Silicon Valley IP viewed through the lens of HBO’s Silicon Valley opening title

It’s widely known that the title sequence for HBO’s Silicon Valley is brilliantly populated with an ever evolving montage of not just the cream of the crop of tech giants and up and comers, but also with a plethora of inside jokes and shout-outs to tech insiders and those in-the-know. See many of these best details from the recent Business Insider article by @kimrrenfro.

What about these companies enables them to garner such notoriety and attention? Can this even be measured at the company level?

We believe ample insight can be gained by investigating the underlying intellectual property within each company. In fact, IP does play a significant role within the series, including one episode in the Season 4 with the obvious title “Intellectual Property”.

Following this line of inquiry, IPqwery shows you how some of these tech titans actually measure up in regards to their intellectual property holdings. We’ve normalized the data and aggregated it to reflect corporate acquisitions, including grouping associated entities together to reflect all IP within each Company’s realm. As an example, facebook IP-data includes the recent acquisitions of both Oculus and Whatsapp, which itself is cleverly reflected within the show’s animated title sequence.

Not-so-subtle animation; watch facebook’s acquisition of Oculus and Whatsapp

On the following images we highlight company IP holdings (patents + trademarks). For simplicity, we’ve combined the totals for pending and granted patents, and likewise for pending and registered trademarks.

We’re also introducing a new metric to reflect how innovative a company may be, aka their IP Activity score.

A new IP-innovation metric

For our IP Activity score, we use a special algorithm to generate a score on a scale of 0 to 5, weighted in favor of each company’s recent IP filings. This metric indicates how innovative a company is relative to others. It takes into account both US patent and US trademark filings over the trailing 5 years.

So while it’s true that a large volume of IP filings, such as from tech giants Google, Oracle or facebook, will naturally lead to a relatively high IP Activity score, smaller companies that have been aggressively filing patents and/or trademarks in recent years past can also generate high scores, even with far fewer IP holdings overall. A Company’s recent rate of filing is the measure we are highlighting, which speaks to its innovation profile.

Being innovative is truly size agnostic, and the IP Activity score helps to equalize the effects of scale, making comparisons somewhat more meaningful.

IP Activity comparisons

On the low-end of IP Activity for these Sil Val companies is Slack (0 patents, 7 tms, IP Activity 1.7/5.0) and Yelp (3 patents, 24 tms, IP Activity 1.9/5.0).

On the flip side, high-enders are Google (27,630 Patents, 586 tms, IP Activity 4.8/5.0) and facebook (4,822 patents, 168 tms, IPActivity 4.2/5.0). Noteworthy is that Dropbox, Oracle and Waymo all score identical IP Activity (3.4/5.0) yet own vastly differently-sized IP portfolios, illustrating our point about size-not-mattering. Pretty cool!

Pied Piper and Hooli, if real, would be nascent players to be sure. Could we conjecture as to their IP Activity score? Perhaps so.

Not surprisingly however, HBO actually holds real Pied Piper and Hooli trademarks (in the US and Canada), which only boosts it’s own LaLaLand-based IP Activity. But sadly, it’s for nothing more hi-tech than T-shirts.

Learn more about IP-data integration and analytics, and see other IP-centric infographics IPqwery has published here.