Arthur said.
Through his journey, the team reminded him again and again that there was no wrong answer. There is only trying and learning. This mindset and support helped Arthur and the team iterate the product from a prototype to a device that could be mass manufactured and deployed in human studies within a year.
Mise en Place
‘Build a wearable that can be mass manufactured’ – this seems like a pretty standard objective for a wearable company. This was a significant goal for Nutromics in 2021. At the time, the startup had limited resources and was navigating the challenging journey of translating academic work for commercial use. It was critical to make the right decisions, and this is where perfectionism often creeps in. For Arthur, this was a point where he had to find a balance between his love for design, as an artist, and building something for the real world.
“Because we were trying to iterate and move fast, we had to learn to build with what we had”, he said. Reflecting further, he continued “There is competition between the ideal design and what we can deploy. The pursuit of perfection here, in a startup, can be your greatest weakness because we don’t always have time or a clear understanding of “perfect” within this context. In fact, we believe that good enough is better than perfect, because that can be deployed.”
This was the modus operandi that Arthur and the team built into the team’s culture from the very first day. It not only helped them iterate fast but also ingrained a growth mindset that made no challenge seem insurmountable.
Reflecting on how this helped him grow, Arthur said “It’s often very difficult to forget when and why you fail. So over time these become your greatest asset. The biggest way my skillset has grown is by leaning on my repertoire of experiences to increase the number of ways I think of a solution. This helps me get to a result much faster.”
Craft, calling, and the dream of something rare
Carmy comes from a world of individual excellence. While all the chefs work together in the kitchen, they must be masters of their trade and even compete against each other. With the Bear he learns to sacrifice ego and instead embrace collaboration and cross-learning. This turns out to be the key to building something truly special and unique.
While the industry norm for engineering is often self-contained excellence, at Nutromics, cross-functional collaboration was fostered from day one. Elaborating on the impact of this, Arthur said, “Having such collaboration earlier in my career has changed my way of thinking. It is beneficial because it makes you more empathetic, seeing things through the lens of people from other industries who fundamentally think differently.”
This system has allowed Arthur to stretch his design skills while delivering undeniable value for different teams. For instance, he designed tools that simplified workflows for the Science team, resulting in an 80x improvement in sensor testing. He has also been able to witness, firsthand, the deployment of the product into the hospital setting, getting feedback from clinicians.
“Seeing your design or your baby out in the real world and get real feedback so early in the product’s life cycle is amazing. You can see the direct translation of your hard work into actual impact in the real world”, Arthur shared.
So, what is the advice the Carmy’s and Arthur’s of the world would give people who feel driven to create something meaningful and lasting?
“I think you have to be really honest about what you want. How important is your job to you? If you’re looking for something that is a 9 to 5 or has structure and stability, those things don’t exist in a startup. Making your peace with that is going to be the biggest thing moving forward because you don’t want to join the world of startups where everything is chaotic only to wish you had the stability of a 9 to 5”, Arthur reflected.
And the biggest skill you could focus on? “Adaptability”, Arthur summarised succinctly.
Five years in, Arthur loves the professional metamorphosis a startup brings, “The work is never boring. The nature of the job changes year by year. I started as an R&D Microfabrication Engineer and that role evolved into a Process Engineer and now is evolving into an Automation Engineer role. The company has evolved and changed, and so have I.”
Arthur feels hopeful and excited about the future as the company looks to move from ICU studies towards launch. This feels like the final stage that accomplishes not only a company goal, but also one Arthur had set at the beginning of his career: to do something truly impactful in healthcare.