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Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

smartcar.com

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Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#191

Post by jstarfish »

aw3c2 wrote: post #174
stcredzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. The Chinese also do this. (As in, the government seems to encourage it outright.) The culture and language barrier do make for an effective moat. It usually takes significant effort and even some cultural change for a company to get its legs for international operation.

> The Chinese You mean "Chinese companies". "The chinese" is just racist.

China is a nation, not a race.

Race itself is a social construct.

Nice try though!

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#192

Post by carbocation »

orasis wrote: post #176
Gpetrium wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reality is that if an idea is really good, the people who came up with it know it better than anyone and that gives them a tremendous advantage in terms of knowing what is important and what isn't. I have to disagree with you emphasizing this point. If someone/entity manages to get your idea or code, they may be able to sell the solution at a fraction of the cost since their R&D was lower than yours. When the en…

At $55M in funding they won’t be undercutting anything - quite the opposite, they’ll need to turn a healthy profit or die.

At $55M in funding, they can undercut for years, since they won't need to turn a healthy profit for quite some time.

For example, Uber and Lyft. (Point being: survival is not just about the long run, but also the short run.)

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#193

Post by perfunctory »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #120
perfunctory wrote: post #81

"is illegally cloning our product" isn't it for the court to establish?

No. If I photocopy the Harry Potter books, change the name on the covers, and sell them as my own, that is obviously illegal. This is the same thing, and nobody needs to wait for the courts to say that it is illegal.

I am sorry. Maybe your Harry Potter example is "obvious", but the case in the blog post is not obvious to me at all. I don't see any verbatim copied documentation. "overall structure"? Hey, the overall structure of almost any api doc is pretty much the same. All I see is similar API, which is not copyrightable, and identical randomly generated identifiers - and it's not obvious to me that it constitutes copyright infringement.

Let's not do witch-hunting.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#194

Post by samatman »

aw3c2 wrote: post #174
stcredzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. The Chinese also do this. (As in, the government seems to encourage it outright.) The culture and language barrier do make for an effective moat. It usually takes significant effort and even some cultural change for a company to get its legs for international operation.

> The Chinese You mean "Chinese companies". "The chinese" is just racist.

In addition to being unwelcome in its own right, this sort of comment is against Hacker News guidelines.

Please don’t do this here.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#195

Post by sp00ls »

LeonM wrote: post #104
mrfusion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible?

You will need additional hardware in the car to achieve this. Smartcar just does a really thorough job of hiding this fact. AFAIK the is not a single car manufacturer (not even Tesla) that has any API available. Most cars don't have internet connectivity anyway. Disclosure: I do NOT work for Smartcar, but have build multiple backends for P2P carsharing and bike rental platforms.

A lot of new cars do have internet built in whether that is exposed for your use or not.

My 2014 Chevy gave me 2 years of their mobile app which could unlock/lock the car via cellular for free. I know the car still has a data connection available because if I play songs via bluetooth it pulls in album art that doesn't exist on my phone via Gracenote. I can also hit the OnStar button and talk to someone via the car and I don't pay for that.

That Chevy lock/unlock API may not be a public API but there is nothing stopping someone from reversing it. Or just signing up to use it: https://developer.gm.com/vehicle-apis

Most modern cars offer the same features.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#196

Post by countryqt30 »

aw3c2 wrote: post #174
stcredzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. The Chinese also do this. (As in, the government seems to encourage it outright.) The culture and language barrier do make for an effective moat. It usually takes significant effort and even some cultural change for a company to get its legs for international operation.

> The Chinese You mean "Chinese companies". "The chinese" is just racist.

Go home to China and cry.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#197

Post by jacquesm »

tomnipotent wrote: post #183
jacquesm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest participation by Bessemer was a series 'B' as far as I can tell: https://otonomo.io/pr/otonomo-announces-25-million-strategic... And even then, series 'A' requires DD as much (and sometimes more so) as later rounds.

VCs are not banks and are not staffed like banks, and they don't do DD like banks. I've been in the weeds in six VC rounds and through an IPO, you'll be incredibly disappointed what passes for DD for VCs.

> you'll be incredibly disappointed what passes for DD for VCs.

There are lots of VCs, some are better at this than others, some really suck. On the whole though they tend to do their homework at least on the commercial front and a competitor with a feature-for-feature identical offering would have most likely been spotted even at the 'not so good ones', irrespective of whether or not the API docs were made public.

The interesting questions to me are:

- what was the exact timeline?

- was an (ex) employee of the company involved in the copying?

- is Otonomo itself aware of the fact that they have this sitting on their website?

- How far down does it go? Is it just the API documentation, or also the underlying code?

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#198

Post by whoisjuan »

keithwhor wrote: post #114

Smartcar has raised $12M in financing from A16Z and NEA. The difference between $12M and $55M is a single financing stage. What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. This is great PR for Smartcar all things considered, and I actually think has a fantastic silver lining:…

> What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly.

They didn't steal the docs (not only the docs). They stole the whole public facing architecture as evidenced by the fact that they are using in some instances the exact same API resources names and method names.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#199

Post by jacquesm »

gnicholas wrote: post #190
jacquesm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot under 'SaaS' that you could use to further illegal schemes that do not fall under 'chrome extensions'. Off the top of my head: anything payment related and two sided market places (money laundering, false binning), anything that allows large volumes of data to be moved around (copyright violation, child pornography, exfiltration of data from corporate networks), proxy services and spider services (DOS…

> anything that allows large volumes of data to be moved around (copyright violation, child pornography, exfiltration of data from corporate networks) So could Mozilla be on the hook if people used Firefox Send to do any of these things?

That thought definitely crossed my mind when it was first announced. I sure hope they thought of that before releasing.

Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

#200

Post by jjeaff »

leesalminen wrote: post #135
jacquesm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do technical due diligence, because at the VCs this specialty is usually not present.

I’ve been through a technical due diligence for an acquisition and the process was severely lacking. In total it took ~8 hours (compared to ~80 for financial diligence). It felt like a once-over smoke test to eek out any major red flags. I almost wish you had done my technical diligence, Jacques. I spent a week preparing for it and was very proud of what I’d built.

Ya, we got very close to closing with a VC in SV. Their technical due diligence consisted of one of their contacts from Google calling and asking me questions about our tech stack. It appeared that the Google dev derailed the deal because we were building our product in PHP. That's how they decided we must not know what we are talking about.
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