Most founders don’t think about intellectual property until it is too late. By then, decisions made in the first few months of a company’s life are already shaping what that company is worth years later.
Our director Nick Silvester sat down with the Oxford Business Insights Podcast to talk about exactly that. He’s not a typical patent attorney. He trained as an engineer, spent years as a race engineer in Formula 3 and World Touring Cars.
Ownership & Timing
A lot of the conversation comes back to timing and habits founders don’t think to question. One story concerns a client whose brand, logo and everything, turned out to legally belong to someone else entirely, an old university relationship nobody thought to formalise on paper. As Nick puts it, “pound signs in people’s eyes make people behave a bit differently”, and sorting ownership out gets a lot harder once there’s real money involved.
AI & Trade Secrets
There’s also a sharp warning about AI. Put a trade secret into an open AI tool without the right settings in place, Nick explains, and “everything you put in becomes the training data”, which in the eyes of a patent examiner counts as public disclosure. He points to the well-known case of Samsung engineers using ChatGPT to check code that later surfaced somewhere it shouldn’t have.
Investor Readiness
Many of IP Asset’s clients are preparing for investment. Nick walks through what changes as a company grows, from a simple “have you done anything about your IP” check early on, through to real scrutiny of how defensible that IP actually is. Sometimes, early patents end up underpinning the entire company’s valuation.
Watch the full episode on the Oxford Business Insights Podcast to hear it all.