Patents are the primary means of protecting IP — trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets offer additional IP protection — and represent a rule-of-law guarantee akin to a deed’s role in protecting land ownership. The founders of the United States wrote patent protection into the Constitution to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Abraham Lincoln revered patents for adding “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”
In today’s knowledge-based economy, IP rights play a foundational role. “Core R&D is the first step in getting good products into people’s hands,” said John Smee, senior VP of engineering and global head of wireless research at Qualcomm. “Everything from smartphones to the Internet of Things, automotive and industrial innovation begins as a breakthrough within our research labs.” At Qualcomm, Smee said, strong IP laws help the company confidently conduct cutting-edge 5G and 6G wireless research that will make its way into products ranging from everyday consumer goods to the factory floor.
Semiconductor companies, in particular, are fiercely protective of their IP because it’s their primary competitive advantage. Chip companies go to extraordinary lengths to protect their IP by maintaining black boxes only accessible to one person per fab, choosing highly secure operating locations, and keeping R&D teams separate from fab operations teams.
On the legal side, America’s Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 bestows legal protection of chip topography and design layout IP while the EU’s Legal Protection of Topographies of Semiconductor Products of 1986 protects IC design. These regulations “have encouraged firms to continue to innovate,” according to the findings of Qualcomm’s and Accenture’s report, Harnessing the power of the semiconductor value chain.Having a high-quality patent portfolio also helps companies build out their ecosystem, should they choose to license, through advising, training, support for launches, assistance in expanding to new markets, and much more.
Licensing democratizes innovation and invention— it makes the cutting-edge IP developed by one firm accessible to a broad range of others. As such, it allows other companies to skip the R&D step and jump right into building on the innovator’s foundation. This lowers the barrier to entry for upstart companies while providing a steady return on investments for the companies who have the resources to dedicate to heavy R&D.
An outsize economic impact
IP protection also has an outsized impact on the US economy and helps create good higher-paying jobs. A report from The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) found that in 2019 industries that intensively use IP protection account for over 41% of U.S. gross domestic product (or about $7.8 trillion) and employ one-third of the total workforce — that’s 47.2 million jobs. In 2019, the average weekly earnings of $1,517 for workers across all IP-intensive industries was 60% higher than weekly earnings for workers in other industries.
Workers in IP-intensive industries were more likely to earn higher wages as well as participate in employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement plans, the USPTO report found.
But patent laws are often subject to much debate — one person’s idea of protection is another’s view of monopoly. That’s where organizations like LeadershIP come into play. The group brings together experts on IP and innovation to debate issues at the intersection of research, policy, and industry.
In addition, several efforts are underway to help inventors get their ideas into the marketplace. The Inventors Patent Academy (TIPA), for instance, is an online learning platform aimed at guiding inventors through the benefits of patenting and the process of obtaining a patent. TIPA has designed its program to make patenting more accessible and understandable for groups historically underrepresented in the patent-heavy science and engineering fields, including women, people of color, people who identify as LGBTQIA, lower-income communities, and people with disabilities.
Closing these gaps would promote U.S. job creation, entrepreneurial activity, economic growth, and global leadership in innovation. Estimates suggest that increasing participation by underrepresented groups in invention and patenting would quadruple the number of American inventors and increase the annual U.S. gross domestic product by nearly $1 trillion.
If we want our nation’s rich history of innovation to continue, experts say, we must create an IP protection ecosystem that helps ensure that tech innovation will thrive.
“With the protection of patents,” Smee said, “there is no limit to where our creativity can take us.”
“We want people to be able to work in whatever way works for them with flexible schedules, in meetings and out of meetings,” Slack chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua told Protocol at Dreamforce 2022.
Throughout the conference, one of Slack’s main rallying cries was that we should cut down on meetings. At both the Slack keynote and a live interview with Pivot’s Kara Swisher, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield declared his hope that people always feel empowered to turn down meetings in the future (and reaffirmed his disdain for the so-called work metaverse).
The “fewer meetings” mantra stems from Slack’s workplace research consortium Future Forum as well, according to its executive leader Brian Elliott. Finding time for deep focus is a priority for many workers, he said, and he’s glad to see this idea at the forefront of Slack’s product. Elliott has helped implement the idea into Slack at large with no-meeting Focus Fridays and Maker Weeks. Salesforce even picked up the practice post-acquisition. That said, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, nor is it one that can be implemented without significant buy-in.
“Those kinds of practices and policies, you can't just top-down mandate them,” Elliott said. “You actually need people to pilot them and experiment with them to figure out what works, and then you need to adapt them to different organizations.”
One of Slack’s main rallying cries throughout Dreamforce 2022 was that we should cut down on meetings.Photo: Lizzy Lawrence/Protocol
Instead of just a dead calendar event, Butterfield’s vision is a comprehensive, easily digestible record of the meeting that makes sense, even if you didn’t attend. Essentially, it’s an elevated version of meeting minutes. This is part of the goal behind Slack canvas, a collaborative document embedded within channels and built from Salesforce-owned Quip.
“We had an instance of something similar to canvas that we called boards internally, two or three years ago,” Tamar Yehoshua, Slack VP of product, told Protocol. “We got it to dog-food, and there were just too many rough edges. Then the Salesforce acquisition came, and we knew with Salesforce, we would get Quip.”
Despite Slack’s rallying cry against meetings, a lot of Dreamforce 2022 took place in person.Photo: Lizzy Lawrence/Protocol
Yehoshua described canvas as a “persistent, real-time layer” of work that she thinks will streamline relevant information. But whether it will reduce the need to attend synchronous meetings remains to be seen.
“We want people to be able to work in whatever way works for them with flexible schedules, in meetings and out of meetings, so it doesn’t have to be this ‘I’m on a 30-minute video call in order to get anything done,’” Yehoshua said.
Canvas and the general availability of video huddles were the main Slack announcements at Dreamforce, accompanied by hundreds of Slack-specific sessions over the conference’s three days. Tamara Jensen, a principal technical project manager at T-Mobile, spoke at a Slack-related session about how to cancel more meetings. She’s leading her company’s efforts to replace unnecessary meetings with Slack, though adoption has been uneven across various teams.
“It depends on which role you’re in,” Jensen said. “As a product person, you talk all day long. As an engineer, you’re in less meetings.”
No matter what Slack does, Jensen said some people are just going to have some meeting FOMO. It’s in our nature to worry about what essential information we might have missed.
“That does take a little bit of training,” Jensen said. “People have to get comfortable saying no, and trust that it’s going to be offline and available to them.”
Hybrid work and figuring out better ways to communicate was not just top of mind for Slack execs, but for Dreamforce attendees, too. Several Dreamforcers talked to Protocol about the pitfalls of making work equally inclusive for office-goers and those working from home, such as including remote workers in a video meeting where most people are Zooming from a conference room.
Dreamforce had a panel about how to lead in a flexible work world, with speakers like Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud and Calendly CEO Tope Awotona. The main takeaway from that panel was, as Sud put it, “Nothing is sacred.” Now is the time to experiment and test out different hybrid and remote policies. Sud said her executive team is dispersed across nine time zones, from Switzerland to Seattle. Instead of all leaders flying to headquarters once a month, every executive hosts a meetup in their hometown.
“It’s tough as executives because what your employees are looking for is certainty,” Sud said. “Part of our job is to know where we can have a philosophy and certainty, but also where we need to be agile and flexible. At Vimeo, we’re just experimenting.”
With all that experimentation, companies are split on whether to ditch or reunite with the full-time office model. But it’s clear that remote work will remain popular with employees even as the pandemic wanes.
“The bet essentially is which model is going to perform better over the next five years, and I would bet on the one that is more attractive to talent, because talent actually drives business results,” Elliott said.
Despite Slack’s rallying cry against meetings, a lot of Dreamforce was — you guessed it — meetings. Between people dutifully taking notes at keynote panels and groups huddling with Humphry Slocombe ice cream in Adirondack chairs outside Moscone Center, connecting synchronously was the ultimate goal of Dreamforce. After years of being unable to come together, Dreamforce attendees were happy to fill their time with live, serendipitous chatter.
As the number of tech companies in the region grows, so does the number of tech workers, whose high salaries put them at an advantage in both LA's renting and buying markets.
According to the most recent Regional Housing Needs Assessment, from 2020, which determines how much housing must be built between 2021 and 2029, Los Angeles needs to construct more than 456,000 units of housing, or around 57,000 per year, to keep up with demand. But the city is anticipated to build just short of 231,000 in that period, or around 29,000 per year. And the flood of new tech workers is only exacerbating the problem.
The average tech salary in Los Angeles ranges from $114,000 for marketing and design positions to more than $148,000 for developers and engineers. This beats out the median annual household income in LA county, which is just over $71,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
High salaries put tech workers at an advantage in both the renting and buying markets, but it’s major liquidity events, such as a company being acquired or going public, that allow people to put down massive down payments or all-cash offers that really give them an edge, said Matt Canzoneri, CEO and co-founder of home-buying platform DwellWell. “They’re not relying on their high paychecks,” Canzoneri said. “They all of a sudden come into a windfall of cash that shakes up the market.”
Developers are more likely to build and price rental units and homes for purchase at rates that people in tech can afford, but are out of others’ budget.
The city’s IPO activity really started picking up in 2021, when companies including Dave and Rivian went public. According to data from PitchBook, the region saw 18 tech IPOs in 2021. That’s more than double the number of IPOs it had in 2020, when seven companies IPO’d, and more than triple the number of tech IPOs in 2019, when five tech companies went public.
LA has also seen a lot of M&A activity in the last few years, PitchBook data shows. In 2021, 434 tech deals took place in the region, worth an average of $377.6 million. That’s up from 284 deals in 2020 worth an average of $246.2 million.
Developers are more likely to build and price rental units and homes for purchase at rates that people in tech can afford, but are out of others' budget. And with the sheer lack of housing units overall, people who don’t make enough money are getting pushed out of certain areas.
According to apartment rental platform RentCafe, the average apartment for rent in Santa Monica costs $3,958, with 95% of the apartments in the area costing more than $2,000 per month. Meanwhile, the average home value is more than $1.9 million, according to Zillow. In Los Angeles overall, the average rent is $2,734, with 74% of the apartments costing more than $2,000 per month. Houses cost $972,828 on average.
Though tech aggravates the housing problem, tech may also provide unconventional solutions: Construction tech companies can create additional housing at a much faster pace than traditional development projects. “We have to look at clever ways of innovating and building our way out of the supply deficit, and one of the ways that we can do that is to limit the time and cost of constructing a home,” said Aisling Carlson, a local startup founder. “Technology can play a key role in adding value there.”
Modal Living, which builds prefab “accessory dwelling units,” sees a heavy concentration of business in Southern California, according to CEO Colin Jube. Adding another unit to a backyard offers “a really good solution for places like LA that have a lot of single-family neighborhoods,” Jube said. California offers a reimbursement of up to $40,000 for households that build an additional unit on their property.
“If you take any average single-family neighborhood in LA or anywhere, there’s really no way to get new, affordable housing into that neighborhood,” Jube said. “It’s built out, and typically zoning will not allow for apartment buildings or other types of housing types. So ADUs are a great way … to add housing density.”
Adding another unit to a backyard offers “a really good solution for places like LA that have a lot of single-family neighborhoods.”
And ADUs aren’t the only things that can be prefabricated. Some companies are building entire homes before they hit a plot of land, often at a much quicker rate than traditional construction. In a city where the construction of new units of housing is slow going, prefabricated housing can be a fix, said Steve Glenn, CEO of Plant Prefab. This kind of building “can make the construction process more efficient from a labor standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, and from a time standpoint, to make it less costly to actually build.”
Though construction tech like this sounds exciting in theory, these solutions must go hand-in-hand with something less cool: Los Angeles zoning laws. “There are way more people that need housing than housing exists,” Jube said. “At its core, that’s really a zoning issue. LA in particular … has a disproportionate amount of single-family zoning.”
A study released in March by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute found that 78% of residential land in the greater Los Angeles area is zoned for single-family housing.
This means there’s fewer housing units per square mile. From there, it’s basic economics of supply and demand: If construction isn’t keeping up with the increasing demand for housing, prices go up and inevitably get too expensive for the people who’ve lived in the city their whole lives.
For reference: In the Bay Area, which is also feeling a housing crunch, 85% of all residential land is zoned for single-family-only dwellings.
“There’s a housing crisis everywhere. But it’s particularly bad in those two cities, and both of those cities suffer from some of the same issues,” Jube said. “Developers that would otherwise be happy to build higher-density projects simply aren’t allowed to because of zoning.”
More than three-quarters of residential land in the greater Los Angeles area is zoned for single-family housing, but the city and the state are working to make room for more housing units and to rezone.Photo: Nat Rubio-Licht/Protocol
And often, tech’s decision makers are all in on this kind of zoning, with the posh Bay Area town of Atherton being a prime example. Tech executives from Netflix, Google, Electronic Arts, and others wrote strongly worded notes to the city council after it proposed legalizing the construction of multifamily properties. Billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen wrote to the council that apartment buildings would “MASSIVELY decrease our home values” and “IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom. LA and the state are working on a number of solutions, including the recently approved LA Housing Element, which requires the city to rezone to make room for a minimum of 255,000 units of housing and could rezone for up to 1.4 million, LA city planner Matthew Glesne told Protocol. Two bills also received support from state legislators in late August that boost home-building by allowing developers to construct housing units on commercial land.
But the city has a long way to go. “We have the second fewest homes per adult of major cities in the country,” Glesne said. “Certainly the lowest income among us pay the price for that.”
Protocol data researcher AJ Caughey assisted with reporting on this story.
