Where are you from originally?
Lompoc, California – a little coastal town north of Santa Barbara. Lompoc is
home to Vandenberg Air Force base where the military and now private companies
launch missiles.
What university did you go to?
Central Washington University where I majored in Business
and Marketing.
What brought you to Austin?
IBM hired me soon after the Tivoli merger to work in
Business Development; so, we moved down from Dallas after spending five years
there.
What is your group’s mission?
To insure the best innovation and intellectual property is
put into the best, most capable companies to maximize that innovation’s global potential.
What need does it fulfill?
There is a vacuum in the buying/selling/licensing of
brilliant innovation. The leading firms are essentially “privateering” the business to serve their own economic interests first – think non-practicing entities (aka:
patent trolls); then, perhaps their client’s.
idealAsset is democratizing the business of transacting and
takes no ownership in the patents and IP it sources.
There are millions of patents and other protected
innovations in the world today that are sitting idle and/or eventually
abandoned simply because they were invented in the “wrong” company – one that doesn’t want to maximize its value.
There is no solution, in any country, attempting to match
these idle innovations with the most capable organizations. That’s where we come in.
What exactly does it bring to startups?
IdealAsset brings the ability for start-ups to efficiently source or exhaust off brilliant IP. By aggregating the world’s available Innovation and Intellectual Property and a vast community of IP buyers, idealAsset creates an affordable and accessible solution for the entire Innovation community – from individual inventor to the largest global Innovation holders.
Further, by allowing start-ups an efficient means to
acquire patents they have the opportunity to shortcut the risk and process of
pursuing their own patents and usually at a cost point well below what they
would have spend in their own pursuits. Prosecuting a net new patent
application through to issuance can take years and cost more than $25,000
apiece.
What type of startup would benefit from your group?
Start-ups that must rely on IP as a means to operate in a
competitive market space. We tend to work with technology, bioscience and
medical device start-ups as they tend to be operating in crowded spaces with
many well financed incumbents.
What was the most challenging aspect of starting up the
initiative?
The biggest challenge has been socializing an entirely new
approach to a mature and slow moving industry that has an incumbency of
middlemen with little to no incentive for significant change. That and quieting
the raucous rhetoric around the need for massive Patent legislation reform by
the largest technology firms. The truth is by allowing the market for
commercializing IP and patents to mature on its own much of the current day
issues with patent trolls and their operating models will wane as new
innovation like idealAsset takes hold and obviates that business model.
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?
Most entrepreneurs recognize the need to protect their
ideas – through
patenting, or copyright or simply trade secret efforts (keeping their secret
sauce, well, secret). That said they
look at this effort as a tactical effort with a specific start/stop timeframe. Investors tend to “check
the box” with
asking if start-ups have protected their ideas.
Innovation and intellectual property is a cornerstone
strategy to any eager start-up’s success.
Markets are dynamic, R&D expenditures in the US are
nearly $2.0 Trillion, yes with a “T” so people and corporations are
inventing all day, every day. Keeping
tabs on innovation and new ideas should be as routine as your quarterly
financials; finding and partnering with IP service providers can help keep a
successful start-up out of (operating) trouble for years to come.
What Austin-based resource have you found to be the most
helpful and why?
1)
There is a very experienced ecosystem
of IP service providers to help entrepreneurs and start-ups with their IP
initiatives – IP
centric law firms, investors, commercialization partners: Dubois, Bryant,
Campbell for IP prosecution, AcclaimIP for patent assessment and analytics,
dozens of IP brokers with access to the world’s
best IP from leading corporations.
2)
Outsource development firms like
Calavista Software – which I have used in 3 of my last start-ups. While they
appear slightly more expensive than hiring your own internal development team – they have vast project/start-up
experience and their development success rate (on time/on budget/as envisioned
product) exceeds 90%; 100% for my companies.
They are simply a more capital efficient expenditure when weighing FCS
risk to cost ratios.
