Two big names from the Seattle high tech and biotech scene—Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners and Pathway Medical’s Tom Clement—are taking new jobs at the University of Washington to help turn some of its most promising research ideas into new startup companies.
LeFaivre and Clement are joining the rebranded UW Center for Commercialization as key deputies to vice provost Linden Rhoads, the high-tech entrepreneur who was hired 18 months ago to light a fire for entrepreneurship on campus. LeFaive will split his time evenly between the university and his other job as a managing director at OVP in Kirkland, WA, while Clement is expected to work full-time for about 18 months, Rhoads says.
Janis Machala, the super-connected startup adviser who Rhoads hired as her deputy in November 2008, is leaving the UW at the beginning of February to go back to her consulting business. Machala says she feels “great” about the progress made in stirring more commercial activity at UW in 2009. “New VCs are also engaging from the Bay Area and other locales now that they are seeing commercial progress” coming from UW research, she says.
The hiring of two people with deep expertise in high tech and cleantech (LeFaivre) as well as life sciences (Clement) is a recognition of how the UW needs specialized talent on staff to help nurture more startups, Rhoads says. The UW conducted more than $1 billion worth of research in 2008, paid for mostly by the feds, charitable foundations, and corporations. It ranks second in federal research funding nationally behind Johns Hopkins University. Yet before Rhoads and Machala came aboard, business leaders long complained that the university was mediocre at best when it came to transforming all that research into new startups or useful products. Getting more experienced industry talent in house to mentor scientists and engineers about the ways of business is a key part of bridging that traditional gap, Rhoads says.
“This takes a lot of expertise. I know a lot about tech startups, but I think it sums it up to point out that two 23-year-olds can’t start a biotech company,” Rhoads says. “There’s a lot of domain expertise required in knowing the safety and efficacy requirements, regulatory issues, product reimbursement.” A similar thing is true for cleantech, she adds.
That rationale was what led her to LeFaivre and Clement. “I wanted to make sure we had the right expertise on both sides of the house,” she says.
Both of these guys are already familiar faces in the local innovation community. LeFaivre, 62, has a doctorate in computer science and formerly worked as a professor at Rutgers and UC San Diego. He has a long track record in the tech world, including stints in management roles at Apple Computer, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Tektronix, before he joined OVP. LeFaivre lately has been carving out greater expertise in the cleantech scene, and he was OVP’s point man on its 2008 investment in EnerG2, an intriguing UW spinoff that’s seeking to develop more efficient ways to store energy.
Clement, 54, is known as one of the most successful medical device entrepreneurs in the Northwest, after a two-decade run as a co-founder of Heart Technology and Pathway Medical Technologies. He stepped down as CEO of Pathway a year ago as the company graduated from pure R&D mode into commercialization mode with its novel tool that drills through, and vacuums out, all sorts of fatty blockages and clots in leg arteries.
While he has backed off from day-to-day demands of running a company, Clement has stayed busy. He’s the chairman of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, and has spent the last eight months or so as an entrepreneur-in-residence at UW for scouting and advising budding medical device entrepreneurs.
“A lot of people might say, ‘Why take this job?'” Clement says. “I haven’t had a boss for a while, and there’s bureaucracy. But I’m really very excited, and Rick is too, that I can help form connections and do something positive for the community. It’s also not a commitment for the rest of my life. I’ll get an opportunity to run another company, which I do want to do.”
Part of Clement’s responsibility will be
