On related note, I let fear of plagiarism be an excuse not to publish content to blogs. I've since found free tools (i.e. Copyscape) that help protect content creators.
Nobody’s going to steal your idea
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#62If 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.
That depends. I know that HN is more focused on ideas that boil down to making a website, the concept isn't true in the general case. For example, if you're doing ASIC/FPGA optimization, coming up with an idea is hard, and implementing one is (relatively) easy.
I used to be an IC designer - ICs are an exception. There are some exceptions of course - medical drugs are another that come to mind.
Most business ideas are pretty simple though, even outside the internet world. Eg. Sam Walton -> just wanted to build a better retail store, turned into Walmart. Howard Schulz -> better coffee shop -> Starbucks. Warren Buffett -> stockpicking -> BRK. And so on. Execution on these was the hard part.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#63There is definitely a great divide on whether to keep an idea secret or not. Locations and the social circles you are apart of matter quite a bit; I live in SF and work in PA and I'm surrounded by very capable people. I have had ideas stolen that I was in mid process of building, particularly by an EIR's (entrepreneur in residence) who had better resources than I and were able to execute much faster. And it turned ou…
I'm not sure Apple's a great example. They keep their ideas secret for marketing reasons: they get immense amounts of free advertising by being dramatic about new product launches. And because they burnish their brand by maximizing their number of public hit products. (They also keep some details of incremental improvements secret because it's a highly competitive market, but that's different than stealing ideas for new products.)
In fact, I'm having trouble thinking of a "big new idea" product they did recently. They were years late to the MP3 player and smartphone markets, for example.
Since the idea's out, would you mind saying more about the idea that was stolen?
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#64I 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 think we can put it another way: An idea is worthless until someone is willing to pay for it.
Worth is in the eye of the beholder. To me, both of your ideas really are worthless (no offence). I wouldn't be inclined to pay for either of them, and do not really have an interest in working on either. That said, the market is vast. If you can find someone to pay you for the idea then I will agree that the idea may have value.
The problem at this stage is that without any execution on those ideas, both are equally likely to fail. For all we know the market for pachyderm telephones is large and nobody wants SMS downtime messages. There has been no market research done at the point of idea conception. Doing so leads into execution, where the value is generally thought to be created.
The other problem is that everyone with skills to build such ideas already have a million of their own. Most wouldn't even consider buying an idea from someone else. If the chances of failure is high, at least you are working on your own failure and not someone else's. That is why ideas are generally considered worthless.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#65An 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…
From the article quoted above ...
"... Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” ... "
I don't think either party had any delusion about the purpose of the "meeting".
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#66I 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 read this article awhile ago and it really fits what you're saying pretty well:
The idea is that an idea does has a worth, but it's small, and it behaves as a multiplier to the execution, which is orders of magnitude larger. For example a good idea is a "3" but a good execution is worth $1,000,000.
A good idea with a mediocre execution is worth a whole lot less than a mediocre idea with a good execution.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#67... but somebody can out-execute you on your own idea.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#68I 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…
You're arguing against a straw man that isn't related to the article.
The article DOES NOT claim ideas have no value. It claims it is unlikely anyone will steal your idea.
I have a large porch swing on my front porch. It obviously isn't worthless, but it is still unlikely to be stolen.
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#69I 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…
PagerDuty! (I work there.)
Re: Nobody’s going to steal your idea
#70I 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…
Think of the idea as a multiplier for how well you execute on ideas.
if you idea sucks, it's a zero, and no matter how well you execute, you arent going to end up with a successful product.
If you have a great idea, let's say it's a 1, your execution is poor, you don't fully realize the potential of the idea.
The problem is that you don't know whether the idea is good until you execute it (since the end result is a zero until you do something). And while you can weed out some really bad ideas by executing them a little bit, it's a lot of investment to determine if an idea is actually no good or you just haven't worked on it hard enough.
There are so many ideas out there, it would just be too much work for people to start working on every idea they've heard to see if there is something to it. Plus, people are usually biased in that they have their own ideas they are interested in executing on, and so yours aren't as attractive since they haven't thought about them as much as you have