What Your Startup Needs to Know about Intellectual Property

When and how to protect your startup's intellectual property

What is intellectual property? Should you, as a founder, protect yours at your startup? We'll cover all things IP, including when—and when not—to protect it.

Three essential contracts that protect a startup’s intellectual property – Fisher Hudson Brown Horton

Idaho and California startups should be aware of which types of contracts are essential to protect their intellectual property.

How To Protect Your Intellectual Property Across Borders

Protect Your Intellectual Property with strong IP rights. Safeguard patents, trademarks, designs, and trade secrets to stay competitive in global markets.

7 Startup Agreements That Save Companies (and Friendships) | Signus

Founder blowups and cap-table surprises are mostly preventable. A focused seven-document set—Founders Agreement, SAFE (Post-Money), Mutual NDA, Independent Contractor Agreement, Advisory Agreement, Consulting Agreement, and PIIA—closes the early gaps that orphan IP, muddle equity, and stall deals. Right-size what you send; use the subset that fits the moment. Clarity beats memory.

From ownership to stewardship: reimagining intellectual property governance through the Knowledge Commons Framework

Contemporary intellectual property (IP) governance remains strongly shaped by proprietary logics of exclusivity, control, and rights allocation, even as knowledge production becomes increasingly co...

Startup idea checklist

I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of the world, so I wrote up my own list.

The Startup Marketing Checklist

I tried dozens of side projects before starting Draft.dev, and now I’ve worked with hundreds of early-stage startups and established enterprises to help with growth marketing. So, a lot of founders ask me how to get started in marketing when your marketing budget is small and your product is new. I created this list to […]

Open Source Startup: Why We Give Away All Our IP 🐝

Interview with Richard D. Bartlett, Loomio cofounder. Reposted with permission from Straight Up, a monthly startup resource that tackles…

Idea Generation

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea...

Field Guide

The Startup Field Guide provides essential tools and insights to support early-stage founders on their journey to success.

Founders Hub | Transform Finance

The founder playbook for building a company that lasts and stays true to why you started it. Research, case studies, and practical tools for incorporation, fundraising terms, board structure, ownership, and culture.

V_labs 4 Phases: Validate

In venture building, validation is key. We test hypotheses and prototype business ideas to ensure successful market fit and growth.

CanInnovate | Kyle Briggs | Substack

I write about innovation, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and related policy. I comment on the incentives created by existing policy structures and recommend practical ways to enact positive change. Click to read CanInnovate, by Kyle Briggs, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter

There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.

Open Sourcing our Company Handbook: read on to know why

In this post we’re explaining the reasons we decided to open s...

The Market Curve

The market you choose to serve is one of the most important factors for an early-stage startup. And for most technologists, it’s a blind …