Patent Strategy

Uncertainty is not a Bad Thing, it is Opportunity. Every time you see a news story or read a blog about a topic you know very well, it is amazing that the stories have lots of factual problems. This is not a problem, it is opportunity. For many years, I have been offended by how…

When an invention requires regulatory approval, a patent is a secondary element of intellectual property protection. Regulatory requirements trump patents as the primary form of protection or moat against a business. Medical devices and pharmaceutical inventions operate within a regulatory framework: the Food and Drug Administration.  The moat for competitors is to first overcome the…

The Invisible Hand versus the Regulator’s Pen. We will always invest where Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is pushing things forward, and avoid businesses where the regulator’s pen can wipe it out. We avoid regulatory risk, and so should early stage companies. Governments, by accident or design, distort the market in many ways. For example, the…

Letting the CTO manage patent policy is bad for business. Some CEOs abdicate their IP policy to the CTO. The CTO spends lots of time with the patent attorney, so it just makes sense to let them deal with it. Right? Sadly, I see the results of this over and over in poor quality IP…

Spend some time “riding the bus” in the Minors before getting to the Big Leagues. I have the enviable position of seeing lots of inventors who bootstrapped their companies along before they take outside investment (if they take any outside investment at all). This is – without question – the single best way to build…

Due diligence in patents requires looking at the patent attorney. When I review patent applications, I always download the full prosecution history of the patent from the USPTO. The prosecution history is the formal, legal record of the back-and-forth between the applicant and the Patent Office, and includes all the papers as originally filed, as…

“Moonshots” and Abdicating Responsibility as an Angel Investor. A friend who is an angel investor asked my opinion on a company. I did not like it for a number of reasons, not the least of which was their poor IP strategy. The real reason why I didn’t like the company was because the inventor was…

The value proposition of “technology” is usually that an employer can fire someone. It is always about doing more work with fewer people. This typically has a short term advantage for a business owner, but typically create poorer experiences for their end users over the long run. Consider a banker, who may approve or disapprove…

The system is arbitrary, but it works. And it is unlikely to change. Some technologies just are not suitable for patents. The patent system is a clunky, one-size-fits-all system.  It does not work for every invention or every industry, but the patent system as we know it has existed for over two centuries and industry…

What drives the entrepreneur may be more complicated than what it seems… For many entrepreneurs, getting to revenue is not “success”, it can be a let down. I see this pattern over and over: an entrepreneur has a product that quickly makes some money, but they get distracted with a ‘new’ and ‘better’ idea. They…