"You're using our idea. We're taking legal action."
A startup sent us that, years ago, at my previous company.
The reason: we were building an open innovation platform, and they said it was their idea.
We had been talking about that platform for years. In public. On stage, in decks, in conversations with half the people in that market.
We told them to go ahead.
We never heard from them again.
I have spent most of my career on the side of the table that connects startups to big companies. So I want to be careful with this story. It is easy to tell it in a way that sounds like I am defending corporates.
I am not.
"These programs are mostly scams"
Last year I wrote a series about why founders are losing faith in corporate innovation programs. What founders told me was brutal.
One founder won a global brand's innovation challenge. The prize was $600. When they asked for a follow-up meeting, nobody replied.
Another said the corporate only wanted to fold the startup's product into its own line, when the whole point of coming to them was that the startup couldn't reach that market alone.
One person put it in five words: "These programs are mostly scams."
I wrote then that some corporates, intentionally or not, take what they learn in a pitch and move on. I still think that.
And it is not only small programs. In 2020 The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon had met with or invested in startups and later launched products that competed with them. One of them, Nucleus, said the Echo Show came out about 8 months after Amazon's Alexa Fund got a look at its plans. Amazon settled with Nucleus for $5 million and did not admit wrongdoing. Amazon's side, as the Journal reported it, was that its fund had told Nucleus about Amazon's own device plans before investing. Keep that in mind. It is the same question this whole piece comes back to.
There is a reason Stanford researchers titled their study of startups and big-company partners "Swimming with Sharks". The sharks are real.
The sharks get accused too
Life is not that simple, though. People do take things from you. And some people say you took something you never touched.
From the outside, the two look exactly the same. A founder pitches. Months later the corporate launches something similar. The founder feels robbed, tells the story, and everyone who has ever been ghosted by a corporate believes it immediately.
Sometimes it is theft. Sometimes the corporate had been working on it for years and the founder walked into a room where the idea already lived.
What we had in our case was not a clever argument. It was the dates. Years of public mentions, before that startup ever came near us. You cannot steal an idea from someone who was saying it out loud before you met.
Korea wrote the line into law
Most people in this business will tell you an idea you pitch is not property. In Korea, that is not quite true.
Since July 2018, Korea's Unfair Competition Prevention Act has treated it as unfair competition to take an economically valuable idea someone shared with you in a business proposal, a bid or a pitch competition, and use it for yourself (Article 2, item 1(cha)). A founder who pitched a corporate in Korea has a real legal path. (Kim & Chang summary)
It just got stronger on the technical side. In January 2026 the National Assembly passed an amendment that brings a Korean-style discovery system into lawsuits over misuse of technical data between large companies and smaller partners. A court-appointed expert can go into the other company's office or factory and look at the materials, and the court can order evidence preserved. (Government release)
Japan went at the same problem from the contract side. In 2021 its Fair Trade Commission and the economy ministry published guidelines for big companies working with startups, covering NDAs, PoCs, joint research and licenses.
But the most useful sentence is the exception in Korea's idea rule. It does not apply if the company that received the idea already knew it when it was shared, or if the idea was already widely known in the industry.
That one line is the whole story.
Did they have it before you walked in?
If they did not, and you can show what you handed over and when, the law is on your side. More now than ever.
If they did, and they can show it with dates, there is no theft. There is a founder who arrived second.
The US draws the same line in a different law. Under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, independent derivation is not "improper means". There too, what settles it is a dated record of building it yourself.
What I ask when a founder says "they stole it"
If a founder tells me this story while I'm deciding whether to back them, I can't just nod. It might be a real wound. It might be a pitch line. These are the three things I'd want to know.
What exactly did you hand over, and is it written down with a date? A deck everyone has seen is one thing. Code, process data or customer numbers shared for a PoC are another. The second kind is what a court can actually look at.
Did they have it before you walked in? Not "did they launch after we met." Before. If the honest answer is "I don't know," the story is not ready to tell investors.
What is left of your company if they did copy it? Founders like this one least. I care about it most.
If one meeting can replace you
Here is my view, and some founders will not like it.
Nucleus said it was copied, and it still had a product, a market and a case to make. That is what a real claim looks like.
But if one pitch meeting is enough for a corporate to replace your whole company, you are probably not the kind of startup Silicon Valley means when it says innovation.
That does not make it hurt less. Losing your business to someone bigger is one of the worst things that can happen to a founder. I am not pretending otherwise.
Markets have always grown by copying and improving. So I don't ask whether the idea could be copied. I ask what would still be theirs the morning after. In a PoC that usually means the things you should be slowest to hand over: your own data, your customer list, the reason customers come back.
Before the next PoC
Korea's law now gives real victims more to work with. That is good. It also means the next accusation, true or not, will cost more to answer.
So, for each seat at the table:
If you run open innovation at a corporate, write down what you are already working on before you meet the startup. Dated. Boring. A dated internal document or a deck you have already presented is a start, and your lawyer can tell you what holds up. It is exactly what that exception asks for, and it is what we had.
If you are a founder going into a PoC, know what you are handing over and put it in writing, with a date, before the meeting. And if your whole company is the idea, fix that before the meeting too.
If you fund either side, a corporate program or the startups in it, ask for the dates before you take a side. Both stories sound true until someone produces them.
Open innovation is not a scam. It is not a fairy tale either. Sometimes the shark is real. Sometimes it's a startup crying shark.
That is also why we built Startup Certified, a place where founders rate a corporate partnership on the things that actually decide it: how clear the opportunity was, how aligned the company was inside, how fast it moved, how transparent the process was, how fair the value exchange was, and how it ended. Same advice there as here: write it down, with dates.
Have you been on either end of this? The one who got copied, or the one accused of copying?
In this newsletter I write down the things I got wrong, or was on the wrong end of, in how capital picks people across borders. If you sit on either side of that table, it's written for you.