December 9 2020 | Bay Area SID

Funding, Growing and Success in a Display Startup

Helge Seetzen, General Partner & CEO, TandemLaunch

Presentation Abstract

The speaker built a display company while he was still in college and had a hugely successful exit, he has since built nearly three dozen companies, raised several tens of millions in funding, served on the boards of over 30 companies, hired, mentored and helped numerous founders and CEO’s. The talk will feature three aspects of a start up in the display industry – what does it take to get funded, how do you grow a startup and what it takes to be successful. The speaker will cite examples from display and non-display companies, both successful and unsuccessful endeavors and the lessons learnt.

Helge Seetzen

Helge Seetzen is a successful multi-media technology entrepreneur with deep experience in the university tech transfer space. He currently serves as the CEO and General Partner of TandemLaunch – a startup foundry that works with driven entrepreneurs to turn research from the world’s best universities into exceptional consumer technology companies. Under his leadership, TandemLaunch has created over 20 technology companies, accounting for hundreds of jobs, $500M+ in market value, and commercialized technologies from over 50 international universities.

Prior to TandemLaunch, Helge co-founded Sunnybrook Technologies and later BrightSide Technologies to commercialize high dynamic range (HDR) display technology and champion the development of the local dimming LED TV concept. BrightSide was successfully sold to Dolby Laboratories at high return to shareholders after receiving accolades such as the Best Buzz Award at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show and a “Top 100 Technologies in 2006” rank by Popular Science Magazine. At Dolby he led all cross-functional development activities for Dolby’s first two consumer video products including today’s Dolby Vision standard for HDR video. In this capacity he built research and engineering departments in Canada and the US, and was closely involved in licensing negotiations with many major consumer electronics manufacturers.

Helge’s leadership in the technology transfer, innovation and entrepreneurial space has been widely recognized through awards such as Business in Vancouver’s 40 under Forty award for business accomplishment, the NSERC Innovation Challenge Award for university technology transfer, and a Special Recognition Award from the Society for Information Display for the pioneering of LED TV technology. Helge serves on the boards of over 20 organizations including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Canada’s national research funding body), MITACS (Canada’s principal industrial grant program for students), HEC Montreal’s Entrepreneurship Program, and over a dozen private corporations. He is a Fellow of the McGill Dobson Center for Entrepreneurship and strong supporter of many other initiatives encouraging entrepreneurship. As a technical leader, he served as the General Chair for Display Week, the largest technical conference on displays, as well as currently as President of the Executive Board of the Society for Information Display. He has published over 20 journal articles, writes a regular column on venture capital innovation in the Information Display Magazine, and holds over 80 patents with an additional 50 pending US applications. Helge received a B.Sc. in physics and a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary imaging technology (physics & computer science) from the University of British Columbia.