You can protect your startup business idea from being stolen.

You can’t protect a good startup business idea! We can’t think of a bigger red flag to a new business than an entrepreneur unable to share his idea without a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA). If someone can sink your new company just because they’ve heard about your idea, it’s probably a pretty lame idea.

If you have a great startup business idea and stash it under your pillow – the entrepreneur fairy doesn't come along at night to exchange it for a great company. While great companies can benefit from a good startup business idea, they require superior execution.

Execution is the best protection

There's a simple and effective way to protect your idea from the world -- focus on actually executing on the business plan. It’s rare that a company loses to its competitors because they “stole the idea” and somehow instantly created a huge company with it.

Take a company like Amazon.com for example. Do you really think the founder Jeff Bezos was worried that someone else might think about selling books online? He knew competition for his idea was inevitable and that Amazon (like most other companies) would have to be successful at execution, not protecting their idea.

If you think great ideas somehow protect you from failure, allow me to direct your attention to the dotcom graveyard, namely Netscape, Webvan and Napster. These were all fantastic ideas that failed on poor execution, not because they were able to keep the secret long enough.

If your idea is good, it will be stolen

A few years back Bill Gross, the founder of IdeaLab had a brilliant idea. He developed the concept of pay-per-click advertising that launched his company, Overture. Pay-per-click was a brilliant idea and like any other brilliant idea, it was stolen, in this case by Google.

Google took this idea, applied it to its wildly popular search engine, and grew faster than any other company in history. Talk about “taking the ball and running with it.”