Week 8

This week, my team and I decided to make a pivot away from the CRISPR patent and towards a different patent. Though we have spent a considerable amount of time researching the patent and discussing business propositions regarding the patent, we have ultimately decided that a startup around the patent is not financially or commercially viable - such a startup requires far too much capital and domain knowledge for college students without advanced training in biology to understand. However, we have been looking hard for other patents to pick up as our primary patents. 

A number of patents look particularly interesting to me. As a CS student, I’m particularly drawn to computer-related technologies that I believe have high potential to be commercialized. Some of the patents I’m personally interested in pursuing with my team are 'Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Minimal Data Leakage’ https://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/24053.html and 'First Practical ORAM for Concealing Access Patterns to Data on the Cloud’ https://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/22558.html. Particularly, the latter patent is very interesting as it allows you to access your data while providing malicious actors with no tangible information whatsoever about how to recover the data you accessed on the cloud. Though the specifics of this are too technical for me to understand, the security ramifications of this seem quite important. 


Ultimately, by next week, I, along with my team, hope to have settled on a new patent that we can quickly move forward with on building a startup around.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6

Week 6 Hi, My name is Kush Rastogi and this is my private blog for IEOR 185. To this point, my team, Pied Piper, has been working well together, but our project is facing some major hurdles. In the past few weeks, we decided on using the famous CRISPR patent championed by Professor Doudna, but we have had difficulty reaching out to the CRISPR team for more comments on the patent and how we could potentially turn it into a business. This is a little concerning to me as it seems many other teams have already selected their patent and have the wishful blessings of the professors whose research the patent came from.  However, just this week, I was able to talk to individuals from Berkeley IPIRA who handle all inquiries related to valuable Berkeley IP. According to these individuals, a company based off of the CRISPR patent would need to have significant capital to begin with, and therefore any startup involved with this work would most likely not be able to provide any th...
Read more

Week 11

For this blog post, we have been asked to answer the question: What keeps us up at night regarding our project? I think the factor that keeps me up the most at night regarding our project is how to properly go to market with our product. As our patent relates to Autism, one of the paths we can take is to market the wearable towards individuals with ASD. One of the problems with this path is that it severely limits our potential market base, and also may begin to stigmatize our product. This would be quite unfortunate, as the purpose of our product is to help people understand their emotions, not to make them feel cornered into a medical prognosis. An alternative that we have discussed is making the product available for children with ASD in schools. While this does in fact limit our market further, the smallness of this market may serve to help us as it makes it easier for us to establish milestones and quickly expand to corner the entire market. Other options that we have discuss...
Read more

Week 13

The entrepreneurial journey this semester has been quite a ride so far. At the beginning of the semester, we started out by focusing on the CRISPR patent before jumping towards wearables, which we have been working on for quite some time now. Before taking this class, I had liked to believe that the journey of building a startup might have been quite formulaic: you have an idea, you get funding, you build your company, you succeed. After the last few months, it's quite obvious that there is in fact no formula for success. The only thing that is constant in the startup process is the human factor - you. As long as you keep working as hard as possible, you may or may not get funding, your product could be a success or a flop, your company may fail or live, but you will unequivocally be more equipped for the future. Though your company may not survive every hurdle you put yourselves through, you will, and I think that's what people mean when they say that startup founders must ...
Read more