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As a founder of a new company and the son of a lawyer lawsuits are certainly something I think about. It seems all companies that become well known eventually f

As a founder of a new company and the son of a lawyer lawsuits are certainly something I think about. It seems all companies that become well known eventually face lawsuits. While it sucks and you never want to face one, many know it is a cost of doing business. You also find people who want to attack a company seeing a big dollar sign in front of them. Plus lawyers might earn hundreds of millions or dare I say billions if they win a case from a company like Facebook or Google.

PakG1 16y ago
When the Twitter strategy docs got leaked a while back, there was a specific section that dealt with potential lawsuits. http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-... (see Defensive Strategy section) Legal - We will be sued for patent infringement, repeatedly and often - Should we get a great patent attorney to proactively go after these patents (We need to talk about this more, we are unsatisfied)
michaelpinto 16y ago
...but those millions may take years to win. Every lawsuit has an opportunity cost. Yes if you get to a certain level that is the cost of doing business, but if you are just out of the gate and have X dollars and Y hours in the day that may be a poor investment. Also there's a difference between a disruptive cost in upsetting an old industry (say a YouTube or Napster) vs. fighting a single companies' walled garden. At the end of the day building a company on top of another companies walled garden is a high risk to begin with, so it could be better to just move on.