Idea Sharing and Local Culture

Two weeks ago I shared my ‘most interesting’ startup idea (an opinionated, low-friction collaboration platform I call ‘GroundFruit’) with an acquaintance. Within days he'd told a friend, then a few days later an investor - without my permission or knowledge. I was shocked and intended to address it the following day when we were set to meet but he flaked and has since moved to Colorado to "work on some things."

The irony here (if it’s what I think) is that his target audience will be us, founders. This hasn’t happened to me before and it got me thinking about how location and culture affect collaboration. In most cities I've lived (SF, LA) everyone was already building The Next Big Thing. The dynamics and culture here (Florida) are different.

Have place, local demographics and culture affected how (and if) you collaborate? Execution is king and idea similarity is really common but some concepts represent years of ‘search time’ in a problem space. Insights can be like a private key: trivial to transmit but hard to derive. The belief ideas “don’t matter” seems a little glib and only mostly true.

I’ve run large founder groups so I’ve had plenty of conversations but I’m still wondering if my views on this are naive. if you had the chance to invest in a founder with a pattern of running, ‘permissionless’, with the ideas of others', would you? Would you work with them? It would almost certainly be a deal-breaker for me but I’d love to hear what people think.