Let’s say you come up with an idea. A lot of people say it’s a pretty great idea. Some people just say “cool” and hope you’ll stop talking. But two people think it’s more than a great idea. They think it’s such a great idea that they quit their jobs, forego salaries for a year, work 70-hour weeks, neglect their loved ones, suffer nervous breakdowns and eventually build your idea into a company worth $100 million—without you. They sell it, become rich (and Internet famous) and you do not. How much money do you deserve?
Zero.
That’s right idea person. You deserve zero dollars.
There’s a popular notion in this country that companies are built on ideas; that the credit for any young, innovative business should go to the person who provided the spark. Founding narratives often include these revelatory moments, when a founder is confronted with some glaring inefficiency and concocts an idea to fix it. And at that moment, the story goes, Company X was born.
The ability to spot inefficiencies and trends, and then turn them into actionable business ideas is a useful skill. But it bears no resemblance to building a company. For that you need to turn an idea into a product, which is harder than it sounds. Then, somehow, you need to get people to use (and maybe even pay for) that product. Expect both tasks to take months or more likely, years. In the meantime, you'll have to inspire overworked, underpaid people to endure the myriad indignities of startup life. And odds are that you’ll fail and those years of sacrificed income and sleepless nights will yield no windfall for you or your partners.
This brings me to the Snapchat lawsuit. The story makes for easy media fodder in that it’s basically the Social Network writ small, updated with characters from the buzziest social app of the moment. And at the center of the lawsuit, is an idea. The story, according to the filing, goes like this: In the spring of 2011, Stanford junior Reggie Brown came up with the idea for Snapchat, a mobile application that allows users to send photos that disappear moments after they’re first viewed. He went to his friend and Stanford dormmate Evan Spiegel, now Snapchat’s CEO. Spiegel declared that it was a “million dollar idea.” They recruited recent grad Bobby Murphy as CTO and the trio decided to split equity equally. (Snapchat declined to comment.)
The lawsuit asserts that Brown worked on marketing and branding. He apparently envisioned Snapchat’s ghost logo, directing Spiegel as he created it on Adobe InDesign. He authored the FAQs and Terms of Service and ran their social media accounts. He spent the summer with Spiegel and Murphy working on the app at Spiegel’s father’s house in Los Angeles. After Brown returned home to visit his family in South Carolina in August 2011, he and Spiegel had a “contentious telephone conversation.” (TechCrunch writer and Stanford classmate Billy Gallagher reports that the argument centered on a patent filing.) Following the conversation, Murphy and Spiegel abruptly shut Brown out of the company, changing administrative passwords and cutting off contact. He’s now suing for compensation.
If the account provided in the lawsuit is true, I would argue that Brown is reasonably entitled to some kind of compensation given his months of work in the earliest, riskiest parts of the business. He was allegedly recognized as a founder with equity for months. Beyond the idea, he contributed what he could. It doesn’t look like much, but as a right-brained person I sympathize with that. He was then summarily cut out of the company without compensation. That’s a legal no-no.
But media accounts of the suit tend to focus on Brown’s idea for the company, his Eureka! moment. (See ledes here, here and here.) And because I’ve written about Snapchat before, both friends and colleagues have mentioned the suit to me in conversation. Their focus is always on Brown’s contribution of the idea and his deserved compensation in relation to the idea. While Brown’s alleged months of work with Snapchat have earned him some recompense in my view, his idea has not.
Let’s take the Social Network scenario as a counterexample. Zuckerberg flat out stole the concept for
If the Snapchat founders had done to Brown what Zuckerberg did to the Winklevosses, I would similarly argue that Brown deserves nothing. Only his work justifies any kind of compensation.
Ideas are worthless without action. They’re so worthless that Seth Godin gladly put up 999 of them on his website to prove the point. “Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution,” says the accompanying post.
Griping about stolen ideas will yield you no sympathy from this writer. Business isn't a race to think. It's a race to build products and acquire customers. If you can't do that, get a good lawyer.
