Startups invent, and then they disclose. They produce product, and then they market it. In years past, one could argue, companies refrained from disclosing their core, proprietary, secret inventions, for fear of enabling competition: Coke never shared its recipes; Jim Simons of Renaissance Capital never published his quantitative trading models; and Google never exposed its search algorithms.

All that changes now in the attention economy, where the pursuit of social influence drives people to expose ever more information about themselves; and companies are forced to respond by disclosing their heretofore “private” inventions publicly via APIs and other forms of developer outreach.

The rule used to be companies whose secret aspirations were hidden behind their “stealth mode” welcome signs, and the exception were companies that were chatty about their plans. Now it has become reversed. The rule are now companies that telegraph their ambitions so as to make developers feel comfortable enough to develop software on top of the companies’ platforms; the exception are now companies that won’t say what they are working on. When it comes to startups, stealth is the new transparency. Transparency is the new stealth.

(via sethgoldstein)
Reblogged from sethgoldstein with 2 notes / 12.03.10 / Permalink