University licensing to start-ups
May 4th, 2010There’s been a long standing and passionate debate about what universities “deserve” when they license technologies to start-ups. There is the famous Google vs. Yahoo comparison where Google is an official Stanford spin-off which brought $336M in revenue from the equity the university owned in the start-up whereas Yahoo was considered as a hobby of the founders and no intellectual property was owned by the university. However one Yahoo founder gave some $75M to Stanford.
So what is a typical license between a university and start-up? Well there is no clear answer but the attached pdf file may be of help. I have done some search and found some info, mostly from US universities. I have also tried to find the rationals for or against such deals. The debate remains open and I do not expect a general agreement any time soon. But I hope this is contributing to the topic.
Tags: Equity, Universities
May 6th, 2010 at 8:18 am
You may also find interesting the related standard license agreement from UNC (North Carolina) which indicates 0.75% of an M&A or a pre-IPO value plus 1 to 2% royalty on revenues… http://research.unc.edu/otd/documents/CAROLINAEXPRESSLICENSEAGREEMENT.pdf
June 15th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
[...] an addition to the post, dated May 4, 2010, I’d like to add a few slides which describe visually the balance between royalties and [...]