Feb 03, 2016

Efrat's Message: Welcome to 2016 

 

Happy New Year to all our clients, colleagues and friends! In 2015 we saw our services grow globally, having supported our clients with fundraising or with IP transactions with a combined value of over $50 million across a range of diversified industries.  We had the opportunity to do what we like doing the most: bring new technology to market, be it via a new startup venture getting off the ground, or a large corporation commercializing its intellectual property.  We have also significantly increased our educational and thought leadership initiatives in 2015, through teaching at Stanford, lecturing to startups, launching our corporate education series, and speaking at IP and business conferences, including the Asia IP Business & Finance conference in Seoul (South Korea) where I was invited as a keynote speaker and had the honor of meeting the head of the Korean Patent Office.

 

As we welcome 2016, Foresight is planning to go global, develop new products and services for our clients, and keep building our educational platformOn the global front, we are planning to open an office in Israel to better serve our startup clients in the "startup nation", a country that has more startups per capita than any other region in the world.  We also plan to continue the collaboration with our affiliates around the world; most notably through partnerships we have in Europe, Japan and Korea.  On the new services front, we are launching a set of new startup assessment tools and services, geared at helping startups improve their valuation and better position them for funding. Finally, we strongly believe in education as a way to move the needle when it comes to awareness as to the importance of IP as a strategic business asset.  We are set to launch a comprehensive corporate education platform through a series of customized workshops and educational tools that we will be deploying in 2016.

 

We are looking forward to seeing many of you as part of our journey this year, either in our Silicon Valley office or in one of our upcoming events.  We value having you as part of the Foresight family and look forward to a productive, innovative and exciting 2016!

 

Warm Regards,

 

Efrat Kasznik, President

New Startup Initiatives:
Startup Assessment Tool & Access Silicon Valley - Tel Aviv


We are excited to announce two new startup initiatives that we are launching in 2016:
 
  • Our Startup Assessment Tool was designed to quickly identify the strengths and weakness of a Startup, and determine its position on our Funding Readiness Matrix. The key to this new tool is its focus on the two primary indicators of startup success: Product and Execution. This tool incorporates knowledge and experience that we accumulated over years of working with startups and investors in Silicon Valley and around the world. As explained in a Business Journals article covering our philosophy behind this assessment, we help startups move from the "Rookie" position to an "All Star" position, while increasing their valuation and their chances of funding.  We have developed a quick 20 Question Survey, which we score using a proprietary ranking algorithm. If you want to see how your company scores on our funding readiness assessment, please click the following link Startup Readiness Survey and one of our startup advisors will contact you with your results and customized recommendations.
  • As we are increasing our involvement in the Israeli startup ecosystem, we have teamed up with Access Silicon Valley, an organization committed to building "virtual bridges" between those cities that have great startup communities and Silicon Valley.  We participated in the launch of Access Silicon Valley - Tel Aviv, where Israeli startup entrepreneurs get real-time access to Silicon Valley angels, VCs and other entrepreneurs that they otherwise wouldn't get the opportunity to see, hear or possibly connect with.  We extend an invitation to all Israeli startups and entrepreneurs to join the group and participate in our upcoming events.  We are planning to hold a startup conference in Israel later during the 2nd half of 2016.  
 
New Research Spotlight:
The Naked Truth: 30% of U.S. Unicorns Have No Patents
 
It seems that not a day goes by without a commentary about Unicorns, a Silicon Valley-coined term used to describe a startup (pre-exit) with a valuation exceeding $1 billion. The number of Unicorns, the vast majority of which are US software companies, has recently crossed the 150 mark, according to the TechCrunch Unicorn leaderboard. Topping the US Unicorn list are high flyers like Uber at $51 billion and Airbnb at $25.5 billion, followed by companies that are mostly concentrated in three industries: Consumer Internet, E-commerce and Software.
 
In a recent Foresight study, which was reported in an article on IP Watchdog , we checked into the most recent group of Unicorns and their patent positions, and how it may be correlated with valuation. We found that 30% of US Unicorns have no US patent assets at all! About 62% of US Unicorns have only 10 or less (issued and pending) US patents in their name; these companies account for more than $157 billion in collective valuation and $25 billion in combined funding.  Taken as a group, there's an "IP Gap": the value distribution is not correlated with the IP distribution: 53% of total US patent assets are assigned to only 8% of companies, which account for 17% of the overall value and 11% of the overall funding. For our detailed findings, and conclusions, continue reading here .
 

Foresight in the Media: Articles, Webinars and Interview Highlights 
 
Below are some of our most recent media highlights.  For a full list, please visit our website .
 
  • Webinars: We often participate in webinars as part of our educational thought leadership platform.  One of our most popular webinars this year was done as part of a webinar series hosted by our colleagues at Patexia on the ever-popular topic of Understanding the Financial Value of IP Assets.

Upcoming Events
 
The list below includes upcoming events that are either hosted by Foresight or where we speak on a panel. Some of these will be live-streamed, so please contact us to for more event information:
 
  • The LegalTech Revolution: How Innovation is Transforming Legal Services, March 16, 2016 - LES Silicon Valley Chapter, Palo Alto, CA