LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 163

Fred Farina — The Caltech Fund

September 5, 2022

Pre-Seed
Seed

Fred is the Chief Innovation and Partnerships officer at Caltech where he oversees the Tech Transfer office and recently set up two new funds : The Caltech Fund and the Wilson and Hill fund.

Fred gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how Caltech labs are run and how his team thinks about the translational potential of scientific work.

Full transcript

Today I am with Fred Farina. Fred is the chief innovation and partnerships officer at Caltech where he oversees the tech transfer office and recently set up two new funds–the Caltech Fund and the Wilson and Hill fund. Fred, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Maybe we start with a little bit of the overview of tech transfer and what you're doing at Caltech.

That sounds good. So, let me go back in time a little bit, because you know, Caltech came to the tech transfer world a bit late compared to our peers like at MIT and Stanford who started MIT in the forties and, uh, Stanford in 1970. And we started in 1995, before that we didn't have an office of tech transfer.