Many trademark problems don’t start in the legal department. They start in design, marketing, or social media. This is where a phrase that looks great but does not actually function as a trademark. Let's not do that. Here is now to use selected marks the best way for legal purposes. What Brand Managers Need to Know About “Failure to Function” in Trademarks Today, one of the fastest-growing reasons trademarks are refused or weakened is something called “failure to function.” A

After our Part I post on the vocabulary of startup funding, we sought to provide additional guidance to founders with new products. Their product exists in some stage of development. There’s early interest—maybe a pilot customer or two. The founder has started hearing phrases like “traction,” “runway,” and “institutional capital,” often in the same week. This is typically where Michigan founders begin to feel a little unmoored—not because the business is weak, but because fun

If you are building a startup in Michigan, fundraising can feel opaque—not because capital is unavailable, but because it comes in stages , each with its own logic, expectations, and tradeoffs. This post is meant to demystify those stages by explaining why they exist, what they are designed to fund, and how Michigan founders typically experience them. Rather than treating funding rounds as labels, it helps to see them as checkpoints in a company’s development. Each round answ