Jared R. Clark

In 2002, after my first year of electrical engineering, someone hired a nineteen-year-old to run patent searches for independent inventors at a nonprofit institute attached to my university's foundation. That job turned into three hundred and fifty searches, a team of fourteen researchers, a course I built with the economics department, and eventually law school. I have never really left that work. I have only done it at larger scale, for larger companies, on harder technology.

I grew up in a small town in South Dakota. I mention it because it explains something about how I practice: I would rather tell you the problem early and plainly than manage you toward it.

The part of the job I have always found most meaningful is the moment the paperwork stops being an obstacle and becomes the thing that lets the work go forward. A claim that holds. A license that opens a dataset. A framework that tells a research team what they can do, not only what they cannot.

A researcher brings you something genuinely new and a date on the calendar after which it becomes public. You have days to understand it — not to summarize it, to understand it — well enough to describe what is novel in language that will survive people looking for reasons it shouldn't. I have spent eighteen years on that side of the table, and I still like it.