3 ms·

I'll answer from the other side, as a co-founder. I won't ask you to sign an NDA to hear my idea. The idea by itself is worthless but your feedback to the idea

by JamesVI 12y ago

I'll answer from the other side, as a co-founder. I won't ask you to sign an NDA to hear my idea. The idea by itself is worthless but your feedback to the idea is invaluable to me. I won't ask you to sign an NDA to play with my prototype/MVP. It is a product and I want customers/testers/critics to try it out and give me feedback. I WILL ask you to sign an NDA before I discuss technical details that I will be including in a patent application. Actually, I HAVE to make you sign an NDA because, outside of the US, public disclosure before filing can invalidate a patent. Having you sign an NDA makes it clear (to the courts) that I didn't intend to publicly disclose the information, even if it leaks before I can file the patent application. I WILL ask you to sign an NDA before I give you access to detailed designs, plans, documents or source code for the product. Before you do any work for me (even if it is "as a friend") I will have you sign an NDA and an assignment of rights document so that there is no question that the company owns rights to any work done. My co-founder and I have signed these same agreements so that the idea and the product belong to the company, not to us as individuals. I do these things on the advice of my attorney, primarily to give future investors confidence that there are not going to be any issues around intellectual property rights. Whenever I sign an NDA that our company lawyer didn't draw up I have a lawyer look it over. That said, they are all pretty similar so once you have seen one you should be able to identify any unusual terms.

alok-g 12y ago
Cannot upvote this enough. When most people say "idea" (including you here), they are not talking about something that is a non-trivial patentable invention (which you cover later). NDAs are for such IP, not for simple business "ideas" about making this or that app. Probably because what one encounters 99.9% of the time in the simpler class, most of the comments here are biased against NDAs. I am working on some that are non-trivial, and some that aren't. For the non-trivial ones, we closely examine everything we find or come across for potential overlaps to constantly assess its potential. It is also true that these are very hard to find because people across the world have already worked on many different things. Sometimes the unknowns involved do not resolve in your favor, as in, the technical solution you were investigating does not work out. And this could very well mean that other people may already have tried that path too without resulting in a story that would be found over the Internet. I have no reason to believe that "such" ideas are dime-a-dozen. But yes, for the same reason, chances of those ideas working out becomes rare by definition.

by JamesVI 12y ago

alok-g 12y ago

Cannot upvote this enough. When most people say "idea" (including you here), they are not talking about something that is a non-trivial patentable invention (which you cover later). NDAs are for such IP, not for simple business "ideas" about making this or that app. Probably because what one encounters 99.9% of the time in the simpler class, most of the comments here are biased against NDAs. I am working on some that are non-trivial, and some that aren't. For the non-trivial ones, we closely examine everything we find or come across for potential overlaps to constantly assess its potential. It is also true that these are very hard to find because people across the world have already worked on many different things. Sometimes the unknowns involved do not resolve in your favor, as in, the technical solution you were investigating does not work out. And this could very well mean that other people may already have tried that path too without resulting in a story that would be found over the Internet. I have no reason to believe that "such" ideas are dime-a-dozen. But yes, for the same reason, chances of those ideas working out becomes rare by definition.