Osage University Partners- Funding university spinouts

Manny Stockman is a Partner at Osage University Partners. OUP exclusively invests in startups spun out of university research.

We talk about the investment thesis of Osage University Partners; technology readiness challenges; lessons learned from investing in early stage technologies at universities; challenges with the current market research used to evaluate product market fit; and spend some time talking about equity splits involving non-operating faculty members that co-founded startups.

Shownotes:
- https://oup.vc
- No better time to launch a startup in the deeptech space
- Startup hubs
- Fund background
- Investment thesis
- Thoughts about market readiness
- Being better prepared while approaching Osage: help them get to yes
- Preparing to building startups at universities
- Advice on amount for money that needs to be raised
- Knocking out risks at early stages
- How to differentiate signal from noise while talking to experts about new technology
- Art of questioning to get to why a technology might not work
- Challenges identifying product market fit and a need for new models
- Investment amounts and stages: $250k-$8M
- Patience while investing
- Challenges with equity splits: Evaluating past vs future contributions
- Past talk about equity splits at university startups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtCe2x12OFI
- Incubator models and thoughts about diluting equity