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People don't steal ideas. Tell as many people as possible. Never ask someone to sign an NDA before hearing your idea, you'll instantly lose all credibility I f

People don't steal ideas. Tell as many people as possible. Never ask someone to sign an NDA before hearing your idea, you'll instantly lose all credibility I find this hard to believe and can see why experienced people would keep startup ideas close to their chest.

tashoecraft 11y ago
This is the general motto for a majority of people. If you've done several startups with big exits, then yeah keep your idea behind NDA's because you can. For everyone else, no one is going to steal your idea. Even in the remote possibility that they somehow would, then you better be more motivated then them and should be well enough ahead that they can't catch up.
krenoten 11y ago
Like everything else, it's a tradeoff. Knowledge about certain market topologies actually can constitute a tremendous advantage, although NDA's are employed far more than is actually necessary.
diminoten 11y ago
Can you elaborate at all on why?
- CheckHook 11y ago
  Somebody with more funds and connections could ship your idea before you rendering yours obsolete. In the case of a hardware based startup they could even patent the idea first.
  - beat 11y ago
    Anyone with the resources and gumption to outperform you at your own idea is someone who has their own ideas. They aren't looking for ideas to steal, because ideas frankly aren't that hard. They're looking for progress on the ideas they have.
  - diminoten 11y ago
    The whole point of the "tell everyone about your idea" mentality is that your idea isn't important/special enough to be copied. It's supposed to be humbling advice to directly contradict this argument.
billmalarky 11y ago
Ideas are mostly worthless. It's the execution that is valuable. I mean I wouldn't share my idea with Rocket Internet, but you get my point.
- smcl 11y ago
  Context: Rocket Internet is the name of the German company operated by the Samwer brothers, who have a reputation of cloning silicon valley's latest and greatest ideas for the German\EU market. Not technically doing anything illegal but certainly not held in the highest regard.
  - icefox 11y ago
    Why is it not held in high regard?
  - getsat 11y ago
    They clone successfully executed ideas, not any old idea someone has.
    - billmalarky 11y ago
      However they also consider their strength to be execution not innovation. That doesn't rule out ideas that seem like "obvious wins" but have yet to be tested. Edit: Apparently in their mission statement they claim to only use proven ideas, but I still wouldn't do business with them regardless.
- realusername 11y ago
  Even in Rocket Internet, the value is mostly in the execution, they have the resources and the expertise to copy any kind of project and they can create a whole team from scratch really quickly. And they are not going to spend anything on an unproven idea, before being copied by Rocket Internet you have definitely more important things to worry about.
  - mts_ 11y ago
VLM 11y ago
I believe the source of the confusion is the difference between your secret sauce and your elevator pitch. They're talking about the elevator pitch. If "everyone" doesn't already know your elevator pitch, or at least doesn't hear it soon, you've probably failed. They're not talking about your secret sauce like, I donno, your AWS login credentials or a really interesting development roadmap or your financial or marketing strategy or something like that. If you can't separate your secret sauce and your elevator pitch that's also a serious problem. The elevator pitch for facebook is we're gonna get prime demographic young people to look at advertisements on our social website. The secret sauce in the roll out was to try aspirational marketing where only ivy students can join and diffuse out thru cool/rich. The medium term secret sauce was something like the pages don't look as foul and obnoxious as myspace pages by dramatically limiting them and the real name policies. The longer term secret sauce is the content they view is sneakily going to be provided by the viewers for free via social networking effects luring them on.
alain94040 11y ago
People copy success, not ideas from random people they meet at parties. It's really that simple. Once your idea turns into a success (that's a lot of work), then people will start wanting to copy you. I can assure you no one wanted to copy Pinterest when it was just an idea. Most people think your idea is bad, they are just too polite to tell you.
onion2k 11y ago
Experienced people don't keep their ideas to themselves. They don't tweet about them or write blog posts about them, but they definitely do discuss them with their peers, networks and mentors. That's the critical point. You should tell people whose opinions you trust and value because without their input your idea is worth much less, and the chance of them stealing the idea and executing it better is absolutely tiny. If you genuinely trust someone there's no need for an NDA. Plus, the number of times anyone has been burned by not having an NDA in place is probably a million times fewer than a person has been helped by someone they shared their idea with. Sharing is helpful far more than it hurts anyone.
m3mnoch 11y ago
> People don't steal ideas. while it feels counter-intuitive, this is absolutely true. people don't steal your idea because theirs is always better.
gmarx 11y ago
Everyone thinks this until they start pitching ideas. No one wants to steal your idea; in fact, the most common reaction is to explain why your idea is stupid.
trustfundbaby 11y ago
Be careful about this one. Don't freely tell your idea to people who have the wherewithal to then go and build it, because they just might. What Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevoss twins should be enough of a cautionary tale for any entrepreneur.
- gscott 11y ago
  The Winklevoss twins were destined to take their good idea and turn it into crap that Zuckerberg wouldn't want to be involved with and they did eventually turn out a turd.
  - trustfundbaby 11y ago
    My original point still stands, if the Twins hadn't disclosed the idea to him ... there might be no facebook today.
    - chippy 11y ago
      Wasn't the idea out in the open before that? A social network?
      - adventured 11y ago
        Very much so. Friendster and MySpace were already prominent. Zuckerberg got the inspiration to do Facebook from the project the Winklevoss twins were trying to get off the ground, and further to do an elite social network riding off of Harvard. That was their primary contribution to what became Facebook; which is to say, not much.
geebee 11y ago
I'd tell as many people as possible about what I have built, but I might stay a little quiet about what I am building until it is ready to show. If I have what I consider to be a good idea, and I am actively pursing it (i.e., writing code to implement it), I would probably keep it close to my chest until I have something to show.
robbyking 11y ago
I agree with you 100%. I used to live in a small town and worked for a company whose CEO was infamous for stealing ideas. According to him, he wasn't actually stealing ideas, he was just implementing other people's ideas without them. The typical scenario -- according to him -- was someone would pitch an idea to him, then he would counter that they should go half on the seed money. If the person wasn't able (or willing) to come up with the money, he'd implement the idea without them.
- gaadd33 11y ago
  How many of those ideas were given the full attention of the CEO and turned into large businesses? It seems like it's easy to take an idea and start to implement it, the hard part is if it doesn't "go viral" or take off massively you now need to really invest more than just money in it.
norenjr 11y ago
People don't steal ideas, they steal proven business models
metaphorm 11y ago
I don't find it hard to believe at all. The simple fact is ideas are cheap and everyone is full of them. Execution matters. The idea does not. An NDA is appropriate for something that is a bit closer to fully baked than just an idea. If you've got a proprietary algorithm or business database that you don't want to leak, then an NDA is appropriate. If you're demanding an NDA just to talk about an idea that you haven't even started working on yet then you're just wasting time and oxygen.
gedrap 11y ago
An idea alone is very hard to copy unless you have deep expertise in that area and can quickly understand the problems it solves. For example, you describe me an idea for some SaaS startup targeted at constructions companies. I have no clue about this industry, so no matter how well you describe it to me I simply can't judge it and definitely can't implement it. Even if you are an expert on the target audience and their problems, the small details that make the difference, you can call it vision, are normally not part of the 'idea'.
chippy 11y ago
I think people are missing a key point a little bit. It's not about telling people your idea, giving them your idea, it's about getting feedback from them, its about learning from others. Ideas get better when more people think about it.
jarfil 11y ago
The idea stealing myth originates from people (cubicle drones) who have so few ideas of their own, that when they finally have one, since it seems so scarce to them, it obviously must be valuable and thus worth "stealing". Unfortunately, this kind of people also lack the ideas necessary to realize the few "precious" ones they have. Who does have a chance of realizing them, are people with lots of ideas, also about how to actually implement ideas. However, when you reach and surpass the "idea a day" treshold, while being able to implement maybe 1 or 10 each month, you get to discard hundreds of your own ideas each year, making them pretty much worthless. So you should never be afraid of sharing your ideas; whoever you're telling them to, will either not care, or fail miserably trying to "steal" them. In each case you're safe. As for the monthly surplus ideas, if you're not implementing them, you risk nothing by sharing them either... except maybe feeling dumb in the off chance of seeing someone else successfully implementing an idea you thought was worthless. PS: in the even rarer case of sharing an idea you're implementing, and someone else beating you to it... you suck, do something at what you suck less.
- alvarosm 11y ago
  Yeah, exactly. If you have just a couple ideas and you think they're great what are the chances they're actually great? you should have dozens and be pretty sceptical and critical to filter out the really good ones.
  - kpommerenke 11y ago
    Ideas that you keep in your head and don't execute on are like brain crack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
- brc 11y ago
  All true, and I would add that the sharing of ideas helps you to refine them, in the same way that describing a programming problem to someone else often helps you resolve it, because you have to structure the problem in language that makes sense to the other person. Sometimes simply structuring a concept in a way suitable for speech presents obvious answers that weren't possible when it was a ton of internal dialogue.
alvarosm 11y ago
It is often inexperienced people or "business" guys without any technical background who think they have the billion dollar idea when in fact there are a thousand people who had the idea before who couldn't or wouldn't execute. So, that advice goes for them: forget NDAs and get good feedback. On the other hand, if you really know what you're doing, you'll know if the idea has a lot of intrinsic value and/or potential for being easily stolen (infrequent and often unpredictable in those rare cases), and who you can to talk to about it. More often than not, "ideas" are pretty simple and valueless and even the best execution can't do much to keep the business afloat. Many successful ideas come from something as simple as merging several different fields (only an expert in both fields is likely to come up with it), or simply from some enabling technologies maturing enough to have everyone and their dog execute the ideas they had but couldn't build successfully before (tablets come to mind, many mobile apps and so on). Experienced people would know what to do with their ideas. Who to talk to to get advice, what to keep close to their chest or not. Others would benefit greatly from any advice at all they could get and for that they need to run the very small risk of telling their idea to others.

tashoecraft 11y ago

This is the general motto for a majority of people. If you've done several startups with big exits, then yeah keep your idea behind NDA's because you can. For everyone else, no one is going to steal your idea. Even in the remote possibility that they somehow would, then you better be more motivated then them and should be well enough ahead that they can't catch up.

krenoten 11y ago

Like everything else, it's a tradeoff. Knowledge about certain market topologies actually can constitute a tremendous advantage, although NDA's are employed far more than is actually necessary.

diminoten 11y ago

Can you elaborate at all on why?

CheckHook 11y ago
Somebody with more funds and connections could ship your idea before you rendering yours obsolete. In the case of a hardware based startup they could even patent the idea first.
- beat 11y ago
  Anyone with the resources and gumption to outperform you at your own idea is someone who has their own ideas. They aren't looking for ideas to steal, because ideas frankly aren't that hard. They're looking for progress on the ideas they have.
- diminoten 11y ago
  The whole point of the "tell everyone about your idea" mentality is that your idea isn't important/special enough to be copied. It's supposed to be humbling advice to directly contradict this argument.

billmalarky 11y ago

Ideas are mostly worthless. It's the execution that is valuable. I mean I wouldn't share my idea with Rocket Internet, but you get my point.

smcl 11y ago
Context: Rocket Internet is the name of the German company operated by the Samwer brothers, who have a reputation of cloning silicon valley's latest and greatest ideas for the German\EU market. Not technically doing anything illegal but certainly not held in the highest regard.
- icefox 11y ago
  Why is it not held in high regard?
- getsat 11y ago
  They clone successfully executed ideas, not any old idea someone has.
  - billmalarky 11y ago
    However they also consider their strength to be execution not innovation. That doesn't rule out ideas that seem like "obvious wins" but have yet to be tested. Edit: Apparently in their mission statement they claim to only use proven ideas, but I still wouldn't do business with them regardless.
realusername 11y ago
Even in Rocket Internet, the value is mostly in the execution, they have the resources and the expertise to copy any kind of project and they can create a whole team from scratch really quickly. And they are not going to spend anything on an unproven idea, before being copied by Rocket Internet you have definitely more important things to worry about.
- mts_ 11y ago

VLM 11y ago

I believe the source of the confusion is the difference between your secret sauce and your elevator pitch. They're talking about the elevator pitch. If "everyone" doesn't already know your elevator pitch, or at least doesn't hear it soon, you've probably failed. They're not talking about your secret sauce like, I donno, your AWS login credentials or a really interesting development roadmap or your financial or marketing strategy or something like that. If you can't separate your secret sauce and your elevator pitch that's also a serious problem. The elevator pitch for facebook is we're gonna get prime demographic young people to look at advertisements on our social website. The secret sauce in the roll out was to try aspirational marketing where only ivy students can join and diffuse out thru cool/rich. The medium term secret sauce was something like the pages don't look as foul and obnoxious as myspace pages by dramatically limiting them and the real name policies. The longer term secret sauce is the content they view is sneakily going to be provided by the viewers for free via social networking effects luring them on.

alain94040 11y ago

People copy success, not ideas from random people they meet at parties. It's really that simple. Once your idea turns into a success (that's a lot of work), then people will start wanting to copy you. I can assure you no one wanted to copy Pinterest when it was just an idea. Most people think your idea is bad, they are just too polite to tell you.

onion2k 11y ago

Experienced people don't keep their ideas to themselves. They don't tweet about them or write blog posts about them, but they definitely do discuss them with their peers, networks and mentors. That's the critical point. You should tell people whose opinions you trust and value because without their input your idea is worth much less, and the chance of them stealing the idea and executing it better is absolutely tiny. If you genuinely trust someone there's no need for an NDA. Plus, the number of times anyone has been burned by not having an NDA in place is probably a million times fewer than a person has been helped by someone they shared their idea with. Sharing is helpful far more than it hurts anyone.

m3mnoch 11y ago

> People don't steal ideas. while it feels counter-intuitive, this is absolutely true. people don't steal your idea because theirs is always better.

gmarx 11y ago

Everyone thinks this until they start pitching ideas. No one wants to steal your idea; in fact, the most common reaction is to explain why your idea is stupid.

trustfundbaby 11y ago

Be careful about this one. Don't freely tell your idea to people who have the wherewithal to then go and build it, because they just might. What Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevoss twins should be enough of a cautionary tale for any entrepreneur.

gscott 11y ago
The Winklevoss twins were destined to take their good idea and turn it into crap that Zuckerberg wouldn't want to be involved with and they did eventually turn out a turd.
- trustfundbaby 11y ago
  My original point still stands, if the Twins hadn't disclosed the idea to him ... there might be no facebook today.
  - chippy 11y ago
    Wasn't the idea out in the open before that? A social network?
    - adventured 11y ago
      Very much so. Friendster and MySpace were already prominent. Zuckerberg got the inspiration to do Facebook from the project the Winklevoss twins were trying to get off the ground, and further to do an elite social network riding off of Harvard. That was their primary contribution to what became Facebook; which is to say, not much.

geebee 11y ago

I'd tell as many people as possible about what I have built, but I might stay a little quiet about what I am building until it is ready to show. If I have what I consider to be a good idea, and I am actively pursing it (i.e., writing code to implement it), I would probably keep it close to my chest until I have something to show.

robbyking 11y ago

I agree with you 100%. I used to live in a small town and worked for a company whose CEO was infamous for stealing ideas. According to him, he wasn't actually stealing ideas, he was just implementing other people's ideas without them. The typical scenario -- according to him -- was someone would pitch an idea to him, then he would counter that they should go half on the seed money. If the person wasn't able (or willing) to come up with the money, he'd implement the idea without them.

gaadd33 11y ago
How many of those ideas were given the full attention of the CEO and turned into large businesses? It seems like it's easy to take an idea and start to implement it, the hard part is if it doesn't "go viral" or take off massively you now need to really invest more than just money in it.

norenjr 11y ago

People don't steal ideas, they steal proven business models

metaphorm 11y ago

I don't find it hard to believe at all. The simple fact is ideas are cheap and everyone is full of them. Execution matters. The idea does not. An NDA is appropriate for something that is a bit closer to fully baked than just an idea. If you've got a proprietary algorithm or business database that you don't want to leak, then an NDA is appropriate. If you're demanding an NDA just to talk about an idea that you haven't even started working on yet then you're just wasting time and oxygen.

gedrap 11y ago

An idea alone is very hard to copy unless you have deep expertise in that area and can quickly understand the problems it solves. For example, you describe me an idea for some SaaS startup targeted at constructions companies. I have no clue about this industry, so no matter how well you describe it to me I simply can't judge it and definitely can't implement it. Even if you are an expert on the target audience and their problems, the small details that make the difference, you can call it vision, are normally not part of the 'idea'.

chippy 11y ago

I think people are missing a key point a little bit. It's not about telling people your idea, giving them your idea, it's about getting feedback from them, its about learning from others. Ideas get better when more people think about it.

jarfil 11y ago

The idea stealing myth originates from people (cubicle drones) who have so few ideas of their own, that when they finally have one, since it seems so scarce to them, it obviously must be valuable and thus worth "stealing". Unfortunately, this kind of people also lack the ideas necessary to realize the few "precious" ones they have. Who does have a chance of realizing them, are people with lots of ideas, also about how to actually implement ideas. However, when you reach and surpass the "idea a day" treshold, while being able to implement maybe 1 or 10 each month, you get to discard hundreds of your own ideas each year, making them pretty much worthless. So you should never be afraid of sharing your ideas; whoever you're telling them to, will either not care, or fail miserably trying to "steal" them. In each case you're safe. As for the monthly surplus ideas, if you're not implementing them, you risk nothing by sharing them either... except maybe feeling dumb in the off chance of seeing someone else successfully implementing an idea you thought was worthless. PS: in the even rarer case of sharing an idea you're implementing, and someone else beating you to it... you suck, do something at what you suck less.

alvarosm 11y ago
Yeah, exactly. If you have just a couple ideas and you think they're great what are the chances they're actually great? you should have dozens and be pretty sceptical and critical to filter out the really good ones.
- kpommerenke 11y ago
  Ideas that you keep in your head and don't execute on are like brain crack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
brc 11y ago
All true, and I would add that the sharing of ideas helps you to refine them, in the same way that describing a programming problem to someone else often helps you resolve it, because you have to structure the problem in language that makes sense to the other person. Sometimes simply structuring a concept in a way suitable for speech presents obvious answers that weren't possible when it was a ton of internal dialogue.

alvarosm 11y ago

It is often inexperienced people or "business" guys without any technical background who think they have the billion dollar idea when in fact there are a thousand people who had the idea before who couldn't or wouldn't execute. So, that advice goes for them: forget NDAs and get good feedback. On the other hand, if you really know what you're doing, you'll know if the idea has a lot of intrinsic value and/or potential for being easily stolen (infrequent and often unpredictable in those rare cases), and who you can to talk to about it. More often than not, "ideas" are pretty simple and valueless and even the best execution can't do much to keep the business afloat. Many successful ideas come from something as simple as merging several different fields (only an expert in both fields is likely to come up with it), or simply from some enabling technologies maturing enough to have everyone and their dog execute the ideas they had but couldn't build successfully before (tablets come to mind, many mobile apps and so on). Experienced people would know what to do with their ideas. Who to talk to to get advice, what to keep close to their chest or not. Others would benefit greatly from any advice at all they could get and for that they need to run the very small risk of telling their idea to others.