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But they have 95k patents and have done or backed scores of lawsuits with their $3b of capital. Surely that's enough! Y Combinator didn't need $3b to show good
by gwern 8y ago
But they have 95k patents and have done or backed scores of lawsuits with their $3b of capital. Surely that's enough! Y Combinator didn't need $3b to show good results despite regular VC having similar long-tail or hit-driven results.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoAll true, but how do you put an asset value on a particular patent? So if you've got a $100M fund and it spends $50M on acquiring patents and then the other $50M on prosecuting them as it can, it isn't possible to predict if one of the patents will be a gold mine or a dud. I think the closest thing I can imagine that would be like this would be mineral rights contracts. You spend $50M on mineral rights contracts on some amount of land and the rest on trying to develop useful resources out of those plots. If one has some easy to reach dense and salable minerals it pays for the others. But a plot that hasn't been geologically surveyed? What is it worth?
- gwern 8y agoWell, the value would seem to be somewhere below $3b, so that's a good place to start for assigning the average value over those 95k patents...