
The Academic Spinout Flywheel - leejohn2010
https://medium.com/@OsageVC/the-academic-spinout-flywheel-fa61931985be#.d2llf1whf
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Animats
That's become Stanford's business model. Not only do faculty and students
start companies, Stanford often funds them. Stanford owns a chunk of Google, a
chunk of Cisco, etc. Stanford has its own "accelerator", "Start-X".[1]

[1] [http://startx.com/](http://startx.com/)

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dnautics
Academic spinoffs in biotech, by contrast, are almost universally
disappointing.

~~~
klipt
Biotech is really just _harder_ than software:
[https://xkcd.com/1605/](https://xkcd.com/1605/)

Everything interacts with everything else. Not to mention the capital
requirements - bio-labs cost millions, while a software startup just needs a
bunch of laptops and a garage.

~~~
dnautics
I wouldn't say that cost is the proximal reason. (Although it is the reason
why indie.bio can't get off the rails except through spinoffs with outside
funding).

Remember a spinoff vs. a startup is that a spinoff is usually a commercialized
idea of an academic product (arguably google was a spinoff while apple was a
startup). In academic CS so far as I can tell, there's a fairly
straightforward relationship between success in academia and competence, as
in: A lot of successful people don't choose the academic route, but a the
people who do choose tho academic route are "legit" \- they are capable of
executing projects. Moreover good projects in CS often have a fairly easy to
see path to commercialization or monetization.

Whereas in biology, most people who wind up in the upper eschelons _got
lucky_. They picked the right project _and_ had a PI that was willing to go to
bat and play politics for them _and_ showed them to play politics. Many of
these people are also, not necessarily competent, or are competent in academic
science but not able to actually make something consumers want or need (often
bio startups fall into the "if you have a hammer then everything is a nail"
paradigm). PIs are great at writing grants - which is why so many spinoffs are
basically organization that exist to burn through SBIRs - and, amazingly, VCs
use SBIR awards as signals for competence (not just financial risk
mitigation).

Finally, the system of promotion in bio is so toxic that a lot of very
competent and intelligent people get frustrated by either having a shitty PI
or just because they were chosen for a project that happened to have a faulty
premise, that they drop out even though they would have done really well.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/cut-
throat-a...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/cut-throat-
academia-leads-to-natural-selection-of-bad-science-claims-
study?CMP=share_btn_fb)

