An Advisor Relationship - Getting Help For Your Startup

Every week a group of curated, successful professionals from all subject matters come to the Village, listen to our members, and offer free advice to help them succeed. These people paying it forward to our members and helping them make waves in the Atlanta tech scene are our Village Advisors. Some startup Founders don't always understand why they may need an Advisor or how exactly how they can help. So here is one story of how a Village Advisor has come alongside a Founder for a fruitful relationship.Yuri Eliezer is a Founding Patent Attorney of Founders Legal who began his time at the Village with a dream of helping startups with IP.  As Yuri spent time at the Village, he started to build relationships and found that he was offering a lot of advice to them on planning for success. Random questions turned into bigger conversations, and every time Yuri left a conversation, he felt he had left them with something new that could benefit their companies. Yuri saw a unique opportunity to build community with other members while still offering valuable advice. With this in mind, he applied for and was accepted into our Village Advisors program. Shortly after, Yuri began working with a startup Founder, Carlo Martinez.

He shares more about their Advisor Relationship below.

“I quickly knew Carlo had a wonderful idea with many different use cases. He solved a pain point that most of us have when finding a career or profession. Which one is the right one? There are many 'tests' out there that you can fill in and will predict the profession you are most suited for... but Carlo envisioned a new approach using different data.Carlo's startup, Steppingblocks, takes the resume of thousands of professionals and maps out their paths in life. Using this data, he is able to see the patterns people took to get to their current job and presents this data in a very visually intuitive way. In short, Carlo's model is revolutionary and will help millions of students decide a career suitable for them not based on some 'personality or aptitude tests' but based on actual, real life career data of thousands."

With Yuri's experience in patents and intellectual property, he knew he could help.

"Over the course of our work together, Carlo and I began to identify the underlying core functions of his invention. Typically inventors see their technological innovation as having multiple opportunities and use cases, but that is not always the most prudent for IP protection. So we decided to work through all of the functions and use cases and detect the underlying ‘innovative principal’ that serves as his fundamental function. That is what every IP attorney wants to protect. If that is secure, a vast amount of functions and use cases are encompassed in the scope of IP that will protect the Founder.Together, we identified his core innovation and we were able to file good patent applications to protect it. And by having identified his intellectual property, Carlo was also able to nail down his MVP (minimally viable product)! The moral of the story: Knowing where your core IP resides enables you to not only protect it, but to narrow down your development, marketing, and sales efforts to an MVP to get your startup off the ground!”

Advisors can help.

There are plenty of entrepreneurs who can significantly benefit from the advice of our Village Advisors. Our Village Advisors are amazing resources for our members, offering subject matter expertise gratis, every Friday. In the world of startups, the best way to navigate through the ups and downs is to get experts to help make the course a little less bumpy. Who can help you get your startup off the ground?This post was written by Raleigh Rose, Mentor Coordinator at the Village.