What would be a smart move for Otonomo now? Complicated perhaps... we are at Peak HN now, so there is a feeling to calm the storm immediately, but maybe there is an argument that things will die down and they have not broken the law (depending on the technicalities re gepoch’s comment), so doing nothing is prudent, though mean. My gut feeling is to put it right today though, maybe 1) give $1MM to Smartcar, 2) put a link to Smartcar’s site while the current document structure exists 3) redo the docs and try to make them better then Smartcar’s.
Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
441–450 of 637 posts
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#442That 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…
> German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet
I heard the model was to actually sell the European copy to the original US startup as it got bigger. It was never in their interest to end up operating an actual company. This backfired on them for one of their "investments" (I think an Airbnb clone?) when the US counterpart decided to go head and head against the Rocket's copy in Europe instead of simply acquiring.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#443Man, plagerism is too bad.
That's all I can say.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet
I heard the model was to actually sell the European copy to the original US startup as it got bigger. It was never in their interest to end up operating an actual company. This backfired on them for one of their "investments" (I think an Airbnb clone?) when the US counterpart decided to go head and head against the Rocket's copy in Europe instead of simply acquiring.
I believe this was Wimdu. Seems like they finally ended up shutting down last year.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/wimdu-rocket-internets-air...
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is flattering.
And yet, flattery is not money.
It can be:
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#446This is pretty weird, some of the things, like the fields related to auth, are just standard oauth data... Granted they providing a very similar service. Similar products, using similar technologies... I mean yeah, things are going to look similar.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#447That 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 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…
An API usually embeds significant design decisions that are hard work to come up with. That said, there is some precedent for companies reimplementing competitors' API verbatim in order to get customers to port their applications more easily...
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#448That 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 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…
So they're making a compatible API. I would consider this a good thing.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#449This may be a silver lining - a competitor has shown that the work you have done, exactly the work you have done is worth 55 million in VC funding. There are enough people on here who can point you in the right direction, or arrange introductions. Spend at least one of those millions on PR and lawyers to ensure it's clear who has the moral high ground, and who should be hired if a company has to choose between you -…
Is it worth 55 mil, or is it just networking? I can imagine the "Kickstarter scam" running in the VC scene, the Kickstarter scam being: you show ads for a product on Kickstarter with the line "300 thousand dollars in backers already! Get yours too!", but that money isn't from genuine backers, coming from your friends instead. Then a chump seeing the ad will think "Oh, this new gadget is popular, it must be good, let…
> I can imagine it'd be nice to spend the genuine VC money on company Lamborghinis and penthouses for a few months, declare bankruptcy, rinse and repeat
or simply refocus the startup on used lambos and penthouses :)
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#450Forgive me, but all I really see that’s ripped of are...some API docs? You can tell they copied them but this is likely the work of a single lazy employee rather than indicative of an entire company. Consider that the value of a company is more than API documentation. It’s the customers, the business relationships, and the employees. The actual tech is last in the things that are valuable. If you want to survive in t…
It is curious that while HN as a whole seems to be on the same side regarding the Google vs. Oracle case, they also are quick to jump on this bandwagon, but in the other direction.
Is it lame to blatantly copy someones API docs? Sure. But even looking at the screenshots in their blog post, which I presume is meant to highlight this issue, it's clear that there are changes as well, so it looks more like derivative work than just blind copying (I'm not sure if there's a meaningful legal distinction here, but it feels more ethical).