I Know Them For 20 Years and I Trust Them

“I Know them for 20 years and I trust them, I have nothing to hide from them”. These words I heard from my boss when we are traveling to Jakarta for a technical meeting with our local partners’ representatives.

And he said that to answer my question about “Is it OK if we tell them everything about our product and what we do?”

I raise that question because a few weeks before that, there’s some company that requests a demo of our product and then, in the end, they’re copying us. So this question is just to double confirm to my boss in case we need to take more precautions to whom we speak. :-)

But anyway, these days the idea is cheap, the execution that matters!

Do you ever hear a story about 3 people from 3 different countries China, Japan, and Indonesia and they are visiting one of the most advanced factories in the USA?

Those who are from China and Japan, the owner of the factory let them go inside but none of them allowed to bring a smartphone (or camera). But it’s totally different treatment for the guy from Indonesia, they let him in without asking him to leave his smartphone at the counter.

One of the managers ask the owner of the factory why he let the Indonesian go in with his smartphone, his answer was: “Don’t worry, even if they record the whole things inside, they won’t be able to copy it!”. Of course, this story is not true, but this story becomes one of our famous jokes from the past.

The point is, the idea itself is not enough because the most important of all is the execution. We can have a great idea or inspired by someone else idea to make it greater, but if we don’t execute, well … guess what?! It’s just an idea.

I’ve met with a lot of people these days who have introduced themself as a founder of a startup with a very good idea of a product. But I also observe that many of them, they didn’t really test their idea before making an expensive commitment to building their product.

In that case what could possibly wrong? The idea might be great, it has a real live product (execution is there), or maybe because they execute the idea wrongly.

Back to the story with my boss, in the end, we’re explaining everything that we know about what we’re doing with our product but not because of the same reason with the fictional story that I’ve told you earlier :-). But because they’ve been knowing each other for 20 years and they are really trusted by each other.