Crown jewels of a Start up Company

Crown jewels of a Start up Company

There are two jewels in your treasure chest that needs to be nurtured and polished, they are your employees and the IP and patents that you have generated with your investors money. I want to have a short think about IP and Patents, it is not so much the art of writing a patent, the work involved in scoping other competitors patents, or your patent strategy of how you layer and build defensible portfolios, which all good stuff but some more practical stuff about it.

have run manufacturing operations for years now, and part of setting up the production process is to baseline and run DoE trials (Design of Experiment) so you can control the process and understand the capabilities of the process hence your yield and then your profitability, this is all normal practice in the mature manufacturing line but as a start up a lot off the early work will be leading edge and as such is worthy of protection either for IP , or as a patent.

I will not touch on what you should patent and what you want to keep quite about, but you should think about it strategically for the company’s future. Practically you need to have an infrastructure in place that will capture the work being done, there are many ways to do this and each company will have there own flavour, I do instil in my engineering teams the idea of cost Vs result, to drive home the concept that each trial you run you learn something from and you record the results, this also gets part way to helping over come the tribal knowledge syndrome a lot of start up companies have died from. The last part of this is a review of work done with a “low cost” patent attorney and see what is patentable and defensible and what should be documented as IP.

The last part of this is do not be frightened to get the some of the crown jewels out now and again and show them off, it is good for your engineers and for positive PR. I would start of with low profile conferences for a couple of the presentation, the progress and target from then on.

A couple of points to end with, law suits have been won and lost on the documentation of IP, and the value of your company and amount of IP and patent protection you have will have is a functional relationship.

Slainte

Gordon

Some more thoughts on being an Entrepreneur or the Wisdom of Deborah or the "real" ways companies get started

"You are not going anywhere unless you set the sails and move"

Some more thoughts on being an Entrepreneur or " the Wisdom of Deborah"
or "the "real" ways companies get started"

Some friends of mines used to think that you had an idea, or invented some new thing in your spare time, wrote a business plan, and VCs gave you money. I told Deborah that I didn't believe that anymore - that so much "convential wisdom" about entrepreneurship was a lie. It just isn't what people think.

"So you're not drinking the kool-aid?" she asked. I just laughed. "Not anymore."

She's right. Entrepreneurship is sometimes glorified like some weird cult, but the truth is that most companies don't start the way people think they do. There is only one way to get money for an idea. If you have successfully built and sold a good sized company, and have an idea in a similar field that you are putting some of your own money into, you may be able to get some funding based on your past success. But barring that, here are the "real" ways companies get started. I've probably forgotten some, so feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments.

1. The PhD - Government funded research leads to some new breakthrough. The PhD that worked on it partners with a few people and finds a little bit of money to commercialize the technology.

2. The corporate spinoff - A company develops a technology that it doesn't want or need. A few employees spinoff with the technology and a bit of cash from the corporation and try to commercialize it.

3. The necessity - A guy runs a small business of some sort, and has an unmet need. He figures out a new widget (or software maybe) to meet his need. Eventually, someone asks about the widget because they could use one too. Guy markets widget and does well.

4. The consultant expansion - A small consultant shop with just a few people tackles and solves an interesting problem. Realizing that their solution has other applications, they seek funding and market it.

5. The hobby - A guy has a hobby, maybe woodworking, for example. Over time he becomes very very good at it, and people start asking him to make them things. He launches a business around it.

6. The part-timer - This is, in my experience, the most popular and one of the best ways to move towards entrepreneurship because it allows you to transition. You start something small, working mainly evenings and weekends while keeping your day job. You have a few excited customers that you use to help figure out the future of your business. You grow to the point where you are stressed out from working two jobs. You work out a plan, and transition full-time to the new venture.

7. The small business - You start something simple and cheap. It never makes it to the "big leagues," but so what? Most entpreneurs never do. Michael Dell is a rare breed.

I bring these up to highlight a key point - you don't get investment for just an idea. It's extremely rare. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop believing that ideas matter. That isn't what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurs aren't idea people, everybody and their brother has ideas. Entrepreneurs are people that exploit ideas by matching them to market needs, executing them despite scarce resources and designing a business model that makes the idea profitable.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop waiting. Start doing something. That is how you learn. Make entrepreneurship your hobby, until you can make it your career. And stop reading garbage about these companies that go from idea to a billion dollar valuation in two years. That requires as much luck and timing as it does vision and execution. You will have much more success if you get these crazy ideas out of your head, and if you put the kool-aid down



Slainte
Gordon