Confidentiality

At JFDI.Asia, we promise not to disclose information shared with us in confidence. In addition to anything you explicitly label as confidential, we make sure our staff understand, respect and maintain the privacy of personal disclosures that emerge in mentoring, private contact information and the plans of individuals and organizations. We won’t publish or speak about you or your organization without your consent. If our own plans might compete with yours, we will tell you.

At the same time, much of the value we add comes through the connections we make between people who appear to us to have two pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. So we need to strike a balance. It helps if you can be clear with us how you want us to add value.

In practice, we rarely find it necessary to discuss truly sensitive information. Sometimes people approach us, concerned that their ideas may be copied. Working in Asia and on the internet, we suggest that is inevitable. So if talking about something puts it at risk of replication, we don’t recommend that you build a business around it.

 

We don’t sign Confidentiality or Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), for the following reasons:

  1. It feels like an expression of distrust. We have nothing to trade on but our reputation and we only have to screw up once to lose it. If you don’t trust our reputation, maybe we shouldn’t be in business together.
  2. It implies an immediate cost, as signing an agreement requires us to take legal advice, track and file what disclosures have and have not been made to whom, on a long-term basis.
  3. It incurs potential future major legal liabilities. We meet with countless individuals and organizations every day who want to discuss ideas. Great minds think alike: we frequently hear uncannily similar ideas from different people. If we sign NDAs and one of them is successful and the other isn’t, we run the risk of having to prove that information did not leak from one discussion to the other.

Here are some links to articles on this topic if you’re interested:

  • Startup Lawyer on NDAs (here)
  • Brad Feld, co-founder of TechStars (here)
  • Jason Mendelson (here)
  • Guy Kawasaki (here in the first paragraph).

 

rtfmThis page is part of JFDI.Asia’s archive of Frequently Asked Questions on innovation and entrepreneurship. For more, Read The Frogging Manual. If you’re here because someone at JFDI gave you a link, please don’t be offended. We get a lot of questions from people, and these pages are the best way we have found to offer a comprehensive, helpful response. If your question remains unanswered, please post it to our OpenFrog Community and we will compile the best of the answers here.