233: Start a Spinout Venture with Andre Laplume

07
Aug

Andre Laplume, Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, is driven by a deep understanding of how employees start a spinout venture.

We discuss the key moments that spark employees to leave their corporate roles and start their own ventures. From strategic disagreements and personal conflicts to ethical dilemmas and liquidity events, he sheds light on the diverse reasons behind these entrepreneurial leaps. He introduces his framework, which focuses on preparations and considerations, addresses strategies and challenges faced during the transition, and highlights post-launch steps for managing and growing the new business. 

He also introduces the idea of hybrid entrepreneurship, where individuals juggle side projects while still employed, eventually turning their side hustle into a full-fledged business. Andre’s new book, Spinout Ventures: Transition from Employees to Entrepreneurs, is a valuable guide for aspiring entrepreneurs and managers alike, offering practical advice on turning corporate frustrations into entrepreneurial success.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Start a Spinout Venture with Andre Laplume

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest now is Andre Laplume, professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University and the author of Spinout Ventures: Transitioning from Employees to Entrepreneurs. Andre, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve. Thanks for the invitation. I look forward to it.

So, Andrei, let me ask you, what is your personal Why and what are you doing to manifest it?

Yeah, I mean, my personal Why, so I’m a researcher, right? That’s my main profession, and I research startups, and entrepreneurship is my main topic of focus. And I’ve been doing this for about a decade. And what I found out and what led to this book actually is that most prospective entrepreneurs are not really being coached very well that I feel they’re being coached down. Perhaps a more mythical path about what entrepreneurship really is and many of them think that entrepreneurship is something they can do at 19 years old or 20 years old, and sometimes it is, but, realistically, a lot of the startups that we’re seeing today, the more sophisticated startups, they aren’t founded by 19 and 20 year olds. Most of them are actually founded by fairly seasoned employees who have years of experience at a larger company and who have decided to leave and start a company. And I think that the more that I did research on this phenomenon, which we’re calling spinouts or spinout ventures, where employees leave to create their own ventures, the more I found out that they were very prominent and also more successful than other types of startups. So that’s really what led me down this pathway, that, okay, we’re living in a culture where the wrong narrative about entrepreneurship is being pushed, and so my purpose in this is to try to change that narrative and to make it more realistic. And also, I think that that sets better expectations for real entrepreneurs so that they don’t believe the myth.

Yeah, that is so interesting that you mentioned this myth, because I think it has its uses, but it also has its drawbacks. I think the uses of it is due to a popular idea of entrepreneurship. I think it’s not a bad thing. I do think that entrepreneurs need a level of dreaminess or ability to dream in order to get started because the flip side of it is that experts very rarely start companies because they see so many pitfalls and so many potentials to go wrong that it paralyzes them. So in some ways, I think there is a use in mythologizing it. But on the other hand, I do agree. And I think there are statistics that the average founder is actually not 23 years old, but something like 45 or 48 years old or something like that.

That’s right. I think it’s 45.

45. And I remember when I first heard about Ray Kroc and that he started McDonald’s or bought McDonald’s when he was 53 years old. That was also a big light bulb moment for me that, okay, it’s not too late in your early 50s. So talking about spinout, so is anyone who starts a company after a history of employment is considered a spinout or you have to have a team to be a spinout?

I mean, I think that there are more strict and loose definitions of what a spinout is. But I think that the key elements are that they’re founded by an individual or a team coming from an incoming company. And the key is that it has to be an independent venture. So we’re not talking about a new company that’s owned by the parent company, right? So complete independence from that organization. And the other aspect is that to really be a spinout, they’ve got to take something with them from the parent firm. And sometimes, maybe that may sound like, oh, taking employees or taking customers or taking intellectual property. But most of the time, what that is, is learning routines, learning good processes, learning how to do things effectively, learning business models, learning stakeholders in the industry. And all these things are usually not proprietary and can be taken to a spinout without any real problems. So that’s the kind of transfers we’re talking about. So I think a spinout has to satisfy all those aspects of the definition.

I love it, I love it. So I think I’m a serial spinout then, perhaps, but let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about the difference between a spinout, a spin-off. You mentioned that it’s all owned by the employee as opposed to the employer, so maybe that’s something to do with it. And then there are other forms that maybe sound similar, like carve-outs. So what are the differences between these forms of entrepreneurship?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the other forms you mentioned, what we call corporate spin-offs and carve-outs, that’s usually what we call a form of corporate entrepreneurship. So this is something that the management, the top management team typically, sometimes even the board of a company will get involved in. If they decide that they have a business unit that they want to divest or they want to remove it from the company so that the company can have more coherence or more strategic alignment, then they may choose to do a corporate spinoff where what they do is they typically, for a public company, what they’ll do is they’ll issue a new stock for the spin-off company. And then the owners of the parent company receive the shares in the spin-off. So their investment is whole after the spin-off occurs. So, that’s a corporate spin-off. So, it’s very much like a managerial decision that they’re doing it because they want to do it. A carve-out is very similar, except that typically with a carve-out, it doesn’t form like a totally new corporation. It just forms a new division within the existing corporation. So, it’s still wholly owned by the same parent. So, these two, the carve-out and the spin-off are both on the corporate side. The spinout, a lot of people often call the spinout an employee spinout. And the reason they put employee in front of there is to emphasize that this is more like a bottom-up decision. So, often the management is caught off guard or they might not even know that it’s happening actually and sometimes the spin-out founders want to negotiate a deal with the parent firm, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they want to be stealthy. So these are not usually decisions that are sanctioned by the management of the parent firms. These are independent decisions made by individuals or very small teams leaving an organization.

Yeah, I can imagine in most cases, it’s not welcome to the management of your, or maybe this is a question to you, is it welcome or it’s more of a threat to the management or at least a loss of key employees who are obviously self-starters and autonomous and driver personalities? What is the typical reaction or do people see the value that, okay, these people left, but they can become a strategic partner for us, they can be our ambassadors? What’s the general experience of employers who lose people to spinouts?

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of variety and I think it differs a lot by industry as well. Some industries are very welcoming of spinouts because they generate a lot more innovations that they can possibly exploit themselves. So rather than shelving those innovations, they want spinouts to occur so that those innovations can continue to be developed on someone else’s dime, if you think about it. And then often they’re looking at acquiring those, the more successful spinouts afterwards. So they have this kind of plan in mind. And so if you think of companies like AstraZeneca that does this quite often, they have a very positive view. Other companies, for instance, Intel is a good example. They’re spinout themselves from Fairchild, but they also have a policy about spinouts that they want to have spinouts of all of the process technologies involved in producing chips so that they can focus on the design technologies. So if you’re doing a process technology spinout, it might be welcomed, but if you’re doing a design technology spinout, it might not be. So it’s not just that some organizations are friendly towards spinouts and others are not, although that does happen, often it’s the type of spinout also matters because, for instance, not all spinouts actually compete with the parent organization. Many of them end up becoming a customer of the parent organization or they may become a supplier of the parent organization or they may end up in some kind of licensing agreement with the parent organization.

So there can be all these really positive things, positive relationships that can exist as well. Share on X

So are there companies that encourage spinouts so that they don’t have to invest in R&D and then maybe they are going to be able to capitalize on this R&D through the relationships?

Yeah, that’s how it works with a lot of these companies, Palantir and AstraZeneca and many others who generate a large number of innovations. They have a large alumni network of people who used to work there but don’t anymore, but they stay together, they meet up, they form startups together, they become investors for each other’s startups, and there is also a very vibrant relationship with Palantir and with parent firm where many of these spinouts end up selling back to the parent company later or sometimes the spinouts don’t work out and those employees may come back to the parent organization. There’s lots of different types of relationships, but if you think about it, if you’ve got a large number, let’s say 50 spinouts that are out there developing innovations, as a parent organization, you may still be developing innovations internally, but if you think about those spinouts as being relatively easy to acquire or to learn from later, it’s much better than having the innovation leak out to total strangers. And so having that network and keeping them close can be valuable over the long term. It can make it easier to hire, it can make it easier to acquire, and it can make it easier to innovate.

Yeah, I guess this is a very enlightened way of looking at spinouts. And it’s kind of an abundance mindset where you think, okay, I took good care of these people. They left because maybe they’re more entrepreneurial than what we can offer them in-house, but we’re going to keep them close and they’re going to bring us first looks of opportunities that we can exploit. That’s pretty positive. Let’s talk about your framework perhaps around spinouts. I think we call it something like the three phases of spinout, or you call it that. So what are the three phases and how should people think? What kind of mindset should they have around their own spinout and how should they think about it?

Yeah, I think we could think of a framework as just what happens before the spinout, what happens during the spinout process, and then what happens afterwards. So maybe we could talk about sort of each stage and what that entails. Starting with the before the spin out process. So before the spinout occurs, usually what’s going on is there’s an individual or perhaps a small group inside of an organization that has decided that they want to leave and pursue their idea outside of the firm. And there could be a lot of different reasons for that. We could talk about all the different triggers that lead to such a decision. But they’ve sort of decided it themselves, but they haven’t actually done it yet. And they may not be ready. So what does it mean to get ready? So while they’re still employed, usually they start to work on the business model canvas or the business model for their new venture. And they’re also now using their work environment as a learning environment. So they may still be doing their day-to-day work and getting their tasks done, but their mind frame has changed to where instead of thinking about, oh, well, I’m talking to this person for my employer, they start to think, okay, well, dual purpose way, okay, I’m talking to this person for my employer, but what can I learn from this person for my startup? And so this process of exploration starts, especially for the spinouts that are gonna stay within the same industry as the parent organization, they start to learn about the industry, they start to meet the stakeholders and talk to them and talk to them about their problems. And they become aware of opportunities that start popping up. And especially what they start to notice is the opportunities that customers or partners are interested in that the organization is not interested in pursuing. So we’ve got lots of examples, for example, in the book, we’ve got interviews with many of these folks that sometimes we call them ringleaders, right? Who are looking to build their team and looking to build their team sometimes with people internally and externally to the parent firm and who are scoping out opportunities, many opportunities that the organization hasn’t exploited and they’re evaluating those and seeing how much validation those have already received, right? Because that’s another thing that makes a spinout founder quite different from the de novo startups is often the ideas that they pursue have already been partially or validated, partially or completely validated within the parent organization. But just because it’s a validated opportunity doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily worthwhile for the organization to pursue because sometimes, they’re looking for a certain return threshold that might be higher, for instance, than what a startup might be looking for. So in that, the phase before the startup is really about trying to better understand that landscape and turning employment into a learning environment. And then that leads us to the actual spinout event. So there’s some decisions that have to be made. First of all, the spinout founders, they have to eventually leave their job. And that can be a really simple exit conversation with no explanation or that can be like a full negotiation where they take the opportunity to see if they can if they can cut some kind of deal with the parent organization to sort of figure out how they could become a client or a supplier or Licensee or have some kind of relationship a positive relationship with the organization some choose not to do that because they don’t get the impression of the vibe that the management will be open to it. And so they decide to just leave and go stealthy. And that’s one of the one of the issues with a company’s management and their approach to spinouts will actually influence the reality of spinouts for them, because if they’re viewed as being hostile and sort of tough, trying to be tough and guard their IP even unreasonably, then that’s going to lead people to leave stealthily and not try to negotiate with them and not try to cut a deal, right? So that’s the one major benefit of a parent firm organization that has a positive culture towards finances. They’re able to negotiate a better exit deal. So that’s an important part. Now, it’s a crucial moment. Because they’re leaving employment, they’re starting a new venture, so they need to find new premises. They need to often find new investors. Some of those investors, by the way, a lot of the people say that your best investor is your first customer. If you’re looking for alternatives to, you know, angels and VCs. But for spinout founders, often the first investors are people they knew in previous employment. They’re former managers or executives that they’ve met and know their capabilities. So that’s another advantage that they have as they are leaving. So, putting that package together, negotiating the deal and going, especially if there are restrictive covenants involved. Now, sometimes in the employment contracts of the leavers, they might have signed a non-compete agreement. Luckily, those are non-enforceable in most places now. Many states and provinces have banned them and the US just recently banned them at the country level, for example. But there remain other things like non-solicitation or no-poach agreements in employment contracts and non-disclosure agreements as well. And so, I think it becomes important that the leavers, as they’re staging their spinout, that they be very cognizant of what’s in their actual contract and make sure that they don’t put themselves in a position of facing litigation because that does happen. Some parent firms that do react in a hostile fashion, they resort to litigating restrictive covenants in an attempt to try to stall or stop the spinout or prevent them from raising capital. So that’s why I think it’s carefully evaluating the risks in the contract and deciding whether to negotiate on the exit. Those are the two most important parts. Now, after the spinout, I’m focusing on sort of what’s interesting about spinouts versus other types of startups because the relationship with the parent firm after the spinout is, there might not be one, maybe the spinout’s trying to avoid the parent firm. Some spinouts go very far away to try to avoid their parents. Others try to stay really close, right? Because they view the parent firm as a source of opportunities for the future. And so they try to not only stay close physically, but also in terms of relationships, they try to maintain those relationships with the key stakeholders in the parent organization so that they can orchestrate things like knowledge spillbacks or spillovers where sometimes the spinout generates innovations that they can sell back to the parent firm. Or vice versa. Sometimes the parent firm generates innovations that they really can’t use, but now they’ve got this network of spinouts that they can try to market it through. So making use of these opportunities, though, requires an ongoing relationship. And so if there is a hostile break, it’s unlikely that any of that good stuff is going to happen later on. Because, people have long memories and when someone’s been scorned, they don’t want to do business with people who scorn them. So that’s why it’s so important during that exit to try to leave in a positive way.

Yeah, that’s very interesting. So what are the ethical dimensions of spinouts? Because you mentioned you’re leaving stealthily. If people feel that management would react negatively or maybe restrict them, then they would not want to show their cards when they were leaving. So what are the ethical dilemmas? Other than, obviously, theft of IP and stuff like that, this is not okay. But other than that, what do you see as the major ethical dilemmas perhaps around spinouts that can crop up?

Yeah, I think the major ethical dilemmas tend to come in when the spinouts are being led by a senior executive that’s leaving. That’s because the senior executives usually have fiduciary duties. They’re privy to the whole show. They’ve seen the whole business. They know a lot of inside information about the company. And as a fiduciary, because they’re automatically fiduciaries under most common law systems, executives are typically fiduciaries, that means that they have a responsibility, often it’s described as a duty honesty or duty of loyalty to their employer. So, what that means is that doing ring leading activities and trying to plan the spinout before leaving and those types of activities without informing the organization is a breach of that, of those fiduciary duties. So, for the more senior executives, it becomes much more important to negotiate an exit rather than trying to do one stealthily because they’re also the most likely leavers to face litigation for spinouts. We did a study of that actually. We found that the higher the rank, the more likely you are to get sued if you do a spinout. And that’s why. It’s because of those fiduciary duties that executives have. Whereas other people in the organization that don’t have those executive privileges and fiduciary duties, they don’t have the same duty of honesty and loyalty to the organization. And so, there are fewer ethical dilemmas for them. Where ethical dilemmas may come in is if they are tempted to do things like solicitation in breach of their restrictive covenants, that can be a problem. It is difficult to prove solicitation in court, but there’s lots of cases where people do all kinds of crazy things like hand out business cards on their way out to the firm and they’re giving their new business card to the clients of the parent firm. That’s obvious solicitation. It’s unethical. It’s also, it breaches restrictive covenants that most employees have signed. But that’s not the same thing. Solicitation is when you’re trying to get someone to come to your organization, but if customers of the parent organization come to you because you’re offering a better product, or if employees are leaving the parent organization to come to the spin out because you’re offering a better employment deal, well, that’s not solicitation. That’s just normal business. So I do think these ethical issues are important, but they tend to be more centered around the executives with those fiduciary duties.

Yeah, interesting, interesting. So what triggers a spinout? What do you see as a typical point where someone feels there is an opportunity for a spinout, or maybe someone reaches a point of frustration where they feel like they can only continue to create something outside the firm? What are the typical trigger points?

Well, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of there are a lot of triggers. In our interviews, we were able to identify some of the more common ones. Probably the most common one and the most ancient one in terms of our knowledge about these things is the strategic disagreement, which you kind of alluded to where the company wants to do one thing and the employees want to do something different. Sometimes, for example, the company wants to restructure and start using new technology, and a lot of the employees who are experts in the old technology, they just don’t want to come along. They’d rather just do a spinout and continue with the old technology. And sometimes it’s the other way around, where the employees want to pursue the new innovations and the employer organization doesn’t, and so that leads to a strategic disagreement. But it’s actually not the majority of the trigger. The triggers can be so numerous, but the strategic disagreement was the one that everyone thought was the most important. But as it turns out, the more studies that were done, we’re seeing things like interpersonal conflicts or managerial frictions, where someone just doesn’t get along with their boss or their managers, and that triggers them to want to leave, either to leave to a different job or to leave to do a new venture. So there are those sort of more negative type triggers. And even, interestingly, some are motivated by what they see as ethical issues within the employing organization. So for example, there was an oil drilling spinout, they spun out of an oil drilling company and they started doing geothermal drilling instead. Because those particular founders felt that it was unethical to continue down the path that they were going with their previous employer and saw the opportunity to go green. So there are all kinds of reasons that trigger spinouts. I don’t think it’s possible to really list them all, but one of the key patterns between, in all of them too, is the liquidity issue. So liquidity events, some people have shares or they have stock options. When those become liquid or become invested, that makes it possible to leave and do a spinout, because a lot of people are doing spinouts, they’re actually funding them themselves rather than, at least at the beginning, bootstrapping them rather than trying to find investors. And so when a company gets acquired, often as part of the acquisition deal, any of the employees who have stock options or shares, they have a way to cash out on those. If a company has an IPO, that’s a very typical trigger. It goes IPO, suddenly all the employees are able to cash out their shares and then do startups. So those liquidity triggers, I think, are really important as well.

That’s very interesting. So the liquidity events actually allow the people to have the capital for the spinout and to start their own business. And so what about those type of situations where there is no liquidity event, they are just working the company and maybe they start to build that spinout as a side hustle, and then the side hustle gets the point where they can replace their salary. Do you see that happening? Or it’s more like startup situations where companies make public and their stock options or a big bonus that funds it, or sometimes people can build up something to a point where it can become viable outside of the business.

Yeah, I mean, I think that we call them hybrid entrepreneurs, the ones who are still working for a company but are starting their side venture. We call them hybrid entrepreneurship because we use a different term for it because it is different. Often the spinouts are in the same industry as their parent organization. And so they might be competing in the same markets or they’ll have overlapping stakeholders. So it can be challenging to sort of do it on the side, because it’s visible to many of the organization’s stakeholders. So often, instead of doing it on the side, what they’re doing is often they’re doing it kind of like as an internal corporate venture for the parent organization, either formally or informally as a major or minor initiative that they’re trying to do within the parent organization, trying to convince parent organizations management that they should fund it and they should pursue it. But also, like for example, Steve Wozniak, when he was founding Apple, he’s working at Hewlett Packard and he had made a PC using what he learned at Hewlett Packard in his cubicle there. And he begged and pleaded with Hewlett Packard to build a PC with him. And eventually they told him no and they sent him on his way and he was lucky. He got an IP release to be able to then go ahead and develop the PC with Steve Jobs and the others. But that’s that typical crucial moment for the spinout founders realizing that they can’t do it internally because they’re not getting the support, they’re not getting the investment, they’re not getting the attention they need. And so that’s when they really start thinking externally. Whereas the hybrid entrepreneurs who are doing something on the side, often it’s something that’s not related to their organization’s business. So, it doesn’t have any kind of antagonism or it doesn’t have any kind of overlap with the stakeholders and clients and customers of the organization. So it can be more isolated and done on the side. And then once it gets big enough, then they can choose to leave their employment to pursue that. So I think it’s a little bit different, but they’re definitely related things, they’re related phenomena.

Okay, all right, that’s good. So it’s hybrid entrepreneurship, when you are developing something that’s different from the business of your employer, whereas the spinout is when you are essentially competing or you’re same customers or same market, you operate the same market. So what does it take to become a spinout? So if someone is thinking, oh, that’s really attractive. I’m working this company. I’ve got some ideas. It would be fantastic if I could somehow evolve into an entrepreneur from being an employee. Is this a myth that is possible or is this something that that there’s a certain point where you can make this happen? Maybe it’s a similar question to a previous one. But if I’m an internal spinout entrepreneur, how can I visualize this opportunity when I can? How can I plan for it that I kind of cut the umbilical cord here?

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a good question. It’s interesting. We were talking about triggers just before. Let me tell you about one story. An employee, she’s working for a company that’s developing products in the commercial construction industry. And she has an accident and breaks a limb and ends up stuck at home, basically stuck in bed with this injury for several months. And during that time, this person was a junior executive at the company. During this time of solitude and calm, healing the wound, she starts to realize that she wants to sell many of the same products that the parent firm sells, but instead of in the commercial construction industry, she wants to do it in the residential industry, which is instead of commercial construction, residential construction. So it’s a different industry, but it’s essentially the same product. So she comes back from her broken leg experience and goes to the employer and says, look, I’ve had time to reflect on this. I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’d like to do these. I’d like to sell a very similar product, but I’d like to sell it to these high-end retail customers instead of selling them through the commercial construction industry. And the employer says, well, we’re not interested in that. We don’t want to sell residential. The commercial construction market is way bigger. Even if we were to win the whole residential market, it would only be like a third of the size of our commercial construction business. And so, she thought, okay, well, this is a no go. But then the realization came that many of the products she wants to sell are really the same products that are being sold through the commercial construction distribution channel, but it’s just a different way of reaching the customer. So she cut a deal with the employer where she would actually buy all of the products from the commercial construction company and then repackage them for the residential market under her own brand. And so that she ended up doing it, it was successful. So the parent company is happy because they’re selling to another customer. To them, it’s just another big customer who’s buying lots of these products. And she’s happy because she doesn’t have to worry about manufacturing it, she’s got a good partner for that. And she can focus on the higher margin regional residential market and work on her own marketing for that. So what was the point of realization? Sometimes people already know that they wanna do it, but they need that time to sort of reflect. And there’s not a lot of time often if you’re a junior executive working in a company and you’re working like crazy hours and really trying to achieve things for your employer. There’s not a lot of time for that reflection to think about, well, what about alternative career paths for myself. But one of the interesting things that I’ve seen and that we’ve seen in interviews is that people describe it as, well, they just reached this point where they’re working for the company long enough that it’s almost like they realized that, hey, I could do this myself. Like, I know how all of this works. It’s like, even though they’re not a fiduciary necessarily, they don’t necessarily have access to all the whole show, but they’ve seen enough of it. They’ve been around enough that they understand it. And it’s that epiphany moment of realizing that, oh, I could do this myself. It doesn’t come right away. Often, it takes several years of experience, typically, before people have that realization. But many people come to that point. And once they’re there, there’s no going back.

Once they make that realization, there's no going back. Share on X

Because what do you do at that point? Either you can wait in line to be the CEO, which might take forever, or you can do something yourself. So we see that quite a bit.

I love it. I love this idea that the myth of entrepreneurship is that people just out of college get a bag of money from a venture fund, and then they start their startup. The reality is that most entrepreneurs are forced in a profession, they develop a knowledge, they develop some skills, and they realize they can do it alone, do it themselves. And they go out and they spinout of the employer organization in one way or another, and they start a business. And that’s what Michael Gerber calls the technicians start businesses. They come out of their profession and they start a business. So I love this concept. And so tell us quickly about your book that is coming out, Spinout Ventures. Is this out already or it’s coming out very soon?

Yeah, it’s out now. It’s available everywhere. Just search for Spinout Ventures. I think we’ve won those keywords, luckily. Yes, and it’s a short book. I actually have a copy of it right here. So we wanted to make it easily digestible for a broad audience of employees and executives. So we tried to write it in a very welcoming way. So in other words, a non-academic language. You can think of it as a how-to guide for employees who want to become entrepreneurs, but it’s also like a how-to guide for the managers who have to deal with employees who want to become entrepreneurs, because they need to know this stuff just as much as the employees do, right? To be able to form an opinion about how they should deal with spinouts and to be able to manage spinouts and to know how to negotiate with them. They may not.

That makes sense. That makes sense. All right, so please go to Amazon and check it out, Spinout Ventures: Transition from Employees to Entrepreneurs. Whether you are an employee or an entrepreneur invading inside a company or you’re a manager that you could actually be impacted by your employees becoming spinouts and you want to make the most of that. And if people would like to connect with you, is there a website that they should visit or LinkedIn? Where can they find you?

Yeah, I’m easy to find on LinkedIn. Just look for my name, Andre Laplume. I’ve won those keywords too.

Sounds good. Sounds good. So, Andre Laplume, a professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, author of Spinout Ventures. Thanks for coming on the show and telling us, sharing your experience and knowledge about spinouts. Definitely, it’s a great source of entrepreneurship and it’s a very valuable content. And so those of you listening, make sure you follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn so that you don’t miss episodes like this. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

Thanks, Steve. 

 

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