How do you protect a brilliant idea when founding a startup?

If you have only an Idea, you lost. Idea itself rarely generates money. But if you have a value proposition, business model, team, promising market, sustainable competitive advantage you can answer a "market pain", besides you are HARD working entrepreneur, it's feasible, you can be successful. One advice: Talk about WHAT can you solve, and keep for yourself HOW. Best, Csaba

Like any other matters, telling an idea to friends always comes with "Risks and Benefits". While you gain the BENEFITS such as some good advices, you may be facing some RISKS as your business idea is likely to be stolen. SO, just consider what you may get and what you may loose to act.

You should tell the idea to your closed friends and partners that you trust in. This is not always right but at least you can reduce the risks, and maximize your benefit of getting good advices.

If your idea is unique and special, you may reserve the copyrights before telling it to other people.

Good luck!

Anphabe organize an event 2 month ago about "From idea to successful business model". Most of attendance are "current employees" who have a dream to open a business someday. Many of them have the same concern that they should keep the inception idea a secret to avoid idea stealing. However ALL the speakers who are very successful entrepreneur disagree with this way of thinking. Today, to be a successful start up, there are much more knowledge that you need to know. Any only by asking (of course THE RIGHT PEOPLE - who has the knowledge and experience that you don't have and you trust their view), you can sharpen you idea and increase the chance to make it work.

.cơ hội thật sự không bao giờ biến mất .chỉ sợ là mình không có đủ "lực" (tài chính) để thực thi ý tưởng đó thôi .sau này bạn sẽ còn tìm thấy rất nhiều cơ hội tràn ngập trong thế giới này để bạn kinh doanh .và có thể ý tưởng đó quan trọng và hay đối với bạn nhưng đối với người khác lại không

.riêng với mình thì rất may mắn vì có quen biết được một anh bạn trong một buổi hội thảo hồi tháng 6, và đến giờ vẫn thường xuyên liên lạc với nhau để trao đổi thông tin .vì anh ta vừa là giảng viên khóa đầu tư chiến lược, vừa làm trong ngành tư vấn, nên mình không ngại chia sẻ những ý tưởng của mình và sau mỗi buổi gặp mình cũng gặt được một hai lời khuyên rất bổ ích

.nói chung là bạn nên tìm cho mình một hai người (cố vấn) để thúc đẩy, mổ xẻ và khuyên bạn những gì nên và không nên làm

Pascal and Pho Pham have great advice. You can learn a lot about start-ups from Guy Kawasaki. His talks are on iTunesU and garage.com. I'll add to the conversation, a summarizing angle: Everybody has ideas. Innovations are ideas worked on and brought to life. So be innovative: bring the idea to life. And the best way to capitalize on it is to move FAST. I know a group in VN running a start-up incubator, a pre-seed-capital stage; such a group can help you move your project along faster. One more thing: This is a new age of crowd-sourcing / open-source; so like Pho Pham says, it's not so much about an original idea that makes you successful, but executing an idea simply, and appealing to a granular customer segment.