Speaker 1  0:06  
Dom, hello and welcome to today's autm webinar. Let's talk success. How TTOs help academic startups communicate to win. My name is donville Young. I'm a member of Autumn's educate team and today's staff host. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio, and today's session is being recorded. If you have a question for the presenter, we encourage you to use the Q and A feature on your zoom toolbar. Should you need closed captioning during today's session, the Zoom live transcript feature is turned on and available on your toolbar. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge and thank Autumn's online professional development sponsor, Marshall Gerstein. We appreciate your ongoing support. I would now like to introduce today's presenter, auto po

Speaker 2  0:56  
don't thank you so much. I'm excited to to see you all. In fact, I can't. Will I see how many people are here, or any of the folks that are in the audience? Or, how does that work?

Speaker 1  1:05  
No, it's the way this is built. You won't be able to,

Speaker 2  1:09  
okay, well, I know I looked at the list of the people that signed up, so I know there's a lot of a number of sort of familiar names. Hopefully you guys are in the audience. It's delightful to see you guys again, and to meet any of the new people that have joined my job today, as donville said, is to talk to you about how we can use communication to better achieve tto goals by little bit by way of background. Let me tell you what my background is. I am primarily working with startups to help them tell their stories better, and that drives their excess success. It accelerates their impact that they can have on the world around them, and obviously one level up from that. I help TTOs, help those startups tell their story better. I help TTOs tell their story better. And also know that when we're talking about startups right, that could also be a licensing agreement. So it's really the portfolio of IP that you have, and then that portfolio of IP can either get licensed to industry, it can get licensed to a startup. In either case, you need to message that correctly in order to get people excited about it. Obviously, if it's licensed to a startup, it is behooves you to make sure that that startup is successful again, to drive that impact and to drive the so positive reinforcement that that their success would have on your institution and your ability to have that institution make the change in the world, which is sort of typically, really one of the prime goals of any educational and research institution. My background is that I started out as a journalist. I worked as a journalist for many years, for lots of publications and lots of countries. I was also a four time co founder. I then merged those two, became head of communications for a startup. Did that for a few and then now have I taught at USC Annenberg, and also now do this as a consultant for, again, as I mentioned, individual startups, for incubators, accelerators, universities, tto offices, right? Anyone who's related to startups, and again, as a tto, you're somewhere between an incubator and an accelerator and a VC and the the storytelling skills that you have to do in order to help those startups succeed is really the exact same that you need to have your entity, your ecosystem, succeed. And again, whether that's licenses or startups themselves, or honestly, the tto itself, right, the story that you guys are telling you guys are, in some degree, a startup as well. So what I wanted to do is today to talk a little bit about the shift that the mindset shift that we all need to undergo to understand that right again, 2030, years ago, you could just have the IP be sort of acknowledged or processed through your system and corporations would would lease it. Those days are long gone. You need to de risk that IP further and further. A lot of universities are now starting or accelerating or expanding their startup ecosystem. There's entrepreneurial ecosystems, but even for again, that licensing, the direct licensing stuff, there's a mindset shift that I want to discuss. A couple of frameworks that I want to go through to help you think through like, hey, how do I think about this stuff differently in order to accelerate that success? Then I want to talk a little bit about the website fundamentals. I'm doing that for two reasons. One is that pretty much everyone, whether you your tto website, whether the website that you have or the sub site that you have for your IP, whether it's the startups themselves that you're trying to support and accelerate their success, of the website tends to be a place where everyone's going to go through it at some point and in the process of converting again, whether they're going to. License it, or support the startup, or whatever, that's where they're going to go. And so it's a perfect place to have to tell your story. You can tell it at exactly the length, the detail, the amount of sort of information and scope that you want to provide. Everything is up to you. Obviously, the color scheme and the visuals the website really is over the home base for you to tell that story. Again, whether it's of a licensed product, or whether it's of a startup, or whether it's of the tto or your ecosystem more broadly, which is why I want to talk about the websites. Again, it's just ties in a lot of those themes. And then finally, just briefly touch on a couple of sort of practical ideas for how that mindset shift that I talked about, how that would then reflect through that as you're trying to get some, some PR and awareness for, again, any, any of those, those levels. So that's the sort of three things. Then I want to leave plenty of time for Q and A. Okay, so the first thing is that, like so often, we think of communications and PR is kind of that thing that happens at the end, and it's really an important strategic exercise to go through the communications process right in the beginning, because it surfaces and forces you to think through a lot of the strategic issues that are at stake. And if you have a messy communication strategy. Again, at any of those levels that I discussed, you are going to have probably your you there's some key strategic issues that you haven't thought through. Obviously, you know, maybe you have and you're just not presenting it right, like that's totally possible. But again, if you have a clear strategy and a clear messaging strategy, there's a really good chance you've thought through so I encourage you to welcome the communications challenges as a way to make sure that you've thought through the strategy right. And the reason for this is as follows, if you have there's a there's a time where everything is internal right for a startup or a licensing deal or whatever else, right, like you're getting your ducks in a row, you're doing the legal work, you're you're you're filing your IP disclosures, maybe in the case of a startup, building the founding team. And then later, you're going to need to get those external audiences excited about what it is that you're doing right. And so if you don't get those people excited, whether that's investors, customers, the hires, the industry, the people who are going to license your your your your inventions, if you're not getting those external audiences excited, then no success, right? And so that's why you need to make sure that you have that message straight. Because otherwise, all that internal work that you did, all that careful groundling, that you did, all those IP disclosure, all those efforts you did to encourage researchers to disclose their IP to your office and the like all of that essentially for not because it didn't have an impact and didn't go anywhere, right? So that's what I want to avoid. And so one of the key things, and it's a structural issue, right? Because you get the IP, the IP is the thing, it's the thing that your office deals with, and it's a an important mindset chip. But the point is that if you think of the IP as a drill, right, like it's the thing, it's the object that is of no inherent value to anyone in the outside world, what the outside world cares about is what the outside world already cares about. Which are their problems? It's their issues. In the case of the drill, think of it like, nobody buys a drill because they want to drill, right? Nobody's buying it because, ooh, it's 5400 RPMs, and it has, you know, a shiny steel tipped, you know, carbide, whatever it is. They're buying it because they want to hang a picture, right? They need a hole in the wall. Maybe their spouse yelled at them and said, The living room is, you know, is, you know, empty and bare, like something's got to be done. So suddenly you find yourself at the hardware store looking at drills, again, not because you really wanted to buy drills, but because you're trying to hang things on the wall, because you're trying to keep your spouse happy. So every IP that you get into your office, right? Or obviously every startup that you're nurturing has that kind of inherent problem built in, or that challenge built in. Because, again, from an academic perspective, like the discovery of that protein, like that is the thing, and that's what the inventor wants to talk about, that's what the IP disclosure wants to talk about. But at the end of the day, from an impact perspective, none of that matters. What matters is that, like, that protein could cure HIV or whatever it's going to do, right? Like, those are the people that are dying, the hospitals that aren't running their thing as effectively, that industry that doesn't have this new material, whatever it is like, they have a very distinct problem. And the goal for you is to make sure that you present everything in terms of the problems that you solve. And one way to quickly think through that is to think about, did the people of didn't? Did the my audience, like, have this problem or this awareness of this issue before they even learned about my IP or my startup? Those are the things you want to talk about. So you don't want to talk about like, hey, our thing is, again, 5400 rpms. They didn't. Wake up in the morning thing make, man, I wish I had a drill that had 5400 rpm. They woke up in the morning and they said, Man, you know, I've got an angry spouse, and I got to, like, get some holes in the wall right. And then they turn it so you want to present things in terms of things that they already knew they had, or problems they had, issues that they were facing before they learned about, you know, your product. And so that is a really key thing. I see that again, with all these IP disclosures, a lot of these websites are TTOs, obviously, with the startups themselves, to the degree you can always present things through the eyes of the again, ultimately, solipsistic customers, right? That is going to help you massively improve your communication and your effectiveness as a tto. There's a second shift which is related to that, which is that the way we talk in academia, and I grew up as the child of two academics, so I know this well,

Speaker 2  10:54  
is that we talk about things. First of all, we want to be very precise in what we talk about. We want to talk about, hey, we've discovered this. We still don't know that there's, you know, all these unknowns. I do want to be careful for drawing conclusions, right, like all the great stuff that drives science forward, in which, ultimately, if you're immersed in academia for decades, you somehow, you know, come to assume that that is sort of the quote right way to communicate, and I appreciate that, and that is absolutely the way science communicates, and that's the way we drive things forward. But in a business world, right? We have a different approach. And we talk about, obviously, the big picture of where we're going. We're to have a certain certainty to it. We want to tell the vision about these people that are dying and how we're going to save them, right? And you might not have everything worked out yet. You might not know exactly how you're gonna make those semiconductor chips to like function. You haven't actually scaled the production process yet and all that, but your goal is say, like, this is where we're going. And, like, follow me, and we're gonna get there. And that feels, often to scientists, like a used car salesman, and it could be right? Like, it absolutely, there's people who talk a big game and have nothing behind it. But more importantly, you have to think about it as just two different outfits that you wear, right? Like, if you wear a bathing suit or a tuxedo, there's nothing wrong with either outfit. They're just very something wrong with wearing the wrong one at the wrong place, right? Like, you're not going to show up at the opera wearing a bathing suit, and that's sort of what's happening if you show up wearing, you know, with a 50 page PowerPoint presentation with charts and graphs and unknowns highlighted when you're bitching for VC money or for a sale or the like. And so I just want everyone to sort of wear the right outfit when they show up at an environment that is different from the environment that they're typically in. And again, obviously, with TTOs, part of the university, that's an important point. So how does that? How does that manifest? Just a couple of kind of quick examples here. This was from a very large university, one of the startups, super exciting, obviously, coming out of COVID, they figured out how to, how to make chlorine disinfectants last, you know, weeks, I think, instead of just hours, and which is obviously an incredible thing. And the trouble with this thing, and at first, when you read it, you're like, wow. Like, it's a pretty clear statement of fact. Like, here's this thing, halamine. It keeps surfaces free from bacteria viruses. It extends the life of chlorine based disinfectants. Like, that's a very nice description of the science involved. The problem is, is that none of the customers that might use this, right? There's like, kindergartens with kids getting sick, hospitals with, you know, fever outbreaks. There's food service establishment where everybody's getting sick, right? Like, those people didn't wake up and say, God, if only we could extend the life of chlorine, Beast disinfectants, right? Like, they wake up and they say, man, like, why do we have, you know, this, this, this infection rate at the in the, er, like, why did people get sick? You know, eating my burritos, like those. Like, help me solve that problem. And so, you know, the way to position this right is not that, like, we do this thing. This is the how we do it right. But the what we do is like, you know, we keep people safe, and we certainly don't, you know, promote ourselves as, like, intelligent looking people peering through microscopes, right? Like this is the place where there's like, the happy people who are not sick because they have been saved by this chlorine beast. Again, life extender. So, again, right idea, academic approach, wrong mindset for presenting it to the outside world. So what does it look like when you do it, right? So here's a couple examples, right? It's like, Sure, these people can talk about their membrane technology, that is, that makes green hydrogen possible, right? Amazing technology. They could talk all about the membranes and whatnot. But what's the impact? The impact is like, you're going to, like, slash the cost of green hydrogen production. You're going to make it competitive, cost competitive with with gray hydrogen so, and then you can get into the science of the details later. Here's one, right? It's like, Here we create these videos effortly. They could talk all day about, like, the the science involved in the AI and this and that, about, about how a. It creates the system creates videos. But what the impact is, you push a button, you get a great video, right, like, and then we can get into the science of it later. And one of the problems that we all have, again, coming from an IP background, is that you sort of know too much, right? You know too much about the science, particularly the the principal investigators involved. I mean, often they've been spending decades, if not their entire career, on this thing. They know exactly what they know. They know all the things they don't know, all the things that they want to do next, right? They have all this stuff, and it's hard to rise above and be like, realize, like, wait a minute, this is about this application and it's and so now it's actually all about those people's problems. So the degree that you can reframe everything that you're presenting, again, be it through the startups you're supporting, be it through the IP you're presenting and the like, you need to sort of rise above and know when you're going to put a whole bunch of PhDs into the room together and they can have their science discussion. That's fine. Obviously it's not a bad thing, but it needs to be presented in a completely different way. And the sort of summary of this, and this is, by the way, a great framework for every email you ever send, everything you ever do is we talk about the message, but message is not a kind of a thing. It's not a sort of standalone, abstract thing. You always have to depend on the audience that you're speaking to and what you want that audience to do as a result. And if you don't know who you're talking to, and maybe you're even unclear on what you want them to do as a result of you having talked to them, then what's the message like? Maybe there is no message, right? Or it's different, right? So I want you to always think through what you're who you're speaking with, and what you want to death them as a result. And that's going to tie through to the website. That's going to tie through to how you present your IP on your tech transfer website. It's obviously going to, you know, when you go to the startups and they're like, our thing could be applicable to everything, yeah, that's great. But like, who are we talking to on day one, and what is that first audience that you need? Like, do you right now? Like, again, for example, that membrane technology, one I was working with after speaking. They're all talking about how this is going to be this, this life changing thing, and it's obviously gonna change the entire industry and all that. But after discussions, it became clear what they really need during the next six months. What they needed were two partners in industry who were willing to be a sort of a test bed for it, right? They needed, they needed, sort of proof of of concept installs at two brand name hydrogen manufacturers or fossil fuel companies and so then that okay? So now we know exactly what the outcome we want to reach these large energy companies, and our goal is to get them to have one of these pilot facilities. No, that should reshapes the message in an entirely different way from everything else that you're going to do, right? So you want to make sure that you always know what your goal is before you start talking about how to get there. And it there. And again, we always talk about, oh, it's about PR and communications. Well, actually, that's sort of like, that's the end result. And that's why my sort of closing section here on this sort of broad mindset shifting is that you really want to think about communications as a strategic function. It's going to force you to think through like, Okay, we've got this membrane technology like, what do we need? What is the next step? And let's define success and define the next step, and then we can work backwards from there to figure out, okay, how do we need to message this thing? And again, just to flog the dead horse, right? Obviously, you want to make sure that it's the exact same process, whether you're whether you're licensing out a technology, whether you're licensing it to one of your startups, or whether you're, you're, you know, have some other kind of path forward on the IP that you have, okay, so that's the sort of first thing. So, right, so we've talked about some of these strategic mindset shift that we need to sort of think through in order to do it. Principle among them this idea of, hey, it's, it's all about the customer and the end result. And also we need to change the way we just talk about it, the mechanics of how we talk about it. We always need to think about who we're talking to and why we're talking to them before we figure out what we're going to talk about. So now I want to talk about this message on the website. And again, this is more immediately valuable to the startups that you're supporting. But again, the concepts echo through this and provide an opportunity for some interesting messaging frameworks. And so I want to take a few minutes to go through that. Okay, so we've got this idea that PR and communications is the, you know, kind of what we're talking about, but really that's just the noise that you are going to hopefully cause in order to drive people into a funnel that you have that you need to predetermine. And again, this could be, and we'll get, we'll get to this a second. But like, I mean, just to take customers and as an example, right? Like, let's say you get a startup. We'll just stick with that example for now. And. And you've got some people, maybe, honestly, you're at the autumn conference, and you're chatting up, you know, people in life sciences and about this great technology that you now have, right? Whatever it is, you're sort of generating that noise. And then what are they gonna do? They're gonna go to the website again. That's why we're talking about this. There may be, sort of, learn a little more information. Maybe they're gonna do some corroboration. They're gonna talk to some other investigators. They're going to talk to, you know, they'll check out your LinkedIn, or whatever it might be, again, whether it's startups or sort of the tto directly, they're going to do some kind of corroboration of the fact that this is really for real, right? They're maybe going to get some materials. They're going to read the original disclosures they but whatever they have, all these things, right? And then at some point, hopefully, they convert again, either becoming a customer of the startup or of maybe a license, or of the of the technology.

Speaker 2  20:47  
And so the way to set that up right. Step one is you really need to figure out where you're trying to go, right, be very clear on what the audience is going to benefit, who the audience is and how they're going to benefit. And then you need to define this funnel right. And you need to set all that up, and then only once you've got all that set up, you're going to then sort of make that noise. Otherwise you're just sort of pouring water into a leaking bucket, and everything is going to drape drip out. And there's no point in really putting all that effort into your into sort of the PR and messaging thing at all, because they're going to get into a non existent or a poorly designed funnel. And obviously every audience has a funnel, whether it's customers, whether it's investors, whether it's licensees, of your of your technologies, right? Like they all have a different funnel. They all sort of tend to go through the website again, but it's important that you just think through like, how you're going to do it, and where your weak spots are, where you're strong, what you're missing and and the like. So to go through what's on a website, and again, these, these, these rules, tend to generalize into a sort of a large, the larger concept, right? Like, again, just to be very clear, you need to figure out who you're talking to. Otherwise, you know, all the things you say are just sort of random buckshot in the night. You want to be very clear that once you know who you're talking to, you want to give them the information you feel that they need to know. You want to give this sort of concept of social proof, like third parties talking about this thing that you have right like, wow, it's great. It saved my life. It did these great things. And the consumer level, that's five star reviews in in a more academic setting. Maybe that's a, you know, an esteemed, leading researcher in the field, talking about it, or it's someone from Pfizer, whatever you have, and you want to also give them, you know, kind of an, you know, an action step that they can do. You want to have those benefits in the descriptions, like right at the top, and again, whether that's top of the website, or top of whatever document you're creating that's super important. You want to hit them with the most important stuff up front, right? Like, you know, conclusions up front. And then also, very importantly, like, everything needs to be geared towards taking your next step. Otherwise, your beautiful website, your beautiful sales materials, everything is just a tree falling in the forest. You'll never know if someone like comes and reads it and is super impressed by this great work that you've done, but they don't know what to do next, right? It's like, set up the meeting. You know, give us your email address. Come visit us, see it in action, whatever. The thing is, there needs to be a next step, even if that's literally just get on the newsletter, if it's too early. But you always want to make sure that you maximize whatever traffic you have, be that on a website, or, you know, at the conference, or like, so when you take those down to the website level, right? So you typically start, hey, here's the title. Is the value we provide, right? There's like, we put a hole in your wall, right? Or whatever, we let you hang your pictures have a beautiful home, right? This is the high level benefit of selling that drill. The subtitle can say, like, Hey, we got this 54 RPM carbide tip drill. You know, give you the cleanest holes in the industry. Whatever it might be like, This is how we do that thing. Here's some imagery of this beautiful art hanging on the wall. Here's other people saying, Man, I can't believe I'm so glad my life has changed now that I own that drill. Again. This is sort of a consumer example, but it always is, you know, kind of just structurally the same, no matter what you're talking about. And then that call to action, hey, this is how you can take this next step, whatever that might be. So you'll find on startup websites, and later, when they get bigger this, you know, some of these rules start to shift because they're turning very broad, right? You look at the Pfizer homepage, or the like, These things tend to end up getting very vague, because they're talking to an extraordinary number of audiences, and they're and they have an extraordinary number of different products. And so at the end, they just say things like, you know, life is, you know, we make life better, or something totally, kind of awfully vague. But for right now, you want to stay really on this end of the detail. So just take a look at a couple of websites. Here's an early startup I was working with recently, right? Like, they take PDFs and they turn them into they turn them into sort of actionable, living documents, like websites and stuff, right? Like so, but they don't mention that was like, we take your content, right? These like stale PDFs, we turn into money. Me. Like everybody wants money. They woke up that morning thinking, Man, I could use some money. Below that. It explains how you're going to do that. Here's how you can visualize it. You need it explained real fast. Here's all the other companies that are already working with us. You're the last person to hear about it. And here's how you take the next step. Right? It's all of those elements right there on the homepage. You haven't even begun scrolling yet on the site, and you've already hit all the top points. Here's another one from drift. Some of you might know that this is this sort of chat bot that pops up when you're on a e commerce site, right again. Here's what you get out of it. You're gonna have, like, basically a fatter pipeline. You're gonna sell more. It's gonna take you less time. Again, universal need that's speaking to the customer. Here's how we create it with this fancy chat bot. Here's what you can see, all these happy customers and happy customer service agents, you know, being efficient. Here are all the great companies already working with us. And here's how you're going to take that next step. So I want you to, so as you go through, you start to see it's like, it's like, you know, watching a movie and realizing, wow, you always meet the you always meet the hero, the mere hero, you know, meet some kind of an obstacle. The hero struggles and almost fails. The hero succeeds. You're like, wow, like virtually every movie is really the exact same story, just with different layers on top. And as you start to see these underlying patterns, you as a tto will be able to be more effective in terms of promoting the tto, promoting your license deals, and promoting the startups that are supporting your that are supporting your, your IP. So there's another way to think about this. There's sort of three interlocking stories that you're going to tell that I've sort of touched on all of them here, but just to give you another framework for thinking about them, right? The first, more important one, or the top one that we've talked about most, which is like, here's how we improve the customers lives. This is the this is the pain that we're solving that's out there in the world. Obviously, that gets a lot of and rightly gets a lot of effort. You might subdivide the audiences and the marketplaces and all that. But like, this is the impact that our company has through its product or service. The about section is often very important. This is why we're doing it right. So this is the motivation behind the company. Sometimes it can be very personal. Sometimes it can be a little bit more so broadly, sort of mission driven. But the point is, you always you can't have a movement without a without a leader and without acolytes and followers. And the way, the best way to get them is say, hey, we see a better future. We saw this awful past. We see a better future follow us as we create change the world. And then the most important thing is to have other people talk about how great you are, or this product or services. It's always more effective. And we're, you know, we might know, and you know, kind of our hearts of hearts, that when we go on Amazon and we see that, you know, some product has, you know, 405 star reviews. Yeah, we know that there's a lot of gaming going on, but the fact is, you still look at it, if it doesn't have the 405 star reviews, you're like, maybe this product isn't so great after all, right, like, we're all looking for, we're all looking to walk into the restaurant that's lively and bustling but has that one nice table available at the window. And we're like, this is going to be a good meal. If you walk into that restaurant and it's empty. You're like wondering who died of food poisoning the day before, and why you're the last person to hear about it, right? So you always want to make sure that you have other people talking about it. You want that sort of liveliness and third party corroboration. And that's, again, a story that you're going to be telling throughout. Again, no matter what you're doing, there's another there's a messaging framework that I came up with as well that addresses a different aspect of it. And this is another good one to keep in mind.

Speaker 2  28:31  
And this is because a lot of founders and TTOs struggle to know exactly when they're talking about what benefits. There's all range of benefits, right? Like, the very first front of foundational one is like, hey, this thing is better, faster and cheaper, right? It like, allows us to do whatever it is, so better, right? Then, of course, what is the doing it better? What does that do? Well, it solves a bunch of problems, right? Cures diseases. It helps us live longer. It makes faster chips in our phones, whatever it might be, right? Like solves those problems. Well, what does that do that yields other larger benefits that that again, makes better companies, makes more efficient hospital systems, whatever it might be, and then, obviously, ultimately, that builds a better society. And so those are distinct levels of, you know, there's like, how, and then why? Why? Why? You always, generally speaking, want to go up the, you know, kind of up that chain, if any of you, I assume all of you, are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's very similar, right? We all have these needs, everything from we want to, you know, sort of not die from hunger, all the way through to personal fulfillment. And obviously, we all have these sort of needs at various levels. And generally speaking, the higher you can speak to them, the better. But there's a time and a place for each right? There's a time to, like, just get down to the nuts and bolts and talk about why this is five cents cheaper. And there's a time to talk about how you know, we're going to unlock your inner artist, or whatever the case may be. But if you at least consciously realize that you have this sort of vocal range, then you can apply. Lie it at the right time in the right place, and know when you're singing which song and whom to sing it to. So just to take an example, here is a company I was working with is an ultra thin endomicroscope. And they obviously, you know, again, they've got the super thing, thin thing. So it's like minimal tissue impact, right? It's only 60 microns, you know, et cetera, has all these very fundamental in the lab benefits. Well, what does that do? Can allow you have shorter operations, right? You're going to diagnose diseases more accurately. Patients are going to recover faster, because you're not jabbing a big hole in their side, right? So, like that creates these sort of solutions. Again, you can think about all the ways you could frame those benefits. And what does that do? Well, now we have sort of, you know, better use of lower insurance costs and more efficient hospitals, right? Was it, you we can see more patients, we can have a larger, healthier population, right? And that ultimately is going to yield these societal benefits, right? So you can take all the way from this microscope, this endo microscope, that's, you know, 60 microns, and talk about the details of 60 microns, and how that's better than whatever the current size in industry standard is, right? Very, very concrete, tactical and immediate, all the way up to like, Hey, we're building a better world here. And knowing when to speak to which benefit will help you build a website or marketing materials or whatever you're doing that is going to speak to that audience, like saying, Wow, this thing was created for me, right? This is actually going to help me live a better life. Like I'm the surgeon, and I realize I work on, you know, I use the under microscopes all the time, and I've seen my rates, and I've seen that the complications that have arisen and the like, I want to make sure that's better, right, so that you address them very specifically, especially initially. You You really identify that first audience, and you can speak then most immediately, to their needs. As you start speaking to a larger audience, your benefit description is, by necessity, going to become more diffuse. And I want to make sure that we stay as focused as humanly possible, especially in those early days, in order to get your tto achievements, your milestones reached as effective, effectively and as efficiently as possible. Okay, so that's sort of like website, but you know, so some more frameworks by way of discussion, discussion on how that would look on a website. You really want to make sure that you've got those key audiences identified. You're speaking with them immediately. You're understanding at which range you can address their their benefits. You make sure that everyone else knows that that this thing is great. You make taking the next step easy, right? So you're really thinking about the world from their perspective, in order to drive the outcome that you guys need in order to meet your milestones. So with that, let me just sort of wrap this up here by speaking through a couple of practical ideas. And again, these echo a lot of the things I talked about, but they also give you a little bit more sort of ideas for how to how to go about this, another way of thinking about this of the pyramid, right? There's another sort of type of pyramid that we have, that startups certainly have, but also these technologies all inevitably have, right? Which is that, like, there's a initial part of the thing, the very mechanical like, Hey, we're going to launch this thing, and we're going to help. You know, one hospital with their endo microscope problem with and it's right now it's like 60 microns later, we're going to have a 20 microns or whatever, right? We have this like launch thing. It might be more expensive than we want, it might be more complicated, it might be harder to produce. It might not be as great as we might not have as many features as we want, but we're going to launch this thing then we're going to it's going to involve, it's going to become an established company, or sort of the industry standard, and then ultimately, it's going to sort of change the world. And it's easy to get tangled up in that, and it's easy to also lose track again, of the other vocal range that you have, which is when to talk about the types and scope of benefits that this invention that you guys have sitting on your desk is going to have. So generally, when you're talking to investors, and you can think of this as sort of licensees as well, right? You talk about the very mechanics of like, Hey, here's the process for getting to, you know, to the first patient, to that first market, to that first impact, and then this is how it's going to be in the future, when you have everyone's using this thing, and it's going to be incredible, and it's going to change the world. And so actually, it's not just this one drug, it's a whole platform of drugs. We're going to be able to cure all these other things with it, right? It's going to be amazing. And the investors and their licensees, like, they need to hear, like, the big picture. That's why they're interested in this, because they really think it's going to be super duper valuable. But they also really need to hear like, how are you going to get to, like, earning your first dollar? And so you want to make sure that they know. You want to make sure that they know exactly you know how that you're that you have your eyes on the immediate prize. Because obviously, nothing that big is ever going to happen if you don't do the take those first steps, employees, people working on this thing, right? The researchers and the like like, they need to be just focused on making sure that that darn. Endo microscope at 60 microns is like working, because if it isn't working, like, Sure, they know about where this is going to go, or they know that if, boy, if they can cure Lyme disease with this, you know this thing that opens up this whole platform opportunity for proteins in the blood and whatever it might be. But again, you really need to get them focused on the early success, like they need to actually be able to manufacture this thing at all before you can get to the future thing. So you really need to keep them focused on what they're doing at the industry conference. When you guys are at autumn, or you're, you know, you're speaking, right? You're talking big picture stuff, right? You're selling the vision of where this is going. Oh my gosh. We have this whole new platform of drug development that we're developing, blah, blah, blah, like, yeah, okay, right now, we're still, you know, not even out of clinicals and and we're still hoping to get positive feedback on just our first indication. But you know, we've got this big thing, right? So again, they really want to focus on that, and then for the customers. And most importantly, you know, you also don't want to over promise or talk about all the other things that they're going to get. If you are a startup and you're selling your 60 micron endo microscope, you don't want to tell them about like the one that you're going to have next year that's 20 microns, because honestly, then they might just wait. And so you want to be sure that you have a valuable proposition to those customers today, and that there's a powerful reason for them to buy today and then tomorrow, when you come out with the next version, right? You can talk about how great the new one is, and no one's going to hold you to it that last year you had this primitive version that you were selling as the next big thing. The point is to keep them focused on the thing that you can sell today. So as you go out and do this, and as you help your communication staff sell these stories about their tto stuff, as you help your startups tell their story more effectively, right? You've gone through this process. You've built all these funnels, you've have all the you figured out who your audience is. You've figured out what are the benefits, and now you just need to get some noise. You need to start making raising some awareness, right? It's really important to understand that the world out there is not this homogenous mass of journalists sort of writhing about in a big pit. And if you just throw a couple of press releases at them, magically, they're going to self sort to the ones that are interested, and they're going to take your thing and they're going to run with it. Step one is to always realize that the audience that you're trying to reach, or this intermediate audience that you're you need to reach in order to reach your actual audience, right? They have their own set of needs and requirements and pressures and problems and pain points, and you need to address those. So first you need to find them. And the fact of the matter is, is that virtually every invention or startup has a relatively narrow audience, journalist, audience, sliver. So even if you think this is amazing, this is going to change everything. And it's not just at whatever you know, physicians Today magazine, so the New York Times is going to be huge, right? There's like, I don't know how many people work at the New York Times. There might be, like, four that we actually could plausibly pitch with some angle on this startup. And the goal is to always meet those people that could find the publications that you're going to meet. This is a, you know, example here of this agriculture sensor technology I was working

Speaker 2  38:14  
with and find the writers. And as you set that up, and you realize it starts to filter out, who are those, those key publications, and who are the key writers? And honestly, the world is often a lot smaller than you think, and it's whatever it is. It's like a whole bunch of people. It's not this sort of amorphous mess. And once you've figured that out, right, then it's always like, again, just like you went through and you said, hey, it's not about the drill, it's about the problem that I'm solving for the journalist, it's the exact same framework that you have to apply, right? Nobody cares about the technology, per se. They care about the things that they are. The journalists care about things that they already care about, right? And you now, your job is to figure out how this technology, how this startup, fits into something that the other, the rest of the world already cares about, right? So for you know, agriculture, right? There's some obvious ones about news, events, media, there's the big drought, there's the hurricane, whatever it is, gives you some opportunities to talk about solutions to farming issues. Maybe there's sort of crop yields is, right? There's a there's, there's, there's low crop to orange crop in Florida comes in poor Well, here's people who have worked on, you know, making it better. You have all these different ways of maybe there's a whole, there's a whole. You can identify a trend. There's, you know, you find three other, two other technologies that are somewhat related, but not competitive. And now you have a trend for how data is changing agriculture, and you package that up as a story, right? There's all these things that people care about. They don't inherently care about this, and you know, an agriculture sensor, unless you package it into a larger story for them that they suddenly say, hey, like, I could write an article about that my audience would care about. Are the latest in how computer technology is changing agriculture, right? And then another one is often that for again, going back to this endo microscope example, the smallest publications are almost inevitably better than the big ones, especially, or at least early on, right? Like, sure the New York Times, it's lovely. Your mom's going to be impressed. But if you are going to really drive sales, and you want to get the top surgeons who are using this, this particular tool, right, you want to go to endo pro magazine. That's where maybe there's only have 1000 readers, but like 900 of them are going to be super relevant to the thing that you have. And by the way, it's also a lot easier to get into, right? So as you figure out your portfolio of technologies and your startups, and you want to help them build awareness most startups, and again, this is not universal for stuff coming out of unit research labs, but like most of this stuff is like pretty deep tech B to B stuff, right? There's a relatively small audience, sometimes literally 10s of people, maybe 10s of 1000s at the upper end. Every once in a while, there's obviously a real big consumer things and and that's a sort of a different beast, but most of the technology you're working on, you're going to be very well served finding like the five publications that everyone has to that in the industry are sort of the the important ones. And then finally, the sort of couple of tools. Obviously you all as as as university employees, you may well have access to the sort of that bottom layer, Muck rack, incision and meltwater, right? These like large established databases to do that journalism research. Those are obviously expensive, and you may or may not have them. The sort of cheaper options Help a Reporter Out quoted and proudly. Are these things where journalists put out announcements. Hey, I'm working on this article, and I'm looking for experts in, you know, endomicroscopy. And then if you find that, and you happen to get to that journalist before he publishes, it be a super efficient way of getting really nice coverage for your technology. It's just like see eating soup with a fork. So it's just, it can be a lot of stuff to go through, because a lot of people are writing a lot of articles about a lot of things that have nothing to do with your patent portfolio. But if you can filter it, you know, in your inbox or have someone else go through it right, it can be very efficient. And then finally, the lowest common denominators, Google Alerts. They're free. It's great way to keep in touch of of technologies and keywords and competitors and the like, and it just once you set it up, emails just come to you every day. So that's sort of the that's sort of the easiest and way to do that, all right. Well, that's, that's really all that I have for now. I wanted to sort of leave the last 20 minutes here for just questions and discussion and and please connect with me directly. I also have a newsletter, and I'll invite you to that and but I have a lot of articles in my archive, on my website, more information about me the services I provide. So so please feel free to reach out to me directly. And with that, let me, let me turn it over to some questions you.

Speaker 2  43:10  
There must be, there must be somebody in, somebody in the audience who can, who I haven't, who haven't bored to sleep. I

Speaker 2  43:35  
anybody? Come on, someone? Someone in the audience has a question comment, how they're doing it. I'd be I'd be super excited. Maybe I missed something. And you have an you have an addition you'd like to make to what I've talked about.

Speaker 2  43:54  
I see Hannah Carbone in the audience. Hannah, are you there? Just to Ah, here we go. Tara Richard, um, do you have a good example of a good tto website? That's a good question. Um, I do not off the top of my head. Um, I the one thing I will say is that I see a lot of websites where the patent disclosures are just pretty much a laundry list of the IP that you guys have. And sometimes they're gussied up with some some wheels of like, Oh, if you're interested in, if you're interested in life sciences, then you can click into life sciences and go down and and so it's often, you know, it just takes some work to bring that in. Someone saying that the tech launch Arizona off the checkout. I've worked with U of A and and I will have to look at that and see how their, how their how their website does it. And I appreciate that, but that's also is one place where there are new tools now. And I. Happy to discuss this with anyone in particular. There are new tools that allow you to sort of take a lot of that IP that you have and those things and on a semi automated basis, start processing it with some of these frameworks that I was talking about, and so that you can actually present it in a far more user friendly fashion, right? Not just like, oh, I have to go on an Easter egg hunt, and say, Oh yes, life sciences and oh yes, this that I have to know where I'm going. I could just be able to say, like, you know, what do you got, you know, in AIDS research, right? And then it would just all of all the the IP that you have that's related to that subject would be surfaced. So, okay, so here's another hold on the so good. We got some questions. Coming in here. What are your thoughts about early research studies, stories, showcasing initial results, maybe patent award, but focused on opportunity, not necessarily licensing? Listen, I think that's, I think that's absolutely great. I think that there's a whole bunch of benefits you get out of it. Obviously, you know, it's early stage and the like. Again, that's a that's you guys. You know most or all of you have a relatively large bullhorn, right? You don't need to necessarily reach out to other other publications, right? You have a university. You might even have a magazine and newspapers associated and websites associated with that university. You've got a lot of ways of getting that word out on your own at the same time, you still want to use all of the tools that you have to make that story exciting and accessible, but that is to raise the awareness to the people who might be interested in that. And again, it might be for the research, might be for the the IP or the or the web, or for the startups, but I think those, I think those things are, are great tools, and you should absolutely sort of leverage those. Okay, so here's Hannah writes, Hi Anna, who, in a startup company is best positioned to work on communications? Should it be outsourced? Fabulous question. Thank you. So the fact of the matter is, is that early on in a startup's life, right? There's basically the founders, and there's not typically a whole lot of money, and so it's going to be the founders who are going to do that early stage outreach. And there's some very good reasons for that, for you know, first of all, generally speaking, journalists want to hear from the person who came up with this thing or who's driving it, right? They have the greatest amount of passion, they have the greatest amount of knowledge. They're the sort of greatest authority on this thing, right? You don't want to outsource that to a PR agency or the like. Obviously, that is not a situation that is tenable. As the company grows, or at some point you're going to hire someone, you're going to hire someone like me, you're going to hire an employee. You're going to work with someone, right? Is it going to start? It's going to start drifting away from the founders. At some point you'll get to a large scale where, hey, there's going to be a big agency that's going to sort of do that. Obviously, as that goes up, the you know, the costs go up, the passion goes down, maybe the the drive, right? It becomes more just a job than then, then, then, then, then, sort of a passion project, as it is, for the founders. So. So the important thing, though, is that if the founders, or you guys, right, are handling this at the early stage, the benefit is not just that you're going to be the greatest authority and the people that care the most about the success of this thing. You're also going to be learning about how to become a good customer of those employees, or outsource consultants, or outsource PR agencies as you grow, so that you know the questions to ask and you know when they're overcharging you and delivering not enough, right? I want all of you to be really good consumers of PR messaging communications services, and the best way you can is to understand some of the fundamental frameworks. And as you saw, like, none of this is rocket science, right? It's not complicated. None of it is, you know, the IP that you guys are licensing on a daily basis is way more intellectually rigorous than any of the stuff that I just put forward. It's just, you know, I sat down and sort of thought it through. And so hopefully that gives you a little bit of sense of like, okay, now I know how to approach it. I know what I can get out of it. I know why and how and when I should use it. And then you do that initially, you start outsourcing it. My final point on that is that also right, don't forget that the communication staff that you might have at the DTO, the communication staff that the university or the research institution that you work at has often has, in a way, like a different goal in mind, right? Like their goal and their mission is to burnish the reputation of the overall institution, which is related to, but distinct from, promoting the specific IP or the specific startup. And so that's also very important. It's all very super awesome. But I just want to make sure that there's also not an understanding like, oh, we can we already have a communications person? Like, we don't need to worry about any of this. Like, well, that communications person, again, has a different mission and related but separate mission. And so I just want to make sure that you guys. Guys are aware of that. Okay, so All right. So then here, let's see, how have you how have you filtered Google Alerts to get the pertinent information? Stuart, great question, right? So this is a perennial problem. When you start setting it up, you think you think you have the keywords right, and inevitably, you end up with some like, you know, Pakistani cricket player with the same last name as your as your founders. You know, something completely out of left field. You know, a story about elephants in Zimbabwe that, for some reason, like, matched the three keywords you put in, and you're gonna need to sort of refine those. And so, you know, obviously names and you have to work on it. Maybe the names of the of the founders is particularly unique. Maybe there's a set of keywords you need. You do need to work on it a while. It's not a perfect system. Google Alerts also misses a whole bunch of stuff. You can recreate Google Alerts, you know, type searches. Obviously, if you guys have access to a, you know, one of the more expensive. Data, media databases and and I encourage you, you know, to do that if you have access to those. Carrie writes, very interested in these new tools, to mention taking IP lists and presenting them better way. I have some examples I would carry. I'll connect with you directly and to anyone who, who's curious the there are some very interesting things that I've seen, and I'm sure you guys have all seen as well. Again, tools that can now parse all of your IP and sort of pull out a lot of the information, not just to analyze its potential value and effectiveness, but more importantly, or at least from my perspective, figuring out the audiences that you need to be speaking to, and what are really the potential breakthroughs and applications, right? So AI can do a lot of the, at least the initial sifting, because otherwise you're staring at tons of dense verbiage around you. You don't even know where to begin. And these can at least shine a light into the darkness and help you figure it out. And then there's things like relate to, actually, the one the site I showed earlier, where you can take these PDFs and allow the users to set their own navigation course through them. So there are now efficient ways to, sort of use technology to accelerate a lot of what otherwise would be, you know, super, you know, super, super complicated and slow. And then let's see here, we've got Victoria. This is great. Do you believe there's some there are differences to take into account according geography, yes, Europe and the US geography matter. In this case, from Barcelona. Hi, Barcelona. Um, so, yes, listen, there's definitely differences in how we communicate, right? In the cliched sense, Americans tend to be, like, big picture and arm wavy, right? Europeans tend to be, I work a lot with, I speak German, and so I work a lot with German startups, right? They tend to be very, sort of factual and limited, and sort of limited in how they want to, you know, grandiose they want to be at the end of the day, it's, obviously, it's always all the same at the end of the day. Everybody wants the understand the bigger picture before they dive in. They don't want unnecessary detail. So I don't think that there's a structural thing, but obviously there's, there's, there's shadings, there's things that, in one cultural context strikes as her hyperbole and grandstanding and another strikes is just right, so you obviously need to calibrate that, but the fundamental ideas are all the same. And okay, so and people recommending this Arizona startup link, so that's great. Shout out to to U of A and and then, how do we integrate this into existing programming for startup store? Well, that's a great thing, so I work with a lot of these, and I'd be delighted to speak with any of you. I work with a lot of these

Speaker 2  53:54  
TTOs, or the entrepreneurial ecosystem associated with the tto and every university has its own flavor of like how separate that is. Sometimes it's underneath, sometimes it's in the research division, sometimes it's somewhere else. Sometimes it's a separate, standalone thing that's been sponsored by some wealthy alumnus. There's any number of ways. The important thing is that the message of communication needs to get through. And I do a whole bunch of these workshops. I do everything from workshops that are directly just sort of introduction to startup PR or, do you know, website reviews, pitch deck reviews, obviously, when there's anything Demo Day related, right, that's a very immediate and obvious place where messaging is super crucial. So I do a lot of deck reviews. And you can, you know, again, bring in a lot of these concepts to to wherever you have either a structured syllabus, and it's called course of events. You have a brown bag lunch series. You have this sort of Demo Day coming up. You want to prepare your startups for it. You want to get all these researchers together, and just as they're kicking the tires for. The whole sort of tto process and potential doing a startup, you can talk about the types of things that they're going to need to do, and they can start to evaluate whether they want to do that, and if so, how so? There's lots of ways to do it, but starting with the communications angle can be in a very effective way of addressing a lot of the sort of key underlying issues of taking a researcher and putting them to the outside world to build an effective startup. And, ah, yes. And so I someone mentions I Corps here donville, thank you. I Corps spent fabulous. I Corps obviously deals with a lot of the stuff I do, also your customer discovery things, and I Corps is very heavy on that. And so the the point is that, especially when we think about again, websites as a way of thinking through this, this the structure websites change. Websites evolve. You don't want to overdo the amount of work and think through this sort of complicated communication strategy when you're in your super early days. A lot of times, if you just think about it for 10 minutes, or you have a week's worth of conversations with industry insiders or potential customers, it becomes pretty clear, pretty fast, like kind of what you can do, and at least a logical straw man for, like, a go to market strategy, and who's going to need it, and the value of it, and where this could go from here. You have a pretty good sense, and so you don't want to, you know, spend too long, so ruminating on your the optimal communication strategy. You come up with something, you put it up on a website. Maybe it's just a, you know, quick holding page like, you know, coming soon, then it grows into a slightly long, scrollable single page thing later, as you get through, you know, phase one clinicals or whatever, obviously, then you start sort of sharing more information on that and and so obviously, these things kind of grow and evolve. And you might realize like, oh, actually, you know, we thought we would become partners with this aspect of the supply chain. Turns out not going to happen. But on the other hand, we got a reimbursement code from, you know, from insurance companies, so we can actually go this different route, or we have to use cash pay customers, whatever it might be. These things change, and you don't want to overdo it, and you don't want to spend too long on it, but I find that there's extraordinary payback with at least a little bit of you know, thinking through this and and, yeah, so this is, this is great, if there's Any other questions that we got for right now,

Speaker 2  57:48  
I'd be delighted to ask you, and again, if you, if you later, you start thinking of you start thinking of other you start thinking of other things or questions that you had, or you want to discuss some of these ideas a little bit more. Little bit more. You know, listen, I'm delighted to chat with everybody directly. I've been a I'm a member of the Better World project on the board of that. We're huge fans of, helping TTOs tell their story better, and spoke at autumn last year, hopefully again next year, if our submission gets accepted. So I've met a lot of you personally. So I'm delighted to be part of this community, and anything that I can do to help is is a victory and a fat you know, I think of as a huge win. So please do, please do reach out all right.

Speaker 1  58:39  
On behalf of autumn, I would like to thank you Otto for your informative presentation on today, and thank you again to our sponsor, Marshall Gerstein. A recording of this webinar will be available for viewing in the autm Learning Center within a week of this event, and is included in your registration. Please be sure to complete the webinar evaluation, which will open immediately when you sign off this session. And thank you again for being here with us today. Thanks again, Otto for the great presentation. And have a great afternoon. Everyone.

Unknown Speaker  59:10  
Bye. Real pleasure. Okay, bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai