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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

+1 thanks for the explanation!

And regarding this:

> Edited to add: You're also asking a lot of people in here to name specific companies even if they can't give you huge lists. This space is super heavy on NDAs (and trigger happy on enforcing them). If you've actually worked in it, there's simply no way you're able to name drop legally.

I understand that an NDA would prevent you from naming your own company or your suppliers and clients, but surely it doesn't prevent you from listing some other companies in this space that you know of (including but not limited to your competitors)? I don't understand why you shouldn't be able to name any company just because you've worked at one of them.

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Every company I know in the space is a company that we've had at least preliminary conversations with (seeing if there's any potential relationship to either purchase from or sell to that company).

Just having that conversation required getting a mutual NDA in place, since the conversation involves revealing your capabilities (even if not your sources). And that's assuming you're even aware of all the NDAs your company has signed with other companies, which isn't always the case. Speculation or name dropping in public could violate an NDA you're not even aware of, then you find yourself having to defend your speculation as just that, rather than as revealing proprietary knowledge (that you didn't actually have but your company did).

At the end of the day, it's easier to default to speaking in generalizations rather than risk the potential repercussions of not doing that. :-/

> Just having that conversation required getting a mutual NDA in place, since the conversation involves revealing your capabilities (even if not your sources). And that's assuming you're even aware of all the NDAs your company has signed with other companies, which isn't always the case.

Interesting. Eight years ago I worked as a buyer for the aggregator with the largest criminal database and I don't remember having to sign an NDA during those sorts of talks. It's possible I've forgotten, but I think it was more a matter of people wanting to know our coverage as much as we wanted to know theirs.

As an aside, the value of those talks wasn't usually in acquiring the data, except maybe in the short term. We always preferred to go directly to the source. The value was simply in learning that the data from a specific source was even available. In a few instances, that got pretty frustrating, since I knew that the seller of the data was scraping a given court's website against that court's wishes (and the TOS on the website), with all associated problems with accuracy and ethics that entails.

Okay, I see. But somehow someone in your company found out about them before they could sign mutual NDAs, right? How does that happen? Do you just need a higher-up who's friends with the right people?

Imagine the legal liability you'd incur if the layperson could track the source of inaccurate data, then proved in court it kept them from getting a loan.

Those are provable damages, and maybe slander if they can convince the court they're a publication

Another reason to be NDAed up.

i imagine its similar to how drugs and weapons dealers meet. when you know seedy people, you get connected. birds of a feather and all that.

Go to an industry site like www.napbs.com and look around.

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