FAQ

Organic growth is where you do it all yourself in house. For a tech startup, that would be creating the tech and product, building the company business plans, strategies, and implementation.

Inorganic growth is where you get all of this from the outside. An acquisition is this type of growth.

We view our transplants as a hybrid because you acquire the tech or existing product inorganically, but you organically create a new type of business around it.

For many years, we have witnessed excess opportunities, especially solution opportunities, that could be done with a platform or general use product. Often there are just too many things to pursue.
We also saw this many times when working with enterprise companies where customers would come up with great solution ideas for our products. However, the company could not do both solutions and underlying hardware.

A company is often resource constrained and focuses on expanding their business and organization. Their investors will want them to scale as fast as possible and achieve good revenue and profit. Invest in what is working. They are OK with new product roadmaps and expansion but not to the detriment of the main market.

So, often these other opportunities are known but not acted upon. There may even be customers clamoring for it. But it is a business decision on how to use the resources.

All technologies and business opportunities have a limited lifetime. Business likes to fill the voids If we can make license fees, royalties, and OEM income with no or small use of our resources, this looks like free money. Also, BigCo can end up with orphan products when they change organization or strategy and they would like to license these out.

Further, if the receiver is an entrepreneur, it is nearly impossible to find or hire a hardering working employee to match an entrepreneur's drive, zeal and ambition. They are going to work hard for their sales which directly profits the licensor.

These opportunities are great for new startups and for medium sized companies that wish to complement their existing business. (Big companies will tend to acquire one of these.) We think various regions will also want to create new business opportunities for the local business ecosystem.

A technology or product might have multiple uses in different fields or geographies. We consider this a platform from which you can serve many different markets and their problems. Often, it takes different supporting infrastructure or features as well as a different business case, strategy, and resources.

Often the licensed product or technology is already in the market place by the licensing company. So, instead of starting from scratch, you are getting a product or technology well beyond the prototype stage and with a wealth of R&D behind it. This means that there is much less risk associated with the technology part of the new business.

As a bonus, there are often known existing potential customers who want this solution. This makes it much easier to start the business development process since you are not starting cold and may already have a usable prototype for doing pilot tests.

We are a blended company that provides mentoring and licensing operations. During one of the license deals, we will charge for our services as well as take a small percentage of a royalty stream. Helping the receiver, we will also take a small percentage of stock as well as charge for consulting services. Each case can be different so there is no set formula.

Well, it turns out many of our first candidates were already in use in some form or another.

We are definitely working with innovation, so we wanted that as a component.

Then we asked ourselves what do we really do? And we realized that the big step was to take raw opportunities and make them into compelling business propositions. We thought of this as distilling or refining. The word “Distillery” was heavily used, hence settled for “Refinery”. (Two of us come from Kentucky, so we favored distillery!)