MY: It’s as much as anything else a barometer of the way in which you are providing services to support the faculty and students who want to commercialize something. It’s easy to start up a thousand companies if you don’t care what the content is. And so, the other challenge I keep giving them is make sure these are companies that we have real reason to believe can be successful. Now that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be successful, because I’d be Warren Buffett if I knew that. It’s a shots on goal thing to some degree.
But it’s not a bad barometer for helping us understand, are we providing the right services? Are we linking our professors up with the venture community in an appropriate way? Are we helping our students develop the skill set they need to interact with the technology on the one hand and the business community on the other to get it out? Are we providing services that help with the IP protection? Are we creating a smooth enough glide-path out of the university that the transaction costs are not so debilitating that you can’t do it?
Frankly, if I could get everything out by starting companies, that’d be great. If I could get everything out by licenses, that would be great too. It turns out it’s some combination of all that. You make as many pathways out as possible. And startups are just a kind of good surrogate for being able to understand a little better on how you’re doing.
X: What are the key ways you measure the return on the university’s investment in commercialization?
MY: If we’re getting a lot of stuff out there, whether it’s companies or licenses, whether those companies are on the whole—not each individual company, but on the whole—beginning to create jobs. And do the professors and students feel like there is a place to come that can provide the services they need to do it. And if that’s all happening, I’m a pretty happy camper.
X: Is the UW doing a fair job of communicating that economic impact of the startup companies it’s producing?
MY: Well, I, yeah, a fair job is probably the description. We are very Northwest in the sense that we’ve been gifted. We’re biblical. We keep our light hidden under a bushel, more than I think is probably appropriate, but I think there is a buzz now around what the university is doing, with people beginning to understand: Wait a minute, the university’s really open to this kind of engagement, as long as we, the business community, come with the right attitude.
If their attitude is, We’re looking for something quick and cheap and easy, and we’re going to get it out there and then we’re going to sell it to somebody who’s going to take it to Palo Alto, ah, I’m less interested in that.
I’d like to see the ecosystem develop around here in the Puget Sound area, but I think the buzz is good. I think there’s a lot more to come. But I think you want to be a little careful about advertising what we’re doing until we are comfortable that we really can deliver what we say we think is happening here. And I think that’s happening.
X: Taking a closer look at the 18 UW startup companies of this latest fiscal year, the largest one I’ve found has 10 employees—
MY: Really? That many?
X: Most of them just have a handful, usually the company founders. And some of the communications that have come out, including a blog post you wrote earlier this month, say that UW startups average 60 employees per company. Is that a fair way to characterize the job creation?
MY: Oh absolutely. If you look longitudinally, we’ve been doing this for a long time—not with the same number of companies over the years. These numbers are always a little squishy, because, is it a UW startup or not? But it’s probably around 250 companies. Of the ones that have survived and—if you do the average, of the successful and the failed ones, the numbers might look different—but of the ones that have survived, it looks like the average is about 60 employees.
It’s also a slightly squishy number. I mean, I don’t mean to make too much of it, because sometimes the company is acquired by a company, and then what you try to do is ask—it’s acquired by Amgen, you don’t sit there and say, Well, it’s got 10,000 employees. You try to say how many really are working in that space, with whatever that drug was that Amgen bought in the space.
So we try to give a little bit of a sense, but I think our sense is it’s around 50 to 60.
X: At least half of the 18 startup companies from fiscal 2014 were founded before the start of the fiscal year, including some several years earlier. In the parlance of university tech transfer, a startup is counted in the year it takes a license from the university. But that wasn’t obvious by reading the university’s communications on this subject. Do you think the public at large understands this nuance—that when the UW says: “University of Washington launched 18 new start-up companies in the past fiscal year based on UW research technologies,” it actually means 18 companies took licenses in fiscal 2014, but might have been formed before that?
MY: Well, what we look for is when they took the license, and is it their primary form of business. Little less concerned when they actually did the incorporation because there was nothing going on except the setting up of the infrastructure of the corporation until the actual business model kicks in.
We certainly don’t intend to be misleading about that. I think that the larger question is,
