- Christopher Schuh, a professor at MIT, wrote this letter recommending Glenn Sklar for his work as an electrochemist and engineer at the startup company Xtalic Corporation. - Glenn was the first technical employee hired at Xtalic and was critical in proving the company's technology and achieving key milestones to secure venture capital funding. - Glenn helped scale the electroplating process from the lab to an industrial scale, improved the stability and properties of the coatings, increased the corrosion resistance of coatings by 100 times through experimentation, and managed other employees. His work was essential in proving the viability of Xtalic's technology.

1. Christopher A. Schuh
Salapatas Associate Professor of Metallurgy
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 8-211
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307
Phone 617.452.2659
Fax 617.324.0053
Email schuh@mit.edu
http://schuh.mit.edu
August 31, 2009
To whom it may concern:
I write this letter at the request of Mr. Glenn Sklar, to offer my opinion of his talents and expertise as an
electrochemist, an engineer, and as a research and development scientist. I have known Glenn since late
2005, when he first interviewed for a position at Xtalic Corporation, an MIT startup company that aimed
to commercialize a new Ni-W electroplating process as a coating. As one of the founders of Xtalic, I
was closely involved in the hiring process that led to Glenn joining the team, and continued to be in
close contact with Glenn in his day-to-day work at Xtalic for the following year and a half or so. Over
that time, I came to appreciate Glenn as a fiery and creative R&D engineer with knowledge of both the
fundamental techniques of his discipline, as well as the practical issues associated with commercial
processes.
I would like begin by first speaking to the specific tasks that were expected of Glenn, and the context in
which he had to work. Glenn was hired as the first, key technical employee of Xtalic besides the
founders, in what would be called the “seed” stage of the company’s existence. The company had a
limited budget and a very tight timeline on which to hit key technical milestones in order to be viable for
follow-on equity investment. The company’s assets at the time were nothing more than a raw collection
of scientific intellectual property, a small lab, and some limited chemical and electrochemical
equipment. What is more, the company was founded not by chemists or electrochemists, but by
metallurgists, with only limited abilities in the area of electrochemical processing. Glenn was hired as
the key chemistry and plating engineering presence of the company’s early days, as a complement to the
existing metallurgical expertise of the founding team. Glenn was to essentially direct the technical effort
of the company to achieve its milestones. This included (i) providing key input on hiring additional
complementary staff and helping manage their research efforts, (ii) providing guiding input on building
the laboratory infrastructure to a form suitable for routine electrochemical process development, (iii)
moving the deposition technology from the laboratory scale (~1 liter) to a proof-of-concept industrial
scale (~100 liters), (iv) improving the process reproducibility and stability, (v) evoking improved
properties of the coatings, including luster and chemical corrosion resistance. In what follows, I will
provide more detail on these issues, and elucidate some specific accomplishments of Glenn’s; in short,
Glenn’s effort on these milestones was critical to proving the technology, lowering the technical risk of
the company, and rendering the company viable for a series A venture capital investment.
In the earliest days of Xtalic, Glenn was of considerable importance in setting the pace and tone of the
company’s technical effort. He helped identify and acquire the proper laboratory equipment needed to
commercialize the technology, developed a path to scale the technology, and quickly demonstrated that
the basic chemistry of the process could be brought to a tank size commensurate with the small end of
what is common in industry. He worked on the Ni-W chemistry in a holistic way, by first reading the
scientific and engineering literature extremely thoroughly (back into the 1940’s), and identifying key
issues for the product. He reproduced old works, iterated through new experiments rapidly, and quickly
found improvements on the prior art. He set the critical parameters defining the deposition bath,
including the levels of metals and complexing agents, and developed the first paradigms of stable bath
operation over extended periods of time. He also developed a new suite of additives for the bath,
including wetters, brighteners and levelers, which are critical to the formation of uniform coatings. The
development of a commercially viable base chemistry that could operate for an extended period of time

2. Christopher A. Schuh
Salapatas Associate Professor of Metallurgy
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 8-211
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307
Phone 617.452.2659
Fax 617.324.0053
Email schuh@mit.edu
http://schuh.mit.edu
was a key milestone for the company, and Glenn’s work on these chemical tasks led directly to its
achievement.
The other major technical achievement that Glenn was responsible for was to improve the properties of
Ni-W coatings. At the time of the company’s founding, we had recently discovered that the use of
reverse pulse current waveforms permitted us to change the microstructure of the deposited film. This
led to improvements in coating quality and mechanical properties. However, the films were still far
from commercially viable; they lacked sufficient corrosion protection properties, and also underwent
tarnish under acidic salt conditions. In order for the coating to be viable, especially as a decorative
finish, we felt quite strongly that it would need drastic improvements in these properties. Glenn was
tasked with exploring the possibility that the use of unique waveforms of pulsed and pulse reverse
current might affect these corrosion properties. Glenn performed hundreds of experiments, and, guided
by his experience and intuition, he meandered and iterated the coating deposition process until he had
demonstrated a 100X increase in the corrosion lifetime of the coating (!). This result was so staggering
a demonstration of the power of reverse pulse plating that it was a key deliverable for the subsequent
investment round. A number of perspective customers saw the improvements we had achieved through
Glenn’s work, and provided references that were critical to the continued funding of the company.
In parallel with these tasks, Glenn also was the key person responsible for processing samples for
technical interaction with customers. His work on customer samples showed great care and attention to
detail; successful plating of such samples required knowledge of chemistry and plating, but also fluid
flow control, surface cleaning and activation, and stripping (for the cases where multiple tries were
necessary to achieve success). Glenn also managed the activities of some additional workers, including
a technician and a co-op student, and did so effectively.
In the end, Glenn’s 1.5 year stay at Xtalic led to the filing of several key patents, on which Glenn was
listed as inventor. His technical work left a lasting legacy in the Xtalic product lines. Today, Xtalic has
about 25 employees and numerous customers that plate Ni-W routinely, for applications in functional
coatings and electronics, at full industrial capacity. Glenn made a substantial contribution to proving
our technology viable, and opening the door to our series A investment.
If you have any questions or would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours,
Christopher Schuh