Angel Invest Boston is sponsored by Peter Fasse, top life science patent attorney.
Purdue is going all out to be Innovation U. Professor Wayne Chen and I spoke of the various initiatives to that end including evaluating faculty on what their patents are worth and what startups they found.
Click here to read full transcript of the episode.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Professor Wayne Chen Who Leads Innovation at Purdue’s School of Engineering
Initiatives Afoot at Purdue to Get Technology Out of the Lab and Into Society
Sal Talks About How Çağrı Savran, a Purdue Professor Was Helped in Founding Savran Technologies
Applying Machine Learning to Determine the Best Management Strategies
The Value of Machine Learning: “…you hit something that the typical human cannot see, that's where your opportunity space, right?”
Purdue School of Engineering Now Being Evaluated on Value of Patents and Starting Companies
“…"No, I'm not a CEO material," we find you a CEO.”
Purdue Is Making Big Investments in Creating Spaces to Connect with Industry
Pitch for Peter Passe, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson
How Angel Groups Work
Purdue University Is Geographically Isolated – Seeking to Connect with Startup Hubs
The Increasing Possibilities of Virtual Connections Post- Corona
“…the disciplines in which Purdue is strong are closer with the investor community in Boston than they are with Silicon Valley…”
Why Sal Daher, CFA Is Now Investing Only in the Life Sciences
Sal’s Biotech Investing Screen
Sal Invites Listeners to Provide Ideas as to How Life Science Companies Can Best Be Supported
The National Science Foundation Is Now Emphasizing Taking Scientific Discovery to Commercialization
Purdue Is Also Supporting Student Entrepreneurship
Wayne Chen’s Closing Thoughts
Transcript of, “Innovation U”
Guest: Purdue Professor Wayne Chen
Sal Daher: This podcast is brought to you by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson.
Sal Daher Introduces Professor Wayne Chen Who Leads Innovation at Purdue’s School of Engineering
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. I'm Sal Daher, an angel who's very curious about how to build technology startups and how to build them well. Today, I'm very much privileged to have with me Professor Wayne Chen of Purdue University. Welcome, Wayne.
Wayne Chen: Thank you, Sal. Yes, I'm a Purdue professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Materials Engineering. I also serve as the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Engineering at Purdue.
Sal Daher: Innovation is a very big thing at Purdue. Purdue, as Wade Lange told me, is number three in the country in terms of producing startups. I assume that you have quite a hand in that on the administrative side.
Initiatives Afoot at Purdue to Get Technology Out of the Lab and Into Society
Wayne Chen: Yes, but this has only happened more recently. Older days were just like another university. Probably, Wade already told you that about seven, eight years ago, we had a president, who was actually our governor. He saw the gap that Purdue, as a massive research institution, we produce a very large amount of intellectual property, only a small fraction gets transferred in to make direct impact to the society.
Our president's Mitch Daniels. He formed and basically changed our campus culture to encourage activities to transition our knowledge directly into societal impact. Through a series of measures, previously, we did have a Burton Morgan Center of Entrepreneurship, where the Center would teach entrepreneurial concepts like NSF I-Corps. There is a design competition to get into market. After Mitch Daniels became our president, we formed the Purdue Foundry, which actually, they're led by Wade, you talked to last time.
They have the side-by-side start from a fire chat. As long as you're ready to start a company, they chat with you, what you will need, find out your needs, find your merit, and let you get into reality by talking to people on the real side, see if your idea is actually practical or what modifications or adjustments we'll need. Then they will get more serious. They will get you connected with a venture capitalist like yourself and come in to look at us, our ideas, our preparations, to see if we're ready to get in the market.
The Purdue Foundry themselves, they also have some small funds that they can support the company, small companies to the initial stages until they can swim in the real water themselves.
Sal Talks About How Çağrı Savran, a Purdue Professor Was Helped in Founding Savran Tachnologies
Sal Daher: Excellent. I could report, Wayne, that your efforts are really valuable because I have heard, seen firsthand with Çağrı Savran of Savran Technologies, a company in which I'm an investor, I'm also on the board, and Çağrı often speaks of how much support he gets from Purdue in setting up Savran. Basically, he says that he wouldn't have been able to start the company without all the support that they got.
At one point, he had somebody coming to his office and teaching him because he couldn't go to the Center. [laughs] It's outstanding. If you are a faculty member looking for a university that really supports its inventors who want to be founders, this is the place to be, a very, very supportive place for entrepreneurship. A lot of this is something which Wayne oversees.
Wayne Chen: Yes, absolutely. This is where we want to achieve. In a traditional university, you count for faculty achievement as how many high-level, high-impact research papers you publish, what are the research programs you bring in, how many PhD students you graduated. We still value these. We're still a university, that's you do faculty just basically exercise your talent, fully.
You express your interest, you look at whatever area you want to work in. That's fine, we support, but also we show faculty that beyond what you have been doing, there is possibly other opportunities that will make more direct impact to society. We're not just waiting for a faculty to come out to ask, "Where can I get help?" We have also faculty entrepreneurial ambassadors that actually would sit in faculty offices, let them visit faculty offices, and see what you're doing. "Have you thought about to put this into market?" If you say yes, we have all the programs. If you say, "I'm not interested, but I never thought of it before," we have courses for you to take, just for faculty.
Sal Daher: That is excellent. That is so powerful.
Wayne Chen: We also have a very powerful group of alumni supporting. For example, in College of Engineering, we have an endowed center called the John Martinson Entrepreneurial Center. We support engineering students, faculty, staff, alumni. If you want to start a company, we provide free incubating space. We find you coaches, we connect you with the VCs, we teach you interviewing skills to the VCs, and we have forums that other successful people come talking to you.
What are the good ways and the bad ways when you want to wade the water in the real site? We also have a very distinct advantage that we also study innovation science. When we bring the innovation product from academic setting to the real world, there is a valley of death. The success rate is very low because there's quite a difference between the faculty life perspective and the reality side.
Even though we help faculty to find them CEOs, to find them whatever help they need, still, it's very different. You live as a faculty member, and you become a company lead. You're going out there, you compete with the real professionals, but we have also something very powerful. We can study what other people are doing right. Now we're in the information age, right?
Applying Machine Learning to Determine the Best Management Strategies
There is plenty of examples of good examples, bad examples. As one human, you cannot learn enough. What can do that? Machine learning. You let the machine to learn all the outside examples and then you put your own company profile into the machine. It will calculate to you how many possible ways that this way, 800 people have tried and failed. Within your company scope, what ways do you have? What options do you have? This is typically a lot more than the founder and his advisers can think about. It opens up a lot more option scope, tell you what optimized space you might try into. There's modern tools.
Sal Daher: What's the size of the training data that you're using? How many startup samples have they been looking at? Do you know?
Wayne Chen: We have a specific faculty working on these. The companies, they've been doing, right now, the project is not quite focusing on the startup yet. They actually are helping major companies to make very smart investment decisions. The sample size actually is in the tens of thousands. It's a very large size, and they're working with some people like USAID. How do you distribute your resources in smart ways to make maximum impact, to make sure you get to the people who actually need them? These are all decision-making process, and there's plenty of examples. In the past, over previous time, people don't actually take this as a science because it's very hard to quantify.
Sal Daher: No, they don't.
Wayne Chen: Now you can quantify them.
Sal Daher: There are few statistical studies that they do. Looking at it from that kind of sample size, it's always astonishing to me when a machine-learning algorithm finds a pattern in something, it is really hard for a human being to make any sense of it. It just doesn't make sense. They see patterns that we can't see, so I can see the value of that.
The Value of Machine Learning: “…you hit something that the typical human cannot see, that's where your opportunity space, right?”
Wayne Chen: If the human intuition can see this, you're within that few percent success rate, but you hit something that the typical human cannot see, that's where your opportunity space, right?
Sal Daher: Very true. Would you like to talk about some particular companies that you're working with, that you think exemplify the work that you're doing, Wayne?
Purdue School of Engineering Now Being Evaluated on Value of Patents and Starting a Company
Wayne Chen: For me, I'm actually only the portion from the administration side. We stand up with the structure and change the culture. For example, we changed our faculty promotion package. In old days, it's only the contribution of your papers, all these grants, your students. Now your patent values, how much your patent has turned into revenue. If you start a company, you can also list that.
Sal Daher: [laughs] This is something else.
Wayne Chen: This is not just encouraging, it's officially in your faculty promotion package.
Sal Daher: Is this in all departments or just in engineering?
Wayne Chen: Engineering, but it will probably expand to all departments. We're a big university, so engineering, we can decide things-- We're still big, but we can decide things quicker. It's propagating to the rest of university because the push for an entrepreneurial culture is university-wide. It is that it comes from our president.
Sal Daher: This is very new for me because I had not heard of faculty receiving incentive for creating value of intellectual property. I knew that Purdue was very strong. It has been well-recognized in surveys as being very strong in technology transfer in the sense that it is one of the best universities to help transfer technologies to companies that come from there. This is not an area where the leading players shine.
If you think of the top players, they tend to be geared towards transferring technologies to very large players. But Purdue seems to have a very interesting approach to transferring technology to the startups, which is a problem. I've heard complaints from several of my startups. Some of the leading universities that we have here in the Boston area are very, very, very difficult to deal with in that regard, and that that transition from being a founder in the university to becoming an independent company is fraught with tension and so forth.
I can tell you at least the report that I've heard from Çağrı, that he was very supported in this, he didn't have problems, and the university was very accommodating and even helping him figure out a way to do it, which is much to your credit.
“…"No, I'm not a CEO material," we find you a CEO.”
Wayne Chen: Yes. This is what we're trying to achieve, so not only we don't put roadblocks, we actually come to your office, talk to you, push you out of your comfort zone, getting to the real side. If you said, "No, I'm not a CEO material," we find you a CEO. "I'm bad at the management," we find you're a managing director. You just need to be CTO. We hope, in the near future, that we actually will become even more entrepreneurial. On-campus, for example, just infrastructure-wise, I'm not sure if Wade or Çağrı has been talking to you, we just completed a big building called the Convergence Building.
Sal Daher: Oh, no, I didn't know about that.
Purdue Is Making Big Investments in Creating Spaces to Connect with Industry
Wayne Chen: It's a five-story building. We have our office of technology commercialization and the Purdue Foundry on the second floor. These are basically engines accelerating companies. Once you file your patent, it goes next door, then people come out chasing you, "You want to start all this?" Then we provide free space. If you want to start your small company on third floor, you have a free space, but in the same building, the first floor was rent to the major companies where larger companies want to put their research centers here or research operations on Purdue campus.
That's an effective way for them to attract talent. For university, it's our way to get connected with industry. For small companies, they direct can actually interact with these companies, see their practice. After one year, you have finished your incubating time. You can rent a space on the first floor to work side by side with these companies. Then on the upper floor, we rent those out to major companies, national companies. They have the first sight to see what's born on the new technology site.
Sal Daher: They have the first shot of the new technologies and the new technologists, the people that are developing these new technologies.
Wayne Chen: Exactly. That provide the incentive for the major companies to come here. They want to come here to recruit Purdue engineering talent anyway, and now you'll see what's technology is developing, what companies we're forming. In addition to this, we actually build a district out there called the Discovery Park District. There are also apartments, houses, all these things, and they're actually a living lab.
We're developing 5G, Wi-Fi 6, in the future, 6G, and this is a small city. All of the major communication companies can come here, test out whatever technologies they have with the real community, with the talent we have. Our electrical engineering has over a hundred professors. We have lots of technologists. We can contribute to the technology frontier of this nation. We let companies to mingle with us in this Convergence Building.
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Pitch for Peter Passe, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson
Sal Daher: This podcast is brought to you by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. The biggest assets of a startup are its team and its intellectual property. So, make the most out of the great efforts of your team by getting the best advice on building your intellectual property portfolio. I urge you to check out Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Fish & Richardson is the foremost patent law firm. You should not skimp on patent advice.
Sal Daher: Wayne, I'm just thinking. The way that angel investing works, I'm not a venture capitalist. Technically, I'm an angel investor, which invests earlier. It's venture capital, but it's a different type of venture capital because angel investors invest their own funds, whereas VCs tend to invest funds that are raised from other people. Anyway, Boston has a very active angel community.
How Angel Groups Work
The way that the angel groups used to work is that they met in person, and they listened to pitches. What's happened at Walnut [an angel investing group to which Sal belongs] because of COVID is that we began meeting online and then we discovered that as we're meeting online, why don't we hear the pitches in video form and then have a longer time to actually ask questions of the entrepreneur so you have a more interactive, a more conversational meeting with the entrepreneurs, which is more like a due diligence meeting?
I have been asking the question at Walnut, and maybe this could be applied to other angel groups in the Boston area, why not open up…because the idea of angel investing is that it's local so you can support the company? At the same time, there's a large number of people who want to help companies in different ways. They can maybe invest in them, maybe they can connect it with people. These are things that you can do virtually.
There's always an advantage to the person-to-person contact. I'm wondering if there is not a way that if we created some recurring virtual events, with Purdue companies where they would participate in some of the angel meetings here in the Boston area, with Walnut, or maybe some of the other groups as well, maybe initially as observers, to sit in on the meetings and just see what goes on, how angels think about things.
Of course, you'd have to be ethical, you have to excuse yourself from companies where you might have a conflict, there might be someone that you're involved with, and so forth. I'm just wondering if there wouldn't be room for having observers and also having potential investors from all across the country participate in these virtual events and to expand the universe of investors and also expand the connections with the resources that exists to support startups because you guys are building a very rich environment in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Purdue University Is Geographically Isolated – Seeking to Connect with Startup Hubs
If you can connect that with particular areas in different parts of the country, the fact that Savran has that Çağrı is a faculty member at Purdue, his company is here in Cambridge, or I should say in Newton, in the Boston area. He comes here once in a while, but the lab is going on here, they're people who are employed here, and the stuff is going on here in Boston, the investors are here in Boston, mostly, because Purdue is also an investor in the company, but the majority of the investors are in the Boston area, not everybody.
Some of them are from other places in the US. What I'm thinking is, maybe the way that Savran's funding came about could become a model for more investing. I know that among my angel investor friends, they've said, "Oh, perhaps there might be interesting companies out in West Lafayette, Indiana, that we don't normally see, that may be interesting for us to support." This new approach to angel investing, there's also the feeling that, no, we don't want to give up the intimate connections that we have, with face-to-face meetings and so forth.
The Increasing Possibilities of Virtual Connections Post- Coronna
We're working on this and I think after Corona, Post-corona, there's going to be room to reinterpret and to reinvent these, mix and match these kinds of connections. I'm leaving you with the question to think about it, it's not something to be answered now, but how could we establish recurring interactions with angel groups in the Boston area, not just in the Boston area, you might also look at Austin, Texas, the Bay Area if we can develop some relationships there as well, knowing, of course, that the best and strongest connections are going to be the local ones, okay, but that these farther-away connections, these virtual connections can also add value of a certain type?
Wayne Chen: Yes. For us, we do not have much local connections. If there's a chance, I would very much like to invite you to visit West Lafayette. It's more or less a college town, and across the river, there's a manufacturing town called Lafayette. Our closest invest will be from Indianapolis, but in the national map, it's probably not the strongest.
Sal Daher: Is there an active angel environment in Indianapolis.
Wayne Chen: I do not think as active as you have in Boston.
Sal Daher: Well, yes, Boston is.
Wayne Chen: We actually had a reasonably strong connection with the Silicon Valley in Bay Area. We have--
Sal Daher: Yes, Boston pales in comparison with Silicon Valley. How was that connection established?
Wayne Chen: There is a group of investors, and they call them Silicon Valley Boiler Investor Group. Just engineer alone, we have over 3,000 alumni there. I hear a small fraction of them are very successful. They are financially independent, so they're trying to find ways how we can help. The Martinson Center has a West Coast office, so we have a physical presence there. The nature of the business they invest is more on the semiconductor side.
Sal Daher: Yes. That's the area they know. A lot of the startups that you're getting are in AG-tech, in biology, the biotech, not necessarily in semiconductors.
Wayne Chen: This is what we're looking next from a strategic point of view, from a university part. Purdue has very few places, I think we're the only one that top 10 college of engineering and top 10 of agriculture college are together in one campus. There's a lot to do with engineer applications into agriculture. Our Department of Agriculture and Biological Engineering has been number one in the country for the last decade, at least.
We have a lot of strengths here, but that's probably not that much in Silicon Valley's investment portfolio. Investors invest in the area they're familiar most. There's a very good potential connection between the Purdue expertise in this area and the Boston area investors.
“…the disciplines in which Purdue is strong are closer with the investor community in Boston than they are with Silicon Valley…”
Sal Daher: Right. You're saying that the disciplines in which Purdue is strong are closer with the investor community in Boston than they are with Silicon Valley, which is very much turned towards software and semiconductors. Boston is very software-centric, but it does have a very important biotech sector. However, still, biotech investors are rare on the landscape. Wayne, I like to say to people because I'm always trying to get people to invest in biotech.
Why Sal Daher, CFA Is Now Investing Only in the Life Sciences
Originally, I started investing in all sorts of areas, and I've made 60 investments. I find that all the value of my portfolio is in a handful of life science companies. Why? Because they have intellectual property that's defensible, because these are platform technologies. They have a lot of uses, and so forth. The software companies that I invested in, some of them did very nicely, some of them are 2.5X, some of them a 5X, but it's not creating as much value as the life science companies.
Those are the companies that create enduring value. Then they add another line and another line, another use case in their platform, and the value multiplies. This is why I'm dedicating myself entirely to life science companies of a very particular type, a type that can be developed without huge amounts of capital, and try to convince investors to come in and support that and to tell them, "Look, the life science is really hard, but it's hard for everyone." A lot of people are scared off, it creates opportunity because not many people want to invest in life science companies.
Wayne Chen: You have a very specific type of investment portfolio. What type of bio companies are you focusing on?
Sal’s Biotech Investing Screen
Sal Daher: My focus in biotech investing is, number one, a company that has strong, very defensible intellectual property and number two, of course, strong founder, strong, dedicated founder. Even if the founder is going to be the CTO or the CSO, that's fine. Then it has to be a company that can be developed to a point where you get a significant collaboration with industry, with no more than $4 million or $5 million in capital raised from investors because you're going to have a very hard time raising that kind of money from anything more than that from angels. Even that is daunting, preferably $2 to $3 million in total, and preferably a technology that has many applications that is a platform such as the Savran technology that can be used in capturing circulating tumor cells for diagnostics.
They can be used for capturing fetal cells in maternal blood for noninvasive prenatal testing. There could be uses in other areas. You have these many different potential verticals, which really give you many more shots on goal than being a therapy company that has one therapy seeking FDA approval. If it doesn't get approved, forget about it [crosstalk] We see a lot of that. I'm looking for these kinds of companies, and I'm looking to have investors support them.
Wayne, there's an explosion of this because you're going to notice, I think you're going to see this at Purdue as well because the technologies are maturing at the same time, that are very accessible. It doesn't cost millions upon millions of dollars to develop a microfluidics chip to the point where Savran has developed it, a few million dollars, it doesn't take $20, $30 million. Savran's technology is doing a miraculous thing.
Sal Invites Listeners to Provide Ideas as to How Life Science Companies Can Best Be Supported
Similar to this there are other technology-- aptamers being used for sensors for bacteria, just all kinds of things. I invite you to come up with suggestions. I invite our listeners to come and suggest new ways of collaborating on an ongoing basis to make it possible to support this avalanche of new life science companies that is going to be coming down the pike. This is the bone I'm gnawing on. How do we support these huge numbers of companies coming down the pike? I put this to you.
Wayne Chen: Certainly, this isn't my job. I'm serving as a bridge, so I don't get involved with very specific companies. Typically, I get myself out, so when I talk to everyone, they know that I'm only an administrator. Certainly, this is a part of my job to connect outside to our companies. I will need to talk to people and see how we can make this a focus area and be presentable to you and then we can figure out how we can move to the next step.
Sal Daher: I can say that a lot of people are open to doing things differently after COVID, and I think it's an opportunity that we can seize to create new ways of collaborating, which we couldn't do before.
Wayne Chen: Yes. Well, like our conversation now.
Sal Daher: Which has been a helped in many ways.
The National Science Foundation Is Now Emphasizing Taking Scientific Discovery to Commercialization
Wayne Chen: Yes, but I also found that there are quite a number of people already reached onto the campus. I was surprised that yesterday I was talking to National Science Foundation, which typically fund that very fundamental research. They have a new division called Convergence Accelerator. National Science Foundation is now emphasizing on the applied side and to push companies through the valley of death, to the commercialization side. This is a very new motion, and behind that, there's also something going through the Congress called the Endless Frontier Act. That's with bipartisan support.
Sal Daher: Bipartisan support. Like the USA JOBS Act was bipartisan.
Wayne Chen: Yes, that act would actually set up a new division called the Division of Technology inside National Science Foundation. Its job is to connect the fundamental research direct to industrial impact to maintain the leadership of United States, the manufacturing or industry in the world. It just wants to connect the bridge of the fundamental research to the direct economic impact.
The current Convergence Accelerator is just the first step, it's going to be something much bigger. I was talking to the Convergence Accelerator program manager, who actually funded Purdue because we're in this business, and we're a pretty strong candidate for the program like this. I talked to also one advisor that's actually National Science Foundation appointed advisor to our research team.
She's a venture capitalist and when I talked to her, she was like, "Oh, I know Purdue. I invest in four companies there." Outside people, actually they're reaching out already, but I will talk to people that's in the area, actually about and ask how many I can pull together. You just missed the one opportunity, we just graduated a class of a faculty of potential company starters as the final term paper.
They presented their idea of their companies. These are at the very early stages, but they do have at least the intellectual property disclosure, they may not all have patents yet. They are very early stages, but they're professors, so they're serious. When they take the class, they spend their time, take the class, form their business plan, and then make the final presentation. They have no investor yet because this is just for education only, but next time something like this happen, I'll let you know and invite you to attend.
Sal Daher: That would be interesting. I'd be very honored to attend.
Purdue Is Also Supporting Student Entrepreneurship
Wayne Chen: Yes, then there's also less formal thing. We also have student entrepreneur’s clubs. They have a very similar competition, but they're probably-- You look at it, it's much premature, but you see the students' energy. The professor, the ones are very serious in technology side.
Sal Daher: Yes. Now, this is very good. Wayne, as we think about wrapping up our interview, are there any things that you wanted to get across to our audience, of founders, of people who are thinking about founding companies, of angel investors that we have not covered, what is the message that you want to leave our listeners with?
Wayne Chen: The one message is that I believe Purdue is still a place, I cannot say it for the entire university but for the College of Engineering, we had a large amount of patents. We have over 450 professors, actually approaching 500 now. It's a big operation. We have over 3,000, now we have 10,000 undergraduate students, 7,000 graduate students. It's a big intellectual base. We're obviously top 10 in the nation, actually, this year is top 5. It's a massive-
Sal Daher: Congratulations.
Wayne Chen: -talent pool, and we're not close to any metropolitan place. There's plenty of space to connect this talent pool with the capitalists to bring these intellectual results to real societal impact.
Sal Daher: Purdue is in a position of benefiting, in particular, from virtual connections because of its geographic isolation from any major center of investing. I think that it makes sense for Purdue to really pursue creating these virtual connections with Austin, with Boston, New York, San Francisco, LA, you've pointed to something very important, this tremendous wealth of intellectual capacity located in a place which is geographically isolated, from a lot of the things that might help create enterprise.
You have plenty of intellectual connections because, in each discipline, you have those kinds of things. The connections that lead to supporting new enterprises, you need to reach out. This is a unique opportunity; I think you've said something very important here. This is a weakness that Purdue has, in a sense, you could say it's a weakness, but at the same time, it is a tremendous strength in the sense that it can reach out to many different places where it can create genuine connections, virtual, which from time to time will be face-to-face, and so forth. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this is why Purdue is making this big effort.
Wayne Chen: [laughs] We're a flyover state. Wherever you fly, we're in the middle, you look down, we're there. We welcome the opportunity of distance communication like we're doing now.
Sal Daher: This is a tremendous concentration of 500 brilliant engineers thinking of new things it has to be connected with somehow.
Wayne Chen’s Closing Thoughts
Wayne Chen: This is a top-five program in the country with a massive amount of talent, with a culture that we welcome. We talk to investment, we talk to the business side, we encourage our faculty to explore on the entrepreneurship side. We're trying to erase all the blocks to facilitate those connections.
Sal Daher: Wayne, you have encapsulated, beautifully here, the tremendous promise of Purdue, of bringing this massive amount of engineering knowledge that is developing out to companies by creating connections, beyond its immediate geography, very well said, very well said.
Wayne Chen: That's what I'm trying to achieve on my job.
Sal Daher: Well, I just want to express how grateful I am to you for making time to do this interview. Thank you very much.
Wayne Chen: Thank you very much for the opportunity to let me introduce Purdue's entrepreneuring culture to you.
Sal Daher: [laughs] It's been wonderful. This is Sal Daher, and this is Angel Invest Boston. Thank you for listening.
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Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.
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