So Bill comes to us through a friend, and Bill's company has some very interesting technology in the healthcare space that is crying out for a simple consumer product. Existing products are expensive and intrusive, and tens of millions of people are looking for a better way to solve their problem. Bill's company can't run with it because of company strategy/focus issues, so they do a deal with us to help commercialize the technology. They're going to keep the high-end of the patient market, but give us rights to the consumer end.
We clean up the saliva drooling down our chin after we run the math on the product opportunity, and jump into the project with both feet. Our going-in assumption was that the technology was pretty solid and what was needed was some marketing work (primarily positioning), some product design work (ergonomics, some materials work, and manufacturability work), and some IP work (the issued IP was a good starting point, but more application were needed).
As we dug into the project, we came to understand that in fact there are 3 key components to making a consumer product like the one we envisaged. The company had figured out only 1 of them. Not being afraid of a challenge, we initially thought we could find and hire some folks to help us with the other two and then we'd come back to the work outlined above. Guess what, if you don't know what you're doing, you don't know who to hire. And in this case we didn't even know how to analyze and scope the problem sufficiently to even pass around a few requests much less RFPs. PhD's, or at least some serious background in medicine, was necessary to complete the actual invention process and manage the project. Oh, and we also learned that the FDA/FTC may want to review the product since the medical claims we'd be making would need to be verified. Yikes, I can spell those acronyms, but I've never worked with those people...
I've learned over the years that while confidently attacking problems with intelligence and hard work can many times put you over the obstacle, lying to yourself (and more importantly your investors and partners) about your skill sets and the limits of those skill sets is a recipe for disaster. If you don't even know where to start, how to organize the tasklist, and most importantly how to prioritize important vs. urgent (and even relevant vs. irrelevant at current stage) you'll never find the finish line (and you'll be much, much poorer for all your dry holes on wrong-headed activities). If you don't have any right to succeed by virtue of knowledge, experience and skills, Exit Stage Right since you're just acting and doing it poorly. And in the business world, you can't just act, you have to execute, so get the heck off the stage and go do what you are good at. This project needed scientists and engineers, marketing problems were a ways down the road. So we bailed and returned everything to the inventor.
In this case, early greed due to the China Math (if we just sell one shoelace to every 10 people, we'll be rich!) blinded us early. We didn't do enough due diligence, we were overconfident in how far we could stretch our model and skills, and we strayed outside our experience zone. Bill & Co. were great folks and they do have a great enabling technology that could help tens of millions of people someday. But we weren't the right partners to help them map and navigate the commercialization waters and find the finish line of a license deal.
Result: A project death and some learning about how to better filter and screen projects to better align with where we have a right to succeed...
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