Earlier this year I was given the wonderful opportunity to participate in a program called ‘ACTiVATE’. It’s a program out of UMBC (my alma mater) which pairs women with technologies out of local universities and research centers. The idea is that women would form businesses using these technologies and that the university that held the patent would get the licensing fees associated with use of the invention. This would also help the universities show compliance with federal regulations relating to use of federal funds: the government is very interested in seeing those technologies “transferred” to commercial companies.

The program paired a woman with a technical background with a woman with a business background for each project. There was a classroom component, with instruction in basic entrepreneurialism, and heavy mentoring. The women screened for the first year of the program were screened using resumes, essays, and interviews. The women came from diverse backgrounds, but many had many years of experience in their field and most had advanced degrees. I was inspired to be included in the program.

Sadly, my partner and I realized that our technology wasn’t feasible, due to lack of interest of the inventor coupled with the lack of the specific technical background of our team. That combo is a killer: if you don’t have the inventor’s ear and the team can’t compensate through its own technical background, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to determine what the reasonable bounds of the technology are. It also gives potential investors absolutely no confidence in the founding team. Our technology had already had 1 million plus invested in it by NASA (it’s actually going up in a satellite launch at the end of this year) and was only in the earliest stages of being able to be produced commercially. Neither my nor my partner’s piggybank was going to get us onto that playing field.

ACTiVATE would have been happy to have me continue. I personally wasn’t interested in continuing with another team’s technology: who wants to come in late to the game?

I learned a valuable set of lessons from the program, in terms of the real level of dedication needed to build a tech transfer business. Balancing that with work and family just isn’t possible right now for me. My FT job is already more than a FT job. I can’t handle another one.

I’ll be interested to see where my classmates end up: I’d love to see a couple of them heading companies that are recognized regionally as hot-shot startups. These women are interesting, are dedicated, and are really coming up with some great ideas. I’ll be happy to go to work for some of them someday.