profile
By KaTY SMITH + Photos by rob hardin
Bill Baumel
Managing director
Ohio Innovation Fund
Age: 48
In position since: 2016
Previous: Partner with RWI Ventures, a
venture capital fund in Silicon Valley.
More than two decades in the West
Coast VC space.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in
accounting from Ohio State University;
MBA from University of Michigan.
Silicon
Valley cred,
Ohio roots
Bill Baumel has just the
background to lead the
Ohio Innovation Fund, an
unprecedented investment
by the state’s universities
in venture capital.
W
hen Bill Baumel was in
business school at the
University of Michigan,
all his friends wanted
to go into investment banking on
Wall Street. It was the early 1990s
and they were dying to get interviews
with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stan-
ley, Merrill Lynch, Boston Consult-
ing, Andersen Consulting and the
like. Not Bill Baumel.
With a bachelor’s degree in ac-
counting from Ohio State University,
the Cincinnati native had spent two
years following college at Deloitte &
Touche in San Francisco, where he
earned his CPA. There, he found him-
self doing due diligence for private
12 ColumbusCEO l December 2019
equity firms. The experience was
enough to draw him into the field of I don’t know
venture capital when he went to the
University of Michigan for his MBA. if I could thrive or
“Everyone was interested in work-
ing for Ford, and Procter and Gamble,
survive, either one, in
and Microsoft, and General Electric a larger entity.
in a leadership development program
and what have you,” Baumel says. I think I’d be too
“And that gave me a real opportunity
because I was probably the only one
blunt.
knocking on Professor Brophy’s door
and saying, ‘Hey, I’m interested in
startups and venture capitalists—I’ll
be your TA.’ ” David Brophy, who
did his doctoral work at Ohio State
University, was a pioneer in the
study of venture capitalism, founding
what is today the Center for Venture
Capital & Private Equity Finance at
University of Michigan. His network
of contacts in California VC was vast,
and it helped Baumel land a venture
associate job in Chicago with Brinson
Partners when he was finished with
his MBA. The firm had about $45 bil-
lion under management, with a small
part of that invested in VC.
It must have seemed odd to some
of his classmates that Baumel would
forgo the fat paychecks, bonuses and
pensions offered by America’s largest
corporations for the chaotic life of
a venture capitalist. “I was a lone
wolf,” he says.
For a startup, the price of short-
term failure is going out of business
instead of a missed quarterly revenue
target. “I love that pressure,” Baumel
says. “It’s a constant need to perform
and get things done. And because
of that, there can be no bureaucracy.
You try and find problems. Every
day. We don’t have time to just have
meetings to talk about forming com-
mittees and then talk about forming a
task force to talk about restructuring
a committee. We just need to get stuff
done and make it happen.”
And Baumel loved the chance to
work on ground-breaking technolo-
gies that held the potential to change
people’s lives and sometimes, the
course of history. “Large companies
have different issues,” he says. “It’s
about maintaining market share,
restructuring, optimizing margins. At
 Bill Baumel knew when
he was in college that the
Q&A startup life was for him.
He explains why:

The characteristics that make someone

successful as an entrepreneur or a venture
capitalist may not make them a good fit in
a 9-to-5, suit-and-tie environment where
things move very slowly.
“I don’t know if I could thrive or survive,
either one, in a larger entity. I just wouldn’t
want it. I think I’d be too blunt. I think I
would be too rash in my decision-making.
In Silicon Valley, it’s a lot easier to find
those people because everyone either
has someone in their family or someone
they know that’s in a startup. So they
understand that culture.”

Speaking of being blunt, it’s all for good:

“If a person at a large company would
hear the conversations I have with our
CEOs and management teams, those
conversations would be considered the
most perhaps brutal, leading-toward-
termination conversations. So for a lot
of startup CEOs and entrepreneurs in
Ohio, they just need to realize hey, we’re
all in this together. We’re not looking to
blame anybody. We’re looking to grow this
together.”

Being honest and transparent at all times

is critical:
“You can’t be looking in the mirror each
day and trying to fool yourself saying,
‘Oh, my gosh, look how much hair I have.’
[Startups have a] fast-paced and iterative
nature and [need] radical transparency
and openness. I need to admit mistakes
immediately and change course
immediately. I can’t let things linger for a
week, a month or a quarter.”

Millennials have a natural affinity for the

startup environment:
“I would describe the younger
generation as inexperienced, they don’t
understand entrepreneurship to a large
extent. On the other hand, they’re eager
to learn. They want to be innovative. They
want to be impactful. They want to make
things happen. And they take the startups
phenomenally well. They love the culture.
For those that had been through corporate
America for a decent period of time, it’s a
tough cultural adjustment. They’re used
to things in a certain way. It’s almost
uncomfortable.”

December 2019 l ColumbusCEO 13

 Procter and Gamble, you’re focused
on laundry detergent, or peanut but-
ter, or health and beauty. Invest in a
startup, you are completely focused on
creating new industries. How do we
disrupt an existing industry?”
That pioneering spirit led Baumel
to spend more than two decades in
venture capital, most of those years
with Los Gatos, California-based RWI
Ventures. He built a track record there
that included investments in Big Data,
cybersecurity, software-as-a-service
and medical technology, with port-
folio companies going public, being
acquired for hundreds of millions of
dollars, and one $1.2 billion valuation. in 2016 to run the newly created $40 in $15 million. They later were joined
By these measures, his career was a million Ohio Innovation Fund. The by Kent State University, which came
resounding success, and it’s clear he universities’ goal was to diversify in with $6 million, says Duane Nellis,
had fun doing it. their investments, create a pathway to president of Ohio University.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a per- commercialization for the work being Talk of getting into venture capital
son who built a career on defying the done in their labs and give students a had been going on at Ohio State since
status quo did just that, once again: He real-world taste of entrepreneurship. 2011, Papadakis says, and the univer-
moved home to Ohio. “We felt there was a gap, [there sity in 2013 set aside $100 million to
wasn’t] a local fund [to] give some invest over 10 years, kicking off its
Midwest calling preference to technologies that came major venture involvement that year
out of universities that participated in with a $50 million investment in the
Recruited on behalf of the leadership the fund,” says Mike Papadakis, CFO nascent Drive Capital. It’s spent $90
teams at Ohio State and Ohio Uni- at Ohio State. The university invested million so far, including the Ohio
versity, Baumel moved to Columbus $20 million, and Ohio University put Innovation Fund investment and

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some pre-2013 funding “alongside”
the former Tech Columbus (now Rev1
Ventures), Papadakis says.
For Baumel, the decision to take the
job came with excitement, to be sure,
and also a certain level of trepidation.
He had visited friends and family
here in the summers and being the
investor he is, he’d put some money
into an angel fund here. The compa-
nies did not impress him. “I remem-
ber there was a particular company...
and I looked at this company and
thought wow, I know 15 companies in
Silicon Valley that are already doing
that better and some are already doing
$50 million in revenue.
“My heart brought me back to
visit to convince my mind,” Baumel
says. “It was purely a heart thing to
come back and visit [while weighing
whether to take the position] because I
was like, please, please don’t be as bad
as it was before.”
It wasn’t—Baumel is thriving in
Columbus, enjoying success with the
15 companies (four in Columbus) he’s
identified for Ohio Innovation Fund
support. As a group, they’ve won
culture awards, been identified as top
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startups by industry organizations and
formed partnerships with top global
corporations. They include:
• Aware, formerly known as Wire-
tap. Founded in Columbus in 2017,
it makes security software for large
global enterprises using major chat
platforms including Facebook at Work,
Microsoft Yammer and Slack. For as
long as such communication platforms
have existed, they’ve presented legal
and safety concerns to employers who
couldn’t control them or even monitor
employee activity on them, presenting
the risk that intellectual property and
security could be compromised.
• Athens-based Stirling Ultracold, a
maker of energy-efficient deep freezers
I honestly
believe our program
is the top venture
entrepreneurship
training for students in
the country.
Baumel says is a $50 million company
with a following among the bioscience
community that has potential to be
four times that size.
• Enable Injections of Cincinnati,
a drug delivery platform patients can
wear that’s doing business with phar-
maceutical and biotech giants Sanofi
and Genentech.
• Complion of Cleveland, with a
cloud-based workflow and document
management software for clinical
trials that’s compliant with U.S. Food
and Drug Administration rules.
One of Ohio Innovation Fund’s
unique characteristics is that students
from the participating universities can
do internships at the fund and also at
the companies it invests in. This edu-
cation component suits Baumel, who
is a natural at explaining complex
business concepts.
“I honestly believe our program
is the top venture entrepreneurship
training for students in the country,”
Baumel says. “They spend 10 weeks
in the summer learning about term
sheets and due diligence and all that,
and then you go live, you’re actually
going to board meetings, working
www.groveport.org
December 2019 l ColumbusCEO 15
 with our executives.” Each year, 50
students from Ohio schools come
through the program, and another 50
are placed in internships at partner
startups. Several of the students who
work in the fund’s office have gone on
to hold jobs there, including venture
associate Faith Voinovich; market-
ing director Katie Coulter; and Matt
Benson, former venture associate who
launched an online hub for esports
and video games professionals, eFuse,
that in November announced it had
secured a $1.4 million investment
from Ohio Innovation Fund.
Such an outcome is exactly what
the universities that funded the Ohio
Innovation Fund envisioned. They’re
also looking forward to the potential
for typical rates of return offered by
VC, which can be in the realm of 15
percent to 20 percent, well above aver-
age returns from the stock market.
“I think it’s going about as well as
we could have hoped,” Papadakis
says. “Over the course of the next
couple of years, we obviously would
hope to start to see some opportunities
to get some return back to the univer-
sity as well.” VC is a commitment for
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16 ColumbusCEO l December 2019
OSU, he says. “It’s not something that
we’re just going to do one set of funds
and then move on. I think the startup
ecosystem is really built around
having a strong long-term strategy
and executing it every year for a long
period of time.”
Baumel says the plan is to raise a
second fund at the end of the first five
years, which comes in 2021. He sees
a second fund, like the first, being no
larger than $100 million. “If you get
too large, you start making compro-
mises on deal quality,” he says. He
expects exits in the range of $200 mil-
lion to $500 million.
Culture combo
One of the things OSU and OU
We wouldn’t be looked for when they sought a leader
for the new fund was someone who
where we are without had ties to Ohio. It was a good strat-
egy, Nellis says.
his mentorship. Bill “Bill’s done an amazing job,” Nellis
is very transparent — says. “His wealth of experience that he
brings to us from Silicon Valley, but
that’s [what] I love so also the fact that he knows Ohio. He’s
from Ohio. He understands the Mid-
much about him. western culture and dynamics, and he
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also understands how to leverage the
resources we have through the fund in
ways that elevate companies.”
Many of the companies Baumel has
encountered here need his support
with strategy, messaging, customer
awareness and staffing decisions. “I
think pretty early on and contrasting
his experience on the West Coast, a lot
of the startup leaders [in Ohio] didn’t
necessarily have experience in a start-
up environment,” Papadakis says. “So
they needed a lot more coaching and a
lot more hands-on attention than what
he was initially anticipating. And
so Bill has been a very collaborative
leader. He spends a lot of time with
his executive teams really trying to
push them to achieve results.”
For Aware, that translates to “some-
where between 10 to 20 emails and
maybe 20 to 30 texts and five phone
conversations per week,” Baumel
says. “Bill is one of the first calls I
make on large decisions or complex
issues,” says Aware co-founder Jeff
Schumann. “We wouldn’t be where
we are without his mentorship. Bill
is very transparent—that’s one of the
things I love so much about him. He
tells me how it is, and sometimes that
works in my favor, and sometimes
that works against me. But I know
that’s Bill and appreciate that because
there’s no politics there.”
Schumann knows all about politics,
having worked for large corpora-
tions early in his career. And after
knocking on many doors looking for
funding and failing to secure it, he’s
been buoyed by Baumel’s brand of
California optimism in addition to
his what-you-see-is-what-you-get
nature. “Midwestern investors, they
have a tendency, everyone wants to
hug each other when you’re leaving a
room and you don’t want to say things
that might hurt somebody’s feelings,”
Schumann says. “But there’s a way to
provide constructive feedback that can
yield a positive outcome. And I think
what the Silicon Valley-based VCs and
even East Coast-based VCs are so good
at is understanding that if we don’t
make these sorts of hard decisions
[such as firing someone who’s not a
fit or upending the business model
entirely], and we don’t come into this
with humility, we are going to fail.
“Midwestern VCs are much more
like, ‘I don’t want to say something
that might upset somebody,’ like this
is their baby—we should just keep
our opinion to ourselves until they
figure it out themselves. By then, it’s
too late.”
It is frustrating, Baumel says, to
watch Midwestern companies with
great ideas fail to realize their vast po-
tential because they’re discouraged by
people in a position to provide fund-
ing and business advice. The culture
here is very much one that eschews
risk-taking, which is a necessary
component in building giant compa-
nies quickly—spending large sums
of money upfront on as-yet unproven
ideas. “If [the founders] try to think
big, they’re told don’t think big, get
back in your hole and you just grow
slow and steady forever,” he says.
“But we are dealing with fast-changing
markets and technology and all that
new opportunity that’s out there. If we
don’t chase that opportunity, someone
else in Silicon Valley, Austin, Seattle,
Boston, China, India, Israel, England,
Europe is going to do that.”
Katy Smith is the editor.

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