(thoughtful music)
-: I'm Haley Noelle, I'm the CEO of 3D-OPS.
I have a bachelor's degree
in cellular and molecular biology.
At the beginning, I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur.
I was just a female scientist,
which in itself had its own challenges.
Still very much a male-dominated world.
One of the things that VentureWell has really helped with is
this company's only going to work
if people trust and believe in you.
Realizing that I believed in this company,
which means I also need to believe in myself.
Becoming a female entrepreneur
gave me a confidence that I didn't have prior.
Yeah, I'm a female CEO of a healthcare startup
at the age of 23.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
It's insane.
16.5 million Americans each year
suffer from severe tissue injuries
that require invasive surgeries.
But what if there was a better solution?
What if we could glue our loved ones back together?
Currently, glues can be split into two major categories.
You've super glues, which are mechanically strong
but not biocompatible.
And surgical glues,
which while being biologically friendly, are extremely weak.
This means that there's a gap in the market.
And this is our mission.
We are trying to create the first
biologically friendly and mechanically strong glue,
and we're doing it with spider silk.
Why spider silk?
It's 20 times more adhesive than Gorilla Glue.
Seven times more elastic than spandex.
And five times stronger than steel.
No manmade material has comparable properties.
But there's a catch.
I don't think many of us want to spend our weekends
running around the woods collecting spiderwebs with a stick.
So instead, our team designed Ariadne 1.0.
A novel method for creating spider silk adhesives.
By using a 3D printer that we've modified,
we are able to create nature's wonder material.
We found out about E-Teams.
There was the Stage 1 application, and we got in.
That was kind of exciting
because it was the first major award we had gotten,
and I don't think we really knew what to expect originally.
Going to Atlanta,
that was one of the most important experiences
that we've had.
Being surrounded by peers who were
going through exactly what we were going through,
or maybe had already gone through
what we were going through at that moment
and had experience in it,
as well as being surrounded by these mentors and advisors
who genuinely cared about the success
of what you were doing.
And the amount of female mentors,
they've been able to look at me and go,
"No, you don't apologize.
No, you stand up for yourself.
No, you say, yes, I can do this."
To have this group of women
who are not only raising you up and supporting you
but giving you opportunities that you didn't know existed.
The Qualcomm Innovator Stipend was incredibly helpful.
One of the first things that we did
with actually some of that funding
was go up to our surgical partners and say,
"We have funding, what studies do we need
for you to be fully on board with this?"
And they said, "All right, let's do it."
So we're now getting funding
from these massive surgical organizations.
It's no longer a question about what my qualifications are
to their qualifications.
And so I think that Innovator Stipend as well as VentureWell
in terms of really helping us be strategic
with how we put that money out,
and recognizing the fact of, "Hey,
you need to recognize your weaknesses
and you need to make them your strengths."
(uplifting music)