Miscellaneous on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Discussing Startups and Intellectual Property with the Boston Inn of Courts

Fri, 01 May 2015 16:16:00 +0000

On Wednesday I had the privilege of being part of a panel before the Inn of Courts in Boston. This is an organization of patent litigators that meets for continuing education and discussing the practice of their craft. For this meeting, they invited a panel of practitioners from startups and academia to listen to lay people talk about how intellectual property is working (or not) for us.

Topics were quite broad including a focus on copyright, trademark, and trade secret as well as patents and licensing. In the end because the panelists were mostly from the software space we focused more on software patents and software licensing.

In Sales, Questions are More Valuable than Answers

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 09:10:00 +0000

Inspired by “A day at the park” by Kostas Kiriakakis.

I spend a lot of my time helping people sell the software I write. For scalability, this often means teaching them how to sell it themselves. When I’m teaching people, which happens informally and formally, often times they want to know the questions the prospect will ask, and what answers they should give. The FAQ, as it were, so they can have the answers at the ready. And they don’t just want the technically correct answers, they want the answers that will encourage the prospect to buy. “What should I say if they ask what I think about competitor X?”, things like that.

Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 08:34:00 +0000

A year ago this month I attended startup weekend in Boston. The company that I helped to launch there, http://sellercrowd.com, is now a successful ongoing concern, with funding and a handful of employees. So I think that counts as a success story for startup weekend, and my conclusion is that it’s a great program and can work well if you make the right choices going into it. To that end, I’d like to share some of my lessons learned from my first startup weekend, and solicit anyone else to add them in the comments.

Recommending the Franklyn D Resort (FDR) in Jamaica

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:09:00 +0000

I just got back from a week in Jamaica, and I’ve been talking off everyone’s ear about the experience. That’s because the Franklyn D. Resort has one major thing going for it: every family gets a full time nanny for the duration of your vacation. Larger families, particularly with multiple age groups of kids, often had two nannies. The resort seemed especially friendly to large families, with big multi-bedroom suites and reasonable rates for additional children. For our trip they were also running a “grandparents stay free” promotion, which I think they do every January. If you are planning a family-oriented vacation, particularly with young kids, you have to consider the Franklyn D. Resort.

Toddler Science and Big Data

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 01:16:00 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time following my son Patrick around watching him explore the world. I’ve shared a few of his important discoveries with Twitter and with friends, under the tag “Toddler Science”. Key discoveries include that tissue boxes contain a finite supply of tissue and that cat magnets do not stick to cats. I spent the New Years weekend with friends, and they too had an opportunity to watch Patrick learning.

2010 The Year in Bookmarks

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:45:00 +0000

As you may have heard, Delicious is going away, or at least being sold off, or otherwise being destroyed by Yahoo. In the last 72 hours, I’ve tried out the two leading alternatives, Diigo and pinboard. Along the way, I got to wondering why I keep all these bookmarks around. I do often search back for things. And in paging through my 1173 bookmarks from 2010, they formed an interesting lens through which to look back at the year. And so I present 2010, the year in bookmarks.

Normal Accidents and Stock Market Crashes

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:31:00 +0000

In the weeks since the precipitous and brief stock market crash on May 6th, I have found myself answering questions about it from people outside the capital markets and discussing it with insiders on many occasions. While I have some thoughts about what went on, I’m often unable to satisfy people’s desire to blame a single precipitating cause. I think what is going on is that too few people understand the nature of complex systems and what is called a “normal accident.” Given the sophistication of the markets, the number of safety checks and balances, as well as the complexity of the implementations, it is not surprising that events such as May 6th happened, nor should people think it is possible to entirely eliminate them.

A Timeless Way of Building or Why do all these houses suck?

Sun, 16 May 2010 18:12:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been looking at a lot of houses. I’ve also been reading A Timeless Way of Building (ATWB). The net result has been a deep dissatisfaction with the available housing stock in Arlington, and probably in the entire United States. So while I would like to recommend the book, it comes with the disclaimer of being hostile to casual house hunting. Instead it will help you develop opinions about everything.

End of the World Insurance: the Financial Halting Problem

Sun, 02 May 2010 21:30:00 +0000

In computer science, the halting problem is very well known. The problem states that it is impossible to build a software program that can analyze other software programs to determine if they will eventually terminate, or halt. This is a useful problem to understand, because many software problems that look possible at first can be reduced to the halting problem and thus demonstrated to be impossible. It’s common to hear someone say “actually, that seems like a halting problem” when discussing compiler optimization, program analysis, and related problems in computer science. This is much like a physicist might say “but that’s perpetual motion.”

Quick House Update

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:45:00 +0000

My last post ended with me losing the house due to being outbid. In a strange turn of events we may have won the bidding war without ever submitting the highest offer. I’ll try to provide more details at a future date, if it turns out they are interesting. At the moment we are still in negotiation with the seller.

A Computer Scientist Bids on a House

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:33:00 +0000

I was going to favor you all with a post about Java’s System.nanoTime. That post will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I spent the day (arguably the weekend since 3:15pm on Friday) putting in a bid on a house. I won’t bore you with the details of property, inspections, financing, etc. However, I think the details of the bidding process are quite interesting.

To quote a friend of mine, when asked how we much we should bid on the house:

Parque de las Ciencas aka Space Rocket Plaza

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:19:00 +0000

It’s been a few weeks since I posted, partly because of a vacation spent in Puerto Rico. I have a few posts in the works, but before I get to those, I hope you can indulge me in a bit of travelogue.

It started with a quest. On our way to Arecibo we had seen this strange structure off in the distance, and been unable to identify what it might be. Even when we got up close, it was unclear what was going on. The possibly-associated giant stone cross only increased our curiosity.

Project Euler, MIT Mystery Hunt Edition

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

The MIT Mystery Hunt starts this Friday at noon, and I’ll be participating seriously for about my 10th year. In the hunt, teams solve a collection of puzzles to discover the location of a gold coin hidden somewhere on campus. The puzzles may be numerous (sometimes over 100), are generally provided without instructions (except when they are provided with painfully explicit instructions), and the overall structure of the hunt is also unknown at the start. Hunt is nearly always finished before Monday, but during the 60 hours starting Friday at noon, many highly capable teams, some with several dozen members, will try their hardest to solve some very challenging puzzles.

Valuing Startup Options

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

Nearly everyone who goes to work for a startup gets options, and the first question they ask is “how much are these options really worth?” When you are considering a job offer, particularly competitive job offers, it’s important to understand the value of the whole package. Putting a value on an option grant in a pre-IPO startup is quite challenging, and there are many opinions. I’d like to share the way I think about option valuation.

Advice to Those Giving Birth at Mount Auburn Hospital

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:44:00 +0000

I started this post shortly after bringing my first child, Patrick Tibbetts, home from Mount Auburn Hospital. Now he is nearly eight months old, and I am finally getting around to posting it. In the interim, I have shared this advice verbally with several friends. I’ll keep it short, just three pieces of advice that I wish we had known.

For those of you that don’t know, Mount Auburn Hospital is in Cambridge, near Harvard, and is the preferred full-service birth hospital in the Cambridge/Arlington/Somerville/Belmont area. Their Bain Birthing Center is very progressive for a hospital-based center. Unfortunately it is a bit dated, which comes from having adopted many of the now-trendy features of birthing centers (big labor and delivery rooms, wood floors, real furniture, bathtubs, etc) early.

Should Your Honor Student be in Shop Class?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:25:00 +0000

Matthew Crawford’s essay in New York Times Magazine last weekend, “The Case for Working With Your Hands” really resonated with me. The primary focus is the intellectual challenges and rewards of repairing motorcycles, as compared with “knowledge work” jobs that our society seems to value. But one point at the end captured my attention:

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?