Talent is and forever will be the cornerstone of a successful venture. Even the most groundbreaking technology can’t succeed without the right team behind it. I recently had the pleasure of putting together a panel in this spirt at the AUTM Annual Conference which focused on strategies for identifying talent for university startups along with Bruce Burgess, Nakia Melecio, and Alla McCoy.  

One insight I shared was the importance of identifying “brokers” within our networks. These individuals won’t join your startup but are excited by your mission and have vast, reliable networks of talent they can unlock for you. For example, we work closely with a CEO of a synthetic biology startup who happily provides introductions to friends and colleagues entirely because they trust that we give our ventures the resources needed to succeed and that we’ll always have something interesting in the pipeline. Credit to Dr. Aven for emphasizing the crucial role these brokers play in startup ecosystems! 

But having brokers isn’t enough, how you organize, activate, and even deactivate them matters just as much. At NobleReach, we leverage Salesforce to catalog brokers and entrepreneurs, using tags to categorize them by technology expertise, application area, and business knowledge to make the fastest matches possible. Similarly, Nakia shared Georgia Tech’s approach using a Google form at Georgia Tech to gather comprehensive information on his MBA intern applicants enabling strategic matching. 

Beyond matching, a clean database enables timely intervention when relationships falter, a concern raised by several attendees during the panel. Whether due to deteriorating researcher-entrepreneur relationships or ventures pivoting, we’ve occasionally needed to discontinue talent engagements. Implementing systematic flags and quarterly reviews, conducted independently by research teams, entrepreneurs, and mentors/tech transfer offices, allows us to anticipate these issues and intervene before it is too late. 

Our conversation reinforced that successful university spinouts need both systematic talent identification approaches and the flexibility to deploy that talent based on stage-specific needs. The foundation of our success continues to be building these meaningful relationships and structured activation processes.