Finally, administrative steps to starting a business well before you can crack the champagne open.
We've already decided. You need to know your customer. I have a burning desire to succeed, know your product.
But you have to do what I call the three way wants. You will normally have capital, your cells and the holder of the intellectual property,
which, in the case of the university, might be icis innovation. And this is not, I call it a three day world, because if.
Have you ever tried to rules with three people? It is remarkably difficult.
So what actually happens is you dance in pairs. And this is precisely what this diagram shows.
You cannot really raise capital until you know what your intellectual property and license terms are going to be.
You can't really recruit your founding team until you know you have capital and reasonable terms.
So you need to take these things in pairs and work your way through.
And so this is a very personal view. You're going to have to decide.
Royalties and equity royalties are, in my view, a retrospective,
rewarding mechanism for things that people have done in the past, and as a result, they scale with the level of risk.
Equity is a forward motivating mechanism.
So you need to have enough equity in the business in order to make sure that the right people are motivated forward.
And you need to create a clear and satisfactory mechanism for governance.
And lastly, you will not escape using accountants and lawyers because things change and the order in which you do things really matters.
On forming Oxon Onyx We realised that if we had taken the party line on how to form a company within the university,
a very, very significant tax benefit would have been lost both to the founders and to the company.
Every five months the situation changes, primarily driven by Treasury.
So you need to get the order right and be prepared to crack the champagne open and celebrate with the people who've made it happen.
When the time is right, I'd like to leave you with one last thought, which is to me the quote that defines entrepreneurship.
I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that. But I knew that the one thing I might regret is not trying.
Thank you very much.