‘We need to get clear on what a commercial champion is’ with Rachel Connolly, Chris Jones and Elad Katz

This special episode was recorded at a live event in Edinburgh on 2 October 2025. We gathered to discuss the role of external experts in commercialising research and how to recruit and support a more diverse pool of experts. 

Elad Katz is the co-founder and chief technology officer for Navigate Precision Biology, a spinout from University of Dundee. Rachel Connolly is an Enterprise Executive at Heriot Watt University specialising in deep tech commercialisation. Chris Jones is Chair and Non-Executive Director for a portfolio of life science companies and an experienced commercial champion.

The panel talks about

• The need for flexibility and matching the right experts with the right project at the right time 
• How the current role descriptors and expectations might be attracting the wrong people
• Addressing the lack of diversity amongst the current pool of external experts
• Why relationships, commitment and drive can be more important than experience

Connect with our guests on LinkedIn - Chris Jones, Elad Katz & Rachel Connolly

 To receive a copy of the report ‘Widening and formalising Executives in Residence (XiR) in Scotland’ by Hamish McAlpine and Britta C Wyatt, get in touch with Orla Kelly

Transcript

[00:00:01] Elad Katz: I think that when you really start, you don't know what you need. And this is where the enterprise team is so important. 

[00:00:07] Chris Jones: It's basically a walks on water and doesn't get wet job description. And if you do that, you're gonna have real trouble trying to fill it.

[00:00:15] Rachel Connolly: So what we need to do is change the people that we're looking for. So is it someone younger? Is it women who have had different experiences? They may not have made it to being a CEO. But they may have done something quite inspiring elsewhere.

[00:00:28] Sarah McLusky: Welcome to the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is all about the journey from teaching, research, and innovation to real world solutions. For season two, we are joined by experienced founders and other experts who work alongside university staff and students to help create and support a culture of enterprise on campus.

[00:00:48] Sarah McLusky: To wrap up this season of Academic Adventures, we have a special episode which was recorded live with an audience in Edinburgh on the 2nd of October, 2025. The recording was part of an afternoon spent discussing the role of external experts in commercializing research. Central to our conversations was a report produced by Hamish McAlpine of Oxentia, which explored how to better recruit and support external experts.

[00:01:12] Sarah McLusky: To hear more about the process of compiling this report, make sure that you listen back to episode nine of this season and my interview with Hamish. If you would like to receive a copy of the report, do get in touch with Orla Kelly and you'll find her email address in the show notes.

[00:01:27] Sarah McLusky: Fueled by the reports findings and various other contributions throughout the afternoon, I sat down with my three guests to get their thoughts on how we can fill the external experts pipeline with enthusiastic, skilled, and diverse people to help take Scottish research and innovation to the world.

[00:01:42] Sarah McLusky: As you'll hear in the live introduction, my guests have a diverse range of perspectives. Elad Katz is a company founder and former academic. Rachel Connolly is a tech transfer officer at Heriot Watt University, and Chris Jones has supported a number of life science spin out companies. We talk about their main takeaways from the afternoon, why defining the commercial champion role is a challenge, how we might recruit a more diverse range of experts, and the importance of getting the right support at the right time.

[00:02:11] Sarah McLusky: Welcome along to this live recording of the Academic Adventures Podcast. And this is gonna wrap up a season of conversations that we've had around the roles of external experts working alongside universities to help spin out and build companies from university research.

[00:02:31] Sarah McLusky: So with me today, I have three people who in a lovely combination, represent some of these different roles in the sector. I'll start from furthest away from me. We have got Chris Jones with us. Chris, very experienced commercial champion, essentially chair and non-executive director of a wide variety of companies. I'm not gonna list them all. But including Brigid Bio, which is the most recent one, which recently spun out of the University of Aberdeen in collaboration with previous podcast guest Andy Porter. I understand. Yeah. So quite a few other all biotech life sciences type companies there. So Chris is gonna give us the perspective of a commercial champion.

[00:03:12] Sarah McLusky: Then I have got Rachel Connolly, who is Enterprise Executive at Heriot Watt University, particularly working with deep tech company founders to help to commercialize their research. And as I think I probably won't need to tell you, when Rachel starts talking, very proactive on the diversity debate that we have, just not even the debate, but that the actions we can take around diversity in this sector.

[00:03:40] Sarah McLusky: And then we have Elad Katz, who is our kind of academic turned founder. Elad is the co-founder and chief technology officer for Navigate Precision Biology, and that was a spin out from the University of Dundee. So welcome to our panel.

[00:03:59] Sarah McLusky: For the people who've not been in the room today, we've had an afternoon of presentations and conversations, all around how we can use external experts better in universities. And so I wonder if I'd start by asking each of you for just one point that has really stood out for you from this afternoon's conversation. So, maybe go from this end, Elad, could I invite you, first of all, tell us your one thing that stood out.

[00:04:24] Elad Katz: Thanks for inviting me. I think that for me it was really refreshing to hear multiple voices here calling for flexibility in the roles of commercial champions or whatever we want to call them after this event. I think that we've had a lot of that experience of needing different people at different phases and been a little bit restricted by the system, and seeing that there is a consensus that there has to be more flexibility. That's great for me. 

[00:04:58] Sarah McLusky: Excellent. I think we might talk a bit more about that and due course. Rachel, what was your standout there? 

[00:05:03] Rachel Connolly: It's just really nice that we're actually starting to properly talk about diversity. The fact that it's been recognized in the report, the fact that it's came up in nearly every single group discussion that's happened today it's great. And it's not just diversity as in male, female, it's, we're talking about neurodiversity, we're talking about different ethnic backgrounds, different class backgrounds, everything. And that's something that really, especially in a deep tech environment that I'm stuck in, not say stuck. I work in entrenched in it is something that needs to be considered because the people who are working with teams need to be able to work with different types of people and bring different types of experience to those roles.

[00:05:39] Sarah McLusky: Fantastic. Definitely gonna talk about that more. And Chris, what was your standout thing from this afternoon? 

[00:05:43] Chris Jones: I think for me there was a lot of conversation about the need to get clear on what a commercial champion is. If you look at the list of potential roles, responsibilities, skills it's basically a walks on water and doesn't get wet job description. And if you do that, you're gonna have real trouble trying to fill it. So stepping back and thinking about what does a company need to spin out and then building the team around it that has those skills may help some of these challenges of availability and finding them and diversity and everything else.

[00:06:23] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Fantastic. That leads us beautifully onto our first question, which is the first recommendation from this report was the need to have clear role descriptions or maybe multiple role descriptions, and thinking also about the skills that these people need. What are those roles, perhaps, Chris? What, how do you think of those roles and what sorts of skills do you think are needed for these different roles?

[00:06:52] Chris Jones: So listening the conversation at our table, and today I'd distinguish entrepreneur in residence, which there's probably every single one has a slightly different job description. But in general is a cross campus trying to level up a broad selection of talent, which is very different from how do we get an individual company spun out.

[00:07:16] Chris Jones: And so I'd sort of leave the entrepreneur in residence to the side 'cause I've never done that. The commercial champion, at the risk of biting the hand that feeds me 'cause I think I've done three things with SE already and it's the reason that I do a lot of work in Scotland. The risk with the commercial champion role is that if you are paying a small amount of money for a part-time engagement to go ask questions about customers and markets, things that are really important, you're then going to attract consultants, people that can work part time. And there was a real sort of consensus at our table about the needs for people that are part of the team that have skin in the game that will be there long term. And in some ways, I don't like the term commercial champion.

[00:08:07] Chris Jones: I fit myself into the box occasionally, but really, companies, for a biotech, you need a clinical plan. You need a regulatory plan, you need a market plan. You need mentoring from somebody who's been there and done that and can take a first time entrepreneur and help them figure out how to get this baby gestated and birthed and then successful along the way.

[00:08:31] Chris Jones: So I think I'll stop there. 

[00:08:33] Sarah McLusky: Yeah, so really thinking about this, not really just one role, and I think that's one thing, Elad, that you're really have strong feelings about as well, isn't it about the you need different people at different times. 

[00:08:44] Elad Katz: Yeah, so we're in privileged position because we've been both through opportunity quantification with Scottish Enterprise, but also through the what is now the last two stages of ICURe.

[00:08:59] Elad Katz: And I think that I said to someone earlier, it's almost opposing philosophies to barely pay anything to someone that is essentially the commercial champion, potentially CEO, in waiting, while they pay a full salary for an entrepreneurial lead. And I think that however it worked for us, at the end of the day, if you are low on your readiness level, having a paid entrepreneurial lead is equally and potentially more important. Because this whole assumption that an academic PI could spend days of their week doing nothing else but entrepreneurship, I dunno, on what planet these people live. It doesn't happen, and academics have other jobs. So having a designated person. That has whatever level of experience, relevant or otherwise, that is guided by someone that you call commercial champion or whatever you want, even if it is a consultant at that stage, is probably the best way to start kicking the tyres and understand if your idea is actually worth pursuing.

[00:10:08] Elad Katz: And I feel that in our journey, for example, we go to that a lot later than I would've liked, and it's because simply there wasn't that kind of a job to offer anyone.

[00:10:19] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. So having that different role there. So it sounds like with this flexibility though, different projects are different. They've got different people, they've got different needs, they've got different levels of skills.

[00:10:30] Sarah McLusky: Is there any need for role descriptors at all? Rachel, you've got thoughts on that? 

[00:10:38] Rachel Connolly: Yeah. We all know we're not daft in this room. Like, there's the classic adage of men apply for a job if they've got 60% to that of things listed in a job description. Women apply for jobs apparently, if they fulfill all of the roles, all the description points, they have to have a hundred percent of what's there, maybe more than what's actually in the job description.

[00:10:57] Rachel Connolly: So if we don't have a role descriptor, especially one that's actually more gender neutral anyway then we're not gonna get the women that we need to get through the door to apply for these jobs. Therefore, you're not gonna get the diversity, you're not gonna get the range of experience, you're not gonna get a lot of attributes that are needed to push these things forward.

[00:11:13] Rachel Connolly: So role description is vitally important, but they have to be just done properly and done well and thoughtful about what does the project need and then write it accordingly. 

[00:11:25] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. And what does it actually need? I know one thing that, has come up in some of the conversations I've been part of this afternoon is that some of the job descriptors, some of the role descriptors cover, because of this need for flexibility, they cover every eventuality, which then, as you say, makes it difficult for more diverse candidates to feel like they match that descriptor.

[00:11:48] Sarah McLusky: Whereas if we could maybe narrow it down to the smaller number of criteria that might help as well. 

[00:11:56] Rachel Connolly: It's gonna definitely help. Also having the flexibility of having more than one commercial champion or advisor type role, but ideally not an advisor. Someone who's gonna be actually getting their boots muddy, going out in the field, teaching the entrepreneurs, especially within a spinout environment.

[00:12:11] Rachel Connolly: They may not have ever left a university before. They don't know how to deal with other people in the real world. So having someone that's gonna just hold their hand but also actually get out there and do it themselves. Yeah. So maybe it takes more than one person, maybe. And that diversity is only gonna help with that.

[00:12:25] Rachel Connolly: You'll get more outreach, you'll get to more places, you'll see more things. You'll have a broader range of contacts that otherwise you wouldn't get. Yeah. So also just add one more thing in. Age. We don't have to go for someone that's necessarily got 20, 30 years worth of experience, who is a older, qualified person.

[00:12:44] Rachel Connolly: Maybe we need to give a chance to younger people too, that actually has got the drive and enthusiasm to do it, but maybe not actually the experience. 

[00:12:51] Sarah McLusky: And sometimes having somebody who's a role model, actually somebody who's closer in age, is maybe just one or two steps ahead can actually be more useful.

[00:13:01] Rachel Connolly: Yeah. 

[00:13:01] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Elad, do you,

[00:13:03] Elad Katz: Yeah, I just wanted to say two things about what Rachel was saying, one about the descriptions. It could be, I think a good thing for enterprise teams and new teams coming together to actually have that laundry list and say, actually, okay, here's all the skills that we used to ask for commercial champions.

[00:13:25] Elad Katz: Can you tell us what are the top five? And put that in the ad. So you don't need to rewrite everything. Actually, it could be a good thing to, in the early interaction, to understand what are the things that they think that are the most, and you may have another opinion. One other comment, because I'm sorry for Chris or any other, a champion that does it differently.

[00:13:48] Elad Katz: I have never ever seen a commercial champion muddy their boots. I think that overwhelmingly, unless they were just on the verge of becoming the CEO, there was someone else calling the people, doing customer discovery, going to conferences, doing all of that. I absolutely love that. Don't get me wrong, I would not ever complain about that.

[00:14:14] Elad Katz: My wife might, but you know, at the end of the day, that's brilliant for this entrepreneur. There's nothing that would be better, but anyone sitting there thinking that this is what the commercial champion should do. And I was there two years ago, never happened, and I'm not, I've been involved in four different spinouts, so I think that I have some coverage may have happened, but it's really, really rare.

[00:14:40] Sarah McLusky: And that might relate to your point, Chris, about attracting just consultants who give very generic advice.

[00:14:47] Chris Jones: Yes. To me there's a, so I still like doing this, the stuff that you do. So I roll up my sleeves and go to the conferences and talk to investors and see what the feedback is to figure out what needs to be in the business plan and do it. But you know, it, It's difficult, right?

[00:15:03] Chris Jones: So one of the challenges is. Can you find somebody that can invest 18 months with a company, which is what it took weeks when Andy called me about Brigid on, maybe a quarter of what you could be earning somewhere else. That's gonna limit your pool a lot. But it, that engagement in getting people as part of your team and building a team is one of the absolute critical skills for a founder.

[00:15:26] Chris Jones: And if I can take you a slight tangent, somewhere in the book was talking about assigning commercial champions and assigning was raising a red flag in front of a bull to me. Right. You know, I think you need, we need to start putting more on the founders to sort of, you know, give 'em the guidance.

[00:15:44] Chris Jones: Here's what you need, here's the team. Go find your commercial champion, go find somebody that you can work with because that relationship is key. And that ability to find somebody will directly relate to potential success in the role. Similar it, the internet has opened up a whole lot of things and made it easier to get to VCs, but 20 years ago, every single VC website said the best way to reach us is to find somebody that knows us already and get an introduction.

[00:16:13] Chris Jones: Which was essentially a screen to say, do you have the people skills, the networking skills, to find your way through contacts to us, because that skill is one of the things that makes a good entrepreneur. And I think there's a piece of this that, should be pushed onto the entrepreneur to say, here's what you need. Here's a team, here's the gaps. Here's a list of maybe 20, 30 people. SE has got a Global Scots list that is brilliant. The more you can get founders to engage in that, understand what they need and be an active part to bringing somebody in that they want, as opposed to, I've walked into many situations where, we kinda had somebody and they were given to us and they didn't do very good. And we're floundering. Where do we go? 

[00:16:54] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Relationships are so important, whether it's, as you say, building a team. It's about, and that's something again that came up in some of the conversations that I had this afternoon, is that this, it's not about finding one person, it's about finding the right team of people and putting them together.

[00:17:09] Sarah McLusky: And certainly again. That team. One thing that's gonna be really important to get a diversity of founders is gonna be our diverse team of people as well involved and this lack of diversity amongst the external experts is something that has come up again and again throughout this podcast series, but also in the recommendations of the report.

[00:17:31] Sarah McLusky: Rachel, I think you've got a lot to say on this topic, haven't you? 

[00:17:34] Rachel Connolly: I've got enough to say, but I'll try and keep it to headlines. But I think in general, if we're looking for people who are experts, someone who's probably been through the academic, academic system up to at least PhD level, so they've got the level of knowledge and experience that need.

[00:17:47] Rachel Connolly: Women make up probably half of all full-time people in an academic situation, yet only 28% of those people make it to being a professor. Out of that, if you're an ethnic minority it drops to around about 17%. And then if you look at everyone from different backgrounds, you know, it just the chance of you becoming someone who's classed as having that level, the level of experience needed.

[00:18:11] Rachel Connolly: To then be an external advisor at the academic level. So you haven't even started on your career, you haven't even left the place yet. Those numbers are already very small. Then you go into the actual real world where you know only 35% of executive roles are female. So again, your chances of finding someone female who's got either the academic life or professional working life is very small.

[00:18:34] Rachel Connolly: And then if you look at people who have created female only founding teams, 3% of UK venture capital goes to all female teams. So again, just by default, just on the women angle, without going down any other angle, your chance of finding that person is already because of the way the system is set up small.

[00:18:53] Rachel Connolly: Yeah, it's immediately small. So if you're looking to try and find those people, you're not gonna get them. So what we need to do is change the people that we're looking for. So is it someone younger? Is it women who have had different experiences? Yes. They may not have made it to being a CEO. But they may have done something quite inspiring elsewhere.

[00:19:12] Rachel Connolly: Have they received like awards for things? Have they done something quite inspirational? Are they just driven enough to do it? Is it someone younger? Is it someone who is neurodiverse, who's able to work with a neurodiverse group in a really positive way? 'cause they've been through that journey themselves?

[00:19:28] Rachel Connolly: Is it someone who is from an ethnic minority that actually their first language isn't English? So maybe actually in the UK we could have someone speaking in meetings in a different language, that would be great. So how do we encourage that? Because the chances are those people haven't received the level of academic or career breaks that they needed to even apply for the role in the first place.

[00:19:50] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. So we're already looking at a smaller pool of people to start with who might be potentially interested in this kind of opportunity. And then as you said, with some of the barriers around role descriptors and whether they will even put themselves forward for the roles, and that's perhaps why we need to take some more affirmative action on this rather than going with the traditional models that we've had for recruitment.

[00:20:18] Sarah McLusky: So any thoughts about what kind of things we could be doing that might improve them? 

[00:20:23] Rachel Connolly: The report highlighted it. The way that we actually put out the advent for these external advisors it's tend to be male gendered. So we can actually change the wording, the descriptors, the things that we're looking for.

[00:20:32] Rachel Connolly: But more importantly, it's actually about finding the things that we actually need. So not having the generic descriptor, not just looking for someone who, someone has X experience because we think that'll be useful. Find the thing that actually is needed by that team and be open to different options.

[00:20:48] Rachel Connolly: So a lot of the time maybe they won't accept that person being the advisor 'cause it doesn't take the generic I have been CEOI have raised X amount of investment. I have done X, Y, Z. And just accept the fact that this person's got a hell of a lot of drive and they're willing to do it. And maybe we have two advisors, someone with someone like Chris's experience, who's willing to help this younger or different person go on that journey alongside the academic founder.

[00:21:13] Rachel Connolly: And that might be the change that's needed to then change it systemically, what is happening. Because if we're not championing people in universities, especially, it's within STEM and everything else, to try to go into that educational pathway to learn these things so they can become the entrepreneurs of the future.

[00:21:30] Rachel Connolly: We don't stand a chance, so we can, if we can do a top down approach for making that change where we are. Maybe it'll encourage and we'll find the heroes then who are gonna be inspiring the next generation to come through. 

[00:21:41] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Hope so. Elad. 

[00:21:43] Elad Katz: I have just a thought about maybe combining the two things that last things that you said.

[00:21:48] Elad Katz: I think that there's a huge number, for example of females and ethnic minorities in business development and chief commercial officers we have this we can call it top down, or whatever we want this idea that, you got this experienced CEO coming in, commercial champion, dragging the team forward, you know, in some sort of a, you know, this is the pull and you are just pulling it out of the university.

[00:22:15] Elad Katz: The question is. Is it not a healthier dynamic for everyone involved that the champion, or whatever we call them, are really becoming co-founders in actually if they're coming from, a senior business development job or whatever we want to call it, a client engagement or whatever roles like this that, as you say, have the drive, see this as an opportunity to actually make their own mark. Make the company their own. I think that's a healthier dynamic for the team, because frankly, I wasn't that interested in the people that were saying, oh, we've done this all before 20 times. You know what mean? You want someone that is a team member.

[00:23:03] Elad Katz: And I think that it's a lot easier if there is something in this for them, that closes the gap of what Chris was saying. No. You know, you're asking someone for 18 months to put basically a quarter of their usual income. If you think actually this is going to be something that I get a stake, I'm not gonna tell you what stake we gave our CEO.

[00:23:24] Elad Katz: Usually it's a healthy stake. That's should be worth the money. 

[00:23:29] Rachel Connolly: Yeah, and I think Chris does do it in the right way, but what I would say is that something that might be a low salary for someone with a lot of experience for a six month, eight month, 18 month period is actually quite a lot of money for someone who maybe doesn't have that much experience.

[00:23:45] Rachel Connolly: So it's the equivalent of what they would be getting as a salary if they were in industry. But give them a chance to actually come and be the commercial champion. They've got the drive they wanna try and they're willing to learn. Great. 

[00:23:58] Elad Katz: Yeah. Because if we move beyond the descriptions and the, the ads and all that what make or break this is the, the ambition and the involvement. And if you can foster that in across the entire team, that has to be the number one factor in the team's success. Someone said about 60% of startups fall in because the founders start falling out. It's exactly that because some, inevitably some of these teams will have people that are more motivated, more dedicated to that particular thing, and if they're not on the same trajectory, likelihood

[00:24:34] Elad Katz: is that it's not gonna work out.

[00:24:35] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. One thing though, I wonder about, Chris, you said about the importance and Elad, you've talked about importance of the relationships. We've got this tendency as human beings to like people who are like us and that is also entrenching this diversity problem potentially. And I don't know any thoughts about how we overcome that.

[00:24:58] Sarah McLusky: At least if people are being, I know you said you don't like the word people being assigned a commercial champion or whatever it is, but maybe that's the kind of action that's actually needed to break out of this cycle of people getting their friends involved.

[00:25:14] Chris Jones: I suppose for me it comes back to skills.

[00:25:16] Chris Jones: It's, yes, we have a tendency to like people that are similar, but you very quickly learn in business that there are many jobs to do that take many different types of people and and people that can do, quality and regulatory are very different than me.

[00:25:32] Chris Jones: And thank goodness. So I think there, I think it's very much about trying to provide the coaching around what skills you need, what you need to build. And I think there's an element that I'll take biotech as an example. In biotech, you need a regulatory plan. You need a clinical plan, which are just as important as the commercial plan.

[00:25:52] Chris Jones: And there's a bit of a risk, in commercial champion, we think sales. If you expand the definition, fields like clinical and regulatory are very much female dominated. And there are a lot of sort of brilliant people that have seen many drugs come through and go to market.

[00:26:09] Chris Jones: And so if you open it slightly and think about skills, a mentor and a champion with a clinical background is maybe just as much value to an early stage as a sales background because in the end of the day, most biotechs want to sell at the end of phase two to a pharma anyway, and aren't really thinking about, you know how I'm going to launch.

[00:26:31] Chris Jones: You have to know your market, you have to know what's big, you gotta talk to people. But I think you can do things like that if you expand it a bit and look at where the talent is. And again, just keep coming back to the team is where the success lies in the company. And successful CEOs are the ones that build great teams around them.

[00:26:52] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Oh, well that leads us really nicely onto our next topic that has come up in the report, and again, in the conversations we've had today, is once we find these commercial champions, entrepreneurs in residence, whatever, we're gonna call them, experts in residence. What do we do with them? How do we put them to work?

[00:27:10] Sarah McLusky: How do they make sure they're integrated, supported. Elad, from your experience, how have you found actually getting those people in and getting them working towards the goals of the company? 

[00:27:23] Elad Katz: So we fired one one commercial champion and one kind of melted away exactly around these type of things because when I was bright-eyed and thought that the commercial champion, I love they muddied their boots, so I'm gonna use that again, will be the person that will be really out there introducing us to people and whatnot. We got quite the reckoning, as you can imagine, realising that the more so their role is two hours a week, giving us some high level, I wouldn't say generic, very high level advice, not practical, how we can make this better next week, which was really what we were seeking. So I think that in that, sitting in a couple of accelerators helped a lot more than actually the commercial champions. Because all of these pains and gains and all of that's the type of analysis that we needed and we needed help with.

[00:28:16] Sarah McLusky: So was there a bit of a mismatch between either the people or the expectations or just a mismatch of what you needed at the time, do you think? 

[00:28:26] Elad Katz: I think that when you really start, you don't know what you need. And this is where the enterprise team is so important, to explain to you what would you need down your journey. And then you can maybe identify what it is. But I felt that, the commercial champion role description was like, almost Godlike here is the person that will figure it all out with you type thing. And as you can imagine, that was a bit of a disappointment.

[00:28:53] Sarah McLusky: So anybody would be a disappointment at that

[00:28:56] Elad Katz: Exactly, this is why I'm not mentioning who that is. So we realized that if we don't go and do the hard work ourselves, nobody's gonna do that for us. It also meant seeing that early commercial champions as potential CEOs was a non-starter. So when we looked for the guy that now became our CEO, the number one thing that we said, I said, I don't want another ex scientist, although he has a PhD in chemistry.

[00:29:25] Elad Katz: Nonetheless, he doesn't know what we do. We do organoid stuff. He's a chemist. Because what we needed is someone that is completely focused on making the numbers work. Understanding what the market opportunities telling us. And it's sometimes really quite bizarre experience because at least the people I'm surrounded by normally are loads of scientists we love going into jargon and all of that.

[00:29:51] Elad Katz: And seeing him looking at the deck and he knows it enough now and says, no, this is too much. Yeah, too much. It, it's quite incredible experience because you really understand how steeped you are still in the technology, in the science. And that's to me where singles him out to our previous experiences.

[00:30:13] Elad Katz: Because as Chris said, it doesn't matter if his background is in regulatory or clinical or whatever, that ability to communicate to investors what that's what A CEO is about. And that doesn't necessarily sit with what we needed early on, which is a completely different. 

[00:30:32] Sarah McLusky: And I think that speaks to what Chris was saying earlier about, it's almost there's, we're almost talking about three different roles, if not more, different roles that we're talking about here in terms of the different contributions that people make.

[00:30:43] Chris Jones: As a CEO, you've got to be able to measure performance, hold people accountable, get delivery, and know what needs to be done. So there's a problem there to begin with. Your question, Sarah, I think originally was once we find them sort of what do we do , which is a real challenge.

[00:30:58] Chris Jones: I think you, you have to be looking nonstop. The original Silicon Valley concept of an entrepreneur in residence was VCs who were sort of like, we see great technology all the time, that doesn't necessarily have seasoned management teams that we trust to take it out. So we're gonna take a really good manager, we're gonna pay 'em for a while.

[00:31:18] Chris Jones: We're gonna give 'em some things to do, but fundamentally they're looking for their next thing. That model is a hard thing to pull off. And so for example, you could pull me into Edinburgh and show me a hundred opportunities, and there may be one that's a fit for my experience and what I do.

[00:31:37] Chris Jones: And there may be none just because on time, it may be that there's a perfect one there, but it's three years from being ready to spin out. I think you've just gotta be searching and looking and get as big a pool as you can because it really is about matching the people to the founder, to the opportunity and point together.

[00:31:55] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Almost a, a certain degree of alchemy around that.

[00:31:58] Sarah McLusky: I think I will come now to one last question to each of you, which is, if there was one thing that you could change right now, what would it be? Anybody want to go first? 

[00:32:13] Chris Jones: The problem is that she told us ahead of time we weren't allowed to say more money.

[00:32:18] Elad Katz: Now I have nothing to say.

[00:32:20] Sarah McLusky: You have to say what you would do with the money. That's the point 

[00:32:24] Chris Jones: I think I would distinguish between commercial expertise and mentorship. And I would find a way to specifically fund mentorship to bring companies along and make sure that new founders, first time founders understand the journey and what has to be done and what it takes, that they get a company out. So I think that would be my one thing. 

[00:32:52] Sarah McLusky: Okay. Thank you.

[00:32:55] Rachel Connolly: I like that idea. And I like the idea that they need to understand what they're about to do and that's good. But I think if I could change one thing, it would be, I would have a fantastic pool of diverse mentor, or not mentors, advisors, mentors, people who are willing to get their boots muddy that I could just easily draw from. Yeah. Who also had fantastic experience in all these different STEM subjects. That'd be fantastic.

[00:33:19] Sarah McLusky: Yes. We are talking wishlist here.

[00:33:22] Rachel Connolly: This is wishlist. 

[00:33:22] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Yeah, Elad 

[00:33:24] Elad Katz: So I'm gonna be sneaky and say that you need time. Which as we know, is money.

[00:33:29] Elad Katz: Because at the end of the day, if you're looking at any academic spin out, inevitably you are asking someone to put time aside to do something that is still considered not part of their day jobs and therefore what mechanism, whether or not it's inside university or external, like Scottish Enterprise or whatnot.

[00:33:51] Elad Katz: Fundamentally, you can't beat the fact that there's only so many hours in the day, and if you need to speak to another potential customer, and I can write grant proposals at 8:00 PM but I can't speak to a collaborator at 8:00 PM unless they happen to be in the United States or we spoke to people in Korea.

[00:34:12] Elad Katz: That's 8:00 AM call, but usually it's middle of the day situation. You have to find a way to allow people to do that. I just want to say about Chris's mentorship thing. I still think that fundamentally a good accelerator that may not be still around could provide a lot of that outside of the commercial hands-on assistance that you need because there is a level that is almost theory of how to be an entrepreneur that is very important, but could be delivered that way, not necessarily one-on-one at the beginning.

[00:34:50] Chris Jones: I'd agree. With Brigid we didn't do it on our own. We had the benefit of the HDSP programmme and ICURe, and half a dozen training programmmes that came along with them, for all of us. And so I think you're absolutely right. All of those things are really important.

[00:35:06] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Oh we'll put the three of you in charge, sort it all out. Fantastic. Ah well, thank you all so much for being part of this, for sharing your insights. Thank you to everybody who's been in the audience. We shall finish it there.

[00:35:21] Sarah McLusky: Sarah here again to wrap up this episode. Thanks again to all of our guests for their contributions. If you would like to connect to them, open up the show notes and you'll find links to their LinkedIn profiles. And while you're on LinkedIn, do pop over to the Academic Adventures Podcast page and share any feedback either for this episode or for any of the whole series.

[00:35:43] Sarah McLusky: Remember that if you would like a copy of the report we were discussing, you can get in touch with Orla Kelly.

[00:35:48] Sarah McLusky: You'll hear all the usual thank yous in a moment, but just a special thank you for this episode to Ross Sloan from Podplistic who recorded the audio at the live event.

[00:35:57] Sarah McLusky: This concludes season two of the Academic Adventures Podcast. We now have an archive of 21 episodes for you to explore. So whether you're a researcher looking for role models or a seasoned professional looking for your next challenge, you're bound to find something to inspire you. Just search for Academic Adventures in your podcast app and you'll find all 21 episodes to binge on. 

[00:36:19] Sarah McLusky: If you've been inspired by this podcast, head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You'll find a link in the show notes or just search for the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and the Connect-Ed Network.

[00:36:37] Sarah McLusky: The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black, and me, Sarah McLusky. This season of the Academic Adventures Podcast is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.