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?
It was a major push that really helped me.
The person who comes up with the original idea is probably the one with the most passion for the thing in the first place and is much more likely to put in the needed effort to see it grow.
That, and the fact that the idea in itself is not as important as the execution plan. The person who came up with it probably was also thinking about that a lot more than the person who stole it.
If it were me and I liked the idea of another person so much that I could steal it, I would probably quit my job and find a way to work with them.
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.
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...):
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.
Do computers fit inside jewelry and get worn on clothes? Yes, RIFD chips and iPod shuffles are jewelry sized.
He didn't miss smaller than state movements having significant influence, he mentioned that ultimately anyone will have the capability to severely disrupt society. Computer viruses could be a serious problem when brain implants will be widespread. Science fiction writers thought of this in the 50's.
No one is claiming that those predictions will be exact to the last detail. We don't know how AIs will look, how brain implants will work in detail today. Maybe 140 char messages are a vital piece of such systems, we'd stumble on that anyway.
You don't need to know every detail. If Google didn't happen, some clever social networking portal system would have happened. If facebook didn't happen, some other way to ID users would. The larger trends are obvious, the details are not.
VCs saw The Matrix. They care how your startup fits into the market in this decade, they want to see something that works now, not hot air about how amazing the future will be.
(Intelligent assistants are GPS things that tell you where to turn and voice activated customer support menus. The prediction about new forms of government are social networks. The underlying idea is that as communication becomes more frequent, less of a hassle, governments and corporations will get reorganized, the startup mania is part of that)
I was an economics major and never understood the main stream view of economists on that (that it's bad).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
At worst a friend has gotten his hopes up then frustrated we can't/didn't execute the idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now just explain in 5 words why I can't live without it and you got it.
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. :)
