Nobody will steal your startup idea

Four perspectives that should calm you the F down

Source: Nikola Yenev

1. Ideas are worth nothing

• The mantra goes, startups are 99% execution.

  • Most €100M startups are worthless before any serious work has been done

• Most startup ideas aren't worth stealing

  • There are a lot of shitty ideas

• If startup ideas are so valuable, why isn’t there a huge market for selling good startup ideas?

  • There isn’t. There’s a huge market for selling great startups. Sure. But ideas? Nope.

2. It very, very rarely happens

• Over the thousands of founders I've met, I've heard only one story of a big corporation 'stealing an idea'.

  • Six months after doing a demo at a German car manufacturer, they saw very similar ideas being launched.

  • This doesn’t prove it’s stolen. Six months is relatively short of developing an entirely new hardware product.

  • Very often, in large corporations, many ideas that startups exist. They just don’t allocate resources to it in exploring them.

• Assume you are not the Winklevoss twins, who settled with Facebook for allegedly stealing their idea.

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3. Stealing an idea means working on somebody else’s idea

• How many startup ideas have you seen in the past months?

  • How many of those did you consider to pick up?

• What are the odds a startup idea aligns with you?

  • 1. Is this a priority worth making time for?

  • 2. Does this align with your core motivations?

  • 3. Can you realistically commit to this long-term?

• Let’s say it’s 1% for each of these aspects.

  • 0.01^3 → 1 in a million

  • Even if 1M people see your startup idea, there’s about a ±63% chance somebody will steal your idea.

• If 1M people see your startup idea, you're doing something right. You got other things to worry about

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4. If people can steal your idea from your website, there’s not much to be secretive about

• If your website has your idea and people can steal the idea from just a picture, what is there to protect?

  • You will promote your solution at some point.

  • You are just buying yourself a couple of months by being neurotic about this

• Many ideas can’t be protected by IP/patents

  • Marketplace ideas

  • Much of B2B SaaS can’t be protected

    • Unless you have a fancy background algorithm

  • The form and design of things are hard to protect and can be expensive.

• Great innovations can be protected

  • But it is not cheap. Easily 25k - 50k to secure patents in particular regions. Do you have that money?

• Share the cookie, not the recipe

  • Make your magic invention a black box.