

Ask HN: Bad experiences after sharing your idea? - tom_ilsinszki

I read a lot about, how ideas are worth next to nothing. As many have pointed out in the past, ideas are worth a negative amount if anything (since you have to put in all the work and money). Also it was interesting to read about all the positive affects of sharing your startup idea (others will help you polish your idea).<p>Still, I'd like to ask...
Did any of you have bad experiences because you shared your startup idea with someone you should not have? What happened?
======
chaostheory
The only bad experiences I've had after sharing my idea are:

1) realizing that my original idea sucks and that it needed to evolve or
completely change

2) realizing that even if my idea is good, most people are either indifferent
to it or they hate it. Which makes me think of this quote, "Don't worry about
people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their
throats."

Neither experience is pleasant. Both are morale killers.

Ideas are cheap.

~~~
rjurney
Isn't item 1 a good thing, because after about 100 iterations your idea will
probably improve?

~~~
chaostheory
Both are good things, that shouldn't be avoided. They're just not pleasant.

~~~
rjurney
They should be. If you feel strongly, you're iterating, and you're getting
feedback - you're probably onto something :)

~~~
chaostheory
Yes I know, but it's easier said than done. It's kind of like how running a
marathon for the 1st time sounds really good in your head, but when you're
actually doing it your legs and lungs ache? You're still going to finish the
run, it's still good for you, but it just doesn't feel good the 1st time.

------
Detrus
The technology roadmap for the next five decades is predictable. For example
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Raymond_Kur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Raymond_Kurzweil)
are spot on so far. What ideas do you have that aren't there? No big ideas
that's for sure.

Startups mainly work by using existing technology to make a working service in
a few years. The main problems are economic, social, psychological, not
technological.

Will people use some silly limited email service? Yes, because it alters the
psychology of communication, enables them to talk to more people quicker. Will
people use a search engine that indexes the web? Yes if content on the web is
worth a damn. Will labeling the world through people's IDs instead of URLs and
brands be more efficient? Yes if you pull it off.

Will people pay for Adobe's apps instead of buying templates? Yes if they're
convinced by designers that templates are bad and they need to go through an
exclusive branding ritual.

A lot of startups are so mesmerized by what's possible with current technology
they can't see two steps ahead. They come up with pretty small ideas in most
cases and it's often difficult to link those ideas to the big technological
trends even when the startup gets as big as Mint or Twitter.

That's why VCs don't care about ideas. We already have the ideas. If you
understand tech like Ray Kurzweil did, you can shit out ideas all day. VCs
care about fitting into the unpredictable world of fickle humans, like
Twitter's 140 characters did, and your motivation to slave away.

The tech economy will move forward one way or another. In the big scheme of
things we will get to AI and understand our own brains until we can predict if
Twitter should add the ability to subdivide long texts into 150 character
chunks to limit the size of rants like this one.

~~~
nostrademons
Just because Kurzweil's predictions from 1990 were correct doesn't mean that
we can predict the future, or even that _Kurzweil's_ predictions for the next
10 years.

Think of it this way: _lots_ of people made predictions in 1990 about what the
next 10 years will be like. (Some of the ones I remember: that Japan would
take over the world, that the American government would fall, that we'd all be
watching WebTV, that cars would drive themselves). Simply by chance,
_somebody_ is bound to be mostly right. That person will then get lots of
media attention for having corrected predicted the last 10 years. But that
doesn't mean he'll predict the next 10 years correctly.

In fact, if you look at Kurzweil's predictions from 2001 for 2009
([http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0275.html)):

He predicted the move to laptops from desktops. He missed the rise of smart
cell phones, instead thinking that we'd be using ultrathin tablets and
computers embedded in jewelry. He incorrectly predicted a move away from
rotating media to solid-state memory (perhaps he was just early, solid state
is likely to catch on significantly over the next 5 years - but in servers,
which is the one place where he thought it _wouldn't_ catch on). He correctly
predicted the rise of wireless. He was dead wrong about the usage of speech
recognition technology, which is still too unreliable to recognize more than a
few keywords.

He missed the rise of international terrorism as a new geopolitical power. He
missed the emergence of the U.S. as an aggressor nation that actively declares
war on other nations (in fact, he predicted that national wars likely wouldn't
exist), but correctly predicted that the U.S. would remain the dominant
military power.

He incorrectly predicted continued economic growth, particularly in the stock
market, which is now below where it was in 2001. Economists still do not
believe price deflation is a good thing. The U.S. remains an economic leader,
but its leadership has declined somewhat. He correctly predicted the rise of
China. He missed the emergence of the EBay/Paypal/Adwords economy, where
perhaps a million or more people can now make their living off selling niche
products online. He did predict the rise of online transactions, however. He
completely missed the growth of social networking as an important cultural
force. He incorrectly predicted the development of intelligent assistants,
which never caught on. He correctly predicted the download economy, where you
pay for an information product and then download it directly instead of
accepting a physical copy.

If you were to meta-analyze these predictions, there's a pattern that emerges.
Those predictions that took an emerging technology that had _already caught on
with mainstream users_ and extrapolated it out to pervasiveness tended to come
true (laptops, faster computers, wireless, China). Those predictions that took
an emerging technology still in the R&D stage and assumed it would catch on
usually failed (solid state storage, speech recognition, intelligent
assistants). And then inflection points that came out of nowhere obviously
were never predicted at all (social networking, AdWords, terrorism, U.S.
aggression).

The thing is - there are always those black swan events that come out of
nowhere. And they tend to be where fortunes are made. Everyone expected
laptops to get cheaper, faster, and lighter in 2001, so that was already
priced into their market value. Nobody expected that a good portion of our
social lives would consist of broadcasting 140 character text messages.

~~~
barmstrong
That's interesting that Kurzweil predicted deflation would be recognized as a
good thing.

I was an economics major and never understood the main stream view of
economists on that (that it's bad).

~~~
nostrademons
It gives people an incentive to sit on their currency and hoard it away
instead of investing it in productive ventures.

Think of it this way: the real interest rate is the nominal interest rate
minus the inflation rate. That means that if the inflation rate is negative,
people can effectively earn interest simply by sitting on their cash, since
it'll be worth more in the future. If people earn interest by doing nothing,
what incentive do they have to invest in a potentially risky venture that may
make more in the long run, but may also cost them their principal?

Deflation biases people towards inaction, because they know that sitting and
waiting means their money will be worth more in the future. Inflation biases
people towards action - they know their money will be worth less in the
future, so they may as well invest in _something_. The Austrian critiques of
monetary inflation are basically right - it _does_ result in bubbles, as
people seek higher returns from progressively more risky investments because
they know their cash will be worth less.

Technically, the mainstream economist view shoots for price stability (0%
inflation) and not inflation. But they recognize that they'll never achieve
that, so they err on the side of inflation. Mostly, this is because inflation
is easier to cure than deflation is. If everybody is biased toward inaction,
then when the Fed pumps money into the system to stimulate action, it tends to
collect within firms who won't spend it because they expect it'll be worth
more in the future. (This is currently a very real problem, as much of the
money the Fed injected in 2009 is collecting in banks that are trying to shore
up their balance sheets and consumers that are trying to pay down debt.) Each
firm always has the option of choosing not to spend the money it's received.
All it takes is one firm that wants to hoard, and the money will never
circulate within the economy.

If you have continuous low-level inflation, however, it can be brought under
control simply by reducing the money supply. You can't spend money that you
don't have. (Well, you can on a micro-level by borrowing from another firm,
but you can't on a macro-level because there's nobody else to borrow from.) So
when the Fed restricts the money supply, that reduction filters all the way
through the economy, people have less money to spend, and prices drop.

~~~
Empact
> It gives people an incentive to sit on their currency and hoard it away
> instead of investing it in productive ventures.

Kind of like the incentive people have when evaluating electronics, which are
under consistent, massive deflation thanks to technological progress? Not such
a problem there, is it? We're not fussing over Dell or Apple, or the car
companies, for that matter, who see similar, though less pronounced, levels of
technology-driven deflation.

Why would such a force, which is so innocuous in these areas, and which
develops naturally due to the rise in productive capacity & efficiency over
time, be so problematic macroscopically? Why would people stop investing, any
more than stop buying computers and cars now? Before answering, see my
following point.

> what incentive do they have to invest in a potentially risky venture that
> may make more in the long run, but may also cost them their principal?

An incentive driven by seeking greater return. In your world, wouldn't
everyone invest in the bond market, or buy annuities, rather than the riskier
stock market? Doesn't exactly gel with reality, does it?

> If you have continuous low-level inflation, however, it can be brought under
> control simply by reducing the money supply.

What does lowering the money supply do, pray tell? Wouldn't that increase the
value of the dollars remaining in the system? That's deflation, by definition.
How can it be both your solution and your problem?

> Deflation biases people towards inaction, Inflation biases people towards
> action

We'll speak more clearly if we aren't so broadly. Natural deflation is not
static, but a force dynamically determined by facts of the economy, such as
the growth in productive output.

For natural deflation, little investment -> less growth in productive output
-> little deflation -> more incentive to invest. Likewise for the converse:
lots of investment -> more deflation -> less incentive to invest. This dynamic
interplay is a self-regulating force which serves to naturally counteract the
market propensity to go off the rails on some wasteful bubble or other.

Seems to me your arguments are specious, and the current bias against
deflation is an orthodoxy.

~~~
nostrademons
> Kind of like the incentive people have when evaluating electronics, which
> are under consistent, massive deflation thanks to technological progress?
> Not such a problem there, is it?

People put off electronics purchases all the time because of price deflation.
How many times have you heard people wait until the next Macworld before
buying things from Apple, or wait and see what the next Android phone will be
before buying anything?

It's not really a problem for the electronics industry because electronics is
a robust and growing industry anyway. So people spend less than they otherwise
would, but nobody cares because they're still spending more (on electronics)
than they used to.

That growth is because electronics is a substitute for several other old
economy goods. What's good for the iPad and the Kindle certainly isn't good
for the publishing industry. It _is_ good for the consumer and the economy,
because it encourages people to switch away from more resource/labor-
intensive, less useful goods like books, and towards less resource/labor-
intensive, more useful goods like tablet PCs.

You can't apply the same logic to the level of the whole economy, because (by
definition) there's nothing for the consumer to switch to. Price deflation
across the _whole_ economy means that the consumer is encouraged to switch
away from goods and into cash. But cash itself is non-productive; it has no
utility for anyone beyond a means of purchasing other, more productive goods.

Whenever you get confused about macro/micro effects, it's helpful to forget
money entirely and look at what people actually _do_. When prices drop for
computers, people switch away from other goods and buy more computers, which,
assuming computers are more efficient to manufacture, is good for the economy.
When prices drop across the economy, there's nothing for people to switch to,
except cash, and cash is _not_ good for the economy or the consumer.

> An incentive driven by seeking greater return. In your world, wouldn't
> everyone invest in the bond market, or buy annuities, rather than the
> riskier stock market? Doesn't exactly gel with reality, does it?

"My world" doesn't actually care whether people purchase bonds or stocks or
real estate. It abstracts those away and assumes the relative asset mix and
risk preferences will be the same. The only difference is that the rate of
return for holding _cash_ has gone up, and hence some percentage of the people
who otherwise would've purchased stocks or bonds or real estate will instead
hold cash. Because they now hold cash instead of stocks/bonds/real estate,
they have no incentive to improve ("invest in") the businesses represented by
those stocks or bonds.

> What does lowering the money supply do, pray tell? Wouldn't that increase
> the value of the dollars remaining in the system? That's deflation, by
> definition. How can it be both your solution and your problem?

No. That's a decrease in the money supply, by definition. (Some people define
inflation as a change in the money supply, but such definitions are highly
unorthodox, and can't describe phenomena like the 2008 deflation, where the
money supply increased sharply yet prices fell.)

Over time, as people's expectations adjust, a rise in the money supply will
tend to lead to inflation and a fall will lead to deflation. But before you
get full-blown deflation, you're going to get _disinflation_ , where prices
are still inflating but at a slower rate. That was the situation during
Volcker's "shock therapy" in the 1981-82 recession: the money supply
contracted, the contraction squeezed the inflation rate down to something
manageable, but then the contraction was reversed before prices could actually
start falling.

> We'll speak more clearly if we aren't so broadly. Natural deflation is not
> static, but a force dynamically determined by facts of the economy, such as
> the growth in productive output.

Agreed.

> For natural deflation, little investment -> less growth in productive output
> -> little deflation -> more incentive to invest. Likewise for the converse:
> lots of investment -> more deflation -> less incentive to invest. This
> dynamic interplay is a self-regulating force which serves to naturally
> counteract the market propensity to go off the rails on some wasteful bubble
> or other.

Somewhat agreed. This, empirically, seems to be the case when deflation is
minor and the economy is hovering near equilibrium.

It does not appear to be the case when there is a sudden shock to the system.
For example, a financial panic increases the demand for hard currency, which
pushes up the value of currency (deflation), which encourages people to hoard
even more currency, which causes still more deflation. In theory, this should
be self-limiting when entrepreneurs realize that assets are available for
bargain-basement prices, then buy them (without credit, otherwise they're at
the mercy of fickle creditors) to put to use in new industries. In practice,
there's good evidence that it can last a decade or more. It only takes one bad
4-year term to unseat a modern democracy, so policymakers have a strong
incentive to not let things get so bad for so long.

------
njl
Some business ideas are innovative, in the sense that they are a new, bold, or
risky approach to solving problems. I don't think you have anything to lose by
sharing those ideas. These ideas are all about execution, and passion and
domain knowledge will out. Share these with impunity, I think.

Some business ideas are just really fancy arbitrage. Execution matters, but
the value is self-evident; the more people that know about the opportunity,
the faster the market is going to get flooded. I'd keep these a little closer
to the vest.

I suspect the start-ups that we talk about and focus upon here on hacker news
fall more in the first category and less in the second.

~~~
mwerty
Do you have any anecdotes?

It would be far more useful and in the spirit of the original question than
advice/opinion (which I see no dearth of on this site).

------
Flemlord
Yes actually. When I quit my job to start my first company, I told a few
employees at my old company what I was working on. One of them thought it was
such a good idea, he also quit and started a similar company. I was
successful, he wasn't, but in the early days, it was a major headache that I
didn't need.

~~~
freddier
I had a similar experience and, in that time, it sure felt like a major
headache. But right now, I think thanks to that I had way more motivation,
someone to compete and a clear goal to beat. And yes, I eventually "won" like
you say you did. Competition never hurts when you're in it to win.

It was a major push that really helped me.

~~~
adrianwaj
People who rip off your idea in such a way can be shamelessly destroyed
business-wise. If one enjoys doing that, then sharing has no downside, it's
like dealing crack: once they take your idea and run with it, you own them.

~~~
DenisM
more details please. how do you destroy them?

------
karipatila
The one thing I have noticed is that it takes considerably longer to implement
the idea if I reveal it to someone else first.

~~~
benatkin
I didn't notice it until I read this: <http://sivers.org/zipit>

------
rjurney
The best thing that's ever happened to me with sharing ideas is that someone
was inspired by them who could execute on them better than I could. They built
it, saving me the trouble.

If you share your good ideas, you'll build a network that informs you and
feeds your brain to synthesize more good ideas. Build the ones that really fit
you and yours, the ones you can't stop yourself from building, and do it now.
Then you don't have this problem, you have the sharing a demo problem, which
is better.

------
drivingmenuts
I sometimes share my ideas with the hope that someone _will_ do something with
it.

I don't really care about making money and honestly, I have too many ideas to
tell the good ones from the bad ones anymore.

~~~
jey
> I have too many ideas to tell the good ones from the bad ones anymore.

It seems having good ideas is actually just a combination of two things:
having lots of ideas (including bad ones), but then putting them through a
really good filter to separate the good from the bad. I think both parts are
skills that can be deliberately developed over time.

------
daniel-cussen
Nobody has ever stolen an idea of mine.

At worst a friend has gotten his hopes up then frustrated we can't/didn't
execute the idea.

------
wlievens
This made me think: what if a particular idea isn't a novel concept in itself,
but rather manifests itself as market information?

For instance, the knowledge that the available software in sector X sucks
might be worth something, simply because people outside the sector don't know
that that opportunity exists.

Not all ideas are about revolutionizing news reporting or optimizing dating...
sometimes they're about making decent software for veterinarians, or something
like that.

------
samratjp
I realized after several iterations that it is sometimes just as hard to ram
down a good idea down someone's throat and it's always worth a shot. But, of
course there will always be exceptions.

I personally do a proxy pitch. If I know the person I am pitching to is a
potential investor/entrepreneur who could actually implement my once in a
"blue moon" (haha) idea, then, I pitch a proxy idea to see how smart their
response is. If I like the relationship with them, I indulge them with my real
one.

------
adrianwaj
Here's my advice: share your ideas, but generally refrain from releasing the
seed of it to anyone but investors, most of the time. It's your passion that
you should protect. This can can be difficult.

For example, here's a couple of mission statements that remind me of what
would have been once the core of ideas: "we turn unstructured information into
structured information" (Dapper) or "organize the world's information"
(Google).

Sometimes one needs to talk about ideas to drill down into it and release a
core value proposition like the ones just mentioned. But, once you have it, if
you mention it, you dissipate its energy in yourself and risk transferring it
to someone else who can manifest it better than yourself: basically rip you
off. At the same time, by sharing the core energy, people may remember you,
help you, or work for you. But they also might trash it or steal it.

So once you've refined the gold, just stick it in your pocket until you
absolutely need to bring it out, like to customers and beneficiaries of the
idea. And when someone talks to you about their ideas, you should likewise
respect it.

Good to know someone's background to determine what and how much of your ideas
you wish to discuss. Also, when your ideas become real physical energy, then
start working.

------
deanj
Yes, I did have this experience. Made a trip to Silicon Valley to talk over a
licensing agreement with a tech giveback (by us). One of the ideas was shot
down by a senior tech guy there as "unworkable". We (stupidly) dropped the
idea after being ridiculed for it.

More than a year later, he and the head of their marketing took at exact idea,
created a company around it, and later sold it for more than 230 million.

So, yes, it can happen.

------
Tangurena
My experience with "sharing ideas" is that I end up spending so much time
explaining, justifying and defending my ideas that I end up with no energy
left to actually implement them. Consequently, I don't bother telling folks
what I'm planning - except for disposible ideas that I spread just to keep
folks from pissing on my leg and call it rain.

------
stretchwithme
I think if you have an idea whose execution is complex, its much harder for
someone else to grasp, let alone copy. And that's a challenge for the
entrepreneur, but you are more likely to build something defensible.

Now just explain in 5 words why I can't live without it and you got it.

------
ahoyhere
Nope, never had a bad experience sharing an idea. I do it on purpose to see if
anyone will ever give me a run for my money... but no. Nobody I've met could
execute with the dilligence I do, nor do they have the marketing savvy.

I talk about how I'm going to revolutionize email, with user interface
enhancements, make it very step-by-step explaining the logic behind them, at
conferences where I speak in front of several hundred people -- and so far as
I can tell, nobody has lifted a finger.

My ideas aren't revolutionary, either, and they could make a lot of money.

Last week I met a person in my city (Vienna), who was excited to meet me cuz
of my reputation, and was worried that it turned out we were going to compete.
I told him, no problem. We talked about our different approaches to the same
problem. I said maybe he should look at selling his technology to people like
me, instead of the end users.

That's about the extent of it. :)

------
lisp123
One time, at Harvard, me and my buds thought up a website. It was gonna be
like Myspace, but, uh, like better and stuff. You know, better features and
just better. We were too tired from coming up with the idea to do anymore from
there, so we went up to this guy and were like, "hey, we have this startup.
It's like a Myspace, but better, and like for colleges maybe, I guess. You
wanna like do the coding for it?" He agreed, but then he stole our idea, that
we put so much thought into. We done the hard part. He just swooped in and
made some code to glue our brilliant ideas together. Of course we sued him
cause we got the monies, and we ended up with millions, just like patent
trolls, but better.

Now I have a new idea. It's like a webapp, but better than webapps today.
Anybody wanna come up with some code to help this idea come together? But if
you read this, and you try to steal my idea, I'm gonna come after you.

~~~
tom_ilsinszki
Oh man, I didn't wanna say it before, but like, I have the same freaking idea.
I mean the webapp thing... I think we should totally team up.

