TandemLaunch – Helge Seetzen

IP & Tech Transfer , venture capital series

From Idea to Enterprise – Technology Transfer Tips for Academics

The earlier articles in this series by Helge Seetzen described the fundamental aspects of building a venture: people, funding, and monetization. While this information is useful for all aspiring entrepreneurial technologists, this fifth and final article in this series is devoted to the specific demographic of university researchers. UNIVERSITY...

March 10, 2015February 5, 2018

IP & Tech Transfer

Why Intellectual Property Licensing is in a League of its Own

I recently had the pleasure of doing an interview with Stephen Ibaraki and thought it was worth sharing some of our conversation on licensing negotiations (You can check out the full interview here). Licensing is unlike exchanges in the normal marketplace because intellectual property licensing occurs entirely in the...

April 23, 2014June 30, 2017

Entrepreneurship

How Success is the Best Brand Builder of All

As an accelerator that focuses on working with university inventors to build great products, and who invests heavily in young talent, the role of a university education is a constant source of internal conversation. As a result, I’ve taken quite an interest in the Thiel Fellowship; Peter Thiel’s idea...

December 17, 2013June 30, 2017

Entrepreneurship

The Student/Entrepreneur Cheat Sheet: Balancing School and Entrepreneurship

I’ve written in the past about the challenges of being an academic and an entrepreneur (here, here, here and here), and it’s one of the more common topics I get asked about. Many students come to me with questions on balance – how do they get their entrepreneur career...

June 6, 2013June 27, 2017

Entrepreneurship

3 Simple Steps for Pitching Your Technology

One of the pitfalls of many tech entrepreneurs is pitching their solution simply and clearly. What is it? What does it do? Is it actually useful? Often, we’ll get stuck either trying to explain it all at once or getting too technical for our audience. We recently had an...

May 30, 2013June 30, 2017

Technology

Three Core Tech Trends

There are, in my mind, three major technology trends in this decade’s consumer electronics world: narcissism, visual realism, and naturalism in interaction. 1) Narcissism Narcissism is less interesting to TandemLaunch, but has become a major driver of our economy. We all want to be famous, we all want to...

August 2, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship , People

Linearity and Employee Incentives Plans

In my last blog post I talked about the fundamentals of effective employee incentive plans: Proportionality, Transparency, Appropriateness, and Certainty. To my mind of thinking, creating linearity in your employee incentive plans is essential to achieve Transparency and Proportionality, and I’d like to elaborate on that a bit using the...

July 3, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship

How to Create Meaningful Employee Incentives

The purpose of incentive plans is to do exactly what the name implies – incentivise the people in your company (both executives and employees) to contribute more than they normally would. In other words, you want them to work harder, move faster, take on more ownership, and generally make...

June 26, 2012July 4, 2017

IP & Tech Transfer , Tech Transfer & IP

Regionally-Focused VS. Domain-Focused University Tech Transfer

Some Technology Transfer Offices (TTO) have been exploring the idea of domain-focused rather than regionally-focused technology transfer recently. This shift is an extremely powerful idea in my mind. In fact, the advantages of domain-focus are the reason TandemLaunch has the specialization it does in consumer electronics market. Yet the...

May 30, 2012July 4, 2017

Entrepreneurship

5 Rules for Cofounder Heaven

Finding a good cofounder is a key ingredient of a successful startup. Having had the opportunity to work with a variety of co-founders over the years, and now pairing up with individual co-founders for TandemLaunch portfolio investments, I have developed a couple rules of thumb for what to look...

March 27, 2012July 4, 2017

Tag: TandemLaunch