It's tough to say. I was young and didn't have the kind of capital to do that myself. It was in the depths of a shitty economy and this hypothetical start up wouldn't have had much of a moat, so I don't think that it would've been easy to get outside capital either. And what would the pitch be? We can do this non-unicorn company's job better and still not be a unicorn? This was right round the beginning of the whole 'everything has to be a unicorn' thing, or at least my awareness of it.

It's unfortunate that the only way to capture the value of my innovation might have been "well, just be an owner instead of a worker."