cuca_de_chumbo

I worked starting 2000 January at a startup in the San Jose area and stayed with the company for 1.5 years approx (i.e., through the dot-com bust/mini-recovery/bust). While I was there we came up with some interesting ideas (I came up with and refined a large portion of these ideas) and filed for 10 patents in 2001. I did a large portion of the patent disclosure work.

Long-story short (I will post further about the situation in further comment below) ...

    * patents filed were never fully pursued by acquiring
      company, and all lapsed in 2007 or before
    * patent appications have huge value and adequately
      describe a beautiful monetizable system -- and due
      to lapsed patents, while one could not prevent others
      from implementing the same, others cannot successfully
      sue a new startup for developing these ideas since
      there is fully documented prior art

More details in a further comment ...

- startup is SF-based company

- pre-series-A

- significant traction already with customers you'd recognize

- likely to raise good series-A round

- about 8 engineers, 18 to 20 employees in all

- me -- 20+ years significant SW dev experience

- me -- would work remotely most of time

- offer: $130K range, 0.2% equity (seems low-ball to me, or inexperience on part of founders ... or lack of respect for the position or me)