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No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

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Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#41

Post by rhizome »

paulhauggis wrote: post #25
api wrote: post #2

I have seen cases where predatory hustler types have cozied up to entrepreneurs to steal various intangibles: intellectual property, time, publicity, and yes, ideas. Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is som…

"Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is someone successfully stealing an idea. Usually anyone mediocre enough to want to lift someone else's idea isn't up to execution." What about companies that have more re…

What about companies that have more resources than the lone-app developer/company?

Organizational inertia. It takes longer to steer a large ship.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#42

Post by vm »

droithomme wrote: post #21

The article takes a truth and expands it to a generalization that is not correct. The vast majority of ideas their imaginer has conceived are useless, impractical, unrealizable, pointless, trivial, overly complex and/or their proponents incapable of either execution or funding of the idea. So whether it is secret or not does not matter. If you are a recognized leader in your field, you often find you less talented co…

Apple is an interesting example because Jobs famously stole ideas from so many others. Having gotten away with it, that's probably why he made new product development so secretive.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#43

Post by rprasad »

droithomme wrote: post #21

The article takes a truth and expands it to a generalization that is not correct. The vast majority of ideas their imaginer has conceived are useless, impractical, unrealizable, pointless, trivial, overly complex and/or their proponents incapable of either execution or funding of the idea. So whether it is secret or not does not matter. If you are a recognized leader in your field, you often find you less talented co…

Apple is so secretive with its development process for the same reason bank robbers are paranoid about other people stealing their money; it's how they got where they are and they can't imagine that there's any other way to do it.

Pretty much every major "new" Apple feature of the past decade was a standard feature in Android, Blackberry, WinMo (yes, WinMo), or Symbian, or was a feature in one or more such phones. Apple took an existing feature an iterated it to improve existing implementations.

You can identify the features that are truly unique to Apple (not based on iterating someone else's creation) because they suck. See e.g., Apple Maps, the Newton, iMac, the all-metal phone, Siri, Do-Not-Disturb, iCloud, iTV, iTunes...

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#45

Post by pekk »

api wrote: post #6
purplefruit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah - I've seen the same thing. It's more about working closely with founders and then, "oh yah that thing you were planning on adding in 6 months, I'm gonna do that now and steal your IP"

Yup. But what I've seen even more is people cozying up to new founders and mooching time, publicity, connections, and money off them. One thing to be on guard against is the human social capital version of the Ponzi scheme. In this a self-promoter makes wild promises, gets you talking them up, and then uses you as a reference to climb the social ladder and gain access to people further up the success chain. At no poi…

This isn't generally approved of? I think it is, if you make money.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#46

Post by byoung2 »

Entrepreneurs enter stealth mode because they have an idea or technology that is, in their opinion, too young for public exposure. It’s a business strategy of secrecy and seclusion meant to avoid alerting competitors to pending products or ideas.

I work for a startup in stealth mode, and we're actually not in stealth mode because we're afraid of a competitor stealing our idea. We're flying under the radar because we are doing a massive amount of scraping to amass a big data set to analyze. We respect robots.txt, but fear that if the big guys caught on they'd change their policies or block us or worse, sue us. They could stop us before we ever launch. But if we have a surprise launch and gain traction, we should be able to partner with them to get the data. The idea is that it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#47

Post by dakimov »

Nobody still has managed to copy Apple's model of success. It's true, people won't steal your ideas if you really think different. They will look at the shining truth in front of them and be not able to grasp it in their mind, because they are stupid talentless biomass.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#49

Post by spyder »

api wrote: post #2

I have seen cases where predatory hustler types have cozied up to entrepreneurs to steal various intangibles: intellectual property, time, publicity, and yes, ideas. Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is som…

For example Zynga seems quite successful at stealing/cloning game ideas. But they seems to steal only after seeing how successful other games are. Because copying an already successful idea has a lower risk then working on an unproved new idea. So only those will work on a new idea who really believes in it, which is probably the one who thinking about and working on it the most (hopefully you). So don't worry too much about others stealing your idea before you successfully execute it.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#50

Post by richardjordan »

I was at a dinner in 1999 when I first came to Silicon Valley. Don Valentine was speaking. He said something that's stuck with me:

"Entrepreneurs spend the first two years of their idea keeping it a closely guarded secret, and then spend the rest of their lives shouting it from the rooftops hoping someone cares".

Don't be stupid and needlessly expose every facet of a good idea to someone better geared up to execute on it than you are, if they're heavily incentivized to do so. But don't over-value keeping it to yourself.

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