Comment by Oculus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Oculus | Hacker News Reader

I think their are valid times when stealth can be important. The most prominent example I know of would be Siri. In the words of Adam Cheyer: I'm convinced that staying in stealth mode was critical to our success.

He goes on to explain why: We were based on some fairly heavy technologies (natural language understanding, conversational dialog, context, local search, plan-based service delegation, PCI-compliant data stores, machine learning), and it took us two years to go from our initial prototype to something ready to deploy and scale. A few weeks after we launched, Steve Jobs called the office and the rest is history. As a startup, we were potentially competing with large companies with lots of resources (e.g. Google, Microsoft), and we needed a good running head start before anyone knew precisely what we were trying to accomplish.

For a more user-facing, social website where getting the right features is important, don't be stealthy, just get it up and iterate (c.f. http://change.org). But if you have a technology that takes some time to get right, being stealthy enables you to have buzz when you emerge and the head-start you need to compete with anyone.

Here's the link: http://www.quora.com/Stealth-Startups/Is-there-a-single-exam...

Would Siri not have worked if the company hadn't been in stealth?

Google and Microsoft had already been working on speech technologies at this point. In fact, Google was already integrating voice into Android in 2008, well before Siri had a personal assistant. Microsoft has to date failed to capitalize on their significant investments in speech recognition in any meaningful way.

Siri seems more successful in speech technology than Microsoft, despite Microsoft's heavy investment and more than a decade of trying to make it work for them. If anything, this seems like proof that execution is what counts.

What about the idea, then? Would Google have cared that Siri was launching a personal assistant if they knew in 2009? I doubt it: they already saw natural speech as the future. Brin and Page sometimes talk about talking to computers naturally being on of their visions almost from founding. Computer personal assistants with computer voices appeared in sci-fi movies as far back as the 80s, and perhaps even farther back. This was not a new idea.

It's Siri's product - the execution - that made waves in the industry. Large organizations tend not to take notice of startups with ideas. There are simply too many people with great ideas for large companies to worry about.

Stealth startups may, in rare cases, be the right decision. I simply doubt the extent to which Siri's success was highly dependent on it's pre-launch stealthiness.

The uncanny valley.

What made waves in the industry was the level of polish that Siri had when it was first shown to the masses.

Had people seen all the lame stages of the product the baseline attitude would be "meh", don't care.

Which is exactly the attitude most of its users have today. However, when it was unvelied the sheer unexpected novelty certainly drove some sales.

I thought that Siri uses Nuance technology?

As for your overall argument, I agree that when the key is the integration of existing components, then giving away the game too early means that there will be copycats in on the idea before you get critical mass for effective traction.

This is a valid point, but I think it misses the reasoning slightly.

Much of markets are perceptions, and as everyone knows if you are a 'hot' startup there has been a tradition of the entrenched folks seeding fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the market to slow down your growth. If you are too open with what you are doing you give those who would have you not be successful time to construct a story about why you are a risk or shouldn't be trusted. Further, you get 'pre-announcements' which can make you feel like a 'me too' company rather than 'we're the first to be doing this.'

A recent example was that Apple Maps was launching with some new 3D features, word got out that this was part of the announcement and Google apparently rushed their map announcement ahead of Apple's to capture that aura of 'first mover.' (Clearly Google was already working on similar features but they moved their announcement to change the message that people heard in the media)

So if you are a startup working on "X" and BigCo could do X if they were investing time and money into it, and your 'buzz' was high and a lot of people were starting to like what they saw as you got closer to launch. It is very possible for BigCo to hold a press conference on the "future of X" with their vision of how it will work, and when you launch all the questions are "well how does that compare to BigCo's vision of X?" and the answer "Well they aren't even working on it while we are here delivering it so I can't really say" doesn't come across as 'leadership' so much as 'sour grapes.'

The OP focusses on the technology aspects of Stealth, which is to say that if you can't say what you are working on because the barriers to entry are so low as to make anyone a potential competitor, that is not a business. But the marketing message risk, regardless of technology, is very high. So stealth is definitely warranted if you are at risk of being marginalized quickly by the players you are choosing to disrupt.

There is a difference between "Oh I can't talk about it we're in stealth mode" and not running an ad campaign notifying the world of what you plan to do. As a start up Google and MS literally pay no attention to what you are doing. It is only after Apple picked them up that the big G even bothered attempting to put together voice search on android and did it relatively quickly.

what benefits did they derive from stealth? None as far as I can tell. Google didn't care about trying to re implement their idea until Apple showed interest and they needed a counter to Apple. As a general rule of thumb no established company is going to steal your startup idea until after you have launched and proved successful, pre-launch they have better things to do.

What did they lose by not talking about it? Who knows people around here like to talk about the serendipity of bumping in to the right person while at lunch.

This difference becomes increasingly ambiguous when many of your friends and acquaintances are VCs, entrepreneurs, or employed at tech companies.

The problem is that painting the world black and white generates much more traffic. I would bet a lot of money that "Stealth Startups Are Stupid Most of the Time" wouldn't have worked nearly as well for the author unfortunately.

interesting. thanks Oculus.

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