Bob has been an investor in all sorts of technology companies over a 30+ year career. He had an early start as an engineer, designing circuits and writing binary code for the Advanced Scientific Computer “supercomputer” project at Texas Instruments–back when a computer had a footprint just slightly larger than a desktop …. Bob’s successful career as an investor and financier ultimately led him to become the CEO and CIO of the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), entrusted with the responsibility of investing the $25 billion endowment of the University of Texas System. In his role at UTIMCO, Bob continued to be deeply involved with the national venture capital community and to become increasingly involved with the UT Office of Technology Commercialization, where it struck him that far too often brilliant research didn’t translate into useful products for the market. As an engineer and a numbers guy, Bob understood that the tech transfer model wasn’t working and the numbers weren’t adding up because a key question was not being asked: Why aren’t the results the hard work of the research community more accessible to entrepreneurs, investors, and other researchers around the country when taxpayers are funding those efforts with billions of dollars?
April is an engineer by training, a Biomedical Engineering graduate of Vanderbilt University. She has worked in engineering sales, venture capital, and at the UT Office of Technology Commercialization. Like her dad, April’s career has spanned engineering and business responsibilities; drawn to engineering sales and venture capital because these were fields where her ideas could become successful realities. April grew up in the digital age; she can’t recall a time when Apple computers didn’t exist in her household. She still has a paper she wrote in high school (which she remembers meticulously crafting on her red “candy” model Apple desktop computer) about the rising tide of the internet “geek” fringe culture. So, as her career began to span the engineering and business worlds, it was natural for her to wonder: Why don’t researchers and business people work together more often and more effectively given the collaborative nature of the internet and its seemingly endless ability to facilitate connections between people, data and the networks through which they travel?