MARTIN OMANDER: Hi.
Welcome to "Root Access," the show on GDL about startups.
My name is Martin Omander.
And I work for Google Developer Relations.
And today, I'm joined by no other than Don Dodge, a fellow
Googler and longtime investor and startup advocate.
By the way, thank you, everybody out there, for all
of your great comments on our YouTube videos.
And we are actually, Don, going to address some of those
comments today.
DON DODGE: Great.
MARTIN OMANDER: Great.
So we actually had an episode a couple of weeks ago called
"Startup Founders Who Say, I Have a Great Idea,
But," dot, dot, dot.
So in that episode, you said that entrepreneurs shouldn't
be afraid of sharing their ideas--
or they shouldn't be afraid of getting them stolen.
And that generated a lot of comments, great comments.
So could you narrow it down for us a bit?
Are you saying startups should tell just
anybody about their ideas?
Isn't that risky business?
DON DODGE: Well, I think sharing your ideas with other
founders and other investors is a good idea because,
generally, the people want to help you.
And they'll give you advice.
They'll expose you to things that you haven't thought of.
They'll take your idea and makes you think about how to
use it in a different market segment or with a different
customer base or different users.
So more times than not, you learn more from sharing your
idea than you do by keeping it secret.
To the question of do people steal ideas, generally, no,
they don't, for several reasons.
The first one is they're too busy doing their own idea and
their own thing to be distracted by your idea.
So that's the first reason people don't
generally steal ideas.
They might see some concepts in what you're doing or UI
approaches or something that might be interesting that they
can incorporate into their idea.
But I wouldn't classify that as stealing your idea.
It's just sort of adopting some principles into their own
idea that make sense for them.
So very rarely have I seen any ideas stolen.
MARTIN OMANDER: I see.
One viewer, Hazael Reyes, said that ideas can be stolen.
He's seen it many times.
And he recommends patenting your idea before it's stolen.
Is that something you see among startups?
DON DODGE: Well, first of all, no, I don't see ideas stolen
very often.
But second to the question of patents, generally, they're a
waste of time and money.
People don't understand how much time it takes to get a
patent and how expensive it is in terms of lawyer fees and
your own time in writing the patent and all of the defenses
to get a patent.
It typically takes two to four years to get a patent issued
and can cost from $25,000 to $100,000 for the process of
getting a patent.
So generally, a startup is either out of business or
wildly successful and acquired before the
patents ever get issued.
So unless your idea is really, really new and different,
patents don't typically make a lot of sense.
And, oh, one other point.
Let's say you're successful and you get a
patent issued to you.
Well, congratulations, now you have to defend it.
So if someone violates your patent, now you have to hire
lawyers to go defend the patent.
So that's going to cost you more time and more money to
defend the patent.
So it's much more expensive and takes more time than
people realize and, generally, not worth it.
MARTIN OMANDER: And you say you have
to defend your patent.
What happens if you don't defend it?
DON DODGE: Then you lose it, because if someone violates
your patent knowingly and openly, then you lose your
patent because you didn't defend it.
MARTIN OMANDER: Ah, right.
So big costs that you may not see upfront.
Interesting.
So another viewer of MrBinaryKode--
I love your username, by the way--
responded, commented, really?
So ideas can't be stolen?
Tell that to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
So, well, we've all heard these legends, right?
How Steve Jobs was allegedly inspired by windowing systems
he had seen at Xerox PARC.
He built a Mac OS.
Then Bill Gates was inspired by Mac OS to build Windows.
Don't those examples show the danger of sharing?
DON DODGE: Well, I think the key word there is "inspired
by." So it wasn't stolen.
It wasn't copied exactly.
It was inspired by.
And by the way, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs also had their
ideas copied or inspired.
So that's the way software works.
That's the way technology works.
You take several different ideas and put them
together in a new way.
They may have been inspired by existing ideas.
But you create something new.
So if ideas are really stolen, then there are courts that
decide those things and award damages and
that kind of thing.
So I don't think in the startup world, stealing ideas
is a big problem.
And I think inspiration is the key word there.
And typically, you see ideas that get adopted or adapted or
inspired and result in taking that idea and incorporating it
into your own product and probably doesn't compete at
all with the original idea.
MARTIN OMANDER: Ah, I see.
I know, Don, you were involved in Napster some years ago.
Was that idea stolen?
Did you guys steal that idea from anywhere?
DON DODGE: Well, Napster got accused of stealing other
things, not ideas but maybe music.
But, no, Napster was the basis of several other ideas.
So like FTP, the file transfer protocol, that existed before.
The instant messaging system and protocol,
that existed before.
All of those sort of ideas existed, but
in different ways.
So all Napster did was took the FTP protocol for file
transfer and took the instant messaging kind of concept and
a few others and put them together in a way that was
totally new.
So we didn't invent anything.
But we took existing ideas and concepts and put them together
in a new way and focused them on a completely new market.
So nothing was invented.
Nothing was stolen.
But Napster was a conglomeration of different
ideas that created something entirely new.
And that's generally what happens.
That's what Steve Jobs did with the graphical user
interface and what Bill Gates did with Windows.
They took existing concepts and just made them into
something new and different.
MARTIN OMANDER: Right.
Finally, Don, Matt [? Perry ?]
asked, if you're a startup founder, you're doing
something, you have an idea, you've gotten started, and
then you notice that somebody else has a patent on your
idea, is that game over?
What do you do?
DON DODGE: Well, I think it's game over if you're trying to
do the same thing in the same market, the same kind of
product that is patented.
That's probably not a good idea.
But if you're starting something that uses the same
concepts in a different market, in a different
product, you're probably OK for several reasons.
First one is startups are so small and insignificant that
the patent holder probably will not be aware of you or
care about what you're doing, at least initially.
Unless you're wildly successful with hundreds of
millions of users or hundreds of millions of dollars in
revenue, they're probably not going to care.
Secondly, if you're in a completely different market
segment-- for example, if the original patent was for
something in manufacturing and you use it in entertainment or
you use it in retail or something that's sort of a
completely different market--
generally, they're not going to care because it's so
expensive to sue and defend the patent.
If you're doing something else, it doesn't matter.
So it does matter if you're violating a patent that's in
the same market with the same kind of product that's going--
then you're going to run into trouble.
And that probably is game over.
MARTIN OMANDER: I see.
Thank you, Don.
And thank you all for watching.
Please keep those comments coming in on YouTube, comments
or questions you'd like us to pick up in future episodes.
Finally, I am also a developer.
And I built a lot of stuff using Google Cloud Platform.
I think it's a great platform.
And life is too short to build stuff anywhere else.
And as a special deal for you, Root Access viewers, we have a
$2,000 credit that you can go and get and get
started on the platform.
Just follow the on-screen instructions.
And good luck on the Cloud Platform.
And thank you for watching.
And see you next time.
Bye.