Homework due for today
- Talking to real life entrepreneurs. I would like you to interview a real entrepreneur that founded a company. Not just anyone who says that they are an entrepreneur but who actually is in the founding team. I prefer it to be face to face, but telephone or email is also acceptable. Many of you might know family members or aquantances who are founders or know people who know. You can also ask me and/or use LinkedIn.
Try to get answers to questions such as these(use your own words):
- What was your first job after your education, and at what point did you know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Also, how did you go from wanting to be an entrepreneur to actually starting the company?
- How did the company develop? How was it successful, how was it not successful? What did you personally do in each scenario?
- Have you started other companies, and how did they go in comparison?
- What are some of the personal traits, talents, skills or knowledge, that have served you well as a founder? What is the mistake you feel is made often in founding a company?
Deliverable: Write a 1-2 page report on your interview. Try to distill out some lessons. Include a section with your own personal reflection on: what it means to be an entrepreneur, and how you yourself see your entrepreneurship, and what you personally learned and got out of the interview.
- Read: the wikipedia articles below. I will be asking for definitions and distinctions!
- Copyrights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
- Trade Secrets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
- Patents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patents
Intellectual Property
- Look at: IP Scenarios
- Break up into groups to discuss and review the cases
- Come up with answers and reasoning for as many of the cases as you can in 15 minutes
- Report outs from each group
- What mechanisms are there in the US to protect IP?
- Copyright
- Trade Secret
- Patents
- What benefits do you get if you have IP rights? Why bother?
- Impresses investors!
- Patent portfolios
- Competitive protection
- Protecting your IP and respecting others’ IP
- Licensing is a contract between two parties where I allow you to ‘use’ something that I own
- You need to decide what you ‘release’ and what you don’t. For example, do you release source code? Do you release your circuit diagrams, and so on. Whatever you ‘release’ you have to ‘protect’
- Two steps:
- First, make it protected, so you own it
- Second, grant someone else permission to use it in a controlled way, by licensing it
- Open Source and Creative Commons
- NDA
- Non disclosure agreement
- Entered in before a meeting where you will hear or tell secrets
- Required to preserve “trade secret” status
- FrieNDA
- Practical Issues for startups
- Stealth mode: Pros and Cons
- How do you get customer feedback if you can’t tell anyone?
- Who owns the IP, individuals or the startup?
- Interesting scenario: Company Founding Scenario