More on my recent trip to California... The primary reason for my visit was to sell a patent I was awarded a few years ago. In my earlier post I mentioned that I visited Google. Google wasn't the buyer of the patent... or to be precise, I don't know who the buyer was, as it was kept confidential. I am moderately happy with the sale, for several reasons. The sale price was more than twice the highest previous offer. I had had the patent for several years and hadn't had much serious licensing interest (although admittedly I had spent little time actively looking for licensees). It is a business model patent, which the courts have not been very keen on recently. And it probably would've cost a couple million to defend against any infringers (although I'm not aware of any infringers). The claims are extremely broad, which is great, but as with any patent there's no guarantee that they'd hold up in court.
The patent is for what I think is a truly revolutionary idea for streamlining online transactions. It's not obvious that the idea will work; on the surface it seems like it probably wouldn't work, but after a little thought most people I've talked to agree that it has some chance of working. The key point is that if it does work, it could be truly huge. Critically, for the idea to be successful it would require massive scale, on the order of millions of transactions a month. The potential buyer might be able to reach this level, but I was pretty sure that I couldn't. I do hope that the buyer makes the idea work. If they use it to build the next ebay or amazon, I would be very satisfied both that my idea was implemented on a large scale and that it resulted in increased efficiencies for the world's transactions, and only slightly jealous and regretful that I wasn't the one who made it happen.
I'm glad I went through the process of patenting my invention. The patent didn't take very long for me to put together, so on a per hour basis it netted me more per hour than I get in my day job. Although the process was an interesting one to go through once, I don't have any plans to patent any of the other ideas bouncing around in my head. The fun part was coming up with the idea and then trying to figure out the details of how it might work. The writing of the claims required a part of my brain I had never used before, and reminded me why I'm glad I'm not a lawyer. Working with (against?) the patent office to get the paperwork completed and to persuade the examiner that the claims should be approved was pretty unpleasant and could've only partially been outsourced to a patent lawyer. Like my experiences with the isolation tank, skydiving, and drugs, it belongs on my list of things worth doing once or twice but not making a habit of.

Random videos of no particular importance:
Stairway to Heaven by the Beatles
Amazing soccer skills demonstration
My favorite pianist
This guy has way too much free time.
Magic tricks explained

Here's a little game I just made to test your knowledge of medicine. Your task is to guess which of the following are possible side effects of the ten top-selling drugs and which are possible side effects of drugs from Prescott Pharmaceuticals, the drug company endorsed by Dr. Stephen Colbert. Click on the Comments link to see the answers.
goiter
tremors
difficulty speaking
dyspepsia
cardiac arrest
fungal infection of the mouth
breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue
taste perversion
gastrointestinal hemorrhage
enlarged abdomen
Arthralgia
Scruffula
mild heart explosions
hairy uvula
restless torso syndrome
mild Hulkism
Phantom Hand Syndrome
Spontaneous Pregnancy
vivid dreams of self-cannibalization
Late Onset Albinoism
monkey lung
spontaneous and uncontrollable gum growth
clown-foot
increased risk of vampire attack
wandering genitals syndrome

During my trip last week I had an opportunity to visit Google's campus. I had never been there before, but as a customer (Adwords), vendor (Adsense) and shareholder I thought I should visit, especially since I was going to be in the area anyway. Like most internet companies, mine is very dependent upon Google. Until recently I thought of my business as serving three constituencies: its users, its advertisers, and its employees. Now it's users, advertisers, employees, and Google. Google impacts us even more than our direct competitors do. Such a business model is dangerous, but Google has consistently smiled on us (mostly because we play by the rules) and so it's worked well for us so far.
Not surprisingly, I was very impressed by the visit. It felt like a college campus, but with much better food in the cafeteria. Not all of their employees are brilliant, but a lot of them are, and the average employee there is probably smarter than at any other large company in the world. If I was just now graduating from college, this is the company I'd want to work at (although with the skills I had straight out of school I don't think I would've made the cut). They offer the types of perks I wish I could offer my employees, but unfortunately my company's annual revenues aren't a million dollars per employee the way Google's are.
Overall, I really like how they run their business. They're innovators not only in their products but also in their approach to running the business. Internal processes are continually improved and become pretty close to optimized. I like how they ignore Wall Street and think long term, not being in any particular hurry to monetize new tools. They do sometimes seem to be moving in a hundred different directions and a lot of their products never catch on, but they've been very careful not to kill their golden goose, search, and indeed they continue to improve it and distance themselves from Yahoo, Microsoft and the other also-rans. The growth will obviously slow in the coming years, and there will certainly be challenges ahead for them, but it's a big world and there's still plenty of room for them to grow. I would be surprised if they weren't much much bigger and more profitable in the future, and if I had to take one guess at what company would have the largest market cap in twenty years, my guess would be Google. (But I'd still put the chances at only about 15%. More likely it will be some company that doesn't exist yet.)
When I first started my company I gravitated toward technology, but in recent years I've come to appreciate why Warren Buffett generally avoids technology when investing. As with everything else, he turned out to be right, and I'd be better off today if I had blindly trusted him rather than having to learn the lessons myself. If I were just starting a company now and my goal was to build an entity with enduring value (as opposed to, for example, wanting to work on cool projects) I probably wouldn't do anything in technology, because it's very hard to build a lasting moat in tech. This is also the reason I don't have much technology in my portfolio, but I've made an exception for Google. With most companies, the closer I look, the less impressed I am. The reverse is true for Google.

I'm back from my trip. Did you miss me? I spent last week reconnecting with a dear friend, sipping bottled poetry and communing with John Muir's ghost. In case you haven't already guessed, I was in (and around) San Francisco, the city with the lowest ratio of (time I spend there / time I want to spend there). The trip's original purpose was pseudo-business-related (more on that in upcoming posts) but I decided to take off the full week and turn it into mostly a vacation. Like the best vacations, I got three discrete doses of happiness from it: the anticipation beforehand, the being and doing during, and the memory afterwards. Unlike prior vacations, I found that I was able to almost completely avoid thinking about work. I only checked email and voicemail once on the entire trip. The fact that my job existed probably only passed through my head once or twice a day, and only for a few minutes. I don't know if I've gotten better at controlling what I think about, or if I care less about work now than I used to, or if I care just as much but simply worry less, or if my subconscious brain has found that I don't have as many good business-related ideas these days and so intruding upon my consciousness with random business-related thoughts isn't as likely to be productive anymore. I'm still getting caught up at work so I don't have time for a longer post, but I'll post a couple more notes about my trip in the next few weeks.