As a co-founder of a startup, my most worrying thoughts are not finding customers or improving the product. They're "when will I get a scary legal letter that asks for millions over a patent I've never heard of".
In other words, if three companies down the block signed millions away to Intellectual Ventures, you would have no idea. Maybe the risk is overblown. Unfortunately we have no idea of knowing.
They try to hammer this point home in the podcast.
It occurred to me there is simple legislation that might chip away at all this shadiness: Pass a law that forbids NDAs in patent licensing deals.
If it did work it would be the greatest conspiracy ever pulled off. A company extracting a billion hostile dollars and people not even posting on anonymous sites? So not likely.
The genius of IV's NDAs isn't that they have millions of companies paying them, but that they can create the mythology that they might. And you might be next.
I'm literally about 100x more worried that my architect gets hit by a bus than I am of being sued over patents.
I'm not saying that lawsuits don't happen, but they're rare.
The odds are already pretty long for being a successful dev, but if these letters take out 10, 15, or 20% of the would-be successful ones, that's a big deal.
The reason google, facebook, etc... would rather buy startups that are breaking new ground is because it's faster and cheaper than just copying/cloning an idea and building it from scratch - especially these days, when innovation happens much quicker.
The only way for me to "manage" some sort of patent lawsuit would be buying insurance against it (is that even possible?), and even then the insurance company would likely settle, handing over more cash, and further validating the business model.