9 ms·

This is very anecdotal, so your experiences probably are very different (especially since I'm in Arizona, a lot of people here just aren't nearly as hacker-frie

This is very anecdotal, so your experiences probably are very different (especially since I'm in Arizona, a lot of people here just aren't nearly as hacker-friendly as the Bay area). Out of the ~15-20 project ideas that people have talked to me about, I've been asked to sign an NDA 4 times. I found something interesting about the people who asked for an NDA: they weren't very good at following up. For most of the other "pitches" (I use the word pitch loosely, because I'm not a VC or anything like that -- just a college student who likes to help friends and acquaintances with projects), I'd get follow-up emails and a lot of lengthy discussions in coffee shops about the idea. The times I signed an NDA? Maybe a phone call once. Maybe a small conversation. The discussions always fizzled out. An NDA almost directly indicated (in my situations) that the person asking had a vision of grandeur without any idea of the work that would go into making that vision a reality. If the idea doesn't make me gasp when you tell me, it probably isn't worth an NDA. And the NDA always indicated that the person is just "looking for a techie guy" to crank out code. The people who asked for an NDA were never really interested in what I had to bring to the table, because it seemed like they assumed that their idea was enough to make a product regardless of the team they assembled. I'm fine if I'm not qualified to build a product (I'll be up-front about the limits of my skills, because I already have enough work!) or a good match for the team they are looking for. I run as fast as I can if I meet someone who doesn't care who they're hiring. I'd rather be rejected than work for someone who doesn't appreciate my work. If I'm going to partner with someone who isn't a hacker, I want them to at least appreciate the difference between good and bad execution on a technical level. If they can't effectively evaluate my work, the relationship is automatically dysfunctional. And that starts with the NDA -- if they prioritize the value of the "idea" over the value of the people, they are already headed in the wrong direction.

joshu 15y ago
> a vision of grandeur this sounds about right. "MY IDEA IS EARTHSHAKING, I can't possibly just TELL it to you. I am totally going to revolutionize the ..."
- joshu 15y ago
  I can't believe this is getting so many upvotes. As an active angel I get emailed about 4 of these a day. Deletia, unfortunately.
  - jplarson 15y ago
    Good question. I wrote this from the vantage point of developers, for whom NDAs is a different situation from that of investor types. There's intrinsically more precedent for an NDA to be rejected by someone potentially writing the checks than by someone potentially receiving them. Accordingly, I reckon that this idea is much more well-trodden for investors such as yourself.
jordhy 15y ago
The very request to sign an NDA assumes the idea could be could and executed upon listening to a 15 minute speech about it. This is a clear litmus test that the idea itself is not worth much. Without intrinsic IP or competitive advantages, the wanna-be-preneur resorts to artificial protection measures like the NDA, secrecy and quickly becomes delusional. Requests to sign NDAs are one of the worsts red flags an early stage entrepreneur can have.
- sjwright 15y ago
  The question I routinely ask whenever someone tells me about their amazing business scheme is "what is your plan to stop competitors from copying the basic idea and overtaking you?" or "what is to stop the established player in the market expanding their product to include this idea (probably as a check-box option) and making your company irrelevant?"
  - ereckers 15y ago
    What's the right answer? Because if it's anything other than "nothing" I'd like to hear an example.
    - Retric 15y ago
      A simple and strait forward one would be PG's using LISP for his website generation software. It was an ideal language for manipulating structured text and let them run rings around the completion even if they had 5x the budget and tried to directly copy them. It was also the type of thing they kept quiet about, just listing the need to LISP programmers on there job pages and that's it. Google's secret sauce included map reduce running on huge cheap server farms. They where not making financial decisions so if a machine took to long to respond they could skip it and still give you a fast response. They also built a highly redundant and salable infrastructure, but that they where willing to talk about. Now, these where things that did not make the marketing copy, but where central to their ability to grow and adapt quickly and cheaply. It's also the type of incite that's shows up when you actually sit down and try to design a system and find out what the actual hard parts are and how to deal with them. AKA, what happens if we need to serve 10,000 requests a second now how about 100,000?

joshu 15y ago

> a vision of grandeur this sounds about right. "MY IDEA IS EARTHSHAKING, I can't possibly just TELL it to you. I am totally going to revolutionize the ..."

joshu 15y ago
I can't believe this is getting so many upvotes. As an active angel I get emailed about 4 of these a day. Deletia, unfortunately.
- jplarson 15y ago
  Good question. I wrote this from the vantage point of developers, for whom NDAs is a different situation from that of investor types. There's intrinsically more precedent for an NDA to be rejected by someone potentially writing the checks than by someone potentially receiving them. Accordingly, I reckon that this idea is much more well-trodden for investors such as yourself.

jordhy 15y ago

The very request to sign an NDA assumes the idea could be could and executed upon listening to a 15 minute speech about it. This is a clear litmus test that the idea itself is not worth much. Without intrinsic IP or competitive advantages, the wanna-be-preneur resorts to artificial protection measures like the NDA, secrecy and quickly becomes delusional. Requests to sign NDAs are one of the worsts red flags an early stage entrepreneur can have.

sjwright 15y ago
The question I routinely ask whenever someone tells me about their amazing business scheme is "what is your plan to stop competitors from copying the basic idea and overtaking you?" or "what is to stop the established player in the market expanding their product to include this idea (probably as a check-box option) and making your company irrelevant?"
- ereckers 15y ago
  What's the right answer? Because if it's anything other than "nothing" I'd like to hear an example.
  - Retric 15y ago
    A simple and strait forward one would be PG's using LISP for his website generation software. It was an ideal language for manipulating structured text and let them run rings around the completion even if they had 5x the budget and tried to directly copy them. It was also the type of thing they kept quiet about, just listing the need to LISP programmers on there job pages and that's it. Google's secret sauce included map reduce running on huge cheap server farms. They where not making financial decisions so if a machine took to long to respond they could skip it and still give you a fast response. They also built a highly redundant and salable infrastructure, but that they where willing to talk about. Now, these where things that did not make the marketing copy, but where central to their ability to grow and adapt quickly and cheaply. It's also the type of incite that's shows up when you actually sit down and try to design a system and find out what the actual hard parts are and how to deal with them. AKA, what happens if we need to serve 10,000 requests a second now how about 100,000?