Steer your own ship

Viktor Suturin and Alisa Suturin
Founders Aliform

After years of prototyping, testing and preparing for market, Aliform has entered a new phase: commercial growth. For founders Victor Suturin and Alisa Suturin, that also means learning to do something that does not come naturally after years of solving problems themselves: letting go. Because the mindset that helped them build the company — taking control, learning fast and finding their own way forward — now has to make room for something else: trusting others to help them scale.

“It is a cool phase,” Victor says. “After years of approvals, prototyping and pilot testing, we are now scaling commercially, moving into manufacturing and building out our sales team. The work is far from done. Scaling brings a whole new set of challenges. But it is exciting to see years of work turning into a product that can help people in the market.”

Go with the flow

Getting there has been anything but a straight line. The first idea originated in Australia, where Victor and his father, a plastic surgeon, developed the rough concept behind the product. From there, Victor and Alisa moved to Germany for the early R&D, took an opportunity in the US during the pandemic and eventually landed in Maastricht after an investment opportunity brought them to Limburg. “Part of our philosophy is that we go with the flow,” Alisa says. Victor immediately qualifies that. “That does not mean we don’t plan. We are planning all the time. The problem is that your plan is going to be destroyed a thousand times over. You have to keep tweaking it, and sometimes you must make drastic and risky moves to deal with a situation.”

Don’t wait for Santa Claus

One of those situations arose after they received an investment from Brightlands Venture Partners to produce their first batch in the Netherlands. A manufacturer was responsible for a critical part of the device. But after that company was acquired, they were told it would take six months to get the parts. For a young company watching its cash run down, that was not an option. “If we had just gone along with that, we would have run out of money and gone bankrupt,” Victor says. “So we put our brains together and figured out how to produce that part ourselves. With the right testing and equipment set-up, we made it in exactly three days of production instead of six months.”

The lesson has stayed with him. “Sometimes you have to be brave enough to solve your own problems and not hope for Santa Claus to solve them for you. People may technically be able to help you, but do they have the will and the time? If they don’t, especially in the early stages, you really want to be able to do it yourself.” That mentality has shaped the way Victor and Alisa have built the company. They learned how to prototype before bringing in specialists, produced before working with larger contract manufacturers and spoke directly with surgeons before building out a sales team. “Our autonomy has been of big value since the beginning,” Victor says. “We never accepted being blind to something. That came with a lot of work, discomfort and learning new skills. But you learn enough to recognise problems and recognise talent, and then you can build accordingly for the future.” His favourite metaphor is appropriately hands-on. “Great things can be achieved when you steer your own ship. And then repair it, build a bigger one and train your own team.”

From player to conductor

Paradoxically, the skills that helped them get this far can also make the next phase harder. Their time has become the scarce resource, as they remain involved in sales and production while managing a growing team.
“The biggest change is prioritising where we really have to spend our time,” Alisa says. “You must allow yourself to delegate or decide what needs to be done now and what can wait until tomorrow or next week.”
Letting go has taken practice. “In the beginning, it often felt easier to do everything ourselves,” she says. “But there is another side: you only have 24 hours. At some point, there needs to be somebody trained and ready to take things over.” And that means accepting that someone else may do things differently. “The realisation is that it is okay to give something away, and that it may be performed differently than you would have done it,” Alisa says. “It can still be a good solution.”
Victor describes the transition as moving from being a musician to conducting the orchestra. A founder still sometimes needs to step back in and play but cannot remain in every role indefinitely. “If you want to go fast, you go alone, and if you want to go far, you go with a group. But that group needs training, a changing mindset and care. That is the difficult part.”

A playpen next to the desk

There is another member of their travelling party who has become surprisingly familiar with startup life. Victor and Alisa are married and have a one-year-old son, Leon. His playpen stands next to them at the office.
“He went to his first conference in London when he was four weeks old,” Alisa says. Since then, Leon has joined them at conferences, clinics, sales pitches and investor meetings. “When I was pregnant, we really did not know how it would work. But actually, having a startup together gives us flexibility. We can put the playpen next to us and take him travelling. It takes more preparation, but it is possible.” Victor laughs that Leon has become “a professional traveller”. 

Sometimes there is a baby bed at the office and Leon sleeps there while his parents finish working. “In the end, we are happy with how it is,” Alisa says. “We can shape the life we want.”“But that freedom comes with a high cost,” Victor adds. “There is no safety net. There are no excuses and there is no one to blame or complain to. Just us. Our investors trusted us with their money, and surgeons use our product to deliver value to patients. When it works, it is really exciting. But when times are tough, they are really tough.”

Working across time zones makes that balance even harder. As the working day ends in Maastricht, surgeons in the US are often just becoming available. “You have spent the whole Dutch day at the office, it is time to go to bed, and all the surgeons come out of surgery and start texting and calling,” Victor says. “Do you take that call at three in the morning and destroy your sleeping pattern again, or do you risk the customer relationship?”
Learning to say ‘not available’ has been difficult, but necessary. Sometimes that means directing someone to a salesperson or simply saying it will have to wait until tomorrow. “You have to learn to let go,” Victor says. “Otherwise, you will eat yourself alive.”

Perfect soil

Their path to Limburg was partly pragmatic, but Victor and Alisa quickly found other reasons to stay: the international environment, startup support, ability to recruit talent and the network around the Brightlands Health Campus. LIOF has since also come on board as an investor and support partner, while funding through programmes such as OPZuid has helped them develop further. 

What they particularly value is how the network around them has grown. Over time, more people became familiar with the company through talks and events, and connections started leading to new connections. “You never know where it will lead, but there is a lot of networking happening and people are actively trying to help,” Alisa says. Victor puts it more visually. “When people think of a place for medical innovation, they think of Boston or Silicon Valley. But if we were a seed floating across different continents, we landed in the perfect soil here. It allowed us to grow and sprout internationally.” “We are big fans of the region and the ecosystem,” Alisa adds.

Worth it

For all the milestones that come with building a company, some moments carry more weight than others. For Victor, one of those happened recently on his birthday, while he was in Montreal for a surgical case. “It went really well, and to be honest, I could not have wished for a better present,” he says. The patient had researched the technology beforehand and found videos of Victor and Alisa talking about it. When she came out of anaesthesia, she recognised him. “She was happy. If we helped fix her abdominal adhesions after God knows how many attempts she had already had, for me personally, that makes it worthwhile.”

Beyond sustainability

For Lidia and Almos, the ambition goes beyond simply replacing one material with a more sustainable alternative. They see a broader problem in the continued use of plastics and chemicals, including the microplastics that end up in the environment. But they also know that sustainability alone will not convince industries to switch materials. “When we buy materials that are sustainable, we often find that they have their faults,” Almos says. “There can be compromises on performance. What excites me is eliminating that trade-off, not having to choose between sustainability and performance. If we can do that with the material and technology we have, we can bring much wider change to the materials industry.”

That is where Lidia sees particular potential in biotechnology. “Biotech as a tool has already been very successful in many industries. Using it for materials is very exciting. We already see how many different properties we can engineer into it, and there is always room to optimise. We have very promising data showing that we can beat commercial materials. That’s exciting to us: biotechnology can become a way of making materials that perform better than some of the materials we use today.” “And we’re being smarter about how we make them,” Almos adds. For Lidia, that is an essential part of what makes the technology sustainable. “It’s not only about the composition of the material, but also about how we produce it and how we feed our microbes. Instead of using petroleumbased inputs, can we use waste streams and turn them into high-performance materials that outperform materials made from petroleum? That’s a really cool thing to do. It’s nature’s superpower, in a way.” Almos takes that idea back to a basic principle. “Waste is inherently a man-made concept. It doesn’t exist in nature or biology. Bringing that principle into industry, and the idea of eliminating waste, is something we’re really excited about.”