

Startup Pitch Competitions have tricked Founders into sharing all their secrets. - waxzce
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/09/11/startup-pitch-competitions-founders/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=startup-pitch-competitions-founders

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austenallred
If "how many users do you have?" or "What is your conversion rate from
freemium to paid?" is a "secret" that would allow someone else to enter your
space and beat your startup at what it does, you don't have much of a startup.
You have many closer snakes to kill than worrying about competitors entering
your space because they heard a stat at a startup competition.

~~~
simonw
Stats like that are private not because they might encourage competitors to
enter your space, but because they might give your existing competitors
ammunition to use against you. Very obvious example: someone who is
considering becoming your customer may chose a competitor if they know that
the competitor has three times as many users as you.

Or maybe you're doing really well, but you want to save the fact that you have
over a million users and use it up get a great press story at a strategic
moment.

There are plenty of good reasons to keep your numbers private.

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jkaljundi
As a smallish angel investor, serial entrepreneur and startup event organizer,
I see no problems neither in asking those questions nor answering them, often
in quite much detail. Agree with r0h1n it is more about the execution.

True, there are some things none of us will disclose. Don't think someone
realistically would expect you to disclose your upcoming deals. Like said,
many are also fun probing questions and you should take them as such and turn
them to your advantage.

We did have mixed feelings at my current startup, Weekdone team management and
collaboration tool when we decided to publish our roadmap:
[https://blog.weekdone.com/weekdone-product-development-
ppp-a...](https://blog.weekdone.com/weekdone-product-development-ppp-
august-2013/) It might give great ideas to competitors or other upstarts. But
the value of customers, both potential and existing, knowing this outweighs
the secrecy. YMMV.

It's also a cultural thing. The blog is French. Europeans are much more
secretive.

On one point in the article: I remember Jeff Clavier (also French, now in the
Valley) telling at an event that when mentoring French and EU startups coming
to the US, the slide he tells them to always out is the exit strategy slide :)
Not for secrecy, but because it's silly to include in your startup's vision.
Built a great business and product instead.

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eli
I probably wouldn't answer some of those questions in public, but not because
I think someone's going to steal my idea. They're just none of your business.

It's a big market and this is an execution game. If you think you can jump in
late just because you heard I have 100,000 users, well, good luck to you.

~~~
benjamta
Quite agree - it's all about execution.

Other people want to come and do what we're doing? Well that's just great, it
validates our market. We just need to make sure we're doing it better than
you.

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mbesto
Lots of people talking here about execution, but what actually makes
"execution", execution?

Let's say for example you are the founder of Vitamin Water and you say "Our
secret sauce is that we will compensate celebrities to promote our brand by
offering them equity in the company".

Great! But do you have the means to pull that off? How can you convince an
investor that you have the ability to convince 50 Cent (or most likely his
accountant) to take equity in your venture?

This is execution. It's immeasurable, subjective, and is the most important
part of _executing_ a startup. It's also extremely hard to articulate
(convincingly, mind you) without actually seeing it happen right in your face.

I "give away" my strategy to Compete Hub (my startup) all of the time. It
helps me validate my market. My competitors could easily analyze this and do
the same thing. The reality is - they know more than me, but they simply don't
have the execution capabilities to do so.

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r0h1n
I don't see it as a "trick" if a founder is willingly answering a question
posed to him/her.

That said, I think this is reflective of the shift in software startups where
the "secret sauce" isn't your idea or statistics, but the speed & method of
your _execution_.

~~~
liam_boogar
I disagree - are you a founder?

Think of the list of things you wouldn't want your competitors to know about
you - your upcoming deals, your plans for growth - these are things that I've
seen founders reveal on stage during a video-recorded pitch competition.

~~~
gjmulhol
But then that founder is making the decision to reveal those details. A judge
has a right to ask whatever he or she wants about the business. It is on the
founder to be responsible in answering it.

To preemptively answer your question, yes, I am a founder. Yes, I have pitched
at video-recorded pitch sessions (though admittedly not ones as high profile
as Distrupt). I have even told a judge "we are not ready to share that detail
publicly, but I would be happy to share at least some of that information with
you after the event".

If you can't share at least some of the basics, then don't pitch at such an
event. They are not a fit for everyone, and if you are a speed play -- relying
only on first mover advantage-- then they are probably not for you. I
personally feel strongly that most founders are too stealthy and too cagey. We
should be able to share at least the core of what we are doing because it is a
good way to get feedback. The risk is that someone will come in and out-
execute you. If that happens, then it was probably going to happen anyway.

------
nemothekid
I've heard this question so much, that I might as well ask - has anyone ever
(in maybe the last 5 years) had their startup idea, copied then successfully
executed by Google that led to the destruction of your startup?

I can only really think that once Reader was released it may have killed a
couple startups but other than that I don't see the historical context for why
this question gets asked so often. Google Drive didn't kill Dropbox, and AWS
has yet to kill linode.

~~~
loceng
Facebook got started similarly, though that was a coder hired to work on a
project and told details presumably in confidence.

------
makerops
"No one is teaching founders which information they should give out to
strangers and which information they have a right to keep to themselves, and
frankly, the judges are more at fault than the founders."

Being ignorant is the founders' fault, not the "judges". As a founder, if you
want to become less ignorant, figure out what you should/should not be
telling. Hide a Dagger behind a Smile is a good book on tactics; along with 48
laws of power, with the former being more applicable.

------
nevi-me
It can go in any direction. I've seen companies that I might potentially
compete with in the near future disclose a lot of things that could give
me/anyone an advantage. It's not that we have "100'000" active users or any of
the metrics, but rather something very important: Their strengths. There is a
company founded by a few guys who had an idea, and patented it. They were
already in mid-management corporate positions, so they managed to secure some
funding. The strength that they always put up on microphone was that they're
relying on patent protection, and that they want to see the likes of Google
license their technology. The problem with this is that if they were
programmers they'd know that their software patent is invalid, and that it's
nothing really out of this world. Instead of focusing on building a solid
product they wave the patent around while some of us are finding ways of
taking them on.

I disclose the technology that my app uses, but I don't feel comfortable
telling the world how I've managed to do something that could take minutes
achievable in seconds.

------
morgante
Founders who protest such competitions are the same types who ask potential
employee's to sign onerous NDAs.

Honestly, almost nothing about running a business should be secret. Because
that's not where your success comes from. It's all in execution and building a
great product/culture. You can openly share all your plans and still see
others fail to copy them.

~~~
agilord
I'd love to see your business plans, upcoming negotiation agendas and planned
budgets. And I am not even your competitor, as I don't know what business you
are in. Imagine your competitor's eagerness for such data.

~~~
morgante
And I'd have no objections to sharing such data. It's simply not the
competitive advantage in most fields. Execution and effort drives success, not
business plans.

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jlees
I like this point:

 _Judges in non-related sectors determine whether an early-stage gaming studio
is ‘better’ than a boot-strapped big data startup._

It's certainly true that watching back to back pitches of very different
companies, even in the same general sector, makes me wonder how on earth the
judges are supposed to pick a 'winner'. However, it's pretty educational at
the end of the day -- numbers matter, perhaps more so than the idea itself? --
any startup can be distilled down into a bunch of metrics and compared against
another. It's that ephemeral 'potential' that makes the difference in terms of
winning competitions, I think; I also wonder if a startup built purely to win
a specific competition would look very different from one built because the
founders had deep expertise and genuine passion for a specific problem or
area?

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fudged71
I disagreed completely with the title, then completely agreed with the
article. Thanks for sharing the link. I've been asked some very probing
questions by journalists as well.

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quizzas
I look at pitch competitions as practice for public speaking so when I do have
a one on one, I'm rock solid with my 30 and 90 second pitches.

