To be honest, our answer was pretty vague. We do believe that somewhere down the road we may come up with some new tool or way of doing things that is patentabl

To be honest, our answer was pretty vague. We do believe that somewhere down the road we may come up with some new tool or way of doing things that is patentable (heck, if Amazon can do it with "1-click"...) and will pursue that as it comes up. In the larger picture, though, I don't think that this is going to make or break anybody. I went to a workshop a few weeks ago that was hosted by the Stern School of Business - they had a panel of VCs and one Angel Investor, a startup business pitching to them, and an audience full of people able to ask questions. What was interesting was that one of the first questions the VCs asked after the pitch was "do you have any patents?" The answer was a pretty straight-forward "no." BUT, when asked about it later by someone in the audience, all of the VCs agreed that they didn't really care that the team didn't have anything patented - that they'd rather see a startup spending their time and energy on implementation than on developing a patent portfolio. Really, they just asked the question because they HAVE to ask the question. I think the larger question here is "why can't someone else do what you're doing?" and the "do you have any patents?" question is the first logical step in answering that. But it's not the end-all be-all. I'm pretty sure Amazon's success really has very little to do with "1-click" and that this wan't even patented until a couple of years ago. (I should check some sources on that...)