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The Cult of the NDA
Anonymous Coward writes "After looking at hundreds of business plans during the tech boom of the late 1990's, and starting my own company two years ago, I've long been bothered by the near obsession with secrecy shown by many tech startups. This is especially striking considering how few startups are actually pursuing unique ideas. I finally wrote an article about this, The Cult of the NDA, where I argue that too much secrecy can actually hurt a company's chances. Open-source startups, anyone?"
The idea is somewhat linear, just applying software on a large scale to an area which has never had it before, but the execution is vastly more difficult.
Through luck and creativity, it appears that I've found various ways to execute this. Two and a half years to build one part of the software, another couple of years of building and testing, two years of working for "the man" to pay off my debts run up during the first four years.
Now I've got this fairly decent product which I've just started to roll out to some large customers. And I've had many people sign NDA's along the way. If they are violated, would I have the money to pursue the violators? No, of course not. So that makes them worthless, right?
No, they're not, because people don't know that I don't have the money to fight. So NDA's are just a harmless bluff for me and probably everyone else. But in the interests of thoroughness I should use them.
Yes they're useless. Yes you should use them. Not everything has to be useful to be used.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
>I've found that for the most part, people like their own ideas, and just aren't much inclined to steal mine
I can't remember who said this:
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are actually good and helpful, you'll have to cram them down people's throats at gunpoint."
Don Lancaster has made the same point about secrecy as the article did. There's only one smartest person in the world, the odds are overwhelming that it's not you, your idea will have occurred to someone else, and the way to make money is to kill bad ideas quickly.
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -Howard Aiken
If you can express your whole "special" idea in a concise enough way that someone who hears it can "steal" it, your idea wasn't worth anything.
Fedex "delivers packages around the world in one day", Starbucks "sells 'gourmet' coffee", and Amazon "sells books on the internet". That's all pretty trivial stuff and, on paper, easily copied.
But how can Fedex do it? Their hub system and computerized inventory system are key to the idea but aren't obvious from simply hearing "Deliver packages". And selling books online is easy but building a community of people to review all the material and offering referral bonuses aren't obvious from hearing about the idea yet are crucial to the company's success.
If your idea is simpler than that, and thus more easily copied, it's probably not an idea to base a business on, it's probably a sideline for an existing business with the resources to exploit it quickly. A product idea, not a business idea.
Summary: "Selling Ice to Desert Nomads" isn't intellectual property, it's not a business idea.