Patent Strategy

How accelerators and angel groups lose their way.

Riding on the back of the entrepreneur. Ever drive by a construction site and see dozens of “supervisors” standing around, while one guy with a shovel is actually working? This is the perfect metaphor for the angel investment community, with the energetic, hard-working entrepreneur is deep down in the hole furiously shoveling, and everyone else…

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The Endless Science Project

Serving two masters, and the enablement of investors. Some startups are the Endless Science Project. They start from a “cool” technological idea and work on endless science projects. They run one science project for a while, get tired of it, and move on to another one. Investors enable this to happen, and we, as investors,…

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Calling yourself an “Expert”

I avoid anyone who calls themselves an “expert” in anything. I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one. – Cato the Elder, from Plutarch’s Lives I run into countless entrepreneurs and inventors, and many of them like to brand themselves as “expert” or, worse yet, “visionary.”…

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Patents Age Like Fine Wine

Patents reach peak valuation around year 12. Why is that? We like to think about patents as call options on technology. With a call option, you have the opportunity, but not the obligation, to cash in the option before it expires. A patent operates in a similar way. You have the opportunity, but not the…

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Trading on the Differences

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…

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IP Valuation in a Regulatory Framework

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…

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Pitching Investors is Not “One-and-Done”

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…

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Registration Numbers

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…

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