They bought my company for a 200 line script

Mick, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Well, so on my new venture it's actually came out of a need that I found about a lot of entrepreneurs. So, you know, I've been an entrepreneur in my life since since my graduation. I've built multiple companies. and I've been investing in Duke startups since past almost seventeen years now. And one thing I found in my interactions with a lot of startups was, you know, the the the lack of understanding of why, you know. Success in startups is often defined by exits and the lack of understanding of why exits occur. And more specifically, you know, the key one of the key reasons or one of the key pillars of you know an exit is building a good, you know, set of assets that your acquirer could benefit from. And so that lead to IP. And I had my own journey where I learned this the hard way. but that kind of led me to start a company or in in in Innovance's case, we acquired a company you know, that was doing that was very similar and then kind of work with the with the existing team to grow it into what it has become now. So that was kind of my motivation to when I saw that problem in the in the industry and with a lot of startups struggling to identify key aspects of their IP or their key moat, their you know, their competitive advantage. we thought that okay, let's kinda build a company around that or let's find a company that's doing something in this space and you know and enhance that.

Well, to begin with, the problem, especially in the age of AI, is you know, it's getting very mo more and more difficult for companies to differentiate themselves. How do you, you know, you know, you started a company, you know, you got some initial traction, but then there are like ten other competitors who've sprung up. How do you defend yourself? Right? The first more advantage doesn't help. You don't have the, you know, you can't outmarket them without an advantage because again everyone is kind of doing similar stuff. IP kind of provides you that one way to defend yourself. And getting traction and customers is is one thing, but also getting you know becoming more attractive for partners, whether it's large companies or investors or you know corporate you know partnerships for for growth or distribution partners. IP plays a big role in all of those and helps you in negotiations. It also, from the investor standpoint, it brings it builds an asset into a company where typically none exists. When you're a startup, there's no assets on your balance sheet, or there's no assets that you really have. If you know your customer base goes down, you have nothing to show off. IP kind of provides you that alternative. You build a set of assets which could be licensed. There are other ways to commercialize it, and there's some what we call salvage value. From an investor standpoint, that you know, more like a risk mitigation strategy, but that is something that that IP pro.

Well, that's a you know, it's a great question. So how do you find IP or build IP? The fact is most entrepreneurs are doing that already, right? Like, you know, you're you're doing things that give you that advantage, you're you're doing things that gives you that, you know, that that value that's drive driving your value proposition. The key thing is it's identifying them and protecting it in the proper way. So Identifying what is your key IP is what we call a process called invention harvesting is identifying what are the IP assets. How do you differentiate from your customers? How from your competitors? How do you, you know, what's your innovation engine essentially? What what is driving the value for your customers in a unique way that your competitors aren't? So that's differentiate like you know, that that's a little bit of innovation. And then the other part is differentiation that's Basically identifying, you know, when two products are kept in front of you, why would you choose one over the other? Right. If you have say, you know, Apple and Android, right? Some people choose Apple, some people choose Android. Why do you choose one over the other? That's how you position that's more to do with positioning. So we had, you know, so that's one aspect. And what is unique about the product itself, that's the other aspect. We identify both of them, you know, and we have a product that we are launching soon. That helps entrepreneurs in identifying those things and then help in guiding them what's the best way to protect it. So, for example, you can protect a brand with a trademark, you can protect designs, you can protect your inventions or innovations with patents, or keeping them as trade secrets. copyrights is another aspect that you can use. So, those are all different aspects about IP that you can use to protect these things. But the first step obviously comes in to identify them. not so much create them artificially, but something that most entrepreneurs are creating anyways. It's just that they don't protect it.

That's a great point. I think so there are different ways to think about that, right? So I mean, one thing that I can tell is I work with a lot of law firms in the, you know, in the IP business. And if say you have so so data sets or existing data, you know, if you have some very valuable real life data, that becomes a big asset, right? And more and more we are seeing that data as a as a mode for a lot of people. The other thing is, you know, if you have a unique way of structuring something, right? So let's say you have your software product and the way you're processing information or data within your company, within your and again, I'm talking about regular software startups, not necessarily deep tech or you know, but but if you have a unique way of processing information and presenting it in a certain way, You know, for the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI to build out an a capability like that or an LLM reproducing a capability like that, it will take some time for them to get to that stage. If you can, you know, take that unique process that you have, protect it, patent it, that would restrict them from launching it because then they'll be violating your if you're if they're following the same process, then they'll be violating your patents. So the only way for them to do it would be to pay you a loyalty fee for every single use, you know, that that they have, or license your IP, or you know, not do it differently, which might not generate the same results or same quality of results. And that gives you the advantage. So you're seeing a lot of large companies adopt these methods, including like some of the biggest SaaS companies, you know, talk about Salesforce, even Atlassian, you see the number of patterns filed by them. You start seeing a lot of you know, large SaaS companies trying to build out a moat around their core processes or algorithms. In the past couple of years, in the past three two to three years, you've seen a growth in you know, patents specifically as a way to protect against those.

Well, you know, you know, so to answer your first question about how did I get started into this, like, you know, I was fresh out of engineering, you know, an engineering graduate and I started working. I was lucky to get a job you know, at a semiconductor outsourcing firm. And then, you know, working there for like a few months, I decided, okay, you know what, we we there's a way around this, you know, what we're doing, there's a better way to do this, and I decided to create a spin-off company. So we started to create a startup. And my employer was kind enough to be my first investor, not just allow me to you know work on the startup, but but they they were one of the first investors in my startup. We built the startup, we grew it quite rapidly in the in in in like one and a half years, we we got some major clients in the semiconductor industry and we got acquired. I thought I'm the you know smartest person on the in on the world and you know and this is 2008 Where this was just around, so if I give you the dates, my my deal closed on October third, two thousand and eight. That was right around the time that Lehman brothers announced their bankruptcy and you know, like a lot of you know, the turmoil was just about to start to happen. So, and we were just right off, we we got a we got an exit, we got a publicly listed company, you know, n Cadence, the company that acquired us, was publicly listed for since nineteen eighties, it's a behemoth in the industry. They acquired us for a part cash, part stock deal. And I thought I'm the smartest person on earth. We have the best products, you know, we are the best team, and that's why we're being acquired. And turns out I was horribly wrong. I had to fire more than half of my team in the first six months. you know, we had you know around eight products. only two of them were continued, and the rest were all shut down. And you know. Like and so so neither the product mattered nor the you know the people you know, there's not an aqua hire because clearly we had to fire half more than half of our steam. And definitely they don't care about our customers because they are a behemoth. Every single customer that we had was already using Cadence's you know software. So they were already their clients. So the only thing that they cared about was a small piece of IP that actually gave them a significant advantage. So, you know, the industry was going through a change at the time. Their product was stuck on one particular platform, and there was a new platform called System OLOG which was growing up. And without sharing too much details and boring you with the technical details of the of the product itself, what we had built, I mean, apart from in in all of our eight products, we had built a multi platform capability. So there was a very simple Perl script that actually did that job. Perl was the predecessor to Python. If you're old enough to remember it, but it was a small 200 line of code, roughly two to three hundred line of line of code script that did that magic. It was not even patented at the time, and all Cadence cared about was that mechanism. They integrated in the first you know, six to eight months, they integrated across their product portfolio, and then they went on an acquisition spree, they acquired three other companies after hours. Because now they were platform independent. They can acquire any company who has built any other platforms or company, you know, products in the similar similar area and just integrate within their suite. And they slow like within two and like within three years, they became the market leader in that particular product domain. we didn't realize back then that what we were giving them was you know a a capability to, you know. To expand beyond their traditional territories and you know be platform independent. Until this date, I mean it's almost 18 years since they acquired us. You know, if you go on that products website, you know, on you know on Cadence's website, you will see that multi-platform interface prominently being the key part of one of their all of their products. So, you know, again, so that kind of You know, that made me realize the value that, you know, we we were just we just built it as part of necessity. We didn't realize that you know, what this is going to do for the larger company, until we got acquired and saw the changes firsthand. So that's what I mean. And again, had I known this, you know, there would have been very different ways that I could have approached this, you know, protected it better and so on and so forth. so yeah, that's that's kind of the learning the hard way.

I think, you know, there are it's a great question, we see that all the time being asked by our clients as well. So I think the the key thing is so first of all, AI has made filing or drafting patents at least very easy. there are some governments, especially US, who has tightened the rules, especially around foreign nationals filing patents in the US and it made it more difficult and more expensive because like until a year ago, you can file your own patent. in in the US as an independent. you don't need a patent agent or an attorney to do that. US made that impossible last year through a ruling change. So now you have to file hire a US patent attorney to file in the US. So there are certain restrictions that has come up, but you know you can still in your home jurisdictions for most of the world in Europe for sure, in Canada, you can file patents yourself. a provisional patent at least very easily. And there's not, you know, it's it's you know, and again I should not be saying this. I'm in the business of filing patents for people as well, like, you know, so we have that part of our service as well. But but, you know, it's it's it's not that difficult or it's not that expensive. to to you know, I mean Claude and Perplexity has pu specifically perplexity patents. you know, some of these tools have gotten very good at drafting patent applications and

You know, so so you can use that you know, to to draft a provisional at least. Maybe not the full claims, but you know, provisional can be done pretty easily and pretty cost effectively. The second part is it is a little bit about, you know, you you need to think deeply about what is worth patenting. And I think that is a key aspect that people often miss. You should not go on and patent everything and anything. But if there's something that could be easily reverse engineered. But it is critical to your company's core value proposition or the core product, then you must think about protecting it through a patent. Because if it could be easily reverse engineered, or people using the product or you know can determine this relatively easily, then that is something that you must protect. But if it's not, it it cannot be reverse engineered, it's encrypted. You can, you know, you can go around, you you can kind of start. selling it without protecting it while keeping it as a trade secret. So there are certain like again the devil isn't the details in these cases. It's difficult to explain, but sometimes like it's evidently clear that you don't need a patent at this point or you don't need to patent these things. Just keep them as a trade secret. you know, just don't disclose it to anyone you know when you're doing your pitch presentations and whatnot. Don't disclose these aspects without an NDA, not everything, but you know, and then These are certain things that you should think about definitely patenting. And I think that is again a little bit of a judgment. you know, but as I said, like, you cost is a barrier, but sometimes, you know, you'll be surprised, you know, there's not, you know, you the things that you can do just with some of the AI tools available these days as well.

we use AI quite a bit. So I mean these days, so we we have been on open AI you know platform since so I've been using GPT two point since twenty twenty one before chat GPT was launched. And so that's why I've been loyal to chat and to to open AI you know, since the beginning and it's a little bit difficult for me to switch. to to anthropic lately but we'd we've been I mean across our organization we've been using all different I think the current the whole the whole agentic workflows with dots that we use across our organization the openai dots is it was released a month ago or you know probably less than that. that has been pretty amazing in in the last few my weeks. the open AI dots has been really powerful. We were using A little bit of her miss and you know, some some of her own harnessing, but it was very difficult to roll out across the organization for a small nimble organization like ours. but Dots has made it possible and really easy. yeah, I think ChatGPT is I think Claude had a similar product like that. I know one of my clients uses Crockpot pretty extensively for the same purpose. And again, it's the same, you know, version of Crockpot and You know, mu Muse is more personal use cases. I I don't use it as much, but you know, but those agentic workflows could be really powerful if you use them well. And what you want to do is create them as a second brain, not just as an assistant. All right. So it starts to replicate you and starts to do a lot of your work and you it helps you progress into higher level tasks as well. So that is something that I've found very useful.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And also like I think most people, like most companies, the their power comes from the people. And when the people leave, the knowledge leaves. This gives us for the first time in history probably, this gives us an opportunity to retain some of that knowledge base, the wisdom, the judgments, the methods, then you know, and preserve it in in form of an L L or a second brain, essentially.

Well, you can people can email me, you know, at Mila at innovance IP dot com. reach out to me on LinkedIn. you know, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn as well. I mean I don't post as much, but but you know, I respond to messages all the time and and you know, so so, you know, you know, people can find me on LinkedIn or email or you know, just get in touch with a team at Hey at Innovance IP dot com and know, some of our team members could respond as well. But you can reach directly to me and your your audience can reach directly to me, as well.

My pleasure, thanks for inviting me.