Our guest today is a lifelong entrepreneur and a 20 18 20 19 American association for the advancement of science Lemelson invention. Ambassador he's achieved repeated success as an independent product developer, including the licensing over 20 products and winning 20 industry awards is the inventor of record on 24 patents.
He has over five best selling books on Amazon with the last one being licensing ideas. Using LinkedIn, you can read his articles online for Forbes and entrepreneur and watch them on invent right TV without further ado. Let me introduce the one and only Stephen Key.
Well, thank you for that introduction. I'm always like, who is that? Who is that person? I never cared much about resumes, but I guess it adds up over time. Doesn't it?
Yes, sir.
yeah. Thank you for inviting me.
Oh, thank you for being here. I was going to ask, can you take a few moments and fill in the gaps from that intro and bring us up to speed with what's going on with you now.
Um, yes, I'm I do quite a bit of writing on intellectual property, but it also write a lot about the business model of licensing ideas to companies, which a lot of people don't, hadn't really heard about. Um, I guess I'm an, a vendor. I think that's kind of a very lofty word or, you know, I'm a creative person.
I have ideas and I want, I don't want to start a business and I we'd like for a company to take it to market for me. And that's what licensing is all about. You're you're going to rent your idea to a company and they're going to take it to market for you. And you're going to collect royalties on every one they sell.
So I write quite a bit on that topic on licensing for creative people like myself, that just don't want to. Mortgage the house or quit your job, or maybe you just don't want to have employees. I'm all, you know, I don't want to have, I don't want to do any of those hard things. What I want to do is be creative and let companies do All the work for me.
All right. Did, did you come from an entrepreneurial or inventors type background? Did anyone in your family while you were growing up,
Uh,
or invent anything or.
Yeah.
that's really a great question. I don't think anybody's ever really asked me that before. My, my father was a company, man. Uh, he got laid off after 25 years, which I probably looking back, it probably did have an impact on me. Um, he did. He loved what he, he did though. He worked for general electric, loved it.
And he always told me, you know, if you find something you truly love to do, you'll never work a day in your life. And I don't think my father ever did no. Once he was laid off, he reinvented himself at least two or three times. He did different things and he just, I always had a really good attitude about it.
Never worried about it and it worked out fine for him. So was he an entrepreneur? I think maybe later in life. A little bit, but no, I, um, I actually got started by accident. I think I was studying economics at Santa Clara university, which was not a good fit for me. And I took an art class by mistake. I mean, um, I'm in my early twenties, I take an art class and I fall in love working with my hands.
I go home. I tell my dad, Hey, I said, Hey, I want to be an artist. And it was like, you want to do what? And I said, I, I want to be an artist. And he said, well, you must like to draw. And I said, no. And he said, well, you must like to paint them. Right. I said, no, I don't like to do that either. So he led to me change majors and basically jump off the cliff. Now, what father does that? I it's interesting. Looking back. He was very brave. Um, he knew that I needed to find something that that was going to make me happy. So I just took, started taking art classes and realized I wasn't going to be this great artist, but there's something about being, being creative that I really loved.
You see, every time I read about artists, they seem to create, they never retired. They loved it so much. And I loved working with my hands. So I just combined working with my hands with a little bit of business. Okay.
So, and that's how I got started. I knew that no one would hire me because I really didn't have any skills.
My, my family, um, you know, it's kind of funny. My, they never, they never had me go out and get a job. Although I had a few jobs, they never prepared me for life. So I don't know if that was a good thing or not, but, um, I knew once I had to get out in the real world, that I had to find a way to make a dollar.
And, and since I had, uh, school was not easy for me, I realized, I realized I didn't think anybody would hire me. So I created my own job. That's how I got started.
