Jeffery: Welcome to the supporters fund ask an investor I’m your host Jeffery potvin let’s please welcome Steve tokarz today general manager General and managing partner at cantilever investors fund LP as our investor for today welcome Steve it’s a real pleasure and honor having you join us today.

Steve: Hey same JP good to be here

Jeffery: Super excited today Steve I know I probably see this about every guest that I get the opportunity to talk with but today you kind of bring this whole different element to the investing side and maybe that’s just because on our show we get to speak to a lot of different people all over the world but you kind of bring this really cool element of that biosciences and I know this is a real tough space and it’s a long game play so I’m dying to dive in and learn a bit more about your background and talk about all the great things that you’ve accomplished throughout your time and of course the time you’ve been spending in the last few years working and operating in the early stage space but maybe to kick things off the way we like to kind of start things turn it over to you if you could share a little bit about your background all the way back to your University of Michigan Michigan days um your MBA all the way up all the great CEO jobs and the businesses you’ve built and then a little bit about what you’re doing today and of course one thing about you that nobody would know

Steve: Hahaha well interestingly I’m not a bioscience life science kind of guy I actually my degree is in engineering physics is the bioscience call guys call me I’m the hardware guy you know the guy used to pound metal but um you know I grew up in Chicago I’m a Midwest person and then you know I came to Michigan to go to school here and the reason I ended up getting an engineering Physics degree is not because I’m smart but because ultimately I really saw in the 1980s what was starting to happen I mean when I started at the college I was carrying Punch Cards to the Mainframe Michigan had the biggest Mainframe next to University of Washington we know what Gates did with that Mainframe but I was literally carrying Punch Cards to the Mainframe at a time I finished my senior design project we were doing CAD cam where literally taking the early CAD programs you had to use a calculator to get things to work on the screen and making functional prototypes and that’s when I realized you know this whole Business Development this whole product development regime it was in a whole Revolution the convergence of events that were happening then were exciting and you know by getting that degree it gave me a tremendous amount of flexibility to do a lot of different things so when I started at Lincoln Electric you know we reinvented the product line there the president of the company then said he wanted to you know change every every product the company had sold over the last you know 50 years within the next five years I mean think about it businesses were were taking five to ten years to launch products launch new business units today if Starbucks doesn’t have a new coffee cup and a new product line they’re out of business and we got to enjoy the cusp of how that grew but fast forward and I ended up working for Masco Corporation after that and Masco was tracking you know 14 billion dollars in sales and I got to move into the project management side but that’s what really moved me toward Business Development Innovation development working with you know Tech Scout up and then moving into the finance side of life to kind of round things up and Masco at one point we created an internally funded Venture Capital group called Innovation Grant where literally we’d have you know our operating companies petition that and we created businesses inside the business so a few folks hear this but I was what we would call an intrapreneur the person inside the large corporation fighting Technologies building business units around it and we would literally recreate our operations when we launched these new core products you know for the divisions I work with and then across the platform we had a plumbing products platform we had a building products platform masco’s Delta faucets beard paints at one point it had a mill guard there was a mascul Canada there’s a Masco Europe it’s a big company but they go by the brands not necessarily the corporate name but um as all folks it was great to be there until it was time to leave and that’s when I started my first companies and you know when I was at Moscow we were finding great great business opportunities that Masco for rightful purposes had no business supporting like we found LED lighting in 2003 when Creed was just starting to come out we saw the Advent the 3D printing and what could happen there in rapid prototyping and then we saw Wireless and batteryless technology that co