Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures recently wrote an excellent blog post about the value of openness, and shares his empirical observation that there is great value in being open about your business plans as a startup. This is not a new meme, and in fact New York entrepreneur Charlie O’Donnell from Path 101, and former Union Square Ventures associate, coined the term “anti-stealth” to describe the concept of total openness when launching a new company. The idea of anti-stealth is that you tell people everything you are doing and that this will benefit your ability to execute.

Brad suggests that every time you share something about you business you will learn more than you will be giving away. In other words, in conversations about what you are doing, the informational trade balance will always be in your favor.

I generally agree with this thesis, but I do believe that, as with everything in life, there is room for nuance.

Some of the nuance I am addressing relates to level of detail. I think if you have a real estate web site idea, or an idea for how to sell books online, that there is little benefit to keeping that secret. In fact I would go as far as to say that there are very few market related ideas that are worthy of stealth. I would never say that there are no such ideas, but there certainly aren’t many. Of course the problem here is that everyone thinks *their* idea is the one idea that needs to be kept secret, so let me clarify.

The one thing I think you want to consider keeping secret are special “executional” techniques. These are often key technical or “technical-ish” insights that are hard won but easily copied. For example, imagine it has taken you 6 months to figure out the secret to building something that will cut your cost of operation by a factor of 10, or perhaps will lead to a 10x growth rate over your competitors.

Lets assume it will take you another 6 months to finish the rest of your product, but it might take an already in-market, or coming-to-market competitor a month to build it into their product. In that situation, I think you might very well be wise to keep your insight to yourself to give you a maximal opportunity to leverage it.

Admittedly, this is tricky if this insight is the key to making people interested in your business. So even in this situation it might be wise to share, but in a more cautious way. For example there is a significant difference between sharing verbally and sharing in writing where someone can pore over your every word. Providing an overview of your insight verbally might be just as beneficial as writing it down, and less risky.

For example there are certain aspects of and a certain level of detail about my current efforts that I will talk about, but will not blog about. Another technique is what I call casual compartmentalization, which is total openness, but with different people about different aspects. In many respects this is a natural behavior and not a strategy since you can’t tell everything to everybody if you don’t write it down publicly.

On another front, if your idea is something that benefits the functionality of your product but cannot be specifically observed, there may be no reason to ever share that. For example, we know Google provides great search results, but we don’t know all of their algorithms. Another example Brad uses is that we don’t know Coke’s secret recipe. There are some companies that could be appropriately described as having “secret recipe” technology, and that is indeed worthy of keeping secret.

The bottom line is I generally agree with the concept of being open and sharing. But I don’t think every single “ah ha” moment needs to be laid out in a detailed written roadmap for your existing or would be competitors. So go ahead. I agree with being open. But I don’t think that means you can’t keep a few secrets.