MSU Research Foundation Podcast
The MSU Research Foundation Podcast takes you behind the scenes of research and entrepreneurship within Michigan State University's ecosystem. Discover how ideas create impact, with stories from dedicated researchers, ambitious entrepreneurs, and the innovators shaping Michigan's future. From breakthrough discoveries to startup journeys, explore how the MSU Research Foundation helps fuel innovation and economic growth across the state.
MSU Research Foundation Podcast
Building a University Startup Ecosystem with IU Ventures
In this episode, we talk with Jon Barada, vice president of IU Ventures, about how Indiana University is building a thriving startup ecosystem powered by alumni engagement and early-stage venture funding. Like the MSU Research Foundation, IU Ventures supports faculty, student, and alumni-led startups through a mix of philanthropic venture funds, an angel network, and community-building programs.
Jon shares how IU Ventures launched its Founders and Funders Network to connect IU-affiliated entrepreneurs with capital, expertise, and one another. We discuss the growing role universities play in early-stage investing—especially in regions underserved by traditional venture capital—and how cross-campus and Big Ten collaboration can help amplify impact. Jon also talks about building trust with advancement teams, cultivating a strong alumni pipeline, and the vision behind the Big Ten Venture Network.
Host: David Washburn
Guests: Jon Barada (Vice President, IU Ventures)
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound
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In this conversation I spoke with Jon Barada. Jon a VP at Indiana University Ventures, IU Ventures. He's a good colleague from another university here in the Big Ten that does a lot of the same types of things we do in terms of early stage venture investing for tech commercialization. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Dave Washburn:Welc ome to the MSU Research Foundation podcast. Today will be a little bit different. I'm excited to talk with Jon Barada, who is vice president of IU Ventures. Yes, that IU, Indiana University, one of our Big Ten University friends down the road in Bloomington. You know I wanted to talk to Jon because many individuals always tell us you know, all the cool things we're doing are wonderful. Is that unique to Michigan State? Do other universities do this? And the answer is yes, and we all talk to each other all the time and try to convene and compare notes, and Jon Barada is one of the great conveners in the Big Ten. He a couple of years ago took it upon himself to try to identify all of the folks interested in doing the types of things we do with our commercialization work and our early venture fund activity, and so I invited Jon to come and talk to us about what they're doing at IU. So welcome Jon.
Jon Barada:Thanks so much, Dave. At first I thought you I was prepared to talk about IU football and our victory at East Lansing last fall, which I think probably the first time IU football has won in East Lansing in a half a century. So if you want to talk about IU football for the time here, I'm happy to do that.
Dave Washburn:Well, you know, I wrote an extensive outline and that didn't make the list, so but IU did have a great year in football and IU is such a great university. I think it's a special place, like all of our Big Ten university communities. I have a special place in my heart for IU. I have a lot of friends who graduated from there. I have a couple of friends that are faculty there now and it's just such a wonderful place and you were so great to pull the group together. But before we get into sort of that sort of early stage venture investing from IU Ventures, I just wondered if you could, you know, tell us about your background, where you from, where did you study? How did you arrive where you are, uh, today?
Jon Barada:Yeah, thanks so much. Well, appreciate the opportunity to be here and go green, go go white. I think is the protocol. I have a nephew who just graduated from Michigan State, so I'm right back at you with the uh, with the love MSU and East Lansing. So Jon Barrett is my name, I'm an Indiana kid, small Indiana, towards uh, towards the uh, the Ohio river, down there, uh, on the Southeast part of the state, Rushville, Indiana, um, named after Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence uh and and home to 1940 presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie.
Jon Barada:So now you know everything you need to know about my hometown of Rushville, Indiana. So just a small town, rural. My parents both went to Indiana University. They met on a trip with a group to the 1968 Rose Bowl the only time Indiana University has played in the Rose Bowl the event, not the stadium, because we played just this past year with the expansion of the Big Ten we got to play UCLA in the Rose Bowl but we lost to USC in that game. In January 1968.
Jon Barada:Two older brothers who went to Indiana University so we're just, you know, lifelong Hoosier fans signed a picture of Bob Knight in my bedroom from the time I was a little kid, you know listening to IU basketball on the on my Walkman you know, when my parents made me go to bed and I needed to listen to the last minutes of the game and over time or whatever.
Jon Barada:So Hoosier through and through. I've been in higher education and healthcare for the most part of my career. Fund development, alumni relations, donor development, fundraising for the Kelly School of Business at IU, for the IU School of Medicine, and then about 15 years ago I had the opportunity to come lead the Bloomington. At the time it was called the Bloomington Hospital Foundation, so we were the philanthropic arm of our local hospital system here in Bloomington, Indiana, so led the foundation. It was a small like $35 million endowment fund and we raised money to build Hospice House and the NICU Advancements to help with cardiac care and do a lot of that work. And, yeah, had the opportunity to really dive into the local community and be connected to the local scene and that led to a conversation with our president and CEO, Tony Armstrong.
Jon Barada:He said hey, come help us build this thing over at IU Ventures and a lot of those kind of transferable skills relative to community building and thinking about how we think about connecting what we call at IU the founders and funders network. And so I've been with the team at IU Ventures, yeah, for like the last, going into my fifth year, and it's just been a blast deploying these early stage venture funds, helping to stitch together our community of IU founders and IU funders and, you know, learning from people at the Big Ten ecosystem as well, so it's been a fantastic journey helping to create these ecosystems.
Dave Washburn:Yeah, I, I was just thank you for all that and I appreciate the the deep connectivity to IU that you have and and I was.
Dave Washburn:I was talking with a colleague a while back who had sort of returned from Silicon Valley to the state of Michigan to help run a venture-backed startup company and he was surprised at how involved both Michigan State and U of M were in terms of doing a lot of mentorship and support and early stage investing to help launch these tech transfer initiatives. He just said it wasn't something that he saw much of in the Valley and I'm sure that the universities there probably don't need to play at that level, but certainly I think in the Midwest and the Big Ten and probably the SEC schools also all play in this game where they, you know you can't find a lot of venture capitalists running around Bloomington or East Lansing or, you know, west Lafayette or Iowa City, and so many universities have sort of taken on this task to figure out how to raise dollars to fund these early stage efforts, to fund these early stage efforts. So IU founders and funders network. So this to me sounds like a community of alumni who have come together. Can you expand?
Jon Barada:on the program, yeah, sure, so I'll tell a little bit of a kind of a journey story, so kind of the clarifying question for us at IU Ventures is how can we put our thumb on the scale to create more IU affiliated startup success stories, right? So how can we be additive to that success? And the reasons that we might do that include economic development reasons. It includes um, you know, tech transfer, getting the best research into the world that helps reduce suffering, cure disease, make the world a better place to live in um. There's a student demand component to that. Right, students are increasingly kind of looking to go to school in places that have startup kind of um resources for them to access um. So there's a bunch of whys a university might do that and, importantly, all of the benefits in order to Indiana University in our case, or to Michigan State in your case. You know we certainly don't claim any credit for Mark Cuban's success as one of our kind of luminary founders.
Jon Barada:That's right. This idea of could we be . 01 percent, . 001 percent of wind in the sails of more IU success startups, so for us as we started to do that assessment, the like many places, and to your point earlier, the first move on that chessboard is funding. There can be a funding gap, and so how do we address that gap in the funding? So our journey is we launched the IU Philanthropic Venture Fund, which had an investment committee and was kind of a house fund, so to speak, and that fund was set up as a nonprofit fund. So evergreen fund. We make investments into IU affiliate startups, and for us to define that IU affiliate it is IU alumni, faculty staff or student. The DNA of any company that might come into our pipeline has to have really strong IU DNA as defined by IU faculty staff, student or alumni founded company or a company that's commercializing technology or other intellectual property that the university has an interest in.
Dave Washburn:Yeah, do they have to be in the state?
Jon Barada:No, they do not. They do not have to be in the state. Certainly, I think 55% of our investments are in Indiana, so there's obviously a high concentration of IU alumni who live in the state of Indiana, but we really opened it up to the entire universe of kind of IU founders, if you will. Second step on that journey was, as we were out talking to alums, building our kind of community, getting awareness about that. We have this fund and we're looking for deal flow was the IU Angel Network and I'll land the plane here. You asked about the.
Jon Barada:IU Founders and Founders Network and I'll land that plane. So we've built about 100 member IU Angel Network. These are alumni for the most part. We do have faculty and some students who are accredited. We have a couple of different levels an accredited level and an education membership level. These are a platform that connects IU founders and IU funders. We put them in the same room. Since we launched that in 2020, we've deployed about $9 million of capital through the IU Angel Network. We take a membership fee, but we don't take any sort of carried interest on that. It's really just a platform that puts the founder and the funder in the room together and maybe we can make something positive happen in terms of getting some capital deployed.
Jon Barada:And then the third prong of that journey was this idea of what we call the IU Founders and Funders Network, and that is the insight around. Resting inside of the nearly 800,000 living IU alumni is a world class venture ecosystem. We have founders with IU DNA, we have funders with IU DNA, we have service providers, attorneys and accountants who can help with transactions and documents. We have customers, we have interns, we have your next CTO is waiting. So this world-class community of really, really talented people, all with this IU DNA. And so our mindset was how can we stitch that community together which we kind of feel is fairly new and novel, around thinking about like an alumni engagement strategy? Right, it's like if you're a Kelly School of Business grad, we communicate to you at the Kelly alum. If you're a school of medicine alum, we communicate to you on that pillar.
Jon Barada:But this idea of around vocation or even an industry, about like this startup ecosystem to kind of bring all the technically the disparate parts of that ecosystem in together, was really the insight that said, hey, let's, let's build a community of Hoosier founders and funders, but also all of those ancillary pieces that go together. And so we've got a different programming that we do, event programming, campus events, online events that we do and it really has become a really powerful referral network. And the idea there is how do we make the network a proper noun right? This is the proper noun the network. You belong to the network and it's something that can create value for you, but also the expectation is that you're giving into the network as well.
Jon Barada:So it's this virtuous cycle of hey, I'm going to mentor a student, I'm going to get funding, I'm going to invest right. It's this idea of all of that ecosystem together can create a really fun, interesting, cool community of people. It's a way to deploy the resources and kind of that engagement of the university to help create more wins for the university. So yeah, it's been a great. It's been a great journey.
Dave Washburn:Well, you know, I think it's interesting to hear all these things and, given your background in what I would call sort of professional advancement or some call it fundraising.
Dave Washburn:But you know, two of three of three of your programs here really leverage the, the massive IU sort of alumni group. You know the Philanthropic Venture Fund for example, the angel network or the funder network. You know, many universities I think go into this and find that they can easily annoy or run afoul with the advancement group. You've somehow figured that out. So I wondered if you could talk about the journey of figuring that out, because folks can get territorial.
Jon Barada:Yeah, for sure no, and that's a good question. So I think for us, what was really the point that we leaned into with this notion and we just we went out and we did research and we talked to our prospective angels and our prospective investors, so to speak, and we said you know, how do you think about this? Do you think this cannibalizes your charitable donations to the university, relative kind of investment? And the answer was an unequivocal no. It's. In fact, it's a way, it's a platform to bring me in closer to the institution. And I think the real key insight for us was you know and I think this resonates as being kind of instinctively true, intuitively true we have kind of two discrete buckets of money, if you will.
Jon Barada:You know, if I have $10, you know some of those are, you know, to operate my house and pay my mortgage and to, you know, fund my 529 plans for my kids. Some of that is to buy food and go out for sports and entertainment. Some of that is investment money and some of that is charitable money. So I have that very discreet kind of notion of this money is to be given away. I expect nothing in return for this other than the hope that I'm going to do good in the world. Help improve someone's life by giving to the local food bank or to give to the cancer center right.
Dave Washburn:Yeah.
Jon Barada:And then over here on this idea of my investing dollars. I have a different orientation to those dollars and those are discrete kind of buckets. So for us we've found that there has been not a negative correlation that you know if I'm investing I'm not donating. Right, that has not proven to be the case in our community that we've built. Time will tell if the positive corollary of that is true, which is to say, as I get more invested into the university and the founders and the faculty and the technology, that actually increases my charitable giving too. We've not had kind of enough timeline to kind of prove that the positive end of that either way, but we feel pretty confident that we're not cannibalizing, so to speak. It's not, it's a let's grow the pie versus. It's a discreet zero sum game where you know an angel is only going to have so much to give to IU and it's going to go down if one of them, if the other, goes up.
Dave Washburn:Yeah.
Jon Barada:That hasn't so far proven to be the case.
Dave Washburn:Yeah, can you? Can you talk about the kind of the deal flow that that all three of these are are looking at and how those are identified and put through a process, so to speak, and exposed to the different programs or different funds?
Jon Barada:Yeah, sure, yeah. So the Philanthropic Venture Fund is a kind of our house fund. It was seeded with kind of IU Ventures money. We're we operate with a separate 501c3 that the, that, the that the university started and created.
Jon Barada:We have an investment committee that is got some faculty and also some really high level alums that have experience kind of working in in the space who are really the ultimate kind of deciders about whether an opportunity gets funded or not. Average check size on that size is about $250, 000. Nice, most of our life science deals are going to come through that fund. A lot of the faculty deals will kind of matriculate through kind of that house fund side of things. The Angel Network average check size there is probably about $25,000. And they share we do have a couple of triggers as well.
Jon Barada:So on the angel network side if at least oh don't quote me on this, Dave, I think it's if at least five angels invest in a deal and the total amount is. Is it a half a million dollars? Is it 250? I'm not. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but there are a couple of um, I'm spacing that right now, but the idea is that if the angel network deems with a certain number and a volume of investment, then it'll also trigger an investment from from the house fund.
Dave Washburn:Okay.
Jon Barada:So that we're kind of we're in co-investors. Now the angels obviously love that um side of that, that and then from a deal deal flow perspective, you know, I would say it's gone. The. The evolution of that has started with a lot of a lot of LinkedIn requests a lot of like build, build it, building our community. Literally one cup of coffee at a time.
Dave Washburn:Okay.
Jon Barada:Coming from that, that that fundraising background. Interestingly, you know, for Michigan State and Indiana University we can look somebody up who was an alum of our institution and we we know when they graduated, we know if they were part of the dance marathon and if they were part of little 500, they were part in the Greek system. Like, we have a lot of like interests and we know a little bit about them in terms of what they were engaged in. Maybe we have some employment information. But one of the things that we it's really hard to have is hey, pull me a list of all the people that are building early stage venture backable companies.
Dave Washburn:Yeah.
Jon Barada:Yeah, well, that's that's. That's not something that we have like really great data on.
Jon Barada:And so we've kind of been building that database. Literally one LinkedIn request, one cup of coffee, one inbound request from our email, somebody filling out a form from our website at a time. Our founders and funders network, our events. So we did an event strategy where we're hosting little meetups in San Francisco and LA and New York where we're bringing together these folks together at a pub or a restaurant and we'll maybe have a speaker.
Jon Barada:But it's a way to kind of generate community. Number one, obviously. Number two it's helping to kind of enforce that network. But it's also a data. You know, it's a data strategy. How do we communicate with and find out who the people are in our IU ecosystem who are investing in early stage companies, who are building early stage companies, who have built and exited early stage companies, so we can bring them in as EIRs or like and really stitch that community together. So what we found is that, as we've been doing that, it's also created like a little bit of a data strategy for our foundation partners to say like actually we've got, you know, 2,500 names now of people with IU DNA who are interested in the work that we're doing.
Jon Barada:So it's a, it's an affinity group. It's an affinity group just like you would have an affinity group of alumni who graduated from a specific school or who are interested in a certain part of the university's mission. We've kind of built that affinity group from scratch.
Jon Barada:Our deal flow in early stages was us just hunting, a lot of hunting and finding those people. Now we are getting 30 to 40 inbound requests a month for people coming into our pipeline. So people go, we people are finding us. There are kind of the word is out a little bit in terms of that we're there and so we're having to do less of that hunting, so to speak. So to speak for deal flow, I mean, it's really kind of started to find us. A little bit. That's kind of word has gotten out. I. I always point to, uh, an inflection point, maybe, maybe 18, 24 months ago on, on one of our Linked"n posts, somebody had responded. Today I learned that my university has a venture capital arm," we're like yes, that's exactly that's that.
Jon Barada:Yeah, that's validation that we're moving in the right direction. So nice, we've, we've run. We've run ads in the football stadium. We've run ads in our alumni magazine. Okay, we, we have a pretty heavy, uh robust, LinkedIn presence. We have an event strategy where we're doing things. So those have been some of the ways we've been able to go about kind of building that deal flow pipeline.
Dave Washburn:Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I was going to ask you, but I think you already answered it. It sounds like some portfolio companies can receive investment across a number of the funds. I think you did say that you know IU has locations around the campus and very strong in health sciences in Indianapolis. I assume you and your colleagues are sort of canvassing the state and offer everything to all of the campuses.
Jon Barada:Yeah, absolutely. We've started in Bloomington kind of the flagship campus, and then there's some really really exciting stuff going on under President Witten's leadership and the Indianapolis campus. So Indiana University, Indianapolis and Purdue University used to have a joint kind of weird I don't fully understand it, but it was IUPUI. Hey, Purdue will do some engineering, we'll do some software and health sciences and kind of mash it up the best of both worlds. A couple of years ago that kind of separated formally.
Jon Barada:And our IU School of Medicine I think is the largest, I think Illinois and IU kind of trade off spots for the largest medical school in the country. And there's some really exciting new initiatives going on. The IU Lab, which is under the leadership of our VP for Research, Russ Mumper, which is really focused on health science kind of development. So working with Eli Lilly, working with IU Health, working with other medical and health science companies, is really trying to think about how do we accelerate and develop the tech transfer function generically speaking coming out of the IU School of Medicine and the world-class research there. So super excited about that I think. Next for us is thinking about how we go to the regional campuses across the state. So Kokomo, indiana, down by Jeffersonville and Louisville over by Evansville. So so campuses across the state and really thinking about how we, how we leverage those. I don't know that we figured that out exactly yet and, honestly, like entrepreneurship may look very different in Kokomo, Indiana, maybe that's more, you know what we'll call Main Street.
Dave Washburn:That's right.
Jon Barada:Type of businesses versus hey.
Jon Barada:I'm trying to build a Silicon Valley software company that I can scale and exit. Well, maybe it's, no, I'm trying to build a $20 million HVAC company here and scale this different. So entrepreneurship, I think, means a little bit something different in each one of our statewide campus partners. So I think that's a new frontier for us will be to really think about how each one of those statewide partners, campuses, systems. You know what does entrepreneurship mean in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. What does that mean and what are the things that might be helpful there relative to Richmond Indiana or Kokomo Indiana, a little bit different than maybe Bloomington Indiana, with the Kelly School of Business and students coming from all over the world and who have different goals or dreams about what they want to do with their future.
Dave Washburn:Yeah, you mentioned President Witten. I did want to point out that I think she spent over a decade as a faculty member and administrator at Michigan State. I think she was. I know she was a dean here. She left about the time I got here in 2014. So we did not cross paths, but I do recall her name and I know that she had a long tenure here before finding her way to become the president of IU. But I wondered, you know, with that, if you could talk a little bit about the work you've done to bring together many of the Big Ten universities, because something I think is really early, but I appreciate your work that you've done there.
Jon Barada:Yeah, well, thanks for saying that, Dave. I appreciate the encouragement. You know, I wish that there was some sort of like miraculous insight or some sort of fantastic story there, but ultimately, um, the genesis of that for me was hey, I'm coming from healthcare philanthropy as the CEO of the Bloomington Hospital Foundation. Um, I don't know anything about venture capital. I don't know anything about startups. I've watched Shark Tank a couple of times.
Jon Barada:I don't know if that qualifies me from being a venture capitalist, and so the concept was really just bore out of this idea of man. I know that I got a truckload to learn and I know there are people doing similar things to what we're trying to do at IU, and I wonder if dot dot.
Dave Washburn:Yeah.
Jon Barada:I wonder if we might share best practices, coach each other up, share documents and, when you know if it makes sense, you know, share lessons learned and you know, hey, don't do this, cause we screwed up and we got a black eye from doing that. Hey, we'll save you the pain, go go. Go left instead of right kind of stuff. So, um, yeah, I remember just kind of sending out, just literally getting on, you know, doing some Googling and finding names of people that looked like they might have titles that would be in the in the same world, and we jumped on a zoom call and you know everyone was like, yeah, this sounds great, uh, this sounds really good. And, uh, I got to give a shout out to our friends uh, Ryan Daymeyer, who's an IU alum at Bridge Bank up in Chicago.
Jon Barada:And um, um our friends at Corals and Brady, um Mark Ehrman um who helped. I said, hey, you know a little bit of that fundraising background. I said, hey, would you guys be willing to sponsor this and help us defray some of the costs?
Dave Washburn:Both very supportive. Yeah, yeah.
Jon Barada:Yeah, so they love the idea and we just pick the date and the time and you know, the rest, they say, is in God's hands. You know, the first year we had, you know, 50, 40, 50 people show up and you know the cast of characters, if you will has started. I feel like it's been fine tuning in terms of, like, the right people who want to be part of that that group have kind of continued to kind of self-select themselves in to this community. And you know, we've got are we is this the fourth of this year will be the fourth anniversary of the Big 10 Venture Network Summit. Yeah, I think I think we're doing our fourth, fourth one this this fall.
Jon Barada:And uh, you know I have had some really cool conversations with the national venture capital association and they would like to kind of be supportive of it as well, and so we got some things cooking on that front. There's so much opportunity this has just been a volunteer kind of passion to kind of bring people together and get a couple of interesting speakers and some food and some sponsors to help make the thing happen. But whether do we start a fund? You know, is there a Big Ten Venture Fund? You know, is there a way to partner with the Big Ten Channel? the Big Ten Network?
Dave Washburn:Is there a way?
Jon Barada:to partner with an innovation showcase that we're showcasing the best of the Big Ten innovation ecosystems. And then it was exciting to bring in, as the Big Ten continues to expand. What a benefit to bring in our West coast, you know partners in Oregon and Washington and USC and UCLA, which just brings in a totally new you know worldview and ecosystem and set of strengths to the table. So, um, and and at the end of the day, right, really really good honorable people who are whip smart, who are doing really interesting things, who get together, enjoy beer and can can just help make, make our work a little bit more fun and help us be a little bit more productive with that community. So that's been a lot of fun and a lot of people have contributed to help make that thing. Um, yeah, I don't want to overstate it. You know we haven't cured any any diseases or anything yet, but but it's been a nice.
Jon Barada:It's been a nice base hit for the community, I think.
Dave Washburn:I think you're right and I think it, uh, I bring it does it does bring a community together and allows you to share best practices and, and I think a lot of the the, certainly in the Midwest Big 10 universities I know that there are folks in the SEC doing the same thing. All of this, to me, is about it's really about helping to drive the impact of research. If you will pulling really smart ideas out of universities that can be turned into entities, either through tech transfer or through the startup mechanism, and and putting them in a position to make, to make that impact, as you say. So, uh, it's, it's support for the students and the faculty and the alumni and the scientists to bring, to bring those things out. Is is really the um, the the game here and, uh, I think, to the extent we can, we can help, uh, you know, with you know mentorship and support, and maybe write a few checks into these places and get them positioned to go, talk to professionals and raise money from professionals. To me, I think that that is sort of what our, what our role is here to create jobs and keep jobs in in our respective states and our respective communities. So I really appreciate you doing all that pulling this group together, and it's just fun to talk to you about all the programs at IU to drive this type of activity.
Dave Washburn:My guest today has been Jon Barada. He is the vice president of IU Ventures. I think they're doing great things there and encourage you to check them out, and he's a friend of ours, certainly at Michigan State, and we look forward to many things. Great things together. Jon, thanks for being here.
Jon Barada:Thank you, Dave.
