“We're Going to Burn Your Company to the Ground”

Intro - 00:06: Welcome to the Biotech Startups podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee. Jon Chee - 00:30: In our last episode, we spoke with Steve Visco about his graduate school experience, witnessing the tech transfer boom, and his time at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. If you missed it, be sure to go back and give it a listen. Today, we're excited to continue our conversation, diving into Steve's experience with global competition against Sony, joint transfers with DuPont and Dow, IP strategy, and handling patent trolls. So sit back, relax, and let's get started. Jon Chee - 01:00: You spin out Poly Plus. You're staying both at Lawrence Berkeley and also working with Poly Plus. How did you find your CEO? Steve Visco - 01:00: Well, we were lucky. The way that worked is the tech transfer office organized with, I think it was Stanford too. I think it was Berkeley Stanford. There may have been one other school, but I think it was basically Berkeley Stanford because Stanford was already doing this. I mean, they were actually, they were ahead of the game that way. Their medical school, they were filing a lot of patents, doing a lot of tech transfer. Steve Visco - 01:28: And they were pulling in quite a bit of revenue. Berkeley reached out to them to help organize this event, where entrepreneurs who've started companies would give presentations and in the audience would be a variety of angel investors, venture cap firms, and other interested parties. We give this presentation and we got besieged with companies that want to talk to us. But in that grouping, Steve Visco - 01:57: Was this guy, Rudy Hurwitch, who did end up being the CEO. And he started a company named Daimo. Daimo was hugely successful. Came out of Berkeley, actually. It was a Berkeley company. I don't know if you've ever seen these kind of devices, because it's pretty old school. It was before computer labeling systems. But he had the letters of the alphabet on a circular platform. And he would dial in letters, then pull this kind of trigger and this adhesive Steve Visco - 02:23: Material, this kind of sticky tape would come out and it would raise punch up into the polymer and create a raised letter. They were in the New York Stock Exchange. They were wildly successful. It was his company. That was his company. They eventually got bought out in an adverse raid. He cashed out. He was quite wealthy, but he always wanted to duplicate the success of Daimo. He became an angel investor. He was always looking for something Steve Visco - 02:52: That he thought could have a big impact on the world. And when we gave that talk, he got very excited. He said, this reminds me of Daimo. He asked us if we were willing to engage with him. He would help raise the angel money. He had a bunch of qualified investors. And then actually, he wanted me to take over the CEO position immediately. But when I told him, like, hey, I'm not ready for that, so he took it. He took the CEO slot. So we were lucky because this is a guy who had like 30 years of business experience Steve Visco - 03:21: Negotiating deals and partnerships, mergers. He had an unusual amount of experience coming to us with a very small company, but we started with four people. Jon Chee - 03:21: Who were the other 12? Was it you two? So you and Rudy and the two more? Steve Visco - 03:21: Mostly faculty. So it was myself and then a guy named Luke Gardena who was a professor of material science. Michel Armand, he's really the father of polymer electrolyte batteries. He was teaching at University of Montreal and he also had a position in Grenoble, Steve Visco - 03:50: France, and then Meilin Liu, who's a professor at Georgia Tech. So we were the four originals. You know, since then, we've obviously, you know, we brought in other people, but that was the founding group. Jon Chee - 03:50: Very cool. And if you're like remembering back to when you first started this, what was the battery landscape like, like battery technology? Were you guys like in a brave new world? Steve Visco - 03:50: No, absolutely. So here's the thing that was really, really unusual is that Steve Visco - 04:18: Like I said, the competing systems, at least in rechargeable batteries, were lead acid. It was 150-year-old technology. And nickel cadmium, that's probably 100 years old. And there were throwaway batteries, obviously. And so we start the company, we get the funding, we open the doors in 1991, and out of the blue, Sony in Japan introduces lithium ion. So everything changes. Jon Chee - 04:18: Oh my god. Jon Chee - 04:47: Or easy time in a way to start a battery company. Steve Visco - 04:47: Yeah. Jon Chee - 04:47: Like the bar just went way up. Steve Visco - 04:47: Right. So what we thought we were competing with was now wildly different. And so in some ways we had to kind of reorient very quickly because we were working on a technology that at best would compete with lithium ion, but lithium ion was already commercial. Right. And they were scaling. So it didn't make any sense at all. So we started immediately looking for much higher energy density Steve Visco - 05:17: Battery couples, you know, like new chemistries, new approaches. And so what we did in a way is like for the first 10 years of the company's life, we became kind of a licensing company. So we did a lot of really fundamental advances in different approaches to battery chemistry, you know, where you could get these large jumps in performance, but we wouldn't do the engineering. It was mostly like early testing, filing fundamental patents, and then we licensed those patents. Steve Visco - 05:46: And then we started doing basically joint development agreements with large companies, right? Because at that point there were chemical companies like DuPont and Dow and a company named Huxcellines, right? That were not battery companies that wanted to get into the battery space. So they had some expertise. It could be polymers or thin film processing that they thought, you know, could make an impact in the battery space. So they were diversifying, looking to get in. In the early days of lithium ion, Steve Visco - 06:16: It was Japan, right? It was Panasonic and Sony and Japan Storage. There were a number of these Japanese battery companies. And actually, for a number of years, all the big battery meetings were in Japan because that's where all the activity was. Everybody wanted to meet with these Japanese companies. And you can imagine the companies in the US at that time, even the big guys were Duracell, EverReady, Rayovac, mostly selling batteries in supermarkets and drugstores. Steve Visco - 06:43: And then Johnson Controls was selling lead acid batteries for ignition batteries for cars. So to those companies, this was a threat to them too. All of a sudden you have these rechargeable batteries that are starting to increase in performance and possibly displace their technologies. So all of those companies started lithium ion programs internal to those companies. But the idea that they would catch up and compete, and every one of them failed. Steve Visco - 07:12: Like they all failed miserably. And the explanation for their failure was that the Japanese were just so far ahead. There's just no way to catch up, right? They were just too far ahead. They had made a lot of money in the early years of lithium-ion because they could charge a lot for it. And as it was scaling, the price was coming down. So the American companies couldn't get in because they'd be losing money or breaking even. So they all kind of threw up their hands in defeat. But, you know, one of the Steve Visco - 07:41: Claims at that time was that, but it's only the Japanese, nobody else is getting in. Nobody's going to be able to get in. Then, yeah, a year later, it's Korea, Samsung, LG, SK. All of a sudden, you've got three big lithium-ion companies producing and competing from Korea. Again, the response is like, okay, maybe the Koreans can get in, but like China, they'll never get in. You'll never see lithium-ion in China. Steve Visco - 08:09: And now China is the major player. So it's just Europe and the US that screwed up, that couldn't get in. And so now you have the situation where it's going to be a big part of the global economy. Battery production is becoming the new oil. So from the time we started to this point in time, nobody, I think, would have predicted that this landscape would have changed like that, where you cannot pick up a newspaper without reading about battery tech. Steve Visco - 08:38: I'm reading about what's happening with respect to building gigafactories and who's going to lead in not just in battery tech, but also in EVs. It's wildly different than when we first started. Jon Chee - 08:38: When you first started, it sounded like you were doing a ton of intellectual property work. You were. And I'm like super interested to learn. Was that also just like, I'm going to just learn how to do this really well on the fly? Steve Visco - 08:38: Yeah, it's funny, guys. It's certainly another story. So the way it happened is kind of subtle. Shortly after we started Steve Visco - 09:08: The company. This is like barely two years in, right? And we're still tiny. We're kind of learning how to almost set up the lab, right? We're doing some kind of early experiments, trying to map out some strategies for new battery technologies. We were approached by a company in Silicon Valley that was making lead acid batteries for Apple. You know, this is, mind you, they hadn't actually propagated, at least in the US, into laptops yet. Steve Visco - 09:36: So it was a little bit early for that. So this company was selling these, obviously heavy lead acid packs that would strap onto the back of like an Apple laptop. And they wanted to go public. When they went out and talked to analysts, analysts said, you know, lead acid is old school. No one's going to get excited about that. You're not going to be able to go public on that. They said, but you do have revenue, which is good. So they were making money. So the analyst said, you need to find a small company Steve Visco - 10:04: That's doing really exciting work in the battery space and then do like a merger, like merge them in and go public together. So they found us, they came to us and they asked us, are you interested? And so we actually had a very smart CEO. We talked for a while. We said, yeah, okay, we'll do this. Let's give it a try. So here we are two years in, we don't have anything approaching a product and we're going to go public. That actually, I actually still have the red herring somewhere in my office that was written up, right. For the public offering. Anyway, Steve Visco - 10:34: There's a whole diligence process that has to happen for that, right? So our value to that company that was going to merge us in was our patents. We have three patents from Lawrence Berkeley lab. And so the underwriters hired a patent group, an IP, you know, intellectual property group to look at our patents and then probably assess some kind of value, make sure that they, you know, they'll probably stand up in court, they're well written. And in the process of doing that, Steve Visco - 11:03: They find out that Lawrence Berkeley lab forgot to pay the maintenance fees and then the patents are abandoned. I mean, that's the truth, right? Oh my God. It was like crazy town. Absolutely crazy town. So this could have been a huge lawsuit against the lab actually, right? It was a major fuck up. So, and we're like freaked out like what? I mean, our patents are invalid now. I mean, they're in the public domain. Steve Visco - 11:32: So the lab's freaking out. And like I told you in the early days of tech transfer, they were not hiring the best and the brightest. So these guys really screwed up. And so they had to petition the US Patent Office, right? And this is a pretty rare thing that you're going to go and say, hey, can you reinstate these patents? Most of the time they're going to say, yeah, no, you didn't pay the maintenance fee, they're gone. But they made a claim and I wasn't there, so I don't know. They made a claim that they had changed their mail stop. Steve Visco - 12:01: On the hill and that they weren't getting the bills. Anybody who works with IP knows there are maintenance fees. So you would say, where the hell are these bills? They did get reinstated. Thank God. And so that patent attorney that we used, that guy was clever. And that's how we ended up finding the company that we worked with to write our patents. But with regards to the IPO, so we're getting ready actually to go out and to go public. And a competing company Steve Visco - 12:31: That had a technology that we were pretty damn sure would never work, right? That would probably be dangerous. Had a conditional contract with Motorola to sell them $100 million worth of batteries. But the condition was they had to meet the Motorola specification. Now they had already gone public, right? And they had three public offerings. Their market cap was in excess of probably $3 billion. And two days before we're going public, Steve Visco - 12:59: Their batteries are shipped to Motorola and they started exploding. And so they went from like a $3 billion market cap to like junk stock overnight. And the company that was leading our IPO, they were invested in that. So they lost a ton of money that day. And they said, no battery IPOs. It just shut down the whole thing. So that whole process stopped. Actually, it's probably good for us that it didn't happen. Jon Chee - 12:59: Yeah. Steve Visco - 12:59: Because, you know, it was too early. I mean, for us, it was definitely too early. But what we got out of that Steve Visco - 13:29: Is basically a very clever patent attorney. And so we've worked with them since then. But then one other thing happened to Polyplus that was really kind of instrumental. Maybe 10 years in, maybe 12 years in, I'd have to look up the exact date. There was another company, a pretty shady company, that was following our intellectual property. So every time we filed the patent, and this was on a particular battery technology called lithium sulfur. Steve Visco - 13:54: Every time we file a patent, they would read our patents, which you can once they issue or publish. So they publish, you can look at the published application. They would read our patents and then write some little addendum on was just some kind of nonsensical stuff and file. And so they were building up a patent portfolio on top of ours in a sense, which you can do. It's basically as patent trolling, right? You can patent troll people. So we were writing very fundamental, clever, well-written patents and they were just Steve Visco - 14:24: Running stuff through the patent office with maybe a few claims that made sense. Most of them I don't think did. And then at one point they made some claims that they were going to start producing batteries, selling batteries. They were going commercial, they were going into manufacturing. And obviously they were going to be infringing our patents because we had all the fundamental rights to the technology. So they had a director of technology at the time who knew our patent portfolio pretty well. He told the CEO, we're going to be infringing Steve Visco - 14:53: Polyplus, there was going to be litigation. So they preempted that by suing us. They sued Polyplus. Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore. It's a type of lawsuit called an interference patent lawsuit where they go into your patent, they copy your exact claims into their patent application. And then the patent office sees it as an exact duplicate. And then it launches this investigation. And then their claim is that we actually invented before them. Steve Visco - 15:22: So it's a way to kind of get the ball rolling. So they filed this interference lawsuit against us and their CEO, now they were backed by a hedge fund, a guy named Jim Simons probably worth in excess of $20 billion. So they had a lot of money to come at us. And their CEO came to Berkeley and told us, we're going to burn your company to the ground. Literally use those words. And he said, then we'll pick up the patents for a song, because it's the end of your company, you'll have to sell. And so he left. Steve Visco - 15:51: We had to make a decision like, do we fight? Because we had money in the bank, do we fight or just kind of roll over and just take whatever deal they're going to give us? We all made the decision like, fuck it, we're going to fight these guys. In our case, it was going to become a technical argument. The first thing, this intellectual property law firm that we're working with did a very smart thing. They reached out to the guy who literally wrote the book on interference law. I mean, there's literally like a Steve Visco - 16:20: Bible and hired him. Right. So this guy, everybody who studies interference law, it's his book, right. So we hired him as our attorney. And then I put one of my guys on the case, I said, Okay, this is all you do. You just read their claims and, you know, look at our patents and then work with this law firm, you know, that's going to fight for us, and then build a case. And that took us a good year. And it was expensive, we spent a lot of money. So we're definitely Steve Visco - 16:46: Were on the edge. Like, we can't do this much longer. So then the case was held in DC, right? There's the USPTO appellate court, and we destroyed them. We literally destroyed them. To the point where the judges started yelling at the opposition, their lawyers saying, this case should never have seen the light of day. Jon Chee - 16:46: Wow. Steve Visco - 16:46: And you wasted all of our time, and you wasted this company's time. And then they took it on appeal to the federal circuit, and we beat them again. Steve Visco - 17:15: Then we had them, so they paid us some money. Oh my God. So that was a pretty scary process. Not something anyone wants to go through. But as we went through that, the scientist that we assigned to the case, he learned a lot about patent law, and he writes our patents now. Jon Chee - 17:15: Wow. Steve Visco - 17:15: And he's part of the team. So that's a very strong position to be in. So now our patents are written by not just a patent attorney, but someone who's a scientist who Steve Visco - 17:44: You know, works with the technology as part of the team. We still use the external law firm, right, for foreign filings and office actions. But our patents are really strong up and they're very detailed and we can file provisional patent applications in a day or an hour if we have to. So that was certainly a learning process, a painful one. But in the end, it paid off. Jon Chee - 17:44: What a journey, bro. I feel like this, especially, you know, Jon Chee - 18:12: Whether it be in battery science, life science, anything that's like R&D heavy and requires like intellectual property protection. This could happen to them. Steve Visco - 18:12: Yeah, for sure. And it happens all the time. But it's particularly scary for a small company. So if you're Pfizer, if you're Pfizer and you get sued, and I'm sure they sue everybody anyway, they're all suing each other. It's a whole different ballgame. That's just part of their budget. Steve Visco - 18:38: In some cases, they'll go to mediation or come to some agreement. But if you're a small company, it could easily be the end of the company. Jon Chee - 18:38: I have like two questions because there's plenty of folks who are kind of, it's now a thing to come from academia like LBL. Steve Visco - 18:38: Yeah, it's more common now. Jon Chee - 18:38: They come out of tech transfer, they license some technology. Steve Visco - 18:38: Right. Jon Chee - 18:38: And they're starting the company. The first component that I'm kind of like interested in is like, sounded like licensing patents is a good way to kind of bring in some cash. Steve Visco - 18:38: Yeah. Jon Chee - 18:38: And is that something you would recommend? Steve Visco - 19:08: I think it probably depends on the discipline. For sure, you have to be very careful with licensing, because one, of course, it can be a complicated negotiation. Depending on the field, in many fields, you can get a royalty on sales. In some cases, like in the battery field, that's become increasingly difficult to do because the margins, at least in say something like lithium ion, are razor thin, where margins are really tight. If you try to negotiate a 5% royalty, Steve Visco - 19:38: They're going to say no, they're going to walk away. But there are ways to maybe have a royalty in the early part of sales and that is the technology starts to grow, obviously with volume start to cut back on the royalty. But in any case, these negotiations can be quite tricky. If you license all of your technology out, you're going to have a hard time doing an IPO or getting acquired. Because what's the point? You don't own the technology anymore, you basically licensed it. Steve Visco - 20:05: But there are other ways to license. You can license by geography, by application. So I would say it certainly worked for us. We were very careful how we did that. So when we did these licenses, they were usually very restrictive to either a geographic region of the world or a particular market or device or size of the market. Yes, I mean, it's really, yeah, it definitely helped us. There were licenses that I would say kept us going too. And in retrospect, Steve Visco - 20:34: It was absolutely the right deal because it turns out that it was kind of a hot area when we licensed it, but it would have been very difficult to commercialize. And so there were some big companies, I think they were, they clearly were doing some of this work internally and their thinking was, if it does go commercial, let's get the license now before it's wildly expensive. So there are all, you know, those kinds of things to think about with regards to licensing, but you have to be careful if you do license. Steve Visco - 21:02: Unless you're naturally adept at these types of things, you're going to want someone who has some experience who can at least give you some advice. There are companies out there that can definitely do that. There are plenty of companies that work on IP licensing. Jon Chee - 21:02: I think that's a great advice for everyone listening. It's not like a binary thing where it's like license it all or don't license it. Zero licensing, all licensing. It sounds like you have to be very, very strategic or else it really will pigeonhole you. Steve Visco - 21:28: Exactly. You would effectively be selling your company out underneath you. I mean, it might seem like a lot at the time, but if it's really important technological advance, then you have to be very careful how you license it. Jon Chee - 21:28: Yeah, absolutely. Steve Visco - 21:28: It certainly teaches you a lot about deal structure too, when you're going through this licensing process. It's a learning process, but I would say be careful and don't be afraid to walk away from a deal. We had some negotiations with Korean companies where we literally kicked them out of our conference room. Steve Visco - 21:57: Told him to go back to Korea. Jon Chee - 21:57: Wow. They're tough negotiators. See, after you basically said, you know, no, we're not doing this deal. Steve Visco - 21:57: Yeah. Jon Chee - 21:57: That's that must have been intense. I was like thinking back to like when you were mentioning that growing up, you were an avid reader and writer. And it's like patents. That's like it comes back. The ability. I'm sure the quality of the patent is how well you write the thing. Steve Visco - 21:57: Yeah, that's right. And how you create the claim set and the specification. So, you know, that's a thing unto itself. Right. So Steve Visco - 22:26: At some point, hopefully you're not in litigation, but at some point, probably someone's going to challenge your patent, right? And actually, that's the other thing about patenting. You certainly would not want to rely on one patent. I mean, you know, virtually anybody who's working in any area where, you know, a big advance is going to mean big business. You know, you're trying to create a picket fence around the invention to make sure there's no daylight. You know, it's just going to close up all those holes. So, yeah, writing the first good patent is going step one. Steve Visco - 22:56: But there's a lot of strategy in how you write these patents and how you write the specification, you know, so that you can in later continuations, you can pull out more of that spec and then create claims that cover what you're really doing inside of the company. Because sometimes when you make these discoveries, there are certain aspects of the discovery. You're not sure how it's going to end up in a product. And as you take the technology forward, you say, oh, wow, this is really important. Let's get better coverage around that. Steve Visco - 23:24: So it's definitely kind of evolving. Yeah, it's rare that you're going to go to market with a single patent. And anytime there's a litigation, you know, a patent litigation, you almost always see both sets of attorneys are going to walk into that courtroom with a stack of patents, you know, right? And that's kind of like saying like, yeah, we got a lot of patents, so don't fuck with us. And then the other guy's going to have, if he doesn't have a stack that's kind of equally large, he's probably in trouble. I mean, it's- Steve Visco - 23:53: That's just kind of the way it goes. So they got to be well written and you kind of have to have a bunch of them. And then you get into a whole different issue, which is where do you patent? It's relatively inexpensive to patent in the United States. It's quite expensive to patent overseas because you have to have it translated. So, you know, there's something called PCT, which is like, you know, kind of holds the European countries for you for a certain period of time. But then you have to make a decision after that period of time is over. OK, which countries? Germany, France? Steve Visco - 24:22: Spain. So every one of those countries, that patent is going to have to be translated and they'll have their own office actions and the EU, the European Union, they can see your patent claims in a different light than the way the USPTO will see them. So you have your patent just sail through the USPTO and then get stopped in the EU. It just means you're going to have to go through multiple iterations. So it's a very complicated process actually. Jon Chee - 24:22: So Jon Chee - 24:51: Did you learn this just the hard way? Steve Visco - 24:51: All of it was the hard way. Jon Chee - 24:51: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Steve Visco - 24:51: I was like, it doesn't seem like there's a playbook for this. I'm sure that, you know, obviously they teach this in law school, but a lot of it should be taught in graduate school in the sciences. Because first of all, even if you have an academic position, right, and you are inclined to file patents, it helps, right? Knowing a bit about how all this works. But certainly, Steve Visco - 25:20: For those students that are going to go out as entrepreneurs and launch companies, IP is going to be for sure a big part of their protection against large companies just kind of taking it, right? Walking away with the technology. Jon Chee - 25:20: I realize you're in the battery industry, but the first thing I think about is like the CRISPR dispute right now. Steve Visco - 25:20: That's right. Jon Chee - 25:20: Which is like a patent dispute, like all over the world. Steve Visco - 25:20: That's right. And that's going to involve. Steve Visco - 25:45: Billions and billions of dollars in revenue. That's a huge discovery. Well, that's the other thing too, is that, and this gets back probably more to the academic environment, but when you see something, right? It's like you get very excited, you know, and particularly if you've run a couple of tests and it looks like you're right about discovery, it's real. And, you know, the mistake people oftentimes make is they give a presentation at a conference. Steve Visco - 26:10: Where they give something away, you know, that hopefully they're not so stupid, they're going to present on it, then it's over. It's a public disclosure. It's over. But quite often people will make the mistake of saying something in a conference that will later come back to haunt them. Or in some cases, you know, they just forget to file overseas within the time frame. So they'll get the US patent, but that's it, right. And that happened in the battery space with lithium ion phosphate, which is used as a positive electrode in lithium ion batteries. Steve Visco - 26:38: It's starting to get increasingly important because, say, a typical Tesla battery, there's obviously a fair amount of cobalt in a positive electrode. Cobalt largely comes from the Congo. One, it's expensive. Two, it's mostly child labor, probably verging on the edge of outright slavery. There are a lot of ethical issues around cobalt right now. There's this move to lithium ion phosphate. While it was invented, probably the most important patent was John Goodenough's, which he got the Nobel Prize for Steve Visco - 27:08: Some of that, but they didn't file overseas. China, which of course is a huge producer, they pay no royalties at all. That's like the rest of world, it's all public domain. Jon Chee - 27:08: Does this mean for a startup that they have to have a global IP strategy out the gate? Steve Visco - 27:08: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. In some cases, companies will be a bit too aggressive. There's this patent everywhere, all around the world. That's quite expensive. Steve Visco - 27:37: Most companies will be much more strategic than that. So in the battery space, obviously, you're going to grab the US, Japan, Korea, China, and Europe. Those would be the obvious places to file patents. There are other places you could think about, Brazil and Australia. That starts to get pretty expensive. You can probably not file in those countries. But again, it's an economic decision. But there are certain places you would absolutely want to file. Steve Visco - 28:05: And those are probably going to be pretty similar for patenting and pharma. You know, obviously India becomes important when they're big producers. So it changed it like India wouldn't be so important for the battery space, at least not yet. It may well be one day, but not yet. So yeah, those are economic strategic decisions that can be a bit tricky, but patenting is not cheap. You know, it adds up. Jon Chee - 28:05: And I was going to say like, it's super cool that you're able to bring it in house. Like you had, you yourself, you were able to do it. Jon Chee - 28:34: And you have someone who's now well versed on both sides. Steve Visco - 28:34: Yeah. And the other thing about that, if you can do that, if you can bring it in-house, there's a huge benefit there with regards to how the patent gets structured. Because typically, as a scientist, you have an idea, OK, you think it's patentable, then you're going to call in a patent agent who will sit with you. And you're going to describe what you've done and then the last questions. But you're educating them on what your discovery is. Steve Visco - 29:03: It's hard to be a jack of all trades, which IP attorneys kind of have to be, right? So they do specialize. Quite often you'll have patent attorneys that specialize in kind of materials science, like batteries and maybe semiconductors. There might be some overlap between the two and pharma is usually totally different, right? That's a separate group of people. But in any case, you're trying to educate someone about your particular invention and they're not experts in that. Steve Visco - 29:31: So they can miss something or they may not see some claims that could be quite important because they don't quite understand the reach of the technology. When it's your team member, they live and die by that stuff. So they really know it. And then they get excited in the sense like, oh, wow, if we file these claims and we do X, Y, Z, then that'll generate some additional claims that we can cover. And so it's just a different way to evolve your patent portfolio. So I think it's good to have someone inside. Jon Chee - 29:59: Yeah, I'm trying to think about like what an early stage company founders like think about like early hires. Is this something where it's like it might be an early hire that you may want to consider? Steve Visco - 29:59: So we didn't do it that way, right? We started with an IP firm. I think it's a little tricky. I think that would probably be an expensive hire for a company that's just starting. And you may not have generated a whole lot of IP yet, but it's something, you know, the question is like, you know, what size of company do you do that? It's certainly a good hire, you know, and Steve Visco - 30:27: In some cases, you know, like any company that starts to grow, it does matter what your degree is, but at the same token, not everybody who has a PhD or a master's degree is really good in the lab. And so you start to see what talents people have as they do different jobs. And sometimes you just find that person like, wow, they really seem to love working with a patent agent or the patent attorneys, right? They really seem to have a feel for this. And that may just be the way that person evolves within your company or you hire one. Steve Visco - 30:56: But I think ultimately, obviously all big companies have their own patent attorneys and usually have an external counsel as well. For us, it's certainly worked out well. Jon Chee - 30:56: Interesting. So it kind of seems like maybe that was like two steps. You first start with an IP focused firm or a big law firm that might have a strong IP practice. And then you have someone on your team who is maybe pure science at first. Steve Visco - 31:20: Right. Jon Chee - 31:20: Because obviously, like you said, they have to communicate about what is the technology and then the IP. Steve Visco - 31:20: Yeah. And as you get further down that path, there are companies now that do IP strategy. It gets pretty complex as you generate a larger and larger portfolio. But that's a whole discipline into it. So actually, Joe Sino, his dad was also Joe Sino, right? Yeah. That's exactly what he did was intellectual property strategy, like how to monetize patents. Steve Visco - 31:49: And just how to grow your portfolio strategically. So that's a specialty within intellectual property. And there are special firms that do just that, right? IP strategy. So if you look at a big company like Wilson-Sonsini, I mean, they're really quite big, right? They'll have all of it. They'll have classic IP attorneys who write patents. They'll typically have some level of IP strategy, litigation, not cheap, but they'll have it, right? In our case, we're lucky to have it inside. Outro - 32:20: That's all for today's episode of the Biotech Startups podcast. We hope you enjoyed our insightful conversation with Steve Visco covering his experience with tech transfer, global intellectual property, and patent litigation. To learn more about Steve's journey, be sure to tune into our next episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening. And we look forward to having you join us again on the Biotech Startups Podcast for part three of Steve's journey, where we will discuss tips on applying for grants, the ins and outs of strategic corporate financing, and talent acquisition and retention. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. 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