Someone Stole My Startup Idea: They Raised Money with My Slides? (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Someone Stole My Startup Idea: They Raised Money with My Slides? (2009)

steveblank.com

87 pointsbithavoc19 comments

Someone taking your idea is annoying. There's nothing you can do.

Someone taking your deck is copyright infringement. You could sue but you'd wouldn't win much if you won at all.

Someone using your deck to successfully raise under the pretence that it is their own work is fraud. If you feel strongly about it you really should contact the police.

At least in the UK that'd get you one of these responses from the police...

"You haven't lost anything, there's nothing to investigate."

"That's a civil matter. You need to get a solicitor."

"Go away or we'll charge you with wasting police time."

They won't even investigate if you've lost something now. I had my shed recently broken into, and multiple tools stolen.

Their response was "This isn't an emergency. We don't have the resources to follow this up. I hope you have home insurance".

My local police force won't even answer burglary or theft calls any more. They have an automated service which gives you a crime reference number over the phone!

"Press 1 for a burglary crime number... press 2 for a theft from the person, for example a mobile phone... press 3 for the loss of an item..."

Option nine is "Minor assault against the person".

The non-emergency number (101) just give you the phone number for the automated service...

Did I mention it's a premium-rate number?

And yet Hammond thought it was quite appropriate to recently raise the 40% tax cut-off to £50k [1] giving an average increase of £390 a year to that bracket, a 1% cut in corporate tax [2], and all the while overall funding for the police has fallen by about 20% when accounting for interest in the past 8 years [3].

I earn to benefit from these tax cuts, and I still think that decision was beyond ludicrous - as does everyone else I know who is set to gain from it. It truly baffles me that we're approaching a period of increasing poverty, where crime will inevitably rise, and the police are getting gutted like this.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/30/budget-incom...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowan...

[3] https://fullfact.org/crime/police-funding-england-and-wales/

> Their response was "This isn't an emergency.

I hope you weren't calling 999 - 101 would have been the appropriate number.

I did call through 101. I was only roughly summarising what they said. I asked if they would come around to inspect the damage and I think the exact reply was something along the lines of "Unfortunately we can only do police call outs for emergencies now. The best we can do is file a report over the phone."

In the third case it's not you who's been defrauded. You're still just the victim of copyright infringement. You'd be bringing it to the attention of the police because the investor had been defrauded, at which point the police might actually pay attention depending on who the investor is..

Did you read the article till the end or look up the background of the person who wrote it? The message is not about the slides.

Two great insight:

> No business plan survives first contact with customers

> The real value is finding the product/market fit. That’s not found in a set of slides.

Business ideas are useless. They're inert. It's like pointing at a random spot on a map and declaring "let's dig there for gold".

OK, let's.

A bias towards action is all that counts. And there's no stealing that. It's either innate or it's cultivated.

--------------------

Addendum: lifted (stolen?!) from one of the best quotes I've read on business ideas:

This isn’t rocket science and I’d never publicly discuss it if I were genuinely concerned that humanity was a species of action. It isn’t. I could guarantee most anyone a pot of gold ten miles from their house, hand them a map, order them a pizza and turn ‘Lost’ (or whatever the show is today) on TV for them. Whatdaya think, are they going to hike ten miles or eat pizza?

Yup. Instant gratification, bird in the hand, risk aversion, you name it. People won’t do SH%T.

So that’s where the opportunity is. Ignore the status quo, realize where the opportunity for arbitrage lies, and take action. It’s everywhere.

If indeed the pot of gold is guaranteed, by which I don't mean a verbal guarantee, I think most people will go to get that gold. But if it is some sort of mad, mad, mad, mad world scenario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Mad,_Mad,_Mad,_Mad_Wo... the smart person might be the one who took the free pizza.

That’s so true. Everyone has an idea, do you have the grit?

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981167

I have the feeling that one should be able to copy and use my material at will. At the end of the day, will he/she be able to deliver on those promisses? He/She has already copy-paste things around, fact is he/she is a total looser and will be discovered in time. He/She is the impostor.

Or alternatively, it's evidence of the kind of ethics that helps you succeed in business, and the VCs made the most profitable decision. Consider, e.g. Steve Jobs scamming Steve Wozniak out of the bonus for Wozniak's Breakout circuit board design.

I strongly believe there are better ways to achieve success that do not come at such a complete loss of ethical/moral standards.

I've found the less intelligent someone is, the more likely they are to act this way. Perhaps an evolutionary defense mechanism. Lacking the ability to really process things at a 2nd/3rd Order level of thought perhaps frees them of the guilt that would result from doing such a thing?

Mark Zuckerberg is a fabulously wealthy and by all accounts intelligent individual, but many actions like using failed login attempts to access people's email accounts [1] certainly suggest "a complete loss of ethical/moral standards". While mediocre success may be possible, history is riddled with examples of success coming by compromising ethics and morals.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...

Give it time. When I meant success, I meant lasting success, not a hit and run. Given what his company is responsible for, I don't see them lasting forever.

Without your explicit permission, that's committing an illegal act called "copyright infringement" in case that wasn't clear.

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