Compound Spinout Sessions
Solving the academia translation problem
Compound does research and investing across multiple areas surrounding bio, AI, robotics, energy, and crypto. We write extensively about new technologies, business models, and world futures.
A big part of our job is speaking to academics, founders, and everyone in between. In our recent conversations with academics, we’ve felt a massive urgency for them to spin out their technologies faster. This is mainly because national budget cuts (and those impending) will shrink their lab and stop some large areas of their prized research. Understandably, academics and their students also don’t always want to run a company, think about markets, hiring, and sales. This naturally creates an opportunity for others to help bring science into the real world.
On the founder side, we regularly speak and collaborate with many incredible operators, past founders, and enterprising students that know that they want to start something new soon and are looking for the mission and future to build towards. When speaking to these folks, we tend to find there’s a known universe of technologies that many operators already explore from the top 10 translational labs as well as areas that have more publicity. However, this is a smaller pool of ideas than what’s out there and we at Compound are fortunate enough to sit at the right intersection to start solving this academia translation problem with Spinout Sessions.
Spinout Sessions are a series of events that enables academics to share their life’s work with a curated set of potential founders/co-founders. We’re focusing our first sessions on immediately translatable biology, chemistry, materials science, and AI research that academics have worked on and validated for years (if not decades!). Potential founders benefit by exploring less known technologies that we’ve vetted as highly impactful and immediately translatable. Our hope is to drive the translation of more top-tier academic research to start impactful and successful companies, and to enable new scientific possibilities and markets.
If you are interested in showcasing your lab’s work or are a potential founder looking for net new ideas, please fill out these forms:
Our first Compound Spinout Session will be in August 2026. We want this to be as big and impactful as possible so please also share with your smartest academics, friends, and operators. If you have any questions, let us know at shelby@compound.vc.