PHP Developer / Blog

It’s inevitable that all startups won’t be successful. In fact it’s a very small percentage which do. This begs the question of what you do with the intellectual property that has been accumulated. Let’s assume that your startup didn’t amass a substantial enough user base to be considered a valuable asset. Let’s also assume that all you have left is some sort of technology which for whatever reason didn’t fulfill the goals of the creators. What can be done with the intellectual property assets?

Where to start from where you left
This leaves you with a majority of the startups. What winds up happening to their technology? What should happen to it? How can you make the most of a failed venture? I’m not sure but hope to create good dialog around this topic.

A real world example: me
Let me give you some background. I had co-founded a photo sharing start-up back in 2003. To put that into perspective we were entering the market at around the same time Flickr was. This was the new breed of sites which focused primarily on sharing photos online instead of printing. Anyways, I’m currently at Yahoo! and the other co-founder took a job at the Chicago Tribune. Needless to say we’re no longer putting all of our eggs in the start-up basket.

Success for a start-up is elusive
We managed to have a handful of successes. It wasn’t a complete failure. We raised 1/2 a million dollars in funding, received several state grants, obtained Adobe’s site of the day award multiple times, were the first slideshow site to integrate with numerous blogging APIs, partnered with Premiere Radio Networks for use on Delilah’s website, surpassed hosting 1 million photos and the list goes on. But we ran out of money. So we failed in our ultimate goal.

The problem at hand
Back to the topic. What do we do with our technology? The worst case scenario is that it sits until it’s no longer valuable to anyone. Which means that there’s a period of time when it does have value. How do you find the right company that could benefit from it? Is the value it brings to them worth the time and energy it would take for you to facilitate a sale of the technology? Does the technology require the engineers who created it?

There’s got to be a better way
In the end I believe it’s most likely that the founders of failed startups will take their technology to the grave with them. But this is not by choice. It’s the worst case scenario. Nobody wins. There has got to be a better way to make use of some really great technology that often only gets created by start-ups who wind up failing. What are they?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 10:47 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.