.. bad idea even now. Patent lawsuits' original use was to prevent theft of original ideas, which is a good thing. But suing for billions for common things like pinch-and-zoom and rounded icons is simply taking things too far. This stifles innovation.
I think people forget that its purpose was to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". In the case of today's software, it is actually doing the opposite; it's a drag on innovation.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
-Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution
I'd argue that multi-touch and pinch-to-zoom combined represents an innovation. Now, whether that should protected for 17-20 years is a completely different matter.
I'd be happiest with a world without software patents, but 12-18 months from filing might be a reasonable compromise position for software/electronics patents. That is short enough that you might simply take the filings, assign each a number (do no review), immediately publish the claims, and then after the fact adjudicate any complaints that someone raises. (lazy evaluation for patents, basically)
IMO, that's enough incentive to get us the iPhone, multi-touch, Bluetooth / LE, NFC, etc, etc, without every startup being worried about a company-killing judgement hanging over their head.
I agree. Software and electronics innovation moves at a faster pace and because of the long validity of patents we have the patent trolls. However for things like medicines, etc the turnaround cycle is longer so its ok to have longer validity.
Maybe the stakeholders should start a discussion about bifurcation of patent laws based on the field, because the one-size-fits all clearly isn't working.
At least Orville did not use the 'nuclear option'. From the article:
The dawn of 1914 brought good news, as the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Wrights’ patent suit, agreeing that Curtiss had infringed. This would have been the perfect time to shut down the competition by re-establishing the Wright monopoly. But Orville did not make a move, as the company manager Grover Loening lamented later: “In no time Curtiss…could have been closed down or bought up, and we would have seen a totally different development of flying starting here and spreading to Europe exactly as the telephone monopoly did…"
If he had shut down Curtiss and his other competitors, the development of aviation would probably have stalled for a while, at least in the US. Perhaps Orville realized that his company was well behind the state-of-the-art by then.
Anyone reading this would also enjoy reading this special issue on Santos-Dummont life [1].
In the text shows Santos-Dummont as a really applauded guy, recognized on the street, with incredible PR skills. He called the press before any presentation and even meetings, he did not applied for any patents and shared his prizes with workers that needed it. Just the opposite from the Wright Brothers.
Sadly, this special issue is in Portuguese only. But I do think it is worth the pain of the automatic translation if you are interested in comparing the stories. It really shows how important it is to share and to see science and technology as the social endeavors they are.
And that also pays a much more meaningful tribute to those that paved the way, after all, any scientific advance is a minute layer added to a mountain of existing knowledge.
they were unwilling to show the machine to anyone who
might steal its design, since enforcing their patent
rights could be a long, laborious, and very expensive
process. Having conquered flight, they wanted to cash
out before going any further.
What happened was the exact opposite. I still have trouble convincing young people with startup ideas that there's really no point being secretive about their 'invention'. Ideas are rarely stolen with impunity. When they are stolen successfully, it's usually because the inventor was so secretive that a clone was regarded as the original by the public and the media.
"Although Brewster patented the kaleidoscope in 1817 (GB 4136), a copy of the prototype was shown to London opticians and copied before the patent was granted. As a consequence, the kaleidoscope became produced in large numbers, but yielded no direct financial benefits to Brewster. It proved to be a massive success with two hundred thousand kaleidoscopes sold in London and Paris in just three months."
These days you should promote any invention as soon as you get patent pending. But I can see why Wright brothers we're suspicious back then.
Other major failures we're early concentration to military sales and not taking competition seriously. Military sales are take it or leave it, you either win big or nothing. If some conservative major gets assigned to deal with the purchase and you are sellign something really new, the sale might be doomed before you start.
> it's usually because the inventor was so secretive that a clone was regarded as the original by the public and the media
From a legal perspective this is not true. But the fact remains that to enforce your IP you will need to spend a lot of money and effort, which is not something a startup can/should do.
So, gee, now all concepts of intellectual property (IP) and proprietary technology are kaput? So we should just f'get
about patents and trade secret
protections. And for national
security, sure, no longer need
security classifications such
as Confidential, Secret, Top
Secret, etc.
Sorry, I don't believe that.
Here's my guess at why people
say not to keep an idea
secret and, instead, to tell
the world: By an idea they
mean just a rough description
of a commercial product/service
as a user/customer might see
it. The technology used
for the product/service is
just routine software and
common, off the shelf (COTS)
hardware. Any crucial, core,
original proprietary technology
is not expected and is just
missing.
Instead, when there was some
software for automatic trading
and it appeared that a guy
got a personal copy, the
owners of that software started
legal action to protect their
technology and intellectual
property -- they didn't tell
the world the crucial, core
internal details of just how
their software worked.
When I was at IBM (research), they generated a ton of patents. But they went through a process to decide if something should be patented (tell everyone about it), or just be a trade secret. They used or licensed these secrets, which seemed to be all about making chips/ waffers and such.
I think the thinking was it would be difficult to figure how they made said thing, once it was out in the public. If you patent, everyone knows.
Fascinating read, any innovator would relate to it. It's always in the hindsight that we can pin point the errors they made, but there's a lesson for all of us in here.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite : An amazing material, apparently. There was a BBC show where it protected an egg from a blowtorch. Unfortunately the guy who made it was extremely protective, so we'll never know quite what it was or whether it was really as effective as it seemed.
- I had a long discussion with my old partners about whether trading models should be kept secret. The big problem is that once you've decided you've got something - and over short periods, it may well look that way - you start to think you can walk on water. I still wonder which way round the causality is. Did we keep everything secret because we thought we'd found a goldmine, or did we think we were brilliant, and the secrecy was a way to flatter ourselves? In any case, once people develop the attitude that they are better than everyone else, it becomes very hard to get any new ideas in there.
- Once you decide your edge is in some kind of knowledge, rather than some kind of execution of a business plan, you are going one way only. Sure, you need some knowledge, but you'd better believe other people have that knowledge as well. There's only one principle involved in steering a plane: change its shape. But there's a HUGE number of ways you can do that, and a huge number of ways to shape your business to explore those ways.
- It seems the patent system was broken a hundred years ago, and it hasn't been fixed. For me the main issue is it causes people to have idea fixation: the idea that ideas are somehow more important than everything else in a business. There's a whole list of interesting things to say about patents as well, but I'll stop here.
> Sure, you need some knowledge, but you'd better believe other people have that knowledge as well.
For any chunk of knowledge, except for very unlikely ties,
there was a first person who
had that knowledge, and for that person, then, the claim is false.
It really is possible to do
research that is genuinely new.
Indeed, the usual criteria for
publication are "new, correct,
and significant". Criteria for
a Ph.D. dissertation are
sometimes "an original contribution
to knowledge worthy of
publication".
Each each paper published in
a peer-reviewed journal
of original research is supposed
to be an example. When the US
NSF or NIH give research grants,
there is supposed to be research
that will be publishable in
a peer-reviewed journal of
original research, that is,
new, knowledge that
did not exist before.
In computing, we write software.
It takes in data, manipulates
it, and puts out data.
For my startup, I wanted some
software that would
take in some available data, do some powerful manipulations, and put out
some valuable data. So
to get some powerful manipulations, difficult to
duplicate or equal, and to know
right away that the manipulations were correct
and likely powerful,
I wrote out some original
applied math. I have to doubt
that anyone else in the world
has written out anything
really the same. Then I
wrote software to perform
the data manipulations
specified by the math.
The software and the math
are my proprietary intellectual
property, and I intend to
use trade secret protection.
Tell the world the details? Heck no.
Am I able to do such original
math derivations, "original
contribution to knowledge",
"new, correct, significant"?
Yup, as demonstrated by my
Ph.D. dissertation and published,
peer-reviewed papers.
>>For any chunk of knowledge, except for very unlikely ties, there was a first person who had that knowledge, and for that person, then, the claim is false.
For practical purposes, if you want to make anything resembling a business out of your knowledge, you are going to need time. And chances are people in the field would have been aware of what interesting things there are in that field, and would have some idea of what you've come up with. They may not have some very specific things like particular implementations, but they will nonetheless have a good idea of what's up and down in the field.
Obviously you are the only person writing your code, but should you assume that someone with a similar background could not come up with something quite similar if he wanted to research it?
> And chances are people in the field would have been aware of what interesting things there are in that field, and would have some idea of what you've come up with.
So, do some research that
others are not likely to do.
Then carry that research
all the way to a
successful business.
My research is some math, based
on theorems and proofs, based
on some advanced prerequisites.
Sure, at least in
principle, there are some university
mathematicians who could
duplicate what I derived.
It's been a while since
I was a teenager. Since then
I've spent a lot of time
around low end business,
and high end research
mathematics, business,
startups, and computing.
Sure, a lot of that
experience
has just junk quality information,
but the experience
does let me
have some understanding
of the people and cultures.
Based on that understanding,
there are at least
three bottlenecks that
help protect me:
(1) To duplicate my research,
the university research
mathematicians would mostly
need a relatively
clean formulation of the
the math part of the real
business
problem as a math problem.
That formulation
requires also understanding
some of my business model,
which is not mathematics,
in particular, what data
to get and how to get it
and, then, what the heck
data to give the users/customers
that they will like, a lot,
and why.
E.g.,
first cut a lot of people
will say that I will need
ballpark 10^27 bytes of data.
Nope! Just why not
is a bit clever;
although the basic
reason is some solid
math, it's a bit novel;
also need to understand and
keep in
mind the business model;
only a small fraction of
research mathematicians
have all the math prerequisites;
and, net,
only a small fraction
of people in pure
math would think of it.
Some of what I'm doing
most people who are close
to such things will say
I can't do that.
For things close to what
I'm doing, they are right.
For exactly what I'm doing,
they are wrong. I found
a narrow path through the
woods that works for just
what I'm doing. If my
path were broad instead
of narrow, a lot of
books would have to be
revised.
(2) The research I did is
relatively applied,
i.e., would
be regarded by the research
mathematics community as
a niche; then such
mathematicians would have to
do the work of focusing on the
niche; that would take them
away from their main stream
of research, get them few or
no academic promotion points,
and is something they wouldn't
want to do.
(3) Even among
good university research mathematicians, some of the
crucial math prerequisites are not well understood.
For a human, there
is little so obscure as
some math theorems and
proofs where the human
is missing the important
prerequisites.
Outside of university research
math departments, the chances
of anyone even being able to
duplicate my work is much smaller.
Then there is the issue of
business: The university
research mathematicians
are a very long way culturally
from a startup in information
technology; they
don't have nearly enough background in the basic computing;
e.g., they don't really know
in any good detail how a Web server works,
or TCP/IP,
know an appropriate
programming
language, understand
server farm system management,
etc.
Then in business, they don't understand information technology
startups. E.g., they haven't
been reading Hacker News,
VentureBeat, AVC.com, Mark Andreessen, etc.
They couldn't, and
even if they could likely wouldn't, do the work alone (too
big of a distraction
from their
university research career)
and with just the math
wouldn't be able to attract
a team without some significant
bucks. Further, for a VC,
a professor with a math
paper and a dime won't cover
a 10 cent cup of coffee.
My effort is yet another
example of something classic
in innovation -- field crossing.
So, for the fields,
there are some advanced
math prerequisites,
some understanding of
some niche topics in
pure and applied math,
the particula...
years ago I was working on a pitch for a startup based on tech I had developed. My adviser, a successful serial entrepreneur told me not to call the tech "revolutionary" (or something like that) because potential investors hear it all the time and it smells like BS.
I thought about that, too. In
the end, I came up with another
description of the investors:
Well, I can't explain that one;
here we don't want NSFW material!
So, I'll give a SFW version;
I'll
concentrate on information
technology since biomedical
is at least a little different:
(1) The investors are not very
technical people. Often we're
talking people with backgrounds
in business development,
marketing, routine software,
former CEOs of startups that
were largely non-technical, etc.
In contrast, the people in
high end research university
STEM field research know
how to evaluate technical work,
e.g., as reviewers and editors
of good peer-reviewed journals.
And if some paper is outside
the field of some prof,
then he will still know how
to get the work reviewed by
others, e.g., as the editor in
chief of a journal gets the
editors and reviewers to do the
work.
Then, just think a little about
what is involved in such peer-review and, then, begin
to see how hopeless it would
be for the usual investors to
do such work. For the VCs,
such technical review work
is hopeless, and they don't do it.
Or for your description
that they
hear hype, that's
not really
the problem; instead, hype or
not, "revolutionary"
or not, they just ignore
anything like research.
Or look at the bios of the VCs:
Could hold a convention in
an airplane wash room for
all of them able to do or
even able to
direct peer-review of
STEM field
research.
(2) Evaluating research is
something the VCs just
won't do. Likely if one of
their limited partners (LPs) caught one of their VCs using
an evaluation of some
research, then the LP would make
sure that VC never got another
dime, at least not from that
LP.
(3) Sometimes VCs make money,
and sometimes they don't.
On average the don't make
very much.
In any case, they don't
try to make money with the
results of research.
(4) Mostly VCs don't evaluate
the technical work. Instead,
for early stage investing,
their criteria are fairly
simple: (A) Look for
traction significantly high
and growing rapidly. (B) Be
sure the work is for a
really large market. (C) Usually be sure the CEO
and company HQ will be a
short drive from the VC's
offices. (D) Look for anything
that is really wacko that
would be a disqualification.
If (A)-(D) look good, then
contact the CEO and argue that
a check of equity funding would
help their growth rate enough
to more than pay for the stock
dilution.
Have a term sheet that for the
CEO is just onerous and puts
the VCs in solid control, e.g.,
able to replace the CEO with
someone loyal to the VC.
For seed funding, the VCs
look at the product, although
not at any technical internals,
and try to estimate how the
target users/customers would
like the product.
For later stage funding, the
VCs look mostly just at what
an accountant does.
And for any VC funding, they
look at what they know about
the market: Commonly VCs
claim to have "deep domain
knowledge"; in terms of
anything technical, that is
a wild belly laugh; could break
a bone slapping a thigh over
that one. But they do have
at least a cursory, from 10,000
feet up, view of the markets.
So, they have heard of viral,
social, local, mobile, sharing,
photo apps, own both an iPhone
and an Android, have used
Google, Facebook, PInterest,
SnapChat, InstaGram, and Uber, have heard about tablets,
laptops, Windows,
Apple, Linux, have seen articles
on Apple's watch, have
gotten a lot of pitch decks,
attended a lot of pitches,
and have listened for a few minutes each to a few.
For more, they know most of the other VCs on, say, Sand Hill Road, and attend morning
what's hot pick-up seminars
in coffee shops. For
exits they know about
acquihires, pitchforking,
M&A, and maybe even IPOs.
While in some sense the VCs
understand that the need
to find companies that
are new and exceptional,
they look for patterns they
have seen from th...
So, what is an inventor to do? It sounds like you are in a similar boat to the one I am in, with a math-software based invention (mine is field crossing between telecommunications and super-resolution mathematics), for which it is hard to get attention in this day of cat-video apps and labor cost arbitrageurs. Twenty years ago I found Steve Jurvetson, who is one of those rare VCs who can actually do technical review. But unfortunately he is now too successful to evaluate out-of-the-blue opportunities,and finding the next one like him is probably going to take just as long as it took me to find him. Likely longer, since last time I was looking was not at a bubble peak with all its attendant noise and wannabes.
Where do you look for funding for actual revolutionary technology, or are you just as frustrated as I am?
I didn't start with the math I derived. E.g., there's a lot of
math I could derive that I
couldn't turn into business.
So, to derive new math, I want
that math to be powerful and
valuable for a new business.
So, I started with the business
idea, the really short, simple
one from 50,000+ feet up. Right, John Doerr, that idea
by itself is worthless.
I'd like to say that I did the
planning for the math next, then
the business model, then
the user interface/user experience (UI/UX), then the
computing, all in some such
order, but no
such thing would be correct.
Instead I did a fitting,
did the planning of the whole
by planning
all the pieces so that they
all fit together; e.g., the
math fits because it is the
crucial core, enabling technology
that lets the rest work and
the whole be valuable.
Or, I don't want to do research
without good plans for
a happy trip to the bank.
I derived some math, but
I'm not trying to be a math
researcher. I wrote some
software, but I'm not trying
to be a programmer. Instead,
I'm trying to be a businessman,
that is, to make money, the
green kind, and there
the math, computing, Moore's
law, the infrastructure
software, the Internet, mobile,
the software I wrote,
etc. are all business advantages,
that is, make my chances
of getting rich better than,
say, running a pizza shop,
being a math prof, or being
a programmer.
But there was another criterion:
I needed to bring my project
to nice profitability just
from my checkbook where I did
all the work.
It was in that context that
I derived the math and wrote
the code.
If you have some good technical
work, then maybe you'd like to
turn it into a business.
To do that, it can help if
you can do all the work
to good profitability
alone funded just by your
own checkbook. And it
is crucial that the technology
can help you get to the
necessary happy users/customers.
A model is the guy who did
the Canadian romantic matchmaking
service Plenty of Fish.
He was long just one guy,
two old Dell servers,
ads just via Google,
and $10 million in annual
revenue. He grew, hired
a staff, and recently
sold for $575 million in
cash. Maybe for his
matchmaking he had some
clever ideas -- maybe.
Some good, new technology
can be a big advantage,
maybe even crucial. But
really you need a feasible
path all the way to
"The Pay Window".
From a background in high
end work in the STEM fields,
it's easy to guess that,
when some high end STEM
field work has some new
results that clearly should
be the crucial, core of a
valuable new business, there
is some funding for that.
In a word, nope. Exception:
Some guy with a lot of
background
in fusion has a plan where
as little as $500 million
equity might get to a prototype
fusion reactor that generates
energy, and get one on one
with a dozen or so billionaires
who will pull out their
personal checkbooks. Otherwise,
essentially nope.
VC? Sure, if look at their
Web sites, can get the idea
that they fund ambitious, change
the world, brilliant, new,
disruptive,
ideas. Yup, and they also
fund tall, short, thin, and
fat people, too. But the
reason they fund is to follow
making money their way
which is to buy, on terms
onerous for the founders,
a fraction of a business
with traction significant
and growing rapidly. That's
what they do. Maybe their
LPs make sure that that is
exactly what they do, no more
and no less, and no funding
off the back of a napkin.
In particular, it appears that
almost universally VCs just
will not fund software
development. Instead, they
want the software running
and in use, with significant
traction growing rapidly.
As IIRC Sam Altman put it
recently, VC funding is to
let a growing business grow
faster. Bringing good, powerful
new STEM field research to
market? Nope.
The idea that good technical
work is valuable, etc. seems
to come heavily from the
massive funding of research
for US national security
of the past 75 years, some
from the best work...
Yes, and also for further development work to make the product fit better into cell towers and phones. Basically, funding would make the same growth process go a lot faster than doing it in my spare time with my own wallet, and patents have a limited lifetime. So far, the main interest has been from ham radio and satellite comm folks, but we know that cell phones are where the real money is at. We really need contacts in the mobile phone infrastructure industry, more than anything.
B2B infrastructure is a hard area in which to run a bootstrap startup. I'm not really sure how to fit 20fold into a consultant mold. I am interested if anyone has any advice on how to do this, though.
Telecoms are notoriously difficult to market to. Actually I wouldn't mind discussing this with you further, my email is on my profile page for the time being if you'd like to get in touch.
I can recommend "Against Intellectual Monopoly" for more stories about how patents can be as much of a hindrance to innovation, as it is a stimulant.
Personally I don't think patents are worth it. It may help with a few innovations, but it's not worth the massive cost and bureaucracy, and for other innovations they may delay development by years.
For anyone that is particularly interested in this specific story, this article is almost an exact summary of the the book Birdmen by Lawrence Goldstone. He frames the story as a rivalry between Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Brothers, but also goes through all of the business missteps and failed attempts at establishing a monopolistic market from which they could extract rents from for the rest of their lives.
I would highly recommend as a case study for what not to do if you reach a groundbreaking development.
Wow, it basically reads like one of dozens of 'creative person is successful, not good with their money or the business parts' stories, just with the Wright brothers.
I mean, sure, if establishing a monopoly and aiming for maximum monetary extraction from a market is the primary goal - which it seems to be for many people (here and otherwise) - then yeah, they "blew it" so to speak. Still, first in flight, history remembers this, and all pilots must speak English if they expect to land in the United States and most well-to-do nations. Oh, and this tidbit:
>In October 1915 Orville sold the Wright Company to a group of investors for a reported $1.5 million.
...a quick calculation makes it look like in today's value that'd be around $35 million. Might not sound like a lot for the Forbes business crowd, but that's a good chunk of change in my opinion.
Their secrecy surely didn't help them, but trying to apply that to today's environment is just stupid. The likelihood of being 'ripped off' is more of a concern now than ever - if the idea can make it to China, it can be made in China without recourse. Try playing whack-a-mole with lawsuits while trying to do business as the originator? Sounds like a terrible business plan.
I'm going to be writing an essay about 'Why I keep secrets as a struggling inventor' soon, and will submit it here for discussion. In it will be one design from years ago that I feel comfortable showing in public. Grand scheme of things I know I have to pay for protection in the patent game, but even with the patent, there are still risk factors in the global scene.
This seems wrong. Firstly, the army didn't believe them to the point of not even looking. The Wrights wanted to sell to the army, and were willing to deliver a working plane that met specific requirements. This path ultimately worked, but it took time for the army to change their mind.
They also flew publicly in France in 1906, thus demonstrating what they had.
They defended their patent when Curtis invented ailerons. Today Curtis would have been handed their own patent and won the battle, but back then they were given wide latitude.
In the end, they sold their patent for something like $1M. I don't recall if that was after Wilbur died.
In my opinion, they did most of it right.
My favorite story was the one where the army put it out for bids (required process) and there were 3 bidders. One of them tried to win by undercutting the Wrights price - he didn't have a plane but planned to buy one from them and thus make himself a middle man. When the Wrights told him that would not happen, he dropped out and they won the bidding process and indeed sold a plane to the army.
I see some misinformation in the article, and didn't get far enough to see any suggestion of an alternative path. There were hints that selling out would be a suggestion. Cave to "real" business people.
That they fell victim to their own monopolistic goal and its pursuit through secrecy is ironic, given that they initially benefitted greatly from information given freely by others working on the problem.
Flight was going to happen and was pushing out of the ground like so many grass sprouts. This ridiculous tale is about the absurd flurry of activity to own a basic concept. It would be better that people had cooperated as well as researched this for the common good. This is why universities should not be trying to make a greedy buck off patents and IP, and why there shouldn't be, say, an 'Amazon Professor of Machine Learning' at the University of Washington. Lack of greed is why we're all enjoying tools like Linux. Let's hear it for open source software.
36 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 86.8 ms ] thread"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
-Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution
I'd be happiest with a world without software patents, but 12-18 months from filing might be a reasonable compromise position for software/electronics patents. That is short enough that you might simply take the filings, assign each a number (do no review), immediately publish the claims, and then after the fact adjudicate any complaints that someone raises. (lazy evaluation for patents, basically)
IMO, that's enough incentive to get us the iPhone, multi-touch, Bluetooth / LE, NFC, etc, etc, without every startup being worried about a company-killing judgement hanging over their head.
Maybe the stakeholders should start a discussion about bifurcation of patent laws based on the field, because the one-size-fits all clearly isn't working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgJiu3gr_LU
That these patents exist in and of itself is not necessarily bothersome. That someone can argue that stretchy scroll is worth billions is.
The dawn of 1914 brought good news, as the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Wrights’ patent suit, agreeing that Curtiss had infringed. This would have been the perfect time to shut down the competition by re-establishing the Wright monopoly. But Orville did not make a move, as the company manager Grover Loening lamented later: “In no time Curtiss…could have been closed down or bought up, and we would have seen a totally different development of flying starting here and spreading to Europe exactly as the telephone monopoly did…"
If he had shut down Curtiss and his other competitors, the development of aviation would probably have stalled for a while, at least in the US. Perhaps Orville realized that his company was well behind the state-of-the-art by then.
In the text shows Santos-Dummont as a really applauded guy, recognized on the street, with incredible PR skills. He called the press before any presentation and even meetings, he did not applied for any patents and shared his prizes with workers that needed it. Just the opposite from the Wright Brothers.
Sadly, this special issue is in Portuguese only. But I do think it is worth the pain of the automatic translation if you are interested in comparing the stories. It really shows how important it is to share and to see science and technology as the social endeavors they are.
[1] http://infograficos.estadao.com.br/especiais/a-redescoberta-...
Dummont created the first motorized airplane, which is a look more like a real airplane than an ultra-light that can't launch itself.
And 100 years earlier there was an Italian that came up with a model airplane that would have flown if built to human scale.
I really don't understand why people care so much about the Wright Brothers. I can't see what they invented originally at all.
More information about Dummont vs Wright here: http://web.archive.org/web/20030820050506/http://www.thefirs...
These days you should promote any invention as soon as you get patent pending. But I can see why Wright brothers we're suspicious back then.
Other major failures we're early concentration to military sales and not taking competition seriously. Military sales are take it or leave it, you either win big or nothing. If some conservative major gets assigned to deal with the purchase and you are sellign something really new, the sale might be doomed before you start.
From a legal perspective this is not true. But the fact remains that to enforce your IP you will need to spend a lot of money and effort, which is not something a startup can/should do.
Sorry, I don't believe that.
Here's my guess at why people say not to keep an idea secret and, instead, to tell the world: By an idea they mean just a rough description of a commercial product/service as a user/customer might see it. The technology used for the product/service is just routine software and common, off the shelf (COTS) hardware. Any crucial, core, original proprietary technology is not expected and is just missing.
Instead, when there was some software for automatic trading and it appeared that a guy got a personal copy, the owners of that software started legal action to protect their technology and intellectual property -- they didn't tell the world the crucial, core internal details of just how their software worked.
I think the thinking was it would be difficult to figure how they made said thing, once it was out in the public. If you patent, everyone knows.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite : An amazing material, apparently. There was a BBC show where it protected an egg from a blowtorch. Unfortunately the guy who made it was extremely protective, so we'll never know quite what it was or whether it was really as effective as it seemed.
- I had a long discussion with my old partners about whether trading models should be kept secret. The big problem is that once you've decided you've got something - and over short periods, it may well look that way - you start to think you can walk on water. I still wonder which way round the causality is. Did we keep everything secret because we thought we'd found a goldmine, or did we think we were brilliant, and the secrecy was a way to flatter ourselves? In any case, once people develop the attitude that they are better than everyone else, it becomes very hard to get any new ideas in there.
- Once you decide your edge is in some kind of knowledge, rather than some kind of execution of a business plan, you are going one way only. Sure, you need some knowledge, but you'd better believe other people have that knowledge as well. There's only one principle involved in steering a plane: change its shape. But there's a HUGE number of ways you can do that, and a huge number of ways to shape your business to explore those ways.
- It seems the patent system was broken a hundred years ago, and it hasn't been fixed. For me the main issue is it causes people to have idea fixation: the idea that ideas are somehow more important than everything else in a business. There's a whole list of interesting things to say about patents as well, but I'll stop here.
For any chunk of knowledge, except for very unlikely ties, there was a first person who had that knowledge, and for that person, then, the claim is false.
It really is possible to do research that is genuinely new. Indeed, the usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant". Criteria for a Ph.D. dissertation are sometimes "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". Each each paper published in a peer-reviewed journal of original research is supposed to be an example. When the US NSF or NIH give research grants, there is supposed to be research that will be publishable in a peer-reviewed journal of original research, that is, new, knowledge that did not exist before.
In computing, we write software. It takes in data, manipulates it, and puts out data.
For my startup, I wanted some software that would take in some available data, do some powerful manipulations, and put out some valuable data. So to get some powerful manipulations, difficult to duplicate or equal, and to know right away that the manipulations were correct and likely powerful, I wrote out some original applied math. I have to doubt that anyone else in the world has written out anything really the same. Then I wrote software to perform the data manipulations specified by the math.
The software and the math are my proprietary intellectual property, and I intend to use trade secret protection. Tell the world the details? Heck no.
Am I able to do such original math derivations, "original contribution to knowledge", "new, correct, significant"? Yup, as demonstrated by my Ph.D. dissertation and published, peer-reviewed papers.
For practical purposes, if you want to make anything resembling a business out of your knowledge, you are going to need time. And chances are people in the field would have been aware of what interesting things there are in that field, and would have some idea of what you've come up with. They may not have some very specific things like particular implementations, but they will nonetheless have a good idea of what's up and down in the field.
Obviously you are the only person writing your code, but should you assume that someone with a similar background could not come up with something quite similar if he wanted to research it?
So, do some research that others are not likely to do. Then carry that research all the way to a successful business.
My research is some math, based on theorems and proofs, based on some advanced prerequisites. Sure, at least in principle, there are some university mathematicians who could duplicate what I derived.
It's been a while since I was a teenager. Since then I've spent a lot of time around low end business, and high end research mathematics, business, startups, and computing. Sure, a lot of that experience has just junk quality information, but the experience does let me have some understanding of the people and cultures. Based on that understanding, there are at least three bottlenecks that help protect me:
(1) To duplicate my research, the university research mathematicians would mostly need a relatively clean formulation of the the math part of the real business problem as a math problem. That formulation requires also understanding some of my business model, which is not mathematics, in particular, what data to get and how to get it and, then, what the heck data to give the users/customers that they will like, a lot, and why.
E.g., first cut a lot of people will say that I will need ballpark 10^27 bytes of data. Nope! Just why not is a bit clever; although the basic reason is some solid math, it's a bit novel; also need to understand and keep in mind the business model; only a small fraction of research mathematicians have all the math prerequisites; and, net, only a small fraction of people in pure math would think of it.
Some of what I'm doing most people who are close to such things will say I can't do that. For things close to what I'm doing, they are right. For exactly what I'm doing, they are wrong. I found a narrow path through the woods that works for just what I'm doing. If my path were broad instead of narrow, a lot of books would have to be revised.
(2) The research I did is relatively applied, i.e., would be regarded by the research mathematics community as a niche; then such mathematicians would have to do the work of focusing on the niche; that would take them away from their main stream of research, get them few or no academic promotion points, and is something they wouldn't want to do.
(3) Even among good university research mathematicians, some of the crucial math prerequisites are not well understood.
For a human, there is little so obscure as some math theorems and proofs where the human is missing the important prerequisites.
Outside of university research math departments, the chances of anyone even being able to duplicate my work is much smaller.
Then there is the issue of business: The university research mathematicians are a very long way culturally from a startup in information technology; they don't have nearly enough background in the basic computing; e.g., they don't really know in any good detail how a Web server works, or TCP/IP, know an appropriate programming language, understand server farm system management, etc.
Then in business, they don't understand information technology startups. E.g., they haven't been reading Hacker News, VentureBeat, AVC.com, Mark Andreessen, etc.
They couldn't, and even if they could likely wouldn't, do the work alone (too big of a distraction from their university research career) and with just the math wouldn't be able to attract a team without some significant bucks. Further, for a VC, a professor with a math paper and a dime won't cover a 10 cent cup of coffee.
My effort is yet another example of something classic in innovation -- field crossing. So, for the fields, there are some advanced math prerequisites, some understanding of some niche topics in pure and applied math, the particula...
But dammit, some things are revolutionary!
Well, I can't explain that one; here we don't want NSFW material!
So, I'll give a SFW version; I'll concentrate on information technology since biomedical is at least a little different:
(1) The investors are not very technical people. Often we're talking people with backgrounds in business development, marketing, routine software, former CEOs of startups that were largely non-technical, etc.
In contrast, the people in high end research university STEM field research know how to evaluate technical work, e.g., as reviewers and editors of good peer-reviewed journals. And if some paper is outside the field of some prof, then he will still know how to get the work reviewed by others, e.g., as the editor in chief of a journal gets the editors and reviewers to do the work.
Then, just think a little about what is involved in such peer-review and, then, begin to see how hopeless it would be for the usual investors to do such work. For the VCs, such technical review work is hopeless, and they don't do it.
Or for your description that they hear hype, that's not really the problem; instead, hype or not, "revolutionary" or not, they just ignore anything like research.
Or look at the bios of the VCs: Could hold a convention in an airplane wash room for all of them able to do or even able to direct peer-review of STEM field research.
(2) Evaluating research is something the VCs just won't do. Likely if one of their limited partners (LPs) caught one of their VCs using an evaluation of some research, then the LP would make sure that VC never got another dime, at least not from that LP.
(3) Sometimes VCs make money, and sometimes they don't. On average the don't make very much. In any case, they don't try to make money with the results of research.
(4) Mostly VCs don't evaluate the technical work. Instead, for early stage investing, their criteria are fairly simple: (A) Look for traction significantly high and growing rapidly. (B) Be sure the work is for a really large market. (C) Usually be sure the CEO and company HQ will be a short drive from the VC's offices. (D) Look for anything that is really wacko that would be a disqualification.
If (A)-(D) look good, then contact the CEO and argue that a check of equity funding would help their growth rate enough to more than pay for the stock dilution.
Have a term sheet that for the CEO is just onerous and puts the VCs in solid control, e.g., able to replace the CEO with someone loyal to the VC.
For seed funding, the VCs look at the product, although not at any technical internals, and try to estimate how the target users/customers would like the product.
For later stage funding, the VCs look mostly just at what an accountant does.
And for any VC funding, they look at what they know about the market: Commonly VCs claim to have "deep domain knowledge"; in terms of anything technical, that is a wild belly laugh; could break a bone slapping a thigh over that one. But they do have at least a cursory, from 10,000 feet up, view of the markets. So, they have heard of viral, social, local, mobile, sharing, photo apps, own both an iPhone and an Android, have used Google, Facebook, PInterest, SnapChat, InstaGram, and Uber, have heard about tablets, laptops, Windows, Apple, Linux, have seen articles on Apple's watch, have gotten a lot of pitch decks, attended a lot of pitches, and have listened for a few minutes each to a few.
For more, they know most of the other VCs on, say, Sand Hill Road, and attend morning what's hot pick-up seminars in coffee shops. For exits they know about acquihires, pitchforking, M&A, and maybe even IPOs.
While in some sense the VCs understand that the need to find companies that are new and exceptional, they look for patterns they have seen from th...
Where do you look for funding for actual revolutionary technology, or are you just as frustrated as I am?
So, I started with the business idea, the really short, simple one from 50,000+ feet up. Right, John Doerr, that idea by itself is worthless.
I'd like to say that I did the planning for the math next, then the business model, then the user interface/user experience (UI/UX), then the computing, all in some such order, but no such thing would be correct.
Instead I did a fitting, did the planning of the whole by planning all the pieces so that they all fit together; e.g., the math fits because it is the crucial core, enabling technology that lets the rest work and the whole be valuable.
Or, I don't want to do research without good plans for a happy trip to the bank.
I derived some math, but I'm not trying to be a math researcher. I wrote some software, but I'm not trying to be a programmer. Instead, I'm trying to be a businessman, that is, to make money, the green kind, and there the math, computing, Moore's law, the infrastructure software, the Internet, mobile, the software I wrote, etc. are all business advantages, that is, make my chances of getting rich better than, say, running a pizza shop, being a math prof, or being a programmer.
But there was another criterion: I needed to bring my project to nice profitability just from my checkbook where I did all the work.
It was in that context that I derived the math and wrote the code.
If you have some good technical work, then maybe you'd like to turn it into a business. To do that, it can help if you can do all the work to good profitability alone funded just by your own checkbook. And it is crucial that the technology can help you get to the necessary happy users/customers.
A model is the guy who did the Canadian romantic matchmaking service Plenty of Fish. He was long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just via Google, and $10 million in annual revenue. He grew, hired a staff, and recently sold for $575 million in cash. Maybe for his matchmaking he had some clever ideas -- maybe.
Some good, new technology can be a big advantage, maybe even crucial. But really you need a feasible path all the way to "The Pay Window".
From a background in high end work in the STEM fields, it's easy to guess that, when some high end STEM field work has some new results that clearly should be the crucial, core of a valuable new business, there is some funding for that. In a word, nope. Exception: Some guy with a lot of background in fusion has a plan where as little as $500 million equity might get to a prototype fusion reactor that generates energy, and get one on one with a dozen or so billionaires who will pull out their personal checkbooks. Otherwise, essentially nope.
VC? Sure, if look at their Web sites, can get the idea that they fund ambitious, change the world, brilliant, new, disruptive, ideas. Yup, and they also fund tall, short, thin, and fat people, too. But the reason they fund is to follow making money their way which is to buy, on terms onerous for the founders, a fraction of a business with traction significant and growing rapidly. That's what they do. Maybe their LPs make sure that that is exactly what they do, no more and no less, and no funding off the back of a napkin. In particular, it appears that almost universally VCs just will not fund software development. Instead, they want the software running and in use, with significant traction growing rapidly. As IIRC Sam Altman put it recently, VC funding is to let a growing business grow faster. Bringing good, powerful new STEM field research to market? Nope.
The idea that good technical work is valuable, etc. seems to come heavily from the massive funding of research for US national security of the past 75 years, some from the best work...
Have you done consulting to see how well 20fold works in practice yet?
B2B infrastructure is a hard area in which to run a bootstrap startup. I'm not really sure how to fit 20fold into a consultant mold. I am interested if anyone has any advice on how to do this, though.
Personally I don't think patents are worth it. It may help with a few innovations, but it's not worth the massive cost and bureaucracy, and for other innovations they may delay development by years.
[1] http://idlewords.com/2003/12/100_years_of_turbulence.htm
I would highly recommend as a case study for what not to do if you reach a groundbreaking development.
I mean, sure, if establishing a monopoly and aiming for maximum monetary extraction from a market is the primary goal - which it seems to be for many people (here and otherwise) - then yeah, they "blew it" so to speak. Still, first in flight, history remembers this, and all pilots must speak English if they expect to land in the United States and most well-to-do nations. Oh, and this tidbit:
>In October 1915 Orville sold the Wright Company to a group of investors for a reported $1.5 million.
...a quick calculation makes it look like in today's value that'd be around $35 million. Might not sound like a lot for the Forbes business crowd, but that's a good chunk of change in my opinion.
Their secrecy surely didn't help them, but trying to apply that to today's environment is just stupid. The likelihood of being 'ripped off' is more of a concern now than ever - if the idea can make it to China, it can be made in China without recourse. Try playing whack-a-mole with lawsuits while trying to do business as the originator? Sounds like a terrible business plan.
I'm going to be writing an essay about 'Why I keep secrets as a struggling inventor' soon, and will submit it here for discussion. In it will be one design from years ago that I feel comfortable showing in public. Grand scheme of things I know I have to pay for protection in the patent game, but even with the patent, there are still risk factors in the global scene.
They also flew publicly in France in 1906, thus demonstrating what they had.
They defended their patent when Curtis invented ailerons. Today Curtis would have been handed their own patent and won the battle, but back then they were given wide latitude.
In the end, they sold their patent for something like $1M. I don't recall if that was after Wilbur died.
In my opinion, they did most of it right.
My favorite story was the one where the army put it out for bids (required process) and there were 3 bidders. One of them tried to win by undercutting the Wrights price - he didn't have a plane but planned to buy one from them and thus make himself a middle man. When the Wrights told him that would not happen, he dropped out and they won the bidding process and indeed sold a plane to the army.
I see some misinformation in the article, and didn't get far enough to see any suggestion of an alternative path. There were hints that selling out would be a suggestion. Cave to "real" business people.