Angel Investors can steal ideas.

Whether they actually do - or not - is a trade secret and you’re unlikely to find any mea culpas or otherwise on Quora!

What you’re likely to find on an open platform will be following things:

1. Ideas are worthless. It’s the execution that matters. While there’s some truth to that, I don’t buy it, for two reasons: (a) By the same token, execution is worthless without an idea (b) I read somewhere that Garrett Camp, original founder of Uber, was holding shares worth $2.2B on the day of Uber’s IPO. I don’t how far this is true but, according to what I read, his only contribution to Uber was the idea and finding Travis Kalnick to execute it.
2. The pitch deck shared by founders with angel investors has a lot more than idea. It tends to have details of business model, GTM strategy, financial projections, and so forth. So what can be stolen is much more than the idea.
3. Use NDAs to prevent angel investors from stealing ideas. What proponents of NDA won’t tell you - probably because they themselves don’t know it - are two things: (a) Many angel investors will refuse to sign them (b) NDAs don’t prevent stealing, they only give the founder with a legal recourse if the theft happens. Now, “legal recourse” is the operative term. It involves lawyers, courts, and so on. It takes a lot of time and money, neither of which the founder is in ample supply of.

I can go on but I hope you get my drift: Ideas are worth something and it’s virtually impossible to ensure that they are not stolen by angel investors.

I’ve heard a few tactics for mitigating the risk of idea getting stolen viz. share information with angel investors in drip feed mode; expose your idea only to trusted angel investors; and so on.

TBH, they’re not very practical for the following reasons:

• Many angel investments I’ve come across close in a matter of days, some even in hours during flashdating sessions. There simply isn’t enough time to engage in drip feed. Either the founder is all-in or out.
• First time founders are unlikely to have such a large network of potential angel investors that they can afford to cherry pick only “trusted angel investors”.

So, what’s a founder to do?

My $0.02: Just take the plunge.

Remember that, at the stage of angel round, the startup hasn’t achieved product market fit, its business model - if one exists - is unproven. So the angel investor takes a lot of risk by investing in the startup. And they’re fronting tangible money.

Compared to that, the founder is fronting an intangible idea and plan for execution around that. Surely the idea might be worth billions one day in the future. But, it could equally well be worth nothing.

Ergo, IMO, the angel investor is arguably taking the bigger risk.

Which is why I’d say the founder should go all-in without worrying too much about things that they can’t control, like their idea getting stolen.