Last week I mentioned that I don’t respond to cold partner offers, and some of the reasons why. I’ve been wanting to write this specific post for a long time, but haven’t done so mainly because I had a hard time verbalizing my rationale. I was working on a gut feeling, with the end still serving my belief, but without any support for why that belief was valid. I think that I’ve thought it through enough now that I can give a more concrete answer.

Originally, my argument was that ideas are a dime a dozen, and that I’m too busy to take time stealing your ideas, since I have plenty of my own that I’ve not acted on. As I mentioned in that prior post, I won’t show nearly as much enthusiasm for someone else’s idea, so the chance that I’d implement it would be slim to none.

Note that I’m specifically talking about cold NDA’s, where I’m requested to sign one before even talking to someone about their company. That is a sign of backwards priorities for me. I mentally see someone who has an idea (most likely not even half unique) who envisions themselves as a paragon of business, using their (again, not unique) talents as a business person to marshal others together toward a common goal: making that founder boatloads of “internet money”.

There’s a way to protect your idea: make the value proposition not about the idea (which it already isn’t anyway). Tell me that you have a B2B marketing idea, and you are the exact person to implement it because of your 20 year experience in B2B marketing. Show me that I would be wasting time trying to develop a warehouse logistics tool without your guidance, since your tenure as a VP at a Fortune 500 shipping company gives you insight that I could never have.

If you can’t explain this in your pitch then it doesn’t matter. No matter how good your idea is, if you cannot prove yourself indispensable, then there’s no reason that you can’t be dispensed with.

Protecting an idea is generally an exercise in futility. No one is contacting me who has a wholly unique, patentable process that has not been thought up before. Not only that, but it weakens the state of that idea. I would much rather allow market competition, or the fitness of the executor of any new product or service to determine success, not simply a document gagging others from discussing it. If you share your idea with someone who is in a much better position to make it into a reality, then I’m probably going to buy from them anyway, as will the general market.

In the end, the market does not care about who thought up what first. It cares about who did it best, cheapest, most effectively and efficiently, and most used. Popularity and breaking free of the long tail validates and pushes even more people to use a product or service, and the network effect is one of the few things that cannot be bought.

If the first thing separating you and me from having a conversation is a negatively charged legal document, it may as well be an ocean.

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