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Very briefly onto the next part now, which is introduction to some basic terms and concepts which I wish I had known when I started this.

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And I will go through this relatively quickly. The first and most important thing to think about with your big idea is the addressable market.

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That's not the total market. It is actually the market.

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Which your specific idea? Can.

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It can address. And that means identifying the ultimate customer, deciding whether it's an existing or a new market,

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which you are creating and whether it's a single or a scalable market.

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And this is the most difficult question you have to answer in a business plan because you don't just Google it.

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There's actually a lot of market research that goes into identifying what the correct market to be going into the particular product is.

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In the case of organics, as I said, the turning point for us was the realisation that not only could we do better with existing transplants,

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but there was a subset of transplants which were not taking place which only our technology could enable to happen.

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And so that raises a very interesting question, which I will not answer, because I'd like to have a job tomorrow.

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What is the addressable market in this case? You've got a more complex, more expensive technology that works a lot better.

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Are people only going to use it for the extreme cases or people going to use it for every single case?

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The second is identify your products and its unique selling points.

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What is it that is actually unique about it?

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What is the customer gaining? And can anything else come close?

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The third key term is intellectual property. Patents matter a lot less than you think they matter.

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They are a mechanism for investment. But the key here is knowing how to generate and protect,

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know how and how to get that knowhow from its previous environment into your company and how to keep it there.

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The fourth to get right at the beginning are what are called inflection points.

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And I'm sure most people here have a good enough mathematical background to know what an inflection point is,

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but to accompany it means something different. When you start a business, you think its value is going to move like this.

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If you get things wrong, it's actually going to do this. But in reality it will probably do neither.

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What it will actually do and no one had ever told me this is this.

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What you actually have is you start with a certain company value and then virtually nothing will happen until you hit a particular event.

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And then virtually nothing will happen until you hit another event.

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And then at some point you might be able to achieve this type of very linear growth that we all dream about.

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And these events are key. They tend to be real events.

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Now, I was so proud when I produced my first working prototype, I thought investors were going to be flooding the gates.

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Matter to no one but us. Because it's not a real event.

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Yes. You have a demonstrator. Yes. It makes it a little bit easier to raise investment.

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But no one in the outside world sees it. It's not validated by any external party.

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The first real inflection point is some sort of real events.

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In the case of MedTech, you'd be a first in man trial showing that the technology can work in humans.

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And the second inflection point would be another real world events such as first sales and where it's pretty soul destroying

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for the founders is this bit where you're working incredibly hard and no one is telling you you've done anything that matters.

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And then suddenly you cross the threshold and then you are in for another period like that, and you've got to be prepared for that.

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And the absolute key is raise enough funding to go from here to here and to cross the next inflection point.

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An exit. You always have to have a strategy for an exit.

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When you start and it's a case of coaches for horses, you might do it for an initial public offering,

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a trade sale or acquisition or combinations thereof and combinations thereof is very interesting if you have a company that might become sustainable.

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But part of it you don't intend to pursue. You might also wish to contemplate having a strategy that allows you to segregate your

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intellectual property so that you can have a dual exit from within the same company.

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So for these reasons, it's very important to think about these things at the beginning.

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Last but not least, the pitch is what you need before you go and talk to investors.

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Use the smartest people you know to test it.

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Make sure all of the key points you've just mentioned are covered.

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And prepare both a cocktail room and a boardroom version because you will need both.

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My supervisor said to me,

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If it takes you more than 2 minutes to describe to a specialist what it is you're doing for your Ph.D., it's not worth doing.

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The same applies to a business pitch. You've got to be able to get someone's attention in 2 minutes.

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And now that you've got to pitch a plan a market, you're going to go out and look for investment.

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Now investment is needed in order to proceed.

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It's not actually what determines the business, although it's very, very important to it.

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But because you need people to value your company.

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The best advice I ever got is create consortia of likely investors and get them to look at your proposition independently.

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Make a list as to who's the most likely to fund you and work your way from the bottom up to that list from least likely to most likely,

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because you're going to be getting really good questions from the investors that are quite unlikely investors.

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And by the time you get to your really likely investors, you'll have most, if not all of the answers.

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And the swear word in starting a company is valuation.

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Now, the party line is this is some clever mathematical formula which somehow balances potential of the company versus risk.

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The honest truth is a company is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

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And there are several conflicting constraints in reaching a valuation.

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The valuation needs to be high enough to make it worth your while to be involved,

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but it needs to be low enough that it leaves enough growth potential for future investors coming in.

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Because if you overvalue something at the beginning, it will no longer be a good investment in your second and third funding round.

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And the only thing that really matters is not the valuation.

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It's actually getting the right investment. You need to cross your next inflection point on the reasonable terms.