Recently we have been asked to sign Ndas quite a bit. As a result, we had a long discussion about NDAs and here are our views on them.

The problem is that most NDAs are overkill and don't acknowledge that we've had other clients in the past and will probably have more in the future. We don't care to get caught in the no-win situation such an NDA puts us in, exposing us to a nonperformance or honest-services prosecution.

And to be honest, we don't have the interest or resources to take your ideas and create anything out of them - most ideas are worthless to us without your domain experience, contacts and access to possible funding to execute on them.

More importantly, we'd like to consider our selves respectable and trustworthy guys. It doesn't take long to ruin ones reputation by blabbing or stealing other peoples ideas. This is especially true in todays digital world, where information is easily available for anyone with a quick Google search.

We've seen nice NDAs too. It's not a problem to sign something that goes along the lines of: "We won't share any materials or ideas conveyed by you to us to third parties. We won't steal your ideas, run and execute on them to create a competing service our selves. At least for the next year.”.

But more often than we'd like, the NDA is very wide. And we simply cannot sign something that in effect binds us from doing anything even remotely similar for the next two years.

For example, let's say during our discussions together we come up with a way to list information about events on a website in an unique way. Then after signing a wide NDA, there'd be the threat of getting sued for doing something similar in another project that is not really in any way related or competing with what you're doing.

That is the reason why we are against singing an NDA in general. Things change of course, when you staple a 500k€ cheque to it.