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Fortify
Fortify CEO Lawrence Ganti.
“I would consider myself an outsider,” new Fortify CEO Lawrence Ganti says, as he looks around his first additive manufacturing trade show en route to a diner at the back of the hall.
Surrounded by hundreds of exhibitors across four halls, Formnext was the optimum place to develop a first impression of an industry, with no prejudices, preconceptions or presuppositions.
“It’s interesting, coming to a show, you get to see how the industry portrays itself,” Ganti begins, with little prompt, as he settles into his seat. “For me, it’s a little bit of a surprise, because they focus on the how not the what. What do I mean by that? You walk in, everybody shows these massive printers, wonderful printers, and this is what we’re doing. And people are like, ‘well, what are you making?’ It’s an industry that has focused very much on the printer rather than the application.”
Ganti continues, drawing a comparison with the internet bubble of the late nineties/early noughties where he held a role at instant messaging company Odigo, which was acquired by Comverse Technology. Here, he perceived the industry was focused more on the technology, less so the application, which contributed to a crash in the market.
“The companies that survived are the ones that focused on the customers.”
From Comverse Technologies, Ganti entered the healthcare space, where he joined Merck and held a range of roles that saw him lead divisions in Japan, India and Brazil. His final role at the company was as CEO and President of Merck Latin America, where he had full P&L responsibilities for 1 billion USD revenues and worked with 2,500 employees across two manufacturing sites and distribution centres. Since Merck, Ganti has worked as CEO of Software as a Service company Innoplexus and President of SiO2 Material Science.
At Si02 Material Science, Ganti helped to grow the company from 90 employees and one manufacturing plant to 520 employees and four manufacturing sites. Revenues grew from 1.5m USD to 60 million USD. The company also played a role in the US Government’s Operation Warp Speed COVID response, where Ganti and his team secured more than 250 million USD in grant funding.
I got a call to say, ‘hey, would you be interested in talking to this 3D printing company?’ I said, ‘no, I'm not interested in making prototypes.’
Operation Warp Speed was a public-private initiative for the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics. SiO2 aligned with the US’ COVID response efforts to ramp up the production capacity of its patented glass-like vial applicable to drugs and vaccines. This involvement with Operation Warp Speed was a significant step for Si02 as a company and Ganti as a business leader.
“When it comes to scaling a company, it’s not just about building a sales team to scale, but it’s also saying, ‘what’s important for the customer’ to prove that you go from small to large,” Ganti says of the learnings garnered from SiO2’s participation in Operation Warp Speed. “A lot of it is around testing, a lot of it is quality control, a lot of that is around data and data analytics.”
Though Ganti learned a lot from his time at Sio2, he didn’t expect he would soon be applying such know-how in the additive manufacturing space.
“I got a call to say, ‘hey, would you be interested in talking to this 3D printing company?’ I said, ‘no.’ I didn’t ask which company, I said, ‘no.’ They said, ‘why?’ I said, ‘I’m not interested in making prototypes.’”
Eventually, he was convinced to talk to a company that ‘has this interesting technology that takes them away from prototypes and moves them much closer to industrial application.’ In October, Ganti assumed the role of CEO of Fortify, enticed by the company’s background in materials and its existing play in markets such as RF and electronics.
“What was interesting [to me] is that the company started as a materials company. They focused on materials: 'how do you bring photopolymers to market? Here are the negatives of photopolymers, how do you fill that gap?' And then it went to eventually saying, 'what was the most elegant way to make parts and make usable parts using the optimised material?'
“Additive manufacturing ended up being part of it. That was interesting to me because I have a more material science background, and that’s where we’re taking the company, is [being] application focused, narrower focus. We might be able to do 100 things [but] we’re never going to be able to do 100 things wonderfully.”
Therein lies a couple of other things Ganti has learned from his extensive business leadership experience: Focus is key, and learning when to say no is paramount.
“Some of my research [around 3D printing] was on the websites of these large additive manufacturing companies and they’re serving every vertical you can imagine,” Ganti says. “If you’re growing for an outside view for investors to make it look sexy, then what you want is you want a large TAM: total addressable market. Therefore, you make it as big as possible. I don’t take that approach. For us, we’re not doing that. We’re saying, ‘we know the market we’re going after is large, we’re actually going to narrow that, [be] much more focused on the RF and electronic space, and try to provide value to our customers in that space.' Once we do that right, and we’re comfortable, then we can move onto the next potential vertical.”
The initial focus on RF and electronics, per Ganti, is not only because there are ongoing projects with Fortify and customers in that space, but the Boston-based firm also sees it as an industry with many challenges that need addressing and sees itself as the one to provide the solutions. Ganti notes that through its endeavours in RF and electronics, Fortify is targeting the commercial rollout of 5G, autonomous sensing, autonomous drones, missile guidance, AV and AR.
With this narrow focus, Ganti believes he will be able to better maintain his customer-centred philosophy.
“I don’t have any preconceived notions of what the industry should look like, because I don’t come from this space,” he says. “It’s not that I’m criticising the space, but I don’t have any bad habits from the space. I’ve seen how it worked in other areas and I understand the challenge. Everybody from a particular space is always going to say that their space is unique. I mean, technology yes, but it’s also very important to have the base understanding and also to say, ‘what is the focus?’ I’ve been very customer focused, to the point where some of my first meetings of the company have been meeting with customers, understanding what are the problems and what are the challenges that they’re facing?”
As he and the Fortify team bids to address those customer challenges, Ganti notes that talent procurement and talent development will be key to the mission. The company is based in Boston, MA where, even if just directly recruiting for additive manufacturing-specific talent, the competition is rife.
At Fortify, there’s no arrogance. There’s a lot of confidence, we know what we’re doing, but arrogance is not part of our DNA.
Recruiting and then integrating that talent will depend first on the company’s messaging – “what we want to be, what we want to do.” – and then on the culture embedded within the company. As Ganti assumed the role of CEO at Fortify with a view to accelerating growth, it meant co-founder Joshua Martin was shifted to Chief Product Officer - but Ganti is keen to emphasise that he has responsibilities that relate to both of those roles.
“Josh has two roles,” Ganti says of the new dynamic. “Josh is one of the founders, so what I view the founders’ role is to ensure the integrity of the culture and ensure that the vision is there. How to accomplish those maybe is no longer his responsibility as an operator, but what he’s good at, and what’s always been good at, is the product side of things. And we look at the product end-to-end. If you look at the vision of what he came up with, what the team was, it was all materials based. He’ll maintain that, but now he’ll be able to take a more strategic focus on that and help the organisation to look from an end-to-end perspective on end-product and look at that from a product pipeline perspective or product strategic perspective.”
End-to-end is a compound word that keeps coming up. Ganti concedes that before entering the additive manufacturing industry, his feel for what the technology was used for was limited to prototyping, unaware of the gradually increasing application for end-use parts. What he couldn’t put his finger on though, even from the outside, was why more weren't using it in industrial settings.
“I didn’t know why people weren’t using it for industrial application,” Ganti says, “at the time, from an outsider. As I’ve gotten to know [the industry], what I’m understanding is that it’s a lot of companies not taking an end-to-end approach. You need the application element, you need the design components, you need the materials component, and then you need the system. And if you don’t integrate [them], it becomes very difficult. If you look at the vendors, you have a lot who are doing wonderful things in each: material providers, you have software providers, you have printer providers, and they all work together, but they’re not designed together. They’re not built end-to-end together. And I think that’s part of some of the challenges that we will see.”
Within that landscape, Fortify is on a mission to grow and do so while practising what it preaches. Ganti identifies his expertise in scaling companies, taking them from one size to a bigger size. But every company is different, and every industry in which they operate has its nuances too, so what’s the formula?
“Partnerships,” he says emphatically. “For us, there’s no way we can grow at the speed we want to grow and there’s no way we can take advantage of our technology by doing it alone. One of the great elements of the culture at Fortify, there’s no arrogance. There’s a lot of confidence, we know what we’re doing, but arrogance is not part of our DNA. So, we want to work with the right partners. We have something called Flux Developer, which effectively takes our technology to an open source to say, ‘hey, open it up.’ Anyone who wants to work with us, we could work with you, here’s the toolkit of how to use your materials and bring your materials to market, given the technology that we’re bringing. I think going to market and growing is going to be a lot about that. It’s about focus and it’s about partnering. [They’re] the two key areas.”
