Steven D. Levitt Quote
The company currently controls more than twenty thousand patents, more than all but a few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a patent troll, accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created the first mass market for intellectual property. Its ringleader is a gregarious man named Nathan, the same Nathan we met earlier, the one who hopes to enfeeble hurricanes by seeding the ocean with skirted truck tires. Yes, that apparatus is an IV invention. Internally it is known as the Salter Sink because it sinks warm surface water and was originally developed by Stephen Salter, a renowned British engineer who has been working for decades to harness the power of ocean waves. By now it should be apparent that Nathan isn’t just some weekend inventor. He is Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. He co-founded IV in 2000 with Edward Jung, a biophysicist who was Microsoft’s chief software architect. Myhrvold played a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder of its research lab, and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan, Gates once observed.
The company currently controls more than twenty thousand patents, more than all but a few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a patent troll, accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created the first mass market for intellectual property. Its ringleader is a gregarious man named Nathan, the same Nathan we met earlier, the one who hopes to enfeeble hurricanes by seeding the ocean with skirted truck tires. Yes, that apparatus is an IV invention. Internally it is known as the Salter Sink because it sinks warm surface water and was originally developed by Stephen Salter, a renowned British engineer who has been working for decades to harness the power of ocean waves. By now it should be apparent that Nathan isn’t just some weekend inventor. He is Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. He co-founded IV in 2000 with Edward Jung, a biophysicist who was Microsoft’s chief software architect. Myhrvold played a variety of roles at Microsoft: futurist, strategist, founder of its research lab, and whisperer-in-chief to Bill Gates. I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan, Gates once observed.
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