“My bias was UV because of it demonstrated efficacy,” Wade says.Īfter briefly considering on-demand disinfection, they quickly shifted their idea to building-and selling-the ultraviolet devices themselves at a price that would work for restaurants, hotels and schools. He had, notably, written the protocol for decontamination of the Diamond Princess ship after its Covid-19 outbreak. At 76, Wade, who has a PhD in environmental health sciences from the University of Michigan, had worked in public health for decades, and, among other roles, had been the VP of environmental health at cruise lines Princess and Norwegian. He and Morgan had connected over a potential partnership for iCracked technicians to repair DJI drones that never panned out.įor scientific credibility, they connected with Richard Wade, a toxicology expert (and father of an iCracked employee) who came on as the company’s chief scientist. For a decade, he lived in China, working at drone company DJI in Shenzhen and then cofounding battery startup EcoFlow in 2016. His parents had spent many years overseas-his mother on ashrams in India, his father in Kenya-and he studied Mandarin in college at Amherst. Harris, who is 29 and a Forbes Under 30 alum, had an unconventional upbringing on a shared property in Santa Barbara.
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Their third-cofounder, Harris, had experience making hardware and knew how to sell. Boyer would bring the connections and strategy, Morgan the leadership. It was venture capitalist, Boyer, 46, cofounder of Tenaya Capital, who had the original germ of an idea to use ultraviolet light to fight Covid. It’s ineffective, it’s unsustainable, it’s dangerous and it’s labor intensive.” “The traditional chemical disinfection industry is highly inefficient. “I don’t have an off switch,” Morgan says.
When Allstate acquired iCracked in February 2019, he stayed just six months before going to another startup. It also reinforced his preference for startups over big companies. “That was a really empowering thing for me early on in my career.” The dirty secret is no one knows what they are doing,” he says. “You look at people starting companies and you think there’s a formula. In high school, Morgan played drums in a jazz band (“We went to Europe and opened for Carlos Santana”), but opted to study mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic State University.Īfter a stint at Abbott and at a small medical device maker, he landed at iCracked in 2015 when his buddy AJ Forsythe, who’d started the company in his Cal Poly dorm, called. Morgan, 33, grew up in Folsom, California, the city made famous by Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” His father was an accountant his mother ran a small business that sold printing forms and then became a school administrator. It will be as ubiquitous as general lighting.” “I think this is going to be baked into every physical space. “I think we can come out of Covid and build a safer, healthier, new normal,” says Morgan.
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