The Fog of Secrecy
dpifke: One of the VCs at a panel I attended in the last year or so said, "if your business plan depends on noone knowing you exist, you have a problem."In all seriousness, the execution is way more important than the idea, and execution is a lot harder to copy than ideas are.  If you're at the stage where you have a working product, you're probably at the stage where you can go public with your idea.