GOT YOU COVERED
Want to safeguard your startup from a long list of business killers? Time to talk insurance
BY THE TIME LEO WELDER LAUNCHED online startup guide ChooseWhat.com in 2008, he’d purchased a handful of general insurance policies but skipped the intellectual-property litigation insurance. “We weren’t filing any patents or selling any specific technology, so it didn’t seem important at the time,” the Austin-based entrepreneur says. By the end of the year, however, he found himself embroiled in a trademark lawsuit with J2 Global, a publicly traded company in Los Angeles, over use of the term efax.
In the end, the companies reached a settlement and ChooseWhat survived—but not before Welder had spent several hundred thousand dollars funding his own defense. So he soon purchased an errors and omissions policy to protect his
