VC works because making a startup can be extremely profitable. Making patents used to be quite profitable, but is that still the case? I can’t recall seeing someone make lots of money from their patent in recent years. (The exception is the pharmaceutical industry, where patents seem to de facto work differently than the rest of the economy. This industry does have financial mechanisms for incubating patentable innovations, which is fortunate because developing the patented products is ridiculously expensive.) When I hear about patents being used these days, it’s mostly as passive deterrence weapons in lawfare between giant corporations, or bad-faith patent trolls, and not as the basis of profitable production like you’d hear about in earlier times (again, except for pharmaceuticals).
So my guess is that something in the legal system changed to make patents not lucrative for most people, and the apparent lack of funding for patents is a rational response to that.
It’s probably worth noting that this could also just be because this pipeline doesn’t seem to exist. Like I know Peter Thiel comments that today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the mailroom of the white house.
Today, I could probably email HP the specs and proof of concept of a brand new kind of printer that printed an order of magnitude cheaper, was way easier to connect to, etc. And there’s little chance they’d see it or respond. I think discounting the possibility that this just doesn’t happen often because corporate bureaucracies aren’t set up to handle it probably shouldn’t be taken off the table.
And if the argument is more along the lines of “why have we not heard of a single person because surely it would have happened once?” The answer could likely be that once in a blue moon someone like IBM or NASA does take an idea from an absolute rando who they don’t hire to implement it, but then they NDA that rando and we don’t hear about him.
VC works because making a startup can be extremely profitable. Making patents used to be quite profitable, but is that still the case? I can’t recall seeing someone make lots of money from their patent in recent years. (The exception is the pharmaceutical industry, where patents seem to de facto work differently than the rest of the economy. This industry does have financial mechanisms for incubating patentable innovations, which is fortunate because developing the patented products is ridiculously expensive.) When I hear about patents being used these days, it’s mostly as passive deterrence weapons in lawfare between giant corporations, or bad-faith patent trolls, and not as the basis of profitable production like you’d hear about in earlier times (again, except for pharmaceuticals).
So my guess is that something in the legal system changed to make patents not lucrative for most people, and the apparent lack of funding for patents is a rational response to that.
It’s probably worth noting that this could also just be because this pipeline doesn’t seem to exist. Like I know Peter Thiel comments that today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the mailroom of the white house.
Today, I could probably email HP the specs and proof of concept of a brand new kind of printer that printed an order of magnitude cheaper, was way easier to connect to, etc. And there’s little chance they’d see it or respond. I think discounting the possibility that this just doesn’t happen often because corporate bureaucracies aren’t set up to handle it probably shouldn’t be taken off the table.
And if the argument is more along the lines of “why have we not heard of a single person because surely it would have happened once?” The answer could likely be that once in a blue moon someone like IBM or NASA does take an idea from an absolute rando who they don’t hire to implement it, but then they NDA that rando and we don’t hear about him.