Take a Tip From a Billionaire: Read the Book ‘Patent It Yourself’

June 12, 2013

We’ve posted on GoPro before. Maybe we can take a reading recommendation from the mini-cam company’s billionaire CEO Nick Woodman. A tweet asked: ‘Whatâ€™s the one book a BIT (Billionaire-In-Training) should read?’ Here is Woodman’s answer.

‘Patenting an idea can be really expensive and intimidating. When I was starting out, I read this terrific book called Patent It Yourself, by a lawyer named David Pressman. It was really straightforward. Using that book, I wrote GoProâ€™s first patent myself. It was this 60-page tome that I went maniacal on. When I took it to the attorneys to get their opinion and to see how much it would cost for them to finalize it, they told me Iâ€™d just saved myself a lot of moneyâ€”Iâ€™d basically done the whole thing myself. More important, the book gave me a good understanding of whatâ€™s patentable and whatâ€™s not. For any entrepreneur whoâ€™s inventing something, itâ€™s the one book you should read.’

YOUR TURN: Tweet your question to Businessweek with the hashtag #AskABillionaire.

WATCH: EVERYONE IS A SPORTS CAMERAMAN WITH GOPRO MINI-CAMS

– @ojones1