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So a few practical insights on having a venture.

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You've decided you want to do it. Very few people are actually going to tell you how it is to be doing it.

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And most of us picture ourselves doing this sort of thing when we see ourselves as business people further down the line.

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Fame, glory, cocktail parties with politicians, this part and the head that is cut off.

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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

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are not really things we think about on the first day of forming a venture.

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And yet they are very, very, very important. And the key take home message from the next five slides is it takes time.

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And this is one of my favourite quotes timing, perseverance and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

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Remember this? Three slides down. I'll be coming back to it.

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Investors and the university and people who've done it before will tell you that

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your time involvement in a business after it gets created should look like this,

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particularly if you're doing other things, particularly if this is your first company, particularly if you're an academic,

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you should be extremely essential to the business and gradually you should be able

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to move away from it and become less important and less crucial to the business.

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My experience has been this so.

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You will notice these massive humps, which is when you think you can actually start coming off,

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and then that's when you have your next fundraising round and then something goes wrong with a product that only you can fix.

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And then this is about Oxford admissions time when you have no choice but to be working 24

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hour days because you're interviewing and then you have to do 14 hour things at night.

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There are at least two jobs worth in doing one company and that is very, very important to realise.

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And the problem with those humps is you can't predict them and you can't time them alongside

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other commitments they happen when the time line of the business tell you they have to happen.

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So it's worth bearing that in mind. So it takes time.

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And yet more time, because what you've ultimately started with is a concept and now suddenly someone

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has given you a very significant investment to turn that concept into a product.

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We're out of the shower now. And so started with this.

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This is what the first works like prototype looked like.

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And I love this quote because I was deeply embarrassed by the fact that it was made of plywood.

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However, if you notice this essential feature here, there's a reservoir here and a pump down here,

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and then you follow it through to the next iteration. Here is the reservoir, here is the pump, and here is the final product.

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Now. I would like to ask you to venture a guess at how old I am in this picture.

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20. I'd like to venture a guess at how old I am now.

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Careful. 37.

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So when I say takes time. Ten years. It's conservative now.

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This isn't 17 years from company formation to where we are today.

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It is actually a 17 year journey from doing the basic science to actually seeing a product happen.

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It takes a long time and it takes staying power.

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And not only does it take time, but it takes exhaustive attention to detail.

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The last 90% takes as long as the first 10%.

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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.

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You have to start creating an intellectual property portfolio, and that happens first, usually before you form the company, but it never stops.

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And just as you're doing this, you have to create a massive document,

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typically about 100 to 1000 pages called a product design specification that pre

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decides everything the product is meant to do before you start building it.

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And then you design it. And just as you're thinking, Great, I have a working product, I'm done here.

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My, the science is done.

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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.

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So now you have to write the instructions for use. You have to do the training videos.

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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.

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Someone comes and says, Oh, but you told us you had a company because you had a pipeline series of products.

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So now start working on the next product and the difficulties as all of these things grow.

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None of them stop. More arrows come in and that's where you become resource constrained in a small company.

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So you have to be prepared for the fact that this will grow and this will change.

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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.

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So it will take time, more time, attention to detail, and you will do things which you never thought were possible.

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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.

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I have spent more time with my elbows deep in blood than pretty much any medication.

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And if anyone had told me that as an as a nun, as an engineering undergraduate and a professor of engineering,

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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.

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I would not have believed them.

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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.

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It's a great deal. And you will also do certain other things that you've never imagined.

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This is 14 months ago in the middle of a farm in Hampshire, which happens to have a hyperbaric chamber.

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And we are about to test the capability of our device to withstand pressures.

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Normally seen in a plane upon compression and decompression.

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Something else no one ever told me I would have to do.

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You have to worry about it working under every possible condition it might experience in practice.

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And one of the favourite and most amusing test. Is the lamp post test.

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So it is actually part of the medical device directive that you have to be able to bump your brand new, shiny, fragile.

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17 years in the making device into a lamppost, repeatedly at different velocities.

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As a professor of biomedical engineering in Oxford. So that it can actually pass the required standards.

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But ultimately and I told you it takes time.

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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.

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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,

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what would be the thing that would make it all worthwhile.

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And for me, it was two things. The first one was this I've never found it easier to smile on a photograph.

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This was the first patient we ever transplanted.

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And as a scientist, I'll never forget this. I was standing there and I was about to connect to my machine.

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The first liver, which I knew after 350 dry runs, was actually going to be transplanted in a real person.

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And what goes through your head at that moment is this. Those reviewers and those publications would better be right.

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Because if I've got this wrong, someone is going to die.

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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.

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This is what he looked like. When he came into the operating theatre, and this is what he looked like three days later.

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And you'll say yes, but he wasn't. He was a transplant that saved him.

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You're right. Except I know we're in the process of proving this,

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that he got out of hospital that little bit earlier and got an organ that little bit earlier and actually

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recovered and went to spend time with his family that little bit sooner because we did what we did.

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And the second, less emotional but equally important moment was seeing this.

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This is a production plant. This is actually a device which I spent the best part of my late teenage years assembling by hand,

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actually being manufactured en masse and coming off a production line.

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And that is also an extremely rewarding feeling.