The University of Washington’s commencement ceremony may have been last weekend, but Jim Roberts and his team at UW TechTransfer aren’t winding things down—they’re gearing up for the high season. “During the summer it doesn’t drop off,” Roberts says.

Roberts is the head business development officer at LaunchPad, a two-year-old initiative within the university’s tech transfer office, formed specifically to identify and help along startup opportunities from UW technologies. As he points out, over the last three or four years, the numbers of UW patents filed and licensing deals have gone up—and so has the number of spinoffs. Those spinoffs typically need a fair bit of support in their early stages.

LaunchPad provides several concrete resources. It partners with UW’s Foster School of Business and Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) to get MBA students to do marketing and commercialization assessments on new companies (e.g., is this really a startup or a licensing deal?). It also brings in law students to work with the companies. In terms of outreach to the business community, LaunchPad has experienced entrepreneurs serve as advisors to its startups, and initially they act as the companies’ strategic advisory board. Roberts’s group also helps startups find business partners. “Whenever we have a startup team, we tap into different angel organizations and venture groups,” he says. “We get the word out about the types of people we’re looking for.”

It seems to be paying off. Last month, four LaunchPad startups (out of a total of 89 teams) placed in the sweet 16 of the CIE Business Plan Competition at UW, which awards $45,000 in prizes. The LaunchPad companies were Impel NeuroPharma (nose-to-brain drug delivery system), Hybiscus Technologies (optical chip-making), Voltan Biofuel (oil-producing algae), and LiteTouch (force-sensing glove for clinicians). Impel went on to win the grand prize ($25K) as well as “best innovation idea.” The next step for Impel, says Roberts, is to bring on an attorney to help negotiate the tech license, and to look for funding.

I asked Roberts what mistakes university entrepreneurs tend to make in setting up companies. “The classic mistake is they’re unwilling to give up control,” he says. “They want to be CEO, but they’d be a better CTO. If you’re going to build this as a company, you have to bring on a team and use their skill sets.”

Roberts says his group is currently looking at possible startups in robotics, alternative fuels, nanotech, Internet, and social networks—it’s a busy time. I also asked him what he thinks about the general state of investments in startups these days. “The funding climate is pretty good in this town,” Roberts says. “It’s very active. If you really have a compelling idea and a strong management team, the funding will be there.”

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Posted by mobile phone:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/learning_from_flickrs_cofounde.php

This is a great post on lessons from Flickr. To summarise:
- great product (this can’t be stressed enough)
- great community management
- the power of the API

Dell Larcen knows more about what’s going on in Silicon Valley than most people. The Los Altos, Calif.-based specialist has been catering to the emotional lives of venture capitalists and their portfolio companies for years.

At venture firms, Larcen is often brought in to help with leadership transitions, or communication breakdowns, or to work out fights over business judgment. (Work is brisk, as you might imagine.) Larcen also parachutes into plenty of portfolio companies. Typically, she’s brought aboard because investors decide that they’re unhappy with the CEO heading the startup. It’s her job to either fine-tune the CEO’s performance, or, if that doesn’t work, ease him or her out the door.

Yesterday, as Larcen piloted her car through Menlo Park, toward yet another fire needing to be extinguished, she told me of a new issue she’s tackling: VCs with conflicting agendas on the boards of the startups they’ve backed. The problem? Some VCs have grown desperate for exits, while others have not. “I’m seeing healthy firms with big funds and long-term strategies” sitting a few seats down the conference table from VCs that are “smaller, they’re out raising another fund, they don’t have a stellar track record and they need some short-term wins,” she said over the phone.

The tension doesn’t come as a surprise. A whole lot of firms are in deep doodoo because of the billions of dollars deployed 1998 and 2002. In 1999 alone, 96 new funds locked down $8.5 billion in capital, according to the National Venture Capital Association. That was a huge increase from five years earlier, when 22 new funds raised a combined $1.7 billion.

As those funds near the end of their 10-year investment periods, panic is setting in at the firms that haven’t produced results necessary to raise fresh capital. A stunning 210 dot-com era venture firms haven’t raised new funds since 2000, according to Thomson Reuters (which pays the bills at PEHub). “By last year, our commitments to a number of venture funds of those vintage years had already dragged out much longer than we cared for them to,” said one head of alternative investments who asked me not to name him.

Though not the most meaningful sample statistically, Larcen is right now working with at least five startups where she’s seeing “very ineffective board governance because of the board members’ passive-aggressive behavior.” Said Larcen, “There’s just enormous underlying tension and frustration that isn’t getting overtly expressed, and it’s evolved to where the VCs are unhappy and think there are performance issues, but they aren’t labeling what the real problem is, themselves.” You have to feel for the CEOs of these companies. Larcen said that in each case, the board is either complaining that the CEO isn’t performing, or doesn’t have a strategy, or isn’t hiring the right people, when board dynamics are really to blame.

So what to do with firms, working side by side, whose goals are not aligned? For now, Larcen is turning to personality tests, anonymous feedback loops, conversations framed in the VCs’ own words, and other qualitative and quantitative tools that she has used to pull off hat tricks in the past. No doubt that a couple, if not all, of the VC board members will also wind up at off-site workshops as Larcen teases out for them what they do well, what that they don’t do well, and what they should stop doing, pronto.

If those measures don’t work, and it’s hard to imagine that they will? “They will,” said Larcen, sounding confident through an increasing bit of static on the line. “I’m very actively engaged.”

If I was, I sure as hell wouldn't admit it!!! (via Private Equity Hub)

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