In academic labs right now, researchers are inventing solutions to the climate crisis, disease, malnutrition, connectivity, and a host of other important problems. Commercializing this science is one of the fastest paths to solving the world's biggest problems. Unfortunately, spinning technology out of a university into a startup is a murky process, limiting the number of impactful companies created. The main element of spinning out – tech transfer of IP from academia – has been improving, but it’s far from solved. We’ve seen negotiations with tech transfer offices (TTOs) take so long that founders burned out, teams lost momentum, and investors walked away. We’ve seen TTOs introduce terms that hurt the startup’s ability to raise capital. We’ve seen so many exotic term combinations that we wondered: how are founders supposed to make sense of it all? So we made this Spinout Playbook to help aspiring scientist founders make sense of the process.