When the internet security company Cloudflare decided to engage in all-out war with what it calls a “dangerous new breed of patent troll,” it found a receptive audience with Eric Lesser, who became the youngest state senator in Massachusetts when elected to office in 2014.
Senator Lesser, now a 32-year-old in his second two-year-term, was in the same Harvard fraternity as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but says he didn’t really think much about tech until after working on President Obama’s first presidential election campaign in 2007. “I was traveling around with him and carrying suitcases and handling logistics for his traveling team,” he explains.
When the campaign was over, he joined then-senior advisor David Axelrod at the White House as a special assistant; he also became involved with the Council of Economic Advisors and more specifically with the agency’s chairman at the time, economist Austan Goolsbee. “That’s really when I started to get exposure to a lot of tech policy and some of the issues,” he says.
Fast-forward and today, among the issues Senator Lesser has become most focused on — because he sees it as among the bigger threats to Massachusetts’s economy — is patent trolling. Indeed, while he’s not sure how much he can do to help Cloudflare, which has a Boston office, a bill that Senator Lesser helped craft will be heard in committee next Tuesday, and it would put a serious crimp in what he calls “shakedown operations” more broadly.
More from a conversation we had this morning, edited for length:
TC: You’re on the young side to be a state senator.
EL: I’d gone to Harvard, then Harvard Law School, and in my third year, I decided to jump into a race in the community where I grew up, and I won. It was a five-way primary, and very close. I think I won by 192 votes out of around 17,000. [Laughs.]
TC: When did you zero in on this patent problem?
EL: In Massachusetts, you serve two-year terms, and after I was reelected to my second term, a friend who I was friendly with in college was at HBS and he sort of said, “There’s this thing that’s starting to create real issues,” and it was patent trolling. I’d had a very atmospheric knowledge of it from law school and IP classes, but I began realizing this was a very big deal.
TC: How did you get started on your related work?
EL: My friend first connected me with Eric Paley of [the venture firm] Founder Collective, and his wife, Shirley, who’s an IP lawyer and so knows this stuff well. Turns out there was a bill in Massachusetts that had been hanging around a while, authored by Anthony Petruccelli, who was a state senator who has since taken a job in the private sector. So we picked it up last year and attached it to an economic development bill, and the response…