Click here for Part I & Part II

An entrepreneur innovating in engineering, defense, and mobile technology

Warren Citrin is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Fractograf. For more than 20 years, Warren has played an integral role in Maryland’s startup community. In addition to Fractograf, he has founded several companies, including Redox Power Systems, Alchemee, Solipsys Corporation, and Gloto Corp. Through his business ventures, Warren has been involved in diverse industries such as cybersecurity, engineering, and mobile technology. He also spent 18 years as an assistant supervisor of the Engineering Analysis Group at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and holds patents in multiple fields. In 2003, Warren won Ernst & Young’s Maryland Entrepreneur of the Year award.

EDWIN WARFIELD: How did you work at Solipsys and Gloto lead to Fractograf?

WARREN CITRIN: Google, Facebook, and Snapchat are a lot of big guys and they try to break through and frequently don’t. For every one thing that Facebook puts out there that works, 20 things don’t. They are the holders of all the information in the world and so I’m not sure that it’s a science. I think it’s more of an art. You can learn some lessons: Simplicity is absolutely required. People aren’t going to take the time to learn your product—they owe you nothing. You need to make this thing as self-evident as possible, both in terms of what it gives you as well as how you use it, and that’s becoming more and more so as technology has taken over and people want to do less and less to use that technology.

Mashable has a list that they put out—it’s called “7 can’t miss apps.” We woke up to see our numbers spike for that first day, and we finally found out that they had actually selected us to be in that list, which was a wonderful thing. You always like to see a spike, and to get feedback from the users and that was the other nice thing was reading the comments. There were some good suggestions about watermarking, other things that could be done with the product, but by and large it was very positive feedback for us and so we read all that and we take it in and we try to improve the product based on that.

For many years I’ve been on the the Board of Visitors of the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, a fabulous operation with lots of excellent research. I put together a small seed fund that I was and have been funding for a number of years. I also funded four fellowships for graduates to do various aspects of research in a number of different fields, and I’ve actually been involved in the creation of a company out there to commercialize University of Maryland research in advanced fuel cell systems. That’s a longer term thing and, again, research to product is a very long road, especially for something as complicated as fuel cell systems. So, I’ve been involved in a number of entrepreneurial activities at the University of Maryland as well as other universities.

Most people who get involved in entrepreneurship want to do some social good. Yes, you want to make fun apps, they’re frivolous but they do lead to things that can, in fact, be helpful to society. Things like potable water are going to become an ever increasing problem, and so to have students looking at other methods, lower energy methods of creating drinkable water so that people out of Sudan and Michigan have drinkable water, is something that we’re starting to think about now because that’s going to become an increasing problem. So, the whole idea of the pre-seed fund and of the sustainability fellowships were to try to address social challenges. It’s going to take a lot more than that and there are many of those funds around the country that are involved and looking into those big issues.

You are going to see particularly with climate change: droughts are going to become enormous, there are going to be hundreds of millions of refugees around the world looking for water. A lot of the conflicts you see around the world today are already due to water shortages and water right developments and that’s only going to get worse. Reverse osmosis and other techniques like that are very energy costly and so there need to be ways of doing these things smarter. I’m sure the Gates Foundation has put effort in that as do others but that’s going to be the thing. You can live without oil but you’re not going to make it very far without water. I’m sure there are a number of entrepreneurs that can appreciate this. Once you have a success and you have a little bit of financial wherewithal, it buys you the freedom to explore various things, and there’s no question—all you have to do is stand on subway platform and look at what everyone’s doing: they’re all looking at their smartphone.

Connect with Warren on LinkedIn

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