I find this hard to believe and can see why experienced people would keep startup ideas close to their chest.
I can assure you no one wanted to copy Pinterest when it was just an idea. Most people think your idea is bad, they are just too polite to tell you.
Plus, the number of times anyone has been burned by not having an NDA in place is probably a million times fewer than a person has been helped by someone they shared their idea with. Sharing is helpful far more than it hurts anyone.
The elevator pitch for facebook is we're gonna get prime demographic young people to look at advertisements on our social website.
The secret sauce in the roll out was to try aspirational marketing where only ivy students can join and diffuse out thru cool/rich. The medium term secret sauce was something like the pages don't look as foul and obnoxious as myspace pages by dramatically limiting them and the real name policies. The longer term secret sauce is the content they view is sneakily going to be provided by the viewers for free via social networking effects luring them on.
Who does have a chance of realizing them, are people with lots of ideas, also about how to actually implement ideas. However, when you reach and surpass the "idea a day" treshold, while being able to implement maybe 1 or 10 each month, you get to discard hundreds of your own ideas each year, making them pretty much worthless.
So you should never be afraid of sharing your ideas; whoever you're telling them to, will either not care, or fail miserably trying to "steal" them. In each case you're safe. As for the monthly surplus ideas, if you're not implementing them, you risk nothing by sharing them either... except maybe feeling dumb in the off chance of seeing someone else successfully implementing an idea you thought was worthless.
PS: in the even rarer case of sharing an idea you're implementing, and someone else beating you to it... you suck, do something at what you suck less.
Edit: Apparently in their mission statement they claim to only use proven ideas, but I still wouldn't do business with them regardless.
I suppose there is a sort of genesis of an idea, but even that probably already arrives with images of a UI and perhaps code in your head...
It's even in their mission statement: > Rocket identifies and builds proven Internet business models and transfers them to new, underserved or untapped markets where it seeks to scale them into market leading online companies.
For everyone else, no one is going to steal your idea. Even in the remote possibility that they somehow would, then you better be more motivated then them and should be well enough ahead that they can't catch up.
An NDA is appropriate for something that is a bit closer to fully baked than just an idea. If you've got a proprietary algorithm or business database that you don't want to leak, then an NDA is appropriate. If you're demanding an NDA just to talk about an idea that you haven't even started working on yet then you're just wasting time and oxygen.
The typical scenario -- according to him -- was someone would pitch an idea to him, then he would counter that they should go half on the seed money. If the person wasn't able (or willing) to come up with the money, he'd implement the idea without them.
Zuckerberg got the inspiration to do Facebook from the project the Winklevoss twins were trying to get off the ground, and further to do an elite social network riding off of Harvard. That was their primary contribution to what became Facebook; which is to say, not much.
while it feels counter-intuitive, this is absolutely true. people don't steal your idea because theirs is always better.
For example, you describe me an idea for some SaaS startup targeted at constructions companies. I have no clue about this industry, so no matter how well you describe it to me I simply can't judge it and definitely can't implement it.
Even if you are an expert on the target audience and their problems, the small details that make the difference, you can call it vision, are normally not part of the 'idea'.
If I have what I consider to be a good idea, and I am actively pursing it (i.e., writing code to implement it), I would probably keep it close to my chest until I have something to show.
Ideas get better when more people think about it.
So, that advice goes for them: forget NDAs and get good feedback. On the other hand, if you really know what you're doing, you'll know if the idea has a lot of intrinsic value and/or potential for being easily stolen (infrequent and often unpredictable in those rare cases), and who you can to talk to about it.
More often than not, "ideas" are pretty simple and valueless and even the best execution can't do much to keep the business afloat. Many successful ideas come from something as simple as merging several different fields (only an expert in both fields is likely to come up with it), or simply from some enabling technologies maturing enough to have everyone and their dog execute the ideas they had but couldn't build successfully before (tablets come to mind, many mobile apps and so on).
Experienced people would know what to do with their ideas. Who to talk to to get advice, what to keep close to their chest or not. Others would benefit greatly from any advice at all they could get and for that they need to run the very small risk of telling their idea to others.
It's supposed to be humbling advice to directly contradict this argument.