I have a periodic conversation with one of my friendly local-neighbourhood venture capitalists. It is usually prefaced politely: “Why, when you are usually fairly forward-thinking on university technology transfer…”, then goes into the turn “… are you so old-school on the issue of equity stakes retained by the university in spinouts?” By this he means: why do I seek to capture a decent slice of the value created by the new venture for the university. This is followed by some…