Doing Words

Why I don’t sign NDAs

// September 29th, 2010 // Industry, people, Startup

I don’t do NDAs, for a few reasons:

• I’ve learned not to sign things without my lawyer reading it first. He’s a great lawyer, so he’s not cheap. Spending a couple of hundred dollars before I’m able to have a coffee with someone isn’t a viable operating model.
• I work with too many businesses every year to be able to manage and abide by the aggregate terms of an archive of NDAs.
• You may be trying to protect the wrong thing. If your idea’s awesome, it’s probably not unique. The value is not in your idea, it’s in your execution.
• If I couldn’t be trusted with your ideas, a quick web search would make that clear, since I’ve been doing this since 1995.
• A big part of the value I bring is my communication skills and the network of people I know. When the time is right, you need me to be able to talk about this.

I have signed NDAs in the past, and I wish I hadn’t, because I have no idea where my copy is now. I take comfort in the knowledge that the other party has almost certainly mislaid their copy too. Making the whole exercise expensive and pointless. Who wants to do expensive and pointless?

Corporates and big brands, that’s who — they specialise in expensive and pointless, many of them devoting whole departments of people to making things more expensive and pointless. I will sign NDAs when I work for corporates and big brands because they will pay me good money and I know I’ll get paid.

Whereas you with the great idea, the back of a napkin and a sharpie pen? I want to like you, and you want to like me. Don’t ask me to sign something that can best be summarised as “we don’t trust you” before we even get to know each other.

I will, however, abide by the terms of a FriendDA.