Eric Ries on the pointlessness of startup stealth
There’s a great section in Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup about stealth that twanged my noggin recently:
“Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor. In fact, I have often given entrepreneurs fearful of this issue the following assignment: take one of your ideas (one of your lesser insights perhaps), find the name of the relevant product manager at an established company who has responsibility for that area, and try to get that company to steal your idea. Call them up, write them a memo, send them a press release-go ahead try it. The truth is that most managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. The challenge lies in prioritisation and execution, and it is those challenges that give a startup hope of surviving.”
In other words - ideas are cheap. Everyone (especially successful product managers at established companies) has far more of them than they have the time to work on, steal or even read about. Openness gains are > stealth gains.