Dorothy uses natural language processing to search the patent database. Many search platforms have semantic search capabilities which seem to vary in their effectiveness. Like Dorothy, the semantic search query is a plain English description of the thing being searched. You are probably asking yourself, “What’s the difference?”

Patents are REALLY important in the pharmaceutical industry. Taking a new drug to market cost $3-$5 billion and can take up to 16 years thanks to the arduous FDA approval process. Even though many patents that cover new drugs have less 5 years pendency after the drug is approved for sale, 80% of the overall revenue pharmaceutical companies make are tied directly to a patent claiming an approved drug. VC’s and institutional investors understand this, and rarely invest in drugs that are not covered by at least one patent. Basically, if you are going to raise money for a biotech company and/or you want to recoup the cost of bringing the drug to market you are going to need a patent.

Meeting with Mike Shamos, patent lawyer, distinguished career professor and the Carnegie Mellon Language Technology Institute, and co-founder of DorothyAI, is always a treat. After explaining various problems that we all agree are extremely difficult maybe impossible, Mike walks to the dry erase board in his office and begins outlining a solution. He goes on to describe numerous applications for the solution all of which solve problems patent lawyers have faced for decades. He’s like a fountain of good ideas.

Being an adult sucks. Remember when you were in school? The moment you leave your last class all of the stress of the semester was washed away. You were free with nothing to worry about.

It’s back to school time. The neighborhood kids are back to work learning the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, and Java or C, maybe Python. Let’s hope they’re are also developing an appreciation for learning and a hunger for knowledge.

You might be surprised to know that we are not searching for perfection at DorothyAI.

We are in a transition here at DorothyAI, as we move from a company that creates software solutions to a company that sells software solutions. Actually, we’re a company that sells the software solutions it is still creating. I don’t know if that is a “transition.” In any case, we’ve spent this week looking at feedback from our previewers and setting our goals for the future.

I’ve been focused on learning to sell for the last 7-8 months, since as CEO I’m also salesperson #1. In that time, I’ve read a Medium article, The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen, at least 10 times. I didn’t get it. What did the collection of randomly chosen images and text about “Subscription Economy” mean? What does Zuora’s product actually do?

We invited 22 people to preview Dorothy, and I’ve had butterflies in my stomach for more than a week.