From my previous life I knew a lot about metal-organic chemical deposition and it occurred to me it might be possible, by tweaking the process, to use it to create graphene. Five weeks later we had more or less done it.
It took another six months to get it to a high enough quality but the approach was there from the start.
So you decided to found a company? That still wasn't on my radar. Colin was the one who suggested we patent the technique. This was 2015. Graphene had been around since 2004 and patents were being filed and papers published at a faster rate than for any other technology.
We did think about publishing our results but there was so much noise around graphene at the time we thought our work would get lost. So we decided to go down the patent route instead.
Colin had previously created a company to commercialise gallium nitride on silicon so he had some experience of patenting a technology and could see how it might work.
