I discovered an unexpected benefit of being plagiarized: it makes imitators easy to find. A couple days ago I was curious how many YC clones there are now, so I tried to make an up to date list. The most fruitful source was to search in Google for distinctive phrases from our application form. Practically all of them copy that, and more often than not they leave chunks of verbatim text unchanged.<p>(I found 26. Some are still unlaunched.)
I wish I had read this a year and a half ago. Before my current startup launched but after it'd gotten angel funding, someone learned about our business from an indiscreet angel investor. That someone then started a very similar business.<p>Idea theft? Maybe. Did it make me angry? Definitely. Not only did I have the usual competitor irritation (these people are out to take food out of my hypothetical future children's mouths, etc.), the potential thievery made me livid, to the point where it was impacting my overall happiness.<p>Over a year later, the two respective companies have iterated in different directions, to the point where I can't really consider them a competitor - their business isn't our business, and vice versa. All that fussing ended up being a pointless waste of energy.
Ethics aside, if a company/startup can't be bothered to make new slides after stealing an idea, it will likely make similar inflexible "shortcuts" later on and fail miserably (as the article showed).
The key: "While the common wisdom said that our success was going to be determined by which company executed better, the common wisdom was wrong. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and <i>learn, discover, iterate</i> and execute."<p>Good to see these guys kept their head in the game, instead of getting wrapped up in lawsuits.
The people who stole these slides remind me of a child who cheats at spelling in primary school.<p>They may do well in tests, but as soon as they need to actually spell something they'll have no chance (hope my spelling is ok, by the way).<p>The other issue is that someone who would steel like that. Would probably also have other ethical shortcomings.
For example they may have no problems ripping off customers, employees or suppliers. Some people may think that is good in business. I don't.
Interesting, but scary. In this case it looks like an unethical and incompetent competitor. However, if they had actually followed up on the stolen strategy properly, it might have posed a bigger problem.
"We made sure our competitor knew [a bunch of stuff]. We made sure they heard how shocked and upset we were that they were going to beat us to an announcement in our market."<p>How do you do that? How do you ensure "they" know what you want them to know?
Reminds me of this post from 37signals a while back. <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1561-why-you-shouldnt-copy-us-or-anyone-else" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1561-why-you-shouldnt-copy-us...</a><p>The definate danger of simply copying an idea is not knowing the motivation, thought processes and discarded tangents that lead to that idea.
"Over the next two years we left them in the dust."<p>You're golden then. There will always be people that try to leech off your success, but you have the ability to get their first.
Here's the link to the post on part 1:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974341" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974341</a>
Any idea what the competitor is? I ask because I went through an upgrade where we helped a client move from Epiphany to Sugar CRM/Lyris ListManager (assuming this is the Epiphany I think it is)<p>if you want to know my experience... both are TERRIBLE products.