11–20 of 114 posts
If you get out-executed, its your fault for not executing. If someone steals your execution because they patented your idea, then it might have been better to keep your mouth shut.
If the person you're talking to is really capable of executing your idea (chances of that are small to begin with), he/she is probably also smart enough that they have their own ideas they're more interested in than yours.
sure - but signing a generic NDA on a cheap piece of copy paper doesn't cost much...so w/e, if it makes someone feel better then don't worry about it.
I'd respectfully disagree -- it depends who you are. Many entrepreneurs, rightly or wrongly, will treat that NDA as their own provisional patent/trademark/copyright. What if you sign that NDA and start working on a related project? (Or an unrelated project that becomes related, or a project that independently comes up with similar ideas/tech?). The problem with signing an NDA is that by definition you're not sure wha…
Yet, when you're implementing that idea or talking to a business about buying your implementation of an idea, it is no longer a run of the mill idea. If your or your client's competitor gets wind of what you're doing, they may try to use that knowledge in their role as competitive antagonist. After all, business is war.
Further, ideas can eventually become methods honed by experience. I worked for a company that discovered attempts to sell their system had the unintended consequence of providing valuable consultation to the prospective client. The prospective client could then use hard-won information on how to roll an in-house implementation. They would do this even if the costs were higher, to avoid relying on an external service. In the end, the company ended up charging for consultation, for some reason, bit their tongue when national news credited the client for the innovation.
"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 Sittercity. She’d met Beim, a partner at Waltham-based Matrix Partners, that year at a trade show. “Nick talked about how Matrix worked with companies and founders,’’ Thiers recalls.
Marcelo was serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix, hoping to join or help start a business that Matrix would back. “I wanted to do family, health, or education - those areas were my passion,’’ Marcelo says.
Three months after the trip, Marcelo started a website, Care.com, to compete directly with Sittercity. Matrix Partners and several prominent investors poured capital into her new company - totaling more than $16 million so far. It wasn’t until late last year that Sittercity raised its first round of venture capital."
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/11/2...
A lot more backstory: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/11/th...
They could take your idea and execute it faster and maybe even better than you.
Look at Zynga: They continue to rip-off smaller developers because they have a much bigger pool of resources.
If the person you're talking to is really capable of executing your idea (chances of that are small to begin with), he/she is probably also smart enough that they have their own ideas they're more interested in than yours.
Ideas are indeed cheap and not particularly scarce. Yet, when you're implementing that idea or talking to a business about buying your implementation of an idea, it is no longer a run of the mill idea. If your or your client's competitor gets wind of what you're doing, they may try to use that knowledge in their role as competitive antagonist. After all, business is war. Further, ideas can eventually become methods h…
Not true, not even metaphorically as with team sports. War is about literal destruction whereas business is a competition in production and creativity.
You only realize how much commitment is required when you get around working on a project. People don't really have the time to build your dream. even If someone steals your idea, they will only get to the first version of your product, you have the vision for the later versions and updates (you'll always be ahead of the game).
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 there was an MVP he let people use it. Today they're based in SF, have strong revenue, a team, venture funding and hundreds of thousands of users.
The people with "stealth companies" that succeed are serial founders with money behind them. Most of the time they don't keep it under-wraps, they just don't share it online. If you ask them what they're doing they'll tell you and they're constantly getting out there talking to partners, investors, etc. Many of these companies fail such as Color.
Unless you're starting a new national airline that could be stopped if a competitor found out what you are doing and went to congress or partners to block you from entering the market.
I recommend talking to competitors if you're put in a situation with one. This is something I've done and they've been very helpful, on one occasion 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.
In the end it's about execution. Get as much as you can out of the door as you can and learn as much about the market as you can.
I actually wrote an article about this a new months ago: http://brack.in/post/32461803751/stealth-is-bullshit