So first of all, what are the essential features of being an entrepreneur?
Well, first and foremost, it's about having a great idea.
Make no mistake, it is about ideas. But the definition of a great idea varies widely according to who you ask.
I don't personally think it is essential for a great idea to be novel.
You will actually see a lot of very successful businesses having been set up
out of ideas that have already been out there for quite a long period of time.
But I fundamentally believe that a great idea has to be unique.
There has to be something about it that no one has really thought about before.
It would be wonderful if this great idea could also be protectable.
Although we will come back to the issue of intellectual property a little bit later within the talk.
It is essential that the idea be transformative.
In other words, that it takes the status quo and completely turns it on its head.
There is no point in it being transformative if no one can afford it and if absolutely no one is willing to pay money for it.
So as you saw, Augur, Knox is about essentially recreating around an organ, an environment which encounters within the human body.
Well, what's novel about that? Surely someone else before you, Constantine, thought of this.
Yes, it was a mad Frenchman to the middle of 19th century.
And in his first attempt, he managed all of 26 minutes before both the organ and the patient died.
So there was a key technological development, which I won't describe here,
which suddenly made it possible when all previous attempts had never been able to do this for longer than 4 to 6 hours to make it happen for 24,
72 and hours and possibly a week.
And that key development was actually understanding born out of science,
understanding how an organ regulates its own blood supply, and then finding an engineering way of recreating it.
But even that wasn't enough to start a business, because even though it is undeniably unique and as a patented idea, protectable.
We needed to check that it could be transformative.
And after a great many science experiments in the lab.
What actually convinced us to go after creating a business was the realisation that with this
technology you would be able to transplant organs which cannot currently be transplanted.
In other words, it wasn't the beauty of the technology, how elegant it was, how scientifically exciting it was.
It was the fact that it could address a very, very real need without requiring any significant change in current legislative or donation practice.
Broadly speaking, in certain territories,
almost half the organs that could potentially be donated are ultimately not retrieved and transplanted in those organs,
which we discovered this technology could potentially uniquely recover and enable transplant of.
The second entrepreneurial feature, in my view, is a passion about translation.
And it's actually not about concepts.
It's about products. And that's one of the very difficult transitions for scientists to make.
We all very easily fall in love with the elegance of our own science.
But this is what it looked like when we started organics.
What you're seeing here is a machine that is probably about the size of three upright pianos back to back, not exactly transportable,
about 1005 hundred variables, about as many knobs and one person in the middle who is solely capable of operating it.
I will show you the development of this device for very practical steps,
but I will tell you that the most challenging effort in this entire approach and in this entire adventure has been the creation of these buttons.
How do you take a machine out of the lab and make it NHS proof so that even a surgeon can't mess it up?
And really it was about taking a very complex device and giving it three buttons.
Play. Pause. Eject.
Not many people can say that their entire contents of of their brain can be accessed through a single button.
I can. The third feature can you handle uncertainty?
Typically within an academic environment, we have uncertainty,
but nowhere near the level that you're going to experience within a business environment.
Uncertainty is present in every single step of the process from whether the
idea is worth translating to the terms under which you're about to translate.
The idea to actually starting the business and making sure that there is enough funding to get you to the next significant milestone.
Every single step of the way. The second very important facet of uncertainty is that it needs to be controlled.
Uncertainty? No one quite dives completely into the unknown.
You should not ever, ever attempt to start a business in an area if you do not understand,
even if you're seeing people around you doing it left and right. Probably what has happened by the time it is a trend, it is already too late.
And I will come back to what I mean by that on the next slide.
And also it is important to realise that there is risk.
You need to be comfortable with risk. You can spend five, ten, 15 years of your life developing something which a miracle cure,
a competitive product, a change in circumstances, financial or otherwise wipe overnight.
And you need to be the kind of person who can take it on the chin, fall over and and be straight back at work the next day working on something else.
The next one is very specifically about youth, and there's a term which investors love to use.
Investors will tell you that they very rarely invest in ideas.
They invest in people. And someone at the dinner last week went as far as to tell me that they don't care about the ideas.
Which actually shocked me. They said, no, we can actually see someone who's going to make a successful business from who they are as a person,
how they respond, how they react, and how they talk about what they're about to do.
And so the first thing about being investable is be extremely good at what you do, particularly coming from a place in Oxford.
There is no alternative to quality and quality. You have to be at the absolute top of your game and you have to be able to challenge
and be challenged on every single aspect of your proposed business proposition.
And in an academic context, that means not only being good according to your own criteria,
but actually being perceived as a leader by your peers, by your professional societies, through your publications, through your lectures.
These are all things that investors and potential downstream events will be looking at as far as you're concerned.
The second thing is reputation.
You have to be prepared on day one, but you might in a good situation once and in a bad situation, have to do this again.
So you actually absolutely must preserve your integrity and reputation throughout the process.
And all these things break down to these four points.
Are you credible as an inventor and a founder in the specific area that you're trying to address?
Are you able to inspire others and make them see that your crazy big idea is actually a different way of seeing things that has tremendous potential.
Are you trustworthy? Absolutely.
No one I know will invest significant sums of money in someone who does not know how to manage the finances of a company.
And this last one is perhaps the most important. Are you able to multitask?
One of the things that is fantastic about doing this, I think that's fantastic about being an academic, is how multifaceted the job is.
You get to teach. You get to do research. You get to write grants.
You get to travel. The world almost every single day uses a different skill set.
Well, that skill sets isn't even a small subset of the breadth of skill set.
You'll need to be your business. You have to be able.
To talk money, talk science.
Be. Inspirational to your team.
Reassuring to your board, you'll have to be able to understand legal aspects, tax aspects, valuation aspects,
financial aspects, things which by and large, as a community of academics, we are not well-trained and well equipped to do.
And the bottom line is you can't delegate those things.
You can get help, you can get advice, but you cannot delegate them.
You have to be prepared to dive in and learn what needs to be learned.
And the final thing is, are you able to assemble a good team?
In every small company. If you need more than two pizzas to feed them, that team is too big.
And that's actually a very wise quote.
Organics went through its first five years, never putting in an order of more than two pizzas at midnight on a Friday.
That is actual fact. So. Having said that, because you can only afford a small number of people and because you will be taking forward a very,
very series of mission critical things in the early days of starting a company,
you have to think very carefully about identifying and covering skillset gaps.
What is it that you're good at and very honestly acknowledge what it is that you are not good at.
Inventors very rarely make good CEOs.
I know the very highly publicised large companies have a few examples that go against that suggestion.
But in my experience, you actually need three facets almost independently represented in your founding team.
You need the technology which in this room probably you will be representing and leading.
You need someone who can take that technology and formulate it into a business
proposition that is actually going to be sustainable and offer a return on investment.
And you also need someone who understands the particular market that you're about to go into.
And in the case of Morgan Oakes, these were the people the three founders were Peter Friend, who's the chair of Transplantation in Oxford.
So pretty good thing to have on board for a company that is going to focus on transplantation.
You cannot hope to penetrate a market and a new world without the champion who is within it.
200%. That wasn't me. That was Peter.
He was the one performing the transplants. He was the one who was the president of the British Transplantation Society.
He was the one who knew every single liver transplant surgeon in North America and Europe.
And you need an excellent CEO. And these three people on the edge of the picture were the original founders of organics.
Now, finding a CEO twice has been the most difficult thing I've had to do.
And as you'll realise for the second one, I didn't look too far for that very reason, I should say innovation was a tremendous help.
When we started forming organics, I personally interviewed 47 CEO candidates before choosing Les Russell,
and the reason is that this is actually a very rare breed of individual.
What you want is someone who has operated within a small business before because it's a completely different thing to have
to operate in a team of three and to be working within a company like GSK where you can delegate to an army of people.
It's just a completely different mindset you need.
We needed someone who had previously worked with the sort of product and the sort of complexities that we're looking to do.
And Les had actually worked for Baxter in developing their blood products, so he was ideally placed for a product that was going to be using blood,
but he had also created and led to spin out companies previously in the medtech area.
The third. So this was the first full time employee of the company, Peter and myself being full time academics.
The next very important person was actually the ISS project manager who helped to spin it out
and who fell in love with the story so much that he decided he wanted to do nothing but that.
And that was Colin Storey, who we decided to appoint as operations director.
When you're building a complex device with thousands of parts that need to be assembled,
you need to make sure that someone has got a clear handle on the production process and the person with academic duties will not be able to do it.
And the final thing that is quite specific to the type of business that organics is,
is one of the biggest thresholds you have to cross in medtech is regulatory.
You are not allowed to do anything from a first man trial to first sales unless you're able
to satisfy the regulator of the safety and in certain territories efficacy of your device.
And so the next key appointment was Tony Day was the regulatory affairs and Quality Systems person.
Now moving away from the slide.
The one thing I've learned also is that you never, ever, ever go into business with someone you would not be willing to volunteer your kidney for.
Now, in my case, it's pretty handy because this man is the chair of kidney transplantation.
So that's a very dangerous promise to make. But I mean it.
To this very day. These are people I trust. These are people I spend a lot of time with and I have three boys.
The youngest is called Peter and he's the reason.
It is a massive commitment. It's almost as great as a marriage and you should not engage into it lightly.
Know the people. Trust them. Bond with them.