The winner of last year’s Governor’s Business Plan Contest, SixLine Semiconductor’s Katy Jinkins, says her approach to tech challenges is to “fail fast” and frequently as part of the innovation process.
Jinkins, the Middleton-based startup company’s CEO, co-founder and co-inventor, was a featured speaker during a recent Wisconsin Technology Council luncheon in Wauwatosa.
“I know it’s going to not work for a long time, but you have to have fast iteration cycles, and you have to find that next path,” she said last week. “You might keep failing and failing and failing, but eventually you’ll find that route forward. And that’s served me well so far, and that’s what we’re continuing to do at SixLine.”
The Middleton-based company is developing advanced electronics components based on “carbon nanotubes,” microscopic structures that are 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. It officially launched in 2022 after Jinkins began working with these materials during her PhD at UW-Madison, exploring their “really extraordinary” electrical properties, she said.
“That’s what SixLine is based around, is replacing the current materials that are used in your cellphones and in your other electronics with our material, carbon nanotubes, for faster performance, as well as lower energy usage, larger bandwidth … and at a lower cost,” she said.
Jinkins said the potential for larger bandwidth is useful for in-demand AI applications, as it can enable large-scale data processing for machine learning software. She emphasized the importance of patenting this technology, underlining the potential impact of her company’s solution.
“When this technology is fully commercialized and fully developed, the impact is going to be so big that I just didn’t want to give that to someone else to take my IP that I had developed and take it on that path,” she said. “As the co-inventor of the technology, the person who is maybe most familiar with it, I just felt like I had the broad picture and the narrow vision of, this is where we’re going and this is how we’re going to get there.”
Still, she said she benefited from being “a little bit blind” to earlier failures in the field, noting some entrepreneurs can get caught up in the complications of previous failed attempts and subsequently discouraged.
“I knew that it was a problem, and I knew that other people had attempted it, but I don’t think I knew all of the details,” she said. “And so that ignorance helped me a little bit.”
She also discussed how the Tech Council’s Governor’s Business Plan Contest helped her refine the business and learn how to present it to others, while connecting her to Wisconsin’s startup ecosystem and investors.
“So really bringing that network together throughout the business plan, and then getting the feedback from either judges or other people in the community was really, really valuable,” she said.
The winner of this year’s BPC will be announced next month at the Tech Council’s Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference. It’s being held at the Italian Community Center in Milwaukee June 5-6.
See more from last week’s event, coverage of last year’s contest and another story on the company.
