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Nobody’s going to steal your idea
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#32I don't agree. Mainly because I don't agree with the premise that ideas are worthless - something that is echoed around all the time. Ideas being worthless is the lazy and easy way to explain to someone why they should get feedback on their idea. The reality is ideas do have value. We've got a great idea for a new product, and we're not telling anyone about it. That's because our idea has value and we don't want anyo…
I would say, your point is right too that "better be safe than sorry". On the other hand I agree with author too that - Today in the world, almost everybody has some idea. It's the execution and in fact smart execution that matters. That doesn't mean that we start shouting our ideas but the thing is smart execution and time to market have so fearsome competition today that "ideas" in itself have lesser value these days.
That is why we started putting our ideas (for free : ) on - http://syncfin.com
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#33Mohnish Pabrai explains this concept of "cloning" really well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBXRNH9VfhA&feature=youtu...
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#34I deal with this every day when I meet founders. They tell me that they're keeping their idea under-wraps because they don't want anyone to steal it or pass it on to someone who could. Not once has any of these people succeeded with this approach. On the other hand, Joel at Bufferapp who I've been watching since the early days was very public. Got out there to find out if people wanted the product pre-MVP and when th…
"one helped me out without intending to by talking about why one feature probably wouldn't work without a tweak because they found out it doesn't work without X."
Didn't you just disprove your whole point there. Your competitor revealed his/her ideas about how to solve a problem (that you hadn't even foreseen yet going by your description) and in the process hurt him/herself in the marketplace. Your advice of meeting and talking openly with your competitors didn't really work out for that person.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#35I don't agree. Mainly because I don't agree with the premise that ideas are worthless - something that is echoed around all the time. Ideas being worthless is the lazy and easy way to explain to someone why they should get feedback on their idea. The reality is ideas do have value. We've got a great idea for a new product, and we're not telling anyone about it. That's because our idea has value and we don't want anyo…
If the value of the idea is trivially obvious, then so is the idea itself.
There are ideas and there are ideas. If it is the paradigm shifting kind, it is probably controversial, non intuitive and may not even make sense within the context of the status quo (e.g., Information Theory, Earth is round, Quantum Mechanics). You really have to shove them down the people's throats to gain any support. You don't worry about these getting stolen, because, most likely, you are getting ridiculed for stating them anyway.
Then there is the iterative kind of ideas (e.g., service which sends you an SMS when your website goes offline). Marginally innovative, just the organic next step from where we are. They are worth something, but probably much less than what people think. Surely you can make a lot of money with these kind of ideas, but the chances are that many other people have come up with this "idea" as well, and it will be up to luck (and execution) to determine who makes the bank.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#36I deal with this every day when I meet founders. They tell me that they're keeping their idea under-wraps because they don't want anyone to steal it or pass it on to someone who could. Not once has any of these people succeeded with this approach. On the other hand, Joel at Bufferapp who I've been watching since the early days was very public. Got out there to find out if people wanted the product pre-MVP and when th…
"one helped me out without intending to by talking about why one feature probably wouldn't work without a tweak because they found out it doesn't work without X." Didn't you just disprove your whole point there. Your competitor revealed his/her ideas about how to solve a problem (that you hadn't even foreseen yet going by your description) and in the process hurt him/herself in the marketplace. Your advice of meeting…
No because they also received value from me explaining what we're building and he was very interested by it. They are a much bigger market-leading competitor so it's not a case that people will deal with every day.
I can understand why someone wouldn't want to talk to a competitor but not when dealing with normal founders, users, etc. As you pointed out it can be risky but overall being open usually leads to a net positive.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#37An obvious counterexample is sittercity/care.com "On July 20, 2006, Sheila Marcelo and Nick Beim flew from Boston to Chicago to visit a company called Sittercity. The business, which charged parents to access an online database of sitters and nannies, had been launched in Boston five years earlier. “We took the meeting to talk about an investment,’’ says Genevieve Thiers, the Boston College alumnae who founded Sitter…
Do you really think "babysitters, online" is a novel, protectable idea?
And regardless, to start a company you have to let people know what your company does. You can't just say "give us money, we can't tell you why but it's totally worth it". So the idea has to be released eventually. What would you have had them do differently?
These guys were around for 5 years and somebody else beat them within 3 months? That's not a stolen idea, that's a failure of execution.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#38I actually did have someone steal my idea. I was interviewing for a technical co-founder and talked to a guy who seemed really interested. However, after a couple of conversations I got a weird vibe from him and went with someone else. (Oh, and I had $1M in funding at this point, & I was looking for a full partner, not someone to "just build my idea.")
A few months later I find that he has started a similar company, with a similar name, and is out raising money. He even said that he came up with the idea when he was 'inspired' by his young daughter. (Dragging your kids into your lie is always scummy.)
(This was for a very unusual startup idea, btw, not a game or social app, etc. I am also a recognized expert in this field, 15+ years of experience, national newspaper/magazine profiles, blah blah blah.)
He ended up getting money in Singapore and launching a pretty sucky site that got zero traction. It's been a couple years now and I haven't seen anything else from him (but I've been too busy with my company to really look).
At the time, I was LIVID but after I cooled off I realized that 1) it was pretty great external validation and 2) someone who would "steal" my idea (and make up a story about it!) would never be able to execute, and I was proven right about both things.
My company is now nearly five years old and we're working on our third product extension off the original idea. :-)
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#39An obvious counterexample is sittercity/care.com "On July 20, 2006, Sheila Marcelo and Nick Beim flew from Boston to Chicago to visit a company called Sittercity. The business, which charged parents to access an online database of sitters and nannies, had been launched in Boston five years earlier. “We took the meeting to talk about an investment,’’ says Genevieve Thiers, the Boston College alumnae who founded Sitter…
Heck, go back to when Steve Jobs visited the Xerox PARC labs in late 1979 and saw the mouse and windows-computing for the first time.[1] Not that PARC was doing anything commercial with it, but those ideas definitely got incorporated into Apple's products.
Jobs goes to PARC on a Thursday, and on Friday afternoon he is ordering one of his people to create a mouse for him. Now Xerox had invested in Apple and Apple got a tour of their research lab in exchange for that investment, but ideas do have value if you're not executing them efficiently and someone else can.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#40Note that there is a difference between trade secret and a cool idea you have. If you have an idea that has been implemented, it's a really smart plan to keep it secret: if the idea's found out, your competition will also likely know how valuable it is. They'll know it's worth implementing. But unimplemented ideas are only as useful as their implementation. And getting people to go along with your ideas? Well, that's where ramming it down their throats comes in. And if your idea is obvious, well, it's not really a trade secret either.
And a trade secret's valuable because it has at least some protection legally.