Walking Through ‘The Green Valley of Death’
Oct 12, 2021
6 min read
Tech industry vet Fariba Danesh reflects on 30+ years in the business of material science.
Written by Laura Beeston
Illustration by Allan Matias
Fariba Danesh could be considered a founding godmother of nLEDs. Paving a way for the tech in our hands, she was a CEO ahead of her time and a key figure in developing and commercializing the LED market. We are delighted that she shared her insights.
For Fariba Danesh, the nice thing about working in science and technology is that every breakthrough and product, at some point in the past, seemed unthinkable—until someone put their mind to it.
“What motivates me is that you do something that looked impossible when you started.”
From her experience, the early days of the LED business faced this particular challenge, involving a lot of trial and error.
In 2021, Nanosys acquired GLO AB, where Danesh was CEO for nine years. Spinning out from researchers building devices in Lund University, Sweden, GLO AB eventually developed LED devices made of nanowires.
“My joke with the gallium nitride is that [it] just builds character.”
Basically, she said, you have constant failure: Nothing will work for nine months at a time and her team would spend months looking at bad devices, surrounded by half-dead prototypes, which was miserable.
“And then, one day, the device works like a dream and is unbelievably good, efficient, useful and great... the thing is so bright and brilliant and perfect, you just think, ‘Oh my god.’
“Visually, you can see the light.”
Danesh swiftly changed the GLO AB strategy away from blue LEDs to green. Blue is the “mainstay of the industry”—and it was quickly becoming commoditized and heavily subsidized by China.
“It turns out, there is no material on Earth that’s a very efficient green emitter,” she explained.
“The industry has something they call ‘The Green Valley of Death,’ because there are some materials—aluminum, indium, gallium, phosphide—that are super efficient in red but the efficiency curve drops steeply as you go to lower wavelengths of green.”
“On the other side, gallium nitride is super efficient in blue. Really cold blue. Then the efficiency curve again drops steeply as the wavelength goes into The Green Valley of Death. [...] In the middle, there is no material that delivers a very efficient green.”
So Danesh worked on that for five years and created some of the best green LEDs on Earth using nanowire technology. And, along the way, they developed direct-emitting, three-color, super-small LEDs, now called a microLED display.
Then it took her two more years to figure out how to put them on a backplane.
Play the long game
Danesh said the difference between success and failure is whether or when you stop.
“If you can just keep pushing through when something is failing, eventually you can gain success,” she advised.
“It's not as black and white as people think it is. It’s just a question of time and place. My motto is: when things look bad, it’s okay. Just keep forging through it and you will eventually arrive at a better place.”
You just gotta forge through it.
“The hassle with nanowires,” Danesh continued, “is that they are three-dimensional devices, so you’re not just controlling all the parameters that typically people control to make LEDs. Take that to the power of three. So it’s not 3X but to the power of three.”
So the GLO AB team suffered through the complexities. For years.
“Basically, we went from making one device, to three devices, to integrating three devices. Normally at a startup you don’t want to bite off so much but it became unavoidable at the time… so that’s where we ended up.”
Displays, in general, are difficult technologies, admitted Danesh, acknowledging that, as CEO, she was quite ambitious and trying to make something big.
“Our mantra was: our technology is scalable to any size and resolution: from augmented reality, which are super small, super high-resolution to large and lower resolution displays like TV… The degree of difficulty that the scalable concept adds is astounding.”
She now observes the display market is doing the opposite of what they did at GLO AB back then: “The market has basically said, ‘This is too hard!’”
Today, each display player offers a different type of product from size display to augmented reality, she explained. “The market has now segmented itself.”
She also said GLO AB was five years ahead of the curve.
“I am super proud of what we did with a small team, on a shoestring [budget], honestly what we did is unbelievable. [Today the market is] spending 10 times the money and they don’t have 20 percent of what we had to show for it.
“Sometimes when you are ahead of the market it’s not helpful, they aren’t ready for it, won’t adopt or take it up.”
Her and her team had a tough go—although, to this day, they all remain close friends.
“You go through a bunch of trenches with each other, it makes for deep friendships. It’s like going to war.”
Danesh reflected that it might have been better to water down the offering and deliver on a smaller subset, “but you know, life is full of these things. I am the goddess of looking back and analysing what I should have done better. I can’t help myself.
“I’m also a stubborn person and thought, you know, we can’t say we’re going to do something and not deliver, so we just kept at it just trying to deliver the full promise.
“But the full promise turned out to be technically incredibly difficult.”
Find your market
Every segment of the tech market has its pros and cons. Often, it also has its era.
“I mean, It took the Japanese companies 15 years to bring LCDs to the market. OLEDs have taken 20 years and the might of Samsung to come into the market,” said Danesh.
“But every 20 years the display industry changes and there’s an inflection point and you can capitalize on it. So, you know. Now it’s the right time.”
Danesh thinks a combination of quantum dots and microLEDs will give Nanosys some additional market differentiation.
Nonetheless, she recalled the difficulties she encountered trying to raise money and find investors for GLO AB, trying to convince venture capitalists to believe in material sciences.
“I used to jokingly ask people: ‘How many more ways do you want to get a pizza to our door? How many apps, chatbots, etc., do we actually need as a human race?’
“Great, you are making money, I get it, but since you are already wealthy, are you accomplishing anything for society or humanity? And at that point, the answer is no. Investors focus on returns.
“We went through an era of near-zero interest in deep tech for, like, 10 years.”
Now, especially as COO at PsiQuantum, Danesh notices that a lot of venture capitalists have come to the realization that the world doesn’t move forward with software alone.
“There are enough high-net-worth individuals and investors now who are looking to [put their money into] something that actually makes a difference to society,” she said.
“They are putting money back into fundamental science and [technologies] that do take longer but have a meaningful impact. It’s nice to see that come back.”
Meritocracy will win
As for what’s next in science and tech, Danesh is convinced “[quantum computing] is a world changing technology. It’s very exciting work, technically super interesting and also something for the next gen,” she said.
“If you want to contribute, this is the kind of thing you gotta do.”
Believing that this world is, ultimately, a meritocracy, Danesh reflected that what makes a difference between those who are intelligent and those who are effective in STEM is the “ability to discern [and] put your finger on what’s important in order to get better results and be impactful.”
No matter what stage of career you’re in, discernment will give you opportunities to grow.
Looking all the way back to the beginning of her career, 30-plus years ago when she was a biochem student researching semiconductors, Danesh recalled advice from her first boss, who she said appreciated her energy and resourcefulness.
“There are two things you must always do,” he told her: “Follow through and care about the results. The rest doesn’t matter. And I think that’s really good advice.”