[0:00] what is the runway program?The the guest today is Tomer Joshua. He was the EMVA class of 2025. He run the, the, the Cornell Tech runway program where startups come out coming from Cornell Tech and we're in Cornell Tech today. So hi. Hi, Tomer. What is the runway program at Cornell Tech? Hi Tony, thank you for having me. It's such a such a pleasure. The Runway Startup Post Doc program at Cornell Tech is a program that helps researchers and scientists experiment with entrepreneurship. We're helping them start startups and we're also advocating for a few things by one of them is creating more ventures, more startups from the academic environment, and another one is enabling scientists and researchers a different career paths versus directing them to only fulfilment in the academia or in industry. We were suggesting a third door, which is entrepreneurship. So we're seeing ourselves as a service to the research and scientific community. Gotcha. Very cool, very cool. So, so like what are like the dimensions of a program like right now? Like how many people go through it each year? How? What are the impacts of the program so far? So we have about 6 to 8 teams a year. I'm starting at the runway and under the umbrella of Runway, we also took the spin out program that exists at Cornell Tech. So we get about four to five teams of that every year. And sometimes we have also ignite startups from the Cornell Technology License Group or other corporate startups that are joining the umbrella. So we're growing. Cornell Tech incubates about 12 to 14 startups every year, and that's amazing to be a part of that and working closely with entrepreneurs and helping them in the earliest phases when they're really figuring out their models and their ventures. So really exciting part to be a part of. Yeah, that's super exciting. They all come from academia. So these are like PHD's and also recent grads from academia and they would start their startup directly from there. Yes, exactly. And Cornell Tech is a very special place for that, partly because of the studio program that all the students that are at Cornell Tech experimenting with building products and some of them also continuing to build startups out of these products that are practicing and building as part of the curriculum. And in the runway start a post doc program, we can actually hire individuals who graduated PhD in recent years for a post doc position here at Cornell Tech, which means we can hire from anywhere in the world. So by by doing that, we're we're trying to again advocate that entrepreneurship is a viable career path for academics. Makes sense. And then like so from academic, like what areas of academia are they like? What's the example of academic research that people would be commercializing? So we're focusing on digital applications specifically. So everything that had to do with AI, computer vision, large language models, all of these, we also work with sensors. So new ways to generate data is we had quite a few startups coming from that space. So it's different teams and they're coming from different backgrounds. Some of them would come purely from the computer science or engineering background. Some of them would come more from bioinformatics or photonics background. So which is are all exciting and we can work with those. Those are some of the topics. Those are all kinds of science. Could be I think. I would say we have a lot of health technology organically. So it's always something that I think we have sort of a bias into in a good way because we are trying to get teams that making the world a better place. And clearly health technology, especially ones that is patient focus, making better outcomes, extending the quality of life for people is definitely things that we're interested in. And having Wild Cornell here across the river right there is a great addition, and we're trying to work closely with them in order to help startups in the healthcare space. That makes sense. That makes sense. And then so, so I'm sure picture like what are the inputs and what are the outputs? Like a input? Are they just done with their pH D? Do they have a company and the patent already? Or like what's the input and what's the output? Did they come out with a patent? And with the three employees, what's the input and output? X Excellent question. So the input for the program when we you know advertise the

[4:36] who should applyprogram, we say all you need is a PhD in an ID. So we get a lot of people in the ID phase. But we in, in recent years as we got start to get more applications and the program start to grow, we also see people coming into the program also with actual products in the hands of users, paying customers as part of of these teams, which is wonderful. But we still are open up, open for, for people with just the in the ID phase, the the output I would describe during the program, we try to help them solve or, or or measure 4 different things. One is their customers, how many customers have they got or, or what type of pilots are they they generated with with customers. The second one is the product they need to build something that clients would be able to use. The third one is fundraising, how much funding they raised from not only investors, it could be non diluted funding, it could be other resources that that are available for them, for example, accelerators, etcetera. And the last one is the I said. Employees. Hiring, Yes, exactly. Thank you, Tony. That's the team building a team. So showing leadership by ability to build a team together to be able to drive all of these, build a product to deliver to the customer then go and able to fundraise on. So thank you, Tony. Yeah, this is that, this is so so they they come out with like all the four of those pillars of well formed, so they're ready to take off. So, so hopefully and every team have a different journey and some of them get Co founders and then something happens sometimes and they they leave, some of them get funding and then managed to get to the milestones that they wanted and they shut down. We see a large percentage of companies still existing, growing. We have multiple companies that raise AB and C around. I think getting better ourselves in choosing the teams and and building a program to help founders, specifically scientific founders, to grow as entrepreneurs. So we're getting better, they're getting better, and we're building better companies to change the world. That's all great. So once you have a couple reps, you get better and better at it. Exactly. Well, what are some examples of a success stories that came out of it? Yeah, excellent question. So on the 1st cohort, we had Safdar, who founded Nanet, which is a smart baby monitor and Nanet sold over $100 million in product and keeps growing today. They take the amazing data sets that they build of sleep analytics and applying looking for new applications in the clinical phase. So think about it in applying that assess if Sleep Medicine is is working well or not, what type of population might work better. So this is one example for something that was born for a very good reason, helping families assess and measure the baby sleep, but it's now growing to become even more than that. So we're very proud to be a part of that. Another company that came spin out company. We're very proud of Hyro to students who graduated from Cornell Tech Woman and Israel started a company way before ChatGPT came out and others and really working for quite some time now recently raised around of 45 million to I think over 100 million in total raised and they're growing very nicely helping automate phone call centers work specifically in the areas of of health services. So trying to help patients having an easier communication with their hospitals or or clinics or anyone that need to get serviced. That's amazing. Wow. And then then so. So what's what what, what's the curriculum like? Like after someone joins in with their PhD and the idea and then they leave with the four pillars all built, like what are the what's the curriculum like to build up those pillars? So our team brings build a

[8:54] the curriculumcurriculum for the scientists transitioning into entrepreneurship, right? It includes about 2 1/2 months of a very intensive programming that covers from strategy to customer discovery, later on sales and marketing, product and project management. And also pitching everything that has to do with legal workshops or finance workshop with a lot of experts that are coming outside of academia to give talks as well as professors, both from Nell, from our partners in Technion and from other places that are coming to participate. And we have a great partnership with Jorge Torres from Yale, who's coming in and giving talks every year about how to understand investors and how to operate in the early stage startups and being thoughtful and build a community of supporters. And so we have, we have multiple, multiple people that are coming, participating. And it's, it's a true pleasure. We're always trying to improve on it. So we collect feedback from our participants, trying to understand what they want more of what they feel like they're missing. That's things that we do and it ends up in a demo day that we open for our group of supporters, mentors in the program, investors that are engaged in our ecosystem. And we're having everyone to kind of celebrate the hard work that put in by these teams. And I think, you know, what we work most closely with them is to find customers and talk to customers. This is the most important thing that we do with them. It's kind of sort of trying to say, OK, now it's time to get out of the lab, get out of our heads and go to talk to people and find what are the real challenges and can we build something to address these challenges. This is like a pre-existing community that once they join Roadway, they have access to this whole community of people. Definitely, and some of the most important resource I would say for Runway is actually being part of a cohort that you build alongside other scientific entrepreneurs and the alumni of the program that are coming and giving talks and always very kind with their time and advice. And you know, they have a way to say, you know, we've been there, we've done that. So if you have questions, come to us. And it's it's always amazing for me to see the generosity of these people coming, dropping everything else and the busy lives that they have and coming over here back physically to Cornell Tech and sharing their advice and offering more of it to the teams. Yeah, that's super helpful to have. This is I guess for the PhDs. A lot of times they come in knowing their area very, very well, but they have to expand beyond that domain. Exactly so so being working on a PhD means that you're

[11:40] transforming from a PhD to an entrepreneurspecialized in one specific topic very, very well. And you know, when you're operating really in the cutting edge of it, which which provides you with, you know, an expert, But not only that, it provides pH DS with a whole set of skills that they learned during their PhD, how to operate independently and or is part of a team, how to research and how to conduct experiments. And for us, building a start up is, is really an experimental thing because you have some basic assumptions and then you go out and you test the assumptions with your people that are potentially your customers. And by doing that, that's the way that we kind of encourage teams to get validation and get conviction that what they're trying to build is really needed before they build it. Yeah, that makes sense. Picture like, like looking backwards, like into their histories. Like at what point was the seed of entrepreneurship like started there? Was it like when they were starting their PhD, they wanted to do startup or was it usually by the time they graduate they want to do a startup? Like at what point? Like how do they usually form? It's a good question. I think that always with with our teams and with our startups, there's no two stories that are alike. There's some people that came into their PhD knowing that they want to operate in computer vision and they want to improve something about computer vision and they entered it and they found out a topic that they wanted to explore. And then they went on and, and, and build a company around it. And there's some people that just came across sometimes not even their own research a lab somewhere. And they said, this is a really cool research, really interesting application and actually came to our program saying, Hey, I want to license that. And we had a few teams that did that. And so just, you know, not diving too deep into IP and, and patents, but we have teams that came with IP from their PhD or from other labs that they interacted with. And we had teams that came here said I really know how to build AI and I have some ideas of how to build IP and and create companies around. So the company doesn't have to tie with their thesis from their. PhD. It's not. It is, yes. We're just trying to be flexible about as much as possible. Honestly, I was thinking about it yesterday. We have this focus here at Cornell Tech about digital technology specifically. And I would love if we could actually extend the program and say, OK, but you know, if someone's doing material science or something that has needed wet labs because it's a new molecule or new biological application, we would love to have something that would address all of the, this community of, of, of researchers, which by the way, there is approximately 50,000 people graduating PhDs just in the US every year. That's, that's a big group of people that even if we can take 1% of it, think about how many entrepreneurs can come out of that and push the economy forward by creating new applications coming from cutting edge research. So just just, you know, food fight. Yeah, that's fascinating. So right now that it's only like 5-10 a year around 5:00 to. 10, yes, I would say we're in the range of five to 10 at the moment and we're looking to grow the program. That's the aim for for all of us here at Runway and at Cornell Tech. I would say that we operate most of our funding coming from

[15:11] funding sourcesphilanthropical sources. So we're looking for more philanthropical resources. Scale up a little bit more. Exactly. Especially in times like like today where the very everything that have to do with the government is very volatile. So there's need to kind of get a long term support that we can anchor and use philanthropic money for it, yeah. That makes sense so that we talk like the SBIR grants like. SBIR grants are right now in the government, so a lot of our teams are utilizing SBIRS and STRS as well. So those are funding that come from the government and right now there is some uncertainty about the upcoming year and what's going to happen with SBIRS. So that's definitely affecting some of our teams. So is the go to like SBRS traditionally bridged from idea formation to venture capital? So the SBR was like the bridge by the time you leave the program is the go to get venture capital funding at that point? Again, case by case basis, Yeah, we had, we just had a team that started the program and within a couple of months already raised venture capital fund. There are teams that finish two years in the program and don't manage to raise venture capital fund, which by the way, the venture backed model specifically is not the one that we are necessarily. We're definitely biased towards because a lot of startups are venture backed. Yeah. But if we can get a startup to be, for example, bootstrap and get money from customers, which we constantly say this is the best money you can get money from your customers is a mix of validation and a great way to get a resources. So if we can push companies to get money from customers 1st and maybe only that's, that's excellent, right? But it's true that in the technology space today, the most I would say popular is the venture model, right? And we do have a lot of venture capitalist as part of our community and as part of our advisory committee. And Ron, we have an amazing advisory committee and we're very lucky to be to have those people in the ecosystem. And they would give advice and share their support with any one of our teams, regardless if they raised money from them or not. And that's also why the philanthropic's important, because if they haven't raised, there needs to be some buffer to help the bridge. Yeah. So the way that we operate is we using the philanthropic funding in order to hire these PhDs for a postdoc position. You take equity in the company as the part of them for the spin, it's Cornell Tech part of it is the Jacobs Technion, Cornell Institute and the equity if a company exits, which we had 15 exits by now, coming back to support more venture creations. So the goal, the goal is to keep growing the programs. That's excellent. Are they usually able to build a product themselves? It's, it's a good question. It's again, each team in their set of skills. I would say that what we usually start with is definitely try to get validation from the market 1st. So OK, interview enough customers to be able to understand what the customers actually want. Because if you build something and then you go to the customer and say, hey, do you want this? And they say no, then that was a waste of time building. So that's what we trying to avoid. And that's a very kind of a classic we have in our mind. This industry would like this type of solution. So I go and build it and then I go and start talking to people. We try to flip it on its head and say go talk to people, understand what they need and then come back with what what they said they want. There's a building pillar, so that way they build something that's useful and then the the sales side you do you have the whole community of people come in so they could help. Build up the definitely, definitely. Sales final. We have amazing people who are coaching the teams on on sales, specifically on customer discovery from multiple angles to really try to avoid biases. Because once we have our thing that we have our ID in mind, we kind of try to look at the world through that lenses. And what we try to teach in customer discovery is actually to inserting our own biases as much as possible in order to really understand the other side that sits across the table from us and really understand their needs and their pain points so we can build something for them. Now, there's a few other things you need to make sure. You need to make sure that it's a top priority for them. You need to make sure that they have money to pay for it. You need to make sure that maybe they purchased similar services or products in the past, just to make sure that there's a path for this to happen. These are all things you don't have to consider as a startup you need to consider. Them every startup need to consider them regardless if it's a pH D or not. We just have the great privilege to work with really great scientific minds that also thinking about this from the business perspective. So we get a chance to really work with them about the business side of things. Yeah. And about the funding, so you help them with the SBIRS, TTR grants, the grants and you help them introduce to VCs. So I would say we're building an ecosystem to make sure that we have all these people just like that, that, you know, we don't have the money like a VC. I will connect them with VC. Similarly, with SBIRS, we will connect them with SBIR agencies that would be able to help them and guide them through the process if they want to pursue SBIR. Route, gosh. And then the 4th 1 was the hiring. Hiring. And does it help with building a team as? Well, I have to say, being part of Cornell is an amazing resource, right? There's plenty of startups and, and we have startups that are coming back here to Cornell Tech to say, hey, I want to hire a Cornellians and people from Cornell Tech and they're coming back to ask for for people. And we constantly share it in the internal channels to enable students know that there's startups that started here at Cornell Tech and they're looking to hire, they're looking to grow and keep the Cornell community engaged. So yeah. That's wonderful. And then I told her, how about

[21:08] Tomer's personal journey to runway programhow about your, your, your personal journey in this? Like how did you get into the this kind of work? That's a good question. Personal journey. I would say that my career, I usually kind of split two parts. The first part was in managing educational programs. A lot of them were in academic institutions and environments. So I did a lot of a lot of work with different academic groups. And then the second part of my career was in early stage startups. When I, I was a founder of a startup, I did some work on the investment side in startups. I worked with early stage startups to represent them in front of customers and investors. So really did a lot of work in the business side of early stage startups and really loved it. And when an opportunity came to work with Cornell Tech I, I got introduced to Fernando Gomez Poquero, who's managing the program and he was looking for someone to build the ecosystem, work on the curriculum, help with recruitment of PHD's. And I was privileged enough, lucky enough to get accepted and I've been with the program for over three years now and enjoying every minute of it. So it fits together the academic work you did the first part, the startup work you did the second part. But there's so much more to learn. You know, while I was working in academia, I never had the chance to work really with the scientists. I worked a lot of undergrads and master students. But then learning about everything that have to do with IP, with licensing, with how labs operate, without professors, with the incentive system inside academia, which were, by the way, another thing we're trying to address, right? How to build more ventures, more startups from the academic environment. We're getting in touch with a lot of other great institutions, really doing amazing work in these spaces and learning from them and trying to advocate for more of it across the board, across the industry. So I guess you're learning about the industry like the whole academia is learning about it too. So everybody learns together. Yeah, yeah. Super. And then remember, you did the NBA at Cornell as well, like. Remember. Yeah. What was the the employee degree program like? Yeah, the employee degree program is is an amazing opportunity that I I was becoming aware of thanks to some of my colleagues at Cornell Tech and they suggested that I'll take a look at it. And I applied, you apply and I need to get accepted to the Executive MBA program. There's three different

[23:37] Executive MBA programs at Cornellexecutive MBA programs at Cornell and you can apply to them and the employee degree program program sponsors most of of the cost for you to join the program. And it's, it's been a real really amazing experience. Spent 220 months, half of my weekends and four long residential sessions in Ithaca. That's eight days in Ithaca far away from my family, but very closely with my court members of the MBA and was an amazing experience. I chose one of the programs that is called the Metro New York Executive MBA and the Metro New York is is meeting at Cornell Tech every other weekend and does a full weekend, full day Saturday, half day Sunday of learning together. One of the models in in that program is building high performing teams, which is a wonderful experience because you get a chance to be assigned with a team and then practice how to lead A-Team as part of it with the different missions homeworks, the project that you do. So that was quite an experience. Well, there are some like kind of pathways to the classmates. Wow. Coming. To the goal, diverse. I mean the court was super diverse from any perspective that I can imagine, from internationals to the different industries to the different characters, everything that you can imagine was on that court and it was just a lot of fun. I think that naturally in New York you get a lot of financial people, financial oriented people, but I think I would say it probably was somewhere between 20 to 30% of the court. But everyone were absolutely fantastic. And I think that, you know, we made friends from life and that program is amazing. And that's, that's priceless. Yeah. What are some of your favorite courses from the NBA program? Definitely the one that Risa micheled. Critical thinking was a phenomenal one. The one on corporate governance from Neve Greenstein was definitely a fascinating 1. I really enjoyed the entrepreneurship, the investment banking and really there was so much it was covered, but I I really enjoyed the experience and. So it covers how did it help with your day-to-day work after learning those that's. An excellent question as someone who lives in the early stages of venture, I learned the business environment and across industries in and out from the life cycle of of companies. So from founding a company all the way to getting into IPO and how it operates after being in the public markets. So I think like I got a really wide understanding both across industries, but also how the business environment operates and I have much well-rounded if maybe macro economics or or just different industries. It's been, it's been a great journey. This was very, very general, very broad. Yes. To cover all kinds of industries. Exactly. That's amazing. Let's see. You wanna go back to the startup stuff, please. Yeah. So, so, so, so for like these these PhDs who are out there working on their thesis, for example, like, is there a way they can dip their toes into entrepreneurship before. Yeah, rather than just. Tony, you have to ask questions. Thank. You, I would recommend to you know any PhD that might be

[27:03] how PhDs first think about startupshearing us not only PhD. By the way, master students who are engaged with research as well should know about the icore program. This is a National Science Foundation program that is accessible to anyone in the US. You can apply to it and learn the basics of how to use tools such as the Business Model Canvas to kind of outline your idea. Learn about the methodology of customer discovery. Like I mentioned earlier, really understand how to find customers, interview them, try to avoid biases and get data from qualitative to quantitative. So how do we create conviction that an idea is actually valid? Or the way that we use in the business Model Canvas is we say we're looking for, first of all, we're looking for viability, feasibility, but the most important one is desirability. So someone really wants what I'm thinking to create and that's going and checking what are the pain points that someone has and really trying to match them. So we start from desirability and then we go to viability and feasibility this. Is the icore program. This is the icore. Program available to everybody. It's available to researchers in any academic institutions in the US There are hubs that are managing it on behalf of the National Science Foundation. Cornell is actually managing one of these files really service a lot of a lot of academic institutions in the Northeast and yeah, doing amazing. Job. So the PhD soon could be like their third year or fourth year of their pH D not done with their thesis yet and they could already take part I. Think it's never too early to look at entrepreneurship and experiment with it. And I think it opens up a whole new perspective that you can look at research. And I think we chat a little bit before this talk and we said, you know, we talked about basic research and commercializing research and kind of the gap in between these two. I think the I core program really tries to address that. And it's a it's, it's a really interesting program. And I would encourage people just to even look at it just to understand that there's resources they're available, including funding to go and interview and learn about entrepreneurship. And I think the more that we have great smart scientists and researchers are working on the cutting edge of of knowledge would be able to actually try and promote it and push it to market as an application, the better the world would be. Trip picture like a PhD student in Ithaca. They're working on their PhD in the lab in the chemical engineering building, for example. They would just step out of the lab and go to the I core info session. That's, that's a good, that's a good question, right.

[29:46] how to sign up for I-Corps coursesAnd they are working usually with Pi with a principal investigator under them. They will do the research and that would be something that they need to coordinate with the principal investigator, but it happens alongside the research. So these courses are taking place a few times a year and they would be able to sign for ones that that would be more suitable for them. They're happening also during the summer time, they're happening during the winter and the fall and the spring semester. So it's, it's really up to to them to sign up. There's also 2 levels of it. There's regional courses that are managed by hubs and there's also national courses and national courses. You can actually get significant amounts of money, somewhere between 40 and $50,000 to travel, go to conferences and meet and interview people with the goal of really getting to 100 interviews on these national ones. But it, in order to get to the national, you have to go through original I core I, I have the privilege to be an advisor with one of the teams that went through a national. So I had a chance to see that it's really dive deep into what I described earlier, the business model Canvas and trying to understand the basic strategy of entrepreneurship. It's amazing resource and everybody should know and take. A little bit like that as a similar head that they should be entrepreneurship. Yes. And I think I think everyone understands that it's, it's important for us to take this knowledge as it was created in an academic environment and bring it to market. It benefits everyone and I think the government is the first to acknowledge that and put funding into it. So it's good to know that this is something that is being perceived as a strategic priority and we hope that it will continue to be. Yeah, for really the PHD's perspective, I like yesterday I met a PhD, you end up going to a software company after her PhD software startup, another one went into consulting, consulting the management consulting firms. Well, like how are they thinking of your different options after they finished? You know, I think it's, I had a chance to really connect with a lot of PhDs that were just looking for career advice. Yeah, a lot of opportunity to engage with people who actually provide career advice for PhDs. And I think the biggest challenge for PhDs, and they spent a lot of time in academia and in academia they are really kind of the success metrics for

[32:16] success metricsthem is to become, you know, a professor. A professor, A researcher. OK, this is what is defined for them. So a lot of, a lot of them are not a lot of the time or even aware of what, what are my options out there? And it's important, most important thing to say is that it's OK to look outside of academia. Actually, there's not enough positions in academia for everyone. Actually, less than 10% of PhDs would continue and stay in academia either as a postdoc position or as a professor position. So it's actually very important for us to take that group of 90% of, of researchers, scientists, PHD's, and tell them, hey, all career paths are viable for you. Yeah, and you should consider them while you're in your PhD. Going to consulting is an excellent 1. Going into software, big tech companies are excellent one. Any career path that they want should be applicable for them. The question is what they want to do and how do they leverage what they learned during their PhD in order to get these jobs. And of course, what we offer is a fair door and say starting a company and being entrepreneur is another viable career path. I guess the Pi that they work with, the Pi went the academic ground. So that's the way that Pi knows so. That's one thing, and they are very much the KPIs, the key performance indicator indicators. For. Pis are how much grant money they bring and in order to grant money, they need to get more publications out there and get better publishing scores. So these are the angle, the lens that the Pis are looking at the word and are the PhDs. And therefore a lot of them would not necessarily think about, hey, maybe commercializing this research or building a company or maybe thinking about hey, have you considered your next steps after completing your PhD? Maybe you want to take a look at working at the tech or consulting or whatever it is going to be. I think that they should do that because if they are in charge of the PhDs, it's not only their responsibility to, you know, train them as great researchers and scientists, but also to think about the day after their PhD and what they're gonna do. Having a good Plan B is important. Have good career services for the research community. Yeah, is important. And we're doing our little part that we think that, you know, a small percent of that group would be interested in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is really hard. It's not for everyone. If someone wants to be able to start up, then we want to be the best place to do it. If they are a researcher, scientist, PhD is diving deep into one specific topic. But you sometimes eat you to look up and look at things from bird's eye view and say OK, is this possible for me? Is it viable for me to stay in academia? How competitive are positions in academia? If one out of every 10 or 100 people get accepted to be a postdoc or A or a professor, then maybe I should consider a Plan B as well. Where is the startup success? Does it matter how many papers were written about it? Or is it more like how many transfers and paths? You know, that's a good, excellent question. I think that when we assess applications for our program, we're looking to see if someone stood out, excelled, made a big effort in in specific ways. And it might be showing great publications, It might be showing amount of publication. It might be by saying, hey, while I was doing PHDI started my own business or I LED a group of, or I built a new community or assessing a specific leadership qualities that the individual has. We'll look at it from different perspectives, but definitely having great publications could be one thing to consider. Yeah, like that's a way to show excels exactly. Did you like investors look at how many papers are published? Like do customers look at how many papers are published? I would say it depends. It depends on a few things. First of all we had quite a few people that were Co inventors of the technology or licensing or or building. So a lot of it would be if we building IP and from IP developing patents, then they need to have some sort of lineage to research papers. So in that case, if you're building something that you create a mode, you create something that is protectable, then you build the patterns around them, then you need to have certain publications. Again, we're not always looking for something that is necessarily we're not examining it only from the lens of is it protectable? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is true that it's it's protectable protectability, amount of IP, sometimes patents granted is is something that is viable and helpful for us to to make a decision if if someone's applying to the program, should we accept them or not? Yeah. Probably from the Pi. There's a lot of Cornellians or like professors at universities. What makes a good Pi for encouraging entrepreneurship? A lot can Pi do to encourage it.

[37:20] professors encourage entrepreneurshipYou know, I, I, I met recently a professor that said, you know, I, I had great publications. I have big lab with a lot of funding and I don't mind so much the research anymore. I think that at this point in my career, I care about the impact that my research has been interesting. So so it was an interesting perspective to learn and to see that someone is is more interested in the impact the technology and the research they had on the world. Willing to and more open minded for spending more time supporting the startup, maybe helping them with applying for more grants, maybe helping them with on their more in the business and the commercial aspect of it. So it was really interesting to see that. But again, different people are motivated by different things. And in academia for researchers, we created an incentive system that is working right now. Is it working like, you know, in a way that is encouraging for more technologies to get out there to the hands of customers? And it's a good question. And can we do better perhaps? Maybe. I think that this is one thing that we're suggesting, trying to streamline innovation through venture creation in academia. Building more startups from the academic environment is, is what we offering. So Pi start to think about that as well, and then they would have a lot of PhD students who would also. Definitely, definitely. Interesting. And then so, so for the closing question, I always ask the guest, what's the kindest thing

[38:53] closing questionanyone's ever done? For you love. Love this question. Wow. I'll I'll go back to mention someone. I I, I mentioned earlier, Hoja Torres that has been working with our program and I think that on his workshop, he, he talks about being thoughtful. And I think that I received a few notes, usually emails that say how you know people are appreciate what you did with something specific. Not like I appreciate the general Tomer effort that he put in, but saying that they were thankful for something that I did and the impact that it made for them made me feel that it was kind and made me feel better and more invested in the work that I'm doing. And that's partly why I get up in the morning and bring energy to this project every day, because I want to help early stage founders to build technologies that would make the world a better place. And it's something I truly believe in. And I think it was motivated, a lot of it, by these notes people wrote. If anybody listens to this write, write a note to someone who did something nice for you and just say thank you. Say it was because of that specific thing they did. And hopefully we can pass it on to other people and be kind to other people.