Amar Sawhney turned his initial struggles to find work after immigrating to the United States from India into motivation to pursue a PhD and become a serial entrepreneur. He has started eight companies, creating more than 4,000 jobs and $2 billion in revenue. Listen to our interview to discover how he overcame obstacles along the way, his perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic and what he wants people to know about Sikh Americans. We also have a full-length video interview from earlier in his entrepreneurship journey here.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed and this is JobMakers. JobMakers is a new podcast launched in March, produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Every Thursday at noon I talk with risk takers. Immigrants who create new jobs, products and services in Massachusetts and across the United States, building on the entrepreneurial spirit that led them to America in the first place. When we return, we’ll meet this week’s immigrant entrepreneur.
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Denzil Mohammed: The entrepreneurial spirit among immigrants and refugees allows them the flexibility to pursue unexpected courses of action, adapt, accept risk and make the most of opportunities they didn’t even know of before. For Dr. Amar Sawhney from India that started at the University of Texas at Austin with 30 job rejections out of 30 applications. But he set on a path that would see him go in directions hitherto unknown. Getting a Ph.D., helping found a company journeying to Boston and starting a string of new companies, using his chemical engineering background to save lives through remarkable local therapy innovations. To date, he has founded eight companies, accounting for 4,000 jobs at more than $2 billion in revenue. He’s been named a Champion of Change by the White House, one of the five most innovative medical device CEOs by Mass Device, the EY Regional Entrepreneur of the Year, even The Immigrant Learning Center’s own Immigrant Entrepreneur Award for Life Science Business. But his influence extends well beyond that space into environmental conservationism, safeguarding refugees, mentoring and promoting STEM education, and building public understanding of America’s Sikhs as you’ll hear in this week’s episode of JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Dr. Sawhney, thank you for joining us on JobMakers. I would ask you, typically, to describe your business, but for you I think I would want to ask you to describe the vision for your businesses and what kind of impact did you think your businesses would have.
Amar Sawhney: So the vision from my businesses is to be able to deliver local therapies that can make an impact in patients’ lives or meaningful impact in patients’ lives. What I mean by local therapies is often manifestation of disease that takes place at a fairly local site. And to be able to treat that with a local therapy is better than to treat it with a systemic therapy meaning giving it, for example, giving a pill that goes everywhere in your body versus what we have now created. For example, at one of my last companies, Ocular Theraputix, little inserts smaller than a rice grain that goes into your tear duct that replaces the entire course of eye drops after surgery. Similarly, we’ve done things where we have created spacers that go between the prostate and the rectum so that in another company, Augmenix which is now part of Boston Scientific, where we were able to minimize any radiation side effects so also that radiation which would otherwise cause complications for the patient for a lifetime. By use of this, it spares the rectum and the side effects that might come from it. So these are types of local therapies that we are creating, where now in my latest company Instylla, have a way to fill tumors with a liquid material that solidifies almost instantly and shuts down the blood supply thus shrinking them. So local therapies are using sometimes these types of materials, hydrogels that I have created for uses inside the body are basically a unifying theme.
Denzil Mohammed: And your journey toward this goal started through rejection, right? You were rejected from 30 jobs at the University of Texas. Describe what that was like and what led you to this path.
Amar Sawhney: Yeah, me, I had come from India to do my masters and PhD at the University of Texas. And in India had access to good jobs, higher education, etc. I actually rarely encountered failure. Generally most things had come fairly easily to me. So coming to the United States, I did my master’s degree, and I had gotten a scholarship for it. And I did what most people would do: Apply to all the campus jobs I could find. But since I did not have a green card, I did not have an H1 visa and at that time, this was back in ‘89, most of the U.S. companies were not as familiar with providing the paperwork and stuff needed for an immigrant. And as a result I applied to 30 jobs thinking that I just need one. I don’t need all of them to be successful. But since most of them didn’t understand what paperwork would be involved, they summarily rejected me, which was quite devastating. Now, I’d never had this type of rejection before and I wondered what had happened. I’d come to this new country, and was there something wrong with me? It’s a lot of introspection went into that. But rather than blame the system and complain about it, I think it’s important to be sort of positive, action oriented. I spoke to my advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell, who’s just a stellar individual himself. He advised me that you may want to consider doing a PhD. And to think about it, that would have been somewhat counterintuitive because you would think you just got rejected after doing a master’s. Do you really want to double up and do a PhD? But I did that and in that way did some really exciting, interesting work where we did chemistries inside the body that would kind of be, allow you to make … so 3D printing is all the rage right now. Back in ’89, ’90 we were doing this type of 3D printing, so to speak, or making materials inside the body using light and polymerizing them in very, very fast ways for forming implants in the body. And that created a couple of companies and that created my first job. So I moved to the Boston area as a result of that new company being founded, a company called Focal.
Denzil Mohammed: And I remember you talking to me about your journey into entrepreneurship and raising money and just the fascinating concept of you being a foreign individual in the U.S., admittedly looking different, sounding different. And yet people were willing to give you money for your ideas. Guide us through what that particular experience was like at first.
Amar Sawhney: Sure thing. Yeah, so I’ve always felt that being a Sikh obviously I look different. I wear a turban. Also, people look at you, they have so far almost a bipolar response, where on one hand they would view you as being foreign and different and things, but in this community of entrepreneurship and science and stuff, when people see somebody different, they actually may feel that you’ve been able to cross over difficulties and make your own path. So there may be something special about this person, whether there is or isn’t. I’m not saying that there’s anything special about me. But people’s perception, actually it can work in your favor as opposed to work against you if you have the self confidence to believe in yourself. If you don’t see yourself as being disadvantaged or somehow you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, or something of that sort. If you come across as being a person who is just, should be judged for what they do and not how they look, now soon people just look past it and it just, it becomes transparent. If you yourself feel that you are different all the time, then it comes across in how you walk, how you talk, and I think then it starts adding up.
Denzil Mohammed: Guide us through what it was like forming your first business, especially not having an MBA, not having that business experience. And what were the qualities you think reflecting back on that time that enabled you to be successful? Was it like a bug that bit you that you wanted to just sort of continue founding companies? Or was it something bigger?
Amar Sawhney: So I think you look at what you want to get out of life, right? Meaning there’s a few things people may want to get out of life. Certainly, economic outcomes are one aspect of it. So I will not say that that was not something that influenced my thinking, but beyond that, it’s a question of if you have the tools to make a difference and build products that will really help improve medical care, you would almost be negligent not to do that. You would be negligent if you’ve been given the opportunity and the privilege to have access to those technologies and you know how to do it. You’re not missing anything. Why would you not actually go out and create those products? So that was important for me because from a legacy standpoint, eventually you want to see how many lives did you touch? How many and what improvements were you able to create in care delivery? So that is what sort of keeps me going at that point in time. And it’s the economic outcome, while not zero, is definitely less of a factor relative to other things, so that’s what has kept me going.
Denzil Mohammed: And you talk about legacy and impacting lives. It’s at least 5,000,000 patients have benefited from your technologies, right?
Amar Sawhney: Definitely. We’re in fact over a million patients every year now are impacted by some of the products that we’ve been creating.
Denzil Mohammed: And what are some of the companies and projects you’re currently involved in?
Amar Sawhney: So currently I’m involved with one of my companies. Instylla is creating a liquid embolic product. A liquid embolic basically is a liquid material that can be delivered into flowing blood and can almost instantly shut down the flow of blood. Sometimes blood flows to undesirable locations such as tumors or a hemorrhage that might be taking place after a car accident, or there may be fistulas of some sort. So there are a number of reasons why blocking blood flow to certain sites is important. If you try right now, people try to put down little plastic balls and stuff like that, little beads to try to do that, or put coils then hope that the blood will clot around it, a little fuzzy hairball type of coils. But liquids will penetrate much deeper, and if they have water-based liquids with which to react almost instantly, we can cast out the tumor down to the capillary level and hopefully much more effectively treat. So that is something that Instylla is doing. We are in the midst of U.S. pivotal clinical trial in 25 sites and doing it in the midst of a pandemic is an interesting exercise, but we’re making good progress over there, so that’s one company. The other company is a company called Rejoni where we are creating materials that are for just inside the uterus. Lots of procedures are done for women inside the uterus, such as removal of fibroids or septae or polyps and things. When they’re cut out for people who are infertile and they need to be treated for this infertility or some other problem. But that resection can create scar and make them infertile further. It can fail. So we are developing systems material which would be administered inside the uterus [to] sort of serve as a bandage and a separator of the uterine walls for a couple of weeks and then allowed safely to absorb. Now women who get ablations done for severe menstrual bleeding, the ablations can cause severe scarring and lead to other complications, so hopefully this is a way for people who have late stage abortions, their uteruses are scraped up quite a bit and can cause scarring. So there were one and a half million women every year who have problems related to scarring from these so we hope to be able to prevent that. So that’s another thing that we’re doing. And the third thing that we’re doing is from my holding company. Pramon has been creating a hemostatic patch, something to stop severe bleeding from, say, the liver or spleen so you would within 30 seconds, you just hold this down. It’s a completely absorbable material. Within three days it could absorb, but at that point in time it almost within 30 seconds stops any kind of bleeding, no matter how strong. There’s nothing like it right now. There are products that J&J has which are, use body’s clotting kind of cascade materials, but this is completely synthetic, doesn’t cause any clotting issues, can be used with patients who are completely anticoagulated, so would be a big step forward in managing hemorrhage. So those are three projects I’m involved with. I’m on the board of several companies. One of the companies is developing clot retrieval systems, a company called Imperative Care, where we go deep inside the brain to pull clots out, meaning every day we’re getting stories of people who are, essentially would have been dead for life, a vegetable and we pull the clot out, and they wake up on on the table and they are able to talk again and and walk again and do the things.
Denzil Mohammed: As a serial entrepreneur, I think you’re in a really good place to talk about the biggest impediments for a successful business like the ones that you founded. And I’m thinking particularly about issues like finding talent, issues like regulation. And how is Massachusetts in a better position than other places to run these kinds of businesses?
Amar Sawhney: I think the regulations are what they are. And, yes, there are barriers but I think they are barriers that ensure good quality of products and its degree of professionalism that may be absent in some other parts of the world. So I think while we all have our moments where we curse the FDA, I think the FDA is a force for good and it helps protect consumers for making sure that the therapies and products that emerge from the medical device or the pharmaceutical industry truly have solid science. And with regards to Massachusetts being a good place, I think it definitely is, especially the Boston area meaning their talent availability, which, incidentally, as you pointed out, is one of the big bottlenecks in scaling businesses, in starting businesses. When you’re starting a business, you know it’s really hard to attract talent because people don’t know whether the business is going to be successful or not, or you’re in the early stages and you really want to hitch your wagon to something which could just be a dream. So getting talent at the initial stages is not hard for us, but at the later stages it becomes harder because now you’ve got many more people you need and you can’t just reach out to your own network. You’ve got to go out and find people just the way any other company finds people, through recruiters and referrals and whatnot. So what I would say is that if you treat people well, you treat people fairly, and that word gets around, people will come back and want to work with you again. So we’ve benefited a lot from that, that anytime I want somebody to come work with us, all we have to say is, mention that to them and they will drop anything that they’re doing and come and work for us. So we are fortunate because we’ve treated them well. Now when companies scale, it can be a challenge because the fight for talent in the Boston area is ferocious. There’s a lot of companies, and the pharma companies and biotech companies have a lot more money than my tech does, and their pay’s way better. So it can be a challenge to try to attract talent as we scale forward.
Denzil Mohammed: And so leaning into the issue of the, how attractive STEM is to students in the U.S. What are your thoughts on just how STEM is perceived or how attractive it is to young people and is the U.S. doing enough to really foster an environment where students would be interested in these fields?
Amar Sawhney: Yeah, you’re putting your finger on something very important, meaning I sometimes go to graduations, for example, meaning I have gone to my alma mater, University of Texas’ graduation. And I remember sitting on the stage, looking at the people crossing the podium. They are receiving their degrees. And I would say more than half were not first generation, at least Americans. So there were so many of them who were of Chinese origin, Indian origin, Korean origin, etc. And I looked at that message, not that that’s a bad thing, but why are not more mainstream Americans pursuing science? But I know that this is something that is near and dear to both my wife Deepika who’s big on the education side of things. And our whole family, meaning we’ve tried to do it from my kids actually helping with mentor children. My son is the captain of his robotics team. My daughter is the captain of the National [inaudible] Lexington High School, and she mentored as many kids as possible to be able to ensure that STEM is not perceived as something that is either hard or foreign or not an attractive career or just difficult, especially with girls after middle school, making sure that those seeds are planted early on, that they continue. So I do feel that we are not doing enough to make it attractive as a choice and it may be perceived as being formidable for whatever reason. It isn’t. It’s not hard. Don’t dream small is what I would say to anybody. What’s the point of dreaming small? If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big.
Denzil Mohammed: Oh, that is such, such a lovely thing to say. It’s excellent advice. You’ve impacted millions of lives and created over $1.5 billion dollars in revenue. But your heart and the impact and legacy that you want to have extends beyond just your businesses. Through your foundation, you have approached issues that are probably out of the mainstream lens. Can you talk a little bit about those issues?
Amar Sawhney: I came to the conclusion that the trillions of dollars that we are spending as the world and country to try to tackle this pandemic, we’re trying to put out a fire. We’re not asking the question, where did the fire start and why did the fire start in the first place? Why do these zoonotic organisms migrate out from deep forests and end up creating these pandemics? Why does that happen? Why do they cross species? Why do they go from bats to humans? And if you sit and analyze that, you come to the conclusion that it is because of depredation of the forests and environment and of man-animal conflict through wildlife trafficking, where bats that were living quietly in a cave are now being grabbed by nets and sold in markets where they harbor these pathogens. Those drip onto civet cats and to pangolins that are being exploited and coming from far away nations, being slaughtered in the Chinese market for example. And that contaminated product, either somebody touches their nose while they’re in the midst of that process, and suddenly it transfers from the bat to the pangolin to the human, and then that person goes and spreads it, and the pandemics originate. So what’s the solution to this? It’s not to be able to come up with only new vaccines, although we need to do that to control this and that is what is needed, but we gotta prevent the fires from starting. We cannot keep spending trillions of dollars putting fires out. And there are probably 500,000 more of these types of viruses out there in the wild waiting to get out if we keep encroaching upon that habitat and we keep exploiting these species. So I’ve been spending a lot of my energy, time, money, on preventing wildlife trafficking. And to be able to not only save species like rhinos and elephant ivory and all those types of things, but also trafficking of a number of other types of [inaudible] animals. And smugglers, these are the same gangs that either traffic humans, traffic animals, they traffic drugs, that they launder money, so it’s that same network. And to be able to go after these folks and prevent this from happening and to be able to put solid worldwide type of regulations, that country is gonna rally together and put in place. Otherwise it’s like a balloon. You squeeze one side, they go to another side. We try to work with the Thai authorities, they’ll go through Laos. But you know the demand has to be shut down and demand comes from China. It comes from U.S. U.S. is the second largest demand point for wildlife products. China is the first. So to be able to do this so that we not only have a legacy where we can continue to enjoy environments which are unpolluted and wildlife species that still exist, but it’s also self preservation now. This is some of the big picture that I want to spend. We do a number of other things which are related to education and human welfare, etc., now, but I think those are all more to alleviate my own conscience than to actually make a real impact. To make a real impact, I think it’s the preventing wildlife trafficking and having species conservation, wildlife conservation, environmental conservation is what we all need to act upon.
Denzil Mohammed: That intersection of public health and environmentalism, we need to be able to spread that message more and just how these issues of public health or environmentalism are not isolated issues. Similarly, immigration is not an isolated issue, it impacts our entire economy and entire society and I keep mentioning it. Without immigrants we probably would not have the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because they both have immigrant co-founders. You’ve had a very terrific experience as an entrepreneur. But as a member of the Sikh community, how do you feel and what is your message to Americans when they are tempted to feel some sort of xenophobia in reaction, a very strong reaction to terrorist attacks but also political rhetoric?
Amar Sawhney: So you know it’s important to understand who the Sikhs are and why they look the way they look. Sikhs were created as soldier saints. They were supposed to be people who would adhere to the three pillars of Sikhism, which was to remember a higher power, to work with the honest sweat of their brow and to share what they had with others. So these are the three pillars of Sikhism and Sikhs were created when there was an oppressive environment prevailing in India of mass conversions and the majority of people didn’t have anywhere else to turn, so they were created as a group to protect others. And they were given certain edicts, to not be under the influence of drugs and alcohol, to have a weapon which was to be used in defense and not in offense at all times. There were a number of things that helped them control how they acted and part of that was they were to be given a distinctive uniform so that they could stand out and not merge in. So if you think about a terrorist, so terrorist doesn’t want to stand out, they want to merge in. So why would you put on a turban, have an unshorn beard and show up in public if you were a terrorist. That is not what people would do. People or terrorist wants to merge in, a Sikh wants to stand out. Unfortunately, images on TV that show somebody out in Afghanistan, where the trouble can be construed as being the same individual who is out over here and people don’t understand the difference. The way around it is education and one of the unfortunate but potentially saving grace type of side effects of these shootings, whether they are the FedEx facility a couple of weeks ago or the temple shooting in Milwaukee or or many such things that have happened, unfortunate incidents of violence against Sikhs at least help further the conversation and raise the awareness as to who these people really are and that they mean you no harm. In fact, they were created with the explicit purpose for people to go seek help from them.
Denzil Mohammed: Despite this, America has allowed you to create a legacy that you are still creating and still fashioning. And it is a home for immigrants regardless who, wherever they come from, you know they’re allowed to be American. They don’t have to shed their past identities just to be here. They don’t need a long lineage in order to succeed in business or in life.
Amar Sawhney: Look, America I think there is no parallel to what this country is. This country has given me a chance, given me an opportunity to do all the things that I would. I don’t think I could even have done these things in my own native India. It would have been hard for me to achieve this. So I think we’re quick to take sides and blame the system and blame others. But America is unparalleled, there are no parallels, meaning it is an amazing country. Social media has ended up creating a frenzy which attempts to highlight the exceptions and the silent majority gets ignored. I think that the American silent majority is very welcoming, very warm and has given me and most of the Sikh people that I know a great avenue to succeed. And they have worked hard and even the folks who were shot in the FedEx facility, they were 66 years old but they were working the midnight shift, the night shifts, just to make sure that they’re not a burden on the system. So the work ethos is deeply ingrained, sort of making sure you’re not a burden on anybody, making sure that you work hard. And those values, Sikh values are American values. American values are Sikh values. I think there’s a congruence in that.
Denzil Mohammed: The decimation of the refugee resettlement program of immigration in the past few years, those things are being turned around, and those will ultimately benefit America because immigrants who come here, people who choose to come here, people who leave everything behind, people are forced to come here have a certain ethos, as you said, of determination, resilience, not wanting to be a burden, wanting to succeed, wanting their children to have better than they did. Dr. Amarpreet Sawhney, thank you so much for making the time to be interviewed today for JobMakers. I really appreciate it and I hope that these messages continue to reverberate out there.
Amar Sawhney: Thank you, Denzil. It was my pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed: So happy that you joined us for this week’s inspiring story of another immigrant entrepreneur. If you know someone we should talk to, email Denzil, that’s D-E-N-Z-I-L, denzil@jobmakerspodcast.org. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers podcast.