Michael Edelman’s 3 Biggest Moves in Building Global Businesses

00:00 Michael: My job is to build the best possible team. And I do that by hiring people who are a lot better than me and a lot smarter than me into roles that are clearly defined. And then I stay out of their way. My job is really about knocking down barriers for them and ensuring they have as much road to run as possible. And then don’t try and hold them back. Try and let them fly. Let them rip.

00:37 Joe: Welcome to the Next Moves. My name is Joe Diabaldo and for the past 25 years I’ve been helping people build careers and build amazing companies. The truth I’ve learned is that we all get stuck at different times. And I want to help you get unstuck, plan your next move, and the move after that. I think the best way to do that is to look at the choices that some of our guests had in front of them and the moves that they made. My guest today is Michael Edelman. Michael, I want to take it back to the beginning and ask you what it was like growing up in Los Angeles and what shaped your early interests.

01:10 Michael: As you said, grew up in LA, went to Boston for college, then from there to graduate school in the UK — predominantly to take a year off between finishing college and supposedly going to medical school. As the oldest son of an immigrant family, medical school was something I was supposed to do. I was not convinced, which is why I kept moving further and further east from home. And ultimately I fell into a lab at the University of Sussex on the south coast of England that had some very well-known chemists. I really enjoyed my work. I originally went thinking I would work for a couple months, make money, then go travel until I ran out of money, then redo. The professor said the work was fine — you could skip the travel. But I loved the work. I just loved being in the lab and what really caught my imagination was being a chemical cook — getting away from the theoretical parts of chemistry and really rolling your sleeves up, getting on the bench and making things. In the lab we were working with highly pyrophoric, very difficult chemistry and I just absolutely loved it. But when I finished my PhD in 1989, you’re at a crossroads. You need to decide whether you want to go into academia or into industry. Academia would mean going on to a post-doc. I was absolutely not interested in that. I always knew I was interested in business. I didn’t know why. I had no reference for business, but I was just excited about the idea of it. So I went and started my career in the UK at ICI — Imperial Chemical Industries — one of the top five chemical companies in the world at the time. I started really in research at ICI in 1989, but immediately put my head above the parapet and said “look, I joined here because you said I could move into any area I want” — onto the commercial side. I really bugged them and bugged them, and finally they offered me a way onto the commercial side, which was to join a division that was being spun out through a management buyout by a US-led private equity firm. I left in ’91 and was given an opportunity by the CEO of that company to move from a technical role into a fully commercial role, which was quite unusual. But I had to do it from the ground up. So I literally started in 1991 on the sales desk selling chemicals over the phone for six months. I learned the basics of the industry, the basics of the business, and then after six months went out on the road with direct accounts selling, and eventually was a territory manager looking after the Nordic area — Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark — which for a young man was pretty exciting.

04:10 Michael: Absolutely beautiful places. And remember this, Joe — this was before you had a cell phone, an iPhone that told you where to go. You had things called maps and there was no real internet. You had to call help lines. I’ll never forget the day I had to go from Manchester, England to a client meeting in Malmö on the south coast of Sweden. I was so excited that I actually made it to the customer. I forget the customer, I forget what we did — but the fact that I just made it there with nothing but an address, I thought was quite amazing. I flew to Copenhagen, rented a car, drove up to the coast, got on a ferry, went across, drove down, and ended up at the customer’s. That’s sort of how I started my career. From really humble commercial beginnings, learning the basics of the industry, getting paid very very little, but given an opportunity to grow. I was really acting as a sponge, learning as much as I could, traveling as aggressively as I could. Eventually moved up in that business to where in ’96 I was running two of their five business units and participated in an IPO of that company on the London Stock Exchange, which was exciting. Got my taste for making a little bit of money through equity. Then decided it was time — the company was still pretty new, had been bought in this division taken out from ICI, we had successfully restructured it to the point where we could float it on the stock exchange. But I was as senior as I was going to get for a young man. I was offered a job outside the company as a main board commercial director of another private equity-backed chemical company — a plastics compounder called Colorite — where we were making color concentrator masterbatch. I joined as a main board director responsible for commercial activity in a turnaround situation. It was exciting but difficult. We were in northwest England, it was a heavily unionized shop. I came in as the naive young American full of excitement — ready to pump people up, let’s go, trying to change things — and I was getting the windows broken on my car and all sorts of fun stuff. I did that for three years. We did turn it around, but it was difficult. It did give me some perspective on heavily unionized environments.

06:53 Joe: Michael, can I ask a question? There are a couple of inflection points. You’ve come from a family of immigrants and moving into a profession feels like the thing that everyone wants you to do. Your father was a surgeon, your mom was a lawyer. And it’s almost as though — what is this idea called business? I had the same challenge, which is no one knows what it is. What was the fascination with business and how did you manage that — as strange as it sounds — with your parents, to explain to them “this is what I want to do”?

07:22 Michael: It’s a really good question. I don’t know where it came from but it was something inside me that I just felt I needed to explore. When I look back at the path I took, the classes I took in college, they were all aimed at getting me to medical school and into that profession. If I did it again, I wouldn’t do that. I would take things like economics and all the business stuff. But I don’t regret it at all because it gives you a framework for thinking and breaking problems down. My 35-year commercial career has all been in advanced materials, semiconductor materials, chemistry related. So although I’m not an expert in anything, I can ask a lot of stupid questions which ultimately make some sense, and I can understand generally what’s going on in the businesses I operate in. But to your point about my parents — they just had no reference. They were always like “look, you’ve got to be your own boss, the whole idea of working for a corporation seems crazy, you need to control your future.” They just didn’t get it. There was no one in business in the family. So it was scary.

08:46 Joe: I look at this and I think about — you’ve had this moment where you’re selling your parents on one thing, or at least telling them what you’re going to do. And then the next one is you’re selling someone on the idea that you want to move from the technical side into commercialization. Was that second transition a multi-month process or were you able to explain “here’s why I should be here and this is what I want”? How did you actually get that transition, because it’s not something you see as often as you’d expect when people become experts in a domain.

09:14 Michael: I knew I wanted to make the transition the moment I accepted the job. I had applied to two jobs — one at Unilever and one at ICI. I got both jobs and the reason I went with ICI was they offered me a route. They basically said “look, you’re going to be a graduate on our FastTrack program, you can go anywhere you want.” So I literally joined, sat in, and said “okay, I now want to transfer out.” And this was in the UK in 1989-1990. The country had fallen into a big recession. Those promises made were not promises kept at the time. The senior folks said “whoa, hang on, we’re cutting people, just be patient.” And I’m not — you’ve known me for a little while — I’m not the most patient person. So I literally knew I wanted to move. I knew I didn’t want to be in R&D. I joined this company because they offered me a move.

10:18 Joe: So you’ve actually taken a crack at building a marketplace for intellectual property as well. I actually want to run through some of these accomplishments because they’re impressive. What was that business — in a brief description, what would you call it?

10:31 Michael: It was literally a marketplace for intellectual property — exactly what you say. We created a market where mainly large corporations could buy and sell confidential intellectual property in a safe way. The business was called yet2.com and it was premised on the fact that if you look at corporations across the world who spend billions and billions of dollars a year on R&D, the majority of that R&D does not get commercialized. It sits on the shelf. And technology has a time value component — meaning it’s not like a fine wine that improves with time, it decreases in value over time. Typically an organization’s majority of revenue will come from 10% of their innovation, 10% of their IP whether they bought it in or invented it themselves. So the other 90% sits on the shelf and ages. Can you imagine a business where if you could start licensing that technology and getting additional revenue — and by the way, that revenue you’ve already invested in, it drops straight to the bottom line as essentially 99% profit margin? You look at some of the big businesses that are successful — Qualcomm is all about licensing revenue, Philips in the Netherlands built a tremendous model on licensing revenue. The problem is that companies don’t know how to connect and make non-intuitive connections. Ford doesn’t need a company to introduce them to GM or to Stellantis — they know each other. But Ford maybe needs somebody to help get them into Roche Pharmaceuticals out of Basel, Switzerland. They just speak a different language. So how can you create a common language and a platform that allows these companies to connect and in a non-competitive way solve each other’s problems and make a bit of money? That was the exciting part. We did that in 1999 and I was instrumental in selling that business at Christmas 2002, and then exited with the sale.

12:56 Joe: So you moved from there — is it Nanoco? Is that how I say it?

13:00 Michael: Well, in between yet2.com and Nanoco, I was consulting for a company called Exatec, which was a GE-Bayer joint venture. I was taking all the licensing skills I’d learned in the previous company and using them to help this company buy out GE’s polycarbonate processing technology — which was a lot of fun. And then I was introduced to my co-founder at Nanoco by some VCs who were interested in investing but were looking for someone to help the technical guy run the business. That was end of 2004. I joined my partner at the time, Nigel Pickett, who was the co-founder and CTO.

13:45 Joe: So Michael, you’ve had a partnership in your life where you worked directly — you were a co-founder with someone else. You built this company and effectively the output is everywhere around us with Samsung in their QLED technology. So what’s the story of Nanoco and how did this partnership get formed? I’m curious why it worked.

14:06 Michael: Nanoco — I was introduced to Nigel Pickett who is the CTO of Nanoco. He and I were introduced by some VCs who were interested in the company. They were interested in him and his technology. He had tried to raise money, had not been successful. I liked him personally and I was excited about the technology. This was 2004 and we really had no idea what the technology was going to be used for. Basically you could create these fluorescent semiconductors that create very bright, monochromatic — very pure — red, green, yellow, orange, blue, purple light, and you can infinitely tune the shade of light. A small amount of energy in gave you a very bright light back. And I thought, well, I don’t know what we’re going to use this for, but my gut tells me this could be really valuable, this could be really interesting. So I joined in September 2004 and the deal was I wasn’t going to draw a salary until we raised money. We set up the company and the deal I had with Nigel was he was just going to focus on the technology — that’s it, get the tech to work — and I would do everything else. I would make sure he got paid, people got paid, we had a place to do the science. That was our deal until I left. He stayed focused on what he was brilliant at and I stayed focused on building the business based on his brilliant technology. He delivered in spades and we were able to take this platform of technology and take it to Asia and build relationships with the largest tech companies in the world, including Samsung, who we started working with in around 2006. They started incorporating our technology in the next generation TVs which were finally launched in 2015 at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. By then we knew we had something. We had done a huge licensing deal with Dow Chemical because when you’re a little company you have to figure out how to scale up, and scaling can be very challenging — many companies fall over. The other challenge as a little company dealing with a big company is that big companies don’t like dealing with little companies all that much. There’s a lot of risk involved. Your balance sheet is weak and if they’re going to develop a whole new multi-billion dollar product range based on your technology, it’s risky for them because you could fall over. So rather than scale up ourselves, we chose to license our technology to Dow out of the US. Dow spent many tens of millions of dollars building a facility in South Korea next to Samsung, who were the main customer. Through this period we were growing rapidly. We IPO’d in London — actually twice. Once into the junior exchange, then in 2015 we flipped up to the main FTSE where you go through the process again. But the technology was successful really to the point where Samsung ended up not buying from us or Dow, but spent a lot of time reverse engineering what we had done and ended up making the technology and the materials themselves. Much to our disappointment, because we and Dow had in good faith built these facilities to supply Samsung and others. Where we ended up was in 2019 — actually at end of ’19, early ’20 — we were in advanced discussions with Samsung to sell them the company. We had term sheets in and then COVID hit. Samsung pulled out in early February 2020. I remember telling them — “look, if you don’t buy us, we’re going to sue you for patent infringement.” They pulled out and on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2020, we sued them in the Eastern District of Texas for patent infringement. These lawsuits are very expensive and they knew we didn’t have the money on our own balance sheet. I went out and raised some specialty litigation finance out of Chicago — a specialist firm there. That case took about four years before it was resolved. It resolved eight hours before we went to court. It was settled and they ended up writing us a check for $150 million.

18:50 Joe: It’s incredible.

18:58 Michael: Which sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But we would have made a lot more money if we had done business. And $150 million to Samsung is a bit of a speeding ticket.

19:10 Joe: And they now have a multi-billion dollar business — the whole QLED TV range is based on the Nanoco technology.

19:18 Michael: Um, but really after the lawsuit — I stepped down at the end of 2020 as CEO of Nanoco, stepped off the board, stayed on as a special adviser to see that lawsuit through — my baby through to the end. And then once that was settled, I left Nanoco fully in early 2021. I took over at a next generation solid-state lithium-ion battery company based in Boston called Ionic Materials, which was a Kleiner Perkins funded — John Doerr himself funded — entity. It was a bit of an exciting ride which we ended up selling part and closing the other part down in the middle of last year, June 2024. And then I joined Polar in November 2024. That’s where I am now.

20:17 Joe: So when you look at this lesson — in Nanoco you’re going through a partnership that works, with a promise to make sure people get paid and that there’s a place to do the science. When you look at your partner, they are the individual driving the science and you’re driving all the other elements of the business. It must have been something special to get that kind of traction. You must have seen “okay, this technology has application.” How does it go from that moment of “this has application somewhere” to suddenly being utilized by Samsung? How does that journey happen and how do you actually get the connections going to create that opportunity?

21:03 Michael: A lot of hard work and a lot of shoe leather — really getting out into the market and talking to as many companies who might be interested as possible, and really listening hard and learning from them. These companies all have tremendously smart people who really understand the potential applications much better than you do. So being able to get in there, learn from them, present as much data as possible, being as data-driven as possible — you’re actually bringing information and facts to them, listening, and exploring possible ways that these can be used. That’s how we did it. We really traveled very hard. I was in Japan probably two weeks a month for a couple of years — just going around, listening, getting material into the hands of these people, seeing how we can improve and see how it works. It was really very much about getting out into the market. You can’t do it from your office.

21:52 Joe: So when I talk to you about where you are now with Polar Performance Materials, this feels like the next step in terms of leveraging all those skills you just talked about. What is this business you’re in right now, what is its opportunity, and how is it borrowing from each of these moments?

22:07 Michael: I’m so excited to be at Polar. It was unexpected — I wasn’t specifically looking for another full operator role. But the business has tremendous potential. It’s in an area that I know well — semiconductor materials. We bring something that’s unique. We have this white powder, this alumina, which goes in to make ceramic parts which go into the tools to make high-end or advanced node semiconductor chips. We’re effectively a tier three supplier to someone like TSMC or Samsung. We supply to a ceramic part maker who then supplies to Lam Research, Applied Materials, or Tokyo Electron, who then build our material and parts into their tools which then get sold — these etch and deposition tools — to TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Micron, and others. It’s really data-driven technical selling. But my first six months in the company was really around restructuring Polar and building the base out — whether it’s head of HR, who you know well Joe, Marietta, new head of finance, head of quality. With that in place, it’s now allowed me to become much more externally focused. I’m now working closely with our sales execs. We’ve got two folks in the US who are very very technical, a full-time person in Japan, another one in Korea, and we’re hiring now in Taiwan. I’m spending a lot more time out in the market talking to all the big current and potential customers and seeing how we can do deals. It’s exciting. People like the product. We’re in the process of doing advanced engineering to create a new factory which is four times the size, which we hope to bring online in the second half of ’27. The future is very bright and I’m excited. I’m having a ton of fun. I love the people I’m working with — which is half of it. We laugh a lot and when you’re building something and you enjoy working with the folks, it just doesn’t feel like work. It’s fun.

24:21 Joe: What did you see? You looked at the business and saw there was something special there. Was it the science at that point? Was it just understanding a market and the opportunity presented by what Polar could produce?

24:36 Michael: I think it was an understanding that they had a unique way of producing alumina — very different from everyone else in the world. They make this ultra-high purity what we would call 5N — 99.999% pure — and they make that out of the gate, where other people make less pure alumina and then clean it up. If we want to get into less pure, we have to make ours dirty. That was one really interesting thing. The other more macro trend is that chips and semiconductors continue to advance — the performance continues to go up, and that’s really driven by the line width on silicon. We’re now commercially down to 1.8 nanometers, TSMC is now working at 1.4 nanometers — that’s 14 angstroms, that’s about 18 atoms wide. The macro trend as you get to higher performance, more advanced node chips, is that every material going in needs to be purer and purer. My gut again said that having something that was hugely pure was going to be very beneficial — trending in the same direction as the industry. What’s turned out is that in addition to purity, there are a number of other significant benefits that our material has to the industry that we’re just discovering. By going and talking to the customers, listening to them, and hearing how they’re using our product — in a lot of ways they’re teaching us. And that’s really important to be open to. We’re at the beginning of the journey. We’re scaling and growing rapidly, we’re now about 70 people, and it’s really exciting. I’m traveling a lot, maybe more than I would hope, but that will settle down. We have a head office up in Oakville, Ontario, and I love going up there — it’s hanging out with some really cool people.

26:36 Joe: So I look at people that are performers and they have these inputs that keep them sane. What are the things that keep you sane in your life? What do you need to do all the time? What keeps you happy?

26:48 Michael: One guess — as you look over my left shoulder. I’m obsessed with skiing. Skiing keeps me sane. The winter season is far too short for me. I’m a lifelong skier, I ski as much as I can in the winter. I’m also a lifelong sailor, but I’ve sort of hung up the sailing in favor of skiing. I’m anxiously awaiting end of October, early November when we can get back out there. That really does keep me sane. And then I spend a lot of time staying in shape so I can ski without getting injured.

27:22 Joe: It’s interesting what you’re talking about — something that people don’t do enough of. You’re hearing more about prehab as opposed to rehab. If you prehabilitate, you actually structure your body so that it can take the pounding. And as you age — I’m going through it — more and more of it becomes about prehab so that you can avoid the rehab afterwards.

27:45 Michael: It’s absolutely right, Joe. If you look at any professional athlete in whatever sport — what you don’t see when you’re watching them compete or play is the amount of prehab work. I had never heard the prehab word before, but that’s a good word. The amount of work they put in, the amount of off-season work they put in to prepare their body — whether it’s a one-minute slalom race or an NBA basketball game — it’s tremendous. And we all watch it and think “oh, we can just go out and do it” and we get hurt. Staying in shape and strengthening what needs to be strengthened does prevent you from getting injured.

28:31 Joe: I remember — I was actually exercising in the condo gym I lived in and there was a CEO I’d seen there a few times, knowing that he had had a couple of successful exits of software companies. He had a trainer there and he was bringing his team in to train them in the condo building with him all the time. I said “why do you do this?” And he said “it saved my life” — literally saved my life because of how much he was working and how imbalanced he was. Probably 35 years old. And he said without this he would struggle to function. I think it’s just becoming more — people call it the corporate athlete sometimes, which I think is a bad term. It’s really just trying to find the inputs that keep you going well and making sure you get them, especially when you have the kind of schedule that you have.

29:18 Michael: I think there’s another factor as well — people who are CEOs, people who are driven to do stuff, like yourself Joe, probably have in some way addictive personalities which allow you to work beyond normal working practices. Putting in 60, 70, 80 hour weeks is not unusual and not something you think is strange, but it is strange to a lot of people. And that requires sort of a weird mental thing. In my case, I can get addicted to work — I love it, I like doing it, I can do it all the time. To the point where I’d be traveling around Asia and think “oh, it’s perfect, I can’t sleep, so I can almost work 24 hours a day, this is great.” But that’s work thinking. What exercise does is allow you to re-center yourself a little bit and rechannel yourself. At least it does for me.

30:26 Joe: It does. I’m going to ask you one last question. You obsess about teams — you’re a very intense person to negotiate with in the best possible way and you actually look for the win-win. But you obsess about teams. You’ve built these teams repeatedly and done it under a lot of pressure. If you had to distill what you’ve learned into a principle for building these companies — which are really just teams of teams — what’s the principle you would share?

30:56 Michael: It’s a really good question and I’m glad you asked because the team is fundamental to any success. My job as CEO of Polar is to build the best possible team. And I do that by hiring people who are a lot better than me and a lot smarter than me into roles that are clearly defined. And then I stay out of their way. My job is really about knocking down barriers for them and ensuring they have as much road to run as possible. That’s it — hire people who are way better than you, way smarter than you, and then don’t try and hold them back. Try and let them fly, let them rip. That’s where the magic happens. I remember when I just started at Polar — we were going through the reorganization, and in my head I knew what we needed to do, but it’s only me with two hands. And then Marietta comes in and she just starts ripping. And then all of a sudden you get that almost network effect that you get in software, and you get to a point where now the company — I don’t need to be involved in the day-to-day minutia of company operations. I can now focus on investors, on major customers, and moving us forward. But the team — all of my successes are based on team. And I often call myself the chief unblocker. My job is to come in and unblock.

32:36 Joe: Amazing, Michael. This was fun.

32:40 Michael: I appreciate you inviting me to do this. All the best.