What to do when your startup gets sued by a big player
Two years ago, I launched a social media gaming company called Cashsquare. Our small team set out to create the first real-life virtual game that lets people buy and sell real-life properties, but in a virtual gaming environment.
We wanted to bring online games to the real world and we did everything the right way. We brought together a team of talented developers and designers from a number of different backgrounds: some came from the real estate development world who dreamed to create something new and different, some were talented developers and marketers looking to try something fun and unique. Our team was hungry and diverse.
We built a business plan. We found office space, which we decided to share with two other companies to reduce costs and overhead. We secured our first round of investment. We spent countless hours developing the game. And of course, we began to build a product and brand while legally dotting all of our i’s and crossing all of our t’s along the way. We were starting to see all of our time, money and energy paying off.
Then we got sued by Square, Inc. – the payment processing company. And it turned we were not the only victims. Square, Inc. has sued numerous startups with the word “square” in their names. Apparently, Square, Inc. feels that it has the monopoly on the word “square”. Apparently it doesn’t matter that there’s no likelihood of confusion (to use the trademark parlance) between our real-life virtual game and Square Inc.’s payment processing business. I guess it’s only a matter of time before Square, Inc. insists that Moscow’s Red Square or Beijing’s Tiananmen Square change their names.
Why is Square, Inc. acting like this? I think it’s because they know that startups like us don’t have the money to fight court battles. I just wish they would use their pile of money to improve their products instead of bullying startups into submission.
We’re moving forward. We just launched our new version and our developers are pushing hard to make new features the next month. We feel we’ve invested a lot in our name and our brand, so we don’t want to throw all the time and energy we’ve invested by the wayside.
This is a very realistic issue that many startups and founders may face. You build something from scratch and even when you do everything the right way, there are still challenges. We are going to fight it and believe our startup will survive, because we do it for the love of the game.
We encourage all startups and founders to follow their passion and persevere in the face of adversity.
