Saturday, September 18, 2010

Stealth Mode?

This post is in reply to a Tweet by Fred Wilson (AVC) - who suggested that Stealth Mode is dead (or perhaps never should have been). His comment was basically that no company should be in stealth mode, nor does it help them in any way.

I will make this post short and too the point...Stealth Mode SHOULD remain alive and well. There are many reasons why Stealth Mode might make sense for your start up. In this day and age where no space is cost prohibitive to enter one should expect MANY clones. From the day you (publicly) launch, expect no less than one dozen students somewhere in India to clone your entire business just to get credit for writing their thesis.

I would ask the uber smart Fred Wilson this - When you are considering investing in a startup, do you post it publicly on your blog, or Twitter stream? I imagine not, as this would alert other (competitors) VC's to perhaps push you out of the round.

1 comment:

Niel Robertson said...

There has been a lot of debate about this. I wrote a pretty length article on our approach to it here:

http://trada.com/blog/2010/03/31/the-stealth-mode-trada%E2%80%99s-position-on-staying-stealth/

I'm with you on this one!
Niel