EP. 02
Devotion to Human Performance
A HYROX world championship racer, a career chemist, and a rule he applies to both: small correct decisions, repeated, beat the big dramatic move.
Dr. Bill Bender
Chief Innovation Officer, Duravi
~27 minutes
Video first
About this episode
Bill Bender raced at the HYROX World Championship in Stockholm, the finish line of a partnership win and decades of training in triathlon before that. He’s also spent thirty years deciding which industrial technologies are worth backing, most recently placing that bet on Duravi. The episode turns on one line from the conversation: “Inside that, there’s a chemistry kid.” Endurance sport and industrial chemistry, he argues, reward the same thing: small, correct decisions added up over time, not the big dramatic move.
That same instinct is what shaped his formula for picking which innovations get backed and which don’t, will someone actually pay for it, and can the team really do what they say. It’s the test behind a career spent helping other people’s breakthroughs see the light, one bet at a time, and it’s exactly what led him to Duravi.
Episode structure
Two kinds of performance | 3 min
Bender’s HYROX World Championship run in Stockholm, the parallel he draws between endurance sport and industrial chemistry, joining Duravi and how its “does anybody care” test applies to solving industrial friction, and the early-career decision to leave bench chemistry for the business side of innovation.
Why AI changes the math | 16 min
Bender’s test for backing a new technology: will someone actually pay for it, and can the team really do what they say. His case for open innovation and “creative destruction,” and why he sees AI as the most powerful open-innovation tool yet – capable of surfacing connections a single expert or company would never find on their own, and turning a months-long research job into a two-hour one.
Changing the metal, not the coating | 3 min
How he ended up at Duravi, and what the technology actually does: changing the metal’s surface itself, not adding another coating on top of it. How the company holds up against his own test for backing something new.
The two he still talks about | 5 min
A cancer immunotherapy company that automates modifying a patient’s own T-cells to fight their specific cancer, and a focused-ultrasound device that treats tremor and addiction by targeting tiny regions of the brain. Bender explains what made both of them stick with him, then closes on how AI could compress the healthcare breakthroughs still to come.
Dr. Bill Bender | Guest
Chief Innovation Officer, Duravi
Bender has spent close to thirty years working across internal and external innovation roles at large enterprises, most recently leading technology investing and deployment at Koch.
Trained as a chemist, he built his career on commercializing other people’s science rather than doing bench work himself. He joined Duravi as Chief Innovation Officer, and competed at the HYROX World Championship level after decades in triathlon.
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