a canadian startup

Staff and Confidentiality

In an effort to get free travel, I used to volunteer to work at the booths when Research In Motion would participate in mobile device or Java conferences. I took pride in how much I knew about our product, the road map, the internals, and everything else. I was a RIM guru at the age of 19. Or at least I pretended to be.

At conferences, people would grill me trying to get information about the future of Blackberry. Would they go color? Was the move to Java really going to happen? When will they add an MP3 player?

I would smile and dance around the questions.

Until my boss overheard me.

He was mad.

“Why are you answering questions about confidential information?”

“Don’t worry, I never gave anything away,” I shyly responded. You see, I would read press releases to make sure what was public and what wasn’t — I practiced weaving around the questions, mimicking what I saw from RIM’s PR.

I thought I was being smart.

Until my boss told me to stop. Stop being smart. He also told me the secret to how to answer information regarding confidential information in a technology company. It’s something I want to share because it may be something you want to share with your co-workers.

You see, in smaller, emerging companies, the employees take pride in being on “the inside”. That’s awesome — this reinforces ownership and teamwork. You’ve all met with a friend who works at Google, Facebook, or Microsoft that brags to you about the secret things going on. People are proud when they can answer questions others can’t. So when someone like myself back then at RIM — a 19 year old kid who knew stuff that reporters were begging to know — was asked about stuff I knew not to talk about I tried to shy away from answering the questions while still implying that I knew. This is a mistake.

Here’s what my boss clearly taught (okay, ordered) me to to do:

SAY YOU DON’T KNOW.

For example:

“Hey is RIM going to come out with colour devices?”

Bad answer from non-PR employee: “Well, as mentioned in our press releases, RIM has been testing colour devices and may move to a colour LCD platform pending changes from the blah blah, but whether or not we are doing so is considered confidential so all I can say is blah blah”

Good answer: “I don’t know, I don’t work in that department.”

You see, although it often makes sense to have a delicate PR-spin answer to questions about confidential matters, the people that work with you must be told that this task is exclusively the job of your PR and Executive teams. Others should just say they don’t know. Saying you don’t know is much more polite than “I am not allowed to speak about that” or “That’s currently confidential” — because otherwise you sound like you’re hiding something.

In a small company, many of our jobs cross over into different departments: so your customer service people might know things about your confidential pricing policies, for example. You’ve got to explain to your customer service people that they can say they “as a customer service person, that isn’t something I know or deal with” without being dishonest.

Most of us startups are good about making employees of the company sign non-disclosure agreements. That’s not enough. Here are my tips for your company in order to protect what’s confidential:

• NDA’s say everything is secret. Prioritize your secrets and let everyone know why we must not speak about them. In the beginning of a startup, it’s typically impossible to hide this information from them — the office is too small and it usually just makes things worse. Explain in detail what must be kept most secret. For example, everything is secret but:
  • Sales figures
  • Traffic data
  • Suppliers or pricing
  • Amount of financing raised

  are especially secret!

• Get an office shredder. Be strict about shredding policies.
• Train your co-workers on discarding their pride and just saying “I don’t know”. Practice with them.
• Train your co-workers on common information gathering techniques used by competitors. For example, people would sometimes call random extensions at RIM and ask for the “ASIC department” to see if RIM was doing any ASIC work. We were taught to send everyone through the main switchboard.

Another thing you might worry about is gossip. People will tell their significant other about how much money your company just raised, who will in turn tell their parents, who will in turn tell…

Honestly there’s not much you can do to stop that — So plan accordingly!