[bhouston]

There are so many people working for each company, consulting for them, advising them, and attending their investor pitches, that I suspect it is hard to keep secrets. It is like that in any industry.

I've had someone attend an investment pitch who I'm pretty sure then told a potential competitor exactly what I planned on doing. If this happens to my company, which is pretty insignificant compared to Lyft and Uber, I bet it is even worse for them.

[wwweston]

Leaks are a reasonable explanation, but it's probably worth remembering they're not the only one. When you've got reasonably smart people working on solving problems and developing products/services in the same space, a certain amount of convergence is going to be natural.

I don't work for either and this is one of several ideas I considered while thinking about that space, and everybody here has probably had the experience of watching a startup build something around an idea they had but never really shared.