I’ve always found this to be a fascinating thing. I think that in our environment, there’s way too much emphasis on “my idea” as the a valuable thing so that people go to extreme lengths to protect even mediocre ideas.
On the other hand, every business needs secret; if not the original idea, but quite possibly the “why” of the idea and where it’s going next.
With some exception, if an idea occurred to you, it’s pretty much occurred to someone else. But as you execute and create unique processes, keep your cards close to your chest. The how is a lot more valuable than the what.
I’m in the ‘nobody is going to steal your idea’ camp.
I believe the idea is just one bit of the puzzle. Important, but definitely nowhere near as important as execution. Your execution is what makes the idea yours, and that is much harder to steal / easier to guard.
Let me put it this way.
If someone wanted to “steal” tech cabal, it’s not just about setting up a website and a forum.
Where do they get their content from?
How do they determine what news is worth sharing and what to ignore?
How is content presented and what determines which format? (Write-up, audio, video, infographics)
How do they find new audiences?
How do they continually engage their existing one?
The idea is a lot more nuanced than “let’s post tech news and have a forum”. That is the end product, of which there is hardly any value in stealing without the principles and patterns that power it.
So to really steal an idea, there is a lot of hard work to be done. And it’s very likely even the most determined thieves don’t have what it takes to steal the whole thing properly.
To refer back to the example, a tech cabal thief would need to cultivate the same industry contacts as tech cabal has, with similar degree of relationship depth. That is not something easy to steal.
Gonna take the “no one is going to steal your idea” concept a bit farther and ask – your idea? Yours? No, it’s not YOUR idea. Nobody owns ideas (unless maybe you are Elon Musk, lol). They float around in the common ether till someone pulls them out and does something with them.
I will even go further to say that it is even better to share your “groundbreaking” idea with people. Maybe even people that have the potential to steal it. Those people actually will have the ability to refine your idea. They will ask questions you have not thought of yet or give you new perspectives on your idea that you did not even think of. Every idea I have ever shared with people I respected were always made better by those people or they showed why I need to drop it. There is this myth that great apps are made in a vacuum by a solo founders and they suddenly showed up one day with this awesome app/idea but all the great inventors of our time shared and refined their ideas with their contemporaries.
Also if you reverse it, think about how many ideas you guys hear in a week. I do not know about you guys, but sometimes when people share an awesome idea with me, I usually find myself feeling weak at the knees. Weak because I know if the idea is executed well it will be killer, but I neither have the time or I am not inspired by the idea enough for the late nights and weekends it will take to do it well (but that does not mean the idea is not great). So when people share killer ideas, what is on my mind is not how I will run away with the idea but if I can partner with them cause being a solo founder is never fun.
So for me the summary of all this is share your ideas with potential thieves and maybe you can make partners out of them.
I think that we’re looking at this from the angle of starting a company. Which is, ‘I have an idea but I don’t want people to steal it’.
But even after you’ve started your company, there are a lot of ideas for making it work etc that you try to keep secret so a competitor doesn’t execute before you. Sometimes your competitor CAN out-execute you.
