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by lettergram 683 days ago
> No plan B

That really hits home for me. I decided to start my current company (https://ipcopilot.ai) when I had already been out of work 3 months, I had 4-6 months runway when I left my prior role. Meaning, I had 1-3 months left before I couldn't pay my mortgage when I incorporated my company.

My responsibilities were high: 3 kids, wife due with another baby in 60 days, no source of income, and an estimated 45-60 days of runway. I passed up two mid-six figure jobs to start this business. My wife just said "better make this work", which fair enough haha.

I was able to get 3 funding offers in 45 days & signed the paperwork for funding the day my 4th child was delivered (1 hr after). 48 days after my first VC meeting. Barely able to make my mortgage payment (my co-founder offered to lend me money).

Obviously, didn't tell the VCs how up against the wall I was, but to say it was stressful is an understatement. That said, everything worked out well and business has been doing great. I had to make it work, there literally wasn't another choice. And if this sounds insane, it kind of was, but I saw the opportunity and took it. I'm also sure I would have figured it out if things didn't work out as well, but inexplicably I knew it would work out. Might also play into the: "Unlimited self-belief"... haha

1 comments

Intriguing product, definitely something that is a major pain point for inventors.

I do wonder however, I see a couple of the profiles listed show 500+ patents.

Does this indicate that we are now in an era of full fledged "IP spam" or can you argue that inventors have in fact historically been under-rewarded by the difficulty of filing patents? Otherwise that is a lot of patents for someone who isn't building a spacecraft :)

Haha to be fair, the team I ran was an applied research group that’d partner with teams within the organization. So every month we’d do designs & bring in ML expertise to a new project. Plus we maintained a ton of tools. This resulted in a lot of patents every month. Particularly, around generative AI, autoML, federated learning, etc years before it was popular. So it was a fairly open space, resulting in a high number of patents