This is the billion dollar question. Many times a product can become a full scale business. It will depend of how far you want to take it. Do you want to build a sales team and scale the business? I guess a product becomes a company once it generates recurring revenue and create jobs.

Any loan application will ask you what is your full time occupation. If 100% of your focus or more than 70% is on that startup, you need to disclose. They need to understand where your revenues are coming from. It's actually a legal obligation then to disclose it.

It is quasi impossible to sell a provisional. First, do the claims and file the patent. Once it's granted, then you will be able to look at licensing options. I actually run a fund that brings patent to life, we don't buy patents, we give equity in exchange of the IP. If you want to know more, we can have a call. Thanks.

Of course. This is very risky since they also might have some patents. If it's just an "addon" or a feature on top of an existing very complex app, I would stay away from it. You would have to reinvent the wheel, build the full scale product, get traction and then try to sell it to them. Most companies don't buy features, they just rebuild them. Unless you can product it with a patent which is very different right now in the software space. Let me know if you want to have a call and if you have more questions.

This seems to be very interesting but I think you should stay away from most VCs who are mostly focus in IT etc. My expertise resides in VC funding in IT so I can't really help with Lobster but if you have decent financials of last year, you can probably go to the Angel route for a small round. Did you look at AngelList?

So if I understand correctly you're building your own fund and you're trying to raise capital to make investments. Building your own fund is a very complex process (I know, I did it with mine). You will need to get a law firm to help you build the GP docs and the LP docs: NDA, LPA, SBD, PPM, Term sheets etc. I could help you with a call if you have more questions. I do have some samples of these documents and can recommend some law firms.

It's becoming more and more difficult for patent trolls to litigate with the current discussions in Congress. It really depends of your market. If it's involving software patents, it's even harder. At Nesting Partners my firm actually bring patents to life then to product then to market to exit! We know quite a lot about patents and work with a lot of trolls (or NPEs) to help them find an alternative to litigation.

Hello, If you're looking for people like me (who have the change to have a Wikipedia page), you should target them with LinkedIn ads. I believe LinkedIn will get you better results than Facebook or Twitter.

Defining a valuation for a seed round for a startup can be pretty difficult. It depends if it's pre-product, pre-revenue, what market etc. It will also depend of the size of the round itself. Would love to help you if you let me know more.

What I usually do with my team is to store the data locally until the machine connects to the web and then push it to the cloud at that point. The data won't be live but at least it will appear once the PC is online. Makes sense?