Product ideas from universities.

I was on an panel today at UNSW in front of a bunch of ECAs (early career academics). I made the statement that 99.99% of product ideas by Australian academics aren’t worth investing in. This confounded them. The data? A couple of careers back I was a general partner at Allen & Buckeridge venture capital (the best performing VC manager of the era) where we had a Pre-Seed (sic) fund of about $75m. Due to the constraints of having the government as an investor (LP) we could only invest in public sector research outcomes. We looked at ca. 4000 University, DSTO and CSIRO opportunities in order to (reluctantly) make 12 investments. One worked out. By my maths that is 99.975%. just saying.