So a few practical insights on having a venture.
You've decided you want to do it. Very few people are actually going to tell you how it is to be doing it.
And most of us picture ourselves doing this sort of thing when we see ourselves as business people further down the line.
Fame, glory, cocktail parties with politicians, this part and the head that is cut off.
I'll give you two guesses as to who it is. Lifting a device at 45 degrees to test whether it can withstand tilt in a plane
are not really things we think about on the first day of forming a venture.
And yet they are very, very, very important. And the key take home message from the next five slides is it takes time.
And this is one of my favourite quotes timing, perseverance and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
Remember this? Three slides down. I'll be coming back to it.
Investors and the university and people who've done it before will tell you that
your time involvement in a business after it gets created should look like this,
particularly if you're doing other things, particularly if this is your first company, particularly if you're an academic,
you should be extremely essential to the business and gradually you should be able
to move away from it and become less important and less crucial to the business.
My experience has been this so.
You will notice these massive humps, which is when you think you can actually start coming off,
and then that's when you have your next fundraising round and then something goes wrong with a product that only you can fix.
And then this is about Oxford admissions time when you have no choice but to be working 24
hour days because you're interviewing and then you have to do 14 hour things at night.
There are at least two jobs worth in doing one company and that is very, very important to realise.
And the problem with those humps is you can't predict them and you can't time them alongside
other commitments they happen when the time line of the business tell you they have to happen.
So it's worth bearing that in mind. So it takes time.
And yet more time, because what you've ultimately started with is a concept and now suddenly someone
has given you a very significant investment to turn that concept into a product.
We're out of the shower now. And so started with this.
This is what the first works like prototype looked like.
And I love this quote because I was deeply embarrassed by the fact that it was made of plywood.
However, if you notice this essential feature here, there's a reservoir here and a pump down here,
and then you follow it through to the next iteration. Here is the reservoir, here is the pump, and here is the final product.
Now. I would like to ask you to venture a guess at how old I am in this picture.
20. I'd like to venture a guess at how old I am now.
Careful. 37.
So when I say takes time. Ten years. It's conservative now.
This isn't 17 years from company formation to where we are today.
It is actually a 17 year journey from doing the basic science to actually seeing a product happen.
It takes a long time and it takes staying power.
And not only does it take time, but it takes exhaustive attention to detail.
The last 90% takes as long as the first 10%.
And this is what makes it difficult. These are the things no one really ever told me I would have to do as technical director of a spinout.
You have to start creating an intellectual property portfolio, and that happens first, usually before you form the company, but it never stops.
And just as you're doing this, you have to create a massive document,
typically about 100 to 1000 pages called a product design specification that pre
decides everything the product is meant to do before you start building it.
And then you design it. And just as you're thinking, Great, I have a working product, I'm done here.
My, the science is done.
Someone comes and tells you, Oh, but we have to deploy it in the real world and you're the only person who really knows how it works.
So now you have to write the instructions for use. You have to do the training videos.
You have to do the training manuals. And just as you're thinking, okay, I'm now able to delegate this to a training team.
Someone comes and says, Oh, but you told us you had a company because you had a pipeline series of products.
So now start working on the next product and the difficulties as all of these things grow.
None of them stop. More arrows come in and that's where you become resource constrained in a small company.
So you have to be prepared for the fact that this will grow and this will change.
And at some point here, you will need to recruit and you will need to come up with a pyramid structure that generally enables you to delegate.
So it will take time, more time, attention to detail, and you will do things which you never thought were possible.
I'll tell you the irony. When I was 16, I decided I was not going to go to medical school because I thought I couldn't stand the sight of blood.
I have spent more time with my elbows deep in blood than pretty much any medication.
And if anyone had told me that as an as a nun, as an engineering undergraduate and a professor of engineering,
I'd be spending my sabbatical year two years ago blue lighting up and down the country, connecting real livers for real patients to be transplanted.
I would not have believed them.
And I like to say that I get to enjoy all the positive sides of the medical profession without having ever had to go to medical school.
It's a great deal. And you will also do certain other things that you've never imagined.
This is 14 months ago in the middle of a farm in Hampshire, which happens to have a hyperbaric chamber.
And we are about to test the capability of our device to withstand pressures.
Normally seen in a plane upon compression and decompression.
Something else no one ever told me I would have to do.
You have to worry about it working under every possible condition it might experience in practice.
And one of the favourite and most amusing test. Is the lamp post test.
So it is actually part of the medical device directive that you have to be able to bump your brand new, shiny, fragile.
17 years in the making device into a lamppost, repeatedly at different velocities.
As a professor of biomedical engineering in Oxford. So that it can actually pass the required standards.
But ultimately and I told you it takes time.
I told you it takes attention to detail. But ultimately and I'm not going to finish this sentence for you because only you can finish it.
Well, I can tell you how I finish the sentence for me, but I'd like for everyone in the room to think about what the end to that sentence would be,
what would be the thing that would make it all worthwhile.
And for me, it was two things. The first one was this I've never found it easier to smile on a photograph.
This was the first patient we ever transplanted.
And as a scientist, I'll never forget this. I was standing there and I was about to connect to my machine.
The first liver, which I knew after 350 dry runs, was actually going to be transplanted in a real person.
And what goes through your head at that moment is this. Those reviewers and those publications would better be right.
Because if I've got this wrong, someone is going to die.
And it's a very sobering thought. And we knew that right after the operation had taken place, I got to meet the first patient, Ian Christie.
This is what he looked like. When he came into the operating theatre, and this is what he looked like three days later.
And you'll say yes, but he wasn't. He was a transplant that saved him.
You're right. Except I know we're in the process of proving this,
that he got out of hospital that little bit earlier and got an organ that little bit earlier and actually
recovered and went to spend time with his family that little bit sooner because we did what we did.
And the second, less emotional but equally important moment was seeing this.
This is a production plant. This is actually a device which I spent the best part of my late teenage years assembling by hand,
actually being manufactured en masse and coming off a production line.
And that is also an extremely rewarding feeling.