The gap that surfaces during due diligence, and the five-step path to closing it while it’s still cheap.

Intellectual property is the main asset in most tech businesses, and it’s the one founders leave undocumented for years on the assumption that paying for something means owning it.

We asked Dommisse Attorneys senior associate Jacques Stemmet, who runs the firm’s IP and trademark practice, what founders should actually have in place.

Start with the most common gap. Under SA law the developer who wrote your code owns it unless they’ve validly assigned it to you, and paying invoices doesn’t transfer ownership. The clause has to say “hereby assigns” rather than “will assign,” and it needs a moral-rights waiver alongside it so you can freely modify the work.

Here’s how to ensure you actually own the code you paid someone to build.

The same question, one generation newer. A prompt alone doesn’t make the output yours in South Africa; ownership follows human input and originality, and there’s no local case law yet to give you certainty. Put real human work into anything you intend to defend, keep some evidence of it, and read the terms of every tool your team builds with.

Here’s how to make sure you own the work your AI produces.

Once you own it, choose how to protect it. A patent buys roughly 20 years of exclusivity in exchange for publishing exactly how your thing works; a trade secret lasts indefinitely but protects only against theft, not anybody who reverse-engineers it. Let the business model choose: patent what ships and can be taken apart, keep secret what nobody outside ever sees.

Here’s how to choose between a patent and a trade secret.

Registering a company at CIPC does not protect your brand, and founders usually learn that when a competitor launches under a confusingly similar name. Search the register before you commit to a name, protect the word mark first, and file in the classes that match what you actually do. South Africa isn’t in the Madrid Protocol, so international protection is a country-by-country job.

Here’s how to protect your brand with a trademark in South Africa.

All of the above can be undone quietly by someone pasting source code or client data into a consumer AI tool that trains on it. A trade secret is protected only while you take reasonable steps to keep it secret, and in SA, client data in a prompt can be a POPIA problem too. Route sensitive work through enterprise tiers and write a one-page usage policy your team will actually follow.

Here’s how to use AI without leaking your company’s secrets.

Work through the five and you can prove you own what you say you own, which is exactly what a buyer or investor checks first. Do it now, while contractors are still friendly and the stakes are low, rather than during due diligence when everyone suddenly understands how much leverage they hold.

These five steps are drawn from What You Own vs What You Think You Own, Jacques’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab, which walks through the whole system for proving what your business owns:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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