April 20, 2025
I recently went through a very tricky challenge whilst mentoring early stage founders. A #NDA, inappropriately written and sent in the wrong circumstances, triggered a surprisingly negative email response from an expert I knew as courteous and generous with their time and expertise.
Thankfully, we were able to solve this situation and we had a very productive discussion, far beyond my most optimistic expectations.
We also all learned from this painful mistake. We learned of the hidden costs of NDAs, and of their complete uselessness most of the time. We all agreed that their defacto use a prerequisite for any discussion in entrepreneurship has more to do with cargo-culting and fake expertise (reminded me of the mention on Linkedin of “advisors” in Sydney getting 20% of equity from founders) than with any “Innovation and IP Strategy”.
Founders, next time an “expert” tells you to always send a NDA - ask them to write the content of the “confidential information” field and to explain to you why this matters.
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Even more recently - I went through the tail-end of a similar story, but this time I was the #expert. The entrepreneur was surprised when I cut our discussion short after a few minutes. Almost half a year ago, I had signed the NDA - silly me. I wrote this in answer their text.
