
NDA = Not doing anything - sharpshoot
http://www.brianoberkirch.com/?p=846
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epall
On the other hand, sometimes your major sustainable competitive advantage is
your IP. My current employer has developed an algorithm that pretty much blows
anybody else out of the water for what we're doing and they most definitely
don't want anybody else learning about it. Granted, their strategy is simply
don't tell anybody (All I know is we have the algorithm, not what it is), but
protection of IP can be important in some cases. If what you're protecting
will be obvious once your product is out there, then yes an NDA is pointless.
However, if you want to protect some behind-the-scenes technology that won't
be evident to anybody using your product, then an NDA may be in order.

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jwecker
I agree with the post. When an idea is new there is a tendency to feel like it
needs protecting. If you're serious about it, though, and get your hands dirty
with the details of implementing whatever it is, NDA's seem more and more
silly. By the time you get a real good idea working you won't care if the
whole world knows. You know that as simple as the idea sounded, it's really
thousands of hours of blood sweat dollars and tears. You'll say- "oh, you want
to do it also? go right ahead and try."

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sharpshoot
yeah agree. Another cool metric is "if your idea can be given away by telling
someone" then it doesn't have enough depth" Most simple things are way more
complicated when u do them - and thats in the thought of the implementation.

Just look at eBay - a platform for auctioning goods. The depth comes in
generating a trust system (how?) then making it easy to list, and for people
to send each other goods. Then each of these ideas can be fleshed out. So its
not really one idea - its a whole bunch including design decisions, customer
acquisition strategies, page element preferences, copy, bug fixing - a whole
load.

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Harj
i couldn't agree with this more if i wanted to. ideas are commodities,
execution is the only thing that matters.

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dangrsmind
Many NDAs require the disclosing party to describe, list, or specify the
confidential items disclosed. But often I find when very early stage inventors
ask people to sign NDAs they often fail to specify what is disclosed even
though their agreements require it. If you ever have to enforce an NDA, trying
to argue that the entire conversation was confidential is much harder than
simply producing the list of disclosures. Also, I've never asked an investor
to sign an NDA. Asking someone to sign an NDA indicates a lack of trust. IMO
if you don't trust the people you are talking to you probably shouldn't be
talking to them at all.

Recently I've been asked to sign NDAs as part of employment interviews. This
seems to have almost become standard practice now. I don't really think this
is a great idea, and I often won't take an interview that requires an NDA. But
sometimes if I am certain that I won't be developing my own ideas in the field
I'll sign one. Inevitably I find that these employment related NDAs are the
most frivolous, silly, and irrelevant ones I sign. YMMV.

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Andys
For the sake of completeness, what might be some of the situations where an
NDA or secrecy of the idea is important?

I'm guessing an example would be if you are entering negotiations to be bought
out by a public company.

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jwecker
Go ahead and keep a secret when you really strategically need to keep a
secret. Don't get emotionally attached to it being a secret though- because
one day, probably soon, it'll get duplicated. And do you have a thoroughly
thought out realistic business reason to keep it (temporarily) secret in the
first place? Usually not in my experience.

~~~
dangrsmind
"Attachment creates delusion."

\-- Buddhist saying

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Tichy
It is easy to come up with ideas, but some ideas are better than others. Maybe
I can agree to the level that "ideas in nuthsells" are worthless. For example
anyone can have the idea to "create a really elegant computer", yet most
people agree that only Steve Jobs can pull it off (just look at the TV
computer design challenge by intel - so depressing). But I think in his mind
the idea is more than just the nutshell description. And having THAT right
idea doesn't seem to be trivial to me.

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python_kiss
About an year ago, a company hired me to code a corporate instant messenger.
There was no technologically innovative angle to it; yet, my employer insisted
that I sign an NDA before the project be disclosed to me. The process took
about three weeks and wasted time that could've been spent on actually coding
it.

In my opinion, NDA's are more useful when they are used to protect a
"technology" rather than a "product".

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mauricecheeks
The worst thing to me about the rise of the NDA is the return of the
colloquial phrase, "i could tell you... but i'd hafta kill you"

:-P

