Ep. 4 How Big Viking Games Fought Off a Patent Troll

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Down, But Not Out, the show where founders tell their real-life stories of entrepreneurial resiliency. I started this show after my one company Visitor Queue was dealt a death blow by Google that led to us almost losing all of our clients and all of our revenue, and that would have happened if it wasn't for the hard work, determination, and resiliency of our team. I love a good underdog so these stories resonate more with me than the story of the one billion dollar exit or the story about how your company IPO'd. These are stories of grit meant to inspire you, the listener, to keep fighting. As entrepreneurs and business owners, we will have our backs against the wall multiple times so let hearing these stories be your fight song, your hooraw, that thing that gets you out of bed on those tough days. This episode is brought to you by my company, Visitor Queue. Identify the anonymous companies visiting your website so your sales team can follow up with them. Start your 14-day free trial at visitorqueue.com. Now let's dive into this episode. Today I'm joined by Greg Thompson, Greg is a lifelong entrepreneur having founded and exited several companies throughout his tenure spanning multiple industries from Facebook games and apps to now workplace well-being and AOTA compliance with his current company, OSG. Greg's career as a founder has no shortage of interesting tales, knowing Greg personally I can say he truly embodies what it means and takes to be an entrepreneur and he really is one of the most creative individuals I think I've ever met. Greg thanks for being on the show, are you ready to share your Down, But Not Out story? Let's do it. Awesome all right so I don't know if my intro sufficed so can you give yourself a brief intro to the audience? Sure, I would say pretty much going back to when I was 12 started off misspent youth of no parties, no girls, just sort of developing a code of my bedroom, and that naturally transitioned into starting my own company when I was first-year university which was a spam filter, which then eventually transitioned into games. Almost every dev who starts out always really loves the idea of doing games and that kind of thing and did well enough in games to spend a couple years traveling and eventually after being in the game industry for I'd say going on over 10 years decided I wanted something different which then brought me to health and safety which while it was a major departure from what my past it was a new challenge and then also an industry that was kind of stuck in the 90s that I figured could have some good opportunities to sort of bring technology into it and try to breathe a little bit of new blood into the industry as a whole, which is where I met you, taught you everything you know. This is slightly true I'll give him that. That's yeah that's a good thing to mention is Greg might razz me a bit throughout but I'll try to dish some punches back and it's because we do know each other and he was my boss at one point but I had to quit because he was just too much he was just too much. Whatever you want what's that you can use the term quit if you want. He walks me out the door let's say. So I know that when I reached out and I asked if you'd be on the show you were more than willing and I brought up kind of the premise of the show and I knew you had a few stories that you could probably tell but the one that you'd mentioned wasn't the current company or with, OSG, but a previous company and around I believe a patent troll, could you walk us through the company that you were working on there before it got to your Down, But Not Out story? Sure and I guess to give a little bit of context as to why I mean we talked about this and I was thinking about and kind of a situation that I'd think would be valuable to talk about and I'd say most people sort of can kind of understand,"Oh wow our revenue dropped because major customer left," or "This kind of change happened," you can kind of wrap your head around it you can kind of guess maybe how things go very few people have had to experience any type of real litigation until they've gotten to a certain size and then unfortunately litigation sort of becomes part of your life and some people are able to avoid it but I think that sort of recounting this particular thing sort of gives people a little bit of an understanding as maybe how the whole process works at least to the point that we got to but then on top of that maybe some ways to help mitigate some of those costs and long-term what ultimately kind of came of it. So I forget your exact initial question now. What was the company I know you've had a few and I know of a few but what was the company, what did it do, and then tell a bit of its story leading up into this patent troll and your Down, But Not Out story? Right so the company is Big Viking Games which is still operating today, I had partnered with another individual and we had kind of one main game that was generating the majority of our revenue, I think at the time we would give or take around I want to say around two and a half to three million dollars a year in revenue, we're working on other things, we're working on growing that revenue however we were fortunate enough to get served by a sheriff. Which I didn't even know we had sheriffs. I didn't know they did that in Canada. Yes so we had a sheriff show up to our office and apparently the only thing sheriffs really do here, that I'm at least aware of, is serve people notices, maybe there's something else they do, for the sheriff even served as a notice that we are being sued by a patent troll out of the U.S. now the reason I say they're a patent troll, and I don't want to give any names because I'm going to guess that there's some NDA or some agreement that eventually is getting signed that sort of included some things but the reason I'm using the term patent troll is they were a company, a shell company, that was just specifically set up it owned one patent and it was set up basically just to litigate that one patent they didn't take anything the patent was acquired from another company etc etc so receive this with now what's kind of unusual is normally when a patent troll sues you they are there's only a demand that comes along with it and in fact maybe even before the the lawsuit side of things it starts with a demand level. Like a settle? Like they want to settle before like give us X number of dollars and we'll go away but and unfortunately, well maybe fortunately, unfortunately that was not the case in this instance, it literally just started off with a lawsuit there was no discussions prior now what was sort of interesting and I think the reason that it did happen this way is because we were named with I believe 11 or 12 other co-defendants now we had companies including EA, Zynga, the largest basically some of the largest game companies in the world at the time were named alongside us and there was another company that I knew the founder of where his revenue was only like$600, 000 a year so like they kind of, I don't know why we fell into the net, I'm not really sure how we got caught up into this but they really were approaching us the same way that you would approach an EA you don't mail EA a letter that's like hey give us some money and we'll go away you really have to go right to the lawsuit stage so we kind of unfortunately were in this situation where overnight we're being sued for patent infringement and these people are not in the mindset of negotiating there's like that's not even on the table no discussion so what you end up having to do is, well not having to do, we sure need to retain counsel and I did pose the question what happens if you just don't respond and they'll ignore it and it goes away hopefully the attorney I talked to was like I don't know what happens because that's just not what you do right, yes sort of expected to defend yourself and we were also in the unfortunate or interestingly weird position of being a Canadian company getting screwed by an American company. Were you the only Canadian company of the twelve? One of the few obviously. One more yeah one maybe two coincidentally there may have been two more we weren't targeted they would just happen to be where we would have been yeah and where was he going with that sorry yes got the demand letter we're like well I guess we talked to a lawyer and so pretty quickly you're starting to interview a couple lawyers because now we're in this situation where we can't use any of our own council because Canadian council can't defend against a U.S. patent case even if we did have we did have some U.S. like business council that we used here and there but they were a small firm so they didn't even have in-house people that even dealt with patent cases. You weren't expecting a patent lawsuit so you didn't retain U.S. counsel for that. Yeah so I interviewed two or three different firms and ended up partnering with I believe ten nine other of the companies that were involved so in total there were ten of us I believe that there may have been two or three that decided to go on their own or two of them partnered up and one decided to go on their own I don't recall and I think that as I was mentioning there was the one company that only had $600, 000 in revenue I believe they managed to get it dismissed real quick when they went to the the troll and they're just like looking we've got nothing here we're almost out of business, I think it was down to two people one person like it was not a good thing and so they kind of got dropped but and so what we quickly encountered unfortunately was the realization that this was not going to be cheap or even come close to cheap so we were sort of hearing that just to get to trial like if we do this alone to get to trial is going to cost us about 2 million U.S. this is not really countering like every expense we're going to have but who knows what happens at trial and then at trial things get really expensive right now you're like paying really top dollar lawyers and I'll get to kind of how that can all go down as well like where in one day you're spending tens of thousands of dollars and so we're working with the other parties to sort of go okay what sort of the route we're gonna take and at the time this matters for the for the later part of it is we were the case was out of San Jose was it San Jose yeah I believe that's where it was, San Diego And so but most of the companies were to San Fran, that's an important thing right so we ended up having to go down by we I think it was just myself that had to go this time around had to go to the court in California just for a mediation so this was probably after about three months there was just a mediation which anybody who's never been involved in any type of case what courts try to do is prevent it from going through the court system because it's a lot so they force the parties to get into the same room and try to hash it out see if there's some medium, see if there's like basically a middle ground that can be worked out and in a certain number of cases there are and then they can just totally avoid the course the court system. So I believe it was I flew down and back within like 18 hours, right flew down met my lawyer there who was also representing others but then you also get your own little special lawyer, It's the same firm though right? Yeah, I think my guy was maybe representing like three or four of the group some had their own council that they brought because you have to remember this one these are really large companies, And you're flying in by yourself with your bags still in your hand. I'm trying to think there's a whole other situation another time so long story short was there for two hours and they gave a number that they wanted $950 000 U.S. to settle And then the other companies would have got their number as well? Well, no don't even know if they got a number so actually, I guess let me take a step back they initially said they wanted three and a half million That's a steep drop. I left basically the number three and a half million was the number they did then they came back to us later after we're like I think your math might be off on something and came back to a smaller number now this would probably be a good time to explain roughly what the patent was or is I don't even know if it's not valid I don't look it up it is basically a patent around the ability to buy, pay for we'll say hmm special privileges let's there are some examples in the patent I don't remember, Within a game you mean, within the game? No no no no Nicholas no it's not Okay this is not even specific at all there's any special privilege? I don't even know if there was anything about a game in it was like I think there's one example where there's a speed limit that if you paid more you're allowed to drive faster down the road I think there may be another situation where if you pay more you might get your pizza delivered faster like the concept of paying for better service like it's kind of this weird thing you're paying for better service but you're paying for a privilege you're paying for an upgrade you're paying, If I sit at the front seat at a hockey game front row is that considered like that's special privilege right like I'm 18 versus a 50 ticket? I don't know I think the patent was borderline well should have never been issued but it was and now you got that to deal with and they basically were claiming that they invented the concept. Okay and so and to take a little sidestep I actually tracked down the guy who is actually credited with the concept of upgrades in a game and we ended up having to pay this not having I think we end up hiring this guy as a witness or an expert or something like that I think I'm like $150-200 000 he made more probably made more off of this being an expert in the case than he actually probably ever made off his game but I don't know the defense a little while ago this is going back. A lot of money in patents apparently by the sounds of it. Litigation is where there's a lot of failures, so kind of fast forwarding the initial crime that we're like look at you're claiming because they were wanting a blanket percentage of all of our sales yeah I believe they wanted five percent of our sales for the last five years and, Moving forward or? And then they wanted it forward until the patent ended because there was only like five years left in the patent so I think that they projected our sales at like 80 some million or something like that over that 10-year span and we're like that's not what our sales are and then again this is off the top of my head but I think we were like look at our sales are closer if you look at that to probably about 35 million, Over the next five years? Yeah so then they think they took five percent of that or maybe a little bit less I don't recall maybe the settlement number wasn't $950 maybe it was a million and a half I know there was a settlement for $950 that may have been their third offer, So do they want that up front or do they want like a royalty back? Boom they go away yeah no they want but now I'm sure they would have been nice with us Nick and they would have taken a payment plan payout, Take a payout, please! But this you have to remember we were small fish in this it cost them almost no more money to keep us in it because that's the sort of thing about this right is they had our case whether we were in it or not didn't really make their expenses go up anymore not much a little bit but not that much in the same way that we were pooling our defense they're effectively pooling their expense, Against all of you, they were waiting for it to get the 12 of you or something like that, Because they want the bigger yeah real money was in the Zynga's the EAs this kind of stuff and then here's the other problem they didn't want to negotiate with us because they then set a precedent yeah or for the standards of what they end up looking for so they couldn't just be like you know what give us a hundred grand and you're out and get rid of you because, They would have yeah, Right because then they're setting the press at least that's what the attorneys were saying they set their precedent for arguably so we were kind of dragged along even if they were willing to go lower simply because we were caught in the net they realized pretty quick that we were not the intended target and they thought we were bigger and you have to remember they're not even experts in the first place right they just probably did some Google Search and found some stuff because at that point I already sold the game to Zynga so they might confused us thinking we were somehow associated maybe sister company a sub I have no idea and so proceed forward we, I guess you didn't take that settlement. We did not. Come back to Canada and so now I think we get our first bill from the lawyers and I think our first bill was around three hundred thousand dollars now split ten ways That was okay that wasn't just your cut okay. Yeah what ten ways so but you have to think this is like a big chunk 30 grand fine, but it's starting to hurt our pocketbook and I'm really concerned because I go we're not going to settle for a million and a half we literally don't have it and emergence aren't that like it's basically an impossible thing to do and they have no interest in even negotiating with us at this point right like so now the real work starts because up until this point there's almost not a whole lot now you start to do discovery and are you familiar with what discovery is? Where they hand over all their evidence against you and it's like a package of? Yeah don't hand over stuff that you think they're going to want what you are allowed to do is ask for stuff. Yes like the evidence against you is that the idea there? They can ask for almost anything right they can be anything that they believe is pertinent and then it's and again I'm no lawyer here obviously this is not legal advice my understanding is it's kind of your responsibility to be your burden to show that it wasn't applicable right like it's kind of the assumption that if you're requesting it you're given the benefit of the doubt that it is good now obviously you're not requesting their children's birth certificates right that's done in bad faith and I believe they can go to the judge and be like look this is ridiculous at the same time if someone let's say they requested emails that contained these specific names you also can't print off one word per page and ship them three containers just to mess with them yeah correct you can't you can't kind of mess with people or [ __ ] people over now what's really important though is you do not need to create data for people so let's say that I came to you and I said I want any documents that contain your sales by month you could go look at we don't have that we have our sales but we do not have it broken down by a month now you're probably not going to just ask for this you're going to say we want your sales we want any summaries we want any discussions we want any discussions around patents that you may have violated do believe violated things where you discounts why you did things emails around promotions anything that even remotely is related and I think it probably took internally oh boy hundreds of hours to compile this stuff. To get the entire discovery together that they're asking for? Correct, all the stuff that they're asking for because you have to think one item can be massive stuff you go we want all communication through all channels related to discounts. you gotta come up with that somehow. Yeah so now you're exporting emails if you're we were using I think Pepchat at the time so like hit stop and like they just start to really add up and yes maybe we have the records in a database yeah so this so therefore we had to do it because they theoretically exist but you got to do these queries it just thought it was a ton of work. So not only are you paying the lawyers and money out of your pocket it's also taking up your time and your and your employees time, My full time to fight this thing it probably took up two employees full time for a number of weeks and just the stress of it and really, Do you think that part of it held the company back at all like not even just the money side of it the fact that you weren't focusing on growing the company? As a company we were almost in a state of limbo for about nine months, Because of this, ridiculous. Really invest in the future yeah because you don't know how much your next bill is going to be. Or like at this point you didn't know if you're going to win this thing right well well it could have sunk the whole company. Here's the one thing that you quickly realize when you're dealing in legal things is you can win the battle and lose the war because you go yeah we won and you're like yeah but you've got no money, yeah you just burnt it all winning this thing way back to the American Canadian thing obviously a legal system that's different here we can if you're coming out ahead or in victory kind of thing you can go after the person for legal fees yeah in the U.S. you can't unless it was a super egregious situation again not a lawyer so we were in a situation that I'm like even if we won how much did it cost us to win yeah like would have been huge And you're a young company at this point right like you're three, four, five years old. In the partnership like with that we kind of rolled it into this new partnership I think only had been like less than a year like, So you don't have a ridiculous you might have three million dollars in annual revenue but you're all of it's invested into regrow growth of the company your employee like you don't have that in the bank you don't have anything in the bank right like your cash flow is pretty low. Oh yeah as a corporation no yeah no like and so it's the thing like everything was being 100 pulled back into the company like so it's not like we had an extra 30 000 everything go away Or this a million dollars that they want a million and a half you would have to scale back or, Yeah impossible to even come up because yeah there was no cash sitting in there yeah and so in order for us to pay it we would have had to effectively lay off I guess half our staff and then somehow keep our revenue going for another just paid like you know it just it wouldn't have worked yeah and so we got our first bill we pay it fine we're doing discovery you'll know this is another reason why it's a patent troll and why it works well for them is because it's very easy to ask for something it's very expensive to produce it they have nothing to produce what can I ask a company. There's just a shell of a company right yeah like at this point did you know if they went after anyone else or is this their first lawsuit? I don't I think this was their first I don't think they attempted the waters with anybody else, So you're the guinea pig here. Yeah they went out swinging right off the hop and so we asked for a couple things like what what do you guys know about us right like where's our name where do you come up with our sales estimates all that kind of stuff and then you know I think like 20 30 pages of stuff right like we've sent thousands and thousands of pages yeah now there's a reason why I say this lawyers being what they are like to make sure you're not sending anything now if you remember they've requested this from us from all of the companies now Zynga is going to have an EA is going to be massive but remember we're sharing legal fees, split evenly let's see yes now there were only a couple things that we paid for on our own if it was very much specific to just our case but in this particular instance their theory was since everyone is being asked realistically the exact same thing and they know whether they're being asked the same thing it kind of all falls into a similar type so everyone splits the bill they have they like to review all of this before they hand it off to the other side to make sure that you're not sending over something you shouldn't and fair but on top of that it's a really great way to get billable hours in now I guess this would be a great place to say that intellectual property lawyers are not cheap, that specialize in patent litigation and especially in California so around here a business lawyer in London Ontario I don't know partners like 350 400 bucks an hour Canadian yep which is looking at around 300 U.S. might be able to get an associate for 250 right probably looking at a partner closer to like 400 yeah right give or take somewhere on there I assume a lot of your audience would be Americans here so I figured American dollars now this would have been oh boy this would have been over 10 years ago so I'm sure rates have gone up our just behind the scenes lawyer attorneys were I believe$650 us an hour because they're from the bay area right they're ju right and they specialize yeah their juniors were like $500 now and their trial lawyers were $850 an hour Geez this was 10 years ago so like you said that's cheap. I let's hope their juniors were reviewing these I don't really know but it wasn't I think it couldn't have been more than like a month later a month and change later we'd get a $75 000 bill because they're now prepping all this stuff because, Is that your split of it or is that everybodys? That was just our portion I think yeah portion sorry my portion so I think you got a bill for like $750 000 combined yeah and you're like holy [ __ ] this is not cheap now this is where things get interesting, And you haven't even gone to trial your lawyer I'm not saying your lawyers didn't do anything but there's no end in sight at this point, We have we've barely started like me yes you've kind of done some discovery but that's that's common discoveries like still child support and so what interesting thing transpires and this was pivotal for us and we didn't know it at the time and it turns out because when we all 10 of us decided to do this we naturally had a legal framework that we all followed as well we had a document this is how everything gets split up this is how everything works so we followed everything to the agreement but I'll explain how we ended up getting away like bandits so all nine people that we partnered with I think were from San Francisco maybe one of them dropped out maybe it was that six hundred thousand dollar company I forget exactly but I believe everyone we partnered with was out of San Fran and maybe one company wasn't but they decided to move everyone wanted they all wanted the case to be moved to San Francisco court because that's where their in-house attorneys were that's where the actual attorneys that were working on the case were out of all that kind of stuff so the thought was hey let's move it there makes more sense they weren't sure if it was going to get approved or not yeah request was put through this decision delay was going to delay everything by about three months if I recall correctly right because the decision had to be made all that kind of stuff so they put the request in we were like what the hell do we care we're in canada whether I'm flying to San Fran or wherever. It doesn't make a difference for you. Yeah we just want this to get over with because the longer it takes the more it's going to cost so we just left it we had there was no advantage to us thank god we did that so remember I said there was going to be three months for them to figure it out, they eventually got approved but, Was it the opposing council that was approving or was that a judge? Judge at that point transfer now still all the same case but just I think happened in a different area I don't understand the details but I don't know how that works doesn't matter because it turned out it didn't matter oh god approved now we now remember there are three months during the three months it was in like a limbo for them ours was not ours continued so now we're the ones racking up expenses well they're not but everyone's still splitting it ten percent each okay now so now we had one expense that was our own because everyone and like I mentioned if it was specifically just for you you paid for it if it was some of the group like the expert opinion guy right like we because that's important if you're trying to invalidate the patent which is also very expensive but you kind of want to know what your position is when you're negotiating and all those types of things and I just noticed that my laptop was starting over but there we go we're back in business we ended up having to do as part of discovery there's also what they call dispositions where you can basically ask the other party any questions you want yeah and again my understanding is it's pretty much it's assumed that if you're asking it there's a good reason you're asking if you don't really you can't really refuse to answer it And you can't really lie either too right because it's just lies You can't lie it's being recorded yeah um there's your lawyer their lawyer I believe I don't know if there was a stenographer or not yeah and but not it's kind of a whatever and so I went I had to go to i got we met them sorry these guys were out of LA I apologize they were out of or no that's what we ended up meeting in LA I don't know maybe the opposing counsel was in LA I don't remember but that's okay however I wasn't the only one that had to go another key employee had to go and be questioned as well because they wanted the product owner as well so another gentleman had to join so we both flew down to LA the day before we met with two of our attorneys luckily both trial attorneys so that's now $850 bucks a pop we met with them so they could coach us through basically how to like how to answer the questions what you're ultimately trying to do I think we did that for six hours Between the two of you? Yeah yeah so they gave us a two for one deal but there was only two of them so No but I meant you were being questioned for six hours but They were coaching us for six hours oh for six hours if you remember but there were also two of them so really get canceled out. Yeah so what $1700 an hour yeah six hours really at six basically 10 grand just for our coaching never mind the cost of getting their hotels and the inconvenience yeah the next day we had another I think it came out to eight hours each right so they came to another 16 hours plus we had to since they didn't live in LA we had to cover all of their travel and yeah all their travel their meals which they had no problem paying for our lunch. Well it was on you. Yeah and we also had to pay them I think a certain amount per for non-working hours but it was like for prep or something like that, long story short by the time we were done that two days I think our bill was $45 000 US is that just the prep and then just the recording right but still 45 grand which was our cost alone yeah so now this is like again what are we up to now I forget and I maybe even been missing some bills in between. I got you at $150 give or take. So because when it all said and done yeah our legal alone was I believe $350. Yeah so about 10% of a year revenue right give or take oh that's a substantial amount. Yeah and so but that was just the legal part because there is a little bit of a story at the end there and so arguably we were we were ahead we were now still had like we were past this but now you have to think our side reviews their paperwork reviews this stuff they had the questions because they then had to ask the other side questions. What are they asking them though is there much on that side of? Any substance on there? So again now luckily that was split and there was a and then I think they were they're trying to they're starting to build a case right like because they need to obviously they can't just suddenly be like oh [ __ ] here we are with no real defense no case they had experts they had internal staff it seemed like every month it was like another here's 50 grain here's 50 grand so like that excuse me that one month where we had to pay 45. that was 45 plus our contribution of the 50 right like it was just money flying out the door constantly and until it got to about 350. Now here's the thing is that was our cost fun in total the whole party had probably if you exclude that 50 grand that was probably just ours alone yeah that's three million dollars up to this point for all of us. Before trial correct? Oh yeah we're not even the trial killed there's normally a second settlement conference before trial there's sometimes even like the judge can do whatever the hell they want to be Yeah this is going to go on for years. Right like you're not yeah oh for sure and and they're like if it gets to trial oh [ __] sky's the limit right depends yeah think if you win or lose it's never over because the other person then appeals it, yeah and you can appeal it higher and like it could oh man just the the floodgates start opening so we're now in a situation where we've paid$300 and something to get to that point alone probably would have cost us around 2 million maybe just shy of two because you have to remember you're paying for some of the other work that other people yeah that we all split equally um but that would have been like if we just got to there alone that would have cost us maybe about two million give or take so we really benefited from this well we then get to the point where and remember did you have remote these other people are three months behind but they're starting to get on some expenses so we found a situation where we realized we're like holy[ __ ] if we can settle our way out of this we're not going to have to pay any of their expenses because you're out like you're not part of the ten at that point your case is done yeah right so they've been covering 90 of our costs, I'm starting to see where this is going. We don't even have to pay 10 percent of theirs yeah so we were talking to them at some point and they recognized that we just like weren't worth pursuing right we managed to build a pretty convincing case, By them you mean the opposing council? Yeah so we made it very clear to them because they're like even if we go completely off of their logic being valued that they're 100% they didn't deserve more than $50 000 because we've carved it and carved it and carved it and carved it and they're like fine give us 50 grand and walk away now it was a hard pill to swallow to pay that 50 grand because you're like it's kind of extortion money but we knew that if we even stuck around for an extra month our bill was going to be more than a hundred grand in legal or 50 grand in legal fees. Yes so you took it and you ran you took the deal We got out we were out and I'll be honest with you we did not go into the agreement with the group realizing that that was going to happen this was not a devious plan it happened to work out that way and obviously the other people in the group were not so pleased once we got out. Hey you got lucky. But we don't really like you yeah because I did not change courts had not all that sort of stuff happened we would have been rate slide along and our bill could have easily been way higher but and again I wanted to make it clear it was not our intention to get because we couldn't be, We'll keep that in for sure yeah. We could have predicted that that was going to happen the way it did however I didn't feel guilty at the end to be like oh man we got off way better than other people had been right off the hop to be like look at this is how we're going to get in screw them and get out. That would have been hard to predict anyway them switching courts and being three months behind yeah. Right what I will say however is if anyone is ever in a situation where they are able to share which I highly highly recommend if you can ever like mount a defense together with someone, do it. Yeah well you said you would have been at 2 million in legal fees when you were at $200,000, right 200 grand. Because you remember like that there are some because you're paying some of like the larger companies since they're way larger their expenses were going to be higher so you end up paying a little bit point being is if you're ever in the situation though where you're sharing make sure you're never in a situation where someone else settles out that you're ended up getting screwed on the rest of the bill or like making sure that like you're not behind or if there's you could even say well you got it at this point maybe if you take it to that point you share I don't really know I'm sure there's other lawyers in other cases that have dealt with this I was really surprised with our agreement that there was no you know you was expected to have to continue to pay right he expected us to pay have to pay some type of language that would have kept us in to pay a certain fair share of whatever there was nothing and so we've kind of stepped back going it would be stupid to stay in from a financial perspective so we ended up getting out for at the time half a million canadian with exchange rate for $400 000 U.S. it was the damage to this whole thing never mind about nine months maybe it was a year it was one nine months to a year something like that and the reason I say nine months to a year because I don't think anything really happened for the first three months like you're sort of sitting there and you're just waiting on a little miscellaneous stuff like nothing really happened right off the bat overall we got out pretty unscathed now not the $400 000 wasn't detrimental really, Yeah yeah it wasn't pocket change for you guys. Fortunately you can write it off on your taxes not that that helps a whole lot when you're not generating a lot of profit yeah but you're able to get a little bit and overall it's it was a hard lesson in the realities of I will at least say the American legal system where I'm not saying the Canadian legal system is perfect in any respect however, as you know as a Canadian boy, we are not a litigious society in general for the most part and the fact that you can be responsible for covering someone's legal expenses if you do a foreign, Yeah like garbage cases yeah, And that you're not given like over-the-top legal fees and in fact normally you'll get back two-thirds of what your legal fees are or two-thirds of reasonable legal fees which I'm still fine with right and I'm not saying that there are zero cases in the U.S. I believe and again not a lawyer I believe there's slap suits and stuff like that they're coming around being like these are totally egregious charge like accusations you're going to have to pay. I think with Stormy Daniels and Trump I think there was some example of that where she had to pay but that is so rare and that's a very small, small subset of the legal things so I would say that it's not something especially on the Canadian side of things that I ever expected to have to deal with around a patent troll because you hear about it and this kind of stuff and suddenly it gets very, It doesn't happen here in Canada right you rarely hear these stories. Yeah there's nothing you can do about it you either go out of business or I don't really know like and that was a real possibility for you guys right to go to like if if your legal fees continued let's say you had in that agreement where you still had to pay 10 even after you'd settle like you would have been in millions of millions of dollars if they went to trial do you know what ended up happening with that case as well these other people fought it off for right you know this trial went on for another six I don't know if it actually even went to trial I don't know all settled up before I'll be honest I didn't pay attention to it after we got out but it would not be crazy to imagine that as a group the legal bills were significantly higher they're ramping up very quickly yeah like we were expecting if it went to trial even as a group it costing us I believe almost a million dollars each even just get to trial so you have to think yes you're splitting it amongst the group but you're still like it's still expensive right it's okay well a million is better than two million if it gets up and we're just really lucky the fact that since they were so delayed the rest of them they were paying our expenses 90 where we were having to pay 10 of nothing because it was just sitting there so we really got away really really way better off than we should have in hindsight and yeah so that's kind of Yeah you dodged a bullet there it took you nine months took you 12 months that probably was a distraction I know the company ended up doing very well after are you able to share a bit about that so after those nine to 12 months? It was about a year and a half into Big Viking I know you exited Big Viking. Yeah I wouldn't say that like there was any lessons specifically because of that or something we did because of that I would say we're just running the business and doing certain activities from that and just because again over time you release new stuff you improve it et cetera et cetera I would say that sort of the brush with death was more the realistic I mean had we just been the only people named it almost would have been a death sentence and I always wish that there was like some advice you'd be like oh if this ever happens this is how you prevent how you get out yeah my thing would be you hope to god that you're defending yourself with somebody else and there also is this bravado around it's not fair it's not fair and you go you know what you're right it's not fair, Life's not fair. Yeah and I hate it but you have to kind of get past it and accept the fact that you just need to bite the bullet and do what makes the most business sense right there's a reason why you if a mugger comes to you with a gun you'll give them a hundred bucks it's not because it's fair it's because it's this, You do what you have to do. Do it at the time yeah if someone comes to you and says look it I don't like you I've got tons of money and my goal is just to make your life miserable I'm going to take this right to trial and I'll lose and I don't care because you're not going to get money and it's going to cost you let's say a million dollars to go through a trial that you don't have there's nothing you can actually do about it and if I go or you can give me 20 grand now you're going to give me 20 grand yeah you gotta apologize and bark like a dog on video this is ridiculous now I'm sure there this borders on extortion depending on how you approach it but you get my point like there's very little you can do about it and obviously while we're on the patent thing I think there's been some patent changes over the last number of years I think in the Obama administration there were some signs. I know there's a lot of there's a lot of anti-patent individuals out there that just say that whole office is ridiculous the way it's managed and the things you can get patented. I get I don't blame the patent office per se because their job is impossibly hard like there are arbiters of whether something's new or not that's so hard they're Googling their own internal documents but I mean they're experts but like you can't know everything and is it powerful is it this and I'm sure there's so much that they push back and then the problem with the system though is when it gets approved now the it's very difficult to get it reversed it's so much easier to get a patent approved than it is to overturn a patent because now the onus is on you to say it's not valid which is way harder and that's the other thing about patent trolls is they if they ever think that this is things are going to go sideways for them they'll set up or just drop the case because if their patent gets overturned in court they can no longer use it yes there's only been a couple companies I think that have really stood up I think Newegg is one of them where if they get a patent case they push it to the very end they do not settle they'll counter sue they will just try to reverse the patent they'll go all out hard and I think we've managed to reverse a number of patents but what's interesting about the strategy is it's almost like the the kid who fights back to the bully bullies stop picking on them because they don't eat up and or they have that confrontation they want a kid who swings back well Newegg probably doesn't get nearly any patent trolls going after them now because they know they're not, Yeah they don't take [ __ ] Exactly so yeah that's a short term and that's actually another thing that some of the patents lawyers were saying to us or the intellectual property lawyers are saying to us they're like word spreads fast in this patent troll community because they're so incestuous and one company may own 30, 40, 500 other of these shell companies that all have these once a company starts rolling over really quick they know to put the hounds on, They attack yeah they know what they're getting out of it right it's a system for them like we get 50 000 each one of them we throw at this and it's a dollar and a dollar out. So that was also the other thing of like you got to fight otherwise you just become a victim and you make it easy and then you become like so it wasn't an easy decision but overall I would say that sounds like the right one all for us and overall I would say that ideally no one has to go through the litigation side of things or illegal I've actually never made it to trial before in any legal case that I've ever done whether I've been on the defense or the yeah the offensive side of things. I know I got you sued at one point but that's, That's right! That's another story we'll go into that another time. I do want to kind of summarize on this because I think it'll be good to hear the trajectory so you had Big Viking Games, you grew it to close to three million or so, you got this lawsuit that set you back it could have put you out of business right it could have could have been a bankruptcy depending on how the cards were played and got laid out but it ended up only putting you back well I say only close half million give or take U.S. and then you ended up I just know this because I know you and I know the the London community end up growing Big Viking Games to I don't even know what i can say but three to four times that north of ten yeah north at ten and then i know you exited Big Viking so you did really well on that from so there's a big return from you fighting and winning that as well for sure yes and i mean in hindsight we could if I could have come up with the million dollars to just make it go away if that settlement i think at one point they were willing to walk away for 9.50 not saying it would have been the right thing to do in high like looking at it but maybe it would have been at the same time if I could just end up focusing on the business and not being distracted and all that kind of stuff yeah but then you also feel like a victim right and you just end up being kind of pissed at the whole thing so it all ended up working out well but yeah I would say, And you feel like you won it sounds like you won to me. Yeah a weird way and I didn't feel like I won with the patent school I felt like I went with the agreement with the other people and how we split he's up yeah in a weird way we won but we didn't beat our enemy we ended up sort of winning against our fellow friends in a way. Yeah it's like you won the war and also lost the war because you yeah you lost to them but you ended up winning overall. You won like you lived to fight another day but you lost a couple limbs doing it yeah there you go one if you're you didn't die how about we go that way if we find winning is not dying yes we won. That's a good way to put it how was the how were those nine to 12 months was that like stressful it was it sucked you said yeah I was like well I guess this is all done right like and I would. I've never had cancer or diagnosed with cancer I'm guessing if someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness or not even terminal let's imagine I was diagnosed with stage two cancer stage three but they're like you know what it's got a high survivability rate let's say this whole process lasted six months I don't personally believe that I would be like you know what I really gotta work on my lawn like oh I really gotta repaint my shed I gotta like I should really redo the bathroom I'm sure it's just you're so consumed about survival and the realities of it that you're not thinking about how am I going to improve my life for the next 10-15 years how many people start new businesses a week into a cancer diagnosis I don't think it happens right because you're so consumed and of fear is really what it is because you're one thing for the future. Everything you've built everything you built about to be flushed away right. I would say that that is the thing is you're like cancer doesn't require you to do anything but it can mentally consume all of your mental cycles to the point you don't end up being productive and I would say that that is what ended up happening is like you're Googling stuff that you think is maybe gonna help the case you're Googling stuff you're like it just ends up being weird and you end up just spinning your tires a lot and so yeah that I would say that that had almost maybe more of an impact long term that there was almost a year of just lost productivity. And just fear right like you were living in fear the whole time yeah I remember we went to look at wedding venues during the whole google thing it was literally the week Google shut us down we had all these the wedding venue tours booked up and we were going to look at weddings I couldn't think of a wedding venues I was literally messaging my team while we're getting a tour on a Saturday. I don't even know if I can afford the wedding anymore. Yeah actually though I don't even know I have a job at the end of this week so yeah I agree with that it consumes you it really does it's a fear I remember like the gut just the gut feeling at all times of just being scared. Yeah and it's also a situation you try not to like you would have tried to not pass it on to your partner yeah and as a boss or as an owner you try not to pass it on to your staff right and it's like you're in the situation where you're trying to shoulder the burden and now I didn't have a partner like a business partner at the time that we were able to kind of share to a certain extent but we were also I'll say pretty big difference in personalities so we approached it drastically different and I'm not a worrier but I am a person who's a realist and as much as you want to think optimistically even like as a cancer diagnosis example you can still think optimistically but that doesn't mean you're, You're not 100% worry-free right you know it's in the back of your head you know it yeah yeah. All right well I think that was really good Greg you provided a lot there is there anything else you wanted to share to add in because I think you cover the story perfectly you really showed that company was up and coming it was doing really well and then this this this patent troll through a wrench in your wrenching your tire and really three off for nine to twelve months but could have put you completely out and shared some good tips on how you fought back to that. I would say overall this is like not related to this exactly but it's in the same realm I've become quite comfortable with legal documents reading them writing we'll call it writing that loose bullet point things that I feel a lawyer could using a template and then just working off of it like just bullet point and be like do this then this and this is how I want this word because you start to realize a lot of language in legal rooms or edge cases whereas this happens or if this happens and all that kind of stuff and you quickly realize that lawyers are not experts in your field so you can be doing a deal with someone an agreement a settlement or whatever they don't know they're just guessing and a lot of people leave business terms up to lawyers which is a terrible idea because they're doing the best they can I'm not blaming them but you come to me and go hey Greg what are 10 things you should make that i should make sure in this agreement I'm working with XYZ company I'd be like I don't even know what they're exactly like does maybe number of connections matter yeah no lawyer's gonna know to include number of connections. No you know your business the best right that comes down to that. Read through an agreement and really understand what's happening and be able to give specific actionable changes was maybe one of the things i'd be really happy with and became very comfortable in doing that I can have a conversation with my lawyer and just or my attorney and say hey I think we need to do this let's push back on this let's tweak these wordings here that kind of stuff and that's only through tons and tons of I guess legal expenses and agreements but it is something that people shouldn't shy away from and there's certain owners or certain business founders especially that have a tendency to do oh I'm not just vomiting but whatever have it. Leave it to the lawyer. Leave it to the lawyer and I think a lot of people forget that there's a difference between an in-house lawyer and an external leader because an in-house lawyer is going to understand the business a lot more they're going to seek out the experts they're going to make sure that kind of stuff is done whereas they care but they just don't know and they may feel bad asking too many details or they'll say hey can you give me a summary of all the things you care about how's it get worded all these types of things so I would definitely say that a huge skill set is being comfortable reading through legal agreements and not hating it like I'll read through miscellaneous laws in our problems and that kind of stuff just to sort of understand I find it kind of interesting you're like okay I didn't realize that's the exact penalty for our past or whatever right yeah you sort of kind of appreciate the language actually something and I also see lawyers and I'll end it at this I have no issue with lawyers a lot of people have this general hate towards them lawyers only do what the clients want them to do for all kinds of purposes now let's take personal injury lawyers out that convince people to launch it. That's good that's good you have to leave that map I see them as insurance you and I can come up with an agreement on the back of a piece of paper we have some bullet points we both sign it it's completely valid however we may not have factored in that you're I'm paying you to take care of my dog for the next five years and I pay you yearly thing and then my dog dies do I still need to pay you every year according to agreement yeah because it was not worked with anything that's where you sort of bring in a lawyer that they hopefully are dealing with these edge cases that you don't think about for them to write it in pretty language that's not needed it's really more for them to be like hey you've been through this what are things that have been missed in the past shareholders agreements would be a great example of that these things have been built over the years and, Yeah it's like a checklist for them they've you know all the little nuances. Yeah exactly years and years of tried and true language that if you and I were to come with a shareholders agreement it would be like if we were starting back in the 20s you know we'd miss everything yeah yeah exactly normal stuff yeah so for sure just become comfortable with attorneys and the whole side of things and I'm sure you've seen in the short time that we work together right but just being generally uncomfortable with it you can avoid lawyers directly like you get them involved like one or two steps down the road sort of yeah right don't call your big brother to fight until you realize that it's about to start swinging. Yeah yeah that's some good advice and a good analogy there all right well Greg that's all the time today, Do you have a big brother? I have one older brother but I would be the one doing the punching he's okay. Yeah, I don't have an older brother I'll bring you in the ringer. Yeah I'm not a great fighter I'd be throwing the punches but I wouldn't be great. I just need you to take could just take you see me take him on the chin. You're gonna be hiding behind me. So yeah thanks for joining I think there were some great lessons in there and I know you have a few others but a few other stories you could go on for another hour about but I think this one was great and the audience will benefit from it so thanks craig for your story of down but not out sounds good have a good one cheers thanks Greg.