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Michael Frank Martin

Michael Frank Martin

This is a personal blog, and the opinions here are not necessarily shared by anybody else, including my employer.

📍 Saratoga, California

The Prehistory of Startups

It seems like the common thread that binds together these different cultures is a commitment to finding win-wins through the use of science and technology to build new products and services that give people a new way to communicate.

Chaotic Progress

How vigorous competition among public political parties and private for-profit companies has promoted progress by balancing the personal interests of new entrants and incumbent elites

Friends, inventors, countrymen, lend me your ears

I come to bury software patents, not to praise them. The evil that invalid patents do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with software patents. The noble reformers have told you software patents were ambiguous: If it were so, it was

Patents and Violence

Industrialization as a proliferation of organizations Historians of the Industrial Revolution have often focused on technological change. As the centuries have passed, details of how technology was invented and commercialized have eroded away, leaving behind a lapidary, stylized story of the triumph of a heroic inventor. Technological change may even

Introducing Xena

Patent professionals are not infrequently asked to analyze a portfolio of patents and provide an estimate of its quality and valuation. Since there are no standards for patent quality and valuations are idiosyncratic to the details of the needs of particular buyers and sellers, determining patent quality and valuation is

GPT-4 Tuning for Writing Style

Here's an example of what you'd get if you asked GPT-4 "Please draft a three paragraph argument in favor of open borders": Paragraph 1: Open borders have long been a subject of contentious debate; however, there are compelling reasons to consider the merits of

Synchronization and Banking

The Problem of Synchronization argued that: The synchronization of buying and selling is a basic function of markets. Recent events call for an explanation of how synchronization works in banking. In the space of less than three days from March 8 to March 10, Silicon Valley Bank went from a

What’s Wrong with the Patent System?

Would-be inventors are now more likely than ever to spend their time and attention on building new products and services for startups and open source projects rather than filing for patents.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Sometimes you hear people say about a person, they’re “doing God’s work” — an important task ... so complex, that only God himself could hope to ever see it accomplished, a task that anybody else would find too daunting to even dare an attempt. Robert Caro is doing God’s work here.

Decoupling in the Nickel Market

An advantage of understanding markets as mechanisms for synchronizing production with consumption is that market price signals are not sacrosanct. Other theories of market price signals, such as the efficient market hypothesis, suggest that market price signals reflect perfect information about available supply and demand, leaving little room for the