I attended a Meetup today. In typical networking fashion, you go around in a circle and everyone says what they’re working on. I talked about Project Borrow, and two other people both said that they were in stealth mode and couldn’t talk freely unless we had signed NDAs. Sorry. But one guy confidently threw out some buzzwords: it was social, it was location-based, it was mobile-first.

He later told me in a more private setting that the idea was very similar to Project Borrow, and he was worried that I was already in it and he hadn’t started. I told him to relax. There are at least 20 efforts that I’ve found that have already emerged in this space. This summer, in fact, I’m trying to get a group of these founders to commit to a monthly conversation or something. I feel like I’m always having one-off conversations with people about best practices, why not broaden the group?

I’ve found it to be a blessing that we’re all working on stuff-sharing for its social impact value, because it immediately means we’re not very competitive. Or maybe I’m just naïve. But the fact that we’re open to sharing best practices shows that not only do we believe what we preach, but that we’re passionate about the end vision, not the product. Besides, we’ve all been around to know that this space is filled with crawling zombies, dead bodies, and newborn babies (as I like to call them). It is immensely hard to find a solution that works, and if any of us get there first, I would be thrilled, because it means that then we will have found a genuine alternative to cheap consumption.

I think this is a big difference between brand new entrepreneurs with ideas, and people who have been working, even for a few months. You very rapidly start to see that the likelihood you’re the only person to have thought of the idea is basically impossible. And, if you’re me, you start to believe that the value of first mover advantage and maintaining stealth and secrecy is not nearly as great as the value of getting to a product that people actually want quickly, because you’re open to feedback from anyone and everyone.

The first hackathon I ever went to, there were 100 people and 25 teams working in isolation on their ideas. Yet at the end of the weekend, four teams presented ideas that were so similar (wearable for personal health) it was astounding that they had not interacted with each other all weekend.

At another networking event I went to, we were divided into groups and tasked to come up with ideas to solve the problem assigned to our group. The group that took on online dating came up with an idea where an app would send you just one recommendation every day pulled from your existing network of friends. If you both liked each other, you were paired up on one date. They called it Coffee and Doughnut. I grabbed the presenter to ask her if her group was joking, or if actually had not heard of the now popular dating app Coffee Meets Bagel before. She was just as surprised as I, and said she hadn’t heard of it.

The takeaway is: don’t be surprised and don’t start to fret if you’re not the first person with your idea… that doesn’t have any implication on your success (generally speaking, certainly patents on specific technologies may be a hindrance). And besides, sometimes it pays to be the fast follower!