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Comment by _Marak_ | Hacker News Reader

Really not surprised to see rauchg [name redacted] steal more ideas for his startup from colleagues.

The entire premise of Zeit is something that I explained to him five years ago in a taxi ride. I was in active communication with Guillermo about developing the idea up until two years ago when he went silent for a month or two and I then I read the announcement for Zeit on Hacker News.

I'm sure he'll sell Zeit to the first high-bidder and completely throw the development team under the bus ( like he did to TJ at his last startup ).

If you don't believe me, you can just look at the Github activity for the Zeit organization. [name redacted] has copy and pastied the same Now project into new projects several times ( which deletes the commit logs of several contributors giving him sole Git credit for the projects ).

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I'm not going to get involved in a flame war, but I'll just say 99% of the time ideas are worthless. Execution is what matters.

Not when you have to actually make money haha. Can't really execute without money, that's the entire point of startups, starve out the little guy with your free offerings until you can sell the team and hype.

Well, as somebody who tried building a bootstrapped and self funded Node.js PaaS competing against Heroku, Dotcloud, and Marak back in 2010[1][2] (the good ole'days) I am certainly sympathetic to the struggle competing against well funded companies. Ultimately though, I prefer lifestyle businesses these days. Funded companies tend to slow down, carry ridiculous baggage, politics, and usually result in less money in the founders pockets. Being self-funded and thus moving fast and agile is an advantage.

[1] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2011/08/10/node...

[2] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2011/12/01/first-...

Totally agree, but when someone is going to copy you and make it free, not a lot I can do in that case, at least not to my knowledge.

Send me an e-mail (in HN profile), I may have some ideas.

Im sympathetic to your money-disadvantaged position in this pursuit, but its just what it is. You got out-monied in this and have to continue looking for a feature that wont be copied down easily. It's not a defensible position if a competitor can copy it immediately.

Much what i was going to say, until he mentioned the continuous conversation over the ensuing 3 years. That's still no slam dunk. Semi-regular emails fleshing out an idea are still far from actual "execution", but we don't have more info and the nature of the collaboration, so i withhold judgment.

I'll say this as a more general comment on this sort of thing: I work more within the realm of academia, and of course in that realm there is a very strong requirement and culture of citing all sources, influences etc. In that context, this issue might not appear, or not as much. Giving credit as a tertiary contributor is both easy and "free". That's harder in the startup world because boundaries if activties are more blurred, and giving any sort of formal recognition of influence or minor collaboration can cost a lot in terms of equity etc. At least, that's my impression, from the academia end of things.

You mean you explained to him your idea of copying Heroku?

Visions of Apple crying foul about Microsoft sealing from Xerox.

We aren't talking about what Heroku does here. I understand the confusion since the space is similar, but it's like comparing oranges to orange juice.

I won't be going into details here on HN because it's a somewhat pointless waste of time. There are valid reasons why TJ and I are upset with rauchg. I've said my piece.

People who whine about some injustice, but when asked to explain, say "I won't waste my time", never come across as convincing to me.

Just an opinion as someone who doesn't care yet about who stole whose lollipop.

Isn't it a bit of a debunked trope that startup ideas have value?

Trade secrets have value.

There is a big difference between emulating or being inspired by another's idea versus actively collaborating with them and then simply stop working with them once you feel you don't need them anymore.

Without people like TJ and myself, Zeit wouldn't exist. Buyer beware to whoever decides to acquire Zeit.

Rauch talks as if he invented the one-command deploy, Heroku did this shit yearsssss ago, not to mention dozens of other platforms and tools. All they're doing is making a really crappy version of Heroku with 1/20 the features, poor performance characteristics, and putting a free price tag on it to keep people like me from competing.

It's really not an innovative idea. Trade secrets? We can all see a bunch of the code, and while I found it to be edifying in some respects, it's nothing special. Features provided to users cannot be trade secret unless you're somehow planning to hide them from your users.

While I don't want to sound condescending or like a promoter of fad philosophies, I've found that meditation and reading Stoic philosophy and really helps to build a thicker skin.

You sound as if resentment / envy is deeply poisoning you, and yet in the scope of business schemes it is really nothing.

Also, based upon your attitude here, it's not surprising that collaboration ended. Most people are insecure and envious, but you can't found companies with people like that as they will kill the company.

This feature does make it seem like they're dangling that they have a price tag to the big boys.

> I'm sure he'll sell Zeit to the first high-bidder and completely throw the development team under the bus ( like he did to TJ at his last startup ).

Care to share more?

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