No point in showing up with a revised NDA, they won't be able to sign it without running it through their lawyer-mill, so you'll just delay the whole thing if y

No point in showing up with a revised NDA, they won't be able to sign it without running it through their lawyer-mill, so you'll just delay the whole thing if you do that. I would respond to them and tell them that you respect their concerns for privacy and confidentiality. However, in your current position you cannot afford legal counsel of your own to properly review and interpret the NDA, and its possible ramifications to you in other career pursuits unrelated to their business/your meeting. You might offer that you will sign the NDA and be bound to it for the purposes of your interviews with them, if they agree to release you from any and all restrictions in the NDA if you and the company do not formalize a business agreement within X (3-6mos. should be sufficient). If the above is not acceptable, suggest that you hold to the meeting, but refrain from discussing specifics and instead talk in higher-level/more abstract terms (eg: "how would you architect a database to handle 5,000,000 read or write operations over a 24 hours period with the queries generally being concentrated over short periods of time" vs. "how would you build a database to compete with groupon" kind of a thing). You are not being completely short-sighted, but you should be aware that in a big swath of the industry NDAs are common. The good thing is that they are rarely ever enforced in any way unless you leave the meeting and then immediately put up a post on HN trying to recruit a team to build the very thing you just discussed with them :)