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602 PHILLIPS ET AL.

license the work and take it into production for the patents we had received. The licensing process at
benefit of the public. UA at that time was not very friendly, and it took
Technology transfer at universities is an effective many meetings and negotiations to come up with
mechanism to transfer university research to the an agreement. We were lucky that we had a great
outside world where it can generate wealth. But the vice president of research who understood the spirit
deeper goal for a university is to fuel the economy and of entrepreneurship and its value for the university.
turn innovative research outcomes into a benefit for He was instrumental in addressing some of the
the public. In fact, small businesses are responsible remaining issues that finally resulted in the licensing
for approximately 45% of the non-farm gross domes- agreement.
tic product, resulting in job creation and reduced The telecom market was very active at that time,
unemployment. I very much wanted to be a part of and several angel investors expressed interest in
that positive effort. funding our project. For the first two years, with the
My commercialization journey started in 1982 support of their funding and some government sup-
when I moved to Tucson, Arizona, and began work- port (SBIR, STTR), we selected the fiber technology.
ing as a postdoc at the University of Arizona (UA). As is typical, after our funding through angel sources
By 1985, I was working on a project related to opti- ran out, we approached venture capital (VC) firms
cal switching, and I wanted to start a company to who were interested in the fiber amplifiers – a hot
commercialize it. Back in 1985, I arranged to meet field at the time. We received six term sheets from
the university provost and get permission for my prospective VC firms, a sign of serious interest. Series
start-up plan. He was not positive and said, “You have A funding came in December 2000 at $22.5 million,
to decide whether you want to be a professor or have and the subsequent Series B in 2002 at $9 million.
a start-up company.” This was just a few years after I started at 100% ownership, and in 5 years, I was
the Bayh-Dole act of 1980, and UA was not yet fully down to less than 5%. NPP’s focus was on making
supportive of technology transfer for faculty-based very small size amplifiers with a few centimeters of
start-ups. So, I abandoned the idea and went back fiber. At the time, comparable products on the market
to the lab. required a few hundred meters of fiber for the same
Fast-forward 13 years later: There was a new amount of amplification. Our product worked with
provost, and the attitude of the universities and the less fiber because of our new glass-making invention.
legislators was changing due to the great commercial We agreed with a large laser company (Spectra Phys-
and economic success of the Bay Area and Route ics) for them to provide the pump diodes and for NPP
128 in Boston. I planned to create a small credit to make the glass and fibers. This effort resulted in
card-sized amplifier for telecommunications (tele- the creation of a credit card-sized optical amplifier.
com) use. We were pursuing two approaches, one However, the telecom market crashed in 2001, and
with fiber technology and the other with integrated overnight the company had to change and become
optics technology, and for each approach, we had a fiber laser company.
patent protection. So I tried again, and this time the I left the company management team in 2002 and
university was fully supportive. The process was in went back to UA after hiring several professionals
place, and the paperwork was starting to flow. My to run the business. These were people with many
application went all the way to the Arizona Board years of experience running laser companies such as
of Regents, who gave NP Photonics, Inc. (NPP), Coherent and Spectra Physics. The company went
approval to license the indicated UA technologies through several years of product manufacturing and
and permitted me to have a start-up while also being started to build a product portfolio during those
a faculty member. years. I served as a scientific advisor for the company
Subsequently, I got together with three of my and chairman of the board during this period. In
friends and co-workers and established our first 2011, I resigned as the chairman of the board and
start-up company. We asked the university to allow scientific advisor due to a disagreement with the new
our company to license the technology based on CEO.