Intellectual property
Building the business
309 episodes across 35 shows cover intellectual property. The shows that cover it most are The Amp Hour, How I Built This and Oxide and Friends. The most recent, from 30 Sept 2026, is “Altium & Duro: The PLM Software Built for Hardware Startups” from OnTrack.
Patents, trademarks, licensing, NDAs, copying and knock-offs, and protecting ideas.
309 episodes from 35 shows, most relevant and most recent first.
309 episodes
#259 - Mini-Episode: Legal Considerations for Co-Branding Agreements with Foster Garvey
Hillary Hughes, a lawyer at Foster Garvey, explains the legal framework for co-branding agreements in the CPG industry, using examples like Doritos Locos Tacos and Oreo Coke Zero. She distinguishes true co-branding from simple licensing by…
Shootout at the CNCF Corral
Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Rachel Stephens, and Adam Jacob discuss the public dispute between Synadia and the CNCF regarding the NATS project, focusing on the failed attempt to withdraw the project and the resulting trademark…
426: Entitled Ducks
David Picciuto, Jimmy Diresta, and Bob Clagett discuss the ethical complexities of design inspiration, focusing on David's accidental appropriation of a side table design from 'Stuff Seth Makes' and Jimmy's past controversy surrounding the…
229: Overview of Patenting for Hardware Startups
Tom Dunlap, managing partner of Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig, explains the different types of intellectual property protection for hardware startups, including utility patents, design patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. He…
207: 4 Parts of Intellectual Property for a Hardware Startup
Steven Weigler, Founding Attorney at EmergeCounsel, outlines the four pillars of intellectual property for hardware startups: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. He explains how design and utility patents protect product…
#432: China MedTech Compliance: Regulatory Risks, Rewards, & Strategy with Elaine Tan
Elaine Tan, creator of MedTech Chopsticks, explains the regulatory and strategic complexities of entering the Chinese medical device market, highlighting the NMPA's 2021 overhaul and the 'China for China' policy. She details the necessity…
#125 The Most Common Lawsuits Hitting Brands Right Now with Handel Food Law
Lauren Handel, founder of Handel Food Law, discusses the current litigation landscape for CPG brands, focusing on the high volume of class action lawsuits driven by plaintiff's lawyers rather than individual consumers. She details specific…
S3 E8: Navigating and Managing Contract Manufacturers with Peter Russo
Peter Russo, a hardware mentor and entrepreneur with 15 licensed brands and $250M in retail sales, shares strategies for managing contract manufacturers (CMs). He emphasizes treating CMs as internal departments, securing IP and tooling…
Ep. 24 - Open Hardware Licenses ft. Thea Flowers
Thea Flowers, president of the Open Source Hardware Association, explains the spectrum of open hardware licensing, ranging from public domain to strongly reciprocal (copyleft) models. She details how copyright, patents, and specific…
S2 E7: Intellectual Property Strategy for Hardware Startups with Troy Grabow
Patent attorney Troy Grabow, founder of Grabow Law, explains IP strategy for hardware startups, distinguishing between patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights. He details the costs and timelines of patent prosecution, the risks…
All we have to fear is FUD itself
Hosts Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal discuss the recent controversy surrounding HashiCorp's accusations against the OpenTofu project, analyzing the incident as a classic example of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) used by entrenched…
RIP USENIX ATC
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company, joined by Tom Lyon, discuss the discontinuation of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) and its historical shift from a practitioner-focused event to an academic one…
STL349: Finishers on Flexner
Mike Mascelli, John Coffey, and Mitch Kohanek discuss the legacy of Bob Flexner, author of 'Understanding Wood Finishing,' and his role in creating a community for professional finishers. The guests highlight how Flexner’s book demystified…
Open Source Anti-Patterns with Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower, known for his work on Kubernetes and CoreOS, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss corporate open source anti-patterns, focusing on the shift from proprietary-born companies to open-born ones like HashiCorp…
Episode 113: Talking DSPs with CEVA CEO Amir Panush
Amir Panoush, CEO of CEVA, explains the company's evolution from a DSP IP provider for 2G/3G mobile to a leader in connectivity, sensing, and inference for IoT, automotive, and satellite markets. He details how CEVA’s low-power…
#253 - Private Label Arrangements: What CPG Brands Should Know Before Signing the Deal | Hillary Hughes, Foster Garvey
Hillary Hughes, who leads the Consumer Brands Industry Group at Foster Garvey, explains the legal and operational complexities of private label arrangements for CPG brands. She details how to structure contracts to manage risks like margin…
S4E36 Wes Schwie| Intellectual Property
Wes Schwie, founder of Gallium Law and co-founder of Innovelis, explains the critical importance of intellectual property protection for inventors, emphasizing the low cost and strategic value of filing provisional patent applications…
Intellectual Property Rights in IoT | Neo IP's JiNan Glasgow George | Internet of Things Podcast
JiNan Glasgow George, founder and CEO of Neo IP, discusses intellectual property strategy for IoT companies, emphasizing that IP is a critical asset for valuation and acquisition readiness. She explains the shift to 'first-to-file' patent…
#366: Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds Hit-List
Howard Root, former CEO of Vascular Solutions, and Mark DuVal, President of DuVal & Associates, discuss Root's five-year federal criminal trial for alleged off-label promotion of a vascular device. Root details how a disgruntled…
Cooperation and Competition Behind the Scenes in the RISC-V Community
Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V International, explains how the open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) fosters a community of cooperation and competition among chip designers, from startups to multinationals like Qualcomm and…
Fork in the road for Terraform?
Josh Padnick, Malcolm Matalka, and Cory O'Daniel, founders of GruntWerk, Terraform Cloud alternatives, and early-stage startups respectively, discuss the OpenTF project formed in response to HashiCorp's decision to relicense Terraform…
Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
Ashley Williams, former Executive Director of the Rust Foundation, along with Adam Jacob and Steve Klabnik, discuss the controversy surrounding the Rust Foundation's proposed trademark policy. They analyze how the policy's aggressive…
Ep. 17 - Do's and Don'ts of Naming Your Company
Stephen Hawes and Lucian Che Park of Opulo discuss the complexities of naming a hardware company and its open-source project, explaining why they separated the company name (Opulo) from the product name (Lumen PnP). They detail the…
Open Source Inside Baseball (with Stephen O'Grady)
Stephen O'Grady, author of The Dead End and Software Paradox, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the trend of open source companies relicensing their software to proprietary models. O'Grady argues that venture capital…
How Medical Device Intellectual Property Protection Varies by Sector
Patent attorney Kevin Buckley, patent agent Neil Thompson, and Stephanie Willerth, CEO of Axolotl and Professor at the University of Victoria, discuss the divergent intellectual property strategies in academia versus the private medical…
S6E45 Jeremy Jarrett | Legal Advice & Strategy for Starting An Engineering Business
Jeremy Jarrett, a corporate and M&A attorney at Sacks Tierney, advises engineers on the legal strategies for starting and scaling a business, emphasizing the importance of entity structure, funding, and contract negotiation. He highlights…
Where it comes up48:32
#257 Co-Man Due Diligence 101 with Riot Energy and Kelley Drye & Warren LLP
Laura Jakobsen, founder of Riot Energy, and Daniella Carelli, Special Counsel at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, discuss the critical importance of co-manufacturer due diligence and contract negotiation for CPG brands. They emphasize that a…
#424: The MedTech Startup Survival Guide with Steve Bell
Steve Bell, a veteran MedTech entrepreneur and co-founder of various AI-powered initiatives, explains why over 75% of startups fail due to emotional attachment to non-viable concepts and underestimating the time and financial commitment…
Why Patents Are a Death Trap for Entrepreneurs!
Host John Teel argues that prioritizing patents is a 'death trap' for hardware entrepreneurs, who should instead focus on validating market demand and minimizing financial risk. He explains that unproven ideas have little value and that…
Where it comes up0:33
105: Patenting Physical Consumer Product Inventions
Rich Goldstein, founder of Goldstein Patent Law, explains the strategic differences between utility and design patents, emphasizing that utility patents protect functionality through specific claims while design patents protect aesthetics…
#188 - Celebrity and Influencer Contracts with Foster Garvey
Hillary Hughes of Foster Garvey explains the legal and business structures of celebrity and influencer endorsements for CPG brands, distinguishing between cash, equity, and royalty deals. She details critical contract components including…
The Wrath of Kahn
Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and a group of engineers including Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, and bch discuss the history of computing, focusing on Severo Ornstein's book 'Computing in the Middle Ages' and the myth of the 'lone inventor.' They…
Open Source and Capitalism with Ashley Williams and Adam Jacob
Ashley Williams (former CTO of MPM, now at Akzo) and Adam Jacob (founder of Chef, now at Oxide Computer Company) join Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the economic tensions between open source software and capitalism. They…
Episode 42: Analyzing Arm's First Q Earnings as a Public Company
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze Arm's first quarterly earnings as a public company, noting the stock's post-earnings drop despite a revenue beat and raised full-year guidance. They discuss the complexity of Arm's licensing and royalty…
Economics and Open Source
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company discuss Joel Spolsky's 2002 'Strategy Letter V' and its implications for open source economics, contrasting Sun Microsystems' failure to monetize software with modern open-core…
#008: Blood In The Water: Americas Assault on Innovation - Kip Doyle - Patent Process, Product Innovation, Defending Patents, Napkin Sketch to Manufacturing
Kip Doyle, inventor of the Card Shark credit card wallet skin and author of 'Blood In The Water', recounts her decade-long struggle to protect her intellectual property against major tech companies like Speck and OtterBox. She details the…
B2B Series: Wireless Standards
Jay Goldberg traces the history of wireless standards, starting with the WWII origins of frequency hopping by actress Hedy Lamarr and engineer George Antheil. He details the 'standards wars' between GSM and Qualcomm's CDMA, explaining how…
Can the Nvidia Monopoly on AI Chips Be Broken?
Sally Ward-Foxton of EE Times discusses the AI chip market with hosts Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo, analyzing the dominance of Nvidia and the potential for neuromorphic and specialized inference chips to break its monopoly. The…
Sun Bum: Tom Rinks. The Secrets of a Master Brand Builder (2023)
Tom Rinks, founder of Sun Bum, explains how he built a $400 million sunscreen brand by combining surf culture, Scandinavian design, and Japanese streetwear into a cohesive identity. He details the creation of the iconic yellow gorilla…
How AI Is Transforming Product Design
Industrial designer and AI consultant Rupert Warries joins hosts Tom Constable and Phil Staunton to discuss how generative AI is transforming product design workflows. Warries explains how tools like Vizcom and ComfyUI allow designers to…
Episode 12: Arm's Business Model Shift
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg discuss a Financial Times report that Arm is shifting its business model from traditional royalties to a percentage of the selling price (ASP) of end products, a move driven by SoftBank's desire to maximize…
Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison
Simon Willison, a software engineer and creator of Django, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to debunk an IEEE Spectrum article claiming open source AI is uniquely dangerous. Willison details the rapid evolution of open source Large…
Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey: Fawn Weaver
Fawn Weaver, founder of Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, explains how she pivoted from planning a book to launching a whiskey brand after purchasing the 300-acre Dan Call farm in Lynchburg, Tennessee. She details the strategic decision to…
Co-Man Contract Pitfalls
Lauren Handel, Principal Attorney at Handel Food Law, outlines critical pitfalls in co-manufacturing contracts for CPG brands. She emphasizes the necessity of mutual NDAs with indefinite terms to protect trade secrets, clear IP ownership…
S1E06 First to file, secrecy, & fast-tracking patents | Tom Galvani
Tom Galvani, a patent attorney and founder of Galvani Legal, explains the mechanics of securing intellectual property for physical products, emphasizing the critical importance of secrecy before filing. He details the distinction between…
Protecting the Intellectual Property of your Medical Device Technology
Kevin Buckley and Neil Thompson from Torrey Pines Law Group discuss intellectual property strategies for software as a medical device (SaMD) and AI-enabled technologies. They explain the Alice two-step rule for patent eligibility, the…
Scrub Daddy: Aaron Krause. How a Failed Experiment Became a Billion-Dollar Sponge
Aaron Krause, founder of Scrub Daddy, explains how he pivoted from selling industrial buffing pads (sold to 3M) to creating a billion-dollar consumer brand after accidentally discovering the temperature-sensitive properties of a foam…
A conversation with the founders of RobOpsCon; a robo dog fight breaks out over patents
Florian Pestoni, CEO of Orbot, and Joe Wieciek, Director of Technical Operations at Outrider, discuss the inaugural RobOpsCon, focusing on the industry's shift from R&D to operational scale and the critical need for robot interoperability…
Oxide's $100M Series B
Oxide Computer Company CEO Steve Tuck and co-founder Bryan Cantrill discuss the company's $100M Series B funding round, highlighting the strategic importance of raising capital to scale manufacturing and engineering teams. They detail…
Episode 21: A Discussion on RISC-V with Calista Redmond CEO of RISC-V International
Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, explains that RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) rather than open-source software, providing a frozen, global standard that prevents vendor lock-in while allowing…