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Ask HN: Why wouldn't FB “steal” my startup idea?

6 points by MrBra 9y ago

Ok, I am not a native English speaker so please bear with me and try to make sense of what I am typing. Like for all of you, I do have many IT project ideas constantly spinning around my mind and for some of them I am really convinced that they could be made into something profitable. But for a series of reasons including that I am already busy with other things, I never got too serious about them.. Even worse, lately there's something else which is stopping me from even thinking about it. Which is: looking at how agile and flexible is today's development and how this has been embraced by big players too, I've almost convinced myself that no matter how good you gonna be at your new project, giant corporations like FB or Google could jump into the same wagon and make their own ten time better version of it or add hundred more feature in a fraction of time my team would need to do so. This is really discouraging, and I find myself loosing faith in my ideas. Is there a fallacy in my reasoning? Why wouldn't a big company like Facebook grab anyone else's proven-right concept (i.e. the first iteration of a new sharing-economy app) and make it theirs in no time? By now they have all the resources and flexibility (hundreds of engineers only busy at exploring ideas) to do so, don't they?

haburka 9y ago
This happened in the popular tv show silicon valley but it's much more likely that your idea wouldn't result in something worth stealing. For example, I know of a successful start-up that migrates cemetary data into a modern database and then sets up a site with it that allows users to view plots of land as well as buy them. Is Google going to hear about this and take over the funeral management business? It's extremely unlikely. Instead, what could happen is that the start-up one day grows very large and is acquired by a company, which then may have competition from Google or FB, if it turns out the market is so large that it's worth competing over. I would recommend that you pursue your ideas because generally you won't make the next Instagram. And even then, you'll probably be acquired before you have to compete with Google.
- narrowrail 9y ago
  Sorry for the tangent, but could you link the burial plot startup? I have 6 plots in Chicago, and when I looked at marketplaces for them ~5 years ago it was a bunch of crappy sites from the 90's.
itamarst 9y ago
Even if it is a good idea, it may not be relevant to a large company. For example, a business that makes $5 million/revenue a year is far too small for Facebook to care about, it's just a blip for them. Empirically Facebook is not starting 100s of tiny businesses a year, even though they have the personnel for it.
sharemywin 9y ago
Someone has to prove the market. Why would they care if you take all the risk of getting initial traction and they can just buy you for 30M-1B. As fast as facebook is they usually offered to by people out. if your not already on their road map you've got a long way to go before you have to worry about it. http://mashable.com/2014/01/06/snapchat-facebook-acquisition-2/#opwxpSmAZiqW http://mashable.com/2014/01/06/snapchat-facebook-acquisition...
- sharemywin 9y ago
  besides you have a much bigger problem building something enough users care about to be worth stealing. Also, If your business has network effects it's hard to start from scratch and compete.
- MrBra 9y ago
  Agreed. Basically we could grow up upto a value of $3 billion, and then Facebook would show interest. Ok. But I think this is true for products that are somewhat orthogonal to their base product and not in direct competition, like a radically new innovative full-blown social network could be. What if mine was such a ground breaking idea? What if, at stage 1 of funding, FB takes over the idea and improves with the same resources that I would only have at "stage 100" funding? Oh and guys, please, I am just reasoning by making hypothesis, no need to remember me how hard is to build such a thing. :)
cjCamel 9y ago
This is something that I often wrestle with. I comfort myself by remembering that this has been the case for a long time though - remember Steve Jobs saying that Dropbox is a feature, not a product? Another example: Slack logically should stand no chance against Facebook for Work, Microsoft Teams etc, but they're doing fine thanks to a laser sharp focus on enterprise communications, whereas FB and MS just can't do it as well, even with much larger resources. If you flip your thinking, you can instead be inspired by the fact that you DON'T need 1000s of developers developing millions of features to create a good product, in fact, it's easier if you don't have that baggage, or an already ingrained culture and business model that may fight against any new direction. Also, if the worse that happens is that Facebook validates your idea by copying it, you've probably done OK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_Inc.#2017_Initial_Public_Offering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_Inc.#2017_Initial_Public_...
- MrBra 9y ago
  Slack is a kind of a white fly or an exception if you see the bigger picture because it's in a segment that targets the devs community, which is very attentive and careful about the product they choose, because have the skills to decide about it. But what would happen with a product targeting a more generic public (non only tech savvy people), like a new sharing economy app or a new innovative social network? What I am trying to say is... the big players are now so big that they are just going to integrate any IT idea that is cool and profitable, in no time. This is what saddens me. We are not in early 2000 anymore, got a concept around manipulating pictures? Yay, make a website and give it a beta badge icon and there you go, you got popular and people are interested in investing in you! Nowadays? Go develop your new picture filters, meanwhile google engineers will publish a blog post where they talk about how their machine learning libs powered by 11230021 GPUs has got better result in that aspect and they will now integrate that capability in all Google pic manipulating products. Do you get what I am saying?
  - cjCamel 9y ago
    Sure I do - Facebook has brazenly added Snapchat features to Messenger and Whatsapp and have undoubtedly clipped the wings of Snap Inc, at least for now. But before Facebook did this Snap demonstrated that it's still possible to ladder up (https://stratechery.com/2016/snapchats-ladder/ https://stratechery.com/2016/snapchats-ladder/) from an initially seemingly easily copy-able idea into something meaningful - the reason why Facebook didn't copy Snapchat initially was because they didn't get it, and didn't see the threat until it was nearly too late. There are new social network startups being developed every day, but the reason they don't succeed isn't because Google copy them - it's because they are trying to copy Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/AirBnB/Uber, not the other way round. Or because they suck. Like I said before - if you develop your idea and the worst that happens is that Facebook copies it, then that's actually a really cool outcome, as by then you've probably done extremely well. The more likely outcome, as I suspect you well know, is that it is ignored by everyone apart from your closest friends. p.s. Here's another Ben Thompson article about the Facebook monopoly. The real reason FB is a problem is because they own the digital representation of our real relationships, and no startup is going to be able to compete with that https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/ https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopo... Btw, I know plenty of non technical people and teams that use Slack.
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ploggingdev 9y ago
Ideas themselves are not worth much. I can sit down and list at least a 100 plausible sounding ideas. You also underestimate the difficulty of turning an idea into a product. Writing code to build an app or a website is only the first step, getting engaged users and growing is far more difficult. > By now they have all the resources and flexibility (hundreds of engineers only busy at exploring ideas) FB employees are certainly not "only busy exploring ideas", I don't know where you got that idea from. In case FB were to do this, it would attract the US Government's attention for monopolistic practices. As opposed to "stealing" your idea, FB (and other large companies) would be more interested in aqui-hiring a successful startup. So yeah, you certainly don't need to be worried about FB stealing your idea. Not convinced yet? Look at the startup ecosystem, how often do you come across one of the large companies stealing a startup's idea? I can't think of many.
- MrBra 9y ago
  > FB employees are certainly not "only busy exploring ideas", I don't know where you got that idea from. Meaning that they have all resources and flexible mindset/approach (agile) to play with interesting ideas and iterate on them quickly! This was not a thing time ago... Nowadays you see companies as big as Microsoft being swiftly responsive to the open source ecosystem and to ie. Electron apps, and releasing Visual Studio Code to tackle that slice of the cake! In that sense. Also please, read again my first sentence :)
- narrowrail 9y ago
  >In case FB were to do this, it would attract the US Government's attention for monopolistic practices. I think this is a bit naive. Private companies are allowed to compete in the marketplace no matter how big they are. Have you noticed that FB has been systematically implementing most of Snap's features over the last year?
  - MrBra 9y ago
    Exactly.
narrowrail 9y ago
FB relies on advertising, so I would say the strategy would be to use that to your advantage. As mentioned elsewhere, Slack is competing very well and relies on freemium without any advertising.