Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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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."

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

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.

"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.

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.

> 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.

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