| I'm the CEO of a VC-backed financial technology company that's been in stealth mode for almost a year (coming out of the proverbial closet later on today), and we had a number of reasons for doing it. First, we needed to give ourselves breathing room, where we weren't distracted. Requests for demos before you're ready, requests for interviews with the press, requests for information by potential investors all take time, which is time that you should better be spending building your product. Second, we didn't want to alert our competitors to what we're doing. While we didn't believe that any of them could innovate faster than we were, we didn't want them to know what our marketing and technology direction was, and thus try to poison the market's mind to our message before we could give it in our own words. Otherwise, by the time we DID give it in our own words, people would have predisposed to think badly of it. There's also the non-customer competition to think of: recruiters (we're in a hyper-competitive market for talent), who will know what you're doing and target your employees; VCs who will at least ponder the notion of grabbing a team and overcapitalizing them and say "do that idea and get it to market before the other guys." This might seem far-fetched, but if you don't have any real benefit in opening to the world, they're definite potential downsides. Finally, we needed to make sure that we had something very tangible to show the world (i.e. customers) when we do come out. If we had made a big display of our story, and then gotten customers interested, and then said "thanks for your interest; come back in a year when we have a demo to show you" it would have been a complete turnoff. Most of the people who we think of as prospects will find out about the company now, and we're ready to come in and give a professional display of what we're doing. What we DIDN'T do was go completely dark. People who we knew and trusted we've worked with the whole time. People who we felt could add value we sought out. We didn't just go into a bunker, but we didn't splash our wares out there for anyone in the world to see. Stealth-mode is definitely an option for the right firm. |