the meeting tmr w/ letao is highly consequencial. because it will set the stage for everything that's to come for advantage spun from trade secrets.
here is what letao lays out for the sake of this "venture": nothing about what you have done will make umass TTO from claiming that your invention is rightfully theirs. not completely nor partially. unless they claim ownership through the umass personnel you have worked with.
listening to this i thought to myself, how would that worst case scenario play out? and i remembered a personal request from beatriz: for selfish reasons, i would like to have this published. we can also look into the patenting process together, but as a PhD student, co-authorship is something that I would really much want.
at the time i agreed, thinking that higher h-indexes or visible publication would strengthen our collective position when applying to sosv sf/ny and pitching to vcs down the line. but i was wrong for two reasons:
- i had no communication with any IP attorney at the time.
- i had no idea engram's business model was so dangerously similar to mine.
any effort to bring what we have done, in its completion to light, even after provisional patenting, would result in the loss of informational gap between us and our competitors.
i don't think this would be an ultimatum, but a spectrum of possibilties, ranked from best to worst for the company, and oppositely, worst to best for beatriz. walking out of tmr's meeting i need to have the definite ranking written down, but so far here are the hypotheticals:
- no paper at all: full trade secret. strongest ip protection but beatriz gets nothing on her publication side.
- biology-only paper after provisional filing: "morphological features correlate with biomarker expression in cortical organoids." describes biolgical finding and not the computational method.
- vague methods paper after provisional filing: references "a computational pipeline" without implementation details. shows it works, doesn't show how.
- full methods paper far in the future: years later when the temporal gap is large enough that disclosure no longer matters competitively.
- full methods paper after provisional: more risky, most academically valuable.
right now, at this very moment, there is no way to know what letao will think of each of these options, which must be eliminated, which must be pursued, or if there is a middle ground that she will find to be moderately ideal vs. not ideal, or there are some other pathways to approach this problem.
bringing the final version of all the options from the menu to beatriz will also be the most indicative litmus test on beatriz herself. how badly does she want this publication to be academically groundbreaking and commerically dangerous, or is this truly something optional that she could hold off, to whatever degree, for the sake of the startup.
we will see what happens. this meeting will prepare me first for how to counter TTO, which isn't a big problem even if the paper is written in its entirety, as long as beatriz and sun's roles weren't involved with the novel computational aspects of the invention and as long as the provisional patent is done in the first place. the bigger risk is how this can be potentially land into the periphery of engram and any other competitor in this space. what comes out of the meeting with letao would be the menus of options i need to memorize when speaking to sun, and based on my perception of him he will definitely favor anything for the startup. and since he is the PI of beatriz, he might, if necessary, bridge the mental framework i would eventually establish in front of him, to beatriz. and finallly, the meeting with beatriz is to settle all near term actions, and expectations not only for the company, but the publication itself.
final note: during the meeting, mention when and what i need to have in writing before provisional patenting.
let's see what happens.