The Cult of the NDA 284
Anonymous Coward writes "After looking at hundreds of business plans during the tech boom of the late 1990's, and starting my own company two years ago, I've long been bothered by the near obsession with secrecy shown by many tech startups. This is especially striking considering how few startups are actually pursuing unique ideas. I finally wrote an article about this, The Cult of the NDA, where I argue that too much secrecy can actually hurt a company's chances. Open-source startups, anyone?"
I'd really like to discuss this story (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'd really like to discuss this story (Score:3, Funny)
Damn you Johnson! I always knew you couldn't keep your mouth shut.
Lets be dignified about this - no histrionics, please. When Ash from security gets here, you'll go directly to clear your desk, hand over your cardkey and leave the building.
You won't speak to anyone else - keep it under your hat and we'll see about letting you stay on major medical until you find something else.
Oh shit! Here - have a tissue. Sip this water. Don't - see, now you're choking!
Ash! Thank God! Get him off my leg before he
NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the computer hardware industry. There is something bigger, badder, and better just around the corner.
Intel's Roadmap, AMD's Roadmap and Apple's product line come to mind
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:4, Informative)
VCs are wary of tech startups. VCs aren't going to go giving money to people who give away their intellectual property.
If you have a truly unique idea, and you announce it to the world before you get to market, you might as well kiss your funding good-bye.
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't finance your grand idea with the money you can raise on your own. . . find a cheaper idea. Start small. Build up. Keep control.
Let's take Dr. Greer as an example. He was just fired from the company he helped found.
How does such a thing happen? Go to the @stake website and look up the Board of Directors.
See any of the company founders on it? Nope. Every damned seat filled by one of the VCs. They don't just give their money away. They buy you.
Don't be 0wNxed.
Then tell people what you're doing right from the very first. The person "to market" isn't the first person who gets out the product. It's the first person to start selling the product. As this gentleman points out it's likely that your business plan/idea isn't unique at all and that there are likely dozens of different people working on it even before you get started. Start selling before they do.
Take out ad. Use bullhorns. Buy billboards.
If nothing else some of those other people who are already ahead of you will just go, "Fuck man," think they're already beat, and go do something else.
Most businesses amount to little more than the corner store. Nobody ever succeded in the corner store business by hiding the fact they were opening a store. Hide your store and you have no customers.
And there are a lot of stores. Even though everyone knows the idea.
Sell shit. Make money. Be happy.
Stop worrying about the other guy and take care of your own damn business. Leave the Spy vs. Spy shit for the real spies. If you're going to "die" if someone finds out what you're up to it's usually a sign that you've picked the wrong damn business to be in.
KFG
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's my situation: I just started a software company too, and we are located in Shanghai, China, where everyone is using warez. I believed we have pretty good stuff, and we have not announced it to the whole world just yet.
If you can't finance your grand idea with the money you can raise on your own. . . find a cheaper idea. Start small. Build up. Keep control.
We did. We sold our house, our cars, our nice furnitures, our stocks (at a loss given the current stock market), took out our IRA and 401K, took out our whole life savings, and established our development center in Shanghai so that we don't have to pay $70K+ to hire an engineer in Silicon Valley.
Don't be 0wNxed.
Yeah, that's everyone's dream, isn't it? Otherwise, why bother taking the risk to start your own?
Take out ad. Use bullhorns. Buy billboards.
How? Since you don't want to take VC money, and start small (remember? that's what your proposed!), where do you find money to do all that? Looks like you haven't started your own company, and managed your budget, have you?
I don't have a rich dad who can give a couple of mils to start with. I worked my bud off for years, save money to start my own.
This is my second attempt. The first one was failed, and I lost pretty much everything I had at that time. I don't feel bitter nor do I regret about it. It's my choice, and I made my decision to go into it fully aware that I might lose my shirt. If I could come back in time, I'd do it again. As a matter of fact, I'm starting again.
If nothing else some of those other people who are already ahead of you will just go, "Fuck man," think they're already beat, and go do something else.
If you are not sure about your plan, and are not even confident about, you probably shouldn't start it anyway, unless people give you money to do the thing, money that you said you shouldn't take.
Besides, if you go into business and you don't have perseverance, don't do it. It's not like you have to give up everytime there's a competitor. When competitors show up, it might be a sign that this is good stuff, if you are the glass-half-full kind.
Sell shit. Make money. Be happy.
Again, how? You said earlier that your idea must be good and original and not a me-too, that means that shouldn't be called selling shit, right? You should be confident that it's real good stuff, right? I believe my idea is good stuff, and I show you how confident I am by betting my whole life savings on it, and by working 16 hours/day and seven days per week.
Stop worrying about the other guy and take care of your own damn business. Leave the Spy vs. Spy shit for the real spies. If you're going to "die" if someone finds out what you're up to it's usually a sign that you've picked the wrong damn business to be in.
Yeah, talking like a
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
I started with what was in my wallet, and it wasn't a very big wallet. I could start again with $20 cash and a credit card with a couple hundred available on it if I had to. I know how.
I run a side business helping other people do the same, not for the money, just because I enjoy it.
I'd respond more fully to your post except it has little to do with my original. It leaves me a bit lost.
Perhaps you can go back and read it again
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, it's impossible to convince anybody on Slashdot that you are working hard. Indeed, if you were working hard, you wouldn't read Slashdot, much less posting to it...
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Funny)
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. They call it brochureware [ods.org]. Take it from someone who works in advertising - don't advertise products you
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Words to live by. This, along with advice my mother was given, have shapped my life. "Never produce anything you would not buy yourself", those two combined and you have ethical business, one that has a good balance between shareholder/owner optimisation and consumer consience. I really wish most companies out there followed said advice. Unfortunatly, for any economic system I have heard of, maximising profits (or market gains, depending on economic systems) in the short te
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:5, Insightful)
These are all people whose primary business is selling things that don't exist yet.
You are thinking in terms of vaporware. I'm thinking in terms of business.
A hotel that doesn't have most of its rooms booked before it opens is a hotel that is most likely to fail.
The fact that they're advertising and taking bookings while the scaffolding is still up doesn't mean they're doing anything slimey.
Entire cities have been sold before they existed.
If this sort of risk bothers you you don't want a business. You want a job.
That's ok. That's what most people really want, no matter what they say.
KFG
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:5, Interesting)
Fedex "delivers packages around the world in one day", Starbucks "sells 'gourmet' coffee", and Amazon "sells books on the internet". That's all pretty trivial stuff and, on paper, easily copied.
But how can Fedex do it? Their hub system and computerized inventory system are key to the idea but aren't obvious from simply hearing "Deliver packages". And selling books online is easy but building a community of people to review all the material and offering referral bonuses aren't obvious from hearing about the idea yet are crucial to the company's success.
If your idea is simpler than that, and thus more easily copied, it's probably not an idea to base a business on, it's probably a sideline for an existing business with the resources to exploit it quickly. A product idea, not a business idea.
Summary: "Selling Ice to Desert Nomads" isn't intellectual property, it's not a business idea.
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:2)
That being the case, I wasn't talking about the general, one line sentences, but about the detailed information that's vital to startups.
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:2, Informative)
The ones I have people sign prohibit discussing anything they may see, hear, or learn related to the technology/product being discussed.
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Amazon succeed because of the two old principles - price and service. I've ordered books from amazon.co.uk in the early afternoon, and they've arrived the next day. When I've had problems, they've refunded without quibble.
It's fair to say that being first gave them a headstart
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Some ideas, like how to run gigabit networking over 1-pair telephone cable, might be enough to support a business. Some, like being an auction-house *online* aren't. That's not to say it's not a valid business idea, but that there's nothing amazing about it. It's like saying you want to start a general store, or a real-world auction house. Not a bad idea, we always need store
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:2)
That's true, but that's not the point of the article. The article is saying that NDA's are unnecessary for people who have no formal connection with the startup (i.e. the venture capitalists the startup is trying to sell the idea to). Also, in the case of the startup, you don't have any current product you're selling that will be made obselete. However, once your company i
But... (Score:2)
A handshake?
Re:But... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:But... (Score:2)
If your idea is simple enough that another company, without your source code and hardware, can implement it so easily that the VC can trivially get them to do it, it's a pretty crappy idea.
Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NDAs are a necessary evil to some environments (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, if it does, you won't make any money off it, no one will know your name, your kids will go to community college, and you'll die embittered and alone.
This society punishes selflessness in many ways, because there are many people who are waiting to turn your selflessness into their profit.
Take a lesson from poker... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's just like UFO's. At first the Govt said experimental aircraft were just aliens. Then it bit them on the ass. It still worked though. People weren't talking about the SR71 or the U2. They were too busy building a better tinfoil hat to protect them from martian rays.
Re:Take a lesson from poker... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people think that taking the 5th is a tacit admission you've done something wrong. Conversely, if you've done nothing wrong, there's no reason not to get up on the stand and answer any question the interrogator might want to ask you.
This is extremely naive.
You're assuming that what you say on the stand can't be construed in a way that is untrue. Well, guess what, you're not in control. You can't caveat or explain w
started company 'tow' years ago? (Score:2, Funny)
The first rule of our business plan (Score:3, Funny)
The second rule of our business plan...
NDAs and startups... inevitable? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called CYA. (Score:5, Insightful)
As the SCO debacle should amply demonstrate, today's corporate culture is not about who's doing what uniquely, or even who "owns" what, but who can best convince/bribe a judge and/or jury. The business plans for many corps seem to be "Try to make money the old-fashioned way (i.e. selling useful products and/or services), and if that fails, sue somebody." To do that, you need reams and reams of paperwork, both to demonstrate that you were "duly diligent" in covering your butt (this is where the NDAs come in) and to document every little thing you've done. (Hence taking minutes of meetings, keeping archives of email, and other time-consuming corporate activities).
Re:It's called CYA. (Score:2)
If that's true (about the bribing), why did Microsoft lose that recent patent case against a tiny opponent?
NDAs and Patents (Score:3, Interesting)
But wait! There is an answer. This great country (U.S.) has decided that software ideas can be patented. Now this is usually done by those big companies to raise the barrier of en
Of that era: (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, as a classic quote puts it ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't remember who said this:
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are actually good and helpful, you'll have to cram them down people's throats at gunpoint."
Don Lancaster has made the same point about secrecy as the article did. There's only one smartest person in the world, the odds are overwhelming that it's not you, your idea will have occurred to someone else, and the way to make money is to kill bad ideas quickly.
Re: (Score:2)
NDAs and Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Read Don Lancaster NOW! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Case Against Patents [tinaja.com]
What does he say about NDA's? Publish your ideas in trade journals ASAP!
He's a wise old man. Go read his whole site. It will do you, and the economy good.
Re:Read Don Lancaster NOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
That being said, he's also wrong sometimes, as are we all. For example, I believe that it was in his "Micro Cookbook" that he said that microcomputers would go nowhere in the business world.
A lot of what Don says about patents is true, and I do agree that everyone thinking about filing a patent should read his "C
Re:NDAs and Patents (Score:2)
I've already patented these:
Patent#kj5k423: Machine or method to create enterprise class starship capable of exploring the galaxy and beyond.
Patent#34kjkdd: Machine or method to terraform a planet and make it suitable for unaided human living.
So, since I'm obviously going to extort the sh-t out of anybody who actually *builds* one of these things, I guess there's no point in anybody investing any money in these areas!
Re:NDAs and Patents (Score:3, Informative)
If I have a trade secret, and somebody comes along and starts to do exactly the same thing, since I have no patent over the technique involved, the only recourse I would have to stop them would be to prove they actually stole th
Re:NDAs and Patents (Score:2)
Which explains why you're the first person ever to have raised this possibility!
Open Source is anathema to profit (Score:3, Insightful)
Your only real profit may come from being first-to-market and unique for a short time; the rest of your company's life will be spent breaking even or dying.
Secrecy is essential.
Re:Open Source is anathema to profit (Score:2)
Santa Cruz Operation" and your main product is closed source.
Re:Open Source is anathema to profit (Score:2)
My company ran into that. It's a small 20 person startup company. Our competitor is a 100+ person company on the opposite side of the country. Every time we announced something, they had an announcement that made it sound like they invented it. This started in 1997, and even today they've got brochures that sound an awful lot like ours.
I'm not really in NDA territory here. Obviously to s
Re:Open Source is anathema to profit (Score:2)
Ford almost bought the entire nation after his first few years in operation.
Then it spent decades treading water, and now it's a pile of rusting hardware that has to buy other piles of rusting hardware to survive.
If Ford had shared his vision with his potential competitors, he'd never have become a household name and industrial legend.
That's the point.
And Toyota was first to market with the product it sells best: robotically made middle-class transportation, sub-luxury SUVs, and low-
Re:Open Source is anathema to profit (Score:4, Insightful)
Even so, did Ford use NDAs to protect his revolutionary idea of "mass production?" Did he even tell his employees to keep the process a secret until his cars were actually on the market? I don't know, but somehow I suspect not.
I also suspect that you didn't read the article, as your original comments are point for point the ideas the article was trying to knock down. You don't even provide any evidence as to why he's wrong.
Here's what it actually said: Being first to market isn't critical (he cites several examples of successful dot coms that waltzed right past the sandblasted corpses of the companies who hit the market first). Secrecy is not essential.
Chances are, whatever idea it is that you're playing so close to the vest really isn't that good an idea. Certainly, if you're working in a fairly glutted field, the advantages of secrecy are outweighed by the loss of input from people who know about the industry. Execution is usually far more important than uniqueness, and that's something nobody can sneak out of HQ in a looseleaf binder.
Sorry (Score:2, Redundant)
transmeta and segway (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:transmeta and segway (Score:2)
The other full of secrecy, NDA slapped on everybody, everywhere. 14 page employment contract and hyper-ego management.
Guess which one is still in business...
The difference I think lies in the fact that the first company was based in the UK while the second in the USA. The first had an awesome innovative product that customers wanted while the second ha
tow? (Score:2)
eTow.com, your one stop source for all your towing needs.
That was the biggest problem with the dotComs, too much specialization.
Idea are not unique!! (Score:2)
Ideas are not unique..
the business implementation and excution is what makes the idea a unqiue buisness!
which measn NDAs unless the business is fully established are useless..
This is everywhere though... (Score:3, Insightful)
Open-source startups, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean come on, I know it's Slashdot, but let's be serious for a minute
Common Household Dirt (Score:2)
You must not be married: if you were, you'd know that the spark goes out, and there'd better not be any dirt in the house.
Re:Open-source startups, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree that greed is good, not in and of itself. But it does have its uses.
Yeah, I know, we see too many patents that are not for any real innovation. But these are just people trying to game the system. The answer to that is to fix the system, not to discard a very important process for rewarding and encouraging innovation.
Re:Open-source startups, anyone? (Score:2)
So Flemming's life-saving discovery went unused for more than a decade, because he wasn't greedy.
Flemming isn't the only one:
From Figures in Radiation History: Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen [msu.edu]
IIRC, the
Sometimes theyre truly neccesesary (Score:3, Interesting)
1. you have knowledge that circumstances in an area are about to change (Airport being built, large employer moving out).
2. Your'e business idea is fragile and competitors could concievable kill it still born if they knew about it. ( You have a customer list, that a competitor might litigate against you using is an example)(SCO's business plan is another example)
3. You feel you really are doing something novel and you dont want everybody and their brother doing it. (Ever notice that hollywood will make half a dozen movies at a shot that all seem to be the same idea ?)
More importantly most people don't like blabbing their business around and if they have to tell others what their business, and they certainly don't want their potential investors going out and blabbing.
My company uses them. (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is somewhat linear, just applying software on a large scale to an area which has never had it before, but the execution is vastly more difficult.
Through luck and creativity, it appears that I've found various ways to execute this. Two and a half years to build one part of the software, another couple of years of building and testing, two years of working for "the man" to pay off my debts run up during the first four years.
Now I've got this fairly decent product which I've just started to roll out to some large customers. And I've had many people sign NDA's along the way. If they are violated, would I have the money to pursue the violators? No, of course not. So that makes them worthless, right?
No, they're not, because people don't know that I don't have the money to fight. So NDA's are just a harmless bluff for me and probably everyone else. But in the interests of thoroughness I should use them.
Yes they're useless. Yes you should use them. Not everything has to be useful to be used.
Re:My company uses them. (Score:2)
Ummm, about that bluffing concept and the "people don't know" statement, I think you may just made a slight mistake...
NDAs are everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
"Full Disclosure on Full Disclosure"
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/opinion/27BLO
"Confidentiality agreements were once primarily used to protect commercial secrets. More recently, celebrities have adopted these contracts to protect themselves against checkbook journalism and embittered assistants. This isn't such a big deal. But increasingly, confidentiality agreements ban their signers from revealing information that furthers more meritorious public debate. The Catholic Church, for example, used them to silence victims of sexual abuse by priests, possibly allowing that crime to continue longer than it otherwise might have.
These agreements aren't made merely out of a concern for privacy. Confidentiality agreements have become a tool used by the rich and powerful against people who can't afford to turn down a job, as a way to stifle public discussion of embarrassing issues, and as a means of ensuring that a whistle-blower can't throw a wrench into the image-making machinery of a public figure."
Read the rest of the editorial to fully appreciate his view point.
While the NDAs discussed in the Slashdot article and NDAs discussed in the Times editorial are different beings (one to protect potential business plan secrets, the other to protect public debate), they still point towards a disturbing trend to use these things in almost all circumstances where they can possibly be used.
Make discussion and conversation illegal, and you've just halted the exchange of ideas.
Just some food for thought.
Re:NDAs are everywhere (Score:2)
In short, no civil confidentiality regulation should be allowed to interfere in a matter of criminal law. I believe that in
NDAs Protect Patentability (Score:5, Informative)
But some patents are legitimate.
If a technique is publicly disclosed prior to filing a patent, then a one-year timeclock starts in which you must file for a US patent on the technique or lose the right to file. In addition, the ability to file is lost immediately in Europe.
So, NDAs are very useful if one intends to file patents.
nda not really bad ... just peace of mind (Score:4, Insightful)
Rarely is somebody going to run away with your idea anyways, because they already have their own.
The funniest is when you were already toying with an idea, and then somebody else asks you to sign an NDA, and then you find out in the meeting that their idea is very similar to yours. Then what do you do?
The first rule.... (Score:5, Funny)
The second rule of NDA Cult is - you DO NOT talk about NDA Cult.
Third rule of NDA Cult, someone yells "Stop!", gets an attorney, or finds shredded documents then deny all knowledge.
Fourth rule, only two guys to a fight(When beans are spilled).
Fifth rule, as many NDA's at a time, fellas.
Sixth rule, no wires, no cell phones.
Seventh rule, NDAs will go on as long as they have to.
And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at NDA Club, you have to shut up about what you see.
Startup secrecy can be a sign of incompetence (Score:5, Informative)
One particular company, involved in one of the latest and greatest tech crazes, had requested that we design ASICs (custom chips) for them. At our first meeting, they made it known in no uncertain terms that we (the vendor) were not to ask any deeply probing questions regarding the end product, or they would promptly and henceforth terminate all discussions. This was the first clue, since we already had a comprehensive NDA and it's a very atypical request.
At one point in a subsequent discussion they wanted to include an embedded processor from one of the well-known embedded processor providers. They claimed another vendor could run it at some number of MHz, and asked what we could do ours at. I replied that I wanted to understand some basic things regarding the processor's use - MIPS rating, types of ops like multiply-accumulates, any add-on DSP functions, etc.. The response I got: "Well, we're not sure, we just want the fastest one." I said "we are quite comparable in process performance and can rework it to at least as good a standard depending on your needs." The impression from other engineers working with me was that they had no clue what they were doing.
Needless to say, soon thereafter they had undergone a major reorg and we didn't hear anything until many months hence, when a different individual with very specific requirements came by and who was very easy to make a business case for. As we found out, the thing that made them "special" had nothing to do with us directly anyway.
The point I'm trying to make is that, in a rush for secrecy, you can end up hiding a lot of the issues from vendors, customers, and investors. Most startups that I have dealt with are basically taking one or more old ideas and adding their "special sauce" to the equation. That "special sauce" needn't be revealed, but if they want some cooperation and funding (and ultimately survival), they should be a little less secretive. At best, you will appear incompetent, and at worst, you will look like so many swindlers in the business world before you.
Re:Startup secrecy can be a sign of incompetence (Score:2)
I think this is a good moral. If your startup company requires secrecy, luck, and the "very best" engineers, then maybe you business plan is not a very good one. A good business plan is one that can be implemented above-board by hard working, but not necessarily superstar people and still whether a few strokes of bad luck. Now that would be a solid company..
Worked for an "Open Source Startup" (Score:2, Interesting)
One of my favorite quotes... (Score:4, Interesting)
Cargo cults (Score:3, Informative)
Having said that, I have seen two large organisations work themselves into NDA deadlock over something that both of them agreed would be mutually beneficial. In large organisations, NDAs also place an extra cost on any simple transaction, as the legal departments go to work.
It occurs to me that start-ups use NDAs as a sort of mixture of puffery ("see, we're big, too") and cargo-cult behaviour ("the big companies use this, so if we behave like them ...").
Red Hat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Red Hat? (Score:2)
Red Hat doesn't sell opensource or for that matter closed source software. No please don't point out the box standing at the better computer shop.
Red Hat sells support. You don't buy so much a box with a bunch of cd's you buy that someone has sat behind a computer and tested all the little rpms burned on those cd's. You pay and pay through the nose for the fact that competent help is just a phone call away. Well known funny fact is that Red H
Re:Red Hat? (Score:2)
"An open source startup" in a context of the original article means "a startup with a business model which is not under NDA". It doesn't mean "a startup selling open source software".
By the way, arguments "vi vs Emacs" are not useless in the industry where the usability is still a common problem. That's why Emacs, with its vim-mode, is the best :)
It's about plans (Score:4, Interesting)
I often have to sign an NDA, sometimes just to get a job interview. If the terms are reasonable, I have no qualms about this: the agreement is just a written form of an implicit agreement I see as part of my professional ethics. If somebody trusts you with sensitive information, it is simply wrong to be careless about passing that information on.
It occurs to me this argument is partially about the attitude gap between the open-source (or "free") software community and the closed-source (or "commercial") software community. Thing is, these two communities don't have to be enemies. Yeah, some OS people think that commercial software is evil [fsf.org], and some commercial software people think that the OS movement is economically clueless [onlineopinion.com.au]. But the reality is that no one model is the best possible one for all kinds of software. Some projects will prosper if they're driven by volunteers who just want to advance the state of the art. Others will only succeed if they're driven by well-capitalized entrepeneurs out to make a buck. Neither model is likely to go away, and I predict that more and more companies will come to rely on both.
Re:It's about plans (Score:2)
You what!? A job interview (certainly a first or second interview rather than a hiring interview) is absolutely not the place to be disclosing information under NDA. No way, no how.
I could understand the NSA in the bad ol' days getting people to sign NDAs that they wouldn't discuss the fact that they were applying to work at the NSA (telling people you worked there would get you fired, so telling people you had applied sure wouldn't
Byline (Score:2, Funny)
NDA is a tool, no more (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless, personal integrity is the key to real secrecy: don't hire/work with/partner with people you don't trust. And that trust has to extend to the decision to share information.
Where I work, a NDA is pretty much req. (Score:2, Interesting)
We are much more of a tech company though. We develop new technology, but we also do a lot of design projects, for instance the SmarTruck 2 [smartruck2.com]
The same thing national security (Score:2)
While secrecy in some areas clearly helps, IMHO - the real thing that won the cold war was the fact that intel (and many other US industries and products) could doubble it's chip speed every 18 months. The russians just couldn't compete against that kind of growth, that kind of economics even though the processes and technology wern't government secrets.
This is even more so with terrorisim.
Patent much better than NDA (Score:3, Insightful)
The other comment I have to the article, is that it is not always such a good idea to have something new and unique. In the very early phases of funding, VCs or angels have no idea if it will fly or not. If they can find at least one other company with the same basic idea, they consider that a validation of the market, and thus, the investment to be less risky. Being first on any market is such a two edged sword. Anyonme remember the Apple Newton?
NDAs and intellectual property (Score:2)
A number of startups that I've dealt with are wrongly convinced of the great importance of what they're doing. They sincerely believe that IBM and Microsoft are spying on them and tracking their movements, desperately trying to learn their secrets.
To most of them, I would say: you have only a few lines of crappy code and a silly idea. Microsoft and IBM don't care about you, and neither does anybody else. When you have some innovative complicated algorithm, or a large code base that's difficult to duplicat
Getting Down to Business (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course the product matters, it has to be something that the market needs or thinks it needs after you show your clients how much it will improve their lives. Produce the best product you can but really more companies should focus not so much on the NDA but on developing their business.
I helped start up an Internet business in '96 that sold for three-quarters of a billion dollars in 2000. We produced innovative products but so did our competitors however we produced a system that allowed us to have better customer service, instant reporting and faster turnaround times. It was the models that we created that attributed to our sucess far more than our products. Of course most people reading this will say that it was just an issue of timing and they are probably right with respect to the purchase price of our business but not the fundamental growth that we produced.
Re:Getting Down to Business (Score:2)
I could shit on a bun and make a better hamburger than McDonalds.
Re:Getting Down to Business (Score:2)
And another thing: If I ever find myself at a interstate exchange where the only thing to eat was McDonald's and Natanh's Shit on Toast, I'll eat the pavement.
Why submit as AC (Score:2)
His /. account remains anonymous (Score:2)
He's well aware we can find out who wrote the article. But because he AC'd, we don't know his /. identity. Just a little touch of anonymity on this end that he might want to keep.
Do you want everything you ever said on /. tied to your real name?
Open Source Startup (Score:3, Interesting)
I for one would love to hear some good arguments that could convince VC's to invest in Open Source based projects.
Re:Open Source Startup (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, because the big companies can throw $$$ at know-how and delivery and marketing and take over the market at any time. You may be able to create a viable business, but you're not likely to be able to grow enough to be the huge success VCs want in order to offset the risk.
Another possible reason people may be focused
Let me spell it out.... (Score:2, Funny)
COOTYS RAT SEMEN... err, no. Make that:
TOO MANY SECRETS!
Several good reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
Once we come to market, sure, somebody else will be able to make copycat products (limited perhaps by our patents), but we still get the first mover advantage with a new kind of device.
Now in this case, there is genuine uniqueness to the product. With a lot of software companies, their uniqueness is all about 2 or 3 features that somebody else can easily nab and throw into a competing product. In fact, since "manufacturing" in the software business involves clobbering in some new features and releasing a new build, which can usually be done in a few days, the time from reading some documentation to coming out with 1-for-1 matching feature sets is often measured in a matter of weeks, not months or years. I think that's why people in the software business are so paranoid about NDAs - keeping featurization and product details secret until it's on the market.
I think the other reason is many companies don't want anybody outside to hear how ugly and dirty their software is and what a big nasty hack it was to kludge it all together.
New paradigm? (Score:3, Funny)
1. [Insert crazy idea or technology here]
2. ??????
3. Profit!!
business model to...
1. NDA
2. [Insert crazy idea or technology here]
3. ??????
4. Profit!!
???
-- Gun
This guy's idea is not new :) (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I guess it's hardly surprising that two people involved in the same kind of business should have the same views, but still...
A Good Hard Kick In The Ass [amazon.com], by one Rob Adams. I borrowed it from the library (sorry Rob :) mainly because I thought it was a catchy title... but it turned out to cover almost exactly the same notions as included in this guy's "Cult of the NDA" article (except, obviously, in a lot more depth and with a lot more entertaining anecdotes). There's an entire chapter of the book that essentially just says "You think you have a unique idea you need to keep secret? You don't and you don't."
Adams also insists on what he calls "execution intelligence" being one of the key pillars in a business-that-might-have-a-chance (as opposed to a business that has no chance because it's still hung up on worshipping its own not-unique and not-even-very-good idea).
Some good stuff in the book. Certainly worth a read - even though a few bits of the book are rather amusing from a post-dotcom perspective (the book was published in 2002 according to Amazon, but I suspect most of it was written quite a bit earlier).
Pete.Warren McCulloch knew... (Score:3, Funny)
Another advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
If you go public, you will probably put others off starting up projects to do the same thing. If you pull your PR bullshit well, you might possibly drive others to pull out. "If they are ready to go public, they must be ahead od us, so we might as well pull out".
If the idea is really original, you shoudl be able to get a patent on it. And a patent is a form of going public, so once you have made your initial filing, shout up. And a patent is likely to impress the VCs too. But if you can't patent, bullshit. It works for evryone else, so why not for techies?
Re:Tow years??? (Score:2)
Re:Open source startups? How about yours? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Open source startups? How about yours? (Score:5, Funny)
VC: SECURITY!!!!!
Re:You got guts, pal (Score:4, Insightful)
To think that there is nothing to learn from Microsoft, and what they have done to become the #1 is a rather big mistake.
While I don't agree with Microsoft's ethics, nor their illegal activities, there are still many other things that they did well. As the article stated (and many things in the article are just common knowledge items, but good discussion starters), a lot of being successful comes from "dumb luck". It was actually cited as being the MOST important factor. Microsoft was in a position to supply a Quick & Dirty Operating System (and even called it QDOS!) when IBM originally was in a business relationship with Microsoft for applicationware. Bill Gates, for all the mostly-deserved ill will sent his way, saw the opportunity for what it was and got Microsoft set up as the OS supplier.
If a business can quickly take advantage of opportunities in a sharp, decisive manor like Microsoft did, then they will have taken advantage of "dumb luck". Luck is 90% random, and 10% how events are reacted to... or something close to that (YMMV) ;)
Re:You got guts, pal (Score:2)
First written in 1997 during the height of the dot com boom, it discusses how disruptive technology introduced by a startup can cause a large company with an established product to collapse. You don't need to take away all of a companies customers to cause it to collapse, you just need to take away enough for it not to maintain it's profit margins (which are fairly slim to start with).
Re:The fatal flaw... (Score:2)
Later: