6 ms·

Someone else had your idea first

109 points by akharris 12y ago

7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things. This is cynical and arrogant. Different people manifest creativity in different ways. Not everybody is interested in coming up with "ideas for new or great things", which in the author's world clearly equates to "tech startup." Also worth noting is that lots of people who do have great ideas: 1. Have great ideas that aren't of a commercial nature. 2. Don't have the know-how, relationships or financial ability to take their ideas further on their own. 3. Contribute those ideas to their employers. > This is also true for many venture capitalists. In fact, it's at the root of a very common question that founders get asked: "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" To be fair, this question isn't necessarily sparked by laziness. It's also sparked by ego - the VC wants to show how familiar they are with the market. They say "Look! I know about things and there's someone else who had the same idea you had." The implicit criticism here is that, because someone else had the idea first, your idea is somehow worse. Later, Harris writes: > Even though the question might seem dumb, it's one of my favorites. It's also a great question to get as a founder. I ask it of almost every founder I meet, because it's very rare to find a truly new idea. The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." But that's not enough. The question begs for a deeper answer, one that talks about why, even though other people have tried the same idea, they're still leaving billions of dollars on the table. It's an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality. It's that framework of thinking and level of insight that makes greatness. So other venture capitalists ask the "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" question because they're lazy and want to stroke their egos but Aaron Harris asks it because he wants to provide founders with "an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality"? C'mon. Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me.
- zo1 12y ago
  >"Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me. " He's on the YCombinator people list page: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ >"Aaron Harris was cofounder of Tutorspree, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2011. Before Tutorspree he worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed product and operations for an analytics group. He has an AB in History and Literature from Harvard."
- graycat 12y ago
  > I have no idea what the point of this post was. Well, as in my post elsewhere in this thread, the title of this thread is just flatly, literally wrong, as in not true, as in false. But, I will try to explain, maybe, "the point" of the original post: In venture capital, the claim in the title is commonly made: So, maybe, "the point" is just to discuss the claim and related thoughts. But, he continues and makes another mistake: He has, > The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." I see two things wrong here: (1) With the qualification "nearly always", along with his comment about "lazy", we have to conclude that he's been talking to the wrong entrepreneurs. (2) His "this" as an "idea" is wrong: As we have covered on HN before, it appears that in Silicon Valley what is meant by an "idea" is just some vague, short, maybe one sentence statement of what the product/service would look like to a customer on a first glance. So, with this meaning of an idea there is nothing to patent, protect with a trade secret, use as Ph.D. dissertation, publish in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in, say, a STEM field, etc. Or, an idea is like "I want to fly to the moon" where we can ask who the heck first thought of that and then conclude who the heck cares. So, for people doing advanced work in STEM fields and looking for business success with, also, say, a technological barrier to entry, his concept of an idea is nearly trivial. He's got an entrepreneur and wants to talk trivialities? Gads. His mistake is to be looking for something nearly trivial. Instead for ideas he should be looking for something, to borrow, "new, correct, and significant", and, of course, for start-ups how to make money. So, in his work with ideas, he's looking for the wrong stuff. In case I rub some fur the wrong way, I highly value and respect my view of ideas -- e.g., my Ph.D. dissertation was mostly just ideas, and they weren't just one or a few sentences and trivial. More broadly I have another concern for information technology start-ups, venture capital, and our economy more generally: In short, the concern is that we are shooting ourselves in the gut. Or, earlier this week I happened to look at the Web site of Polaris Partners, and there I saw the backgrounds of the partners: Several, maybe all, the partners interested in biotechnology had biotechnology Ph.D. degrees. No partner interested in information had a Ph.D. degree. And that Web site is not the only such. In my career, nearly always I had my technical work, and since I quite mowing grass for a few dollars as a teenager all of my work has been technical, reviewed by someone who had the qualifications to understand it and did understand it. Then I looked at the Web sites of some venture firms and the backgrounds of the partners interested in information technology: I have a tough time finding a Ph.D. or even a BS STEM major. Gotta tell ya, it would be one heck of an amazing BA major in English and history who would or could understand or review any of my technical work. Several professions have professional peer review, and I doubt that any of them, law, medicine, engineering, tenure committees, have BA English and history majors. But, wait, it gets worse: If I accept an equity check I will report to a Board of Directors (BoD) that can fire me at anytime for any reason or no reason, deny me my unvested stock, get me in hot water with my illiquid vested stock, etc. So, first BoD scenario: The company is up and running, good revenue, first earnings, and I, as founder, CEO, come to the BoD meeting with the budget and list of projects. There is a major new project, and I cover how it will go. It's based on some original work, I did, in applied mathematics with some advanced prerequisites. Essentially all of my high confidence in the project is based squarely on the mathematics. So, I cover the mathematics. The project has to do with, say, ad targeting? As I learned as a first year graduate student in seminars with some of the best mathematicians in the world, there is little so painful as listening to and trying to understand some advanced mathematics while missing most of the prerequisites -- were talking an unanesthetized, upper molar root canal procedure along with a barbed wire enema while being flogged with a cat of nine tails and standing on a charcoal fire. What the fun in that? I can see nearly all the English and history majors running, screaming from the board room directly, do not pass GO, do not collect $100, to the little boys room for blowing all tubes at both ends. Some BoD meeting. I see that disaster coming right at me like an 80 MPH freight train 50 yards away. Bummer. BoD meeting over. In information technology venture firms, can we have some basic technical competence, please, pretty please? Else that must have been one heck of an English and history major. Gee, they covered the Gleason bound for heap sort and O(n ln(n)) notation right along with Hamlet? And they explained the importance of P vs NP just before the Council of Trent? And cache concurrency in multi-core processors was, sure, along with Henry James, 'The Golden Bowl' -- from the Prince. For the Internet, they connected that with the principle of The Great Natural Order? Recursion in software connected with the "child is the father of the man"? And in the paper I published solving an old problem in the constraint qualifications of the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, I was not the first with the ideas because Sir Francis Bacon just had to have known all that all along? And that every closed, convex subset has a unique element of minimum norm, that was from Hammurabi, right? Where does our technology get such nonsense? Does this really mean that soon we will be doing abdominal surgery with smoking incense and rusty pocket knives? That's enough -- I'm going to upchuck.
jacobolus 12y ago
The thing that’s annoying about the question is that it’s phrased in an inherently adversarial way, putting the answerer on the defensive, amping up the stress of an already stressful context and encouraging aggressive blustery responses. I’m neither a startup founder nor a VC, but I’ve found that in similar contexts (dates, interviews, public debates, private arguments, etc.) this sometimes serves to score points with some external audience, but is almost never the most productive way to advance a conversation that both parties are trying to learn something from. The goal of a VC isn’t to “win” in a contest against the founder here. The goal is for each side to learn what the other side has to offer and critically evaluate whether a deal makes sense, or whether there are other connections that can be made. I’ve known a small handful of people who ask aggressive questions like this as a deliberate test to see what the other person will do and are then very savvy about parsing responses and seeing through anxiety/bravado/etc. But this is a very difficult skill to master, and such tests should be used carefully and sparingly. Most of the people I know who ask this kind of question are just in it because they enjoy aggressive adversarial conversations, even when it’s not at all in their own interest.
- jcr 12y ago
  Do you think your opinion on the question as being "aggressive" or "adversarial" is a matter of personal experience? I see the question as both direct and deep. It's a good way to pry open the problem/market space, think about what has been done or is being done by competitors, and consider/query the "new" approach to the "old" problem. If you know your market, it's an easy question to answer. In fact, it's a fun question to answer -- it's not every day that you the luxury of a smart and trained person assisting you with the endless task of prying open and evaluating your problem/market space. If you consider the question to be aggressive, adversarial, and intended to be harmful, then answering it becomes more difficult, particularly if you're unprepared. On the other hand, if you consider the question to be simply direct, deep, and intended to be helpful, then answering it is much easier.
  - jacobolus 12y ago
    It obviously depends a lot on tone of voice, context of the relationship between the two people, etc. I just know that I’ve occasionally showed something new to someone, or announced I was working on something, and their immediate response was along the lines of “oh, I saw that years ago when X did the same thing” or “Y tried that and it didn’t work out” or “doesn’t everyone already use Z’s version of that?” with a dismissive or aggressive sort of tone. It’s the same kind of framing of a conversation you get as when an idea is met with “oh, that’s physically/technically impossible” or “that’s way too expensive to possibly work” or “what kind of crazy customer do you think would ever want that?” Trying to understand how a new idea or product relates to existing stuff is obviously a useful topic of discussion, but depending whether it’s phrased/expressed inquisitively or aggressively could make a big difference. Something like the title of the post under discussion – “someone else had your idea first” – is one of the less productive ways to phrase things, IMO. Personally, I love answering these kinds of questions and can easily be sent either into passionate “prove why I’m right” mode or passionate “let’s look at this logically/scientifically” mode. But I also know plenty of folks who I think would be great startup founders who respond very defensively or get shut down when they feel attacked. The problem here is that while the VC might be thinking “The question begs for a deeper answer, [...] an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality.” what is also happening is that someone who doesn’t thrive on aggressive adversarial conversations will be weeded out, even though they might be great at all kinds of other things, and might be able to express their ideas very well in a less adversarial context. I dunno, I’m not an expert on startup psychology. Maybe the only people who make good startup founders love this style of conversation.
soperj 12y ago
Depends on how far you dumb down the idea really. No one would be telling Steve Wozniak that someone else had his idea for a very innovative way of developing a computer in the late 70s, but if you say your idea is "a computer" then yah, someone else had that idea.
- graycat 12y ago
  Still, necessarily there was a first person (or a tie with several people) for the idea of a computer. So, maybe the claim in the title was true for Wozniak but definitely it is false for someone and, thus, a false statement.
graycat 12y ago
For the title here, I've heard that before. Let's see: Take the set of all people who have had that idea and pick the ones who had the idea, say, since the big bang ~13.7 billion years ago, first. Then for those people, no one else had their idea first. Contradiction. Claim is false. Done. Not complicated. What's more complicated is why such a claim would be made, and a conjecture is that someone wants to denigrate ideas and the people who have them.
coda_ 12y ago
Having read the entire article, I'm a little confused. He says it's one of his favorite questions to both ask and be asked, but when VCs ask it, it is sparked by their ego with the intent of putting them down. But when he asks the question himself, he doesn't claim to do it with the same bad intentions. Seems overly negative towards VCs to acknowledge that they ask a really great question, but do it with the intent of making founders feel like crap.
baddox 12y ago
> I think part of the reason that people ask this question as a way of putting founders down is that they assume that startups are zero sum. That's an assumption born in certain models of markets, but it's completely wrong when looking at startups. Which models of markets? As far as I knew, one of the fundamental points of modeling markets is that they aren't zero-sum.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Mature, well-developed markets are close to zero-sum. Think Wall-Mart or McDonald's mature: niches where there are old, aggressive, amazingly well-optimized players, generally two or three in number, who occupy the landscape so completely that for one to grow the rest are probably going to have to shrink. It isn't a perfect zero-sum, and even in those markets companies are always looking for new ground to colonize, but it's close enough that to first order it makes sense to analyze things in zero-sum terms. And it's also the antithesis of start-ups in most cases, which are frequently attempting to create new markets where none existed by serving needs that no one knew they had.
  - baddox 12y ago
    I don't think your example is at all zero-sum, because the overall size of the economy can and generally does grow, and thus even the most well-entrenched markets like discount department stores or fast food can and do grow. Perhaps it's true that a market with a few well-optimized firms, each of which can't increase their market share without taking it from another firm, but even then, the market size can grow.
RandomCode 12y ago
I can do miracles. I have God's endorsement. Soon, I will be telling hardware companies what to do. My operating system is divine intellect. God may say to kill you.
Zigurd 12y ago
There are a couple missed points in that article. First, those kinds of somewhat aggressive questions are far more likely to be asked by the young MBAs VC firms hire to poke holes in business plans and do other grunt work. This is how they have fun. VC partners seldom need to publicly stroke their egos. Secondly, of course someone else had that idea first. The future is here. Your "idea" amounts to creating a local maximum in future distribution because you can execute on that idea particularly well. So don't get insulted by the person asking, or by the question itself.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
krapp 12y ago
Jokes on them, none of my ideas are any good.
mathattack 12y ago
It is a good question, and just a different way of asking, "Who is your question and how are you different?" and "How much do you know the history of the market you're trying to disrupt?" If someone claims to be disrupting a market that they know nothing about, there are potential warning signs. (This isn't to say that outsiders don't have great ideas, just that it's tougher.)
alain94040 12y ago
I think the author got it wrong. I also ask that same question "isn't X or Y already doing this?" to most startups that pitch me. I'm not trying to make the founder feel bad, or sound smart, or anything like that. I say this because I want to find out what they do different. I'm signaling that I'm already aware of those other companies, and I want to know: (a) if they are already successful, how you'll beat them or (b) if they failed, why you think you won't fail
- Alex3917 12y ago
  That's actually what the original post was saying, albeit I had to reread it a couple times to figure that out.
- chacham15 12y ago
  > I also ask that same question "isn't X or Y already doing this?" to most startups that pitch me. I'm not trying to make the founder feel bad, or sound smart, or anything like that. The question itself is adversarial because it assumes that you understand completely what the founder is doing and implies that it isnt any different from X or Y. Thats why people like Paul Graham who want to know the same thing phrase it differently: "how are you different from X or Y".
eldude 12y ago
There are a lot of comments here about the adversarial nature of a such a question, and they're completely correct: Asking this question is an assertion of dominance. They're also not wrong that assertions of dominance tend to backfire and elicit indignation. The key insight though, is that dominant individuals tend to respond to assertions of dominance with their own return assertion of dominance. In other words, they don't like being dominated, and it's this reaction VCs are typically looking for as dominant behavior is likely perceived as a requisite character trait for entrepreneurial success. Programmers though tend to conversely be a prestige driven culture and respond negatively to dominance challenges like this. If you're curious to know more, checkout the very interesting paper "Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct Yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence"[1] [1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2013)%20-%20Two%20Ways%20to%20the%20Top.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2...
- atrilla 12y ago
  I think I disagree with your comment regarding programmers: Linus is admired for such strong opinions, close to impoliteness, for example. More than a jujutsu technique for dealing with such incisive questions, it is clear that being the second contender to enter the marker saves you the trouble of having to create such market (and it is sometimes reasonable to play it this safe). It's just a different approach to making money. To me, a VC asking this is a sign of weakness on his behalf (due to ignorance?).
  - eldude 12y ago
    1. Linus is in a dominant position. Dominance doesn't invoke indignance when it's directed toward non-tribesman or by the alpha (the paper discusses this). What's interesting about this, is you can read whether someone perceives Linus to be an/the alpha based on whether they reject or accept his behavior. Further interesting, if they accept his behavior, they are likely self-associating with whichever tribe they consider Linus to be the alpha of (e.g., programmers, Linux, OSes, etc...). 2. Yes, I agree on a VC's concern of risks on the viability of a market. (See First Mover Advantage myth) I'm focusing more on the way it's communicated rather than the content or the why. 3. Yes, I think you're right that a VC is masking weakness if he asks this, as opposed to, "How are you different from X?" Though, IMO it's still an assertion of dominance, similar to a veil of bravado.
ccvannorman 12y ago
As a startup founder, I jump at this question -- not aggressively or defensively, but enthusiastically, because I know exactly why we're different/better.
j_baker 12y ago
> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things. See "Theory X": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y > I think part of the reason that people ask this question as a way of putting founders down is that they assume that startups are zero sum. This sentiment has just gotten so trite. The idea that economics is not a zero-sum game is one of the first principles of capitalism.
kentf 12y ago
http://kent.io/the-well-of-lost-ideas http://kent.io/the-well-of-lost-ideas
lazylizard 12y ago
its like this. say a friend says he wants to build a system to enable smartphone turn by turn navigation indoors.. my first thought would be..apple/google/mall developers/nokia all have more millions than we have dollars and what have they done about it? why you? what advantage do you have over them? or what has changed in the circumstances or context to make this indoor navigation thing interesting? i guess thats a rather adversarial way to phrase things, but are questions i actually want to know the answers to..
harrylove 12y ago
Quid pro quo: what percentage does originality contribute to success and greatness? Is it more than 20%? How did you arrive at the percentage? Does the percentage change based on the vertical, the market, the greater market cycle, the country, the entrepreneur, et cetera? If so, how? If you, as a VC, can't answer those questions, then asking me how original my idea is has no value. If the answer is that originality contributes less than 20%, why should I focus on it? If the real question is, have I thought about my competition and do I have a strategy for beating them, ask me that instead. Further, if I haven't thought about my strategy yet, aren't you then looking at my potential to learn, devise, and execute a strategy? Aren't you asking yourself, is this a person who has done great work but needs guidance and can I work with this person? And I'll go a step further. What percentage of the 75% of failed VC backed companies had an original idea and/or knew their competition, and had a great strategy?

109 points by akharris 12y ago

> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things. This is cynical and arrogant. Different people manifest creativity in different ways. Not everybody is interested in coming up with "ideas for new or great things", which in the author's world clearly equates to "tech startup." Also worth noting is that lots of people who do have great ideas: 1. Have great ideas that aren't of a commercial nature. 2. Don't have the know-how, relationships or financial ability to take their ideas further on their own. 3. Contribute those ideas to their employers. > This is also true for many venture capitalists. In fact, it's at the root of a very common question that founders get asked: "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" To be fair, this question isn't necessarily sparked by laziness. It's also sparked by ego - the VC wants to show how familiar they are with the market. They say "Look! I know about things and there's someone else who had the same idea you had." The implicit criticism here is that, because someone else had the idea first, your idea is somehow worse. Later, Harris writes: > Even though the question might seem dumb, it's one of my favorites. It's also a great question to get as a founder. I ask it of almost every founder I meet, because it's very rare to find a truly new idea. The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." But that's not enough. The question begs for a deeper answer, one that talks about why, even though other people have tried the same idea, they're still leaving billions of dollars on the table. It's an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality. It's that framework of thinking and level of insight that makes greatness. So other venture capitalists ask the "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" question because they're lazy and want to stroke their egos but Aaron Harris asks it because he wants to provide founders with "an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality"? C'mon. Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me.

zo1 12y ago
>"Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me. " He's on the YCombinator people list page: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ >"Aaron Harris was cofounder of Tutorspree, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2011. Before Tutorspree he worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed product and operations for an analytics group. He has an AB in History and Literature from Harvard."
graycat 12y ago
> I have no idea what the point of this post was. Well, as in my post elsewhere in this thread, the title of this thread is just flatly, literally wrong, as in not true, as in false. But, I will try to explain, maybe, "the point" of the original post: In venture capital, the claim in the title is commonly made: So, maybe, "the point" is just to discuss the claim and related thoughts. But, he continues and makes another mistake: He has, > The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." I see two things wrong here: (1) With the qualification "nearly always", along with his comment about "lazy", we have to conclude that he's been talking to the wrong entrepreneurs. (2) His "this" as an "idea" is wrong: As we have covered on HN before, it appears that in Silicon Valley what is meant by an "idea" is just some vague, short, maybe one sentence statement of what the product/service would look like to a customer on a first glance. So, with this meaning of an idea there is nothing to patent, protect with a trade secret, use as Ph.D. dissertation, publish in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in, say, a STEM field, etc. Or, an idea is like "I want to fly to the moon" where we can ask who the heck first thought of that and then conclude who the heck cares. So, for people doing advanced work in STEM fields and looking for business success with, also, say, a technological barrier to entry, his concept of an idea is nearly trivial. He's got an entrepreneur and wants to talk trivialities? Gads. His mistake is to be looking for something nearly trivial. Instead for ideas he should be looking for something, to borrow, "new, correct, and significant", and, of course, for start-ups how to make money. So, in his work with ideas, he's looking for the wrong stuff. In case I rub some fur the wrong way, I highly value and respect my view of ideas -- e.g., my Ph.D. dissertation was mostly just ideas, and they weren't just one or a few sentences and trivial. More broadly I have another concern for information technology start-ups, venture capital, and our economy more generally: In short, the concern is that we are shooting ourselves in the gut. Or, earlier this week I happened to look at the Web site of Polaris Partners, and there I saw the backgrounds of the partners: Several, maybe all, the partners interested in biotechnology had biotechnology Ph.D. degrees. No partner interested in information had a Ph.D. degree. And that Web site is not the only such. In my career, nearly always I had my technical work, and since I quite mowing grass for a few dollars as a teenager all of my work has been technical, reviewed by someone who had the qualifications to understand it and did understand it. Then I looked at the Web sites of some venture firms and the backgrounds of the partners interested in information technology: I have a tough time finding a Ph.D. or even a BS STEM major. Gotta tell ya, it would be one heck of an amazing BA major in English and history who would or could understand or review any of my technical work. Several professions have professional peer review, and I doubt that any of them, law, medicine, engineering, tenure committees, have BA English and history majors. But, wait, it gets worse: If I accept an equity check I will report to a Board of Directors (BoD) that can fire me at anytime for any reason or no reason, deny me my unvested stock, get me in hot water with my illiquid vested stock, etc. So, first BoD scenario: The company is up and running, good revenue, first earnings, and I, as founder, CEO, come to the BoD meeting with the budget and list of projects. There is a major new project, and I cover how it will go. It's based on some original work, I did, in applied mathematics with some advanced prerequisites. Essentially all of my high confidence in the project is based squarely on the mathematics. So, I cover the mathematics. The project has to do with, say, ad targeting? As I learned as a first year graduate student in seminars with some of the best mathematicians in the world, there is little so painful as listening to and trying to understand some advanced mathematics while missing most of the prerequisites -- were talking an unanesthetized, upper molar root canal procedure along with a barbed wire enema while being flogged with a cat of nine tails and standing on a charcoal fire. What the fun in that? I can see nearly all the English and history majors running, screaming from the board room directly, do not pass GO, do not collect $100, to the little boys room for blowing all tubes at both ends. Some BoD meeting. I see that disaster coming right at me like an 80 MPH freight train 50 yards away. Bummer. BoD meeting over. In information technology venture firms, can we have some basic technical competence, please, pretty please? Else that must have been one heck of an English and history major. Gee, they covered the Gleason bound for heap sort and O(n ln(n)) notation right along with Hamlet? And they explained the importance of P vs NP just before the Council of Trent? And cache concurrency in multi-core processors was, sure, along with Henry James, 'The Golden Bowl' -- from the Prince. For the Internet, they connected that with the principle of The Great Natural Order? Recursion in software connected with the "child is the father of the man"? And in the paper I published solving an old problem in the constraint qualifications of the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, I was not the first with the ideas because Sir Francis Bacon just had to have known all that all along? And that every closed, convex subset has a unique element of minimum norm, that was from Hammurabi, right? Where does our technology get such nonsense? Does this really mean that soon we will be doing abdominal surgery with smoking incense and rusty pocket knives? That's enough -- I'm going to upchuck.

jacobolus 12y ago

The thing that’s annoying about the question is that it’s phrased in an inherently adversarial way, putting the answerer on the defensive, amping up the stress of an already stressful context and encouraging aggressive blustery responses. I’m neither a startup founder nor a VC, but I’ve found that in similar contexts (dates, interviews, public debates, private arguments, etc.) this sometimes serves to score points with some external audience, but is almost never the most productive way to advance a conversation that both parties are trying to learn something from. The goal of a VC isn’t to “win” in a contest against the founder here. The goal is for each side to learn what the other side has to offer and critically evaluate whether a deal makes sense, or whether there are other connections that can be made. I’ve known a small handful of people who ask aggressive questions like this as a deliberate test to see what the other person will do and are then very savvy about parsing responses and seeing through anxiety/bravado/etc. But this is a very difficult skill to master, and such tests should be used carefully and sparingly. Most of the people I know who ask this kind of question are just in it because they enjoy aggressive adversarial conversations, even when it’s not at all in their own interest.

jcr 12y ago
Do you think your opinion on the question as being "aggressive" or "adversarial" is a matter of personal experience? I see the question as both direct and deep. It's a good way to pry open the problem/market space, think about what has been done or is being done by competitors, and consider/query the "new" approach to the "old" problem. If you know your market, it's an easy question to answer. In fact, it's a fun question to answer -- it's not every day that you the luxury of a smart and trained person assisting you with the endless task of prying open and evaluating your problem/market space. If you consider the question to be aggressive, adversarial, and intended to be harmful, then answering it becomes more difficult, particularly if you're unprepared. On the other hand, if you consider the question to be simply direct, deep, and intended to be helpful, then answering it is much easier.
- jacobolus 12y ago
  It obviously depends a lot on tone of voice, context of the relationship between the two people, etc. I just know that I’ve occasionally showed something new to someone, or announced I was working on something, and their immediate response was along the lines of “oh, I saw that years ago when X did the same thing” or “Y tried that and it didn’t work out” or “doesn’t everyone already use Z’s version of that?” with a dismissive or aggressive sort of tone. It’s the same kind of framing of a conversation you get as when an idea is met with “oh, that’s physically/technically impossible” or “that’s way too expensive to possibly work” or “what kind of crazy customer do you think would ever want that?” Trying to understand how a new idea or product relates to existing stuff is obviously a useful topic of discussion, but depending whether it’s phrased/expressed inquisitively or aggressively could make a big difference. Something like the title of the post under discussion – “someone else had your idea first” – is one of the less productive ways to phrase things, IMO. Personally, I love answering these kinds of questions and can easily be sent either into passionate “prove why I’m right” mode or passionate “let’s look at this logically/scientifically” mode. But I also know plenty of folks who I think would be great startup founders who respond very defensively or get shut down when they feel attacked. The problem here is that while the VC might be thinking “The question begs for a deeper answer, [...] an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality.” what is also happening is that someone who doesn’t thrive on aggressive adversarial conversations will be weeded out, even though they might be great at all kinds of other things, and might be able to express their ideas very well in a less adversarial context. I dunno, I’m not an expert on startup psychology. Maybe the only people who make good startup founders love this style of conversation.

soperj 12y ago

Depends on how far you dumb down the idea really. No one would be telling Steve Wozniak that someone else had his idea for a very innovative way of developing a computer in the late 70s, but if you say your idea is "a computer" then yah, someone else had that idea.

graycat 12y ago
Still, necessarily there was a first person (or a tie with several people) for the idea of a computer. So, maybe the claim in the title was true for Wozniak but definitely it is false for someone and, thus, a false statement.

graycat 12y ago

For the title here, I've heard that before. Let's see: Take the set of all people who have had that idea and pick the ones who had the idea, say, since the big bang ~13.7 billion years ago, first. Then for those people, no one else had their idea first. Contradiction. Claim is false. Done. Not complicated. What's more complicated is why such a claim would be made, and a conjecture is that someone wants to denigrate ideas and the people who have them.

coda_ 12y ago

Having read the entire article, I'm a little confused. He says it's one of his favorite questions to both ask and be asked, but when VCs ask it, it is sparked by their ego with the intent of putting them down. But when he asks the question himself, he doesn't claim to do it with the same bad intentions. Seems overly negative towards VCs to acknowledge that they ask a really great question, but do it with the intent of making founders feel like crap.

baddox 12y ago

> I think part of the reason that people ask this question as a way of putting founders down is that they assume that startups are zero sum. That's an assumption born in certain models of markets, but it's completely wrong when looking at startups. Which models of markets? As far as I knew, one of the fundamental points of modeling markets is that they aren't zero-sum.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
Mature, well-developed markets are close to zero-sum. Think Wall-Mart or McDonald's mature: niches where there are old, aggressive, amazingly well-optimized players, generally two or three in number, who occupy the landscape so completely that for one to grow the rest are probably going to have to shrink. It isn't a perfect zero-sum, and even in those markets companies are always looking for new ground to colonize, but it's close enough that to first order it makes sense to analyze things in zero-sum terms. And it's also the antithesis of start-ups in most cases, which are frequently attempting to create new markets where none existed by serving needs that no one knew they had.
- baddox 12y ago
  I don't think your example is at all zero-sum, because the overall size of the economy can and generally does grow, and thus even the most well-entrenched markets like discount department stores or fast food can and do grow. Perhaps it's true that a market with a few well-optimized firms, each of which can't increase their market share without taking it from another firm, but even then, the market size can grow.

RandomCode 12y ago

I can do miracles. I have God's endorsement. Soon, I will be telling hardware companies what to do. My operating system is divine intellect. God may say to kill you.

Zigurd 12y ago

There are a couple missed points in that article. First, those kinds of somewhat aggressive questions are far more likely to be asked by the young MBAs VC firms hire to poke holes in business plans and do other grunt work. This is how they have fun. VC partners seldom need to publicly stroke their egos. Secondly, of course someone else had that idea first. The future is here. Your "idea" amounts to creating a local maximum in future distribution because you can execute on that idea particularly well. So don't get insulted by the person asking, or by the question itself.

deleted 12y ago

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krapp 12y ago

Jokes on them, none of my ideas are any good.

mathattack 12y ago

It is a good question, and just a different way of asking, "Who is your question and how are you different?" and "How much do you know the history of the market you're trying to disrupt?" If someone claims to be disrupting a market that they know nothing about, there are potential warning signs. (This isn't to say that outsiders don't have great ideas, just that it's tougher.)

alain94040 12y ago

I think the author got it wrong. I also ask that same question "isn't X or Y already doing this?" to most startups that pitch me. I'm not trying to make the founder feel bad, or sound smart, or anything like that. I say this because I want to find out what they do different. I'm signaling that I'm already aware of those other companies, and I want to know: (a) if they are already successful, how you'll beat them or (b) if they failed, why you think you won't fail

Alex3917 12y ago
That's actually what the original post was saying, albeit I had to reread it a couple times to figure that out.
chacham15 12y ago
> I also ask that same question "isn't X or Y already doing this?" to most startups that pitch me. I'm not trying to make the founder feel bad, or sound smart, or anything like that. The question itself is adversarial because it assumes that you understand completely what the founder is doing and implies that it isnt any different from X or Y. Thats why people like Paul Graham who want to know the same thing phrase it differently: "how are you different from X or Y".

eldude 12y ago

There are a lot of comments here about the adversarial nature of a such a question, and they're completely correct: Asking this question is an assertion of dominance. They're also not wrong that assertions of dominance tend to backfire and elicit indignation. The key insight though, is that dominant individuals tend to respond to assertions of dominance with their own return assertion of dominance. In other words, they don't like being dominated, and it's this reaction VCs are typically looking for as dominant behavior is likely perceived as a requisite character trait for entrepreneurial success. Programmers though tend to conversely be a prestige driven culture and respond negatively to dominance challenges like this. If you're curious to know more, checkout the very interesting paper "Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct Yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence"[1] [1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2013)%20-%20Two%20Ways%20to%20the%20Top.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2...

atrilla 12y ago
I think I disagree with your comment regarding programmers: Linus is admired for such strong opinions, close to impoliteness, for example. More than a jujutsu technique for dealing with such incisive questions, it is clear that being the second contender to enter the marker saves you the trouble of having to create such market (and it is sometimes reasonable to play it this safe). It's just a different approach to making money. To me, a VC asking this is a sign of weakness on his behalf (due to ignorance?).
- eldude 12y ago
  1. Linus is in a dominant position. Dominance doesn't invoke indignance when it's directed toward non-tribesman or by the alpha (the paper discusses this). What's interesting about this, is you can read whether someone perceives Linus to be an/the alpha based on whether they reject or accept his behavior. Further interesting, if they accept his behavior, they are likely self-associating with whichever tribe they consider Linus to be the alpha of (e.g., programmers, Linux, OSes, etc...). 2. Yes, I agree on a VC's concern of risks on the viability of a market. (See First Mover Advantage myth) I'm focusing more on the way it's communicated rather than the content or the why. 3. Yes, I think you're right that a VC is masking weakness if he asks this, as opposed to, "How are you different from X?" Though, IMO it's still an assertion of dominance, similar to a veil of bravado.

ccvannorman 12y ago

As a startup founder, I jump at this question -- not aggressively or defensively, but enthusiastically, because I know exactly why we're different/better.

j_baker 12y ago

kentf 12y ago

http://kent.io/the-well-of-lost-ideas http://kent.io/the-well-of-lost-ideas

lazylizard 12y ago

its like this. say a friend says he wants to build a system to enable smartphone turn by turn navigation indoors.. my first thought would be..apple/google/mall developers/nokia all have more millions than we have dollars and what have they done about it? why you? what advantage do you have over them? or what has changed in the circumstances or context to make this indoor navigation thing interesting? i guess thats a rather adversarial way to phrase things, but are questions i actually want to know the answers to..

harrylove 12y ago

Quid pro quo: what percentage does originality contribute to success and greatness? Is it more than 20%? How did you arrive at the percentage? Does the percentage change based on the vertical, the market, the greater market cycle, the country, the entrepreneur, et cetera? If so, how? If you, as a VC, can't answer those questions, then asking me how original my idea is has no value. If the answer is that originality contributes less than 20%, why should I focus on it? If the real question is, have I thought about my competition and do I have a strategy for beating them, ask me that instead. Further, if I haven't thought about my strategy yet, aren't you then looking at my potential to learn, devise, and execute a strategy? Aren't you asking yourself, is this a person who has done great work but needs guidance and can I work with this person? And I'll go a step further. What percentage of the 75% of failed VC backed companies had an original idea and/or knew their competition, and had a great strategy?