“Any four of the big pieces of intellectual property that you can get traditionally — patents, trademarks … copyrights and trade secrets — the common thread that runs through all four of those is time. If you’re first at any of those four, eventually you’re going to win against third parties.

If you beat them, right? If you’re the first one to think of the idea or the first one to publish the idea in terms of patents, you’re going to win in the United States and in the world, and in a lot of cases.  Having a technology available to us that can prove this time, that’s freely available and is able to be integrated and used as a kind of an undeniable proof of time, that’s crowdsourced, essentially, is pretty powerful.”  

Eli Sheets is the founder of IdeaBlock, an innovative new technology platform that leverages the power of blockchain to provide immutable and provable timestamps for intellectual property. Essentially, IdeaBlock’s customers can prove when they first had their ideas, which helps them defend their intellectual property rights.

Eli is 18 months or so into IdeaBlock and after raising money from friends and family, has a growing base of paying customers using his product’s beta. In this podcast episode, Eli talks about learning to program computers, working at the US patent office, spending several years as a patent attorney before starting IdeaBlock. Eli explains how the technology works, who uses it and what it’s like to be at this stage of the entrepreneurial journey. 

Please enjoy my conversation with Eli Sheets from IdeaBlock.