Hiring: What's Currently Working
January 16, 2026
With AI hiring drama all over the news, it's clear the rules have changed when it comes to Silicon Valley's talent wars.
Hello, Everyone. Today, we’re talking about patents. Often when I ask a startup “What about their business is hard for someone else to copy” the response is “ Oh, don’t worry. We’re filing patents. So nobody can copy us.”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Patents are much more of a defensive tool for your company to use in later stages to prevent legal issues, rather than a way of stopping someone from stealing your idea right now. More importantly, patents take up a ton of time and money that you really should be using acquiring customers instead.
Your lawyer will, of course, extol the many virtues of patent protection, but I would encourage you to look up the early history of Facebook and a service called ConnectU before you start relying on legal routes to protect you from a competitor.
Investors, on the other hand, are much more likely to be interested in competitive advantages that are based on: technology, network effects, or even a better user experience. Not patents.
