How to be successful: steal ideas and copy people | Hacker News Reader

How to be successful: steal ideas and copy people

maxkle.in

42 pointsbartman10 comments

Before someone launches another ad hominem attack on Max, here's the gist of this story:

"find a successful business, discover as much as possible about it, re-implement it all, then battle them for supremacy.”

If you like Max's style though, go ahead and read it - it's well-written, lightly entertaining and thought provoking.

I also liked the insight that ideas are, in themselves passive. The premise of the article is that you need an enemy, a foil, to invigorate you and your company.

Team building 101: Find common enemy.

But beware, the team easily turns inward and loses the interest to create value. Simply beating the enemy isn't necessarily enough.

I found this disturbing, morally repulsive, profoundly insightful and utterly compelling. Blog added to reader.

I like this approach. Not because it gives you an easy start but because it forces you to look at a problem or business and think about how it could be done better.

You aren't really stealing ideas and copying people you are improving them. If you didn't the chance of success would be far slimmer. This is healthy capitalism. This process forces the other company to respond by improving and morphing. If they don't they risk becoming obsolete.

Re: "stealing ideas" vs "improving on them".

Doesn't your comclusion here go against the USA's entire full-court-press on maximal "intellectual property"? I mean, we've extended copyrights, we've allowed just about every vague pipe-dream to be patented, and we've actually criminalized reverse engineering in a lot of situations.

I sympathize with your viewpoint, but is that the direction we're heading? Are we heading in the right direction?

Interesting article - but I think people should note that creating 10% better business and trying to compete with the incubants is a very risky and time consuming game. Much riskier and much more time consuming then anyone could anticipate... Of course - it all depends on the market segment you are trying to conquer.

This tactical approach will only work in existing markets with known customers and known solutions. War is only the tool to achieve the goal, should not be the goal itself.

But when you work on an idea you came up with yourself, your life is not like that. There is no enemy...

Wrong. The enemy is "everyone else". "They're not using my idea, so they're doing it wrong and I'll kick their asses." I imagine that anyone who ever invented something new must have thought this at some point.

This idea will be incredibly useful to me. Not that you can run a successful business by copying and iterating on what others have done, but that the human psyche needs an enemy for motivation.

It's everywhere: people going crazy watching sports, gang wars, people scheming to get back at those more 'popular' then they are. It's probably a huge part of why WoW is so successful. Using this to your advantage is bound to boost motivation.

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