Rawand grew up watching his father's passion for engineering. Despite avoiding the field at first, Rawand developed a similar passion for the craft.

Rawand is a Ph.D. candidate at the Rice University George R. Brown School of Engineering and has more than five years of experience at NASA, first as a graduate research fellow, then as a life support systems engineer. He shares his journey and the technology he helped create that puts fires out in space and will reduce air conditioning costs on Earth.

He sits down with host Maya Pomroy to talk about his experience of transitioning from engineer to entrepreneur, his company, Helix Earth Technologies, and how the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Napier Rice Launch Challenge ignited a new fire within him.

Owl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.

Episode Quotes:

Solving problems not only in space but also on earth

12:17 - I found out there's a whole bunch of different problems that we could solve on Earth. And one of them being that we could help solve air conditioning energy use problems. So, in human environments, especially in a place like Houston, 70% of the energy used in the air conditioning cycle is devoted to just pulling the humidity out of the air, not cooling the temperature. And so we found out that we could actually solve this problem with our filters and reduce the energy cost by more than 50%. I started pursuing this research and eventually was able to get involved with the innovation fellowship program at Liu Idea Lab for Entrepreneurship.

How Rice helped Rawand pursue entrepreneurship

15:08 - I've always been interested in entrepreneurship, so I've always had that vision to go and spin out and do my own thing, but it never became real until maybe a year and a half ago. A lot of it is because of Rice.

What’s the most essential part of a pitch?

20:43 - The most essential piece of a pitch there's a couple things. So the first thing is that you want to be very clear. You know, what is the problem that you're trying to tackle, and why does it matter? So for us, it's air conditioning; we want to save the planet, and that's a great thing to do, but also have to make it clear: why does it matter? And so, when you look at the amount of money that people spend on companies and just individuals or corporations, how much they spend on air conditioning energy costs, it's enormous. And so, when you put a $200 billion price tag in front of people's faces, that catches attention.The emissions that come with that are also enormous. So, you want to be very clear as to why the problem is big, why it needs to be solved, and why should people care? That's the biggest part of the pitch for me.

On what he learned from his start-up competition experience

15:52 - I was used to presenting things from a scientific perspective, where it's like, Okay, here are all the things we've done. (16:04) In the business planning competition, you have to throw all that out. You have to tell people a good story. You don't have to necessarily have all of the answers, which is one thing that was a little bit difficult for me. You have to have a good plan for how you're going to actually achieve the things that you set out to achieve.

Show Links:

• Helix Earth Technologies
• Transcript

Guest Profile:

• Rawand Rasheed | LinkedIn