No One Will Steal Your Big Idea | Hacker News Reader

No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

cognoscenti.wbur.org

127 pointseathas68 comments

Be careful not to confuse IDEAS with OPPORTUNITIES.

With caveats, you can generally be loose with ideas.

Opportunities are a very different matter. Opportunities represent an immediate or near-immediate path to revenue. They are stolen every day.

What's the difference?

IDEA:

Let's make a new toaster oven to sell at Walmart.

OPPORTUNITY:

I just met with a Joe Buyer at Walmart. They need a toaster oven with a digital timer to retail for no more than $59. They are willing to issue a PO for 100K units. They are actively looking for one. If they can see a viable prototype they'll issue the PO and close the deal.

I hope you can spot the difference between the two. Which one would you steal?

I'm sad there is no way to upvote this more than once. That's all you need to know about startup ideas in a few lines of text.

I have seen cases where predatory hustler types have cozied up to entrepreneurs to steal various intangibles: intellectual property, time, publicity, and yes, ideas.

Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is someone successfully stealing an idea. Usually anyone mediocre enough to want to lift someone else's idea isn't up to execution.

What I'm talking about here is more the personal one-on-one long-con... the predatory narcissistic types who hang around the business community, make grandiose claims, and then deliver nothing or worse mooch time/money off entrepreneurs. Stealth-mode won't protect you from this. Street smarts and skepticism will.

Edit: Here's a bit of advice for avoiding these gadflies:

Get specific. Who are you? Why are you interested? What do you want to do and what do you want in return? If they claim to be an investor, are they an angel? Accredited? With what firm? What else have they invested in? If they don't get specific back, they are blowing hot air.

Avoid "business consultants" who talk about "accelerating" you or "taking you to the next level" without getting very very very specific about how. Most of these people are bozos. Even if they're not bozos, usually they are not who an early-stage startup needs.

If someone talks fast and uses a lot of buzzwords, this is a bad sign.

Check references carefully. Keep in mind that narcissistic self-promoter types can be extremely creative about making a nothing look like a something.

If you do get involved with someone, drop them and move on if they don't deliver. Don't ever take hot air as a substitute for real results.

If you hang around the startup culture and talk up your idea you will run into these people and they will at the very least waste your time.

Also: the "scene" will kill your startup. Concentrate on executing and ignore the "startup scene."

Yah - I've seen the same thing. It's more about working closely with founders and then, "oh yah that thing you were planning on adding in 6 months, I'm gonna do that now and steal your IP"

Yup. But what I've seen even more is people cozying up to new founders and mooching time, publicity, connections, and money off them.

One thing to be on guard against is the human social capital version of the Ponzi scheme. In this a self-promoter makes wild promises, gets you talking them up, and then uses you as a reference to climb the social ladder and gain access to people further up the success chain. At no point is anything actually done or delivered to anyone. The end-game for such a person is to worm their way into a successful venture at just the right moment to hitch a ride... such as at the moment of a liquidity event. Another goal can be for them to get their "stink" on as many entrepreneurs as possible-- get their names on contracts, etc.-- so that if someone is successful they can come along later and sue. If they time it right, they might catch you at a liquidity point and you'll pay them off to make them go away... very similar to a patent troll.

These people will waste your time and make you look like a jerk. You'd be surprised how many of these there are, especially if you're in a "startup hub."

This isn't generally approved of? I think it is, if you make money.

There's nothing wrong with networking of course, but there is something wrong with claiming relationships that don't exist, claiming to own things you don't own, lying about your accomplishments, and damaging other peoples' reputations in the process. The line is a bit fuzzy, but there are definitely a lot of things that are at best unprofessional and slimy.

People who just do this and nothing else usually don't cause much overt harm, but they do waste peoples' time and time is quite valuable. It's in the slimy ass-clowning category.

Exactly. Every time I've seen someone attempt to 'steal' an idea, they aren't up to the challenge of executing on it. I believe the reason for this is that there a very strong correlation between the type of personality that would consider stealing someone else's idea and then not wanting to put in the hard work of making it a reality.

That's not to say that it doesn't happen. I myself have seen someone do something I've admired and then incorporated that practice into my own procedures. That's not outright theft of an idea, but it's fairly close. Of course if this type of thing didn't occur then civilization would stop advancing.

A good case in point might be the cruchpad (http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/crunchpad-end/). Of course that went beyond theft of just an idea, but the principal still holds.

I think you're exactly right: the danger isn't outright theft, but inspiring something even better. As you say, that's progress. SOTSOG.

But it would be nice to reap some reward for your blood, sweat and tears; to at least have your day in the sun before being eclipsed.

Could you give a quick summary of what happened? Reading the post and the HN comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968018) gave me a mixed picture

As I understand it, techcrunch was designing a tablet in partnership with a design firm. The firm ripped off the design and created a competing tablet.

It was called the joojoo but they didn't get it out until ariund when the iPad was released and it couldn't compete at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo has the history

On January 9th 2012, Fusion Garage confirmed that the company had gone into liquidation owing creditors $40 million.

Seems like a fitting conclusion given everything else that has happened

"Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is someone successfully stealing an idea. Usually anyone mediocre enough to want to lift someone else's idea isn't up to execution."

What about companies that have more resources than the lone-app developer/company? If it's a good idea, they could have it to market before you even have a chance to finish. Yes, eventually this might happen anyway, but why give them a chance to get it out there before you?

What about companies that have more resources than the lone-app developer/company?

Organizational inertia. It takes longer to steer a large ship.

It doesn't need a large ship. It can be a dedicated smaller team but one fully equipped with more resources (servers, a marketing department) compared to the start up.

Just to take a decision on copying the idea, creating the team, how many people, degrees of independance, internal politic on who is on charge of tha team.... Only with that it is going to take at least 6 months in a big company. If not a year... then when they have created the product, all the departments will want to have a part of the pie. So te dance begins again.

OK, a larger ship, which is the topic at hand. More resources means more complexity.

Just last night my girlfriend was up for a couple hours late on a Saturday night PM'ing a bugfix for a missing ellipsis in her (very large and technologically famous) company's website's "...More Info" link. It took 10 hours to get her off the hook, and it's still not fixed.

> What's even more rare is someone successfully stealing an idea. Usually anyone mediocre enough to want to lift someone else's idea isn't up to execution.

That applies when the idea is something genuinely challenging.

But what if it's just a specific need felt by a specific group of people that can be fulfilled with a CRUD app. That's a viable business, but the product can be implemented by just about any developer.

Then it will be built, released by the secretive party, and promptly copied post-hoc. If something is simple enough to be knocked off easily, "when" it happens is largely irrelevant.

There's a lot of difference -- i.e.work -- between a CRUD app and a successful business. The experience has shown that the first version of anything is rarely successful; it's only after a lot of testing and tweaking that you find the right formula (and then you still have to keep working on it).

Anyway, an idea that a) has the concrete people with a concrete need, b) can be (at least initially) solved with a CRUD app and c) hasn't been (successfully) tried before is so rare that you probably have more chance to literally stumble on a buried treasure. Of course we would all like to have an idea like this, but the problem is that you can't possibly know that you do until you execute and test it -- in nearly all cases it will turn out that you were wrong on b) and/or c) above.

Well, we can't all be math gurus :p

But it really does work that you figure out a group of people with a need, and then fulfill that need the way they want. BingoCardCreator is a good example of this. There are countless opportunities if you just find them, and even having competitors in the space is not an obstacle - everyone does sales anyway.

For example Zynga seems quite successful at stealing/cloning game ideas. But they seems to steal only after seeing how successful other games are. Because copying an already successful idea has a lower risk then working on an unproved new idea. So only those will work on a new idea who really believes in it, which is probably the one who thinking about and working on it the most (hopefully you). So don't worry too much about others stealing your idea before you successfully execute it.

Do you call that successful?

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AZNGA

Success is relative. Most startups fail long before going public.

Interestingly, I've been reading a book on the Wright brothers. Even experimenters who were aware of the Wright's progress before they flew were unable to capitalize on the (correct) Wright ideas, because they didn't believe them, or they had to do it their own way, or whatever.

The article takes a truth and expands it to a generalization that is not correct.

The vast majority of ideas their imaginer has conceived are useless, impractical, unrealizable, pointless, trivial, overly complex and/or their proponents incapable of either execution or funding of the idea. So whether it is secret or not does not matter.

If you are a recognized leader in your field, you often find you less talented competitors will copy every idea you have poorly. They use espionage to find your ideas early and try to beat you to market with your own ideas. This is why Apple is very secretive. All of their ideas are rapidly copied by numerous competitors. Even a rumor that Apple might be working on something is enough to get competitive startups funded. Many Apple ideas are developed under multiple iterations over several years before anyone outside the black ops team even hears a rumor about them. It would be very counterproductive for Apple to release advance notice of the next decade or even next year's new designs.

Psychologically it is often a bad idea to present ideas to the public before they are ready, during the protected incubation stage. New ideas not fully realized are often ripped to shreds by critics. It is much better to get to the stage of having a prototype before you release your design to the general public. Maintaining secrecy at the early stage can preserve the motivation of the designers and prevent burnout, and reactionary responses to poorly thought out but virulent criticism. This can be especially troublesome if a very interesting idea developed at a publicly traded corporation leaks out and then is ridiculed by a notable writer or critic. Often the result is for the project to be cancelled in order to appease shareholders and a culture of fear of innovation takes over as everyone plays it safe to avoid criticism.

Well put.

Everything regarding strategy depends on the specifics of the situation. Trying to take something as important as whether you need to be in stealth or not and making as if there is a hard and fast rule gives no help to the aspiring entrepreneur and can be harmful.

We have one self described successful entrepreneur saying very clearly not to worry. As if he's telling someone not to sweat the brand of office copier purchased for the office.

Apple is an interesting example because Jobs famously stole ideas from so many others. Having gotten away with it, that's probably why he made new product development so secretive.

Apple is so secretive with its development process for the same reason bank robbers are paranoid about other people stealing their money; it's how they got where they are and they can't imagine that there's any other way to do it.

Pretty much every major "new" Apple feature of the past decade was a standard feature in Android, Blackberry, WinMo (yes, WinMo), or Symbian, or was a feature in one or more such phones. Apple took an existing feature an iterated it to improve existing implementations.

You can identify the features that are truly unique to Apple (not based on iterating someone else's creation) because they suck. See e.g., Apple Maps, the Newton, iMac, the all-metal phone, Siri, Do-Not-Disturb, iCloud, iTV, iTunes...

> bank robbers are paranoid about other people stealing their money

Maybe that's just because they have unusually large piles of cash lying around, and can't exactly go to the police if someone tries to take it? Seems like a pretty rational paranoia to me.

The true fallacy of thinking someone is going to steal "your" idea is in thinking the idea is uniquely yours in the first place, especially if the idea is more of a concept or an entire product rather than something very small like a new feature.

Smartphones were thought up long before the iPhone, web search was thought up long before Google existed, personal tablets were thought up long before the iPad existed, the internet/web itself was basically invented in fiction long before it became a real thing.

I've lost track of the amount of times I've had some grand idea that nobody was doing only to see an announcement months/years later from company XYZ whose product was pretty much exactly my idea, even though I've never publicly shared the idea.

Product/service ideas are always, to some degree, just remixes of older ideas allowed for by current technology. When you have your insight, there are certainly dozens/hundreds of other people around the world with backgrounds similar to your own having vaguely the same idea at virtually the same time. Execution (or in most cases, even bothering to turn the idea into reality) and timing are everything.

Having said all of that, being in stealth mode still isn't always a bad thing because sometimes knowing how you are executing on an idea can be helpful to other people already on the same path as you are.

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

-- Howard H. Aiken, designer of the Harvard Mark I computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken)

Thats what atansoff was probably thinking when he showed Aiken his prototype!

It's certainly not what Jobs was thinking with Apple's infamous secrecy. Perhaps his idea wasn't original? /ducks

That really captures the truth of the whole matter! +++++

Although I agree in general, there is a valid ulterior motive to playing the "stealth startup" game, and that is as a marketing strategy to generate buzz prior to launch and drive user adoption on launch day. IMO this is really no different from a "private beta" strategy or "sign up your email pre-launch" strategy.

However, the only founders who can generate any real marketing traction on the "stealth startup" play are rockstars: "John Doe is working on a stealth startup" is nowhere in the same league as "Naveen Selvadurai is working on a stealth startup." And I would argue the sheer marketing value of the latter warrants the secrecy.

Should I recognize that name?

The google suggests he's a co-founder of foursquare.

Foursquare cofounder.

For a "rockstar", it's also about minimising snark directed at your product [concept] before it's ready for widespread public beta.

c.f. Color which failed because it was so underwhelming when it came out of stealth.

I got all my big ideas "stolen", but not because I talked about them or told them to anyone, they were stolen because I didn't do anything with them, and waited till I have the best design, best business plan, best team, till my kids grow up, till I save enough money, what not. Someone else thought about it too, and simply went on and did something about it.

Seems like I see this article on hacker news a lot. Here are some of my past favorites.

http://www.humbledmba.com/startups-in-stealth-mode-need-one-...

http://eaaasyusuf.blogspot.com/2012/03/tell-everyone-about-y...

More meaningful advice is to hide the magnitude of your success if the barriers to entry are low. You will get lots of competition once others know they can fast-follow and make money. Instead, keep it a secret and race to lock up the market.

Take Groupon. After iterating, they found explosive revenue growth. Everyone knew how rapid the growth was - every deal lists its revenue on the site & they announced massive fundraises. Add that to low barriers to start a competitor, and we had HUNDREDS of Groupon clones in 2010.

Take Uber. Many people think that they're doing well - high ASP, thousands of vigilant customers (thousands took to Twitter to protest Washington DC legislation that would ban Uber). Since each city is a new market to be built from scratch, new entrants have an opportunity to compete, thus Uber has many competitors: Lyft, Hailo, Flywheel, Sidecar, Cabulous, TaxiMagic.

If you're making money, you will get competition. No matter what. So keep that success a secret while you build competitive barriers to own the market.

I was at a dinner in 1999 when I first came to Silicon Valley. Don Valentine was speaking. He said something that's stuck with me:

"Entrepreneurs spend the first two years of their idea keeping it a closely guarded secret, and then spend the rest of their lives shouting it from the rooftops hoping someone cares".

Don't be stupid and needlessly expose every facet of a good idea to someone better geared up to execute on it than you are, if they're heavily incentivized to do so. But don't over-value keeping it to yourself.

Like all grandiose sayings, this one is demonstrably false.

Consider the startup we all love to hate, Groupon. Groupon was founded solely on a Big Idea. I think thats why it got so much hate in the beginning, because all it took was that fucking idea and any one of us could have had it.

Without Lightbank to hyper-fuel its growth, one of the million knockoffs run by a larger company would have pushed to the fore and destroyed them. Every bit of stealth was essential.

Relevant: http://jackealtman.com/2013/01/10/startup-knowledge-decays-q...

yup, gotta agree.

Ideas are like any other valuable thing: a rare few are amazing, some are good, most are meh, and some are wtf? For those people that are good at idea generation, being tacit can be one useful means to getting paid on delivery.

i will blame the headline there. is it now mandatory for every headline to be either none, all, always, never, best or worst?

headline aside, nice article, like "collaboration is the winning strategy — fear is the innovation-killer"

I still disagree.

Collaboration is the winning strategy? For whom?

The writer forgot to add, "for the strongest player." For the weaker player, collaboration usually means assimilation. This is not always bad, but it must be addressed plainly.

Groupon was not founded on the idea that propelled them to success (assuming Groupon still counts as a success). The site grew out of ThePoint.com, a group fundraising site.

They took the expertise they had building that platform - for years - and then applied it to coupons.

There have been a zillion iterations on coupon sites. Some of them probably came close to Groupon's basic model. The idea was not really the main thing.

Ah no, wrong, people will steal your big idea.

Apple was a Johnny Come Lately to the smartphone market that was started by IBM with the Simon in 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon Qualcomm wanted to use the Apple Newton to make a smartphone out of it, Apple refused and so Qualcomm licensed the Palm Pilot and made one of the first modern era smartphones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyocera_6035 let us not also forget the Microsoft Windows CE smartphones, the RIM Blackberry smartphones, or the Linux based smartphones, or even Microsofts Tablet PC running Windows XP in 2002.

Somehow after seeing all these smartphones and tablets, Apple wanted to steal their idea for Project Purple. It took them a long time, but they analyzed the weaknesses of the other devices and developed a better smartphone called the iPhone, but to say Apple was first to make a smartphone is quite false, as it wasn't even their idea. If Apple didn't copy the big idea several other companies had, they wouldn't be dominating the market right now with iOS devices. The irony is despite prior art, Apple is suing the beejezus out of their competitors.

So yes someone will defiantly steal your 'Big Idea' and you should not fear it, and you should instead plan to out-innovate anyone who does steal your 'Big Idea' with a better product.

The point the article makes is one I strongly believe in. A startup should reach out for all the help it can get - far better than dying undiscovered for lack of needed assistance.

Nevertheless it is also true that theft of ideas happens all the time, and is not limited to startups in any way. Think Microsoft and the Samwer brothers for instance. Little - no innovation, very successful at cloning first movers.

There are some interesting stories in the startup world too: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/11/th...

One exception is if direct competitors get a whiff of your upcoming killer, differentiating feature.

A smart competitor will try to cut you off at the pass. For example, they may decide to offer the same thing before you do. Or they may prep their argument to customers & the public as to why your feature isn't good. And it will light a fire under the competitors ass regardless.

This is typically relevant to direct competitors. For example, the free storage wars between Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail.

If you have an idea for a newfangled iPhone todo list app or whatever, yeah, nobody's gonna steal that.

This actually happened to me a few months ago. The field only had a few competitors and I followed the usual advice of getting at least 'something' out there. The problem was, I did too good a job of showing off how much better my product would become.

The main competitor updated their product and website to list all their new features, clearly inspired directly by my product to the point of even using the same copy in the feature descriptions!

Stealth mode does have some benefits when dealing with smart competition.

I always like Eric Ries' take on this. You can test the theory:

If you have one 'great' idea, chances are you have more. Take your _second_ best idea and do all you can to get someone to steal it. Target individuals; shout from the rooftops; describe it in detail to everyone you meet. Nobody will run with it.

To execute on an idea you have to be personally invested, have domain knowledge and be deeply passionate. Ideas in isolation rarely have the qualities that would make them require 'stealth mode'. In fact, the best ideas come from a series of iterations on great execution.

Create success and you will have copycats and parasites, no question (Groupon, iPad, Paypal...the other examples from this thread), but at this point you should be in a position to leverage first-mover advantage, funding, and your more developed longterm roadmap.

People may copy your MVP, but Uber is a classic case where their first and prominent product (UberCab) is clearly not the actual longterm strategy. Cloning UberCab is really creating a cargo-cult startup.

The exception here would be markets - the Samwer brothers have a particular niche in cloning successful North-American scoped startups for European and African markets, but at the point you hit their radar, the 'Stealth Mode' boat has sailed anyway.

The problem is what you mean by the word idea. I get tired of hearing "execution is everything" because what that really means is "details matter."

Instagram is a good example of this. "A mobile app where people can share photos" is not a very valuable idea. "A mobile app where people can add filters to imbue meaning into photos, combined with a quick and beautiful interface, combined with a social stream, commenting, favoriting, and notifications, packaged into a easy to use app" turned out to be more valuable. Even more valuable is that idea combined with a number of sketches, designs, user surveys, and proofs of concepts. These levels of detail all fall under the umbrella of "idea" -- but it's understanding the core thesis of an idea combined with being able to see it's consequences in the details that can actually be valuable.

This means sharing your idea can be dangerous if a) you are sharing it at a sufficient level of detail and b) you are sharing it with someone who can empathize with the thesis of the idea and draw the same logical conclusions in terms of implementation details. Basically, if someone "gets it" and can execute on that understanding.

Entrepreneurs enter stealth mode because they have an idea or technology that is, in their opinion, too young for public exposure. It’s a business strategy of secrecy and seclusion meant to avoid alerting competitors to pending products or ideas.

I work for a startup in stealth mode, and we're actually not in stealth mode because we're afraid of a competitor stealing our idea. We're flying under the radar because we are doing a massive amount of scraping to amass a big data set to analyze. We respect robots.txt, but fear that if the big guys caught on they'd change their policies or block us or worse, sue us. They could stop us before we ever launch. But if we have a surprise launch and gain traction, we should be able to partner with them to get the data. The idea is that it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

Nice try, person-trying-to-steal-my-idea.

This article makes me want to start a blog section to LaunchSky.com -- just to post this article to it and our signed up beta-users.

Based on the customer survey's we've asked a large group of the beta sign-ups, this is a fairly significant fear in the community. ~42% of responders said they'd be concerned with someone stealing their idea, so we pivoted to build a private sharing feature alongside the community exposure to an idea.

While I agree that there are steal-able parts to ideas and the creation process, the fear behind certain (often unprotectable pieces) are just about as ineffective and productively constricting as anything I can imagine.

For any given idea (even in your own city), there might be 10 teams working on it. Of those ten teams that had a bright idea, 5 will never do anything with it. 5 will try to do something, and 3 will make it to market - one will have a great product. In my experience if a lot of teams are looking at a problem that's market validation (but not sufficient for success.)

So someone's already stealing your big idea - they just don't know it yet. Your job is to get to market first and/or to treat customers better.

huh? This must be a joke. Do I even need to read the article? I click and there's a picture of Steve Jobs holding up the iPhone? The most stolen idea on the planet, just ask the courts. Not to mention the ipad.

Disclaimer, I'm not an apple fanboy. I actually prefer android.

If you don't have the legal clout that apple has to defend its IP, then you'd better not take the advice of this article.

The whole execution is more important thing is true, but thinking that means you can just go blurt your trade secrets out to everyone is just dead wrong. People want you to think that so you'll tell them. It's a big fnord.

The article argues that since it takes a lot of effort to do a startup, no one will steal your idea? Oh, I guess you forgot about the big corps that will just clone you in two weeks when they don't feel like buying your company.

This is true within reason, be careful about discussing your idea with strangers who have the resources and/or ability to go out and build it. Look no further than Zuckerburg vs The Winklevii to understand this

That's more a case of be prepared to be embarrassed by strangers executing your idea on a scale bigger than you dreamed of. There were people building "exclusive" dating websites at my university in 2004, but they didn't meet Mark Zuckerberg or the Winkelvii.

People don't just steal ideas, that is only part of it. They steal implementations instead of working out the best way to do something. They steal success without taking the risk.

The thing is, if the idea is obvious, there's no point in hiding it. If it's not obvious, nobody will figure it out even if you explicitly try to explain it to them.

So, I suppose no one has ripped off StackOverflow, right? Seriously? Unbelievable.

The title is one-sided link bait.

Nobody still has managed to copy Apple's model of success. It's true, people won't steal your ideas if you really think different. They will look at the shining truth in front of them and be not able to grasp it in their mind, because they are stupid talentless biomass.

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