Origins: Why I started Technium.
This is Part 1 of a series I’m putting together to increase transparency as we move closer every single day to launching our private beta with a select group of serial entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations.
Every member of our founding team has their unique reason and backstory for joining and staying with Technium, but here’s mine.
My parents are merchants. I’ve seen the power of trade. The global trade of ideas, culture, products, and services across border and language barriers. The scale and impact of globalization is too immense to measure.
Today I’m a merchant. Instead of trading products across international borders, I’m trading innovation. Reaching inside the minds of the greatest people in the world and getting their innovations into the hands of passionate entrepreneurs.
Not too long ago while in college, I was one of those passionate entrepreneurs. I spent months looking for technologies at UT Austin to start a company. I started at the tech transfer office website. Not bad, but I eventually found a lot of potential projects missing from their list. I needed a bigger scope too. I tried Google patents to widen my view. I found some good leads, but patents are hard to interpret, so I scuttled from inventor-to-inventor to ask more questions. I discovered how open and energetic inventors were to even meet with a wide-eyed undergrad, but it was geographically limiting.
I needed burning questions answered quickly like: How do I turn “biomarker for PARP inhibitor drug sensitivity in cancer” into a business opportunity? What’s the best way to reach similar or competing inventors? What are basic terms of a potential license? By the time I figured all this out, I ended up jumping into venture capital. I could’ve just as easily built something from scratch in that time, costing the inventor and the university thousands and potentially millions in upside.
After speaking to many entrepreneurs and investors in the Austin community, I found out I wasn’t alone. The passion and energy was real, but the challenges between finding the technology and starting a company with it was a chasm too wide to cross. The opportunity cost too high. I even ran into a VC who successfully invested in a startup that licensed surgical technologies from three universities and plans to IPO the company, but said, “I will never do a deal like that again.” Pity.
Knowing entrepreneurs and investors work on equity, it was clear why they didn’t work on time-consuming deep technology startups. Even if they understood the power of raw technologies to solve big problems, they needed outsized outcomes, ASAP. To engage more entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations they needed to find, diligence, and get a deal done in ~100–120 days, not 6–12 months. Cash-on-cash returns are there, but the upfront brain damage is clear.
Investigating further, I learned these challenges existed because everyone focused on patents when the exponential value was in the inventors and their body of aggregate knowledge. There wasn’t a simple way for entrepreneurs to search for the best inventors, see their body of knowledge, and then connect and transact with them directly. So we built Technium.
