Intro - 00:00:08: The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee.
Jon Chee - 00:00:29: 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. Yeah, and you know, just to kind of level set and to set the stage I think for all of our listeners out here, I really wanted to kind of illustrate the founder's journey and the entrepreneurial journey that you've had thus far. And I thought a good place to start was really kind of early days and in the beginning so our listeners can learn vicariously through your lived experiences. So, you know, can you just tell me a little bit about your early life and your upbringing? Like, was there an aspect of your upbringing that sparked your interest in science and entrepreneurship?
Steven Visco - 00:02:27: Yeah, actually, you know, it's funny, when I was going way back, you know, childhood, I was probably pretty introverted. I'm certainly not anymore. I grew out of that pretty quick. But, you know, 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.
Jon Chee - 00:02:54: Oh, cool.
Steven Visco - 00:02:55: Some relevant. I did not go into that field, but I was reading about, you know, Louis Pasteur and Salk and I just was, you know, and that probably started when I was, I don't think I was more than 8 or 9 years old. I got fascinated with their kind of 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, you know, and it was a testament to the scientific method. So I found all of them, you know, absolutely fascinating. So, I mean, I had my little microscope, I was making cultures, I was actually taking pond water and following amoebas and paramecium, doing all that kind of stuff at a pretty young age.
So, I mean, the funny thing back then is that schools, it 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 seventh and eighth grade. So I was way ahead of what they were doing in the schools. And it 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, I mean, it took probably until I was later in high school and early college so I started to kind of experience science the way I kind of had already taught myself. So I was interested, you know, 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. It's certainly those things obviously help your vocabulary, but in a way that I would not have predicted because I had to make a choice, because I was thinking about going into writing versus science. Because I just found it, I mean, it's just so fascinating. Obviously, read all other 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, 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 because oddly enough was I actually had a rock band and I played lead guitar. 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. Just as, you know, all those things were probably, you know, they all played into even I think, the kind of entrepreneurial spirit, you know, just like, you know, kind of creative process, being kind of out there and actually enjoying the whole kind of audience experience. Because it typically 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 Chee - 00:06:29: I feel like nowadays it's all about specialized, specialized, specialized, specialized. Specialize early. Like you hit your kindergarten years, do you want to be in biochemistry or do you want to be in physiological? It's so early and.
Steven Visco - 00:06:45: Yeah, right.
Jon Chee - 00:06:46: That's how when you were growing up, was your family, you know, how would your family just like explore what interests you or did they when you eventually made the decision?
Steven Visco - 00:06:58: 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. So which meant that he had to get his college degree part-time. He didn't have it.
Jon Chee - 00:07:14: Oh, wow.
Steven Visco - 00:07:15: He worked Saturdays and Sundays for eight years to get a BS and then followed that up with a master's degree. So, you know, 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, you know, we couldn't complain about our homework load, but 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 that I 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, this is, you know, that predates a lot of the kind of wild entrepreneurship that you see now. There's so much of it in the US right? Particularly in California. And that was unknown to them. So you know, it was like medicine and law. Right. Those are kind of the two places that you'd probably go with an education. You know, business maybe. But it didn't have, at least at that time, kind of the prestige. Right. These kind of more academic pursuits. I was certainly considering medicine. It was definitely one of the things I thought about. But no, it was a very supportive home with, you know, where education was really stressed, you know, and they certainly kept a very close eye. Yeah.
Jon Chee - 00:08:52: And so, you know, fast forwarding a little bit. I know you ultimately chose to focus on chemistry and you eventually ended up at UMass for your undergrad. What spurred that decision to finally choose that? You obviously had a bunch of interests, writing was one of them.
Steven Visco - 00:09:15: Yeah, it's kind of funny. So I was, I would say through the University of Massachusetts, I was pretty much taking the pre-med. Yeah. Yeah. All the way through until I probably junior year. I started to enjoy. 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. And that was all chemistry. 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. And so we were kind of simulating. 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 are headed toward medical school, you know, and it may have just been an odd coincidence, but they were really focused on the money, you know, 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 pre-med. And I actually liked a lot of the people that were actually in the chemistry program. And I had a couple of friends who really were into it. They wanted to go to grad school in chemistry. So it wasn't like, yeah, this is what I want. This is my life's goal to do. And to be honest, I didn't know what it meant to kind of do that for a living and where it would take me.
And I think, you know, in the 70s and 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, I think, much less competitive. It was pretty easy to get into grad school. You know, you didn't have to jump through the hoops that you do now. So I wasn't 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. So it happened pretty organically. It really did. And even within the discipline of chemistry, I had no idea that would end up moving kind of into electrochemistry, which happened at Brown. Electrochemistry is the fundamental science that underlies battery development, but interesting. Also used for a lot of other things. It's not just that. And so that was kind of what 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 Chee - 00:12:24: It's super interesting. I honestly, that was the, like, you know, Steve, I've known you for so long, and this is. And it's, you know, growing up with you, I was like, Steve knew it from the start. He knew. And it's very, you know, and because it kind of, that story resonates with me too, because I, you know, when I was doing the kind of pre-med course, I kind of was like, I don't know if I actually want to do this. And then in a similar way, I just like fell into a lab. Was it that lab at UMass that like, really got you hooked into chemistry?
Steven Visco - 00:13:01: 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. You know, I mean, he was not running big programs. He was running very fundamental academic studies of electrochemistry of something called metal carbonyls, you know, this kind of odd class of materials, but very interesting science, I would say. And so, you know, that kind of gave me the basic training to be competent in electrochemistry, but was not focused on batteries. In fact, I really knew virtually nothing other than the most basic elements of what constitutes a galaxy on 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 actually of all the places, I got a pretty nice offer in Newfoundland, right? In Canada. Newfoundland. And I thought, wow, that's going to be actually pretty cool, like when you know, unless you're born there. I mean, 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, 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 like Nova Scotia, that would take you out there. And it was going to be 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 was like, oh, yeah, it's pretty funny. He says, no, I'm serious. Icebergs. I'm going to Santa Barbara.
Jon Chee - 00:15:08: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steven Visco - 00:15:09: I would do the iceberg.
Jon Chee - 00:15:10: I would have been in the same boat.
Steven Visco - 00:15:11: No, that kind of pushed me.
Jon Chee - 00:15:14: And I was just going to ask, like, you know, going from Massachusetts to Rhode Island to Santa Barbara is, you know, different. There's seasons on the east coast, and Santa Barbara is like perpetually perfect weather, or in my opinion, perfect.
Steven Visco - 00:15:30: Yeah, no, that's it. You know, it's pretty funny. I had never been in California, and neither had my wife. I was married at the time, actually. We just had gotten married. So, you know, my wife, Donna, she had never been there either. And my only experience or knowledge of California were these beach movies, right? Like these surfer movies I had seen as a kid. So my impression was that California was just beautiful beaches like, 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 at it and I said, yep, that's exactly what California looks like. They were like all surfers, everything. She was like, my God, this is exactly like, it really was like that the whole time.
Jon Chee - 00:16:17: I was like shocked. So, like, your decision to go, to make that journey, the cross-country journey was. And you know, was it primarily kind of like, I want to be on the west coast and live a west coast lifestyle or was it like, was there like a specific department? You're like, I want to work in that department with that PI or a combination of the two.
Steven Visco - 00:16:40: Certainly looked at, 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, very interesting to me. But it was just part of the package. Like, I thought, I'm going to be in California. It's a relatively, you know, Brown has got 5,000 students. It's a small school, Ivy League versus the UC, which typically could be 30,000 students. Right. So it's a big, 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 it was going to end up, whether it would be academia or an industrial job.
And when I got to Santa Barbara, then actually that certainly opened my eyes in a lot of ways. One, yeah, it was big research. So, you know, my first exposure to kind of big, big, large grants. So most of the faculty in that department were, 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 obviously 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 kind of had a, 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. Yeah, 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 Chee - 00:18:49: It sounds like, you know, your, the lab at Santa Barbara was like really kind of like a formative experience.
Steven Visco - 00:18:56: Like. Yeah, it certainly was. Yeah. No, that, you know, Kennedy was a very, 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. That was, you never, you did not hear the term solid-state batteries in the 80s. No way. I mean, now it's, it's a big deal. Right. But, you know, many years later, it kind of resurfaced. So he was looking into materials that could get you to. And yeah, it was too early. I mean, it really, that field hadn't developed sufficiently. This is obviously before lithium-ion. So rechargeable batteries were nickel, cadmium, lead-acid, pretty early days. I mean, it is. If you were to go into a commercial battery company back in the 80s, I mean, it looked like the dark ages, you know, like everything was covered with carbon. It was dirty.
Jon Chee - 00:19:59: Oh, man.
Steven Visco - 00:20:00: Oh, yeah. You know, now, of course, if you were to walk into a lithium-ion plant, it looks like a semiconductor fab. Right. Ultra clean room, dry room type situation. Totally different. So, you know, 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. You know, none of it ever really 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 Chee - 00:20:52: Wow. He was really ahead of the game.
Steven Visco - 00:20:55: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Jon Chee - 00:20:57: That's incredible. Like, would you say out of like your kind of like, UMass to Brown to Santa Barbara, he was kind of like a mentor that kind of.
Steven Visco - 00:21:09: Yeah, no, for sure. You know, he. For sure. And then Lawrence Berkeley was a whole nother thing because that was even a bigger step in terms of the scale of the work that's done. You know, that's a pretty obvious, obviously a national.
Jon Chee - 00:21:22: But.
Steven Visco - 00:21:22: And, but it was. Things changed pretty dramatically during the time I was at Lawrence Berkeley, because when we 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 have, they did do some classified work, but they're clearly too close to the campus. So, you know, it was very easy for protesters to just march up.
Jon Chee - 00:21:51: Yeah, yeah.
Steven Visco - 00:21:52: Putting up signs and screaming. So they stopped that stuff. By the time I got there, there was no classified work going on. But they had kind of what they used to call block funding. So they would just get these chunks of money, and it was almost like Bell Labs. Right. Bell Labs was famous for just letting scientists do what they wanted. Right. So the assumption being you're smart. You know, there's a lot of exciting things that you can do. Tell us what motivates you, and 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 leftover attitude from the Manhattan Project. Right. Where the idea, 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 that started to shift. So.
Jon Chee - 00:22:57: And during your time there.
Steven Visco - 00:22:58: Yeah. And in a way, for me, a very, you know, it was very instructive. Right. So when I started there, you didn't think about funding. Right. It was all kind of taken care of. You didn't have to get funding. And then as the years kind of 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. Right. And you saw that at Berkeley, too, 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 so those types of arrangements.
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, because there's a possibility of a profit motive which did not exist before those relationships started to evolve. And they created things called CRADAs, 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 mean, 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 into 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 a number of scientists working there. And so the budgets expanded. And the Republicans started looking at that and saying, you know, I don't see what the benefit is to the American taxpayer.
And so the labs needed a response that was, you know, an existential threat in a way. Right? And so there's two responses typically, right, 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 the economy, help grow the economy. And the Republicans very smartly said, yeah, show us, where are these jobs? Where are these supposed companies? Where are the licenses for intellectual property? And then you had virtually every national lab set up a tech transfer office.
Jon Chee - 00:26:31: Interesting. Is that, like, the birth. That was the birth.
Steven Visco - 00:26:35: Like, that's when it really took off. That's when you, even if they had one, it was probably one person. You know, they hired lawyers to handle intellectual property. They hired kind of marketing people to reach out to the staff to see if there were inventions that could be licensed. And then everything started to change. And 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 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, you know, you need permission, fly overseas. And that stuff's looked at pretty critically. And now it's probably even more so. But if you have money from industry, you know, and you tell them like, well, you know, there's an important conference in Paris next week, they don't care, you know, because, you know, if you're doing good work, you're actually 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 now 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, you know, so that's a difficult. 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.
Jon Chee - 00:28:42: Yeah, yeah, they do it in house.
Steven Visco - 00:28:44: Why wouldn't we have our own people do this then? We absolutely own the IP outright. It's confidential. You don't have to worry about that. The argument always has to be, yeah, but 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, then you're in a good position. And then you start talking about IP and other parts of it. 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 Chee - 00:29:42: That's incredible. So when you'd left Santa Barbara, did you join LBL with the thought that I'm going to get this massive, like, pile of.
Steven Visco - 00:29:53: No, not at all. I had no idea what's going to happen at LBL. I went to LBL partly because it's, you know, I mean, it's obviously a pretty famous national lab and they had a big battery effort, but also because it was California, you know, like, when I was in Santa Barbara and we were having a lot of fun down there, for sure. I mean, it was good science, but, you know, it was just like an amazing place to land after a pretty brutal winter in New England.
Jon Chee - 00:30:19: Yeah.
Steven Visco - 00:30:20: And I remember walking into like 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 Chee - 00:30:32: I'm. Yeah, I'm not leaving. I am not leaving.
Steven Visco - 00:30:35: No way. We're sticking around. LBL was part of it. And I thought from LBL, you know, obviously, it's got great credentials, so, you know, 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, like, that really didn't exist. Like I said, the tech transfer offices were years later. That was starting to happen. But even then. So you would see licensing of technology, but particularly Berkeley, and LBL had not started companies. You didn't have scientists leaving to start companies. That obviously has changed. We were like, we were the second company ever launched out of the lab. Wow.
Jon Chee - 00:31:22: Wow.
Steven Visco - 00:31:23: 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. Right. It could be a career ender, actually. So they didn't get the best of the brightest. That has obviously changed because it's now a big part of. 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 is we filed. We had three patents that were getting some attention, and I.
Jon Chee - 00:32:26: While at LBL.
Steven Visco - 00:32:27: While at LBL. That's right. So we're at LBL. No idea about starting a company that, you know, 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. You know, 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, no, no, no, do not say those things, because that's just not even close to being right. 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 two hours with this guy, walking him through all of that, and, you know, no good favor 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.
Jon Chee - 00:33:36: Wow.
Steven Visco - 00:33:37: So you can imagine that things went crazy at that point. So, you know, 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. And that was like 1989, right? And so basically, the lab got very excited, like, 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, you know, we just had one kid, we're going to have another one. It's like, that's a very risky thing to do. And, you know, obviously, at the lab, you have health benefits, you have, you know, all sorts of perks. It was 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, you know, one kid here, one on the. No, we actually. Matthew had been born, so he 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 then, you know, we'll find a CEO and then I'll be CTO to keep things going down there. And then, you know, the lead investor is 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 the lab said, you can keep your position, but you can't do anything battery related. So it was like, that's pretty much what I know how to do.
Jon Chee - 00:36:10: Yeah, that's my thing.
Steven Visco - 00:36:12: That is my thing. Well, that's kind of weird. So they said, no, that's like absolute. You know, it's a 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, you know, it's going to help the companies. You know, who cares about the lab? So I had to actually start a fuel cell group from nowhere, which I did and grew into a pretty big effort.
Jon Chee - 00:36:40: Oh, my God. Casually, just casually, I just, you know.
Steven Visco - 00:36:44: 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 while, you know, Polyplus 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. Was all kind of important, but it was also that's a difficult thing to do. So now, I mean, just to have two vastly different kind of 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.
Jon Chee - 00:37:36: Yeah, yeah.
Steven Visco - 00:37:37: You can't complain, like, well, I can't really deal with this right now because I have to put out fires at LBL. They don't want, no one wants to hear that. So you just.
Jon Chee - 00:37:45: When you started Polyplus and you, you know, you're coming right out of LBL, did you go through the tech transfer office or was that.
Steven Visco - 00:37:54: Yeah, we had the license. Yeah. 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 and that had this kind of a cute 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, you end up getting the money back.
Jon Chee - 00:38:33: Thank you. That's great. It's like, thank you. I appreciate that.
Steven Visco - 00:38:36: And that's probably, you know, so. Because I was in a rare situation of being on both sides.
Jon Chee - 00:38:41: Yeah.
Steven Visco - 00:38:41: So we actually saw. I mean, I got every year I got a check, which was coming from Polyplus. It was pretty funny.
Jon Chee - 00:38:48: And you had to do the same thing for your fuel cell technology.
Steven Visco - 00:38:51: For the fuel cell technology there, you know, so that. Those licenses. Yes, I got money for those as well. Which is, 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 of it. And LBL 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. It can be, you know that sound.
Jon Chee - 00:39:29: I mean, especially when you're partnering with these big.
Steven Visco - 00:39:32: That's right.
Jon Chee - 00:39:33: Big industry.
Steven Visco - 00:39:34: Oh, yeah, I know.
Jon Chee - 00:39:35: Like Orange.
Steven Visco - 00:39:36: Berkeley Lab, they were, you know, and 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. Wow.
Jon Chee - 00:39:48: I didn't even know that there was this ecosystem to it.
Outro - 00:39:52: 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 two 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 produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening.
The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.
