Comment by notacoward

Had a very similar moment at one of the startups I worked for, which also served as my introduction to a new CEO.

Shortly after NewCEO was hired, we had an all-hands introduction meeting. "All hands" at this point meant about 50 people, so our largest conference room was packed. I ended up sitting on the floor by the big whiteboard, opposite NewCEO. He started talking about how bigger companies were (he believed) actively trying to reverse-engineer our product. Without exactly meaning to, I said "good luck" loudly enough to get his attention, so he looked at me expectantly.

"We're having enough trouble engineering it forwards."

A few people laughed. NewCEO kind of glared. I guess I should mention that I was the product architect BTW. We never particularly got along, but he was neither the first nor the last CEO I outlasted during my career so meh.

Getting back to the point, maybe a competitor who had access to our code might, with great difficulty, learn something about the problem domain we were exploring (continuous data protection). More likely they would have been misled by all the remnants of wrong turns we'd taken during the exploration process. They'd literally be better off without it. Our entire business was a gamble that we could get to market before bigger competitors woke up to the opportunity and threw more bodies/dollars at it. As it turns out, that's exactly what did happen. We lost the bet. Other people having our code would not have changed that outcome one bit.