Browsing Quora, I notice people that declare “no one wants to steal your idea” and “execution is everything”.
These people are stupid.
Ideas have always been stolen. Kellogg vs Post, Jobs vs Gates…to name a few. The McDonald’s brothers created competition by giving free tours of their new assembly line idea for food because “ideas are worthless”. Among those ordinary folks who joined a tour? Founders of Taco Bell and Burger King. Thank goodness Kroc wasn’t that stupid, otherwise no one would’ve made money. I’ve successfully spawned numerous fake Plan to Start’s just by talking to measure the spread of ideas. To understand that ideas are copied and stolen, is to understand people are unholy and choose not to think for themselves wherever possible.
KFC is supposedly a proprietary recipe that only 2 executives in the company know. But the real secret, is it was never the recipe. In the 1950′s, it was Sander’s invention of the pressure fryer that could reduce cooking time of chicken from 40 minutes to 8 minutes. He marketed it with a persona he developed for himself. This was technology that had never been built before, but could easily be duplicated. So they instead attributed their success to a secret recipe as a means to deter competitors. It worked and people then became obsessed with trying to steal and duplicate this recipe while KFC took the market.