theprice

Ep 9: Eli Sheets, Founder of IdeaBlock – Using Blockchain to Protect Intellectual Property Rights

“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.

Ep 7 – Mark Johnson – Founder of Hotel Chatter, Jaunted and Vegas Chatter which were sold to CondeNast

Today I talk to Mark Johnson, is an entreprenuer, and an investor and a creator.  

Back in the early 2000s, Mark started writing reviews for hotels. When he saw it start to gain traffic, he started to think this might be something he would do.  Over the course of 10 years Mark turned that idea into a business with over 40 content creators. Run out of the attic of his house, Mark bootstrapped that content business into a company eventually sold to Conde Nast.  I talk with Mark about what it was like to build and exit that business.

But before we get into all that we spend time talking about Mark’s newest project Foodboro and what its like to build a service from scratch (again)!  We also talk about the pitfalls of angel investing and Mark describes what its like to be a limited partner in a venture fund.  

This episode of full of fun stories and take aways.  Check it out.