00:00:01 [Music] moving the needle on founder failure one conversation at a time i'm your host lucas poles and welcome to startup 2.0 by spark xyz join us each week as we give you access to some of the top investors and entrepreneurs around the country to help you think through and overcome some of the top challenges that start-ups i think there's no better place in the country to be investing than los angeles what is the problem that you're solving and for who like what is that specific pain point sometimes when a company is not

00:00:31 listening to its customers and just thinks it knows better than it customers has a really really hard time finding product market fit i want to see somebody that that isn't gonna stop you know this person you just feel like they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna make it work [Music] a big heartfelt thank you to brex who without their support this show would not be possible we've seen firsthand the difficulties accessing basic corporate credit without providing a security deposit or personal guarantee early on

00:01:04 as companies grow managing expenses has become more difficult and time consuming which is why we've partnered with brex to offer a corporate credit card that is not personally guaranteed offers higher credit limits provides auto reconciliation and integrates with erps using receipt capture brex is the credit card of the start ecosystem and we highly encourage you to check them out all right as people are filtering in we will get started uh wait this is going to go we're very fortunate to have a bunch of great panelists uh here to

00:01:35 talk about entrepreneurship in the university ecosystem and different components of it uh very excited to have all the panelists uh i will give my introduction at the end but i would love to have the panel start out uh going left to right on giving a self introduction on who they are david you are first on my screen so i will let you kick it off oh thank you i didn't know who was left on your screen [Laughter] but uh i'm glad to be here i'm david choi i'm professor of entrepreneurship at loyola marymount university in los

00:02:10 angeles um one of the things we brag about is that we're one of the first schools to have an entrepreneurship program in the us and you know it's one of the top-ranked programs in the country it's interesting that our our entrepreneurship major actually is one of the largest majors on campus and we're now about to have a master's program in entrepreneurship focus on sustainability starting uh next year we're planning for that we've had a tremendous success in developing entrepreneur leaders whether they go into startups or become

00:02:48 employees of large companies i think we've been we've been developing some really uh awful minded uh individuals i've been teaching for now that's my 18th year and it's been a lot of fun thank you awesome thanks david uh richard you're next on my screen hi so my name is richard i'm from a licensing adventures manager in oxford university innovation so my role is to identify work with academics researchers students and members of staff throughout the whole of the university of oxford to identify protective rip and then take

00:03:24 it forward either through licensing to an existing company or helping them to set up and to then support a spin-out company from the university of oxford uh i mean for context i think last year we started 20 companies raising like 855 million in funding and did about eight almost 900 deals nice uh it is hefty uh congrats on that uh steve you are next on my screen thanks lucas hi everyone um richard i'm also from oxford university innovation i sit on a different side of the fence i guess and i'm an investment manager

00:04:05 looking after the university's equity interests in its spin-out portfolio so we have about 150 active spin-outs i guess they've been formed over the last 20 or 30 years as richard said we spend out 20 or so new ones every year and we also manage a follow-on fund ourselves where we invest in some of our spin-outs and uh my background is in venture investing uh in australia and new zealand before i joined oxford a couple years ago i've also run entrepreneurial programs and a business incubator in the past as well

00:04:42 awesome thanks steve uh cyrus hi everyone um thank you for having me i'm cyrus johabi i'm a professor and chair of the computer science department at usc university of southern california in los angeles uh as far as entrepreneurship experience i i was a co-founder of two startups one acquired in 2012 another one in 2019 i've also been on various as an advisory member or scientific advisor member on various startups and i made the mistake of investing once uh in one of my my student startups uh i'm kidding of course that was that was

00:05:30 a great experience and as far as my research background my my main areas data science and ai and in particular my expertise in geospatial and location data analysis awesome thank you cyrus uh andrea hello everyone my name is andrea lipton and i work with harvard business publishing corporate learning and so just to position us in the ecosystem we are the non-profit subsidiary of the business school and so you probably know us best because we're the publishers of the harvard business review and the part of the world that i sit in

00:06:10 will bring a distinctly different perspective than my fellow panelists because in corporate learning we're looking at how do we actually work with corporations around the globe to develop their leaders and so we're focused a lot on how to drive innovation entrepreneurship within organizations and i've been with harvard business publishing for about a year and a half though i was on the client side in my years working in talent development and leadership development and organizations and i've also had the opportunity to

00:06:40 personally coach but i'm also an executive coach outside of my work with harvard business publishing a number of early stage startup founders so really excited to be here with everyone today awesome a big thank you to our panelists another big thank you to moonshot house who actually put this entirely together they're the community arm of creating new ventures it's a global virtual network for investors leaders creative minds in the last two months they've already brought on 250 executives into the exclusive network uh doing very

00:07:17 well and uh look forward to doing more of these events with them my name is lucas poles my background what i currently do now i do early stage investing in b2b sas companies under ambly capital i also run spark which is a platform management software for incubators and accelerators and previously before this i actually used to run an accelerator here in la additionally i was fortunate enough to work with noam wasserman on a case study about hybrid entrepreneurship and so i'm quite familiar with

00:07:54 some of the academic side though absolutely not as much as in-depth as everyone here uh as well as the investing side from an entrepreneurship standpoint by sitting on both sides of the table uh and so yeah we're going to kick it off um and one of the best places to kick it off is maybe a little venting uh so let's talk about uh some of the challenges uh that your uh your respective programs are currently facing uh whether it's covid whether it's uh coming together between the different disciplines uh

00:08:27 who would like to kick it off i see david on muted so i'm gonna call on you i'm just i'm just getting prepared but i'm a bad complainer but you know um i think uh if you look at the entrepreneurship faculty members you know we do teaching research like as any other faculty member and then we have to do mentoring advising companies and uh and so on so when additional curricular programs you know uh develop new programs you know all kinds of things so i guess that's my venting but in terms of day to day

00:09:09 uh i think this uh you know online teaching has made probably the teaching a little bit more difficult i mean we tell our students we keep them at the same level of uh you know standard we always demand of them and uh but uh i think some of the experiential components of teaching has become harder there's less you know natural casual learning from each other right so those are my uh the most obvious day-to-day struggles well i i think uh i can go next and uh first thing is that you should never ask

00:09:44 a chair of a department event uh because that that's gonna take like two hours so i'm i'm going to spare you uh and i'm not bent on on that aspect but um i guess uh i'll i'll maybe mention a little bit of a short-term challenge i see specifically with entrepreneurship or at least my observation at usc we had a number of programs at usc to help with entrepreneurship for students including competitions and uh having for example competitions that included actually workshops for example for the students to learn

00:10:20 about the business side of the thing if they're coming from computer science or engineering uh learn for example how to do a business to put together a business plan how to do customer analysis and so on and then also pair them with entrepreneurs and and folks from industry to help as mentors uh one challenge i see with the covet and everything being on zoom uh i i don't see these to be some of them were cancelled and some of them i don't see them as successful as before and uh this is i i would say

00:10:56 not unexpected because uh as you all know uh one of the major aspects of uh of entrepreneurship and putting together a startup is actually the whole networking and being able to talk to people and uh the zoom and online kind of doesn't make it the the most efficient uh and a lot of people including myself are kind of zoomed out so when they're asked to to attend various panels or talks uh uh usually the first the first response is that no sorry i'm too busy so it's even more difficult to find mentors

00:11:29 to help fit the students and so on uh so that's more of a short term or hopefully shorter or the current challenge uh a more kind of a broader challenge in general in academia for as far as entrepreneurship goes as uh the the issue of ip and uh the fact that uh every time we have a new ideas uh either us or the students this process of going through the intellectual property protection and so on through the university in order to uh get to the point that we can basically start a company and uh that has been always a

00:12:09 kind of delaying things and i think uh one at least in computer science i say i see one backdoor is basically uh doing most of our work and make it open source uh and then once once you get to uh the companies they can basically use the open source code uh the same as anybody else who can do it but uh of course the folks who developed the code originally has better understanding of how to utilize the code and how to uh expand it so uh that's i guess another aspect of the challenges totally understandable andrea please

00:12:50 i'll go next you know and take a slightly different i think it's a different direction of you know what i worry about right now is the relationship between the economic pressure that the the covenant and the pandemic is created globally on universities and what this will ultimately mean for all of our programs but especially those around entrepreneurship because there's inherent risk in it right we're entre our entrepreneurs are taking us to green pastures to new fields blue water right all of the models that

00:13:22 we've all read and talked about there and so at times like this where we're looking at asking questions like what's going to happen to our endowments will you know not having students on campus is impacting our revenue so how do we think about that how what will we choose to continue to fund um and then the logistics of actually how to run those programs in ways that are safe for all the participants and you know leverage technology to find different ways to create that incidental learning those moments of

00:13:52 inspiration that happen when i drop a pencil and then down to pick it up in the hallway at the office and look up and see something i've never seen before and how do we you know how do we factor all of those things in and make choices that aren't you know maybe as safe as we'd like them to be and predictable as we'd like them to be in highly uncertain times [Music] definitely interesting um a couple of questions that stemmed out of that just coming to my head but i'll let uh let richard and steve uh jump on it

00:14:24 maybe you want to address a little bit about what cyrus talked about especially because uh you guys work in the technology transfer space at a different university um and for anyone that doesn't understand what technology transfer is that universities and the academics end up creating uh ip specifically within the university and for universities to be able to tap into that maybe technology transfer office where they basically send the ip to then help either build teams or get licensed out with other companies though youtube will

00:15:00 probably be able to explain it better than i can yeah so we do as lucas just said in my experience if we have a new disclosure which is a patent-related for example generally speaking from first disclosure to filing it can be done in maybe two to three weeks so i don't think that's necessarily a huge barrier in terms of timelines particularly since that could be run in parallel with peer review process for publications for example which will usually take months not weeks for software there's substantially less

00:15:29 time in that i mean in my experience video is usually getting information together from the academic in terms of what have you created whatever third-party dependencies are there only reach reclaims from third party dependencies is there's something can be taken forward it it doesn't take that long the harder part is actually in terms of working out well given what you've got or on where we are what you actually want to do of it going forward and that's where the challenges come in if you're limited to working in team

00:15:57 in teams or zoom and we don't get the opportunity to have us in front in person meetings and a platform such as this for example it's great if you're having this kind of only one person's talking at a time but if you're in a room trying to troubleshoot what is it you want to do what is success how should we take this forward and trying to you know really drill down to what the value proposition is it's very difficult to do that in a platform such as this because you can't have those fortuitous parallel

00:16:24 conversations taking place where you can have one person's commentary and a useful or another contribution to another person then takes a conversational rule that everybody's been happy with it you just can't do you can't replicate that on an existing platform do you think you were anything to add yeah um i think i'd support richard says um i think as uh as a tech transfer office we're kind of used to being in the middle which means that everyone's got a reason to hate us um the university you know

00:16:56 we bri we bring the filthy commercialization world into an academic environment uh academics don't like us because we slow them down and stop them doing the right things that they want to do um and investors don't like us because we're just a an obstacle between them and the ip so um so we're kind of used to sitting in the middle there being uh being kicked around with everyone but having said that it's a fascinating place to be uh and um we've certainly seen a lot more activity over the last few months in this kobe

00:17:24 world uh a lot a lot more but but significantly more than we saw pretty so we didn't expect that to happen so so our challenge is it's just been uh traditionally in oxford it's been a very constrained environment through things like real estate strangely enough and now that constraint has kind of short-term disappeared because everything happens on zoom and we don't need to have physical spaces for teams as often but i guess longer term our real challenge is one of scaling up we think we have a very good early stage

00:18:00 pipeline so so oxford is a really strong university research-wise across the board so we have a lot of ip inventions happening four or five hundred every year we have a very good process of spinning those out into spin-outs we have some very engaged and committed seed series a investors around around us locally and we have strong connections into uh into global network but what we what we somehow lack is that kind of expansion into the very big companies from from the small ones that were good at starting

00:18:36 so so that's really how do we scale up what we do and and extend our capabilities further down the value chain if you like everyone talks about unicorns we've got uh one or two in oxford we love an order of magnitude more how do we start to build those really big companies around our ecosystem awesome thank you um just going off that point like what is your more typical model within the tech transfer office do you have more of a venture studio where you guys are actually putting the team together

00:19:06 to uh to create the actual startup or do you focus more on licensing to others and then doing fundraising on that standpoint we often find ourselves taking a lead from the founders themselves so we have some founders for example who's sufficiently well connected and prior experience of doing companies or they've come from industry have moved to university and what they want is some basically going down the uh do you have some connections to help us to maybe find some additional investors or maybe massaging slightly of a pitch

00:19:41 there may be given some additional reassurance or details around what is university process how do we get through university process whereas we have others who will come to us with an idea they think it makes sense but simply have no idea what else to do at which point we will then do everything up to a point the company spun out whatever is needed to help them to get to that stage we can also in fact we often do have people sitting on the boards of those companies to say one or two years afterwards to make sure

00:20:07 their support after base burnout as well so we don't just support up to point a license deal has been done we will then actively support that company afterwards awesome cool i want to jump back to something that cyrus had touched on uh which is the inability to have different types of co-founders connecting so from his perspective because he runs the viterbi which is the engineering school looking for business students to bring into their ventures it gets around towards the idea that especially universities

00:20:47 students or university students end up creating very homogeneous teams uh just because of how discipline or how siloed the different disciplines uh specifically are and that it's very difficult uh for them to jump back and forth and so i wanted to discuss maybe this challenge especially as we look at kobe right now because when you're right we're stuck on zoom it's very difficult to try to break down those barriers and maybe what are the solutions now and then even after when we have a vaccine we try to get back to

00:21:18 a little bit closer to normal uh well i think in oxford for oxford a variety of different ways which oxford specifically tries to break down barriers between different subject areas so for example the university is and has been for several hundred years a collegiate university so you don't apply to do ace we do apply to do a degree in a particular subject and you then obviously go through a degree program which is dedicated to that subject but you're also a part of the college and the college will include students

00:21:52 that span all subjects across the entirety of the university so you then have a specialization academically but you also have a broad network of individuals from across the university from variety of different subject areas through the collegiate-based system at graduate level you also find that you've got degree programs and default programs or phd programs where again you've got a doctoral training centers or centers of doctoral training that are groups of fiend subjects for those individuals who are on those

00:22:20 subjects to go through a variety of different university departments we also have a biomedical research centers which are specifically designed to force scientists engineers mathematicians and clinicians to work together on multi-disciplinary projects there are also a number of funding schemes which are provided by uk government and other sources in the uk that are specifically dedicated toward multi-disciplinary teams specific means uh multiple levels within the academic setup within our environment

00:22:50 individuals are being forced where possible to work across different seams to break down those silos clearly doesn't always happen you do often have people who are working on a subject with someone else who's an expert investor which now just focus on that particular subject area it doesn't always necessarily lead to multiplication but there are multiple instances about taking place we're also often find you have networking events i mean in oxford we have something else called a foundry which is specifically dedicated or is

00:23:19 actually run set up by the business school so messiah business school and is specifically focused on undergraduate students and this is where students who wish to be entrepreneurs or entrepreneurially uh inclined can go there can network and meet people who are similarly similar mindset but from across the entirety of university and they are being supported going for an accelerated program to start new companies i can also maybe comment on that so uh we have very similar programs that richard mentioned but

00:23:50 uh two uh kind of organic way that i see students get together and at least in in my case students from computer science and on a business school because usc does have actually a very good business school as well is uh that there are there are actually two ways one is that we have um uh these degree programs like for example uh our undergrad we have one undergrad degree called csba which is computer sciences administration and this is basically computer science students taking courses from business school and

00:24:24 that's where they they start becoming friends with business school students in in in their class and or business school students who take a minor in computer science for example and take computer science courses so that's one organic way that unfortunately they gain because of everything being online it's uh less of a opportunity for for students to meet in a class and and become friends so that uh i i can see that as a uh obstacle uh and the other organic way was basically uh students living in student housings and

00:25:03 dormitories and then they they organically come together i mean and they become friends and you suddenly see somebody from business school and somebody from art and somebody from computer science end up to be friends and they basically put their mind together and come up with an idea that has all the aspects and again unfortunately because of everything being online that opportunity is now also somehow injured so uh though i i mean the programs as richard said we try to put them together and try to

00:25:34 bring people together because of competitions or various things uh but the more organic natural way of uh students coming together from different disciplines unfortunately it's definitely slowed down because of the current situation sorry are u.s students at home or they actually on campus some of them uh but not i mean at least in the case of usc some of them still uh try to go and live around campus i mean student housing is not available so they cannot live on inside dormitories inside campus but they

00:26:10 can uh for example by themselves decide to live around campus and we have some of that uh but not they're definitely not going to classes on campus okay because that that's different to be uk if may add so there are a few things sorry andrea uh a few things we do uh cyrus mentioned uh you know because of kobe it's very difficult to beat so uh we've used a couple different online uh community uh programs where you can list what project you're working on your teammates are what kind of skills you might need okay

00:26:45 and then other people can list their strengths and their skill sets so we have a uh we used one platform we just changed and so we're trying to populate that and get that going we have specific uh co-curricular programs like startup weekend which brings in students from all different majors on one weekend 50 some hours to work together uh and then some of the few other things we did was like in our computer science program i think the intro class is open to every major so people can try it out and maybe they

00:27:20 don't like it but they get to know some computer science folks and then same with uh entrepreneurship we try to open it up as long as we have space for any major students can come in take a class and get to know the basics with the intention that they'll uh collaborate the future doesn't always work so we try whatever we can to increase that activity is going to jump in it is to highlight that for years on our campuses we've been using these interdisciplinary like still staying in our silos but saying

00:27:58 just like an organization you can reach over there and we'll do these interdisciplinary things and so you know might this pandemic be you know like the silver lining of the pandemic show us that frankly the disciplines have broken down in the real world but they haven't in our in our institutions right so we've been behind there's the the e-quad my father was a a computer science professor right there was that building and like he never knew any of the professors in other buildings and i remember noting this when i was

00:28:31 getting a campus tour from him and he's like i have no idea what that building is and he'd been there for 15 years um and so you know i invite us especially because we're talking about how this impacts entrepreneurs how do we take this moment and the shortcomings that we're seeing of the way that our institutions work in general and ask ourselves how do we lean into these entrepreneurial communities that we're already involved with and help rethink both for this moment and for the future because now we're

00:29:00 also looking forward and saying you know in 5 10 15 years our or our institutions are going to be flooded with students who spent a very formative year of their lives learning virtually together some of them all have had great experiences other of them will have very poor experiences you know and what does this moment mean for us it really could be a tremendous turning point or it could be something that we tolerate and then go back to what we've always done and it'll be interesting to see which of our organizations chooses kind

00:29:32 of the blue pill or the red pill you know my interaction with uh you know institutions in higher education if you you know i've worked at different i've interact with a few different ones but you know enjoy you're very optimistic and uh you know energetic you tell the administration hey you know our bureaucracy is a little too much it's not good to have so much bureaucracy they don't know what you're talking about they never learned that bureaucracy was bad they think you know what's wrong with good rules you know good form

00:30:10 formalities that's that's a that's how you know do you do things right right whereas in business we know the less the bureaucracy it's actually more efficient and more you know innovative that concept never resonated they never got that top in the university administration so is that is that a conversation that is actually happening at the universities right now like because we are forced to re-examine not just the value that universities are actually bringing students because they don't have the ability to

00:30:43 get on campus and go network and do majority of the the main value of going to university because i mean in essence half the things you learn in university you can learn on youtube at this point i feel like a lot of people are unfortunately learning that and so are the universities actually going through and rethinking like hey this is maybe a time to reset or are they so entrenched in their ways that they're like no we're just gonna we're gonna white knuckle this until we get out and then everything will be fine

00:31:12 after that i can chip in there lucas i think um it's kind easier to characterize universities as reasonably bureaucratic institutions and i think they are in many ways but um the flip side of that is that they've been around a very long time you know sort of um you know joker oxford that that we dusted off our protocols for covid from the bubonic plague in the 17th century you know we've kind of been through uh pandemics before and you know in all seriousness the universities have been around they're

00:31:44 not going anywhere they're very long-term institutions that have adapted over time and and i think you're seeing an enormous uh effort across all universities to adapt to this new world quite quite what that means i think it's a little bit too early to say long term but i think coming out of it there will be uh universities that capitalize well on that others that perhaps don't and that's going to be a source of uh competitive advantage if you like in the education market but certainly there's also awful lot of

00:32:13 things being tried and tested um and and time will tell uh which of those stick i i have actually um rather opposite view lookers than you're having that they can learn everything from youtube uh so uh one one up uh kind of observation um or at least let me start by this so one one um uh decision usc made uh in the past before the covey covet we i don't know if you guys know but usa has a very uh very good distance education network or what they call then it goes back to many many years ago and

00:32:54 it basically has these studios where we prepare uh the classes and so on and various ranking for the past several years always been number one at least in computer science uh that said uh there was a uh intentional decision of not offering then courses for our undergrad students so this this this education was only for uh graduate students and that exactly was because we thought that the undergrad students need to have the experience of actually being on campus and the experience of learning and

00:33:29 working with other students being actually a lot of the endowment in the past several years at usc was spent on building residential housing inside campus for the students to the point that for the first time a couple of years ago all our freshmen were getting uh cam inside campus housing uh using the the endowment that basically built the whole village on the north of campus and uh i think that was very successful and this this was actually a good decision now interestingly what this covet taught us

00:34:02 uh was that putting everybody on zoom which we ended up doing for our undergrad uh we said oh okay so i mean graduate students were doing that let's do that for undergrad it's probably not going to be a big difference it's been a big difference i mean i i told you at the beginning you should not get me started venting as a department chair but that's that's the problem i mean i'm getting complaints from students undergrad students especially freshmen uh you think computer science should be the easiest material to teach online

00:34:32 right because it is basically all coding and so on however uh they they are really suffering i mean it seems that it becomes more difficult not having that in-person collaborative uh uh work on homework assignments and and going to your friend uh next door asking questions and so on all that is missing uh and then this one-on-one and in-person interaction with the faculty uh during office hours and so on so i think in a sense actually the the covert experience showed and they really all want to go back

00:35:08 they they really want to come back to campus so discovered if anything actually showed the opposite that it seems that the university actually did have something that they were offering uh by creating this environment that the students can experience you know cyrus i'd love to jump on what you shared because um absolutely you know there's a presumption that content about technology is better delivered over technology than content over things like soft skills leadership development communication skills

00:35:38 and that's a that's a question mark for me especially given my background but i think that one of the things that we're seeing which really comes back to how do we enable one of the questions that we've received before this around how do we enable professors and and university um staff who have not been entrepreneurs themselves to really be accelerators of our entrepreneur community right are we setting our professors up some of you all up to be successful because right now i whether it's in grade school

00:36:12 uh my sister you know is an educator i have so many educators in my family and community and so many of them said nobody ever gave me even the beginning of a class i got maybe zoom basics of like how to use a room after a waiting room after people started getting zoom bombed and how to show my students how to raise their hands um and so i you know i wonder is this kind of a microcosm of some of that bigger tension that we've seen in our institutions around what we actually need ourselves so that

00:36:44 we can be the best uh you know the best uh you know agents of change for our entrepreneurial communities i'm curious what the rest of you think and sorry lucas i realized i just suddenly wrestled asking questions away from you without your permission please this is what we love i love inciting stuff and deep thought so yeah please cyrus did you all have like a crash course for professors who suddenly were going on zoom i'm i'm curious what happened yeah i didn't want to just uh monopolize the the

00:37:21 panel and they keep talking but sure since your house yes we do i mean there are many many uh training courses all the way from uh the mechanics of using zoom and so on uh also our its information technology services they they provided a lot of default kind of uh links for everybody so if i'm teaching a course we use blackboard for example it's automatically creates a zoom link for my course it automatically recorded the default is password protected so basically if i put with minimum effort i i

00:37:57 my course is set up uh so i i don't think that's at least i i don't feel that's an issue in our site and then we also have uh centers for excellent teaching that they're all now uh providing all sorts of hints and experiences on teaching on zoom and most importantly taking exam on zoom i mean that that's one of the main challenges uh so that we uh how to proctor exams online how various approaches to exams and so on so i mean that's that's a separate i would say uh set of challenges to to deal with the mechanics and and what's

00:38:33 the effective way of uh that but uh my point was that besides that this this in person and uh having other i mean having the other students around you so that they can help you uh i think that's what's missing that personal touch the experience even even for for technology uh topics as uh close to the to the online system that they're using like computer science they still need that extra personal communication and that's the experience that the universities uh or the the value at that the universities provide i agree

00:39:13 with everything cyrus said about you know the importance of coming back and stuff like that what i found interesting andrea is at my school we talked about offering education online years after years and we never could get get to it and then when coveted within a matter of a couple weeks everybody you know change their behavior and we crash learned and i think most of us are offering pretty good or awesome classes but i think going forward i think we're actually going to utilize this technology and the skill we learned

00:39:48 right so i think we'll probably have a little bit more online classes even though when most of my classes are going to be in person we're probably uh mix it up with some online sessions as well you know going forward so we'll try to use the best of both in the future awesome thanks for that guys um so i want to get richard and steve involved a little bit i want to go back to the uh the point they made earlier about uh kind of taking that next step with their ecosystems respectively so how do you

00:40:26 get more towards more unicorns so i want to talk a little bit about that and then finding out like what maybe are some of the steps that you are taking maybe what's on your wish list of things that you think should be taken in the future especially as technology transfer is very it's in very early stages uh for a lot of universities going forward and really tapping that power yeah um i think that's uh a long-term game essentially uh i mean oxford's first spin out was in 1959 and this year we did our

00:41:03 200 or something so it it takes a long time and we've done probably uh more in the last three years than we did in the previous 47 or whatever it is um so it's a it's a very long-term game and uh i think the secret for oxford has been to see this less as a transactional process of taking a piece of intellectual property and moving it through a commercialization process to an end point maybe a licensed deal or something like that and saying that we want to make an impact on the world with this piece of knowledge this invention

00:41:38 then we have to think about all the different players that need to be involved in that and bring all of those parties uh to the um to what we're now calling an ecosystem so you know it's the same that it takes a child a village to raise a child you you need uh for successful businesses you need uh you need the research you need the talent you need the investors the capital uh the physical infrastructure uh the place the connections the networks and all of those things need to come together so uh universities stand a very good chance

00:42:13 of being at the center of those sort of ecosystems to help those other things coalesce around them to create something which is a fantastic environment in which to grow a business so for us it's it's been about attracting investors into oxford attracting talent into oxford um and having it being seen as a fantastic place to grow a business and we've been very successful with uh oxford has one of the biggest or the world's biggest uh university venturing fund in town which has been a fantastic catalyst for for creating ventures

00:42:47 but we want to go beyond that bring more talent in bring teams in as well who've been through the process of creating a business going back in doing it again recycling their talent they capital their expertise so long-term gain but uh but um it can be achieved over time and i think just one of the triggers that's actually quite interesting for us at the moment is that we we're starting now to recycle cash back to the university from exits that have occurred within our spinout portfolio and that's a very

00:43:22 powerful signal back to the university this is um something that not only creates impact in the world but can actually be profitable as well and that fun that funding that goes back can be reinvested in more strategic areas of research to accelerate the flywheel if you like and create more so small steps and they all have to come together and then eventually the momentum starts to be built yeah so i think in a uk context for example the big push for doing tech transfer and related activities came from a shift in

00:43:53 government policy but suggested that your academic institutions will be assessed based on the impact of their research with impact being one of those metrics being companies started or licensed deals done some measurable relatively straightforward kpi demonstrating the research was having an impact on society at large that is then led down to research funders tying well how is your project going to deliver impact that's been caused a change in attitude change of thinking you've got as if steve's alluded to

00:44:22 building a local ecosystem building a framework you then have a younger population of uh new research groups leaders wanting to come in they've come into an environment where impact is a clean measure and they want to establish a career and that is then fostering a need to take entrepreneurship seriously taking the fact your research needs to do something positive beyond uh research publications is something that could be seen as a positive but as well as for example having a steve alluded to past success stories leading to more

00:44:54 money going into departments which has been having a positive impact on the department in terms of more research being funded or changing facilities and improvement and facilities which again has a multiplicative gain that's all changing leading to a change of mindset which is why we're getting more vc stage companies coming out as well as an increased availability of uh investors or investment funds at seed and series a stage but what we're lacking as steve's already said again is that growth investment fund capital so that growth

00:45:22 stays capital we can take it from series 8 to much larger stage companies and for those investors being willing to wait for that company to become those big uniform unicorn companies with the uk as a whole would like to have and then to have us management teams coming across all those key individuals without prior experience of running those kinds of companies wanting to start to working with these university spinal companies from oxford to event and fam grow awesome i feel like one of the key drivers that

00:45:51 was kind of hyped on was the start of the flywheel and that getting capital back from the next company really probably shifts a lot of the mentalities of people within the university because you're seen as a referee generator rather than a tractor yeah for i think tech transfer as a function will largely be lost leading because for most academic institutions for the majority of their time i i think it's difficult to say if a tech transfer is going to be a net positive because of the cost in terms of getting

00:46:22 stuff out because you're always going to have a funnel but if there is a key driver in terms of having that money going back into the universities it's a clear driver there saying look we're not doing this so that others can profit we're doing this so that all stakeholders can drive a benefit is it something that could be possible to not be to not be just a loss leader and then you actually could turn it into a problem-making machine for the actual university going forward is that even something

00:46:50 that's considered in the model or is it uh or is it even possible i think for a majority of academic institutions it's seen as uh we want to do something where it can be seen to be having impact because as an institution we want to have a positive impact but it isn't that that function isn't necessarily in itself going to choose a profit i think in oxford context it's not unreasonable to believe that we will end up being self-sustainable as a consequence of the funds we're generating so we can cover our own costs and then

00:47:23 anything we make beyond that to then be returned to university but if if you can compare the amount of money we're generating versus the amount of research income comes into university each year or it's endowment we're probably just going to be a rounding error i mean we're competing against an academic institution has been around for almost a thousand years yeah it's uh it's absolutely true so thank you for that uh anyone else thought moving on cool so let's uh let's briefly talk about the uh this this idea that and you probably see

00:48:01 it more in the french community rather than at the actual universities but the conflict between the idea that entrepreneurship cannot be taught it must more be learned by actually doing so i want to kind of gather your thoughts around what the benefits are of teaching entrepreneurship kind of in the universities and what type of impact that actually has on their specific ventures that they're trying to start at the university because a lot of the time you end up having to uh you're you're you might be crushed by

00:48:35 the idea that they have to learn continuously right rather than uh their ventures failing and moving on so uh let's talk through a little bit about the idea of can entrepreneurship be top okay i'll start with that because that's my uh bread and butter so um you know if you look at certain studies actually they say and they looked at different universities that the effect of entrepreneur education didn't have a lot of positive effect on the success of entrepreneurs or startups but i think it depends on the

00:49:17 school it depends on the program it depends what they teach i think it's probably true that you can't teach entrepreneurship in the traditional way you teach literature or some other subject but i think most education does have to be experiential right although you know there are things that could be taught the traditional way as well so if you think about what entrepreneurs need to do a startup and be successful in addition to great technology that might come out the technology transfer office

00:49:48 they probably need certain business basics right they need probably entrepreneurship basics like lean startup which i'm sure lucas you you emphasize on and then they need what people might call on mindset so you know this opportunity orientation and resilience all that kind of stuff right and so if you if you just teach one aspect of it just teach business but just get your mindset the entrepreneur is not going to be properly prepared but if you teach in this in a more systematic way and do it mostly in an experiential way

00:50:27 some don't have to be all experiential i think there's a good chance that this person is going to be pretty well equipped so i actually think pretty positively about the effect of the right entrepreneurship education uh contributing to success of startups i would just say i completely agree as a person who's dedicated her life to professional development and asking these questions it's really about unbundling the set of skills capabilities awarenesses that an entrepreneur needs and then i think also asking and i'm

00:51:08 asking this as a genuine question you know does an individual entrepreneur because we talk about it as like a proper noun like it's a person as opposed to um i had the fortune of working with one ceo who once drew a circle of his of his c-suite and he looked at me and he said andrea we are a complete hole together and then he proceeded to explain to me how none of his hires were exactly the best fit for their title in a traditional way because they integrated in a jigsaw way that all of them collectively brought

00:51:41 this together right and this is one of the issues of how many founders do you have and things like that but i'm curious are you thinking about like i as a single entrepreneur capital e you need to have the totality of it or i need to value the totality of it be clear about what subset i bring and you know what compliments i should be seeking in my founder community or in my investor community or in the rest of the world that i surround myself with to be successful if i can just uh address your question

00:52:09 so again i totally agree with what you said if you unbundled all the skills that might make an entrepreneur successful and if she or she knows you don't have certain skill set right or certain competencies you can complement that with with a co-founder or team member or team members right thereby have all the skill sets or competencies needed so i agree uh with what you just said awesome thank you for that um before we get let's quickly make an observation about 25 years ago we were having this exact

00:52:48 conversation about could leadership be taught and so i feel like this is the you know periodically we have this conversation and go wow there are these people who seem to be really good at this thing that seems like we should all be really good at are they born that way right and then and then there's the evolution of the conversation about what really goes into that so i personally find this really exciting because imagine where we could be hopefully not that long from now but a few years from now if that conversation

00:53:18 matures in the same way some of the conversations about things like leadership development have transformed over the last certainly in the time that i've been in that space is interesting that maybe the smartest guy in business peter drucker you know said for a long time that entrepreneurship could be taught like any other discipline you know he said that for many decades uh you know after all learning all these different techniques that i you know go to a conference to learn my predecessor in my program i think he had

00:53:51 the best technique for probably encouraging uh you know people to pursue startups or or develop the courage to do something and what he did was he just told his students i believe in you right and that end up being more powerful than any technique right any educational method we ever used okay and he created probably you know more entrepreneurs than most people uh developed more of them taught more of them using all sort of fantasy techniques uh in entrepreneurship awesome so we've got a couple questions

00:54:33 in the last couple of minutes so we're going to jump to how do regulations uh tie school hands in terms of non-profit versus profitable uh approaches to uh entrepreneurship and what regulations are you aware of that should change in order to have better support for student entrepreneurs anyone can take that so actually i was looking at the qns and there was another question about why don't school invest in startups basically student startup which i think is kind of tied to this other question that you brought up

00:55:19 i don't know exactly the regulations and laws and probably i shouldn't have said anything but since nobody talked uh i do know that our school at some point was looking into investing in in startups because as i said we have a number of competitions and so on and sometimes the school provides space sometimes the seed money and so on so potentially they could have used that as an investment and get some percentage of the company which would help later on as the as a revenue model back to the university from these uh startups uh

00:55:55 but i i know some regulation or some uh uh law for this profit versus non-profit uh is is not uh kind of uh making that happening now i know they're looking into it i don't know the status but there seems to be a little bit of a challenge uh for for the schools to actually invest in startups that their students so i'll push back a little bit on that so so greif actually has uh an evergreen fund so they took it as donations i think into the actual fund and if there are any exits it gets sent straight back to the fund as not

00:56:37 just an educational piece but another way to be able to support entrepreneurs at usc so it has to have a specific co-founder from usc to be considered and they'll put in nominal amounts they set up different regulations on the idea around uh they're not going to be leading rounds they're not going to put a substantial portion into the round it's very much follow on in smaller amounts to help support the ecosystem so so the investor would be the endowment or the investor would be the university that's a good question because that's

00:57:13 the part so if there is a separate endowment that is can be used for msn that's that's for sure i don't think it's a specific endowment i i think it's i think it's technically under the grife center for what they were actually doing so they become an investor in the technology absolutely wrong i'm not on the interworship yeah so that yeah i don't know if there's i think that i i know that people looking into it as a possible way of revenue but it hasn't been straightforward let's just put it that way otherwise it would

00:57:47 have been done by now i'll just point to um harvard business publishing is a example of this right actually as a non-profit that's owned by the university they started us in 1994 and so there are models out there for how universities can consider having kind of spin-offs that are working right so we i mean if if you bought an hbr which i'm guessing many of you within the sound of my voice have right you have fed into exactly this kind of system um and so i'm certainly not a lawyer who can answer about the regulations piece

00:58:23 you know there are effective models were an example of it and i saw ali's question about impediments and rather than answering from the impediments i apologize for answering not exactly the question you're asking but i wonder could we be thinking differently about the leaders that we already do have um so you know how might we use things like financial aid to think about driving entrepreneurship in our you know in our institutions and i know that each of them has very different relationships with us

00:58:54 right and in the united states the ivy leagues and other schools have different um and state schools have different relationships with this but i think there are ways that we could be more supportive um but again going back to something we talked about earlier that there tend to be you know these buildings and they are silent they're visual versions of our silos how might we start to cross across campus a little more um to think about that differently going forward awesome i should also i saw that last

00:59:26 question also i just quickly so just to clarify so there is the universities if if the ip started at the university and then the ip is transferred to startup then as part of the negotiation with the startup the university can get shares in the company and then if that company suddenly become google then then of course there's a revenue so i think that's that's an already established uh process the the alternative process is there for not for not the ip that is developed at the university but just the students

01:00:00 at the university do a startup and then university support with some other either with funding or space and that get uh shares in the company that's the that's the one that is not straightforward at least yeah and you know a lot of universities have problems just like cyrus mentioned their lawyers telling them it's not possible whatever but then we then we look at certain universities they do have these funds so it's probably possible you know we just need some little lawyers i just i know we're at

01:00:30 time lucas that i recognize that i think it's elian rodriguez and if i said your first name wrong please please coach me when we meet in person today and i apologize um but this this question of digital divide within student populations um i just wanted to speak into this and say that i think this is really exacerbating an issue that already exists in the entrepreneurial and venture capital world which is it is systematically disadvantages women and other underrepresented groups that they tend to have less access less network

01:01:02 less connection and so i think that right now is a really risky moment for us especially at a time when there's so much focus globally on these issues of equity um so while i can't answer the specifics of your question about the experience specifically we know that it's real um and that it's you know that the groups that already were at a disadvantage it's disadvantaging even even more and that's something that we can all lean into to close some of that gap i think so uh that was actually going to be our uh

01:01:33 our last question so i'll put it to the group so how has the experience been with the provide for maybe the underrepresented groups within the university yeah i don't i'm i'm the reason i'm trying to be quiet i need to catch another meeting i think that i can i i can't live but if i start this that's gonna take a while oh all good well then we'll uh we'll shut it down to be respectful to our panelists thank you so much for uh for jumping on i really appreciate the time uh thank you especially to

01:02:13 everyone in the uk for uh taking this meeting like 9 or 10 at night so thank you again uh look forward to uh chatting with everyone uh again soon have a great day thank you very much thank you thank you you