forget YOU commuting to the city - with 10 bedrooms you can provide free rooms for YOUR employees to come to you :-) (assuming you own a startup and have employees)
My car getting hacked could potentially cause loss of life - my router or laptop can't so easily. However, some security can be had by enforcing physical-only updates. My router requires updates by ethernet cable (physical) so I would prefer my car to be the same - even if I have to bring it into a certified shop.
Fine but many router vendors do not push updates for deployed routers. Majority of ordinary users barely know how to plug in an ethernet cable let alone download&update firmware.
Why would Certicom bother filing a patent(s) on this. The only likely buyer/licensee would be a nation state - which can easily appropriate whatever IP it desires. Further, NSA paying/licensing with a foreign company (Canadian Certicom) only adds to the number of people in the know. Likely Certicom realized this and contributes to the reason why some of the patent applications were never pursued beyond provisional patent applications.
"Using that private key, they can observe CSPRNG output on the wire, “decrypt it”, and use that to rewind and fast-forward other people’s CSPRNGs, discovering their keys."
The more thought and due diligence you put in, the lower the probability you will get screwed. However, how much effort, time, and $money into finding, hiring, talking to lawyer(s) do you want to put into this?
If you are at all worried about whether they are negotiating in good faith, then before you go any further, file one or more patents asap. This provides you with at least 2 things:
1) increases what you have to put on the table
2) if talks dissolve and you find they were in it to get as much info from you as possible (e.g. to use in their product), you have some legal options. Whether you need this recourse AND whether its even feasible, is left for a later time.
Business is war, expect no less. And in this case, the more they give you (cash or equity), the more they lose.
I think this is great oversimplification of the real world and see 2 problems:
1) There are many jobs that simply do not allow the inner secrets or secret sauce to be made public. Even a supposedly open company such as Google does not publish the exact formula for its biggest secret sauce (search ranking). Sure the PageRanking patent formula is public, but this only gets one so far - the actual ranking is much more complex and involves many more factors - otherwise SEO would have been automated long ago.
2) How long until companies recognize that employees are leveraging publication of their work and thereby work to stop it (e.g. enforce policies). Many corporations readily recognize that a large problem is turnover and spend significant amounts to try to prevent it and then hire new employees - what is to stop them from creating and enforcing policies to prevent employees from all external publications?
> A typical valley based startup will “graduate” into the billion dollar club within 4-5 years
This is survivor bias. The truly magnificent ones hit the billion dollar club within 4-5 years. But there are plenty of highly successful that not only survive but thrive and are profitable and fail to meet your objective
> Is it end of the road? Hell, NO! We WILL create billion dollar companies. More importantly, we will create stories – far more impactful than our global counterparts. Why? Because our heart is where it should be – in the right place.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but being successful requires more than wishful thinking. Much more.