27 Years in IP and Finance: How Matt Moyers Wrote The Venture Capital Alternative
“I think that inventors are one of the most important professions in society.”
Matt Moyers, author of The Venture Capital Alternative
Matt Moyers has spent 27 years at the rare intersection of intellectual property and finance. He carried the idea for a book for the better part of a decade, ever since he watched a bankrupt company’s patent portfolio sell for 14 times its opening bid, before he finally wrote The Venture Capital Alternative. He drafted it in 60 days, spent 18 months editing, shopped every publisher he could find, and chose Scribe for a finished book that reads like a major house produced it.
The patent sale that started it
Clip · Matt Moyers on the 14x patent sale · 27s
Matt’s team was called in to allocate the value when Nortel, once the AT&T of Canada, liquidated and sold its patents. The numbers stopped him.
“Google offered to buy those patents for $314 million [...] a consortium ended up buying it with Apple and another group of companies for $4.5 billion. So it was 14 times higher than the original price.”
Matt Moyers
The difficulty of valuing that IP convinced him a book needed to exist about how to see the patent system through the lens of finance, and how to make it fairer.
A decade on the shelf
Like a lot of authors, the gap between the first glimmer and the decision to actually do it was long.
“I sat on that idea for the better part of a decade before I actually started doing something with it.”
Matt Moyers
What finally moved him was a run of clients whose inventions were used without authorization by some of the largest tech companies in the world.
Why he wrote it
Clip · Matt Moyers on why he wrote it · 40s
Matt kept hearing the same story from small inventors, and eventually decided the stories themselves had to be told, with a solution attached.
“I made my invention. I tried to commercialize it. Big tech came in [...] And now I don’t know what to do [...] after seeing it so many times [...] I was like, I got to just write these stories.”
Matt Moyers
Choosing Scribe
He had a draft before he ever contacted a publisher, then went looking for the one that would get it to the standard he wanted.
“I reached out to a whole bunch of different publishers, thought about self-publishing [...] I wanted something that would look like it was done by one of the big publishing firms [...] Scribe offered the best hybrid solution [...] Scribe’s editor came through and I thought he was really good.”
Matt Moyers
Sixty days to draft, 18 months to edit
Matt committed by buying into a gimmicky-sounding promise, and it was exactly the push he needed.
“I actually pumped out the first draft of the book in about 60 days using his method. And then I spent another 18 months editing it.”
Matt Moyers
When he reread the draft he realized it was really three books, which told him something about what comes next: he now believes he has three or four more books in him.
What is already happening
The book is new and Matt is honest that the heavy marketing is still ahead. But the phones are already bringing the exact people he wrote it for.
“I get a lot of calls from the guys who are like, I just got this patent [...] I need funding to build this business [...] I’m hoping that the book will bring more investors to the table.”
Matt Moyers
The book is out in every format, including audio, at thevcalternative.com. Because the principles are timeless, Matt says, he can keep introducing it to inventors and investors for years, simply by putting it in the right hands.
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