Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets • Hacker News Board

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#11

Post by pxlpshr » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 5:28 PM UTC

wheels wrote: post #10

pxlpshr wrote: post #3

TechCrunch likes to stir the pot and create controversy, but I do get tired of them acting like they do no wrong. Maybe it's just me but I rarely see them mocking themselves. As mentioned in the comments by another entrepreneur: When I launched OtherInbox at TechCrunch50 in 2008, being “stealth” was a requirement for participation. We had to be launching something new that no one had heard about and secrecy was so im…

That's a sign of a maturing media outlet. Wouldn't it be bizarre if the New York Times never had differing opinion pieces? (Note: I'm not putting TC and the NYT in the same bucket, but this is a bad point to call them out on.)

Good point. My comment was also in regard to other stories I've read there, I just opted not to go into too many details for the sake of staying on topic.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#12

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 5:51 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#13

Post by 10ren » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 5:52 PM UTC

Another good reason to be in stealth is if a company is built around a technology or idea that it hopes to patent but has not yet filed.

I think this exception can be generalized to pure technology development, even without the patent legal requirement of non-disclosure. It applies if you are developing a new technology that already has a known market; or an entirely new technology (in which case you are more an inventor or scientist than an entrepreneur). So, Edison got his light-bulb working well enough; Birdseye discovered the freezing rate for fish that worked well enough.

Of course, most internet startups are not pure technology. They're mostly about market development, and at best, applying technology to that new market.

A final factor is that, even for pure technology, it helps if you can discuss it with someone. So it's good to have a team. This is one benefit of working in a big corp lab.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#14

Post by vlad » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 5:56 PM UTC

The headline does not do the article justice.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#15

Post by zaidf » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 6:05 PM UTC

The smartest guys give the illusion that they are very open. But that is only because they have so much to share, they can keep talking(without being boring) and yet not get to the stuff that can really hurt them. That has been my experience.

Make no mistake, even the biggest preachers of being open withheld information. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion about what to share and what not to.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#16

Post by baguasquirrel » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 6:16 PM UTC

Saying that you're stealth is actually a great excuse to not have to spend half an hour yakking to people when you actually want to code.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#17

Post by DaniFong » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 6:21 PM UTC

While I think this can be great advice in the internet space, there's a pretty big difference between having a consumer product pre-vc funding which you can bootstrap to a release, and a biotech or cleantech based startup post-funding with roughly a dozen serious potential customers.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#18

Post by tonystubblebine » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 6:23 PM UTC

To provide some balance, does anyone here have any positive experiences with being in stealth mode?

I have one. We launched Twttr in a stealth private beta for at least a few months. I think the period coincided with the period it took to get an official SMS short code. During the stealth period we were serving SMS traffic out of an SMS modem attached to an office laptop. We got the normal benefit of polishing the product that you'd get from a private beta. Plus we got to develop the product without any public scrutiny. But we were very conservative about who we let know about the project, basically close friends and family who didn't work for a major internet company.

I think the hardest part about changing your product strategy is going back on your promises (in our case we'd promised customers, investors, and employees that we were going to build a world-changing podcast product). I don't know if it would have been fatal, but it definitely would have been uncomfortable to be accused of abandoning our initial product before knowing we had a success (and contrary to some statements, there were a big chunk of internal users who knew we had something important from the first day we used it).

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#19

Post by Goladus » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 6:31 PM UTC

baguasquirrel wrote: post #16

Saying that you're stealth is actually a great excuse to not have to spend half an hour yakking to people when you actually want to code.

Yeah that was my first thought after reading that cartoon.

Re: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

#20

Post by newhouseb » Sat, Dec 19, 2009, 6:35 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #15

The smartest guys give the illusion that they are very open. But that is only because they have so much to share, they can keep talking(without being boring) and yet not get to the stuff that can really hurt them. That has been my experience. Make no mistake, even the biggest preachers of being open withheld information. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion about what to share and what not to.

I fall largely into the bucket of "if you can give away your idea in one sentence, then you're toast" but I personally break down my projects into three parts:

1. The idea itself in the way you'd present it to the layman

2. The engineering problems you face in implementing the idea

3. The solution to said problems

You can come off as being "open" by disclosing only the first part. If another person overhears (1) in your discussion, in order to implement the idea they first need to figure out (2) what makes it hard before even (3) devoting resources to solving the problem. And how you approach (2) and (3) in addition to just (1) is what determines success (read: execution). Note that I am making an assumption that whatever you're working on requires actual engineering.

So for the example of Google,

1) A search engine that lets you find stuff

2) Relevance is really freakin' hard

3) PageRank

None of this of course applies to negotiations with VCs, where the rules turn on their head and you don't want to make yourselves look like you are effortlessly delivering solutions. And unless you're looking for a certain type of leverage, acknowledging the fact that negotiations exist to other people is probably a bad idea too.