Demystifying Tech Transfer with Seth Bannon and Ashton Trotman-Grant

Episode Summary:  

In this very special episode of Translation, Seth is joined by Ash Trotman-Grant to demystify spinning out from academia. Much of this knowledge has so far only been available to select groups of academics and PhD founders are at a disadvantage – some potentially breakthrough technologies  never saw the light of day and didn’t get a chance to have a real impact. We want to bring the power of the tech transfer process back to entrepreneurial scientists.

Enter the Spinout Playbook – your complete guide to spinning out of academia. In this episode, we chat about the Playbook’s content and share useful tips for entrepreneurial academics eager to spin out their research into an impactful company. Ash shares his experience from spinning out Notch Therapeutics and, together with Seth, they offer brilliant insights into navigating the (up until now) stormy waters of the spinout process.

About the Guests

• Seth is a Founding Partner at Fifty Years, a venture capital firm backing founders using technology to solve the world’s biggest problems.
• Ash is a Synthetic Biologist at Fifty Years and Founder of Notch Therapeutics, a stem cell spin out company from the University of Toronto.
• Ash & the Fifty Years team have created the Spinout Playbook, a living document that will help academic founders spin out their companies from universities and negotiate with Tech Transfer Offices – TTOs.

Key Takeaways

• A spinout is a company that has been developed from a university's research.
• The process of establishing the spinout as a new company involves multiple hurdles, like licensing patents from the tech transfer office, splitting equity among academic and full-time founders, and deciding when to leave academia.
• Universities take months to sign agreements and make startups unfundable by taking too much equity.
• The final licensing agreement may include counter-productive clauses that prevent the company from succeeding.
• University tech transfer offices (TTOs) refuse to negotiate directly with grad students and postdocs.
• For Ash, the creation of Notch Therapeutics was his first real step into the entrepreneurship world and the first encounter with the process of spinning out a company.
• The Spinout Playbook, the newest Fifty Years initiative, will serve as a comprehensive guide for founders and scientists wishing to spin out a company.

Impact

• The Spinout Playbook will help future founders and scientists better navigate the challenges of the process.
• Previously only available to a coterie of academics, the know-how of tech transfer will allow great science to see the light of day more easily.
• A transparent process can give scientists the tools and information they need to build world-changing companies, which is hard enough by itself.

The Spinout Playbook