Toronto Entrepreneur

Many people believe sharing your idea with people will result in great feedback and no one is out there to steal your idea. WRONG! They promote that thought in university courses and there are people who evangelize this. Sharing is great but you have to choose who you share your idea with. Sure many people are not out there to steal your idea, but there is one or two people. Also maybe someone will tell your idea to someone else and they might find it interesting and take it away from you.

So I’m going to tell you a real story that our startup went through to show you what I mean. In this story I will keep the person and the company involved anonymous for privacy reasons. So we were at a specific stage of our startup that we needed to hire a contractor to do a little piece of our work. The project was literally a 2 week project and required a certain skill that we didn’t have. So we started putting out ads and asking around among “friends”. Finally a “friend” who I’d known for about 3 years and I knew had the skills came through. I was very happy about that person because the nature of the project was so that we were forced to expose a lot of our business to them. So we ran my friend through the idea of our project briefly. We needed to get some work done before we were able to outsource the little piece to my friend. So things didn’t work as scheduled on our end and we missed our deadline by two weeks. I called my friend and asked if we could meet up to go through the details of the project and start working on it. My friend had accepted a position at a startup by then and was unable to take on the project. I wasn’t told about the company or what the company did.

We, just like any other startup were constantly keeping an eye on our competition and one day a little google alert appeared in my gmail account. It was a job posting by one of our competitors, which I’m not going to name. What really grabbed my attention was the URL the job was posted at. It was on UofT’s job forum (which I was familiar with), so I clicked the link and read the job posting. At the end of the posting I came across a user name which was very familiar to me. The user name was part of the email of my “friend”. I couldn’t believe my eyes. So I double checked the email and I was right. But that wasn’t enough proof so I had to log into my student account at UofT (my user name was g6camus after my favourite writer Albert Camus — If you are looking for one of the best existential novels of twentieth century, check out The Fall) and `finger` that user name. Guess who? Yes it was my “friend”.

I was really shocked. My friend knew what our project was about and was supposed to work on it with us. Now my friend was on the opposite team? That was a scary moment. So I did some further investigation and realized that my friend was part of a startup which is funded by the same company, funding our competition. Scary enough if you ask me.

So lesson learned is that if “friends” or people you know can do things like that, believe me there are strangers who would do worse. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share your idea with anyone because that is plain wrong and will not let you grow. You just need to be careful whom you share your idea with. Share it with those who have a high potential of being useful in your company. They at least might worth the risk.

Yours truly,

Rokhm Fard