Self-Aggrandizement: Undisclosed

Undisclosed
Filed Monday, July 11 2005.

Back in my venture capital days, I saw and signed a slew of NDA's, or non-disclosure agreements, which guaranteed that, as a signee, I wouldn't steal a company's ideas and try to pass them off as my own.

Running Cyan, I almost never saw an NDA - literary releases, perhaps, but rarely something that guaranteed the secrecy of abstractly discussed ideas for running a business. Since starting Long Tail a few months back, however, those NDAs have returned to my life in full force. My desk is littered with them, and my fax machine buzzes with incoming and outgoing signed copies throughout the day.

Long Tail, on the other hand, doesn't have an NDA of its own. In part because, from a legal standpoint, most aren't worth the paper they're printed on. But mainly because I don't think business ideas themselves are worth all that much. The best way to protect a good idea, by far, is to execute it, really, really well.

As we've been lining up vendor partnerships for digital release of Long Tail's content, many of the NDA's I've signed recently cover aspects of selling movies over the internet. Yet, I suspect, most reasonably bright eight year olds could come up with the same concept: "Hey! You know what would be great? You should be able to buy movies online like you buy MP3s!!"

No shit. But saying as much doesn't make it so. Instead, you have to somehow piece together an endless array of servers and bandwidth and software and content partnerships, top it off with some special sauce, and then get your downloads out into the world. Doing so, as you might imagine, takes ungodly amounts of work. Which, in short, is why Long Tail is partnering with digital download vendors in the first place: the millions of dollars and thousands of hours of sweat equity these companies put in to making movie downloads work will doubtless yield far better solutions than my colleagues and I could half-assedly cobble together in-house in our spare time.

So, send me your NDA. I'm happy to sign it. I'll even use my good pen. But if you think that piece of paper brings you even one step closer to changing the world or retiring young to the Bahamas, you're out of your mind. While you and your lawyers were drafting up that NDA, moving commas and reworking clauses, somebody else was busy instead making the same idea into a reality. And that's the person we're going to partner with. Because, odds are, they're about to kick your ass.

[Post-script: about three minutes after I put this online, another "fully executed" NDA just rolled out of my fax machine. The timeliness of Self-Aggrandizement entries never ceases to amaze.]

Undisclosed Filed Monday, July 11 2005.

Undisclosed
Filed Monday, July 11 2005.