Questions for Linden Rhoads, University of Washington Vice Provost for Technology Transfer

Linden Rhoads takes over UW Tech Transfer, which commercializes research developments, on Aug. 14. The Puget Sound Business Journal reached her during a business trip in Europe.

You’re in Paris now. What’s it like this time of year? Well for one thing, as you know, the weather this year in Seattle hasn’t been what we would have it be. So here is this thing in the sky, a glowing orb, which I’m acquainting myself with in Paris.

You’ve been involved in a lot of Seattle-area tech startups. Which were the biggest successes? I think AdRelevance and Singingfish were wonderful successes because we created a lot of value in a small amount of time. And I’m also proud that the products are still in use today and that wasn’t true of many products that were created in that (dot-com) era.

You were involved in a company called Virtual i-O that made virtual-reality eyeglasses and failed in the ’90s. What did you take away from that experience? In the case of Virtual i-O, it failed for the simplest of reasons. We picked the wrong thing to do. The entire product category had no chance of being successful at this time in history. Everyone connected with it; we worked so hard. It was so much ingenuity and creativity and effort, and in some respects all we did was prolong the inevitable.

UW Tech Transfer has come under criticism for being too slow and bureaucratic and not necessarily in tune with the business community. What are your plans? I think that Tech Transfer has radically improved over recent years and that sometimes reputation takes a long time to catch up to reality. So I think that their reputation, to the extent that it’s negative, is not necessarily deserved currently. That being said, when you look at the tremendous increase in the number of invention disclosures, patent filings and licenses that technology transfer is managing and how that’s ramped over the last few years and how the head count has ramped over the last few years — there are 55 people there now — I think that you would expect exactly what has happened, which is there are some information-technology and process challenges there. One specific plan I have is to overhaul the IT infrastructure so that we can manage a tremendous amount of transactions and documents every year and be much, much more responsive and, even more importantly, that we don’t drop anything.

You live on Orcas Island. What is life like there? I do have Wi-Fi in every area of the house and I like to sail a lot. My family ran a sailing camp in Maine when I was young. It appeals to my interest in physics and science — to sail. It’s an opportunity to do a lot of deep thinking without a lot of interruption.

I’ve read you’re pretty involved in Democratic politics. I actually have the Washington state license plate “OBAMA” on my Mini Cooper.

Did you have a lot of competition to get it? I was the first to request that vanity plate.

EENGLEMAN@BIZJOURNALS.COM | 206.876.5430

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