Any gardener knows that a plant can’t thrive in the absence of light.
If the same is true for startups, you could say Olga Pawluczyk is a CEO with a green thumb. And she knows all about the power of light.
Since 2010, her staff at P&P Optica has more than tripled in size, thanks to the high-performance spectroscopy systems it produces at its Waterloo laboratories, where blue laser beams punctuate the red glow from the ceiling lights.
Spectrometers use light to analyse the chemical makeup of substances. They can be used to match paint to a colour chip, scan liquids during airport security checks, test blood and screen fruit for pesticides, among many other duties.
“A spectrometer is a much more sensitive eyeball, essentially,” Pawluczyk says.
What differentiates P&P’s technology is its highly advanced efficiency and accuracy, which won high praise from R&D Magazine this year.
In honouring the company with an R&D 100 award – the equivalent of an Oscar for innovation – the magazine said P&P’s new spectrometer “has greatly expanded the applications potential for optical spectrometry,” and performs “approximately 20 times better than the closest competing technologies.”
P&P’s growth followed quickly on the heels of grants from FedDev Ontario and the Ontario Centres of Excellence, which were crucial in enabling Pawluczyk and her staff to develop the new technology and put it in the hands of top scientists.
I sat down recently with Pawluczyk, who joined Communitech’s board last year, for a wide-ranging chat about everything from spectroscopy to entrepreneurship to the low number of female tech CEOs.
Q – Tell me about P&P Optica; where it’s been and where it is now.
A – The company started in ’95 in Quebec City as an optics consulting company, and right now we are the fourth iteration of P&P Optica.
Really it started in 2004 in the form it is at right now.
We are 20 people, plus or minus two – we’re always in flux a little bit with co-op students and whatnot – and have grown significantly in the last couple of years.
We went from six people in 2010 to 20 now.
Essentially, because it started as a family-owned business, we developed the technology on a shoestring budget, and once we saw traction in the market, we decided to turn it into a startup, bring in outside investors and actually grow to match the need of the market.
So, we established a big manufacturing laboratory here in Waterloo by getting a FedDev loan for that, and that’s sort of where the new chapter of P&P has been growing.
Because we’ve grown so fast, revenue is still in the red, but we’re hoping to reach positive cash flow sometime next year, and we seem to be on target.
We’ve grown our sales over three times in one year, so it’s a very exciting period for the company. Everything that we were, we’re not anymore, and we’ve changed quite a bit.
Q – How did the company come into being?
A – My father and my brother worked at the National Optics Institute, or INO, in Quebec City. Both were optics people, and they actually had an idea for measuring length of wire much more precisely, using optical methods as opposed to measuring the wire by weight.
If you think about it, if you have an error rate of one per cent, and somebody buys 100 metres, you have to give them 101 metres just to make sure that your error is covered. So, if you reduce your error to 0.1 per cent, you just have to give them 100 metres and a couple of centimetres, which adds up really quickly when you’re making copper wire.
So, that was the first technology, and that didn’t pan out too well because the company that was purchasing these parts went under.
My brother and dad decided to continue on, so slowly but surely, as optics people, they started designing things and went into fibre optics.
And then my dad moved to Ontario, and the company he worked at needed a very high-performance optical spectrometer.
My dad knew some people in Poland who could produce things for us, and he went there and set up a laboratory to make what are called diffraction gratings – essentially, glorified prisms.
We make spectrometers; spectrometers measure how light interacts with things and measures chemistry based on that. Gratings split light into multiple colours; the rainbow effect of a prism.
So, my dad set up a lab in Europe and we started selling these really exotic optical components made in Europe, and saw how incredible a performance advantage they can give to anybody who uses spectrometers.
I graduated from my master’s and said, ‘Well, if my brother and father are working there, why shouldn’t I work there?’ So, I joined the company as well, in about 2000.
We said, ‘Hold on a second; we could actually design our own spectrometer.’ We had a lot of people around us who were excellent in optics and they helped us to design a system. We made a patent application, and that was sort of the beginning of where we are right now.
We were selling one component at a time, seeing how great it makes somebody else’s product, so we decided to make it our own.
The Polish lab was very limited. It was great for making one-off systems where we could sell maybe 200 systems a year, so we decided, ‘Let’s bring it to Canada and set it up the way my dad always wanted to set it up.’
And we did; we built the laboratory and it’s now fully operational. It’s the first year that it’s been operational.
We started selling our gratings, made in Canada, in April.
Q – What is the involvement of your dad and brother now?
A – My dad actually was always just on the sidelines and helping with ideas, and in 2004 he joined it, and my brother had also developed a large part of P&P in fibre optics for spectroscopy.
We decided that, because we were selling spectrometers and fibre optics to spectroscopy companies, that wasn’t very great, so my brother is now doing fibres at FiberTech Optica, and myself and my dad are running P&P Optica.
Q – Does P&P refer to your surname, and the two of you?
A – Actually, when they started the company, it was my brother, Rafal Pawluczyk, and Pierre Pelletier, another guy who worked in the company. So it was Pawluczyk and Pelletier, or in Quebec, Pelletier and Pawluczyk.
And it kind of stuck, because, why not? A lot of people have crazy names, so we have a crazy name with P&P Optica.
Q – What is a spectrometer and why is it important?
A – A spectrometer measures how light interacts with substances.
For example, the fact that you can see that the grass around us is a little bit yellow, you can tell that it doesn’t have chlorophyll in it, and it’s somewhat dead. So, your eye is acting like a spectrometer; you can make predictions, based on what you see, about the chemistry of things around you.
A spectrometer is a much more sensitive eyeball, essentially. It sees colours; different materials absorb light differently, and it can identify these materials.
Spectroscopy is used everywhere, from Home Hardware to match your colour chip to your wall, all the way to blood analysis, to measuring fat content in milk, to looking at Mars and trying to figure out if there is life on Mars, and anything in between.
Apparently, even some cars have spectrometers right now, to measure the output of the engine and adjust it based on that output, to make it fire differently.
Q – You mentioned that your company has grown quite a lot in the last couple of years. Where do you expect it to go in the next few years, and where will you target the business?
A – That’s always a difficult question. Because our spectrometer is such a platform technology, it can be used in many fields.
So, we decided to narrow it down to four markets right now, and sort of explore those four markets in the next year or so, with the hopes of developing an application.
The markets are defence and security; for example, detecting whether the bottled water that you have in your backpack when you’re going through security is really water. We can tell that, or whether somebody has bomb residues or something.
Then we have environmental. We have quite a few clients who like to fly with a spectrometer in the plane and either look upwards into the air to see if there are any pollutants, or downwards to see what’s growing or what the water is like underneath the plane.
Then we have industrial process control. That’s really interesting, actually, and I think a very fast-growing market. Consider something as simple as sorting apples. A couple of decades ago, that was all done by eye and by hand. Then you had the introduction of black-and-white cameras so you could sort the super-ripe apples from not-so-ripe apples, just from black-and-white images. Then you went into colour and you could now sort them into categories.
Now, imagine having a spectrometer that can tell you if pesticides were being used on these apples or not.
Now you can really look at nutritional value, or how ripe something is or how it was grown.
The same thing is useful for recycling, sorting plastics, for example. A lot of recycling in Canada is still done by hand.
Or whatever you can imagine.
And then, finally, is health care. What we see is, a lot of our clients are still in the research stages with health-care applications, but using a high-efficiency or high-performance spectrometer like ours, you can do imaging of a cell while the cell is still alive, and you don’t have to add anything to it.
For example, right now, if you consider imaging of cells, you typically have to inject them with some dye. The dye gets absorbed into whatever it is that you want to detect.
So, if you have cancer, dyes tend to be absorbed more by cancerous cells, for example.
But if you have a very sensitive spectrometer, you could actually detect the small chemical differences between cancerous and non-cancerous cells without injecting the dye.
The moment you put something in the system, like a dye, it changes how the system behaves, so by using a spectrometer, you’re eliminating that one thing and just shining normal light at the cell.
So that’s pretty exciting.
Some technologies exist already; we have Christie Medical here, which has really fascinating technology. They use a camera – so, a much simpler spectrometer than ours – and they can see where the veins are much better than a nurse could. They project it back on somebody’s arm, and then the nurse can find the veins that much more easily.
Or, in cancer research, somebody extracts a tumour, and then they inject dyes into the tumour first, and then after the surgery will shine a special light to see if the tumour was completely removed.
Now imagine doing the same thing without having to inject any dye.
Those are the four areas, and we’ve been working very hard to figure out where the advantage of our technology fits the best. It looks like it’s in imaging. Because we have so much better signal, essentially, instead of just looking at a single point somewhere, we can spread that signal along an image.
So, instead of seeing colours, like with a camera where you see three colours, with the PPO HyperChannel spectrometer we can essentially look into thousands of spectral bands and then have very precise chemical information on an image.
That’s what won the award, actually.
Q – What proportions do those four areas make up in your current operations?
A – Surprisingly to me, defence and security is the largest proportion. I would say we’re about 40 per cent there, and then the other three are split relatively equally, with medical being more research and selling one or two instruments to a client, as opposed to multiple systems for the other applications. They push us to really try harder, where the other guys don’t really push our abilities very far.
Q – How did your time at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre set the course for what you’ve done since then, and inform your feelings about what you do?
A – At Sunnybrook, I did my master’s in medical biophysics, doing research on predicting the risk of somebody getting breast cancer based on how their mammogram looked.
And, actually, the first client who we ever delivered a spectrometer to was a lecturer of mine, Dr. Lothar Lilge from Princess Margaret Hospital.
He did essentially the same study, but using light as opposed to X-rays, so, illuminating a breast with strong white light, seeing what spectrum you get from it and then correlating it to risk of breast cancer.
That was our first-ever full spectrometer that we delivered.
He’s still at Princess Margaret and has bought multiple, multiple systems from us, and has done multiple studies using our spectrometers.
Doing medical imaging, if you look at my path, I finished systems design engineering here at Waterloo, then I went to do medical biophysics, which is also a very multi-disciplinary subject. So we had physics, we had imaging, we had statistics, we had some clinical knowledge that we had to learn about the cancers and whatnot.
Then I went into optics, which is also used everywhere, and spectroscopy is used everywhere, so I think my passion is sort of connecting dots amongst many, many disciplines that don’t really look related.
So if you look at medical imaging, my first connection to Sunnybrook was actually as a co-op student, and I did tracing of arteries in a leg for diabetic patients.
If you look at that as just a problem of signal or image processing, it’s identical to tracing rivers or roads on a map. There is nothing different about it.
It’s the same thing with spectroscopy. I remember one day – it was fairly early in P&P Optica – I went to a hospital in the morning with a spectrometer, and we looked at brains of mice on a microscope. Then I took the same spectrometer to a pulp and paper mill, and we looked at water content in the pulp.
Now, that’s pretty neat, that you can have one instrument that does that. Other than computers, I can’t really think of any other technology that’s so everywhere.
Now we’re seeing where spectroscopy can take us. It’s just light, so it’s very non-invasive; it doesn’t burn people, doesn’t really cause anything crazy and it’s not very expensive.
So if you look at personalized medicine, point-of-care medicine, the only technology that kind of makes sense on a large scale is optics.
MRI is very expensive. Yes, it’s harmless, but it’s very, very expensive. CT, PET and X-ray are all ionizing radiation, so you can’t repeat it too often. Maybe ultrasound, but there are some issues with penetration and identification of things.
With optics, you can do imaging. We’re all used to optics; we all have eyes. And it can do measurement as well.
Yes, it has some drawbacks, but it really is one of those technologies that I think we haven’t harvested very much. We all fell in love with electronics and we forgot optics, and that’s the first science that anybody really played with.
If you look back to Newton, that’s optics, not anything else.
Q – What would you say appeals to you more, engineering or entrepreneurship
A – You can’t take one away from the other.
I think without my engineering background, I would not be the entrepreneur I am, and without the entrepreneurship, I wouldn’t be the engineer I am.
Both separately ask you to solve problems quickly and efficiently; together they’re a really good combination.
I find, as a CEO who has an engineering background, that I can solve different basic problems of the company faster than if I was just an entrepreneur without the engineering background.
That being said, I think engineering needed to be augmented with a couple of things, like doing my MBA at Laurier and some pain and suffering as I was growing up in the company.
You make a lot of mistakes as engineer because you think in such mathematical and structured ways that certain things blindside you.
There’s the standard line, ‘Build-a-better-mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door’ to buy that mousetrap. I fell for that as well, and it took a long time to kind of regroup and see that sales and marketing and PR and networking and all of these things are actually a very important part of the business.
Q – So building a better mousetrap is just the start?
A – It’s an important start, but it’s not the only thing you need to have in business, and I’m lucky enough that the business survived for me to realize that.
Q – Here’s a question that’s on a lot of people’s minds, and one people will expect me to ask you. Why do you think there are there so few female tech entrepreneurs?
A – Ah, the elephant in the room.
Well, I think I’ve been lucky in growing up that I never felt any different from my brother.
I think women seem to be a little bit more cautious about how they do things. The family aspect is important, and I think it is difficult to balance the two.
I choose not to have kids right now; it’s a personal choice. I don’t think it’s one that everybody can make.
Could I handle both? Probably, but it’s certainly easier making that choice.
What worries me is that, when I was going through engineering, the proportion of women was growing; not quickly, but it was happening.
Now, from what I hear, it’s dropping. Why is that? Do we not appear something special to society? Do we not appear something special to ourselves? I have no idea, but it is disconcerting.
It’s a hard question to answer.
We’re smart, we work hard, and I don’t know. It’s not that the opportunities aren’t there. I never really felt super-discriminated against.
Yes, you hear some people say some stupid things, but I’m pretty certain that my male counterparts also get to hear stupid things from the people around them.
I think we just aren’t exposed, maybe, to that many women who succeed.
Who are my role models? You look maybe at Xerox, which was led by two very strong women, but that’s about it.
You look at the top 500 companies and most of them are led by men, so I don’t think we have too many people to look up to.
I’ve been lucky; I think growing up in Canada, being supported by my parents, growing up now as opposed to some other time in history, I think it’s very doable and very possible.
But, I think people still have that stigma, that it’s scary and that’s not what women do; women have safe careers.
That’s not a very eloquent answer. I wish I knew what it was.
Q – A tech company, especially these days, can pretty much locate wherever it wants. Why is yours in Waterloo?
A – We kind of fell to Waterloo because that’s where my parents lived. You start a company and don’t really think about where it started. My parents were here, my brother moved here and we were in Waterloo.
But why I am staying is, I see that the community is really great around here.
As immigrants, we didn’t really have the network, but Waterloo is a place where you can build that network of supporters and friends, what I call my extended family, and it really makes a huge difference.
You come to Communitech and you see how much work they’ve done to help companies, and you see the entrepreneurship centre at Laurier, you see the MBET at Waterloo. All of these things make a really neat community.
For me, that’s important. It’s nice to belong somewhere, and I think it would be very difficult to move out to pursue greener pastures somewhere else, because I am a member of the community now and I enjoy that feeling of belonging.
Now, the fact that we have really brilliant people, good engineering schools and we’re in driving distance to the airport doesn’t work against us, either.
Q – How has your position on Communitech’s board affected your view of the tech ecosystem in Waterloo Region?
A – I’m just very new on the board, but [the ecosystem is] vibrant and it’s really here to stay, I think.
What I’ve seen in the past is that a lot of programs sponsored by the government tend to kind of be great and then ebb and become not so great, and what I see here is, everybody in the community is working really hard to make sure that this community has a chance and will be here for another several decades.
It’s not just a passing fad.
There’s more of us than one would think if we just think of RIM and a couple of startups in the Accelerator Centre. There are a lot of companies outside of the Hub, the Accelerator Centre and the big names that we all know, and that’s incredible.
