Most founders spend an enormous amount of time thinking about revenue. How fast can we grow? Which markets should we enter? How do we convince investors that this will scale?
Much less time is spent on a quieter, more uncomfortable question:
Are we actually allowed to sell what we’re building?
When reviewing startup decks, the pattern is strikingly consistent. Teams usually explain their business model, their target markets, and their competitors in detail. What’s missing is almost always a clear view of the intellectual property landscape they are stepping into.
There is no overview of existing patents.
No freedom-to-operate analysis.
No discussion of how their technology relates to what already exists.
This omission is rarely intentional. Early-stage founders are under pressure. Cash, salaries, and runway dominate every conversation. IP feels abstract, slow, and easy to postpone.
Until it isn’t.
At some point, “later” arrives as a legal letter that makes it clear a product cannot be sold in a specific country, or at all. That moment tends to come when the company is already exposed, with customers, contracts, and expectations in place.
The problem doesn’t start with founders
What many teams miss is that this issue often begins long before a company is formed.
Engineering education is heavily focused on problem-solving. Engineers learn how to model systems, optimize performance, and make complex technologies work reliably. What they rarely learn is how to recognize invention.
Many technical programs still don’t teach patents or IP strategy. As a result, engineers enter companies highly skilled in execution, but largely blind to the novelty of their own solutions.
This creates a subtle but important mindset problem.
Engineers tend to believe that invention is something extraordinary, reserved for rare geniuses. They see their own work as “just implementation,” even when it solves problems others haven’t managed to solve before.
If you ask an engineer to invent something new, they often struggle. If you ask them to solve a long list of concrete problems, they will get to work, and some of those solutions may be genuinely novel. The difference is recognition.
You cannot recognize an invention without comparison.
Until you understand what already exists, you cannot see what is truly different in your own solution.
Why “simple” solutions are often the most valuable
This blind spot affects founders as much as engineers.
Inside a product team, progress often feels incremental. Features are improved, workflows are refined, friction is reduced. From the inside, nothing feels revolutionary.
From the outside, the result can be transformative.
A good example is Starlink. What once required technicians, precise alignment, and specialized equipment now feels effortless to the user. Plug it in, open an app, and it works.
That simplicity is misleading.
When something feels easy today, it is usually because someone solved an extremely hard problem earlier. Making complexity disappear is often the most valuable form of innovation, and one of the easiest to underestimate.
This is where significant IP is often hiding in plain sight.
How value quietly slips away
When engineers don’t recognize invention and founders don’t ask IP questions early, value gets lost in the gap between creation and protection.
Companies move forward assuming they will “deal with IP later,” without first understanding the landscape they are operating in. Revenue grows, products improve, but the legal and strategic foundations remain unclear.
Key questions are left unanswered:
- What patents already exist around our solution?
- How does our approach differ from known prior art?
- Do we have freedom to operate in the markets we plan to enter?
- Which parts of our technology should be patented, and which should remain trade secrets?
Without clear answers, IP becomes reactive. Decisions are made under pressure, options are limited, and costs increase.
Why this matters even more now
This problem is becoming more acute as companies rush to build AI into products and workflows.
Development teams often assume that using open-source components or existing models means there is no IP to consider. But differentiation rarely comes from the components themselves. It comes from how they are combined, constrained, and applied.
If you ask teams what they do differently, and why others don’t do it the same way, they usually have an answer. That difference is often where protectable value lives.
Only if someone knows to look for it.
What strong teams do differently
The goal is not to file as many patents as possible. It is to build clarity early.
Strong teams treat IP as a strategic question from the beginning, not as a legal formality to be handled later. They integrate IP thinking into the same conversations as revenue models and market strategy.
That means deliberately asking:
- What is already protected in this space?
- Where are we truly different?
- Where do we have freedom to operate?
- How do we protect what matters most?
Teams that do this early reduce risk, improve their negotiating position, and gain a much clearer understanding of what they actually own.
A simple conclusion
Most companies don’t fail at IP because they lack innovation.
They fail because:
- Engineers aren’t trained to recognize invention.
- Founders delay IP thinking.
- And critical value is lost in between.
Intellectual property is not a legal afterthought. It is how innovation becomes durable business value.
The earlier teams acknowledge that, the fewer surprises they face later.
Insights by:
Dimitris Giannoccaro
