It was better for us, they didn't have engineers skilled enough to understand what we were saying and asked for a second meeting with their top notch tech people. But I've smelled something fishy and just forcefed them with top grade tech-looking bullshit under very heavy pressure. Top notch tech folks were confused, corp dev guys were pissed off, but they didn't have a nerve to ask "just repeat what did you say in the last meeting".
Then they've asked for the code and I gave them the code! We had brilliant C macro library for memory management, hash tables, list traversal, etc developed by my cofounder. Very nice piece of code, elegant, efficient and reliable. They've got all of it :-)
When they came back confused I told them that I thought they want to check the clarity and quality of the code and this piece of code is quite representative. They had to specifically ask for the trade secret (and I would have refused) but again didn't have the nerve.
It was a big name in the industry, $5B yearly revenue back then.
Then they've asked for the code and I gave them the code! We had brilliant C macro library for memory management, hash tables, list traversal, etc developed by my cofounder. Very nice piece of code, elegant, efficient and reliable. They've got all of it :-) When they came back confused I told them that I thought they want to check the clarity and quality of the code and this piece of code is quite representative. They had to specifically ask for the trade secret (and I would have refused) but again didn't have the nerve.
It was a big name in the industry, $5B yearly revenue back then.