“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”
-- Howard Aiken
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/don-t_worry_about_people_ste...
Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
81–90 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the alternative to this is the patent scheme the pharma industry uses. Think about it - a drug may be trivially simple to manufacture, the hard part is developing it in the first place then shepherding it through the FDA approval process. So they rely on patents because secrecy at that scale is impossible. For an example closer to home, did you never wonder how RMS working alone was able to put Symbolics out of…
If one guy working from a closet at MIT can destroy your multi-million dollar business, then you are in the wrong business.
You've completely missed my point. The hard part is NOT the coding. It's knowing what to code, what features your users want. Symbolics did the hard part, RMS merely copied what they (market) researched. Like the way anyone can make a copy of a DVD once a studio has actually made the film.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#83If information was of no value, then we wouldn't have insider trading laws, nor intellectual property laws. Stealth mode attempts to avert premature competition. If you don't set out to make money, then release early! Linux is an excellent example of where stealth mode would have inhibited the project.
Ah, but insider trading concerns shares, which are (usually) highly liquid and have a proven market value. As for IP, if a company is patents/trademarks/copyrights an asset, they anticipate that the asset is valuable enough to defend legally. This may or may not be the case, depending on the asset in question.
A startup's stealth product is unproven, and it may turn out that it has little or no value.
Hence: whether or not information has value depends on the information in question.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#84If you're not marketing to tech people, then you've got nothing to gain and everything to lose by talking about it on places like HN. As usual, I'll give Patrick of Bingo Card Creator as my example. He has been completely transparent with us guys about what he's doing and how he's doing it. We have a complete blueprint for how to compete with him. None of us are going to bother, because it's a very small market oppor…
Someone from the Joel on Software forums has actually copied his bingo idea. This was a couple of years ago I think.
Someone from the Joel on Software forums has actually copied his bingo idea.
Twice.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#85If you're not marketing to tech people, then you've got nothing to gain and everything to lose by talking about it on places like HN. As usual, I'll give Patrick of Bingo Card Creator as my example. He has been completely transparent with us guys about what he's doing and how he's doing it. We have a complete blueprint for how to compete with him. None of us are going to bother, because it's a very small market oppor…
Unless, of course, you are able to adapt to openness, and compensate for its costs by taking advantage of its benefits. If you can grow despite this handicap, you have an enormous competitive advantage against those who would collapse if their secrets were revealed.
Intentionally doing things the hard way can sometimes make you much more resilient, as long as you reach the endgame in one piece.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#86The reason we started in stealth mode was to hope to launch at TechCrunch50. It has since been cancelled and it's pseudo replacement, The Launch Conference, is not slated until 2011 so it's a no-go.
Since we already said "We're in stealth" it then became weird to say "Here's what we're doing" without actually launching at the same time. However, we have dropped enough hints that most people following totally get it.
Someone has actually already copied our idea (doing the same thing, with a similar name, exact same pre-launch strategy, etc) I'm 100% sure it's a copy because too many elements are EXACTLY the same and I know for sure the person was following the blog and twitter well before starting his own. In that respect, being MORE in stealth would have actually helped ward off copy-cats like that until we were ready to launch.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#87My understanding is that's it more about marketing rather than people stealing your idea. You may want to emerge on the scene with a new product and concentrate the media buzz rather than having information trickle out and have it seem like old news when you launch.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone from the Joel on Software forums has actually copied his bingo idea. This was a couple of years ago I think.
Someone from the Joel on Software forums has actually copied his bingo idea. Twice.
So, in hindsight would you change anything / be a tad more secretive? I'm guessing you wouldn't, but would love to hear your take.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#89I'm the CEO of a VC-backed financial technology company that's been in stealth mode for almost a year (coming out of the proverbial closet later on today), and we had a number of reasons for doing it.
First, we needed to give ourselves breathing room, where we weren't distracted. Requests for demos before you're ready, requests for interviews with the press, requests for information by potential investors all take time, which is time that you should better be spending building your product.
Second, we didn't want to alert our competitors to what we're doing. While we didn't believe that any of them could innovate faster than we were, we didn't want them to know what our marketing and technology direction was, and thus try to poison the market's mind to our message before we could give it in our own words. Otherwise, by the time we DID give it in our own words, people would have predisposed to think badly of it.
There's also the non-customer competition to think of: recruiters (we're in a hyper-competitive market for talent), who will know what you're doing and target your employees; VCs who will at least ponder the notion of grabbing a team and overcapitalizing them and say "do that idea and get it to market before the other guys." This might seem far-fetched, but if you don't have any real benefit in opening to the world, they're definite potential downsides.
Finally, we needed to make sure that we had something very tangible to show the world (i.e. customers) when we do come out. If we had made a big display of our story, and then gotten customers interested, and then said "thanks for your interest; come back in a year when we have a demo to show you" it would have been a complete turnoff. Most of the people who we think of as prospects will find out about the company now, and we're ready to come in and give a professional display of what we're doing.
What we DIDN'T do was go completely dark. People who we knew and trusted we've worked with the whole time. People who we felt could add value we sought out. We didn't just go into a bunker, but we didn't splash our wares out there for anyone in the world to see.
Stealth-mode is definitely an option for the right firm.
Re: Ask HN: If ideas are worthless, why are some startups in stealth mode?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one guy working from a closet at MIT can destroy your multi-million dollar business, then you are in the wrong business.
You've completely missed my point. The hard part is NOT the coding. It's knowing what to code, what features your users want. Symbolics did the hard part, RMS merely copied what they (market) researched. Like the way anyone can make a copy of a DVD once a studio has actually made the film.
Movie studios are in the business of making movies, plural. Just cause I can copy DVDs once and set up a DVD burning shop doesn't mean I can make the next movie. Movie studios have the process and equipment (cameras, sets), contacts (directors, actors) to make movies.
If the hardest part of your business can be so easily copied by someone else, then you do have a problem. If it can't be copied then you might not have a problem