| When I was a child the NFL was still drinking Kool-Aid, and only the Gators had Gatorade. Other schools were envious and there was pressure to release it. It's hot down there in the SEC. By the time I got to the University they were starting to rake in the bucks on the Gatorade and there was an emerging culture where there was widespread pressure to "invent new things or new ways of making the same old things". It didn't usually work out and has long since faded, but it was an exciting time, not exactly shared by other universities, even some of the most prestigious. This was quite strong in the Chemistry department where competition was very fierce in this respect, which could be seen as unsustainable at the time. So when I was still a teenager I realized it was already too late and there would have to be a way to own my own inventions other than academic research, that had to be crossed off the list early. It looked like a pretty smooth track but it was not headed where I wanted to go. Therefore no PhD, no Bell Labs, no IBM, etc. I forked early without resources which always seems premature, but in hindsight it was almost already too late for entrepreneurial effort alone to allow me to later launch without outside capital. Interestingly, none of the other most lucrative university royalties today are nearly as many decades old as Gatorade. |