Moats or Fast Legs?
I did some patent review work in Dallas recently. I traded my security consulting time to a company who in return provided their legal firms time for my patents. I have been living and breathing patent strategies for the last few weeks.
One of our advisors sent me back comments to a provisional “elevator pitch” I put together. As always brilliant feedback and very valuable suggestions. Surround yourself with brilliant people and its hard to fail!
One of the suggestions was;
“Where is your moat?” meaning what is going to slow down someone coming after you?
We will have various patents by the time we launch, we are assembling a team of brilliant people (our chief software architect agreed to join this week and we have several very prominent board members). We are also going to be tackling the hard problems first which means people will have to follow us over the rugged mountains to catch us rather than along the well trodden path. Basically I am prepared to bet our brains are bigger than theirs 
But what really got me thinking was this. Do you need a moat or fast legs? Fast legs mean you can outrun any competitors, release faster, react faster to changes, improve and fix bugs faster. You can meet customers feedback and needs faster.
While we are clearly going to protect our business with patents, I think really fast legs are better than a moat today.
February 2, 2007 at 1:03 am
[...] Mark Curphey, a really smart guy I respect for his work founding OWASP and creating the first edition of the Guide, lost a goodly percentage of my respect today: [...]
February 2, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I think you are missing a key point and key phrase; “protect” our business with patents. If we didn’t need to protect it I wouldn’t be bothering. That was the point of the post. A US patent takes 18 months between filing and provisional approval. The EU is similar. If we are still building the same thing in 18 months I think we’ll be dead in the water anyways. Innovation today moves far faster than the USPTO, however general advice from any experienced software exec is to protect what you have designed from others claiming they did it first. You will also see the names of many of the US’s biggest CSO’s on patent applications if you do a search and there are few VC firms who will invest in a firm that doesn’t have a patent strategy (a protectionist one at least).
If you had also read the post you would have noticed that no money was wasted as you implied.