

How do you avoid getting Zuckerberg-ed? - zaru

I'm helping some non-technical people start their startup and the question is a common one,"How do I prevent my technical lead from stealing my idea and creating their own version?" I've struggled with a good answer.  Is there any standard contract for this kind of thing?
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nostrademons
The best way to avoid it is to make yourself valuable enough that the
technical lead can start the company more easily with you than without you.
There's a _lot_ of non-technical tasks that are needed in a startup:
everything from talking to customers to negotiating contracts to finding
investors to drawing logos to ordering pizza. Make yourself really good at
those and your technical lead will _want_ to work with you. Don't, and why
should they?

Other people can chime in on the legal aspects, but I suspect there's not a
whole lot you can do. Ideas are only protectable to the extent that you can
patent them, which costs money and gives you only a very limited monopoly. If
all you have is a general idea for "I'm going to enter this market," you
haven't actually added any value.

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michaelpinto
That's a false argument: If Zuck was really just a "code monkey who got lucky"
he could never have built that business up into anything. The problem with
your premise is that it assumes that a site or a company is "one great idea" —
that's the case to a degree but it's really "one great idea + execution + the
right team to grow it".

Honestly Facebook was far from the first social website — in fact during the
web 1.0 era theglobe.com went public and once upon a time there was a great
site called SixDegrees.com which lasted from '97 until 2001 and used the same
formula that facebook did. But the difference was execution, execution and
execution.

On a side note techies get screwed over by business people more than the other
way around. For every Gates there are dozens of inventors who lost out on
their patents and the like. So your real question should be "How to avoid be
Winklevossed?"

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veyron
There are three situations:

1) the idea is sufficiently novel that it would be difficult for an average
person to conceive without suggestions

2) the idea is commonplace, but the value-add is something that is not obvious

3) the idea is a clone.

In the third case, there's really nothing you can do to protect yourself.

The second case is what happened to the Winklevosses. Their value-add, the
idea of exclusivity, is something that a lot of people write off as obvious.
However, and a poster correctly pointed out, the idea of social networking is
commonplace. The cachet was an idea that the Winklevosses figured out, and
that essentially was what propelled the entire project (had that been
commonplace, someone else would have tried a long time ago)

Again, its difficult to protect nontechnical people in this circumstance, but
the idea would be to let the technical people build the standard stuff first
and then reveal the value-add after trust has been established (the
winklevosses made the mistake of revealing the value-add way too quickly,
before establishing trust)

In the first case, you definitely want to learn the technical stuff yourself.
Especially if the idea is really good, in which case any developer would try
to zuckerpunch you. You don't really have any protection, other than
potentially trying to patent.

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gyardley
Of course there is. The startup should have a good lawyer, which will provide
you with the usual employment agreements and IP assignments, customized for
your area.

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petervandijck
How do you avoid anyone from stealing your idea?

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zaru
Thanks for the advice everyone

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mrvc
Look, to be part of a startup you need to be providing value equal to your
equity share. Otherwise you're leeching. If you're non-tech you can add value
through getting word out, negotiating, and taking care of all non-tech
business issues (legal, accounting, marketing, sales), basically things a tech
is _usually_ not very good at.

If you are not valuable equal to your equity share, reduce your equity share
to a more appropriate value or GTFO.

I calculate equity split on my startups using an auction format and it just
works: <http://nerdr.com/hacking-the-50-50-equity-split-using-shak/>

