I just asked him.

“Teflon is a high molecular weight polymer made using perfluoronated surfactants. Technically, PTFE is a fluorine-containing material but it is not the PFAS pollutants of recent concern. In the conventional synthesis, the real source of PFAS pollution is primarily those surfactants used in its manufacture. Our process made the use of those surfactants unnecessary.”

Why do you DuPont never acted on your patents?

“It was a cost of business decision because they had already invested so much capital in making Teflon with those surfactants.”

Is your dad forbidden from recreating this technology with DuPont in control of those patents? There's probably a tonne of VC money out there for an environmentally friendly disruptor to teflon.

I’m going to link to another reply on this and provide some additional color:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961328

Getting a product like this stood up is a $100 million endeavor at minimum. That’s before customer #1 presses “buy.”

My father and the colleague I mentioned are both successful serial entrepreneurs (large exits, Sequioa backed unicorn, etc.). There is close to zero appetite from VCs in this.

VCs seem to be allergic to these CapEx intensive businesses and I don’t blame them—the risks are enormous when compared to something like a SaaS.

That said, if you know someone who’s dying to throw hundreds of millions at this problem, he’d probably take the intro. You can email me at super solenoid theory at gmail dot com.

On the other hand, the capital intensive nature makes it a lot harder for a competitor to spin up their version overnight and eat your lunch.

As pg said, "do things that don't scale".

I think Carbon13 and the other "climate emergency" accelerators would be interested in some capacity, at least as a starter. They've got a fairly strong network of Family Houses & trusts.

I think you'd get seed money, and a network large enough to raise some serious capital in future rounds.

One of my patent reform ideas is that patents must be used. If left fallow (production under a certain amount) for too long, bam, it hits the public domain, or back to the originator.

Or just make it a couple years. If you can't profit handsomely off your idea in a couple years, then it's probably more efficient for society as a whole to be allowed to work on it.

Ig you remove the incentive, why would they pay to do the research in the first place?

There is a gulf of value between "literal cure for cancer" and, like, some basic consumer good. Most things do not exist at either extreme end. Not all things worth doing are wildly profitable.

Huh? The incentive hasn't been removed. You only lose it if you aren't producing the patented product for commercial sale.

I'm talking about a hypothetical world where the lifetime of a patent is only, say, 5 years. That's a much shorter window to recoup expenses, and thus many projects that are financially justifiable in the current environment would not be.

I'm pretty sure Teflon is made with tetrafluoroethylene, a gas, not with surfactants?

As I understand it (and I don’t claim to understand it all that well), the processing involved in turning tetrafluoroethylene into a useful form of PTFE involves the use of fluorinated surfactants to get everything into a solution or emulsion.