Run away from people that think you will steal their idea.

Note: While this might be true 99% of the time, always trust your instincts.

Let me elaborate on this. People believe having an idea is 90% of the work, and building it is the other 10%. They think big companies are great ideas, but it is the other way around. It’s the implementation of the idea that counts. Here is an example: “Let’s make a tablet” Microsoft came up with that idea years before apple. And yet nothing came out of it. Then Apple made the iPad, and it was a huge success. It was not the idea. It was the way Apple developed it.

The first signal you should run away from someone is NDAs (not in all cases!). So, someone contacted you and asked you to sign a contract to show you his idea to change the world. If you had this idea, you’d be able to create a Fortune 500 company in less than a month. You could sell it to google and even travel to space. Big ideas like search engines, social networks, and electric cars were hard sells. Revolutionary ideas never feel revolutionary. Unless your idea is an exact recipe for something like how to double a battery’s capacity, it has little to no value. Ideas have a life of their own, a life you give to them. “Build it, and they shall come,” people say, but there hasn’t been something less true in software than that. Uber built their app by talking to users, getting drivers, and political wars with cities. The same goes for Airbnb to box. It’s someone working on an idea that makes companies happen.

Run away from aggressive partnership contracts, especially those where one side has 50% equity for having the idea, and the other gets 50% for building it. It is great to be partners. It’s great to be employed. Building most of the company and getting half because someone else thought of the idea. Not so great.

If it doesn’t sound right, it is probably not correct.

Run. Away.