Community Spotlight with Peter Kylin

Peter Kylin is a Swedish patent attorney who started his career in IP as an Examiner at the EPO. He has worked in-house in industry and ran and grew the successful patent firm Hynell in Sweden before setting up Sweden’s first outsourced IP formalities/paralegal business, NellPat that became IP Station and is now RightHub Services.

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Adam Wylie – I think the audience will know a bit about the work at the EPO, so I would like to focus on what made Hynell a success and the formation of NellPat.

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Peter Kylin - One of the patent agencies that I'd been working with during my time in-house was exceptional - Hynell. It was the only one that was not in the big city but in Hagfors in the middle of the woods in mid-Sweden. It was also very different because I had so much work to send out to various firms. When I started in-house in 1991, we would file some eight patent applications a year, In 1993, we filed 38 patent applications. I had to use almost all of the patent firms in Sweden to assist with all these applications. One of them - Hynell - was so different because when I phoned Stockholm after a while, with an urgent case, they said ‘Oh, no, not again’. I mean, you could almost feel them getting a stomachache because I was calling. Whereas when I phoned them in Hagfors, they kind of went, ‘Oh, f-ck it, this is good’. Their approach was totally different. They were swearing, they were using dialect. Whereas you could feel when you talk to Stockholm, it was not like that.

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Hynell’s then CEO decided that he should retire. He had been negotiating with someone who had been working for him for quite some time, but they couldn't reach a deal. ?So, he just asked me, saying ‘Peter, I will give you this at a very good price if you, take it over. You come in here, you will be the CEO from the start’.

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I had never thought of being a CEO or an entrepreneur. But when I asked around, people said, ‘yeah, it would suit you’. I was really nervous, afraid of taking the responsibility of a workplace with nine people. I went there and was frank with them. I said ‘I want you to feel that I can really do this’ and told them who I am and so on and I got a good impression. So, I said yes and took it over. It was a fantastic experience. We expanded and expanded during my years. We tripled the turnover. We grew to where 40 people involved. We made a profit every year.

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Adam Wylie – So you as a neophyte entrepreneur were doing something right. What was that?

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Peter Kylin - I think I found a lot of inspiration from sport. I played football, rugby, volleyball and I've seen what a team can achieve, if you create comfort in the team and everybody knows their role and they have trust in the leader etc. That's what I wanted to apply at Hynell. I used sometimes just go to my staff and ask. What are you doing well? What would you like to do? What would you like to try? They would come up with ideas and 90% of the time, when some employee said, 'I would like to try doing this' and I tried it on the market, it would work.

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Adam Wylie - Any specific examples that you can give of something that was particularly different or creative or new to the industry?

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Peter Kylin - I feel it was more of a success story internally. I mean, that it gave my staff mobilisation for drawing self-confidence, and the comfort in moving into challenges and also, coming up with ideas and working in a proactive manner.

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I was the one who was good at targeting new clients, but the staff would assist in providing the clients with exactly what they needed. I think was a rare thing in our industry and I still think it is - to actually get into a tight relationship with the client. I had this motto that working with IP for our clients should be fun and shouldn't be a burden. You shouldn't just tell the client 'you have these ten options. Please choose’. Most clients have no idea.

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It's more ‘I think you like this and this and that, so this is my recommendation.' But may patent attorneys find it a bit challenging, to recommend a course of action. Of course, sometimes you would give a bad advice.

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I still think many patent attorneys are spoilt because there is a shortage of attorneys, so plenty of work. ?I remember early on targeting a specific company that I thought would be good to work with. I thought in three years I'm going to have them. I had them after three months. You know why? Because when I went there to see them. They told me, oh, they hadn't had a visit from the patent attorney in Stockholm for ten years. I think this is too common among patent attorneys not wanting to work, pack stuff to go and visit customers and really listen to them.

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Adam Wylie - So Hynell grown and then we come to what you regard as your baby, ?NellPat/IP Station. Can you talk me through that? Did you see a need in the market for outsourced formalities?

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Peter Kylin ?-I was quite frustrated when I worked for this big IP law firm, I could see how top management, having done their time and having the shares just kind of made decisions from the top. You would have people working hard to get to that position to get the shares. I think that it's an old feudal system, which I thought didn't fit today's society.

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So, that was a starting point, I thought there must be some other possibility. I saw digitalisation coming and realised that you don't any longer have to sit in Stockholm or in Munich or in London to deal with patents - you can be anywhere. At one of the first board meetings, I said that I see great potential in the formalities department here in Hagfors because having the office in Hagfors is perhaps a third of the cost compared to having one in a nice part of Stockholm, and living is so much cheaper. I mean, housing in Hagfors costs the 10th of Stockholm and so on. Everything from an economic viewpoint showed that it would be good to have that outside of the big city. Also in Hagfors, the human spirit is tough. These people have been growing up in a tough environment. They were tough and they could handle the stress.

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Adam Wylie - What do you attribute that to? Lack of opportunities, the weather, the fact that it's cold and dark six months of the year?

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Peter Kylin - Exactly. You have a culture in Hagfors where people wouldn’t say I, “oh, I'm so isolated”. They would kind of just spit into their hands and say, “let's go for it and do it together”.

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Already in 1999, I had the idea and I talked about it back and forth in 2004. We started to make a test with an attorney who had just started his own firm. He phoned us and said he needed formalities help. Everything felt great and it grew and developed. My marketing strategy was to go after those single patent attorneys that had left firms to start on their own.

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Adam Wylie - So sole practitioners basically who don't want the admin cost/organisational burden.

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Peter Kylin - Exactly. My idea was to handpick those who were the most productive, those who would supply for the others. I still think that this is a valid idea. What I did not foresee is that most patent attorneys are so cautious. In the end I started to lend the money to new firms to get them started. The attorney could have a salary for the first year and get their own clients, and they would ?just give us a fair share of shares back in return. Actually, that was extremely profitable.

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Adam Wylie - So you were supplying seed money?

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Peter Kylin - Yes.

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Adam Wylie - What sort of impact do you think Nellpat and IP Station have had on Hagfors as a town - has it had considerable growth? Before IP Station, the town was dominated by steel industries. It [FK1]?strikes me that there weren't possibly many opportunities, for what becomes highly skilled administrative work, with career progression opportunities What do you think Hagfors as a town would say about IP station?

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Peter Kylin - It's a tremendous factor in Hagfors to have a company within the intellectual area, which is also extra suitable for women. So, it sticks out. I would guess that Hagfors is probably one of the villages in the world having the highest amount of per capita knowledge of IP.

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Adam Wylie - I think that's probably the case.

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Peter Kylin - It's so fascinating that you have so many people - also now retired people - knowing the field. They need to know what it's about. And of course, they will spread this knowledge in Hagfors to others because they are curious. I think it has made a big difference and a big impact. I don't care so much about money, but what I feel in my gut is to be able to have assisted in creating this node, because I mean, it could grow to any size. As I see it, it has started, and that is such a great feeling. I think you could do the same thing in other villages with other niches, moving it out from big cities and getting the culture.

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Adam Wylie - So 14 years in the making and moving upwards and growing, shall we say that?

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Peter Kylin - I think that is a fair assessment.

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