It's a risky game. We've had a major accelerator application, proceeded to an interview, they requested our business plan which we promptly sent to them. Then they went silent and stopped taking our calls or answering emails. We moved on, only to discover that their alumni for this batch included a similar company that was shameless enough even to use complete sentences out of our business plan. I avoid everything that's linked to that accelerator or people from it since then.

We have similar stories... A possible investor (a supplier for our product) went through a Due Diligence with us to learn more about our process etc. Couple of weeks later our founder got the no plus a note that they would not sell their product to us anymore, since they were planning on persuing service similar to ours within their own company.

A couple months later our founder has another possible investor and we go through a Due Diligence again. This time we were already wary from our first DD (plus the investor had a bit of a reputation of being a scammer in the past) and lo and behold their IT guy wants to have full access to our software packages / pipeline, source code and databases, so they "can assess the quality". (...) I didn't end up giving them any of our source code, which they were fine with after a while. This whole spiel went on for another month where they "focused" more on other processes. Eventually they went quiet and their CTO asked me privately if I wanted to jump ship to join them, because they need someone with my expertise...

Does this happen often or did we just have some bad luck? Also has anyone ever been asked to provide the source code to their product? (that seemed kind of outrageous to me)

Maybe if people named those people their scam would be a little harder to execute next time.

the agreements we did have included that we don't disclose their names. I did not see the exact wording and don't know if they extend beyond the due diligence, so to be on the save side I'd rather zip it.

Plus I think a write-up of guide lines or red flags that one should watch out for during a DD or when talking to a VC might help more than just name calling. What worked the last time: Google their names and go past page 1 (Most seem to know how to alter their search results)

> the agreements we did have included that we don't disclose their names.

That's just one sided. They can steal your ideas (because they didn't signed the relevant NDA), and you can't even name the bastards if they do?

I have zero experience in this stuff, but it looks like in this situation, one should either refuse to sign this sort of non-disparagement clause, or have them sign the relevant NDA.

I think it would be helpful to other entrepreneurs here if you could name and shame

I think the whole story is not as simple. First of all, it happened in China, the country with vastly different cultural mentality. "36 stratagems" are fully alive and kicking here. People in businesses here lie, cheat and deceive because it's considered to be market acumen and cleverness. The fund behind the accelerator made a right decision in the cultural context: to improve the position of their own "family" using every available material. Bad faith? What bad faith? I bet they won't even understand what they did wrong when confronted. So I generally avoid any contact with Chinese funds unless absolutely necessary.

We've had our own little revenge though. The competitor is funded well but has a very weak technical team. We used numerous holes in their systems to obtain critical data about their business. Shall we use it or not is another moral question, but it gave us great insights and let us adjust our strategy without spending our own or VC's money and time on getting to know it.

I wish they would. This is like being in a group of friends and you're talking about potential romantic partners and one keeps vaguely alluding to a negative experience with someone but not actually being helpful.

you should publicly shame the VC. it should be a necessity. if you're worried about the backlash at least go anonymous and publish on something like pastebin.

It would be relatively easy for the VC to identify where the 'anonymous' leak came from - the people they screwed.

When you screw so far and wide, it becomes really hard to hide.

I find TPT interesting and - as a teacher - have a strong interest in platforms that could help debalkanize curriculum and support materials; however, it's always seemed to me that the marketplace model (while a successful business) must limit both the amount of teacher engagement as well as the type of teachers/materials present on the platform due to the incentives involved. Because of that, it's never seemed systemically useful.

Did the platform you built attempt to create a shared curriculum libraries? If so, was the focus on the school, district or national scale?

Happy to take a response via email so as not to derail the thread (see profile).

It did. At that time this was a system that would be deployed within each school on its local network for a lot of other functionality. The pitch around lesson plan management was sharing and exchange internally within the school while also allowing teachers to sell in the marketplace network of other people on the system. The schools themselves would be able to build a library of quality lesson plans that they could use to continuously try to improve each aspect of the classes they taught by experimenting with more effective ways of teaching each lesson within each class.

That's awesome. Did this system go into production? If so, were you able to monitor how (or if) teachers used the shared curriculum to iteratively improve curriculum? Did the platform manage discrete files or were lesson content/relevant media/assessments/etc. associated with each other in a network of some kind?

It's a topic of personal interest. I believe teachers are far too isolated in their lesson planning/curriculum creation which leads to significant redundancies in labor, glacial curriculum improvement, and contributes to the difficulty serving the needs of my individual students.

After the funding fell through we never got to build it, but you describe the exact problem.

I may publish the business plan one day just for fun in case anyone else wants to follow through on it. :)