Rex Dixon's Tumblra tumblelog

Q: Your position on NDAs?

rafer:

Image by kharied via Flickr

A: I only sign them for lots of cash.

I had that email exchange with a great founder. He asked for further explanation of my answer. Here it is, with his name deleted:

I’m an outlier on this, though less on this than other things. I’ve never signed a lot of NDAs. It seems the people that do are the people that do not take them very seriously. I’ve always taken all commitments to confidentiality very seriously, whether formal or informal.

However, I don’t think there’s anything confidential that you can tell me that which actually has value for ___startup___. I think that’s true of basically every web startup. It’s all about execution at this moment in history. Ideas in isolation are basically worthless and fifteen people have each of them at once. Secrets are also very expensive financially. They closely resemble lies in that regard. I’m too cheap for either.

Given that viewpoint, there’s no business benefit to taking on the additional legal liability of an NDA, and the only reason to do so is as part of a much larger financial transaction.

[I’m blogging the above, though omitting your name of course.]

Sounds like the smart thing to do, and who wants all that paperwork? We live in a digital age, where we work in virtual environments most of the time. What counts are the people you are doing business with. It may be a business of bits and bytes, but the people you work with end up driving the end results. NDA’s only skew that view and color it in a way they want you to see it. Plus as @rafer said above - lot’s of money would help! ;P

posted 1 month ago