But what if they steal my idea? | Hacker News Reader

But what if they steal my idea?

blog.findthetechguy.com

42 pointsjonlegend30 comments

If you're really passionate about your idea, you just want it to exist. It's almost a chore to be the one to create it yourself. For years I tried to get people to steal the idea for Stack Overflow and just build the damn thing so I didn't have to see Experts Exchange in the search results ever again.

If your whole attitude towards the idea is "this thing can make me rich" then you may not be passionate enough to be an entrepreneur.

Let me add to your point:"If you're really passionate about your idea, you just want it to exist in the best form you can visualize it in." A lot of times your idea already exists, but your vision is a better version of that idea, whether in presentation, user interface, usability, social networking, or any other aspect that you believe can be improved upon.

I agree, the concern over 'idea-theft' shouldn't be a real issue. If it is, I find it unlikely that the person with the idea will end up executing it anyway.

The way I think about it is that if the idea is so good then you should rather go implement it. There are many advantages here. First, by implementing you can validate a lot of assumptions you made. Second you got some experience in the area and likely know a bit more and your idea is more refined.

Because what's worse than someone stealing your idea: to see someone who had a similar idea as yours and they have already implemented it. It happened to me a couple of times and since then I just start thinking about how I am going to execute on my idea the moment I feel striongly about something.

Its really nice to see so many people agreeing on putting your idea out there. I am in the process of building a web portal (http://friendvestment.com) that allows people to share their ideas/startups looking for financial/technical partners. While building, one of my main fears was that most of the new people will worry about sharing their "big" idea and ask for security, etc for their ideas. But the fact that an idea has zero value if it is just an idea, seems to be resonating a lot these days through people...

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -Howard Aiken (the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer)

That's true for absolute blockbuster ideas. Ideas that are merely good, slightly novel or clever yet are good enough to form the basis of a lucrative business probably don't have to be fought for as much.

Two things:

First, some one else who overhears your idea may not exactly share your enthusiasm, even a competitor. It all depends on whether they see it as being equally groundbreaking as you do. Which may be good or bad, considering how informed you are.

Secondly, even if they do steal your idea, the end result could be quite different. Just like two people hearing a story and taking away two different interpretations of it, so shall two people who start with an idea, arrive at two totally different implementations of it.

Ideas are inherently cheap. The determination to bring it to the people, the team behind the idea and some amount of luck all play a more important part than the idea itself. Which is why YC looks more at the team dynamic and your perseverance than the idea itself (which is not to say that they dont).

> the end result could be quite different

Exactly. Notch (of Minecraft fame) recently expressed a desire to make a game that's something like a fantasy RPG version of Football Manager. I'm really, really tempted to steal the idea and make something with it.

Because I know that whatever I make with that simple core idea will be utterly unlike someone else's creation with the same idea. It's just a germ of inspiration; all the important details still need to be worked out and actually implemented. It's probably not true for every market, but similar games can happily coexist unless they're really identical clones.

That idea already exists too:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/03/wiiware-impre-6/

It's incredibly addictive, but after playing it for a while you start to run into the limitations of the game. If you could make it better and play up the indie cred you'd have a hit on your hands.

> Notch (of Minecraft fame) recently expressed a desire to make a game that's something like a fantasy RPG version of Football Manager. I'm really, really tempted to steal the idea and make something with it.

Cool, did he say that? I'm sortof building something that contains that element.

A decent metaphor for an NDA at startup might be asking someone to sign a prenup on your first date.

The field of invention attracts a lot of paranoid kooks who will die in obscurity because they won't connect with people to validate and develop their ideas.

I know a guy who's invented a cat toilet and thinks that he invented the white LED and got cheated of the discovery because somebody stole a suitcase out of his car in Manhattan.

If somebody's got an idea and they don't want to talk about it, I start to suspect that there are mental health problems involved, and I'll make sure to steer clear.

Mental health problems is a bit presumptuous I think! Keeping an idea under wraps is pretty standard behaviour, albeit misguided in many cases

There's stuff I don't talk about, but it's operational stuff, not basic concepts.

The question isn't what if they steal my idea, it's 'what if they're better at _____ than I am?'.

Then if you have any honor as a maker of things and a doer of stuff, you'll appreciate that your new thinkstuff was given a chance to become greater then you could ever make it.

I think you're exactly right that a number of people think this. It certainly crosses my mind before I bully myself into not being so pathetic... Lots of people are better at stuff then me, and the reverse is also true.

I agree that worrying whether people are smarter or more naturally gifted than you might be is fruitless.

There's something quite magical involved in making things - pure aptitude isn't a good measure for success.

But I do think it's worth worrying about covering bases and thinking ahead. Have a plan - make sure that you'll be progressing faster than your competitor, that you'll be working harder than your competitor.

If you have the initial idea - you also potentially have the spark that makes it magical. A copycat won't.

This is a remarkably common meme. Let me share a bit of Battlebots history - perhaps it will help.

Back when Battlebots was a going thing, they would have a competition which started on Tuesday (preliminaries) and ran through Sunday (finals). One could generalize about the teams as two types, people who shared information and people who didn't.

A common theme amongst the people who didn't share information was that they didn't want competitors "stealing their ideas, or developing counter measures before the match." They would go to great lengths to "hide" things (covering their robots, not talking about them, etc) and they would invariably lose. (in the 3 years we went I don't think a single "secret" team moved into the finals)

Information sharers on the other hand were communicative almost to a fault, they would tell you EVERYTHING about their creation, how long it took to build, why they think it could win, what they thought was key in various fights, etc, etc. Curiously, they often won their matches.

Spotting this trend early in my Battlebots 'career' I sought to understand the mechanism behind it.

The answer turned out to be ideas in a vacuum suck. (pun intended) Basically any idea, no matter how great, when it comes from an individual without anyone else thinking about it, there are going to be all sorts of problems with it. Because everyone thinks about things a bit differently, by saying "Hey, I've got this idea, what do you think?" you gather alternative points of view which always shed more light on the idea than you had originally. Can that douse your passion? Sure. But it can inflame it too.

I wondered about 'stealing' as well, if these folks are giving away their ideas why aren't they being stolen left and right? The insight there was that people who can execute on ideas, well they have a bazillion already, more often than not their problem is choosing rather than coming up with something. They don't steal ideas because if they did they wouldn't have time to get to it for a while and by then you probably already did it. The folks who don't have any ideas of their own, they generally can't execute for squat, further, not being someone who could develop the idea in the first place, and thus not being able to 'grow' it as you would be sharing it and listening to the feedback, they can't pull it off either.

So where does that leave us? The old saw that ideas are a dime a dozen?

Ideas are seeds, they are not process. For all the ideas I've seen go from conception to production, the actual idea part was not a statistically significant part of executing on it. Some didn't emerge as recognizable from the original concept. So generally, worrying about someone stealing your idea is overrated, worrying that you aren't up to the task of executing on your own idea, that is worth worrying about.

On a (kind of) related note, there's the story of Freddie Keppard.

Freddie was, by most accounts, paranoid - he was an incredibly talented musician but he was always afraid someone was trying to steal his material. People say he even played with a handkerchief over his fingers to conceal the notes he was playing. Because of this, the people that do remember him remember him as the guy who turned down the offer to be the first ever recorded jazz artist.

The Victor Talking Machine Company (makers of the Victrola) then made the offer to The Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

The record sold a million copies... in 1917.

Summary: the people who can execute have ideas of their own. The people who can't, don't. Seems a little too neatly black-and-white to me... yet the data supports it... A nice explanation would be that everyone has great ideas, all the time, but only those who can execute ever get anywhere with them. So it looks like only they have great ideas.

I think there are also people who can execute, but are happy to copy ideas, for the sake of money. Both imitators and employees.

> If your idea is good enough, competitors will pop and try to crush you.

Money changes this. Your theory could explain this by saying that then, the people who can't execute (and have no ideas of their own) can hire people who can execute - and who have forgone their own ideas, for a paycheck.

Aside: once your product gets going, your ideas and issues only fit with your product; they are specialized. Competitors can then only use these secondary ideas if they copy your initial idea. If they do this, they are following you, and transform you into a leader. If you keep improving, you will keep winning (these "sustaining innovations" almost always win - provided the direction you are improving in is the one that customers still want).

This is why YC looks at the team dynamic and the individuals to determine which teams to fund and help. All good ideas are worthless without proper execution and superior knowledge in the subject matter.

After reading this article, I reread the relevant portion of Jim Collins' "Good to Great". His point (proven by many, many examples) is that being first out of the gate is rarely a sustainable advantage. The key is being the best - learning from not only your mistakes, but the mistakes of those before you.

I found a summarized version of this chapter on his website...

http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/best-beats...

I have been exactly in this situation. I had an idea a few months ago, which has a great potential. My problems were the same, I don't have the necessary coding skills to turn it into reality. I needed a cofounder, and I too, had a chance of getting my idea stolen.

But I managed to overcome this. I knew I simply couldn't approach and pitch every coder I knew, because after all, it is just an idea, I had to bring something else to the table. Instead, after I pitched a few people (risking the idea, I know, but I had to) and after I thought I was ready, I went after an angel. I was lucky that the first angel I pitched the idea offered me help. He didn't try to find me a cofounder or incentivate me to code, his help was much different.

At first, his help was actually questioning the idea itself. I had to think and address the questions he raised. He also pointed me towards a couple books (The 4 Steps to Epyphany and Business Model Generation), which have been helping me alot (this is my first entrepreneurship). After those first steps, he asked for a market research that should show if the market had potential or not. I didn't even know how to do that, took me a while, but the result was very positive, he was surprised by the quality of it.

Anyway, there is a limit how far one can go without having coding skills, and I knew my limit was close, I needed a cofounder soon, so after that research, I went to pitch a friend of mine, giving him a copy of the presentation I did. He was surprised by the research, and the fact I already had an angel interested and one that was actually investing time on me (we had 4 meetings at that time already, and I think I can say that time is more expensive than money for them). I guess that this, and the fact that the idea grew alot from the first time I pitched him (he was one of those first few people that I trained my pitching) convinced him to join me in this entrepreneurship.

We are currently assembling our beta team and just started development. We are also applying to YC!

If you are thinking that I actually pitched a friend of mine, so I didn't had the whole "trust issue", I am actually living in Brazil, and my friend is in the US. We never actually met face to face before this. We used to play a game together, over 4 years ago, and kept in touch since then. All I knew about him was that he was an excellent person and coder. We just had some interesting values and other interests in common.

Execution is what matters. You can turn the greatest idea into the stupidest product in the world if you're not careful.

It's all about the execution not NDAs.

This is how I judge whether someone is an experienced entrepreneur or not. New entrepreneurs keep ideas to themselves. Experienced ones are much more open about them. I used to keep my ideas to myself, but learned that it does more harm than good. If you can trust people, they won't trust you.

There's also the option to file a patent application or otherwise build intellectual property protection where appropriate, as a supplement to trying to execute as well and as rapidly as possible.

It's not a what if, when you're idea hits the market people who want to will "steal" it.

The better question is: how do I survive when my idea is public?

Yes, that's in the article:

>If your idea is good enough, competitors will pop and try to crush you.

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