INTERVIEW Third, we are establishing an institution for Entrepreneurship, embedding all 18 facul- ties. Transfer and entrepreneurship must become an intrinsic pillar of the university: Carried by scientists themselves, just as re- search and teaching are. We want to reach everyone, also all our students. That is the only way it will be sustainable. As the founder of NanoTemper Technol- ogies – a LMU spin-off and now global market leader in biophysical measuring instruments – you have personally experi- enced the journey from idea to a success- ful company. Which lessons from this time have most strongly shaped your under- standing of entrepreneurship today? The commercially successful transfer of research and technologies into mar- ketable applications remains a central challenge. How do you plan to further strengthen the bridge between excellent basic research and successful spin-offs at LMU? The bridge metaphor is instructive, but I would push it further. A bridge implies two separate banks. What we are building at LMU is more like a continuous landscape, where the distance between a discovery in the lab and a company on the market is measured not in years, but in months. The structural answer is the One-Stop- Shop: all competencies along the value chain, legal, operational, financial, in one place, without the need for coordination with third parties. But the cultural answer is equally important. We are creating an LMU Entrepreneurship Foundation, which will invest its assets into a GmbH. This entity will handle IP commercialization for the university, take equity stakes in spin-offs, and offer direct financing instruments, including lead investments. We are also enabling participation via virtual shares, equity stakes, or license fees, each in the low single-digit percentage range. These are founder-friendly conditions, designed so that our spin-offs can grow fast, become profitable, and pay taxes in Germany. We are also systematically growing our IP pipeline. Our goal is a strong increase in invention disclosures over the coming years. More high-quality IP creates the foundation for scalable spin-offs and li- censing agreements. And from 2027, we plan to build a professional, cross-technol- ogy transfer chain specifically for deep tech like quantum computing, AI, biotechnol- ogy, cybersecurity, with active scouting, strategic portfolio management, and an accelerated time-to-deal structure. I started as a scientist. I failed at science. In the sense that my main PhD project never produced the results I had hoped for. What I discovered instead was that my real tal- ent lay not in generating knowledge, but in transforming it into something useful. That shift in self-understanding was the beginning of everything. The first lesson is about environment. NanoTemper emerged from the Center for NanoScience at LMU, where companies were being steadily founded before and after us: Nanion, attocube, ibidi, GNA Bio- solutions. Our professors actively supported this spirit. When you are surrounded by founders every day, founding becomes imaginable. That density of entrepreneurial role models is what we are now trying to create across all 18 faculties of our LMU. We want to accelerate the speed of IP transfer and com pany formation. The second lesson is about focus. In our ear- ly years, we tried too many things simulta- neously and made no progress in any direc- tion. A mentor told us: "Just build a device and try to sell it." We listened. That single act of focus became our turning point. Ideas are worthless without execution, and execution requires ruthless prioritization. The third lesson is about trust. This is the one I carry most deeply. We were nearly de- stroyed by someone we trusted too quickly. We were saved by people who believed in us when no one else did: our Business Angel Volker, who found us at an LMU open house day; Sonja from the university's patent office; Christoph from the transfer depart- ment. A network of people with integrity is worth more than any amount of capital. This is why I believe so strongly that the university must be a place where founders feel genuinely supported, not processed. And the fourth lesson: Never build a com- pany only to become rich. Build it to have an impact. Build it to help cure a disease. Many founders in the life sciences busi- ness face long development cycles and significant capital requirements. Is there a general remedy to be successful? There is no universal remedy. But there is a universal discipline: Start selling before you think you are ready. NanoTemper is a deep-tech company. We had supercool technology and no product. Customers do not buy technology: They buy solutions to their problems. The moment we stopped developing and started selling, everything changed. We sold 29 prototypes in less than a year, each one slightly better than the last, shaped by real customer feed- back. By the end of 2010, we were profitable. On the question of funding: Bootstrapping, venture capital, grants, business angels: These are tools, not destinations. The im- portant thing is that you have options, and that the decision remains yours. For life sciences founders specifically, the capital intensity is real and the timelines are long. But the underlying discipline is the same: find the one thing that creates the most value for your customer, and concen- trate everything on it. Spreading resources across too many projects is a reliable path to failure. For this you have to know to whom you are selling what. For example, in biotherapeutics it looks like that it's, in the end, always pharma buying the whole start-up to get the one drug candidate. I now see more founders and investors, for example Curie.Bio, creating a streamlined „remedy“ to do this faster and with a higher probability for success. In your view, what framework conditions are essential for science-based start-ups, particularly in the life sciences to compete internationally? Are Harvard or Berkeley still the benchmark or rather Tsinghua in Beijing and Jiao Tong in Shanghai? BIOTECH IN BAVARIA - REPORT 2025 | 26 35