Moats for deeptech startups | Hacker News Reader

Moats for deeptech startups

invertedpassion.com

31 pointsparaschopra9 comments

This seems to just focus on the cons of patents as a moat. And a patent is less protection for a startup than I would like. But they leaned hard into the worthlessness of them. I feel like I hear about the abuses of patents so you should abolish the system, and the uselessness of patents.

It seems to me like if I have a patent, than at the worst I should be able to sell it to a well funded company if I lose and there are two or three well funded competitors. Possibly even via a merger/acquisition.

The companies you would want to sell to may very well just ignore it and make it anyway.

I meant if you had a patent on I dunno, app based crowdsourced taxis (or however you would describe it), presumably Uber and Lyft would be interested in acquiring it shutting their competitor down. Those two would be well funded enough to go through the patent litigation with each other.

Not necessarily. They might just shrug and let it die.

Let the patent die as opposed to acquiring it? Why?

I mean, wouldn't the patent on "being Uber/Lyft" be worth a lot to either of them to dominate the market?

It's rarely that simple. They each build up portfolios of different pieces and once it is sufficiently unclear which would win, both discount the value of anything additional on the unlikelihood the other will start something they might lose.

Yup. Anything involving the courts is high risk. If someone is spinning up a small entity to pursue some legal theory, it usually isn’t super high risk for them in practice as they can contain their losses.

But existing entities with cash to lose, it’s rarely worth it unless the payoff is potentially huge and the case is really solid, and often not even then.

Litigation Lawyers are great at making solid seeming situations super ambiguous and hard to figure out when it suits them, and these things can be drawn out for decades at incredible expense.

And especially for software patents, there is no such thing as a really solid case anymore.

It’s essentially a form of chicken/mutually assured destruction, near as I can tell.

No moat like a hardware moat.

Depending on the application, you could literally build software in the open and still maintain if not expand exposure.

Ah, the Huawei strategy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com