It’s been a busy summer. Even while students were away the halls of TCO were packed with inventions, patents, and hustle. The machine of invention is relentless.
I did alot of ideation this summer, which is one of my favorite things to do at TCO. Take something, shape it, make it better. Course I still like the dance, the art of the deal, and the ramp up to awesomeness. But ideation lets you create. And that has me thinking about new ways to triage and assess ideas.
I look back on successful techs that I have been a part of that turned into deals for the university and I think about common aspects in and around those deals and techs, what are the factors that made those things fly, or was it all by chance? For as much as I perceive and believe that some technologies are more valuable then others, I can’t help but think of the crazy things that come out of Silicon Valley that no sane person would believe had any potential and in mere years some of them have become juggernaughts of disruption and billion dollar pay days.
I like to think that part of my skill set is believing and overcoming the odds of no that befall all technologies attempting to get to market. Its like a mission. And it is a roller coaster. And its pretty unpredictable. And all these things I think freak out just about everyone in for the journey. You need to be insanely resilient to start a biz. You have to have more optimism than most and you have to know your customer, your product, the market and have a nose for traction.
This has me thinking about triage and assessment of technologies in a new light. Of course there’s the basics of assessment, how big is the market, who or what is the gold standard and the competition questions. Then there’s patents and protection. None of my deals have ever had any protection, no patents in my neck of the woods, not to say i don’t like them, but I tend to favor techs or shall i say i’ve had more success with techs that had inherent momentum to them, ie traction potential.
On the way home today from work, coming out of an ideation session with a team of inventors part of the Arts & Sciences CAPS group, where we dabbled with some feature mapping and tales of traction, got me to thinking that traditional assessment is good but in software, for me, what I need to see is “traction potential” or a TPS, yes thats right Office Space people, I need a TPS report. What is that technologies Traction Potential Score? It should be noted that i’m solely speaking to a tech’s TPS score in the view of a deal to be, not a TPS score in the sense of its overall success in the market. Tho they are related, like anything however, especially in making things come to life, there are phases, ie the journey.
How do you compute a Traction Potential Score?
Well for me, first we have to qualify what I like to work with. It has to be copyrighted content, software orientated, and or problem that is addressable by software. So what I need to see is either software thats been made, or content that could be something and or a problem articulated with a notion that software could fix it.
Then there’s factors that get weighed in the mix. Some are more critical than others.
They are: Team, Alignment, Audacity, Conviction, DogFood, Enablement, Narrative, Sauce, Customer, Baselines.
Team, people matter. I often hear this from investment, they lead their investment based on people first not technology. Why? Because you want to bet on the person with the idea to overcome the journey and pitfalls ahead. This is why so many investment groups end up placing their own people into deals i figure, control is one aspect i’m sure, but its also a sense of can the guy/gal at the helm take the hit that will hit hard- hr, tech, customer – related fails etc. For us at the early stages of idea, tech, to license arena, team matters in that licensing is also a journey. So a team needs to be there hand in hand to get the job done. The university is not a solo quest. You need people to make things happen.
Alignment, likely the most important thing early on in getting traction. If you are aligned you’re ready to do things, crazy things, you’re ready to dream and fail, you’re willing to get back up and pitch, you are willing to be smashed, twisted and then wham you just re-take shape and are good to go. You align well with others. You may not always agree, but you’re in it. With teams are not aligned, all traction stops. This is a big deal because you’re trying to drive the ball down the field and if the team isn’t working the ball stops and the clock runs, and runs, and runs. What’s worse is that the team can falsely project that alignment is there but its not thus you don’t realize the clock is running and the ball has gone no where. For TCO alignment doesn’t come easy. We’re often a rock in a hard place by a factor of 10. We’re attempting to help inventors navigate a sea of constraints, legal, conflict, protection of the tech, situational awareness of whats needed to make the tech to go further, optics, politics, dynamics, people stuff, you name it. But successful deals are born on the backs of alignment. Sometimes we can’t control the alignment because its outside parties, our would be license’s are often at odds with the universities directive. This is to be expected really, you don’t want to fault someone for being hustle orientated, you want the economic engine to roar and go fast. In the end, to me, thinking about TPS, alignment is a big factor. Luckily it can always be address and tweaked thru communication, best practices, and willingness to bounce back.
Audacity, I use this word alot. I like techs that have the audacity to change things. They say, why walk when you can teleport across the room. Thats a cool tech, lets harness that one and run with it. Audacity helps the marketing and competitive conviction of a concept. It feeds the essence of the software to change your perspective of what you thought “was” before. In the valley, everything is change orientated. Investors love change, to a degree, especially in the sense that this change brings on the potential for new standards, new real estate of which they own or are a player of. Techs need a degree of audacity.
Conviction, follows alignment, but is really centered on the sheer will factor of a tech. Sometimes I see techs that communicate conviction. Then I meet the people that invented them and I see conviction in their eyes, their mannerisms, the way they quickly attain alignment, become a part of the team, and invent additional IP nearly on the fly or manifest it for the one goal, to make this tech move, make it fly. These people are self starters. They are the mover and shakers the university is working to cultivate, to unearth and likely find. Odds are they are already known in their groups and departments, but not always. A big part of the resiliency you need to go.
DogFood.. heh, this refers to the likely-hood that the university or inventor will use the technology themselves. I still stand behind the notion that some of our biggest deals to date are based on the Dog Food factor, ie, we ate it ourselves. This is great for the traction score because you’re gonna do the idea regardless of commercialization. This allows the TCO to work in parallel of your efforts. Plus its a nice big indicator of interest to biz leads when they realize the university is going to see it thru. Of course most take that wrong though. They see that the university needs that thing they made, cool, i’ll license it and sell it back to them, awesome- but thats not how it works. It hasn’t happened on my watch at least. Plus thats the wrong thinking I want from a biz lead. I want them to think about new customers, beyond the buckeye walls. What is good however is that technically their is a first customer, the university, and that in marketing and telling people the tale of why they need x thing is huge early on. So many startups fail to get a first customer, in techs with high Dog Food factor, we got you covered on that. The Dog Food factor also means the tech has more widgets and wheels, there’s more meat on the bone, and that makes the IP richer and a better healthier hand for the university, meaning more likely to net $ in my opinion. A strong Dog Food factor also means the administration, the higher ups stand to benefit more in that these techs represent a often infrastructure need that is converted into cash. I also like them because the university is a sea of possible context. I tell people Ohio State is a city. You name it, we have it.
Enablement, how well is the technology currently enabled. Meaning, do you have code, do you have an app, do you have content? Traction is about speed, time, time to get to market, can you get it, you have to iterate and roll, fast. If the tech has no current enablement, thats unfortunate, it doesn’t rule it out of the TPS, though likely downs the score a bit. Some IP is tricky, its conversational, its someone recognizing the need, and that seems meh at first until you realize theres more to that need. I often gravitate toward ideas with code however but are part of a story that I see enabled. There are a handful of techs that purely content and or just stories of customers and needs, that I see the end game on. I already see the software. I know it can be made, thus it factors into my enablement score be it lower often than sitting on existing code. Its hard to explain, but sometimes you see it, you know everything to make, and its not hard to you, you still people to make it, but you see it. Thats why i think I like prototyping so much, is because seeing it in my mind and then seeing it in code, no matter how crude is an amazing feeling of awesome. In those instances I become inventor in some ways. I enjoy helping people see their ideas realized, its why I’m at TCO.
Narrative, can the tech be spoken to in a narrative form that people get. What most people don’t realize is that whatever big idea you’ve got, if you can’t articulate it in 5 minutes or less, odds of you netting any traction is near zero. Its not to say we want noncomplex ideas, its just that our audience does. I still recall my first day at TCO going around campus leaping from complex context to complex context. It was crazy, insanely complicated battery technology, polymers, to medical this and that. A primary TCO mission is to inform the planet of the insanely awesome invention we have at Ohio State, to do that, techs have go from complex to meaning in marketing. And its a super fine line. You dont want to dumb it down but you also dont want to alienate. A conversation of huh is still better than no conversation, so i’ll take a huh any day, but when the other party declines to connect based on confusion, thats not good. In 5 minute pitches, the audience actually views the speaker more than the deck. So the narratives are key. People have heard this before, the elevator pitch. But whats more accurate in todays scene is the taxi pitch, meaning you’re pitching to people distracted, looking to get in another vehicle to take them somewhere, and you need to have enough appeal for them to either pass on the taxi or invite you in for the ride. Techs with a low narrative score can hinder traction because the language of understanding is unknown.
Sauce… hmmm this is like techs having an angle to them. I love it when I come across a tech/idea that has angle. The angle refers to a secret sauce aspect of the idea, like for example, pending law changes will impact this market causing these people to freak out because this will be mandated. Building for that pending change, regulation etc, is a nice angle. It doesn’t rule out others can target it as well, however. Sometimes sauce is purely technology awesomeness, xyz tech does it better than anything out there, or maybe its the patent. Every tech has a sauce, the special, the one thing the inventor pulled from the heavens and infused into their creation. Sometimes we can’t see the sauce, but we feel it as it moves thru the vibes of the inventor, its fuels their conviction, and we get it, and more so it plays to narrative in a big way. TCO isn’t meant to be an all knowing league of extraordinary people (though we are) we’re about having the right mixture of people to take IP further, and the mission is not to run these new companies, tell established ones what to do, but help set them and the IP in motion.
Customers. Ya gotta know the customer. You have to have a sense for who they are. I like to know what they eat for breakfast, I wanna know frequency of use with the said thing you made for them. I want to know what inspires them. What they read, who they hang with, and why they want your product. With customers come a sense of transaction, which in itself is a worthy factor but I bundle it in with Customer. Transactions, moments of engagement between customers and your said thing is what drives your IP in the end. That value that customers see in your IP, and transact accordingly is the crowning achievement of commercialization. Can an idea with no customers have traction? The crazy thing is yes. Why because technology is an ever oozing entity in itself. Technology is like force and things like the internet help spawn patterns of random weirdness, like strange fragments or residue left over from human interaction, I believe sometimes these fragments themselves are things that get traction regardless of a known customer or not. Whats more crazy is that those things snowball, especially online and they themselves reveal whole new markets and customers that feed them. This is the power of software, especially when it fades to near zero cost, technology doesnt ask why, and there for it breeds an army of doers that don’t ask why either. That lack of why or lack of customer orientated thinking runs rampant online and cannot be underestimated. It doesnt appear in our halls too often however, as inventors invent IP typically for a reason, but we as an org, as a university, need to champion discovery, we have to nurture the possible, especially the force of technology, its a cult. I mean you can ignore it, but why? There’s a hundred would be Zuckerbergs on campus, why and what would the university stand to gain in limiting the dreams of people? Nothing. So dream on customer or not I say. But for our TPS score, we like ya to have a customer in mind.
Baselines. Are there norms to compare to? Baselines are like competition but I don’t want to use that word any more because it spooks people into the wrong line of thinking. Too many times would be startup or inventor thinkers get caught on the its gotta be something that no ones done before mindset. They obsess over newness, but that is a terrible pit of badness. For me on the traction score, if you have no competition, that is a huge red flag. With no known baselines, you’re really on to something or you’re in a scary unknown un-investable space because with no baselines, ummm whats up or down? Plus the “i gotta be the only one” thinking is really really bad for the whole traction story, for the narrative it means you’re super unknown, for enablement it means the tech is either really hard to understand, and or going down a path of squiggly uncertainty because we’re not customer focused as much as being totally new and unique focused. But is there a line of good competition and bad? Yes but its case by case basis really. Baselines include more than competition, they speak to the norms or patterns in and around the tech, perspective of market, market size, willingness of that market to embrace new things, typical costs, team makeups, likely investors in that space etc. Computing this factor is tricky as well, its like a gut score. There’s some but not overwhelming odds. The perception of ODDS against you is also dangerous, which is why you need a high conviction, audacity, enablement and alignment score to overcome those ODDS, which are purely suggestive, its not like you feel them, they are thrown at you by others. When you pitch an idea, you pitch it a 1000 times to a sea of nos until you net that ok lets talk. Through pitching you gain confidence, more data, and help hone your narrative, heighten your sauce, brag about your dog food and shine thru enablement.
Traction is a battle, but going forward I’ll be thinking more about the TPS report! The next post will be applying the TPS to some past deals and ones i’m working on now to thinking about TPS in terms of what I see in the valley and more.