| LegitHyperbole said: Success story is right, that's proper impressive. You must have gotten a lot of experience and know how just being apart and so close to that, though, I'd reckon. Did they ever go public? |
Yeah they did. My other (original) boss started a charity foundation with the proceeds:
https://www.turingfoundation.org/overons_uk.html
It were stressful times since the foundation had most of its money parked at Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis :/
TomTom shares crashed as well during that time. They started at 27 Euro (initial offer) peaked at 88, then crashed down to 4 euros in the financial crisis. Slowly recovered to 21 Euro (2015) but then down again to now 5 Euro.
And yes, lot of experience, including being part of a huge patent dispute for which I was grilled for 3 days in Washington DC. Deposition to Garmin's lawyers, defending my work. No we never copied Garmin, ugh, the nerve!
https://casetext.com/case/garmin-ltd-v-tomtom-5
We won that one (or rather it was settled with NDAs, I have no idea what was agreed in the end)
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/tomtom-says-wins-lawsuit-brought-by-garmin-idUSL23104524/
That was a terrible time, Garmin tried to bar us from sale in the USA. (Fighting an injunction) We still had a small company mentality and never bothered with patents, then quickly learned the hard way you need them. So we started filing patents and also buying them from smaller companies to bring a counter suit to Garmin.
Silver lining, now I have my name on a bunch of patents. They're owned by the company however, not mine.
