Krishna Nadella

Microgreen Polymers co-founder Krishna Nadella had heard the horror stories about the University of Washington's TechTransfer department. Nadella -- who arrived at the UW from India in 2000 to study mechanical engineering -- was told that it just moved too slow and didn't adapt to the needs of entrepreneurs.

But nine years later, Nadella is building a successful materials science business on the back of patented technology spun out of UW professor Vipin Kumar's lab. How did the 32-year-old do it?

It all started at the 2002 UW business plan competition, where Nadella and some other students won second place by pitching an idea to transform the food packaging business through a new plastic manufacturing process.

The idea was based on patented technology that had been sitting around the UW for seven years, with Nadella and the team receiving a three-month option from the UW TechTransfer department to see what they could do with it.

"After that business plan competition, we looked at ourselves and said 'What do we want do now?" said Nadella. 

Shortly thereafter, Nadella accepted a summer entrepreneurial fellowship at the UW where he was chosen to mine the UW's TechTransfer department for compelling technologies that could possibly be licensed.

Meanwhile, he continued working on the concept for Microgreen Polymers, and by 2003 the company had been chosen to represent the UW at business plan competitions at the the University of Oregon, Rice University and the UW.

The team -- led by Nadella and co-founder Greg Branch-- finished in second and third place in the competitions and won about $35,000 in prize money. It then received about $250,000 in research grants to develop products based on the technology in Dr. Kumar's lab, including an insulated eco-friendly coffee cup.

By 2004, the technology was progressing well and Microgreen entered into a formal agreement to license three patents from the UW TechTransfer department. As part of the deal, the UW reserved the right to receive royalties on revenues that the business generated.

Nadella said he had heard from other people that the TechTransfer department didn't understand the needs of entrepreneurs.

But Nadella -- who has worked with the department for more than six years now -- said he thinks that mischaracterizes their role.

"The university is not in the business of making money for profit, so entrepreneurs and investors expecting the university to move at the speed of a startup company -- let alone just the business world -- is an unrealistic expectation to go in with in my mind," he said.

It did take time to secure the technology, and there were instances where the negotiations dragged on. But, overall, Nadella's happy with the experience and impressed that the department rolled the dice on the students back in 2002 by offering an option on the underutilized technology.

"I am extremely pleased with how the TechTransfer office has improved itself over the last six years and I've been extremely pleased with the way they've always treated Microgreen," he said. "We've had some tough negotiations with them when things seemed bleak, but both parties stayed at it and we both won."

And Microgreen's ties to the UW are starting to pay dividends. Five of the company's 11 employees have degrees from the UW. And  the company -- which raised a $2.6 million venture round in 2006 and is in the process of closing another oversubscribed round -- has started to pay royalties back to the university on the technology.

Nadella said he's hopeful that some of those dollars will eventually go to other students who may want to get a business idea built on UW technology.

There are some other less obvious benefits.

For example, Nadella said that because of Microgreen's success, students in Dr. Kumar's lab have continued to work on the technology -- filing additional provisional patents. Nadella said that could benefit both the UW and Microgreen, which after receiving venture financing started funding R&D efforts at the lab.

"We have a very good relationship with the state of Washington and the university in general, where we are funding R&D, they are channeling technology to us and we are commercializing technology and as a result we are training students who are becoming our future employees," he said. "In my case, the system worked."

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