challenge to look for investors if your founders are companies, not individual people. Investors don’t like that. Getting qualified people and keeping them in a small company is also a big challenge.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known before you got started with the company? To be patient. I’m a very impatient person and I’m learning patience. If I had known how long some things take, it would have made l i f e e a s i e r . I n s c i e n c e , y o u n e e d p a t i e n c e w i t h your work, but I think it requires a different kind of patience if you’re waiting for other companies to react or answer. You just can’t do anything to speed up the process. Doing science or development is more fun than wa i t i n g f o r c o n t r a c t s o r d i s c u s s i n g c o n t r a c t s .

Do you have any advice for somebody who’s just star t ing their own business? If you found a company, it’s really important that the basic contracts you’re building it on – your shareholder agreement, statute and inves tment contrac t , for example – are set up correctly. That way, you still have a “say” in your business, and i t ’s clear what will happen i f you get investors in who will want to sell the company at some point. But one has to be c a r e f u l wha t one s i g n s . I f y ou c ome f r om a un i-

l i c a l a s m a M e d r r a p

T e

Start-up starter Biophysicist Julia Zimmermann co - f ounded Ter r aplasma in 2011.

If you’re a woman founding a company, just ignore stupid comments from stupid people versity, you may not know anything about contracts, except your own employment contract, and for me it was totally new. So my advice is to buy a book and read about contract law because there’s a lot of stuf f in that area that one doesn’t understand in the beginning.

B e c au s e we ha v e n ow f o und e d t wo dau g hter companies as well, we know a lot, but it was really “learning by doing”. For the first c ompany, we had s ome f und s t o p a y o u r l e g a l costs, but investors have more money and they can hire a lot of lawyers, who of course work to get the best deal for their clients. We were lucky in that we had enough money to get a lawyer who was very good and who was able to explain to me exactly what was in every paragraph of the contract. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have understood it as it’s just not my language.

Also, if you’re a woman founding a company, just ignore stupid comments from stupid people. The start-up world is a very male-driven environment and people do say strange things sometimes.

Julia Zimmermann is co-managing director and co-founder of Terraplasma, chief technology officer of Terraplasma Medical and an adviser for Terraplasma Emission Control. Julianna Photopoulos i s a sc ience wr i t er based in Br i s t ol, UK

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