Real technical depth in physics or an adjacent field. Enough to read a campaign output and judge whether it is real, novel, and significant, and enough to hold your own with our research team. A PhD is the most common way to get there and it is not the only one; a serious research career, or years of hands-on technical work close to the physics, can do the same. What we cannot work with is someone who needs the result explained to them before they can classify it.
A technology transfer and IP management background. You have run the path from result to filing to publication yourself, with real stakes, and you know the places it goes wrong. Knowledge or technology transfer at a national lab, a research institution, or a university office; in-house IP strategy at a deep tech company; managing a prosecution docket and the counsel attached to it. Advising on this from the outside is not the same thing.
Portfolio judgment. You have run a research program with a real prioritization mechanism and a real kill mechanism, under a budget and against a clock. You can tell us about something you shut down while it was still interesting.
A network, not a Rolodex. You have standing relationships with credible people across several physics subfields, you know who is worth listening to and who is merely loud, and those people will take your call.
You know when there is no patent to be had. You can look at a result and tell whether there is eligible subject matter in it or whether you are looking at a law of nature in an apparatus costume. You have had that argument with a scientist who was sure their discovery was patentable, and you were the one who was right.
The nerve to hold a line you cannot enforce by title. You will be under pressure from every direction to let something out early, and the pressure will be reasonable every time. Your leverage is the rule set and your credibility, not your seniority. You have held a line like that before without losing the relationship.
Clear eyes about AI-generated science. You know where these systems produce insight and where they produce plausible nonsense, and you treat verification as the thing that separates the two. You do not need to build the platform. You do need to be unimpressed by it until it earns otherwise.