11 brain functions, including memory and reaction time. Once everyone is baselined, if they hit their head, I can immediately compare their score to their baseline.
It’s an interesting path for me, how to take an idea from the lab out of it. I was lucky enough to get a CEO in Yael (Katz) who’s absolutely terrific. Under her stewardship, we’ve combined state of the arts science with good commercialization. I’m so thrilled to be doing this; it’s really badly needed. (Efforts by the Texas Medical Center, including TMCx.) I moved here from San Diego, which has the Salk Institute, one of leaders in the nation as far as biotech commercialization. I often thought, why isn’t TMC leading that? I’m really jazzed about the new opportunities now.
X: How is being an entrepreneur different from academia?
D.E.: People coming from this work don’t have a natural sense of what enterprise software really takes. We can write pretty software, but will somebody be able to modify the software and use it later? It’s a real step up in the level of professionalism that’s required.
Another lesson is the amount of legalese that one has to learn. It’s a lot. A whole history of rare events happening in different cases and it collectively adds up to a huge number of clauses and paragraphs and exceptions and paperwork. At first, I thought I’m clever; I can figure this stuff out. Now I just pay for legal help.
It’s a hard lesson for scientists to take on; we’re used to being able to steer the ship ourselves and understand it all. Without having a ton of experience in business, walking into this, you can’t simulate all the scenarios that can go wrong. People who
