Inventor Millions: College Drop-Out Gets Patent on Idea, Sells Invention for $100 Million

00:00

A few years ago, required came to see me in my office. His name was Alex Gomez. And as he passionately told me about his idea, he told me how he had dropped out of medical school to pursue his invention. As a medical resident, he noticed that when a cold surgical camera is inserted into a warm body, the lens would fog up. Now, what surprised him is that what doctors were doing is they were taking a cold bucket of water and just cleaning off the lens, and then taking that lens and putting it back into the patient. At this grove, Alex crazy, it went against everything that he was trained in medical school, about the need for sterile environment, in operating rooms. But he was working at a small South Florida Hospital at the time, and thought this was a unique practice to South Florida. Now at Cornell Medical School, he was able to see work in an operating room in a major New York Hospital and found the same thing happened there. It turns out that the warm bucket of water was a fact of life at hospitals throughout the country. Something that my client, Alex wanted to change. And he worked furiously on this. He told me that he worked on prototype after prototype from his dorm room. And his final obstacle was finding a cleaning solution that would work with his camera lens defogging unit, and nothing that he tried worked. Until one day, he was studying for an exam. It was three o'clock in the morning, and he was reading up on cleaning solutions for treating burns. And that is the solution that worked and and is still the solution that he's using in his product today. When Alex came to see me, he had dropped out of medical school. He had maxed out his credit cards, and was running short of investor money. I worked with Alex to file his patent and secure his intellectual property. From this point forward, his progress was staggering. He was able to raise $3 million in capital and start production. He grew his staff to 140 employees and grew his revenues to 21 million a year. At this point, he attracted the attention of a medical giant Medtronic, who bought out his patent and his idea for $100 million. Now, most important part of the deal was Alex's intellectual property. Medtronic wanted to know that if they bought this patent competitors would not be able to poke holes in the patent and design around Alex's device and compete with them. They had an army of lawyers scrutinize the patent to find any loopholes or mistakes, or oversights. I am proud of the job I did for Alex Gomez. His patent was bulletproof. And that is my goal for every single one of my clients.