Eps 89 - From Ideas to Assets: Protecting Your Big Idea with CEO Nate Hecker Transcript
erin [00:00:00]:
So it's okay. Hello, ladies. Welcome to this week's episode of the Hourly to exit podcast. As you can tell, this is a new and exciting location for us. I'm very excited about today's guest as well as this conversation. I know it's going to be a great one for you. So welcome, Nate.
Nate [00:00:29]:
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
erin [00:00:31]:
Yeah, great. So we have Nate Hecker, who is the CEO of big idea with us. And so I'm going to let Nate tell you about his company. But this is a topic that I know a lot of you have been interested in understanding, how to inventory and protect your intellectual property, ways to license it, and to monetize it. And so we're going to cover all these things today. So, Nate, can you introduce yourself and the audience to your company?
Nate [00:01:02]:
Absolutely. Like you said, I'm Nate Hecker. I am the CEO and co founder of Bigidea, the creator of the Bigidea platform. So big idea platform is a revolutionary new type of platform that will help with ip management in the digital age. So we take a different type of approach. We use crypto, ledgers and blockchain behind the scenes to enable ip into the digital age, into the intelligent age, and try to hopefully shake up this industry a bit and be a driving force of good impact.
erin [00:01:34]:
So before you go any further, because I know that crypto and blockchain is a big mystery for me, most of us. So just give us the basics.
Nate [00:01:44]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, most people shy away when they hear blockchain. It's a very scary, disruptive technology. They immediately think of bitcoin or cryptocurrency. But we look at blockchain as a technology. So there's a lot of good things blockchain can do as a utility. So one of those things when we talk about time stamping something or proving authenticity, or even assigning ownership or attribution to something, blockchain can act as a public notary almost, so you can think about it as a mutable database that is completely public. And if you find creative ways to use that in your technology, you can really disrupt a lot of spaces.
Nate [00:02:22]:
And we think IP is one of those spaces where it can be disrupted.
erin [00:02:26]:
With, well, how did you get here? Like, how did big idea come to be?
Nate [00:02:29]:
It's a bit of a journey. It wasn't an aha moment all of a sudden. It definitely came to us over the last few years. So my background is actually in healthcare tech, healthcare technology. So I spent the last decade or so in that world really specializing in data interoperability as well as security compliance and privacy. So this is a new space for me, I will say just being in it for the last two years, but about two years ago, the company I was with was being acquired. And so, as you know, with any type of acquisition, the future gets a little fuzzy.
erin [00:03:03]:
You've been there.
Nate [00:03:03]:
Uh huh. So it gave me the opportunity to pick my head up a bit and say, okay, what do I want to do next? And the obvious answer would be, do something in your lane in healthcare. But when I entered the space, it was doctors still wrote on notepads and they still had medical record rooms, which now fast forward twelve years later, none of that exists anymore. So it's a very mature, very standardized industry. And so we looked to reenter that space. We saw it as a challenge, right? There was not as much opportunity in that space to come in as a startup company. And so my good friend and I, now my business partner and co founder, Jared Arnold, he and I sat down and just started going through different types of business ideas. We had 2030 different business ideas that we were working on and going through and doing market analysis and product fit.
Nate [00:03:59]:
And we started realizing as we were doing all this research, we had nowhere to put all this. And even though we thought we had some good ideas, like maybe it wasn't right for us, it could be right for someone else. We were using Google sheets and excel and notion to track all of this, but there wasn't a platform for us to be able to get feedback or collaborate on. And so we said, well, why don't we look at the idea management space? We started going down this path of, of seeing if, sorry, pause. Just collect my thoughts for a second. So we started going through the idea management place and seeing if this could be a viable product. And one night I have this poster in my office that says, ideas are worthless without execution. And everyone loves to say that, right? Everyone says, everyone's got a million dollar idea.
Nate [00:04:59]:
Ideas are worthless. Ideas are dime a dozen. Dime a dozen, you heard them all. So we decided to challenge us a bit. Like, why is that the case? Because ideas aren't worthless. Every great new innovation that comes about starts with an idea. Every new product feature, every new service offering, it starts with someone having an idea. And as you collaborate and as you iterate ideas, they start to take shape, they start to take form.
Nate [00:05:26]:
And you go through, you know, you go through the different stages and get to strategy, get to planning. And we see this now as ideas have potential to have a lot of value, especially the more they get worked on.
erin [00:05:38]:
Do their seeds, right?
Nate [00:05:39]:
Yeah, there's seeds. Right. And so we went back and we really challenged, okay, well, why are ideas worthless? Well, the hard thing is once you say an idea to somebody, well, who owns that idea? And if you say it to a dozen people or 20 people, it loses more and more value because now everyone sort of knows that idea. And that's why all of a sudden we were like, blockchain can fix this. So blockchain, we have the ability of taking an idea and once documented, we can timestamp. We can then prove authenticity of that idea happened at this time, and we can assign ownership and attribution to it. So we really started going down this, and at the time we didn't realize we were actually in the IP space. So we were actually building a really good software for trade secrets and know how and copyrights.
Nate [00:06:30]:
And so that's where we sort of came about. And we started looking at the IP space and realizing after studying it for almost a year of being in it and really looking at what's currently available in the space, it was established, it had software, but not a lot of new software, and it was very academia. And it reminded me a lot of what healthcare looked like ten years ago. And so it got us really excited.
erin [00:06:56]:
You know, you use the term idea management. I've never heard that term before. Is that something?
Nate [00:07:01]:
Yeah, I mean, our original concept was, I came from corporate for my last few years of working, and we would always use consultants for everything to validate. And I know that working in smaller companies, great ideas come from your entry level employees, employees that are working on your product every day, dealing with customers. But these ideas weren't getting up to senior leadership or they were getting lost in middle management. So we started off with this idea management software, and that's sort of where we started. But there is a lot of companies that do idea management. Not a lot of companies utilize it, but there are companies out there that do idea management.
erin [00:07:43]:
Now, how did you know what you're working on was IP? When did that connection get made and how?
Nate [00:07:49]:
That's a good question. I just knew that we really started looking at ideas. Ideas are really trade secrets, or they can be. They can be. And so that's sort of where we started. We really started. We shift immediately to ideas, into trade secrets, because we saw this as a space of, not many people know what a trade secret is, let alone how to classify it or protect it. And my background being in security and privacy I spent the last ten years protecting Phi, or, sorry, personal health record.
Nate [00:08:22]:
Yeah, personal health information. And I realized, like I reflected in my career, we didn't spend a lot protecting our trade secrets, our know how. And we realized there was an opportunity here, if we can teach people properly what a trade secret is, you know, how our software can help with it, you know, really focus on the people process and technology piece and being that technology piece that helps streamline that process, there might be something here.
erin [00:08:51]:
And so did you have a vision or a mission in mind when you first started, or was it just okay? How can I use what I know in a way that's interesting to me and valuable to people?
Nate [00:09:03]:
I would say it was the latter. I would say we started just sort of navigating and constantly iterating. And as we iterated, we kept shifting. And like any startup, we're still shifting today. As we learn this space, we learn new problems. We see our product can fit that, and if we do a slight pivot, capture that market. So, yeah, it started with just the idea of being able to enable creators, and we realized that a good lesson here is companies don't create intellectual property, people do, but people aren't really empowered. And so the whole thing was to say, with decentralized technology, can we give some of that power back to the creator? Would they be more willing to contribute ideas and IP to a company if the attribution was back to the person?
erin [00:09:53]:
Oh, how interesting. Yeah.
Nate [00:09:54]:
So we looked at it as like LinkedIn, right? Like, LinkedIn is great at documenting your experience and your accolades and your credentials, but what about all the things you contribute to in a company over the course of, you know, however many years you're with them, you can talk about through your experience, but there's really no software to prove that you contributed to this piece of IP. And so we saw it as a way of empowering the creators. And that's still one of our core missions, is we're building for the creator, not necessarily for the company the company owns and manages. But the people are the ones that you really want to get fired up and incentivize to create IP for you.
erin [00:10:32]:
Right. So do companies feel a conflict with that? Do they feel like I will have extra responsibilities when I acknowledge who my creators are versus it all going into the kitty?
Nate [00:10:46]:
Yeah, I don't believe so. I think the industry, in my experience, has always been hard to incentivize people to document. And so there's this whole like, knowledge management piece and, you know, we're just trying to take it a step further of classifying that knowledge and making sure that, you know, the institutional knowledge in someone's head when they walk away can really hurt a company. So if you can incentivize them to take that institutional knowledge, those trade secrets, and be able to incentivize them to document those, and be able to pass that ownership directly onto the company and enable that company to protect that now, or use that to educate the rest of their workforce, we see it as a huge upside and a huge benefit for a company to want to use our software.
erin [00:11:31]:
So it's not just a way to document big ideas, so to speak, but also just the nitty gritty of running your business.
Nate [00:11:39]:
Absolutely. Yep. We're trying to build a full stack intellectual property management system that goes everything from documentation to protection to collaboration, and then moves into, you know, our real hope for the future is to enable IP in a new way and give people a new opportunity. Because IP is everywhere, right? And it's really hard to be discovered. Most people aren't good at showcasing their IP and getting it out there. We think we can build a platform that will allow you to showcase and allow your ip to be discoverable. And then with new technologies coming, with AI and augmented and virtual reality and metaverse, there's a ton of opportunity coming for how you can utilize your current IP in those new ways.
erin [00:12:25]:
Yeah, well, you bring us to the audience that we have here, which are expertise based businesses, service providers, professional services providers, who have corporate clients who aren't thinking. They're thinking about, how do I build scale into my business? How do I build a business that has some independence from me just selling my time? And they know that it somehow involves creating assets and leveraging them, but they don't always call it IP or intellectual property. I like that you talk about ideas, because mostly they ask, how do I protect my ideas? That's generally. And it's very kind of overwhelming. And so when they think, I'd like to say intellectual property is everywhere, because every time we use our intellect, we're creating intellectual property. But how are we, how do we help them understand it? How do we help them categorize it, inventory it, protect it? And so how does bigidea platform help you?
Nate [00:13:29]:
We actually have the same challenge. The feedback I just received a little bit ago was like, you got to cut the word intellectual property out. Like, people don't connect necessarily with that word unless they're in the industry. So what we call them are intellectual digital assets. And I know that's not a better term than intellectual property, but moving it more to a tokenization or digitalization. Using blockchain, we allow someone to come in and register a creation, a piece of work that could be an idea, that could be a copyright, a new material, and then we wrap that into a container that we call an intellectual asset. So our platform at first, like just getting it documented and classified is huge. And so as you start registering your intellectual assets or your different pieces of IP, you start building out your, what we call your intellectual capital.
Nate [00:14:21]:
So that's like the first sort of stage, I think, of like really being, helping out companies is just to document and get to a place where your ip can start working for you. Once you have intellectual capital, if you're a company that's looking to grow, looking to get financing, looking to fundraise, you said it best. They're assets, right? And so the more we can document and build your portfolio, portfolio of assets, those can be leveraged in conversations when it comes to financing and investors and finances, like, they love to know what's behind you, what's behind your company, what am I truly investing in? And those assets are what make you unique. So I think just starting with building your portfolio and giving a very simple, efficient and low cost tool to allow people to register. Now, the whole blockchain piece, again, I know we talked about can be scary. We just put it in the background, right? So we make it super easy. We don't put any burden onto the user. We just use it in the background to be able to go back and audit and prove that this asset was created here by this person.
Nate [00:15:28]:
So that's sort of like the first step, I think, in utilizing us.
erin [00:15:32]:
Yeah, yeah. The language that we use, you use, I use is so important, you know, funny that, you know, I probably laugh a little bit when you mentioned intellectual capital. So, you know, I come from the corporate background and I've been now talking to this audience of experts. And when I first started the conversation, I use the term intellectual capital, which is very all encompassing, you know, relationships and all these things and reputation and crickets, just absolute crickets. So I'm like, okay, let me start talking about intellectual property. Crickets. Crickets. Okay, let me start talking about assets.
erin [00:16:06]:
And so I was like, okay. And sometimes I use the term inventory, you know, that's the other way that I look at it and just to try to make it relatable to the kinds of kind of common sense business terms that we use every day. But, yeah, it's hard when you come from a corporate background where everything is ich, and then you have to kind of modify how you talk about it.
Nate [00:16:28]:
When you figure it out, can you let me know? Because I think assets is the key. People relate to assets, and that's why we try to just talk about them. These are just intellectual assets, which is, I know, still a new concept, but hopefully people can grab a little bit more towards that.
erin [00:16:42]:
Yeah, I was talking to my team earlier today, and we were talking about one of the audiences we like to talk to are business coaches who help experts create scale. And I have been busy cataloging how business coaches talk about how they help their clients scale. And it's like this list that's growing of all the ways that they talk about scale without ever using the term intellectual property. I'm like, how is nowhere? It's nowhere we go to. They'll have whole webinars, everything, and never once do they use the term intellectual property. So I'm like, okay, I got to figure out how to get in there.
Nate [00:17:25]:
That's amazing. No, we're constantly trying to connect with. We don't call our users users, we call them creators. We try to relate to them in a different way that everyone's a creator. And I think with new technology, with Genai and all the new tools out there, I think everyone at some point is going to be a creator. Most people are already on social media. They're on Instagram, they're taking pictures, they're creating. They just don't know it.
Nate [00:17:51]:
And so what they're really taking every time is they are creating that IP. And so we're trying to connect with them at a level of really trying to empower the creator in you. And then how does that work for your business?
erin [00:18:03]:
Well, how easy is it to use the platform?
Nate [00:18:06]:
I'm biased. I think it's really easy. There is, I think in the front, it's a little bit difficult getting started. We're working on trying to figure that piece out, but once you're in, it's really, really easy to use. One of our main principles when building this was to build a very usable, very high end user experience. And the reason for that, not to get too technical, we heard of web two and web three, sort of the shift we're moving into. If you ever dabbled into the blockchain web three, space, the user experience is horrible. We really, in the last ten years, have perfected the web two space.
Nate [00:18:44]:
Instagram, Facebook, Google. It's very easy. Your parents are using it. Your grandparents are now using it. Everyone's on the Internet. And so we really did a lot of good the last ten years. And then web three came along and sort of ruined a lot of that.
erin [00:18:58]:
Just tell us, web two versus web three.
Nate [00:19:02]:
Yes, I'll give you my explanation of it. Hopefully that works. So web one was the ability to just be able to post out there. So think about just going to a company's website and seeing a billboard of what they're selling. Web two was the ability to interact. We call that read and write. So now you can, like Instagram, you can now post Wikipedia, you can now you can post, and you can build communities to read the Internet but also write to it. Web three gets into ownership.
Nate [00:19:32]:
So you've never been able to own anything before. When you post on Facebook, you post on Instagram. They own that. You can't pull that information back out. So web three is a new world where the individual creator is now able to own the materials they're posting. So it's a really cool place where we're going, you know, trying to explain as easy as possible. So going back to the user experience, we try to bridge the gap. We try to put all that web three behind the scenes and make a really elegant user experience while giving them the UI they're used to, clicking on nice big buttons, being able to write and document just like you would in Google.
Nate [00:20:11]:
So, you know, like I said, the beginning is a little tough, is because we do require every person or every creator to prove identity. So one little step, one little hurdle we go through is, you know, the ability to take a picture of the front and the back of your id.
erin [00:20:26]:
I do have an account. I'm going through that. Yes.
Nate [00:20:29]:
Yeah, that's like, the one hurdle. But, like, that steps really important because now we're able to assign IP directly to an identity, not just you as a user, you as an identity. And to me, that's really cool because, you know, there is, it's an immutable record now that this person, this human, created this IP. And so there's a really important reason for it. But once you get over it, I think it's actually pretty easy to use. And then we just got to massage how we talk about things, like not necessarily calling things IP and figuring out a better usable word to represent that.
erin [00:21:02]:
Right. All right, we're pausing for a second. I can't remember if you said that building the connectivity with the copyright office, that was on the record. Off the record.
Nate [00:21:11]:
I'm sorry.
erin [00:21:13]:
At some point, you were planning to connect the platform to, like, the copyright office or the trademark office, or I.
Nate [00:21:20]:
Will say we integrated already with the United States PTO, but the copyright I would keep off just because it's a very difficult challenge. I'm happy to talk about the challenge, but we have integrated with USPTO, so I'm happy to talk about that.
erin [00:21:31]:
Okay. All right. Okay. All right. So one of the ways you're helping people is like helping them actually reach the USPTO.
Nate [00:21:40]:
USPTO, yep.
erin [00:21:41]:
Yeah. And so tell us about that.
Nate [00:21:42]:
Yeah, so we're not here to compete with the patent service that, you know, the United States offers. And today, and traditional IP. And so as we talked about. Right, we started as an idea management, we moved into trade secrets and copyrights and we realized that we can keep going, we can capture all different types of IP. And so most recently, and our latest update coming out later this month, we've actually integrated directly into the United States States patent and trademark office.
erin [00:22:07]:
Amazing.
Nate [00:22:08]:
So now you're like, well, I already have a patent or you have a trademark, so what? But now we're able to sort of ingest that into our platform and one represent it as an intellectual asset, as part of your portfolio and allow you to manage it all in one place. But the really cool stuff is what to come of what we are going to be able to do with that once it's in our platform. So again, our main mission is to make iPad enable IP, make it, give it opportunity to thrive in the digital landscape. And so the very first thing is you need to register, and once you register it, what we're building next, I think is going to be pretty cool and give users and creators new ways of creating revenue.
erin [00:22:49]:
Well, let's talk about what you're building next.
Nate [00:22:51]:
Yeah, I'm excited. We're in the building stages right now. And so everything we built today on our platform around performance, portfolio management, collaboration, and we didn't really talk about Marketplace, but we do have a marketplace feature. All of this was sort of foundational for us to be able to get started on to really build the next wave of how we're going to enable IP. And so our plans is, you know, if we can take a digital asset or digital intellectual asset, and then we can facilitate licensing agreements with other people and other parties. Well, we can also facilitate artificial intelligent licensing agreements. Very interesting, right? And so once we have those different licensing agreements, we can actually partner with different AI engines. So as an example, chat GPT is an AI engine dolly mid journey.
Nate [00:23:43]:
We can partner with these types of companies and we can actually take the licensing agreement as well as the intellectual asset and ingest it directly into the.
erin [00:23:52]:
AI engine so they actually have a license to use it instead of just stealing it. Okay. All right.
Nate [00:23:56]:
Yes. Well, I will say so. A good example that I always use, if you right now go to chatgpt or go to Dolly, which is the image generator of chatgpt, and you type in, draw me a picture of Taylor Swift holding a can of coke, it's not gonna generate what you think it's going to. It's gonna generate you probably a woman that's blonde, maybe country esque, holding a red can without any labels. So right now, all the AI engines are actually really good at making sure they're not infringing on top of trademarks or likeness or other types of IP. And so everyone looks at it. I'm like, well, that's amazing. They can do that.
Nate [00:24:38]:
And it is. But think about how much it's limiting them to be able to use. And so if you're able to go out and license Taylor Swift's likeness for who knows how much money that costs nowadays, and also be able to license out the trademark for coke, well, you could go back, ingest those licensing agreements directly into an AI engine and generate the exact image you are thinking about in your head. And the cool thing is the terms and conditions of that licensing contract. Well, why aren't they just part of the prompt that goes in to make sure that AI stays compliant with the terms of the contract? And so I think we're entering a really cool world. And we have to first get a ton of iPads, you know, into our system and have it registered. And then we really are looking forward to how we're going to enable creators for the future.
erin [00:25:26]:
And so would you have a mass license, like all the, all the assets that we have, people would opt in, opt out. Like, how would you.
Nate [00:25:36]:
Yeah, I mean, it's about just treating IP as an intellectual asset and then allowing you to have full control of the management of that asset. So you have the ability to make that public, make that private.
erin [00:25:50]:
So you have toggles of what exactly.
Nate [00:25:52]:
It's a bunch of configuration options. And again, we're trying to make it easy. And again, we're not trying to compete with lawyers or agencies. We actually see this as a new way for agencies and lawyers to actually manage and come in and help manage these assets. So I don't know, from your perspective as an attorney.
erin [00:26:09]:
Yeah, I mean, I think we all want licensing to be easier, right? I mean, so we have things like Creative Commons, where you have kind of standardized licensing that you don't need to negotiate an individual license for. And you have services like, is it the copyright? Copyrights, CCC, I can't believe. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah. So they have, you know, kind of just, they can license for you, you know, if you want something from the New York Times or from Harvard Business Journal or whatever. And so we want things like that. We want ideas to get spread around. We want people to be, have an easy way to access our content because, you know, guess what? Steal it if they can't figure out how to do it.
erin [00:26:48]:
And so it's better for everybody to have an easy way that people can get access. So, yeah, I don't think lawyers are really, that it's the other, it's the one on one stuff. Right. That's still the stuff that you need, presumably need lawyers for.
Nate [00:27:08]:
And we're trying to build flexibility into our site. So we're starting with standard agreements that people can just use off the shelf or give them the option to upload their own and then be able to make sure that the other party understands that this is not a standard contract, that this is something written, custom. And you may just want to take an extra glance and have it reviewed by your attorney before entering it. So the licensing space is complicated. We're trying our best to simplify it. But start out, we'll just keep it very open to allow people to be able to use their own contracts if they're more comfortable with that.
erin [00:27:41]:
Right. So, for instance, I have, I'm called the graphics queen. I love to kind of visualize different concepts. And so I had someone just last week ask me if she could use one of my graphics with her materials and say, you know, I honestly just said yes. Yeah. And, but is that something where I could have uploaded that and she comes to me and says, hey, I would like to use, you know, this content. I send them over to Bigidea and.
Nate [00:28:09]:
Absolutely. That's such a great, amazing example. So, yeah, if you would have wrapped that and created that as an intellectual asset, you could have just sent her a link, she could have registered solid. And maybe that image is like your eyes only. And so we'll actually, even, you could protect it with a non disclosure agreement. And so you could actually send them a link, but before they could actually see the contents of it, they're actually signing an NDA first. And then you can enter into sort of negotiations. And so depends on if you're selling it or you're licensing it, you'll have the option of a one click button to be able to go and license that from you.
Nate [00:28:45]:
So we're hoping to be able to offer an express license like you talked about, just one easy click. Here's the terms and conditions of what you can use it for. And that person in our side has a choice to want to do it or not. And then we execute that full contract right there, so there's no need to go outside our platform and just keeps it very efficient and very easy. So, yeah, that's a great example. And then we're also looking at like, you know, digital likeness and voice rights are a big theme coming up with, you know, AI and deepfakes. So why not be able to register your likeness and voice rights as an intellectual asset and do the same thing and just easily license that out or just consent, right. The big thing is with that is you have to have the ability to consent, then you have to have the ability to license.
Nate [00:29:31]:
And then once you license it, right, monetize and tracking. So there's just a lot of options. We can go and we're just trying to, we're not trying to boil the ocean, but we're trying to stay broad that we can capture all types of IP and figuring out and really let up to the users for how they want to utilize this to fit their business or their model.
erin [00:29:50]:
Now, you have many, many use cases, but I just thought of one, as you mentioned. I'm all ears, which is due diligence. Rooms. So people can just kind of have everything in there, and then a buyer wants to look at it, they go in through there.
Nate [00:30:03]:
So we. Yeah, so, collaboration again, a big point today. What we offer is the ability to invite someone into your intellectual asset, so you can add them as a collaborator. You can decide what role they have and you can facilitate if they require an NDA before they're able to collaborate and see what's going on. And then the cool thing again, going back to this blockchain technology behind the scenes, we are able to capture every edit that everyone's making. And so you have this immutable log of being able to contribute together on this asset. And every change, every revision is rehashed and posted back up on our ledger, and we're able to sign attribution to each person's change or upload of documents. So we do see ourselves as a massive collaboration to what you are getting into.
Nate [00:30:51]:
And something that we'll be releasing in April is part of our workspaces, the ability to not only invite creators in, but businesses in. Now and then we'll have the ability of creating data rooms. Data rooms are sometimes like a one way facing way. It's great for like m and A events or if you're negotiating a financing deal, but so we have the ability of not only doing data rooms, but like these collaboration zones, so you can add multiple intellectual assets into a room or documents into a room. And again, it's completely tracked of who owns what and who's contributing what to really bring that transparency that collaboration needs. And transparency to me builds trust, obviously. I know you just recently talked about collaboration, thinking about it, yeah. Needing agreements.
Nate [00:31:38]:
And so we just want to be able to be the technology that enables the compliance of that agreement. So yeah, lots of good stuff coming. We're very, very excited about that release and being able to start working with businesses to enable them.
erin [00:31:51]:
And so today someone can go to, is it bigidea.com?
Nate [00:31:56]:
And it is bigideaplatform.com dot.
erin [00:31:58]:
Okay, great.
Nate [00:31:59]:
But it is available for individual users to sign up to identify themselves and be able to start creating their first intellectual assets. And if they want, they can go ahead and keep everything private and build their portfolio or their intellectual capital, or they can make it public and make it discoverable so that people can search and find it. And maybe it could, maybe there's multiple reasons why you may want to have your ip discoverable.
erin [00:32:22]:
Would Google find it or you have to be.
Nate [00:32:24]:
Right now we're not indexing anything. This is probably my healthcare background around privacy. We don't index anything from these ideas. And so you have to be a validated user in order to be on our platform. And again, it also comes down to auditing. So we want to see who's viewing different assets. And so in order to do that, we track who's able to do it, do the different pieces.
erin [00:32:49]:
You're also reminded of the poor man's copyright. Remember that?
Nate [00:32:53]:
Oh, yeah.
erin [00:32:54]:
So I guess if I have deposited something without registering at the copyright office, I can prove when I that I created it before somebody else created theirs.
Nate [00:33:10]:
Yes, exactly. It's almost like it's a very efficient poor man's copyright to be able to go in there and take a piece of work, classify it as a copyright, and we will go ahead and do all the attribution, timestamping and authenticity for you. So it's very, very efficient way. Now, copyright, obviously once you create a piece of work, it is protected under copyright. But sometimes it's hard to prove when you created it. Ours just gives you an extra level to be able to prove that out. I will say the cool thing is I'm learning this, I'm not a lawyer by trade, but I'm learning the space pretty quickly that if you created something, it's copyrighted. It may not give you the same rights as a registered copyright with the copyright office, but you can always register that at any time.
Nate [00:33:57]:
So if you start seeing your copyrights being infringed, you can still go get it registered and offer that level of protection, that extra level of protection. And then we can go and pull that, you know, eventually pull that copyright and show that this is a registered copyright to make sure that users know that there's additional level of a registered copyright here.
erin [00:34:14]:
Now, has blockchain or been used as evidence in litigation yet, do you know? I don't know.
Nate [00:34:24]:
It has in many niche use cases to prove, mostly in the finance world around transactions, but there's a ton of, there's a lot of research out there that shows of how it can be used as basically a notary or a public timestamp of events. And so it has been used in a lot of cases and I think we're going to see a lot more of it happen going forward. I get back to IP just really hasn't been an industry that's really been tested with these new types of technology, even in AI. I think our laws and the industry is not ready for Genai.
erin [00:34:58]:
No, not at all.
Nate [00:35:00]:
And we're seeing the USPTO and copyright trying to figure it out quickly and figure out what side they want to be on. So I think in the next few years we're going to see a couple cases being tried here and we're obviously paying attention very closely. But yeah, there's been some niche cases that are there, but nothing substantial yet to really back behind.
erin [00:35:20]:
Good. Okay, well, speaking of the future, I mean, you created this business. So many people start a business in order for the exit, the ultimate exit. How do you look at this business, your role in it, what your next step would be for you to exit?
Nate [00:35:36]:
That's a good question. I don't fully know the answer yet, but I know I look at technology from an industry level and I look at it from, I think industries go through two different stages with technology. It goes through a consolidated stage, which I think where the IP has been, and then it goes through a disruptive stage. And so I think we're, I think the IP space is primed for disruption, just like healthcare was ten years ago, and has now gradually moved into the consolidated stage. So I look at it from that perspective. And so I think we're just on the beginning of the disruptive stage in this legal tech or IP tech type of world. And so I'm really excited to ride this wave. And I think in the next five, seven years, when we start moving to that consolidated stage again, I think I will take a, we'll see where we're at and we'll take that position.
Nate [00:36:28]:
But I have learned one thing about myself. I'm not made for corporate America. So I am sure regardless of where we are with big idea, I will be probably in a similar position. I love being in the, you know, high growth startups wearing multiple hats, and so I know that's where I'll probably be in the next few years, regardless of where this goes. But I'm just excited about all the opportunity out there.
erin [00:36:52]:
That is awesome. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for making the time to talk to our audience. It's something that they all ask about, so I know this is going to be very, very exciting for them. So once again, so it was bigideaplatform.com.
Nate [00:37:07]:
Nailed it.
erin [00:37:08]:
And if people want to connect with you, where can they find you?
Nate [00:37:11]:
You can email us directly at info@bigideaplatform.com. Hop on our bigideaplatform.com. And through that website, you can find our contact information as well as be able to launch the app that will get you right into our platform.
erin [00:37:24]:
Awesome.
Nate [00:37:25]:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
erin [00:37:26]:
Well, thank you.