It took a few months to get Kamal Patel scheduled for this interview.
He had a busy spring.
Patel finished up his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at the University at Buffalo while launching his company, Layer Slayers, with fellow recent UB grad Daunel Augustin. Layer Slayers earned second-place in UB’s highly competitive Panasci entrepreneurship competition.
Patel also spent the past year helping local investor Jack Greco write the Buffalo Bridge newsletter, a weekly summary of the happenings in Buffalo’s startup economy.
And on top of all that, Patel is working part-time for Tresca Design, the growing engineering firm run by Dan Buckmaster, who also started the company a few years ago as a UB student.
Both Augustin and Patel could have taken their degrees and started building careers inside somebody else’s business. But these are inherent builders – they want to get to work building their own thing.
“I could be putting in time to build a career but I’m not doing that,” Patel said. “I plan to learn a lot of skills and make some great friends, and that’s much more important to me than anything.”
Layer Slayers is being advised by Daniel Hutchinson, co-founder and chief technology officer at PostProcess Technologies, who is supporting the recent UB grads as they build out a specialized training firm for additive manufacturing. Layer Slayers will partner with companies who are thirsting for a skilled workforce in 3D printing and build training modules for their specific needs.
Right now Patel and Augustin are still finalizing their minimum viable product and clarifying which companies will be early adopters, helping them debug the software and make sure the training is effective.
But if all goes well, Layer Slayer will become a trusted partner in an industry where there currently are none. After all, hundreds of companies make 3D printing machines, which themselves can use hundreds of different materials, making the applications infinite.
It’s not the kind of industry where a generalized training curriculum is useful, Patel said. Leaning into that truth is a big business opportunity.
“Additive manufacturing is growing beyond belief, and it’s becoming a necessity for innovation” in industry, Patel said. “We think there’s going to be a day when companies only buy machines with Layer Slayers training."
Patel’s parents are natives of India but he was born in Maryland, then moved to Canada as a toddler. He lived there until about halfway through high school, when his family moved to Kenmore. He finished his secondary education at Kenmore West High School and applied to one place, UB.
Through different internships at different companies, Patel realized the importance of carefully curating his own professional pathway. The luxuries of a major corporation were nice in an ancillary way. His heart tugged in a different direction.
“I’m much happier in a startup situation where there is a camaraderie, a family and a tight knit group of people all working toward the same goal,” he said. “That ethos really important to me.”
Patel was a regular attendant to the Buffalo OpenCoffeeClub meetings that Greco helped organize monthly in downtown Buffalo, and started his own event for students at UB’s Amherst campus (before the Covid-19 pandemic stopped both programs).
Through that, he was enlisted to help Greco with Buffalo Bridge, giving him a key relationship with one of Buffalo’s most influential startup investors. Between Greco and Hutchinson, he’s developed quite a network for a recent grad.
Patel laughs for a moment when he recalls telling his parents that he was going to found a company instead of find a job. But as owners of several Subways, they had to acknowledge the move.
“They respect it,” he said. "They know the entrepreneurial spirit, the grind."
