

Ask HN: How do you protect your idea(s) from being stolen by your partners - thepreacher

I ask this because I have just had a light come on in my head. I know its a brilliant idea and will work if implemented properly. I have some of the skills required and I can find people to help with the things I cannot do. However in-explaining to them what the idea is, they can go behind me and get it done faster. Heck, they can get it done without my help. The way I see it I have two options:
1. Keep it to myself and take the time I need to build up the skills I lack, then go it alone or 
2. Tell them and hope that they turn out to be more decent human beings than I have ever met? What's your advice?
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dkersten
I'd say there is little value in keeping _any_ idea to yourself. Ideas are
incredibly cheap[1]. First mover advantage has also been shown not to be very
important - just look at Facebook vs earlier social networks as an extreme
example. Its all about execution - anyone can come up with good ideas (hell,
YC is now even experimenting with accepting teams _without_ ideas). Besides,
lots of people have ideas all the time and very few people go through with
them. The going through with them is the valuable part, not the having ideas
part.

[1] I was at Startup Weekend recently and our team (5 of us who had never met
before the Friday night) turned a vague and impossible concept into a workable
product prototype including business plan, market validation and pitch to
investors in ~40 hours. We started out because we felt it would be a fun
project to build crazy multiplayer game AI and ended up with an analytics
solution that real game developers told us they would happily pay for to being
approached by an investor asking us to continue working on it - all in the
space of a weekend of focused brainstorming. If a focused weekend is all it
takes to come up with a refined idea, basic prototype, business plan, market
validation and pitch to investors, then I don't think its worth worrying about
if someone will steal your idea. Most startups fail anyway and I bet very very
few, if any at all, failures are because the company didn't keep quiet about
their idea.

PS: the one time when it may make sense to keep your ideas secret is if you
are told to, eg, by an investor who's about to give you a lot of money (but be
careful! don't want the investor to back out after you've told everyone else
that you can't talk about your business...). Outside of that special case, I
think you _need_ to give your idea away at some stage, eg, at a minimum for
market validation or to tell investors about it (they won't sign NDA's).

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revorad
Don't partner with people who you can't even trust with an idea.

