Speaker 1  0:00  
Good afternoon and welcome to today's webinar, optimizing your SBIR STTR efforts. Modern day best practices for a successful program presented by Autumn. My name is Lauren Smith Carter autumns Professional Development Associate, and I will be your staff hosts today. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio, and today's session is being recorded. If you have a question for the panelists encourage you to use the q&a feature on the on your zoom toolbar. If you have a technical question or comment, please feel free to use the chat. Should you need closed captioning during today's session, the Zoom closed captioning feature is turned on and available on your toolbar. Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank autumns online professional development sponsor, Marsh Marshall Gerstein IP, we appreciate your ongoing support. I now have the pleasure of introducing you to today's presenters. roompot Doshi leads Omni Sync, a VC and US Air Force backed company from San Diego. New sinks flagship product, Turbo SBIR works like TurboTax for startups to find and apply for SBIR STTR grants and contracts across all agencies from one central place. Ruth hawk has a PhD from Cambridge university academic experience at the Scripps Research Institute and UC San Diego industry experience at an hibi RX, and is a third time founder with a prior exit Ryan Buckmaster manages funding and mentor programs at UW co motion. The University of Washington tech transfer office to eight inventors of new technologies developed at UW move the innovations toward commercialization. Ryan runs a biannual grant competition for commercialization funding, recruits business leaders to mentor UW teams pursuing commercialization of new innovations, finds resources for teams, including expert consultants, and A's teams applying for grants such as SBIR and STTR hours. Prior to commotion Ryan helped more than a dozen company spinouts including CSA TS Kido tech olace Robotics zap energy, as well as numerous agreements with existing organizations. Brian also conducted research into cell based biosensors, and Gan quantum dots and worked with the semiconductor industry. Beto Matthews serves as the founding director to the technology commercialization center of the Southwest Texas border Small Business Development Center LEED network at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In this role, he is responsible for developing the strategy and providing executive direction to programs created to foster innovation and promotion of science and technology driven entrepreneurial capacity and economic development. He also serves as the executive director to the Texas Federal and State Technology Partnership Program. The statewide program seeks to enhance access and awards to non equity, dilutive funding for applied and translational research ventures. Welcome repop, Brian and Beto, we're so excited to learn from you today. We also have Caroline Arzo. From AMI sync, and she will moderate today. I will now turn it over to you to get started.

Speaker 2  3:57  
Hi, Laura. And thank you so much and to the audience, we're really excited to have you. I'm really glad that we can spend some time with root POC, Ryan and dijo and really learn from their experiences in terms of how they run their SBIR STTR programs. What I'm going to do now is share my screen for our presentation. And then what we'll do is just jump in. This is going to be a very interactive panel. So please feel free to pause the q&a with your questions, add comments chats into the box, and we'd be more than happy to jump in and answer those at anytime possible. But we're looking forward to this being an interactive webinar and an educational one.

Unknown Speaker  4:38  
Awesome, so I'll be sharing my screen right now. Perfect. Can you give me a second Can you guys see this presenting? Awesome.

Speaker 2  4:57  
So right now we are Are you right here is that our goal is to help you as we discuss how to optimize your SBIR and STTR efforts, so there's gonna be an interactive webinar to highlight modern day best practices for a successful program. We have already introduced our speakers, but I have beautiful photos of them here. So we're gonna have them introduce themselves as well, one more time. So thank you, Lauren, for the introduction, Ryan Vizio Rupak. You both have, you all have very different approaches to how you support SBIR and STTR applicants at your own respective organizations. Can you talk a little bit about the structure of your organization and your processes specifically when it comes to supporting SBIR and STTR applicants? Ryan, why don't you go first? Sure.

Speaker 3  5:47  
commotions, the University of Washington's tech transfer office. So our primary mandate is to support University innovators who wish to commercialize their technologies for a greater impact. So we're very much a cradle to grave structure, supporting innovators. So mostly, we're working with University technologies, although some of our educational ag activities do span to undergraduates and beyond the University of Washington. But as our SBIR application program has really conditioned that teams go through our other programs, like the gender gap fund and other commercialization, internal support mechanisms. And what we typically do is, we have a call for applications two to three times a year as well as just kind of inbound technology managers might suggest the one consider it. And then we usually have a consultation with a group like, what do you want to accomplish? Who's going to do this? Do you understand how the SBIR program works? This is actually a company someone has to go run the company. And then then we will help them create account on turbo SBIR, which is a fantastic tool, it has a lot of knowledge really breaks it down step by step. And then we also paired with various consulting resources. So we typically do a couple hours with the Turbo SBIR application support, like just getting the registrations done, Island does that takes place often trips people up. And then 10 hours with either a consultant from our mentor network or the term SBIR mentors till really seems bigger, I've been on strategy grantsmanship. And some of the budget issues just hopefully enhance the quality application. And we really work to try to move teams along a two month process to work on the application and also utilize this triple SPR for startups webinar series to help keep them on track. That's our goal anyway. Right. Are

Speaker 2  7:43  
the majority of individuals, as you mentioned, are university innovators. Do a lot go through your incubator programs? Or is it just more of a general call to action to the community? General

Speaker 3  7:57  
call to the so actually a No, we only advertise it to people who've submitted a record of innovation to us. We've actually already interactive commotion, just because if they haven't done that, but probably too early, and we also target people who have applied to our GAP funds and assess people who've done that typically or maybe at a good stage. Consider SBIR earlier than that. Usually it's probably too early. So we tend to target people are already in the pipeline and focused on that.

Speaker 2  8:29  
Got it? That makes a lot of sense. So thank you for sharing how UW approaches this. The SBIR STTR program repack? I'd love it if you could introduce yourself share a little bit about what you do what turbo SBIR is that Ryan mentioned, and then we'll jump into features experience as well.

Speaker 4  8:45  
Yeah, absolutely. So Lauren actually gave a really good intro about about my background. I remember the one thing that I would I guess add to that would be the reason why we started the company and why we developed turbo SPR as system is because so when I was doing my postdoc at UCSD, my co founder Norman and I actually were there and I was interning with me at the time. And we actually had a technology that we were developing, and we wanted to spin it up. And and we went through a lot of the same hurdles and barriers that most you know, academic and content entrepreneurs kind of go through. And at that time, when we tried looking for like in the first few days, it was a complete nightmare in terms of how massively spread out the ecosystem was and how difficult it was to get information about how to go about doing this. And at least in our ecosystem, when we reached out for help internally in the university systems, we got one straight answer. This is outside of University's purview because it's it's an it's a for profit grant programs. So our university's grant office cannot help you Sorry, you know, go find help somewhere else kind of a thing. And so that was pretty disappointing. And so for us when we started this company, the first and foremost thing to do was to bring all information into one place. So at least getting that access to that becomes easier. And that's kind of what we then ended up developing. So jobos prt is a single sign on system to get access to all SPR programs across all federal agencies from the one place. And what that means essentially, you have the ability to find opportunities, apply for them, and apply for multiple ones and find the fit with multiple ones all in one place and get help and support as and when you need optionally as much as you need. So that's kind of what we built. And we've been partnering with university tech transfer offices, incubators and accelerators, some VC funds, etc. All the support organizations that are basically helping entrepreneurs, kickstart their their companies and get to the next round of funding or the next milestone that they have to kind of expand the reach of our products and systems much more across the country.

Speaker 2  11:01  
Awesome. Thank you, Reebok. I know many people, and likely this is where the name came from. But liken this to TurboTax for as the IRS here funding for UC systems and find and apply to SBIR opportunities using that software and human support combination that TurboTax is well known for. So I really appreciate you going in the background on all the communities that you've worked with. Can you quickly speak to the number of SBIR applicants you've helped, and as a company, and so you can speak to just the wide range of experiences you will have seen from SBIR applicants and their needs. I

Speaker 4  11:39  
can pull up that number right now. So as of today, I think so far, we've gone through about 747 companies so far in the in the three years that we've been around. And in terms of number of proposals on our system that I can pull that number as well, real time. Sorry, I should have known that you could ask if it's but the last time I checked, it was something like 2600 or something to that degree. But yeah, awesome. So

Speaker 2  12:10  
you know, you've worked with a wide range of applicants, and you've seen different journeys in terms of what support they have, from their entrepreneurs support organizations if they are already working with one. So thank you for sharing about turbo SBIR and Omni Sync and the way you work visa, you have a really wonderful history in the SVD. See, with the work that you've done for SBIR STTR support, I would love it if you could give a little bit of a background on you. And speaking to that barrier and STTR side of things, and just how your structure is how hands on you are and how your SBC works, as opposed to the way that Ryan mentioned it working at UW

Speaker 5  12:51  
Sure. Thank you for that, Caroline. And I'll try to build up what Ryan and Andrew Burke said. And good morning to you all, from here from sunny San Antonio, Texas. So what I'll start by saying is, you know, there is an SBDC at every state so there's a state level SBDC office. Here in Texas, being Texas being as large as Texas is it's it's divided into four quadrants, and it's divided by counties. So we reside on the southwest portion of Texas. So that's pretty much a region that goes all the way from El Paso up north of Austin to and south to the border. Now. Now I sit at the network level office are which and the entire state is divided up by counties for these network opportunities. And since and, and most SBDCs work with main street type businesses, your standard manufacturer, small businesses and so on that that you see, just about everywhere. So five years ago, they the University of Texas, San Antonio came to me and said, you know, let's do this thing of building a technology commercialization center. And and we've since then been we are the only a SBDC which is the Association of Small Business Development Centers, which is a federal national organization. We are the only AQa edited technology commercialization Center here in Texas so there's only one office so we serve that role across the state. So our client and you become a client when you work with our center is the entire state of Texas. So we work with all the research universities here in Texas and and that's that's our funnel if you may, and you don't have to be university affiliated. So you can be in the community you can be in a rural part of Texas you can be in a in a major city MSA and so on and, and it works a little bit about myself. I came into this position about five and a half years ago to found this center here. And prior to that I came from industry so so not to date myself. Have I we kind of built a company way back and and utilized SBIR STTR funds. I'm both a grantee awardee and mentor and reviewer for, for SBIR grants. And this was a quite a few years ago before, what innovation and commercialization was really main mainstream conversation. And we exited on a on a few ventures and ideas as part of it as part of the companies that I was involved with. And it was a phenomenal experience, and kind of learned this idea of translating technologies from innovation, development, IP and into market. So for me at the time, when I started out, it was more of an academic exercise I was I got engaged with with fat with a friend of mine, who was also a professor at the time, and we started exploring a thing on the B one bomber, and with the Air Force, and I was I co developed a technology that is actually being utilized in the B one bomber right now. And that's how I got introduced into this space. And it went on to be a very successful venture. And that's, that's how I got into innovation and, and commercialization. So coming back to the SBDC side, we are kind of we work as so I, the SBDC. Here at the University of Texas, San Antonio is housed inside the Institute for Economic Development. And that's a pretty large institute here. And to give you a sense of it, our economic impact here annually is roughly in the $3 billion range. And that's direct engagement. So, so for us, it was about building the pipeline, or the or the funnel for new innovation and technology. So my particular office only deals with scalable, and Advanced Science Technology Ventures. That's our that's our narrow lane, if you may. And as part of that objective, we assist and out all companies from early stage ideation ventures to all the way to procurement of those innovations by the respective federal partners and our major primes and or other investors. So I hope that kind of give you a give you a broad sweep spectrum of the things that we do. Thank you.

Speaker 2  17:21  
Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for sharing the show. So I want the audience to note that there are different processes and different structures across states and across organizations for supporting us Bowers to chair applicants, there's no one perfect way of doing it. And in fact, we want you to learn from everyone's experience to see what works best in your community. So if you guys work with any SBDCs, or incubators, or you have specific structure at your university, feel free to put it in the chat, we'd love to learn about what works in your community. Now, past these introductions, I want to jump in and talk a little bit about the logistics of how you help your SBIR and STTR applicants, because I think this is the information that is going to be most useful for our community members. So Peter, if you want to start on this, what is your process for helping researchers through the SBIR STTR process? From search to application to submission? What are the big challenges that you face? And what are your prophecies for working through them.

Speaker 5  18:20  
So thank you for that. So I'll go back to a dhrupad said, which is very similar to my experience, which is essentially I've constructed this program to be what I wish I had when I started out and the Innovation Commercialization space. So it's really very much experiential translation of our experience as a venture, and then moving that over to what we would have liked in our ecosystem. So So with that, so we are the technology commercialization centers, and the way I've stated is that the SBIR STTR is one lane of one program within that overarching office. So the way we structure our SBIR STTR is First you've got a standard client intake form for us to learn a little bit about you. And then beyond that, we have a separate intake process for what we call our SBIR STTR intake. And really, that that intake is, is there is a there's a form, right, you get to write things in it's pretty descriptive, and it's quite a few pages long. And we want you to kind of articulate your the innovation that you think you have the best way you can. And then on my team internally kind of goes through each application and we follow up that application with a brief with a call with a client and presentation with a from the client on what they think the innovation is. And that is really for us to kind of learn about their innovation and and how we think we could assist them now we have other programs under our office beyond the SBIR STTR. But, but one this talk is about SBIR STTR and secondly, they know that it's It's the largest funnel in our program. So for those two reasons, you know, we we focus in on that now to, for me a successful program is really based on a couple of things. One is we've we know that innovation comes from everywhere from all segments of society from all parts of your respective region. The question is, do we have a pathway for those innovations to to have potential sprs TTR. The common conversation and the common understanding out there is that SBIR phase one is where you start your journey. And we've discovered that it's not where you start your journey. And that's not where most people, especially if you're looking at diversity, and inclusion is where they would start their journey. So So we kind of look at those approaches and kind of see what we can build, to help folks kind of get onto the ramp, if you may, to a potential successful application and venture and cooperation. So that's kind of how we structure our program. I'll stop that. Thank you

Speaker 2  21:04  
know, awesome, thank you for sharing the show. Um, real quick, is there anything that you would like to jump in and add? Or you're also on mute? Reebok just let you down?

Speaker 4  21:14  
Yeah, it's the nail on the head, what we just said, which is a lot of people, and we see this too, they come to us, thinking that they would want to start right away. They get into it. And within the first two days, they realized, okay, this is way beyond what I thought was needed to happen. And so I've got to take like 10 notches, like, take 10 steps back and rethink and reanalyze and re strategize. So go into that initial ramp with someone like, you know, the system that we just created, is super important. I mean, we see that time and again, because what ends up otherwise happening is that the, the startup actually gets turned away falsely, because they realize that, because they get scared away, we see that okay, wait, wait a minute, this is too much just because they weren't ready. They weren't prepared for it. It's kind of like, you know, showing up for a flight and you forgot your ticket or whatever, like, you know, you're staying he showed up and everything's ready to go. And I was like, Oh, my God, you know, I don't have my ticket, my boarding pass or whatever. So no, I, I can't. And that's kind of why we run a lot of webinars and stuff like that, to kind of educate people on what might be needed. It might not be No, no, not all the webinars are specific to their situation. But there is a general theme here. Regardless of what area of science and tech you come from, there's there are a few general things that you might want to consider before you actually start filling out a phase one or even looking at a solicitation to be very honest, you know, you might want to consider those things. And we can we can dive deeper into those if you want. Yeah,

Speaker 2  22:54  
Ryan, I'd love to hear about your experience. I saw smile there at some point. And I know that you've spoken about how you bring the community together. At what point do you find that people are coming to you? Is there a goal to bring them in earlier? And what are your processes for really educating the community and bringing them in?

Speaker 3  23:12  
Yeah, like we our goal is bringing the appropriate time. So initially, a lot of our time, it was my time at SPR is spent talking to people about what their goals are, where they are, and make them aware, this is not just a academic grant, because we're, for the most part, we're dealing with people if they've never done a startup before, this is often the software that stops born, typically cheap LLC or something. But just that the requirements of the program that if someone actually has to go run this company, so it's often a sometimes that's a big misunderstanding, they spend quite a bit of time on the app, just understand what it is. And also, we do have some limits of who we can aid. So your Washington State, like many states have prohibition against state aid to private enterprise, less your large airplane manufacturer, apparently, but so we only provide a help to the newly formed company that's formed for the purpose of commercializing a university technology. So that does kind of limit that we're very early in the process. So curve, Asian repugnance loss kind of education to make people understand that it's a big deal and a lot of ways that you're often first time forming a company. And that's not hard. But it's kind of daunting, if you've never done it before and a lot to think about in the SBR process. It's very different. And it's not something you can just do in the week before the deadline. And that's the recipe for failure. So I think trying to impress upon people that this is serious that you really are looking to start a business by performing a grant to the government. So that's a big part of the process. And actually, we Have a breakpoint that if you don't, actually, before we actually start to provide resources you actually need to get the company formed. I found that's a good step in seriousness. If you don't get that done in time, then well, maybe next cycle you'll have things will be bit more together.

Speaker 2  25:15  
Awesome. Right. Okay, thank you for sharing. I know that you mentioned that education is a big step of the process, not only from the beginnings of what this entails, but going through the SBIR STTR process. I remember previously you'd mentioned working with tribus bars for startups program as a way of educating your your community members in terms of the SBIR STTR application, I want to give Rupak actually a moment to speak to that, can you describe what the for startups program is and how it works. So

Unknown Speaker  25:51  
the SR for service program

Speaker 4  25:52  
has gone through a lot of iterations now, like we've been, we've been like, we're a startup, right? So we try test, see what works. And then we iterate upon that. It started off as a program where we would bring a cohort of companies, and then under a particular model, we would kind of helped them every single week on one particular aspect of the application and review it every single week as well, that was a small, kind of contained kind of, like 1015 companies maybe. And it's all relative, right. And for us, 1015 is small for some centers, maybe that's a lot. And then it's kind of relative. And then over time, what it ended up being is like now we actually have that as more of the start, we kick off with an open webinar for the entire community, you don't even have to be a turbo SPR, you know, company at all, if you didn't want to be, it's still an introduction session of what's expected for the current solicitation for any given agency. So we have one almost every month for depending on the agency, like what's expected this round, what is difficult to be seen what a successful company looks like, in this round are successful project being funded looks like in this round, or whatever, at least what we think is gonna happen. And then we talk about like success rates and how things work and stuff like that, and just get get P basically, it's like a, it's a prebake for the actual election of big. So that we figure out, we figured out that that kind of helps a lot of companies kind of recalibrate where they are in the process. And that's a good check point as to when they realize that you were ready for this or we're not ready for this, I don't like they kind of realized that in the next 10 weeks, this is not going to happen, that we're too far off from what's expected or they realize, okay, we're primed for this exactly look like this example company that made it or whatever. And so that's kind of how we kick off the program. And then every week, we kind of have this webinar with a closer group. So now we have much more now we usually have 40 5060 kind of companies, depending on the cycle again. But what we're doing now is every week, our consulting group actually walks through what's needed to happen for every single aspect of the proposal. So we go from ideation, to, you know, initial outreach with the program officer with the governments directly to get feedback, then we go into an admin, document creation, budget creation, stuff like that. So that kind of people realize that there is much more to a grant than just writing out the technical piece, because that's, so most professors and folks who come out of it, they're really good at that piece, because they know that piece really well. And they kind of just delay or ignore everything else that needs to get put together to make a successful compliant package. And so we kind of start first there to make sure that people actually understand that and also, we realized that the filter as well. So people who are too lazy or don't want to do it or whatever, they will just weed out this because they will then they're like, oh, you know what, there's too much work, I don't want to do it, then you're the bad fit for this program. And so So again, we do that. And then we actually bring in the technical piece, you know, towards the second half of the program, because we want them to be focused completely on that when they're doing that and not worry about the administrative pieces. And then finally, we have a full week for managing the assembly, the package assembly, the submission, the back and forth error, submission, error checks and stuff like that. And then we can finish the program with a follow on after that. And then we usually realize that, you know, there's usually a percentage of dropout through the program. And then those usually then come in to the next cycle. And that's going to how we continue those programs throughout the year. So we have one almost any given time of the year we'll have at least one if not two, running concurrently. The challenge has always been to kind of make sure that people are aware that is going on. We kind of rely on notifications a lot. So email and nowadays we also text people to let them know this happening. And sometimes folks kind of don't realize that it is important and they realize oh, I'll just do it later. And they missed the time right they missed the window. And so hopefully they come back the next cycle to monitor it but I know that Ryan big folks from his satisfied I've also had the struggle to kind of be aware of what's happening when it's happening. So as much as we can do to kind of continue optimizing and improving that it's always to the better of everyone.

Speaker 2  30:12  
Yeah, so Ryan does an amazing job in his community of bringing everyone together and bringing that education piece. And I, what I want to echo from what you stated through POC is that Ryan mentioned that he works in tandem with turbo SBIR to help feed people into this cohort based program that gives this structure to educate startups and researchers on what is needed, given the guidance and the handhold them through each step of the process. And also let them know if they're ready or not. I like what you mentioned, Ryan, about the failsafe of having their company formed before getting the resources and seeing if they're ready before they are able to move on. And the openness to supporting them later on in the cycle, if they're not able to pursue the current solicitation, knowing that they have some grounds for the next solicitation. So actually, what I wanted to do is open it up to visual Orion Feel free, whoever wants to jump in. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about the biggest challenges that you guys have faced in your process. I know Ryan, you have a very different approach than visual does. His center is more hands on. And you are working to bring in a lot of people when it comes to bring the community together. And usual has a whole team dedicated to SBIR and STTR support, as well as other support with the SPDC. So I'd love to hear about your unique challenges at your center, and how you've supplemented that support with turbo SBIR, if any of that comes up. But please, if you guys can share a little bit about your unique challenges. I would love to hear that.

Speaker 3  31:58  
Well, I can go ahead and well, first of all, this will tell if so I took this position like about a year ago now and my predecessor was very much they really liked grant writing. And they actually made a little guides at the dates and when to do things for like the NSF and NIH, SBIR ours, and did a lot of back and forth. That was not very sustainable. And they were doing it and several the guys fell out of work came out dated. So inherited, I had to find a way to provide support, but there's only just me and what somebody could do sustainably. So, actually, triple SBR has provided that type of guidance then, besides, you know, just spend a bit of money on outside consultancy those who turbo SBIR or others, or that kind of hands on working with the teams that are an application that's got the first talent just like how can we provide this service that isn't valued, you know, people are always asking me letter that I took on the role like, hey, I can help SBIR grants. It's like, Oh, okay. That's not one, I think the other channels continuously system, you know, the deal with your people who are kind of new to entrepreneurship with various levels of dedication, and, you know, trying to both be supportive, but also make sure that we're not wasting each other's time, you know, a bit of challenge as repacks I mean, I found that somebody I think a lot of teams, the first time around was just starting to come together, I've come to peace of the ashram that often is a bit later, for various reasons that one team registrations got stuck and their application was done. But they couldn't do another team forming the company. This was more complicated. They thought, you know, no team is I think we just weren't mentally ready for what had to happen in these decided to delay. But I'm like war, exhaust, making sure people appreciate what they're signing up for, you know, they really want to do this.

Speaker 2  34:04  
Thanks for sharing. Ryan Bucha. Do you want to talk a little bit about the unique challenges that you face? down in Texas?

Speaker 5  34:11  
Sure, sure. Challenges EDA, who doesn't have any right, and we definitely have our share of challenges. So one of the things that that I'm, I'm going to tie it in with respect to how the turbo SPR platform was designed for the way we looked at it from the perspective of meeting our challenges, right? So a challenge that we're gonna we started the center. Five years ago, we were a small team, and it's gonna build the center up, raise funding for it and so on. And this start being an academic venture, even though we are situated at university now. We can't use Academic funds for any of what we're doing. So we have to find other non academic funds, right. So the challenge for us was one the kind of program I wanted to build with, with expertise on my team affiliated with new technologies, so almost to a rule, that means everybody has to have a STEM background. And and the reason is we want to be able and what be honest one of one of things I test for early is your comprehension of reading through an SBIR proposal and kind of dissecting it. Right we we need to know how well might so I train my team in actually going through real world SBIR applications and kind of working through it. So so that's why the second they all have gone through the SBA is tutorials and certification processes to be an official SBA SPR advisor. And the challenges I have is when you look at that is a budgetary challenge, because one compensation is a challenge, because I have to, you know, these are folks who could find employment elsewhere at the drop of a hat. And so we kind of really have to find people that are willing or that are passionate about translating technologies to the market, and are in a stage in their life that they're in a position to give back. We just can't compete with the private sector, when it comes to compensation. So so that's one, the second piece of that is finding the kinds of funds for us to be able to offer the community what we want to offer. So we have to raise funding. So a model we looked at initially to address the challenge was, was charging companies. And, and we found quickly that that wasn't really going to work because most of these companies didn't have the capital that they could really invest in it. So we kind of moved to a sponsorship model. So we are looking to find sponsors in the community and elsewhere to help us help us meet those challenges. So so that is an ongoing challenge of you're always looking for sponsors and a way to to, to collaborate and leverage us and we asked them to help us with the funding for the different programs, including the platform. Now, one of the things we have to do to raise funding is metrics. Right? So so so we've got to be able to articulate, you know, what are the metrics we can generate through the program, and how that that can benefit us as a statewide resource. Now, we've had some really feather in the hat kind of moments, we had a client of ours win the XPRIZE. And we had the client when the bill and Gates Foundation grant. And so there was a couple of feather in the hat moments, in addition to some doe made ushr halogens I think I'm getting the name wrong, but it's not made USA something else. But so us them winning those kinds of competitions have helped us kind of because of the same company has also went through the SBIR through our SBIR STTR lane, and we're successful. And you know, phase one, phase two, and so on. So for us, it's it's it's Focus, focus on the SBIR STTR laid but then finding resources and finding avenues to support it. And raising those resources. Because this is all part of the same pie. It's just that people don't see it that way sometimes. So I kind of see my objective as communicating that these are all pieces that are linked together. And you and if you foster it be the University of Technology Transfer Office, the incubators and accelerators that affiliate with us, in addition to the different venture competitions that that have the have our clients participate in, these are all pieces of the of the of the larger innovation economy that's in the country and in the state of Texas. So that's my challenge right there is connecting the pieces and raising funds to kind of do this from the ground up.

Speaker 2  38:47  
So I really appreciate that comprehensive view and the challenges that you're facing in Texas. And overall in connecting the innovation economy, I wanted to highlight a few of the challenges that you mentioned, because it's something that I know is near and dear to the hearts of the team at turbo SBIR. So one that you mentioned was the restraints on resources. You have an amazing, amazing team at UTSA. And I know that they are working hard and it's from a point of mission orientation. And Ryan, you mentioned that you were the one person you know with this on your shoulders and people were coming to you and it could get really overwhelming. So I know that people in the support organizations and SBDCs and universities who are here's for SBIR and STTR support are often over one, you can't necessarily provide all the comprehensive support that you need to or that you would want to when it comes to I'm going through grants.gov etc and identify funding opportunities, going through the actual application helping with grant writing, supporting with submission. It's too much to juggle with limited resources. And that's why we really enjoyed partnering with you guys at Riverwest dir to Use the software as a process management system that's scalable and optimized, so that you're able to give that extra support and extra breaths of resources to the entire community and bring them all in, even though you yourself can't support the entire community at once. And so in terms of restraint, resources, I really appreciate you highlighting that video. Another thing I'd love to highlight is the metrics aspect. Report, I think that when we have spoken to our SBDC partners, our university partners, metrics has always been a big, big value add in that big highlight, would you mind speaking a little bit to the way that traverse the IRS handles metrics? And overall, what you viewed as the importance of metrics of these communities? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4  40:55  
So I mean, the So Mike, the company was founded by two scientists, right? Former scientist, you can call them now I guess we don't do any more wet lab work. But basically, sorry. Sorry, I have someone in the background. But basically, every single click proposal, and person on our system is tracked in terms of at least de identified, you know, to whatever degree we can ask like what they're accomplishing on the system. So, for example, on our system, every single proposal is stuff is created as a project for a specific agency. And that gets tracked for that particular username, or that particular email. So at any given point, someone like could be Joe and Ryan, can go into their ecosystem. And know, out of all the users from my ecosystem, who've signed up through my portal, how many of them have created projects, and then how many of them are actually actively working with them at any point in time. They can also go in and out of any given proposal, if they wanted to collaborate with any of them on anything, provide live support on any particular document, correct, any particular thing that they might find is incorrect, or even just to ensure that they have reviewed stuff for, for quality, if if they do that if they decide to do that. In addition to that, we also have a chat system built out where they can essentially moderate as well as kind of store all their conversations for any given company for any given proposal in one place. And so that kind of helps understand the level of engagement that any particular client has with the ecosystem of support. So if tomorrow vigil could go to, you know, an EDA or whatever, or a donor, and tell them that look are what the world this is the world we're doing. We have, you know, whatever 100 companies in our ecosystem that have essentially created 200 proposals in the last year, and we have spent upwards of like a week, if you total all the hours or whatever of the chapter, you need to total support of about 500 hours or something or something to that degree, that's possible to do with the, the system that we provide, our company was always set up as it's written into our mandate that any decision we take is going to be an evidence based decision. So we don't usually go off of gut feelings, every single feature that we develop every single metric that that we provide, etc, is all coming from tracking. And it's baked into our, into our model, always. And that's all the tracking, we've done. The one thing we do want to get better at is tracking submissions. And that's so far we haven't been able, what we can do is we can go as far as telling people that this company is actively working on a submission, we aren't currently able to track something that's actually submitted to the federal federal portal, because that integration isn't currently even allowed. So like we could do it if it was opened by the government. But at some point, we will be able to get some federal agencies to kind of open that access to allow us to kind of track a full successful final submission, right? Automatically. Obviously, we can add we what we can do is the best we can do right now just asking people and asking for the final step and stuff like that. But that's obviously flawed because not everyone gets back to you or not everyone actually understands that they've actually submitted successfully or not, etc. And so that's that's one challenge that we'd like to address as soon as we can.

Speaker 2  44:51  
Awesome report I appreciate you sharing. What I want to do is actually go through the next few slides just to get a little bit of context to what you shared, and then we can dive back in into the processes that our partners are working with and the challenges that they're facing and the key takeaways that they would like, for their audience to hear. And so their fellow colleagues here, so what rip off mentioned in terms of metrics, I just want to give you a visual representation. So it seems like my screen is not moving. There we go. Awesome. So what repop mentioned, and what we've kind of identified, just to give context is that with turbo SBIR and we have partnerships with SBCs, and universities, tech transfer offices, VC groups, etc, everyone across the nation, it's a streamlined process for search to submission, and to manage the entirety of your community. So finding the right funding opportunities, answering all the common questions on education on what this is, managing the application, and educating on the steps of application, measuring your results as a community and bring together your community. I know, visual had mentioned, highlighting some of the resources, and some of the other competitions and partners in your individual community and giving that as resources to yours to your startups. So using artificial intelligence to identify funding opportunities, you can see, it'll show you previous grant awardees, companies, patents, professors, as well with our other turbo innovate, approach and automatically identify as finding our place. So using artificial intelligence will take 10 seconds to read your bio and identify best fit agency opportunities. And so

Unknown Speaker  46:44  
it's not 10 seconds, it's

Speaker 2  46:46  
not 10 seconds. Do it like a human being and it gives you a Netflix style recommendation. So it's like contextual magic. Ryan, visual, how do you usually see your SBIR applicants with densifying funding opportunities? So how do you help them normally? Do they already have funding or three ideas when they come to you? Is this an obstacle for getting people involved in the process? What would you say in terms of identifying opportunities?

Speaker 5  47:16  
That, so this picture here, so one of the things that we've so this, to me, is a work in progress for us. So we will be working on this, but what we have done in the past is, so this is where the one on one engagement with the clients go a long way. So I expect. So we while we do a lot of things in a cohort model, just because of the demand on our center. I tried to insist that all my staff work with the clients one on one for some period of time and and the reason we do that is really to get to put out to have our finger on the pulse of where they are in terms of resource allocation and interest in pursuing other opportunities. Now, sometimes companies, a lot of the folks have day jobs elsewhere, that they can only focus on SBIR STTR. And that's all they're looking at. And then there are others who are in in the venture full time, and they're looking for any and all opportunities, right. So a 25k opportunity is really great for some of our clients and, and some will won't even look at anything below 250k. So, so So it all depends on the type of client you're working with. And for us, we once we understand the client, then the then you call upon the personal resources within our center as well as additional staff, which we share amongst ourselves to help. So that is ad hoc ish, okay, that's kind of like an ad hoc prosper. Additionally, we have a newsletter that goes out to our clients and in the newsletter, we would list opportunities that, that that come up. So though that's so that is open to all the people can see where it matches and then occasionally view because I also run a Department of Defense tech scar Tech's tech program here in Texas, which is which we didn't talk about, but it's not. But what in that, as part of that is I get emails and guidance from from the DoD on certain technologies they're looking for. And if there's a fit, we're within our space for a particular client, we will send out a personal email to them and say, Hey, I think you should take a look at this. And here's how we can help you. So So it all depends. So, but this one right here that that, that you guys have asked me a year from now and I'll let you know, sir. Thank you.

Speaker 2  49:47  
Yeah, so what I'm hearing visuo Is that you have these policies of these relationships, and the companies that come to us from your Kubernetes solution. Use this as an extra support to buoy your current process. Ryan, if I'm not misunderstanding, you normally send information about the for startups programs to have people come in and start identify funding opportunities. So the post should be shows process where he's getting them in and having that kind of over encompassing support this type of tool and in general, identifying funding opportunities is something that you're not able to fully help with.

Speaker 3  50:24  
No, we just don't have the bandwidth for that. But it is very handy, like for your various introductory webinars like, Hey, here's this NIH, NSF, if people often they come to us, they have to have an idea for the agency to be like, what, who they work with some of those broadening that, you know, like NSF is actually very open to the opposite. We're considering things that people assume be NIH territory, often they will do as well. So but it's handy bill to like, you know, for the various seminars that TriWest Biado, the people have to let people know, we couldn't get them interested might be for them.

Speaker 2  51:02  
Reebok, would you mind speaking briefly as to the types of funding opportunities that you have seen companies identify? So oftentimes, and like Ryan mentioned, a company will have an idea, they'll think going, they're eligible for NIH, etc. However, I know, with your AI approach, that you've seen a lot of overlap and hit agency opportunities, would you mind speaking to the potential funding opportunities that are out there? Yeah,

Speaker 4  51:29  
absolutely. So I can tell you that 100%, almost of every of the startups that have come to us, knowing that they want to apply for any given agency have ended up applying to other agencies, 100% of them. And that's just because what's obvious is not always either, right? Or it's not the only thing that you can do. And it's not the right thing for a startup to just focus on that one thing anyway. Because it's like fundraising, that VCs, you don't pitch to an investor and sit back and relax, and wait, you know, you actually go through hundreds of VCs, to eventually funnel out to the top two, or three who might even listen to you. So this is not that different in terms of like, hitting every single agency and opportunity that that you might be eligible for. And so that's kind of what what we find is that our AI is able to expand the Fit beyond the obvious one, which like a healthcare company will come to and say, oh, yeah, we know NIH funds the service stuff, and, and they'll try. And then in the meanwhile, we showed them how their stuff is actually a maybe even a much better fit for a CDM RP or a DOD or some some some other kind of mechanism that they weren't even aware of. And that's what Rei is really going to do to expanding beyond the obvious. And we've seen that successfully time. And again, like I said, 100% of every single company that came to us apply for other things.

Speaker 2  52:59  
Awesome Robot, thank you for sharing, it's great to know that there are a ton of opportunities out there for companies that they don't really realize that they're eligible for. And they have a lot of difficulty in terms of identifying feature, I know your hands up, I'd love to give you some space to speak. And then we'll rush through the rest, because I know we're going on to q&a. So

Speaker 5  53:17  
yeah, just wanting just wanting to add add to that one of the advantages of getting to know your clients and getting and having a team that's research qualified, is that you can look at translating the opportunity, sometimes we notice that clients have a hard time understanding that this particular opportunity could apply to the technology. So so that is where I also noticed that that it really plays into so we found ourselves in many cases, sort of encouraging advocating for clients, no, no, this could apply. And this is how you should read the application, you know, and those kinds of things. And that is where our engagements with the federal agency PM, sometimes we get on calls with them to the to the respective tee box, and kind of sometimes our provide that additional level of comprehension of that technology. While there is no hard and fast rule for that, within our office is just what we do, depending on the zest of the client, right. So that has a great I noticed on a personality basis that's really powerful depends on how hungry the client is how motivated or versus this is, you know, and all of that plays into this. So we kind of look at this as a holistic approach. And so I think that's where it provides additional ways to help a client. Thank you.

Speaker 2  54:39  
Awesome, thank you, Michelle. I think the communication with the agencies the understanding and that relationship with your clients in the plural coming to you is such a phenomenal thing to emphasize. What I want to do here is just quickly summarize what we spoke about. We spoke about the different agencies, the different organizations that support SBIR and STTR, like Ryan's organization like the shows, and the differences in how they approach their support to their communities, including the challenges that they face. We also spoke a little bit about turbo SBIR support, and how we've partnered with each of these communities to really optimize and create a process management system for each organization and their needs. So Ryan, needs Ryan's needs to have more of the educational and grant writing support and send people over to get started in the process. And he just needs just to have a software process management system to support his current process and the team that he has in place. We spoke about the finding the research option is with the artificial intelligence, the workflows and the submission support with the cohort program, as well as the proposal preparation software. A little bit about bring your community together. So the chat features in managing assigning your team members, your grant writers to Ryan, you mentioned, having strategic consultation, Can't stress consultants that you've brought in to support your team members, and having them access this information and work in the process. We've talked a little bit about tracking metrics, understanding your users, the total amount of funding that they're going after things like this, to streamline your KPIs. And about bring your community together. So highlighting resources, your community, the opportunities out there at bringing that information in. So we have in essence talked about different SBIR STTR programs, different challenges that they face, the way that turbo SBIR streamlines the process from search to submission, and bring the community together. What I want to do is open it up right now for questions, I'd love to hear about your own SBIR STTR programs where you currently have built out how early you guys are, what your challenges are, and what your structures are in place. So what I'm gonna do is stop sharing my screen and then just open this up to questions from the audience.

Speaker 2  57:08  
While we're waiting for a couple of questions from the audience, I'd love to hear Ryan ujo group off what are your biggest takeaways for someone who's trying to support SBIR STTR applicants

Speaker 3  57:22  
come from being early in the funnel would be that something that a lot is sometimes discouraging people, they're not ready, I redirect people to our gap fund. And I emphasize again, just education just because that's totally alien to people, which is really why I like to support tools where you literally lays it down everything you need to do systematically.

Speaker 2  57:49  
Awesome visual, what would be the biggest takeaways that you would give to an organization who is building SBIR STTR support?

Speaker 5  57:56  
So my so I'll talk from you know, it's easy when you're starting out your office to say, well, I need more people interacting with my office, right. So you look at numbers from that perspective. And we were once there, and we are now in this unique position where we have more assets of our center than we can then then then we can effectively manage it. So my biggest challenge challenge is trying to maintain the quality of service we can offer with the resources we have. So having said that, the challenge I now tell my team and which we do is you don't want to sugarcoat the SBIR STTR process. This is not for everyone, this is not as not fill an application and get a grant kind of kind of process. This is a highly competitive process. So we are pretty transparent of what the odds are that you get awarded. And we also transparent about the amount of time you need to allocate for the venture. And since we do have scholarships on some of the things that we do offer, we also tell them what the likelihood of receiving that is, in some ways, I can almost tell you that we are almost trying to tuck you away from the SBIR STTR program, once we make you aware of it, right, we tell you the process then we spend time talking you away from it because Because managing expectations is really what it's all about. We observe because we really need you to be in this for the long haul. And and look at it and not as a get rich quick scheme that somehow some people seem to have that kind of perspective. It's easy money and it's quick and so on. Right? And so so we'd really try to shoot down those fairy tales that that exists in the program. Because there is a marketing side of the program, right, which is, you know, here's great money for innovations. It's all positive and uplifting and motivating But then there's the hard work. And so we that's really what we focus on on teams. It's kind of I tell my team now, it's one of those things that you won't like me now, but you will thank me later about because we live we literally have clients will come in and say, you know, is it okay? If I take on a home loan to fund some of this work, and I'm like, I, from what you've told me, I wouldn't touch your home at all. Okay, so. So we kind of see some of our activities as protecting families from bad decisions, marital harmony, things like that, that wasn't part of the job description. Because Because really accompanies get get really personal with as an Andy tell us the financial chat, liquidity crunches that they were running into. And so our conversation goes more beyond just the grind. It also has to do with the bridge funding, the time period, different federal programs, pay, pay cycles, and all of that, because it's really it matters a lot when you are maybe a two or three man team or three, three, woman team so so yeah, so that in a nutshell, kinda we try to be that authentic feedback to clients. Now, since we don't take equity positions in companies, a lot of accelerators and incubators do and one of the things we highlight is, you know, even this is where we're different from, from a typical tech transfer office. We don't even affiliate with our particular university on the licensing piece, right? I mean, that money doesn't flow back into my particular office, that that's not my my goal. So I keep that separate I firewall that, because it's a conflict of interest. I tell our only goal is help the business be successful in Texas. That's it. That's the only goal. And so that allows us to be pretty transparent and pretty authentic on on our conversations. So I'll stop there. Thank you.

Speaker 2  1:01:53  
Thank you, Lisa. Rupak, if you want to share what you feel are the biggest takeaways from webinar and the biggest things that people who are supporting SBIR STTR applicants should know, as they continue to optimize their own programs, please go ahead and take it away.

Speaker 4  1:02:12  
Yeah, I think I'll go off of what Ryan and we just said, which is like this is, it's, I think a lot of people have this, this kind of flaking thought process, that grant is something that's very similar to tax form, and we maybe have, we may have been partially responsible for the whole TurboTax part of it, which is like, it's, you can do it in one city. Right? They, they feel that it's possible, I can start today, two days before the deadline, I can pull through everything in one shot and just give it 2448 hours and and finish it. It doesn't work like that, because it's just there are so many things that are not in your control, that you even if you wanted to spend 48 hours, you wouldn't be able to do it. Because you can get stuck somewhere that you don't have the ability to clear like, you know, legally. And so just to help people understand that this is a two month three month process, in the best case scenario, maybe 15 days, if you actually have everything done, and you're on it completely. That's usually a big challenge. The second challenge is helping fight the constant battle of service versus scalable product, right? The I mean, every every company out there, every resource provider, every state service provider, is facing the same battle, which is called Sahaj, for everybody. And paying for salaries is really challenging unless you can find those mission driven people like me, Joel's mentioning, so how do you provide help in a format that doesn't require a high degree of cost? Because there's only a finite amount of money anywhere, even from the SBA to support something like this? Right? So how many humans will it take to actually help every single company that you want to help to the degree that they're expecting the helm? Right? So it's kind of like trying to train customers to be good customers and understanding what they need to do themselves, what they have to do themselves what they need to commit to, and where it is feasible to provide some additional help that you could never get from anywhere else. It's kind of like the knowledge that doesn't exist anywhere else, but cannot be programmed into software. That's kind of when you bring that stuff in. And that combination, and what's the right balance of that? That's always the heartbeats, like, for example, a lot of what Vijay mentioned in terms of like, understanding the technology and finding the right match with the problem statement that the DoD might have. A lot of that would be programmable in some degree, but you will at some point, you will still stop and you'll require someone to come in. But is that person required for every single step of that that entire matching process or the piece where after matches get made to explain those matches or something like that? So that's kind of the constant battle that we're also experiencing on our side, which is what the like, do you really need to have one person per company helping every company in that and that's in our you will never be able to help the number of companies that exist? Or, like, do you kind of help companies understand that this only works in an affordable and scalable manner? If they do, they basically live their own way. So I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 2  1:05:24  
Awesome. So I'm gonna ask one last question. Before I give it up for Lauren, I just want to end on a positive note. Because I always love hearing when So Ryan, I would love to hear about one of the things in your past year as you've encountered the SBIR STTR program at UW, and you were tasked with all the work that your predecessor had in her mind? What is some of the biggest wins? Or what is the big win for you? What are you proud of and yourself and the way your program has grown in the past year? Now,

Speaker 3  1:05:52  
oh, we're still pretty new this and is still iterating. So but that we've managed to do a couple cycles of calls, and we've had some successful applications in one's been awarded plus nice one's been rejected. Well, that's a learning experience. So the fact that we're getting a news is getting out there, and people are coming to us, that's a good sign that, uh, that we're also getting some organic reach out now. So I consider that a win, you know, our goal is to help support the innovators and along their journey so that this can be a tool to it, is the ultimate success, love. You know, I think, ultimately, for the program to be very helpful, you show like, yeah, there's a lot of sub contracts coming back to the university. And for a very small amount of money, there's a sexually great return. And also, you know, helping support licenses and whatnot. But we're still pretty early in that and but, uh, I feel good about what's working in this as as represented zero, we found a sustainable balance, providing appropriate help, because in the end, that, you know, people are starting to start up and that, you know, and then we could provide that to help but, you know, they will have to kind of step up to really do the start up, because it's ultimately their turn to success or failure.

Speaker 2  1:07:12  
Awesome. Thank you. And, Lauren, I want to make any closing comments. We really appreciate you having the time with us today and jumping again, opening your camera and thank God divine everyone.

Speaker 1  1:07:25  
Well, thank you, everyone. On behalf of autumn, I would like to thank you for Apoc, Brian, Beto, and Caroline for this informative presentation. And thank you to all of our attendees for for joining us today. As a reminder, a recording of this webinar will be available for viewing on the autumn Learning Center within a few days of this event and is included in your registration fee, slide handouts, and a certificate of attendance can also be accessed there. Please remember to complete the webinar evaluation which will open when you close out of this webinar. This will help us to serve your needs in the future. Again, thank you for joining us and have a good rest of the day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai