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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

#351

Post by otoburb »

stale2002 wrote: post #342
otoburb wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they go down this route, SmartCar should ask for at least their post-money valuation based on their last $10M raise back in March 2018[1], not just a "couple of million". [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/smartcar#section-ove...

No judge would agree to that as damages. The smart car documentation is worth some amount of money. But there is no way in hell that it is worth 10 million dollars. In law, there is this concept of "damages". Smartcar did not get lose 10 million dollars because a company stole their docs.

Unless I misunderstood, the parent comment referred to a buy-out/acquisition route, which is where SmartCar should ask for at least a post-money ballpark figure -- no judge involved in an acquisition process.

If SmartCar goes for damages, then that's an entirely different ball of wax.

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

#352

Post by jacquesm »

matz1 wrote: post #348
jacquesm wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lost the civil suit. And the only reason you bring it up is because it is exceptional. The general rule is that the courts tend to get it right but there are obvious (and glaring) exceptions. The quality of your lawyer will help in the gray areas, and may get you a reduced sentence in case of a criminal affair but in general you will lose if you go to court with a case where you were in the wrong. It's not a perfe…

He win the criminal suit. >And the only reason you bring it up is because it is exceptional So you need exceptional lawyer. >The quality of your lawyer will help in the gray areas An exceptional lawyer will make seemingly black and white situation to looks like grey. > in general you will lose if you go to court with a case where you were in the wrong Sure, the point of court is argue that meaning of "wrong"

> He win the criminal suit.

You don't 'win' a criminal suit. The standards of proof in a criminal suit are different than the standards of proof in a civil one, because the punishment in a criminal suit is much heavier than in a civil suit (where the maximum is some monetary penalty, whereas in a criminal suit it is imprisonment or in some countries even death).

I really think your view of the legal system is somewhat theoretical, there is no such case that it can always be won given the right lawyer or argument.

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

#353

Post by jmtame »

Looks like par for the course. This happens all the time and it’s just part of the game you have to play when entering the markets. A judge or jury will have to figure out the rest of it, if you have the resources to go that route. Ultimately you’d be better off viewing this as a distraction. Every hour you spend on this is an hour you don’t spend on your own customers or hiring your team to do what matters: execute. And others will pop up just like this, with more funding and more powerful lawyers.

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

#354

Post by brixon »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #44

That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course. And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. 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. On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more…

This is commonly called the second mover advantage. If they do not have some special sauce that prevents an easy copy of their idea then it was going to happen sooner or later.

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

#355

Post by reredacted »

sahaskatta wrote: post #205
ethbro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If a remote team is writing your API documentation by copying and pasting, then what is the actual implementation team building from?

Hi, I'm the CEO of Smartcar. While I can't go into exact details, I can say from what we know so far: this occurred out of their main headquarters.

So Otonomo took down their API.

Can you confirm that more of their API other than the authorization code was duplicated? Honestly duplicating auth APIs are perfectly fine. If you showed proof of business APIs being duplicated, I'd have more faith in your claim. Right now this looks like a publicity stunt on a baseless argument.

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

#356

Post by reredacted »

whoisjuan wrote: post #198
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.

But we don't know that, do we? They only showed some auth code. The OP does _not_ show that Otonomo has duplicated any business APIs, and Otonomo took their docs down. Unless someone has proof Otonomo copied more than just the examples documented in the OP, this is just pure PR fluff.

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

#357

Post by agotterer »

Just because they copied your idea doesn't mean they've won. Executing on that idea better than your competitors is how you ultimately win. It seems like you have a bit of a head start, so find a way to take advantage of that. Just don't forget that many companies with even deeper pockets have tried to knock off ideas before and have failed. Go execute better than them.

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

#359

Post by mirimir »

inlined wrote: post #237
joeax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty egregious, but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself. The other company still has the write all the backend code, and given their track record of just ripping stuff off, may not have the engineering chops to pull it off. In addition, as Smartcar continuously improves their product and API, the other company can only react to these changes. If I was the O…

> but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself You never know. When someone ripped off Parse we were able to deduce which version of our JS SDK was ripped off by which bugs weren’t fixed. We had a weird moral dilemma: we were upset at the copycat yet concerned that their users had security vulnerabilities unpatched. [Edit: added quote to clarify to what I was responding]

If they didn't catch bugs, maybe they also wouldn't catch booby-traps. Are there examples where developers have done that?

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

#360

Post by tobilg »

blotter_paper wrote: post #291
ChuckMcM wrote: post #44

That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course. And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. 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. On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more…

>Companies have been known to talk about expensive and complicated features or options in order to get people trying to copy their success to waste time and money on something for which there is no actual demand. Anyone know of a specific documented example of this? I'm not really doubting, just interested.

I think their first startup was an eBay clone called alando.de which was later sold to eBay when they entered the German market (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samwer-Brüder#Alando in German)
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