Nathan Myhrvold *83 has one of the premier résumés of the digital age. He didn’t merely work in software; he founded Microsoft Research and spent 13 years as an all-purpose sage and eccentric genius at the side of Bill Gates.
WSJ's Amol Sharma sat down with Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, at his Bellevue, Wash., headquarters. They discussed going to court to enforce patents, targeting the company's own investors for patent infringement and the return curve on nuclear reactor technology.
Yesterday, we ran the first half of a sit-down interview with Nathan Myhrvold, cofounder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention laboratory and investment firm. Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft (and an Xconomist), placed his current company’s goals in the context of venture capital and private equity, arguing that there is a real need to create what he calls an “invention capital” industry.
This time last week, Nathan Myhrvold was sitting down with Bill Gates. Gates had just returned from the Olympics, where he had watched some high-profile ping-pong matches—a very hot ticket in China. The two former Microsoft colleagues were catching up, and their discussion turned to racquet sports, and the various technical differences between them.
Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in 1996. Horner is an eminent paleontologist, and was a consultant on the movie. Myhrvold was there because he really likes dinosaurs. Between takes, the two men got to talking, and Horner asked Myhrvold if he was interested in funding dinosaur expeditions.
Myhrvold defends himself from those who call him "the most feared man in Silicon Valley."
"Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley," he says. "Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.' "
In this week's podcast, BusinessWeek's executive editor, John Byrne, and senior writer, Michael Orey, discuss how snapping up thousands of patents can make Intellectual Ventures a leader in innovation -- or litigation.
When visitors walk into the headquarters of Intellectual Ventures, they come face to face with the full-size head of a Tyrannosaurus rex—the special-effects model used in the film “Jurassic Park II”. Is that a hint that the company wants to eat IT companies alive?
As he showed me around his best-equipped-in-the-universe kitchen, I half-expected Nathan Myhrvold to introduce himself as "Bond, James Bond." Myhrvold, the 46-year-old former chief technology officer for Microsoft, left the the company in 2000 with well over $100 in his pocket in order to roam the world with his wife and twin teenage boys.