When I was a cofounder of a mobile streaming platform called Second Screen - later we called it “10 Block” to represent the blocks of 10 minute video it could stream to social viewers on our platform - our final chapter was an M&A journey. To document our novel idea, we applied to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2019.

As the chief operating officer of our early stage startup, I led the initiative to create our patent application with a patenting law firm. The project had unusual demands, as entrepreneurs so often face, and faced budget restrictions as well.

“I found a Vietnamese-speaking entrepreneur who could interview the tech team in Vietnam and produce a technical sketch of our system.”

— With her example I sketched the rest of the drawings to complete our application.

My work on this initiative included producing technical sketches of the system. This particular challenge involved locating a technically-minded entrepreneur familiar with patenting who could speak Vietnamese to interface with the development team in Vietnam who built the platform long before I joined the company. The sketches never existed, and the team had never produced a sketch.

Thanks to Gigi Wang at UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center, I was able to connect with a local founder of a technical company who just graduated Berkeley with a PhD. She’s a brilliant woman who is currently CEO of her own startup addressing cognitive impairments with light and sound. Mai Nguyen had the skills and experience to be able to capture an accurate first sketch after just a half an hour call with the development team.

I’m not a technical person but I’m creative who can learn from a model and replicate it so once I had the first technical drawing I was able to produce all the rest of the drawings needed to make our patent application.