Wallet Max Planet Positive Podcast™ Episode 19 with Investor René Bastón, Covenant Venture Capital

Now, you've worked across academia, government and private markets, right? So what's one assumption each sector gets wrong about the others that in your experience, everyone should come together to work on it?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

I'll start from the academia side and the nonprofit side, actually, because this was a common theme in both.

Everybody saw, and I think this has changed over time as tech transfer offices have become more sophisticated and that sort of thing.

But I heard this more than once in

both places.

You know, that's Johnson & Johnson.

They've got unlimited funds.

So they would get angry if they didn't do sponsored research or if they didn't license the technology or if they didn't provide money for an event or something like that.

And what they didn't realize is, yeah, it's a large company and it's got big coffers, but all of that funding is divvied up among different departments who may have a discretionary line of income that they can spend on things.

And beyond that, they have to get approval from somebody else who may not give them approval.

So it was a lot of time.

It takes a lot of time.

And you heard this a lot.

And these poor folks who, you know, really actually wanted to work with you, they got such a bad rap on that side of things because there was a misunderstanding of the way that their internal structure worked.

operated.

So that's one thing.

On the flip side, with investors, similar type of thing where folks were like, investors only want what they want and they're here basically to cherry pick and then leave you in the lurch and all of that.

And that's, you know, part of that is a misunderstanding of the way that investors actually work, how, you know, they have to return money to their LPs.

And they're always looking from that perspective at the things that they're willing to invest in.

And they have very limited time because they, They have to put their money to work in 10-year cycles, which really means a five-year cycle of investment and then a five-year cycle of maintenance and hopefully of liquidity that gets distributed.

And so there's a speed challenge there between academia and investment and business that was always a cause of friction and a cause of misunderstanding historically.

because they didn't understand how that actually works.

And I think the flip side also on the science side, right? So folks on the business side always wanted things to go faster than that system was capable of producing.

The way that the system operated depended on a lot of peer review, a lot of double checking before you get things out, as opposed to this notion, which I think is a little bit less so in pharmaceutical industry and clinical care, for example, but the notion of break things fast and then move on, right? So that's hard to do in science.