Author Archives: Jean Niehues

If you’re a regular reader of our blog or Mary’s Forbes contributions, you know that we here are Traklight are fans of the show Silicon Valley. A show about a tech company has a ring of the familiar, and said company’s early stage struggles and failures to plan are certainly going to pique our interestContinue reading “What Pied Piper Could’ve Done to Avoid a Lawsuit”

If a potential investor looked at your company today, what value would you place on the company? How would the investor value the company? These are both interesting questions to ask yourself and ones that you need to have answers for to be ready.

In part one of the series, I discussed not doing the proper paperwork before going to market. Myth 2: We can patent all of our ideas.

In business, as in life, one of the most important things you can do is ask the right questions. And there are so many questions out there, from “Should I start my own business?” to “How is this Columbia House membership NOT a good idea?” At Traklight, our questionnaire is designed with all your business questionsContinue reading “Introducing Our Improved Questionnaire”

This is a guest blog by Mark Oblad, founder and principal developer of Valcu

If you’ve read our latest ebook on HBO’s Silicon Valley, you know the perils that can arise from issues of ownership and work created while otherwise employed. While a creator can easily separate in their mind the work done for each separate entity and see no contradiction or overlap, the law is less forgiving of suchContinue reading “LifeLock in IP Battle With Former Employee”

I recently had the pleasure of presenting a webinar with Kelly Pacatte, Senior Employee Relations Consultant at TriNet and learned about some new HR risks.   We learned that ignoring these risks, like other business risks, is catastrophic.

Is your small business on track to succeed? How do you know? How do you communicate that knowledge to stakeholders? It turns out that the answer is found in how well you understand your business’s intangible or strategic assets—those assets which you cannot see or touch, but are powerful enough to trip you up ifContinue reading “The Road to Success: How Intangible Assets Are Essential for a Business”

On the surface, the job description of a marketer is to help their company or their client raise awareness of their brand or educate customers in the hopes of generating sales of whatever product they have to offer. So while it’s logical to view marketers as an extension of sales, they’re every bit as inventiveContinue reading “How Can Marketers Be Better at their Jobs? Add Intellectual Property to Your Knowledge Bank”

Risk is something of a mature subject. That’s not to say that risk is solely the providence of people past a certain age, but we become more aware of it as we age and mature. As kids we don’t ponder the idea of our own mortality or the possibility of failure; it’s less that weContinue reading “How to Avoid Business Risk”