Why You Should Risk Sharing Your Idea - Scott Weiss

One of the rookie mistakes first-time entrepreneurs often make is to be too guarded about their idea - in fact, many will actually spend their first $25,000 on patent lawyers without ever fully vetting their product. In order to gain credibility and attract investor attention, it's critical to aggressively seek out the most relevant people in the world and get their feedback. I believe most young entrepreneurs massively overestimate the chances of someone stealing their idea versus the benefits associated with sharing it.
When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email - former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders. After we had the target list, we got resourceful in getting to them - friends of friends, cold emails and FedExed letters. One of the tactics we used was trying to get a diagram of our technology into their hands - subject matter experts just couldn't resist correcting our analysis. Here are the huge benefits with taking the "sharing" risk:

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