Founders very often come to us talking about partially diverting our investment to file patents. At FRC we generally strongly advise against patents for very early-stage businesses. We believe your strongest protection is your capacity to innovate and iterate faster and better than the competition. Your customers’ satisfaction and your product obsession are the strongest weapons against getting copied. Additionally, it is extremely difficult to patent software as it is relatively easy to find loopholes in case you did patent something proprietary. Therefore we advise early-stage founders not to waste money if they don’t have to file patents. Facebook is a very obvious example of a hard-to-patent software whose clients have provided the biggest entry barrier to anyone trying to copy it.
This blog will always be less than 1000 characters, which is just a bit more than a Tweet and much more interesting.