The Secret to Startup Success? Tell Every Single Person You Meet About Your Idea
Here's a social situation almost everyone in the startup community will recognize: You're at a party, or a conference, or a networking event, and some young founder sidles up to you to chat about his big project. He says his idea is going to disrupt everything about everything. He tells you about how it's sure to scale massively the minute he deploys. He tells you about the flood of investment dollars that will surely be unleashed the moment his brilliant idea sees the light of day. But he refuses to tell you his idea, at least until you sign a non-disclosure agreement, which he conveniently has in his pocket.
Does this make sense?
How can this founder gain any traction when he's terrified that the mere act of talking about his idea will be his undoing? This irrational fear adds up to a whole lot of missed opportunities:
1. The opportunity to have his idea scrutinized from multiple perspectives.
2. The opportunity to "wow" potential advisors or investors.
3. The opportunity to collaborate with people who share his vision.
Is it possible that his idea is so brilliant and unique that it's worth giving up all these opportunities to protect it? It's pretty unlikely. Consider some of the greatest ideas in history — the theory of evolution, alternating current, the internet. Not one of these sprung, fully formed and funded, from any one person's mind.
Charles Darwin arrived at the idea of natural selection independently — but so did Alfred Russel Wallace. In fact, it wasn't until Darwin learned of Wallace's progress on the idea that he really got himself together enough to share his theory with the world. Darwin so respected Wallace's views that he later included many of his citations in The Descent of Man.
Let's look at another great idea: alternating current. Nikola Tesla didn't fly solo on figuring out how to periodically reverse the flow of an electrical charge. This method of transmitting electricity (used in almost all the buildings in which we live and work) represents the work of dozens of physicists, inventors, and engineers who pioneered the theories and developments that made using alternating current possible. And then there's the internet. Last month, five people — Marc Andreessen, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Louis Pouzin — shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in recognition of their respective roles in the creation of the Internet.
Not a single one of these ideas hit like lightning. Many minds working together resulted in the greatest creations and discoveries of our time. Ideas aren't immobile, concrete things that can be stolen. They're living, breathing, social beings that benefit greatly from coming into contact with other ideas.
I once heard a really interesting quote about the social nature of ideas:
"If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we swap, we each still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we swap, we each have two ideas."
This apple-swapping concept is often credited to George Bernard Shaw, but in the grand tradition of great ideas, it's also attributed to a Chicago business magazine called SYSTEM, comedian Jimmy Durante, Thomas Jefferson, former US Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan, and a handful of other sources. How appropriate that even the idea of sharing ideas is a shared idea.
This concept, this moment of collaboration and trust, it's incredible. And it's totally available to all of us at any time. Sharing ideas is how we move from the illusion of isolated invention to a process of collaborative discovery — it's how we move forward.
So go. Talk to every single person you meet about your idea. Talk until they tell you to shut up. Discover new questions and patterns so you can test and refine your idea. Then find more people to talk to.
Goay Joe Lie
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