Couldn’t disagree with you more.

There are very few startups that need to be in “stealth mode”. If anything, startups need to be more vocal to get themselves on the map and to do way way more customer development.

I agree with you, I only remember, maybe once thinking that “yeah, those guys needed to be in stealth mode, that makes sense”

I think anyone who credits stealth mode with their success probably doesn’t realize they would very likely have also been successful without it.

Are you sure, specially in easily copied technology domains?

In my experience, software, business processes, and hardware are best kept close to the vest until sufficient momentum and maybe market saturation is reached.

It does not matter if the item holds a copyright/patent/trade mark; they are post even re-active solutions. It's like an ambulance after a car crash. Excellent if there are good doctors in the ambulance, but better the avoid the car crash all together.

Please provide examples of “easily copyable technology.”

Putting together a team of competent engineers, developers, etc and having them create something meaningful is hard enough as it is. Trying to copy someone else’s tech doesn’t lower the bar all that much.

You mean where a technology was stolen then reproduced, impacting the inventing businesses? I ran a quick brave search and came up with a few articles about knock offs[0][1][2].

There are myriad of other examples, or different scenarios where an NDA or non-compete failed, and another company just puts out a product faster and cheaper. Happens with software, hardware, and of course business processes.

[0] https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/amusing-knockoffs-popular-tech...

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/30-knockoff-products-tha...

[2] https://www.liveabout.com/hilarious-knock-off-brands-4767601

I see a bunch of probably unsuccessful knock offs.

I don’t see any out there that indicates they beat the original idea to the market by way of breached NDA or non-compete.

If you are in the domain of easily-copied technology, you probably shouldn't be building a startup around it, because there are very few barriers to entry for someone else to do the same and eat your lunch or at least cream off some customers without ever having paid for the R&D behind whatever the anchor is.

Ok sure. Better for me - weak competitors.

What would make a competitor weak, exactly?

This is justifying it.