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Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Editor-at-large of ReCODE. You may know me as the Editor of the country's leading tabloid magazine about M&A, the National Acquire.

But in my spare time, I'm just reporter and you're listening to ReCODE decode a podcast about power change and the people you need to know were part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today in the red chair is Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School and the director of its program in law, science and technology.

In late last year, he co-authored a paper called Exit Strategy that ruffled quite a few feathers in Silicon Valley.

In it, Mark and his co-author Andrew McCreary argued that by focusing on an exit in the form of an IPO or acquisition by a larger company, startups and venture capitalists are suffocating innovation in the tech industry, he is speaking my language.

Mark, welcome to ReCODE decode.

Thank you, happy to be here.

So we're going to talk a lot about a lot of legal stuff because we're talking about robotics.

But let's talk, this is a topic I talk about quite a bit.

And the FTC recently is going to start looking at a lot of these acquisitions.

Let's just get right into it. So talk about your paper that you were trying to achieve with exit strategy.

Sure. So the basic idea is, if you think about it from outside venture capital and outside Silicon Valley, the kind of odd fact that if you start a company in Silicon Valley,

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