Steve Visco - PolyPlus - Part 1

Intro  - 00:00:00: Welcome to the Biotech Startups podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, experienced scientists, serial entrepreneurs, and biotech investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup. Gain actionable insight into navigating the life sciences industry in each episode as we explore the business of science from preseed to IPO, with your host Jon Chee. The purpose of The Biotech Startups Podcast is to provide general insight into the ever-changing world of life sciences through the experience of a variety of guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast are at the user's own risk. The views expressed by guests and any employee of Excedr on the podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Excedr or content sponsors. Any appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement or recommendation of any product, service, or entity referenced in the podcast by Excedr or by its guests.

Jon - 00:01:09: My second guest is Steven Visco, Co-Founder and CEO of PolyPlus. Having spent decades focusing on IP development and licensing, Steve's experience and expertise offers insights that all entrepreneurs can benefit from. Before PolyPlus, Steve worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a principal investigator, running several programs in the field of solid state ionics, developing an extensive patent portfolio, much of which has been licensed to industry. He is a world renowned chemist, author, serial inventor, and an internationally recognized expert in lithium batteries and fuel cell technology. He holds over 100 US Patents, more than 200 International Patents, and has authored nearly 100 journal articles, as well as books, monographs, and other publications. Steve's deep chemistry background has led to great success in his field, both abroad and domestically. Over the next three episodes, we cover a wide range of topics, from Steve's childhood love of science and literature to his time at LBNL, all the way to co-founding PolyPlus, and his breadth of knowledge regarding intellectual property. Today, we'll be talking about how he serendipitously stumbled into chemistry research, the origins of tech transfer, and the inner workings of a US National Laboratory. Without further ado, let's dive into episode two of The Biotech Startups Podcast. Hey, Steve, so good to see you. Thank you for being so generous to jump onto the podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time and just to kind of like set the stage, I think, for all of our listeners out here. I really wanted to kind of illustrate the founders journey and the entrepreneurial journey that you have had thus far. And I thought a good place to start was really early days and in the beginning so our listeners can learn vicariously through your lived experiences and yeah. So can you just tell me a little bit about your early life and your upbringing? Was there an aspect of your upbringing that sparked your interest in science and entrepreneurship?

Steven - 00:02:53: Yeah, I mean, going way back childhood, I was probably pretty introverted. I'm certainly not anymore. I grew out of that pretty quick. So in that sense, I spent a lot of time by myself. I read a lot. I was actually a huge reader, and I'm not sure how it started, but I got interested in actually the early pioneers of vaccines, oddly enough. Right. I did not go into that field. And I was reading about Louis Pasteur and Salk, and that probably started when I was I don't think I was more than eight or nine years old. I got fascinated with their life stories and then the science behind how they made their discoveries. And that was a rather amazing time because those discoveries saved lives, changed the world, and they're basically kind of heroes, and it was a testament to the scientific method. So I found all of that absolutely fascinating. So I had my little microscope. I was making cultures. I was actually taking pond water and following amoebas and paramecium, all that kind of stuff at a pretty young age. So, I mean, the funny thing back then is that schools was a very good school system we went to, but when it came to things like science and biology, you generally didn't really see that until 7th and 8th grade. So I was way ahead what they were doing in the schools, which was a little frustrating because by the time I actually, I think, saw my first microscope in school, that was really basic stuff, really elementary. So it took probably until I was later in high school and early college. So I started to kind of experience science the way I already kind of taught myself. So I was interested very early on. And the other thing that drove me, oddly enough, was literature. I was a huge reader, and so I read exhaustively all the kind of the classics. Those things obviously help your vocabulary, but in a way that I would not have predicted because I had to make a choice between because I was thinking about going into writing versus science, because it's just so fascinating. And I obviously read all of the classics, but that has served me very well because in the sciences, I think particularly now, because I saw that when I was at Lawrence Berkeley Lab with a lot of the Berkeley PhD students. Most of them can't write, and if they do write, it's usually quite poorly and quite often they're very weak at communicating what it is they're trying to do or why it's important or why anybody else should care. And those traits, those skills are actually very important. It means you're either going to have to hire someone to do it for you, or you ought to know how to do it. If you're going to lead, you better know how to communicate. So those things came really, I would say, from pretty early childhood. And then when I was in high school, the other thing that probably helped, oddly enough, I actually had a rock band and I played lead guitar.

Jon - 00:05:46: Cool.

Steven - 00:05:47: So I was performing at a bunch of different venues. And so you get used to being in front of a crowd and having people watch you without being nervous, without screwing up because it's pretty noticeable when you screw up. Music, as you know, all those things were probably they all played into even, I think, the kind of entrepreneurial spirit. Just liking that kind of creative process, being kind of out there and actually enjoying the whole kind of audience experience because it is a big part of fundraising. It's certainly a big part of raising money. And actually, if you are writing proposals to the government for grants, it plays there as well.

 Jon - 00:06:25: I have so many directions in my mind to go in because I feel like nowadays it's all about specialized, specialized, specialized, specialized, specialized. Early, like you hit your kindergarten years, like, do you want to be in biochemistry or do you want to be in physio? It's so early. And when you were growing up, would your family just explore what interests you or when you eventually made the decision?

 Steven - 00:06:49: Yeah, absolutely. They were very supportive. My father ended up being a teacher. He actually started off, oddly enough, as an auto mechanic and then ended up teaching at a vocational high school, which meant that he had to get his college degree part time. He didn't have it. Oh, wow. He worked Saturdays and Sundays for eight years to get a BS and then followed that up with a master's degree. So he was working much harder than any of us at school because he had a full time job and he had to get a degree. So we couldn't complain about our homework load. It was crazy what he was doing. But they were just very supportive in general of education. They had that, I would say, kind of Renaissance approach, that it was all important literature. Matter of fact, I was a nut for comic books when I was a kid and my parents made a deal with me. They could only read two comic books for every classic novel I read. So I read a lot of classic novels. They had these incentives, I think, for them because back in those days that predates a lot of the kind of wild entrepreneurship that you see now. There's so much of it in the US. Particularly in California, and that was unknown to them. So it was like medicine and law, right? Those are kind of the two places that you'd probably go with an education business, maybe, but it didn't have, at least at that time, kind of the prestige, these kind of more academic pursuits. So I was certainly considering medicine. It was definitely one of the things I thought about. But no, it was a very supportive home where education was really stressed. 

Jon - 00:08:30: And so fast forwarding a little bit. I know you ultimately chose to focus on chemistry, and you eventually ended up at UMass for your undergrad. Kind of what spurred that decision to finally choose that. Obviously, you had a bunch of interests. Writing was one of them.

Steven - 00:08:45: It's kind of funny. So I would say through the University of Massachusetts, I was pretty much taking premed okay. Yeah. All the way through until probably junior year. Actually, one of my professors asked me to do research for him at that time was pretty unusual for an undergrad to do research in a research lab and actually publish, which I did. So I was publishing as an undergrad, actually, it was a chemistry of natural systems. In fact, what was going on was they were about to flood an area in western Massachusetts and turn it into a reservoir. So we were studying how that would impact the area and what would grow in the reservoir after they flooded basically this valley. It was kind of interesting. So there was a lot of chemistry involved, and I started to get really into the kind of research mode and a lot of the people that I was associating with who were headed toward medical school. And it may. Have just been an odd coincidence, but they were really focused on the money and not so much the science or the aspects that you'd be helping people and doing kind of good works. So I got kind of disillusioned with that program. Like, I didn't like many of the people that in fact were in premed and liked a lot of the people that were in the chemistry program. And I had a couple of friends who really were into it. They wanted to go to grad school and chemistry. So it wasn't like, yeah, this is my life's goal. To do that was not and to be honest, I didn't know what it meant to do that for a living. I think in the 70s or 80s going to grad school, of course people were doing it. It was typically more associated with academia. Like, you might be looking for an academic position. It was much less competitive. It was pretty easy to get into grad school. You didn't have to jump through the hoops that you do now. So I was, in a sense, probably all that serious about what I was going to do. So I applied to a bunch of grad schools, got into a bunch of grad schools, and then ended up at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, which was a great experience. But people were not nearly as focused and kind of driven at that time toward, say, a specialization and a path, and this is what I'm going to do. It happened pretty organically. It really did. Even within the discipline of chemistry, I had no idea that would end up moving into electric chemistry, which happened at Brown. Electric chemistry is the fundamental science that underlies battery development, but it's also used for a lot of other things. It's not just that. So that gave me the basis for what was to come later, but I was completely oblivious to the fact that it could take me in that direction.

Jon - 00:11:24: That's super interesting. Honestly, Steve, I've known you for so long, and growing up with you, I was like, Steve knew it from the start. And because that story resonates with me too, because when I was doing the premed course, I kind of was like, I don't know if I actually want to do this. And in a similar way, I just fell into a lab. Was it that lab at UMass that really got you hooked into chemistry?

Steven - 00:11:48: That was my first experience doing research, and I really enjoyed it. And then at Brown, I had a great advisor. Very, very clever guy, but extremely academic. He was not running big programs. He was running very fundamental academic studies of electric chemistry, of something called metal carbonyls. Kind of odd class of materials, but very interesting science, I would say. And so that kind of gave me the basic training to be competent in elect chemistry, but was not focused on batteries. In fact, I really knew virtually nothing other than the most basic elements of what constitutes a galvanic cell and a battery. It really wasn't until I got to Santa Barbara that that happened. And that was also kind of a funny thing for me, too, because I was wrapping up at Brown and I started looking at postdocs and of all the places, I got a pretty nice offer in Newfoundland, right, in Canada. And I thought, wow, it's going to be actually pretty cool. Unless you're born there, it's just pretty rare to have a chance to be there for a couple of years and do research. St. John's University is the only place there. And so I was talking to him, and while we were kind of figuring out the details, and I got an offer at UC Santa Barbara, and I'm talking to this guy at St. John's in Newfoundland, and he says, well, how are you going to get here? And I said, Well, I was looking at the map, and there's a ferry from somewhere, I think it was Halifax, maybe, Nova Scotia that would take you out there. And it was in basically March time, like this time of year. So he said, Well, I don't know if they'll have the icebergs out of the way by then. I laughed. I said, that's pretty funny. He says, no, I'm serious. Icebergs. I'm going to Santa Barbara.

Jon - 00:13:31: Yeah, I would have been in the same boat.

Steven -00:13:33: That kind of pushed me to California.

Jon - 00:13:35: And I was just going to ask going from Massachusetts to Rhode Island to Santa Barbara is there are seasons on the East Coast, and Santa Barbara is like, in perpetually perfect weather, in my opinion, perfect.

Steven - 00:13:49: Yeah, no, it's pretty funny. So I had never been to California, and I was married at the time, actually. We just had gotten married. So my wife Donna, she had never been there either. And my only experience or knowledge of California were these beach movies, right? Like surfer movies I had seen as a kid. So my impression was that California was just beautiful beaches, beautiful people who are in great shape and surf. And then we actually drove to Santa Barbara, literally pulled up to the Santa Barbara beach and I looked out and I said, yes, that's exactly what California looks like. They're like all surfers. My God, this is exactly like one of those. It really was like that the whole time. I was like shocked.

Jon - 00:14:33: So your decision to make the cross country journey, was it primarily kind of like I want to be on the West Coast and live a West Coast lifestyle or was it like a specific department? You're like, I want to work in that department with that PI or a combination too.

Steven - 00:14:48: When I got the offer, I certainly looked at it was a guy named John Kennedy. I looked at what he was doing, it looked very interesting to me, but it was just part of the package. Like I thought, I'm going to be in California. Brown has got 5000 students. It's a small school, Ivy League versus the UC, which typically can be 30,000 students, right? So it's a big campus. So I thought that would be kind of an interesting experience. So I was really driven more by this kind of let's see what it's like out there and see where this leads me. I still had no idea where I was going to end up, whether it be academia or an industrial job. And when I got to Santa Barbara then it certainly opened my eyes in a lot of ways. One, yeah, it was big research. So my first exposure to kind of big large grants. So most of the faculty in that department, I mean, in some cases they would have many millions of dollars in funding, which was probably an order of magnitude larger than what I was seeing at Brown, which enables the purchase of a lot more sophisticated equipment, a lot more postdocs, larger groups, more travel. It's just like a whole different thing. So that was definitely my first exposure to that. And then as it turned out, this guy John Kennedy, who was running that lab, was a guy who had actually been in industry and then switched to academia later in his life. So he had industrial experience, which he brought with him to the lab. And that exposure was very helpful too. So he was very grounded in what type of fundamental research could ultimately lead to practical applications. And that's something that was certainly never talked about at the time in the Brown chemistry department. That was pretty far afield from what we were doing there. We had no idea what was all going to go.

Jon - 00:16:39: It sounds like the lab at Santa Barbara was really kind of like a formative experience.

Steven - 00:16:44: Yeah, it certainly was. Kennedy was a very smart guy working in solid state chemistry, and actually, he was one of the first to really start looking, I would say seriously, at solid-state batteries. Right. You did not hear the term solid-state batteries in the 80s. No way. I mean, now it's a big deal, right. But many years later, it kind of resurfaced. So he was looking into materials, and it was too early. I mean, that field hadn't developed sufficiently. This is obviously before lithium-ion. So rechargeable batteries were nickel-cadmium, lead-acid. Early days. If you were to go into a commercial battery company back in the 80s, it looked like the dark ages. Everything was covered with carbon. It was dirty.

Jon - 00:17:35: Oh, man. 

Steven - 00:17:36: Oh, yeah. Now, of course, if you were to walk into a lithium-ion plant, it looks like a semiconductor fab. Right. Clean room, dry room, type situation, totally different. So everything changed. Everything really changed. But he was certainly of a mind to kind of move in the direction that the entire field has moved, but he was pretty early in his thinking. He was definitely one of the pioneers, and that also was interesting for me to see and to work with someone who was thinking way out of the box, doing some pretty crazy stuff. None of it got into the commercial sphere, but some of the work that we did there in 1982 is actually the beginnings of what we're doing at PolyPlus.

Jon - 00:18:21: Wow. Yeah. He was really ahead of the game.

Steven - 00:18:24: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Jon - 00:18:26: That's incredible. Would you say out of, like, UMass, to Brown, to Santa Barbara? He was kind of like a mentor.

Steven - 00:18:33: Absolutely. Yeah. No, for sure. And then Lawrence Berkeley was another thing, because that was even a bigger step in terms of the scale of the work that's done. But things changed pretty dramatically during the time I was at Lawrence Berkeley, because when I first got to Lawrence Berkeley, most of the national labs were funded by Department of Energy or the Department of Defense. LBL is a DOE lab. Right. At one point, they did do some classified work, but they're clearly too close to the campus, so it was very easy for protesters to just march up, putting up signs and screaming. So they completely stopped that stuff. By the time I got there, there was no classified work going on, but they had kind of what these call block funding, so they would just get these chunks of money. And it was almost like Bell labs, right? Bell labs is famous for just letting scientists do what they wanted. So the assumption being, you're smart, there's a lot of exciting things that you can do. Tell us what motivates you, we'll give you the money. If it works out, we'll continue to fund you. If not, we'll redirect you. And LBL was kind of working in that mode. And I think that was, in a sense, also some kind of leftover attitude from the Manhattan Project. Right. So you get a lot of really smart people together, give them all the money they need to do what they want to do, and then something amazing will happen. So there was a lot of that type of thinking and quite a bit of funding available at the time.

Jon - 00:19:58: That started to shift during your time there.

Steven - 00:20:01: Yeah, and in a way, for me, it was very instructive. Right. So when I started there, you didn't think about funding. It was all kind of taken care of. You didn't have to get funding. And then as the years progressed, you started to see a shift. It started to become a much more competitive landscape. And so effectively, of course, you had to then write proposals, which everybody does now, so there's no guarantee. You'd have to write a proposal to some division of the Department of Energy or in some cases, probably you could get money from DoD, but it was not likely at LBL. And slowly researchers started to reach out into industry. And you saw that at Berkeley, too, I would say, in the early 90s, where companies like Novelis and some of the big pharma companies would actually set up these kind of partnerships with UC Berkeley right, to do research with some kind of intellectual property agreement. So it was starting to happen. Right. And they were very complicated at first, right. Because there was this whole big concern about this kind of conflict of interest or corruption of the academic environment, right. Because there's a possibility of a profit motive which did not exist before those relationships started to evolve. Craters, which are these cooperative research agreements, most of the national labs. And actually, I would say a lot, this whole kind of tech transfer phenomenon that happened. I think that goes back to Newt Gingrich, because actually, the Republicans at varying time, but at one time in particular, again, I think it was like in the 80s, maybe in's the 90s, where they started to say, hey, why do we need these national labs? The national labs were created for the war. Right. It was the Manhattan Project. I mean, that's where they came from. Right. And then, of course, like anything else, they kind of started to grow in size, in bureaucracy, and in the number of scientists working there. And so the budgets expanded, and the Republicans started looking at that and saying, I don't see what the benefit is to the American taxpayer. So the labs needed a response that was an existential threat, in a way. Right. And so there's two responses typically to that question. When you say, what does the American taxpayer get for their tax dollars? Whether it's universities or national labs? The answer will always be, we train the next generation of scientists. So that's one good answer. But with the national labs, because their budgets are so much bigger, they needed to be something else. And they said, and the technologies that we develop go on to create companies and products, and those things will help grow the economy. And the Republicans very smartly, said, yeah, show us where these jobs, where are these supposed companies? Where are the licenses for intellectual property? And then you had all virtually every national lab set up a tech transfer office. Right?

Jon - 00:22:58: Interesting. Is that like the birth? That was the birth.

Steven - 00:23:02: That's when it really took off. Even if they had one, it was probably one person. They hired lawyers to handle intellectual property. They hired marketing people to reach out to the staff to see if there were inventions that could be licensed. And then everything started to change. So I was there when that was all starting to really take off, and I was reaching out to industrial players to see if they wanted to work with our group on solid oxide fuel cells and batteries. And so we started getting all sorts of money both from Department of Energy and from the industry. And at the time, I didn't realize it, but the other benefit of having money from industry is that it's pretty unrestricted. So if you have funding from the Department of Energy, particularly at a national lab, you can't just go fly to a conference in Vienna, permission overseas. And that stuff's looked at pretty critically, and now it's probably even more so. But if you have money from industry and you tell them, like, well, there's an important conference in Paris next week, they don't care, because if you're doing good work, you actually are saving them money. And the other thing you had to learn, and this took a lot of the other scientists a while to learn, is that when you go to a big company, whether it's pharma or battery companies or energy companies and you're asking them for a couple of million dollars to do research at a national lab where they're not going to own all the IP. And it's their money, right? So in some cases, they will negotiate for all the IP. And so that's certainly a negotiation that takes place. But when you're telling them that you want to do this work and you're going to need this money from them, they have to be pretty damn confident that you're as good as you say you are, because they could pay their own staff to do that work. Why wouldn't we have our own people do this? Then we absolutely own the IP outright. It's confidential. We don't have to worry about that. The argument always has to be, we're experts. We are like world class in this particular area, and you're not, and you actually don't have those people, and you're going to have to hire those people, and it'll take you maybe a decade for them to be productive. So if you can make that argument, you're in a good position, and then you start talking about IP and other parts of the so I learned all of that because these things were happening within the national lab system. So I was negotiating with these companies, kind of fundraising with industry and DoE at the same time, and other government funding agencies. So I learned a lot about actually writing proposals, bringing in relatively large proposals, like pretty big money.

Jon - 00:25:46: That's incredible. So when you left Santa Barbara, did you join LBL with the thought that, I'm going to get this massive pile of cash?

Steven - 00:25:55: I had no idea what was going to happen at LBL. I went to LBL partly because it's obviously a pretty famous national lab and they had a big battery effort, but also because it was California when I was in Santa Barbara, and we were having a lot of fun down there, for sure. I mean, it was good signs, but it was just like an amazing place to land after a pretty brutal winter in New England. And I remember walking into this ice cream shop and telling my wife Donna, that, you know, if I leave California, that guy who's scooping ice cream is going to have a better life than me.

Jon - 00:26:27: I'm not leaving. I am not leaving.

Steven - 00:26:30: No way. We're sticking around. Yeah. LBL. Was part of that. And I thought from LBL, obviously, it's got great credentials, so it could be a jumping point for other things. But that avenue from, say, a national lab to creating a company that wasn't really there when I started there, that really didn't exist. Like I said, the tech transfer offices were years later. That was starting to happen. But even then, you would see licensing of technology, particularly Berkeley and LBL had not started companies. You didn't have scientists leaving to start companies. That obviously has changed. We were the second company ever launched out of the lab.

Jon - 00:27:07: Wow.

Steven - 00:27:08: And when we started filing patents because we were making discoveries in the battery field, it was actually quite difficult to do because the lab had a pretty limited budget for writing patents. So they could only pick a few of the various inventions that people had to actually patent, and they weren't particularly good at it. If you're a hotshot IP attorney, you're going to go to Apple. You're not going to go to some national lab where they just started doing this kind of stuff. It could be a career ender, actually. So they didn't get the best of the brightest. That has obviously changed because they get a lot of revenue now from licensing, and they get a lot of attention for the companies they start. But we were the first one, so it was difficult. And the way we launched the company was also quite unusual. So what happened? We had three patents that were getting some attention 

Jon - 00:27:55: While at LBL

Steven - 00:2757: While at LBL. That's right. So we're at LBL no idea about starting a company. We were just thinking, oh, we could license maybe some of this. And I got a call from the Wall Street Journal and a reporter from the Wall Street Journal said, I just read a press release about the research that you're doing and I want to write something. Probably he was going to give us three lines somewhere in the Wall Street Journal. And he basically told me what he was going to write. And I said, no, do not say those things because that's not even close to being right. I tell you what, if you got a few minutes, let me explain to you what we're doing, why it's important, why batteries are important, kind of how they function and why this will make a difference. So I must have spent like 2 hours with this guy walking him through all of that and favorite goes on butter. So he was so thankful that rather than writing a couple of sentences, he gave me like a quarter page in the Wall Street Journal. Wow. So you can imagine that things went crazy at that point. It just said, big breakthrough at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, it's going to change the battery field. So we were getting calls from venture firms and battery companies and companies that wanted to be battery companies. It was just insane. That was like 1989, right? And so basically the lab got very excited. This is exactly the kind of turn of events that they wanted. And so there was talk about us creating a company, which I definitely have my doubts about. It's like we had one kid, we're going to have another one. It's like that's a very risky thing to do. And obviously at the lab you have health benefits, you have all sorts of perks. It's like if we go out and start a company, maybe it's going to disappear in a year. So in any case, the conversation started and the lab was so eager to have us do it, that when we in fact met investors who were willing to kind of help us basically raise the angel money to get the company started. And so we did. We actually incorporated kind of issued common shares and then we went out to raise money. When the money started materializing, when it was clear we're going to have a company because you can imagine the people that were raising money said, okay, you got to leave the lab and run this thing. And I thought we had two kids. And I was like, look, this is a risky thing back then. It had not been done before. And I said, you know what, I'm going to do a 50-50. I'll keep my position at the lab and we'll find a CEO and then I'll be CTO to keep things going down there. And then the lead investor was like, that's not going to work anyway. In the end, of course we negotiated. It did work, but I had to convince the lab back in those days was a real concern about conflict of interest because this hadn't been done. So here we have a group at Lawrence Berkeley working on battery technology for the Department of Energy, largely. And now I have this company that's going to be working on battery technology and said, you can keep your position, but you can't do anything battery-related. So it's like, that's pretty much what I know how to do.

Jon - 00:31:06: Yeah, that's my thing.

Steven - 00:31:08: Well, that's kind of weird. So they said, no, that's like absolute conflict, because you can imagine the thinking, like, you're inventing things at Lawrence Berkeley and those things that kind of pop into your head, you're not going to report them. You're going to give them to your company because you have a vested interest, and it's going to help the companies who cares about the lab. So I actually had to start a fuel cell group from nowhere, which I did, and grew into a pretty big effort. Casually, just casually, I just started reading the literature and kind of coming up to speed. And we actually ended up filing a bunch of patents and licensing all that technology all the while while podcast was happening. So it was a pretty wild ride and very certainly pretty unique. But actually, that work that I did on fuel cells in some ways helped guide some of the things we ended up doing down here for some very technical reasons. So it was all helpful, it was all kind of important, but that's a difficult thing to do. So now, I mean, just to have two vastly different research areas running at the same time, and in a way, you have two different masters. Everybody wants success. So whenever you get into that situation where something is time critical, which entity do you focus on? Because everybody wants you to focus on their entity. Yeah, you can't complain like, well, I can't really deal with this right now because I have to put out fires at LBL. No one wants to hear that.

Jon - 00:32:30: So when you started PolyPlus and you're coming right out of LBL, did you go through the tech transfer office or was that.

Steven - 00:32:37: So that was kind of interesting too. We had to license our own IP, so we had to get exclusive license to our own patents, which we did. We negotiated an exclusive license. This is kind of acute aside, but that had a minimum annual royalty attached to it, right? So every year the company had to pay Lawrence Berkeley Lab kind of a license fee every single year. But as an inventor at a national lab, you get 50% of any royalties that come in. It's like from one pocket to the other. Jon - 00:33:10: Thank you. That's great. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Steven - 00:33:13: Because I was in a rare situation of being on both sides, but we actually saw every year I got a check which was coming from PolyPlus. Pretty funny.

Jon - 00:33:21: And you had to do the same thing for your fuel cell technology.

Steven - 00:33:24: For the fuel cell technology. Those licenses, yes, I got money for those as well. And that's probably true. Now, that was a relatively new development, I mean, at the national labs and most universities. So most universities and national labs now, when you file a patent, the inventors get some percentage. At LBL, it used to be 50%. So 50% would go to Lawrence Berkeley Lab and 50% would go to the inventors split equally right among the inventors. That's now, I think 30%. But it can be substantial.

Jon - 00:33:56: That sounds I mean, especially when you're partnering with these big industry.

Steven - 00:33:59: Oh, yeah, I know. Like at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, when I was collecting royalties, I won't say how much I was collecting, but I know that there were people that were seeing like quarter of a million dollar checks

Jon - 00:34:09: Wow. I didn't even know that there was this ecosystem to it.

Steven - 00:34:13: That's right.

Outro - 00:34:15: That’s all for today’s episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our insightful conversation with Steve Visco covering his coast-to-coast grad school transition and the tech transfer boom during his time at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. To learn more about Steve’s journey be sure to tune in to our next episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening and we look forward to having you join us again for part 2 of Steve’s journey for an in-depth discussion on IP strategy, licensing patents, and working with tech transfer offices. The Biotech Startups Podcast is brought to you by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Make sure to search for Biotech Startup's podcasts in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and click subscribe. To learn more about our leasing program, visit our website www.excedr.com. We provide research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support a path to exceptional outcomes. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening.