martin_hnuid

That's very interesting. I wasn't familiar with this. Thanks.

> Theft only applies when the item being obtained is unique and belongs to someone else. ... > Once you share something ... > Any copies that are made that are not made by you are not morally yours

Sorry, that's a really twisted view of reality. Let me use a hypothetical example to illustrate this:

You hire a bunch of developers and invest a cool million dollars to develop code for an amazing new online browser-based CAD tool. It's a membership site. Members can use this CAD tool behind a login. The tool, which took the bulk of one million dollars to develop is nearly all client side JS based because that's the only choice available.

Again, it took you and your team a whole year and a million dollars. Let's spice this up and say that you had to sell your home to raise a big chunk of that money and have been homeless for a whole year. You've been sleeping on friend's couches during this time.

A year and a monumental effort later you launch this site and start signing-up free and paid users. The site is featured in all CAD-related blogs. It's going great.

Now someone gains access to your site through one of the free promotions and proceeds to copy 100% of your JS code. They use that to then launch a competing site within a couple of months. They charge 1/4 of what you charge because, after all, they just spent a few thousand dollars spinning-up their site because they STOLE the million dollar effort you made in the form of a CAD tool written in JS.

The code wasn't "shared". It is the operating code for an online business. Nobody says "Hey world, I share my code code freely. Here's a pink unicorn to go with that. Enjoy!". No, in fact, there will probably be terms of service as well as comments within the code establishing copyright. The code isn't given away for anyone to copy and launch their own business bypassing all of the effort, financial and time investment. That's ludicrous.

So, your site/service goes down in flames. You have no money to bring legal action. You can't, they are in China. It's impossible. You are broke. Lost all your money. Lost your home and now have no business.

And, yeah, nobody wants you on their couch any more.

In what alternate reality is that not theft?

I'm in the process of doing that right now.

I've also started to ping a few investors to have general conversations about what I want to do. I don't need money for the initial phase of this business. I can self fund.

That said, I want to make sure I engage with potential investors early on in order to be ready for when I need that influx of cash to take it past the inflection point. So right now it's about booking meetings, throwing my ideas up on the wall and listening to opinions and criticism.

Is this the wrong approach with VC's?

Does Robinhood offer an API?

I use PyCharm too. Love it.

Hmmm. OK. Read through most of this thread. Not sure I agree with some of what is being said about Django. In particular about this "magic" thing.

It took me a while to get comfortable with Django. I tried to learn it on and off for about four years. I finally decided the only way to do it was to focus, commit to it and not jump off into something else until I got it.

That probably took about six months. Much of it felt confusing and, yes, magical. Until I made one more decision: Read The Source Luke.

Seriously. I started to look things up in Django source code. Every single time I came across something I did not understand or that seemed magical I went to source. It was painful at first but it became easier as it turned into a habit.

And then it happened, one day it just clicked. What seemed like a confusing mess months earlier made complete sense. It almost felt like this happened overnight, which wasn't the case.

I now believe the best way to learn Django is to do it exactly this way. Have the source open on another monitor and look-up everything as you go through a tutorial or book. In the process you'll discover much more than what you were looking for originally.

I know this is a tough one. I'm trying to understand what the options might be while fully understanding that JS is, in the end, not protectable.

Say you develop a site that offers a very specialized CAD package unique to an industry. The entire thing has to be client side JS and it could take a year or more to develop. Theft of code in a case like that could be catastrophic.

Frankly, I'm surprised nobody has come up with a real solution for this.

I agree with your points. The only reason I attempted to attach a revenue figure to the two end points I presented was to give readers some sense of potential scale without having to describe the ideas at this stage.

Another way to describe them would be that at one end it's a lifestyle business while at the other it could be a large scale VC-IPO-worthy business.

I am not making my decision based on this. I'd be perfectly happy with a good solid long-term lifestyle business. Yet, I do have ideas I am passionate about that could fly very high past that.

The lifestyle business ideas I can fully fund myself. The larger business I can fund for the first round and later-on would need VC money to grow it and go through the inflection point that would make it a sizable business.