Someone else had your idea first
aaronkharris.com
aaronkharris.com
I’m neither a startup founder nor a VC, but I’ve found that in similar contexts (dates, interviews, public debates, private arguments, etc.) this sometimes serves to score points with some external audience, but is almost never the most productive way to advance a conversation that both parties are trying to learn something from.
The goal of a VC isn’t to “win” in a contest against the founder here. The goal is for each side to learn what the other side has to offer and critically evaluate whether a deal makes sense, or whether there are other connections that can be made.
I’ve known a small handful of people who ask aggressive questions like this as a deliberate test to see what the other person will do and are then very savvy about parsing responses and seeing through anxiety/bravado/etc. But this is a very difficult skill to master, and such tests should be used carefully and sparingly.
Most of the people I know who ask this kind of question are just in it because they enjoy aggressive adversarial conversations, even when it’s not at all in their own interest.
I see the question as both direct and deep. It's a good way to pry open the problem/market space, think about what has been done or is being done by competitors, and consider/query the "new" approach to the "old" problem. If you know your market, it's an easy question to answer. In fact, it's a fun question to answer -- it's not every day that you the luxury of a smart and trained person assisting you with the endless task of prying open and evaluating your problem/market space.
If you consider the question to be aggressive, adversarial, and intended to be harmful, then answering it becomes more difficult, particularly if you're unprepared. On the other hand, if you consider the question to be simply direct, deep, and intended to be helpful, then answering it is much easier.
It’s the same kind of framing of a conversation you get as when an idea is met with “oh, that’s physically/technically impossible” or “that’s way too expensive to possibly work” or “what kind of crazy customer do you think would ever want that?”
Trying to understand how a new idea or product relates to existing stuff is obviously a useful topic of discussion, but depending whether it’s phrased/expressed inquisitively or aggressively could make a big difference. Something like the title of the post under discussion – “someone else had your idea first” – is one of the less productive ways to phrase things, IMO.
Personally, I love answering these kinds of questions and can easily be sent either into passionate “prove why I’m right” mode or passionate “let’s look at this logically/scientifically” mode. But I also know plenty of folks who I think would be great startup founders who respond very defensively or get shut down when they feel attacked.
The problem here is that while the VC might be thinking “The question begs for a deeper answer, [...] an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality.” what is also happening is that someone who doesn’t thrive on aggressive adversarial conversations will be weeded out, even though they might be great at all kinds of other things, and might be able to express their ideas very well in a less adversarial context. I dunno, I’m not an expert on startup psychology. Maybe the only people who make good startup founders love this style of conversation.
I've avoided a lot of bad investments based on entrepreneurs who answer variants of this question with something like, "Well, they suck and we don't." This answer violates the Law of Common Humanity ("We are pretty much like Them"), which rarely bodes well for the product or the company.
He says it's one of his favorite questions to both ask and be asked, but when VCs ask it, it is sparked by their ego with the intent of putting them down. But when he asks the question himself, he doesn't claim to do it with the same bad intentions.
Seems overly negative towards VCs to acknowledge that they ask a really great question, but do it with the intent of making founders feel like crap.
If you, as a VC, can't answer those questions, then asking me how original my idea is has no value. If the answer is that originality contributes less than 20%, why should I focus on it?
If the real question is, have I thought about my competition and do I have a strategy for beating them, ask me that instead. Further, if I haven't thought about my strategy yet, aren't you then looking at my potential to learn, devise, and execute a strategy? Aren't you asking yourself, is this a person who has done great work but needs guidance and can I work with this person?
And I'll go a step further. What percentage of the 75% of failed VC backed companies had an original idea and/or knew their competition, and had a great strategy?
See "Theory X": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
> I think part of the reason that people ask this question as a way of putting founders down is that they assume that startups are zero sum.
This sentiment has just gotten so trite. The idea that economics is not a zero-sum game is one of the first principles of capitalism.
The key insight though, is that dominant individuals tend to respond to assertions of dominance with their own return assertion of dominance. In other words, they don't like being dominated, and it's this reaction VCs are typically looking for as dominant behavior is likely perceived as a requisite character trait for entrepreneurial success. Programmers though tend to conversely be a prestige driven culture and respond negatively to dominance challenges like this.
If you're curious to know more, checkout the very interesting paper "Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct Yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence"[1]
[1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2...
More than a jujutsu technique for dealing with such incisive questions, it is clear that being the second contender to enter the marker saves you the trouble of having to create such market (and it is sometimes reasonable to play it this safe). It's just a different approach to making money. To me, a VC asking this is a sign of weakness on his behalf (due to ignorance?).
2. Yes, I agree on a VC's concern of risks on the viability of a market. (See First Mover Advantage myth) I'm focusing more on the way it's communicated rather than the content or the why.
3. Yes, I think you're right that a VC is masking weakness if he asks this, as opposed to, "How are you different from X?" Though, IMO it's still an assertion of dominance, similar to a veil of bravado.
(a) if they are already successful, how you'll beat them
or
(b) if they failed, why you think you won't fail
The question itself is adversarial because it assumes that you understand completely what the founder is doing and implies that it isnt any different from X or Y. Thats why people like Paul Graham who want to know the same thing phrase it differently: "how are you different from X or Y".
This is cynical and arrogant. Different people manifest creativity in different ways. Not everybody is interested in coming up with "ideas for new or great things", which in the author's world clearly equates to "tech startup." Also worth noting is that lots of people who do have great ideas:
1. Have great ideas that aren't of a commercial nature.
2. Don't have the know-how, relationships or financial ability to take their ideas further on their own.
3. Contribute those ideas to their employers.
> This is also true for many venture capitalists. In fact, it's at the root of a very common question that founders get asked: "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" To be fair, this question isn't necessarily sparked by laziness. It's also sparked by ego - the VC wants to show how familiar they are with the market. They say "Look! I know about things and there's someone else who had the same idea you had." The implicit criticism here is that, because someone else had the idea first, your idea is somehow worse.
Later, Harris writes:
> Even though the question might seem dumb, it's one of my favorites. It's also a great question to get as a founder. I ask it of almost every founder I meet, because it's very rare to find a truly new idea. The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." But that's not enough. The question begs for a deeper answer, one that talks about why, even though other people have tried the same idea, they're still leaving billions of dollars on the table. It's an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality. It's that framework of thinking and level of insight that makes greatness.
So other venture capitalists ask the "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" question because they're lazy and want to stroke their egos but Aaron Harris asks it because he wants to provide founders with "an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality"? C'mon.
Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me.
He's on the YCombinator people list page:
https://www.ycombinator.com/people/
>"Aaron Harris was cofounder of Tutorspree, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2011. Before Tutorspree he worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed product and operations for an analytics group. He has an AB in History and Literature from Harvard."
Well, as in my post elsewhere in this thread, the title of this thread is just flatly, literally wrong, as in not true, as in false. But, I will try to explain, maybe, "the point" of the original post:
In venture capital, the claim in the title is commonly made: So, maybe, "the point" is just to discuss the claim and related thoughts.
But, he continues and makes another mistake: He has,
> The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before."
I see two things wrong here:
(1) With the qualification "nearly always", along with his comment about "lazy", we have to conclude that he's been talking to the wrong entrepreneurs.
(2) His "this" as an "idea" is wrong: As we have covered on HN before, it appears that in Silicon Valley what is meant by an "idea" is just some vague, short, maybe one sentence statement of what the product/service would look like to a customer on a first glance. So, with this meaning of an idea there is nothing to patent, protect with a trade secret, use as Ph.D. dissertation, publish in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in, say, a STEM field, etc. Or, an idea is like "I want to fly to the moon" where we can ask who the heck first thought of that and then conclude who the heck cares.
So, for people doing advanced work in STEM fields and looking for business success with, also, say, a technological barrier to entry, his concept of an idea is nearly trivial. He's got an entrepreneur and wants to talk trivialities? Gads.
His mistake is to be looking for something nearly trivial. Instead for ideas he should be looking for something, to borrow, "new, correct, and significant", and, of course, for start-ups how to make money.
So, in his work with ideas, he's looking for the wrong stuff. In case I rub some fur the wrong way, I highly value and respect my view of ideas -- e.g., my Ph.D. dissertation was mostly just ideas, and they weren't just one or a few sentences and trivial.
More broadly I have another concern for information technology start-ups, venture capital, and our economy more generally: In short, the concern is that we are shooting ourselves in the gut. Or, earlier this week I happened to look at the Web site of Polaris Partners, and there I saw the backgrounds of the partners: Several, maybe all, the partners interested in biotechnology had biotechnology Ph.D. degrees. No partner interested in information had a Ph.D. degree. And that Web site is not the only such.
In my career, nearly always I had my technical work, and since I quite mowing grass for a few dollars as a teenager all of my work has been technical, reviewed by someone who had the qualifications to understand it and did understand it.
Then I looked at the Web sites of some venture firms and the backgrounds of the partners interested in information technology: I have a tough time finding a Ph.D. or even a BS STEM major. Gotta tell ya, it would be one heck of an amazing BA major in English and history who would or could understand or review any of my technical work.
Several professions have professional peer review, and I doubt that any of them, law, medicine, engineering, tenure committees, have BA English and history majors.
But, wait, it gets worse: If I accept an equity check I will report to a Board of Directors (BoD) that can fire me at anytime for any reason or no reason, deny me my unvested stock, get me in hot water with my illiquid vested stock, etc.
So, first BoD scenario: The company is up and running, good revenue, first earnings, and I, as founder, CEO, come to the BoD meeting with the budget and list of projects. There is a major new project, and I cover how it will go. It's based on some original work, I did, in applied mathematics with some advanced prerequisites. Essentially all of my high confidence in the project is based squarely on the mathematics. So, I cover the mathematics. The project has to do with, say, ad targeting?
As I learned as a first year graduate student in seminars with some of the best mathematicians in the world, there is little so painful as listening to and trying to understand some advanced mathematics while missing most of the prerequisites -- were talking an unanesthetized, upper molar root canal procedure along with a barbed wire enema while being flogged with a cat of nine tails and standing on a charcoal fire. What the fun in that? I can see nearly all the English and history majors running, screaming from the board room directly, do not pass GO, do not collect $100, to the little boys room for blowing all tubes at both ends. Some BoD meeting. I see that disaster coming right at me like an 80 MPH freight train 50 yards away. Bummer. BoD meeting over.
In information technology venture firms, can we have some basic technical competence, please, pretty please?
Else that must have been one heck of an English and history major. Gee, they covered the Gleason bound for heap sort and O(n ln(n)) notation right along with Hamlet? And they explained the importance of P vs NP just before the Council of Trent? And cache concurrency in multi-core processors was, sure, along with Henry James, 'The Golden Bowl' -- from the Prince. For the Internet, they connected that with the principle of The Great Natural Order? Recursion in software connected with the "child is the father of the man"?
And in the paper I published solving an old problem in the constraint qualifications of the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, I was not the first with the ideas because Sir Francis Bacon just had to have known all that all along? And that every closed, convex subset has a unique element of minimum norm, that was from Hammurabi, right?
Where does our technology get such nonsense? Does this really mean that soon we will be doing abdominal surgery with smoking incense and rusty pocket knives?
That's enough -- I'm going to upchuck.
In science and in startups, that question is a short-cut for "did you truly check related work, and as anything important typically has some and my job requires me to keep up-to-date on that, distill that for me: what's our common ground and what's your special sauce?"
I had that exact conversation just a few hours ago. It wasn't offensive; it let us more quickly get to the fun stuff.
The title was stated as a claim, not a question, and an English major should be able to be clear on the difference.
While there really are some ideas that really are new, correct, and significant, your restatement of the title, with your considerable revision, is much better, appropriate, and productive.
I omitted some of what the heck I want in a start-up: With a biomedical analogy, I want a safe, effective, cheap, side effect free, one pill taken once cure for any cancer, with, of course, necessarily, some, let's call them, ideas that are most definitely "new, correct, and significant". Then product-market fit and both virality and traction growing quickly and business success will be low risk and high ROI. Sadly we'd literally have to hire security at the lab door.
I also omitted: For a simpler explanation, and one more appropriate for information technology, I want to start with a problem to be solved -- in Silicon Valley speak, maybe that's their version of an idea. I want a problem something like curing cancer -- a biggie where there is no doubt, no question, 100% certainty, that the first good or a much better solution will definitely be a must-have for enough people and earnings per person to zoom past $1 billion market capitalization like a US ABM rocket passes 100,000 feet up. No more question about product-market fit than for that cancer pill.
Then the challenge is how the heck to get that solution? But, definitely, no doubt, get the solution and collect the big bucks. No doubt. But, likely the problem's tough to do as in no one has even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue how to solve it. They can think and think and think, hit the library, etc. and come up empty, sadder but wiser, have found 10,000 things that won't work.
And I want low risk. Right, big, tough problem no one knows how to solve, high payoff, low risk.
And when I get the solution, I want to know with rock solid certainty that I really do have the solution.
Again, given the problem, the only thing left to get the big bucks is the solution as described. Maybe we can't get the solution (the solution to the cancer pill is still waiting) in which case maybe pick another problem. But if we do get the solution, then we do get the big bucks -- no doubt.
Basically have turned the whole project into just get the solution and know that we really have it.
Impossible? Not at all.
Again, with this approach, as in the cancer pill, all we need is the solution and know it's good.
How to get the solution? Sure, now, be technical. Now we need a leading example: Ike had a problem; he wanted to know what the Russkies were up to. He tried the U-2, and it got shot down. So, now what? Ah, a problem! Right, it's not a commercial problem, but now we're into just the solution part where we want to be technical. So, give a call, right, who else, to Kelly Johnson at Lockheed. He shows up with an armload of papers.
So, there is titanium and a new engine from the Florida unit of Pratt and Whitney, an engine that is an ordinary turbojet until about Mach 2.0 at which time it is just a ramjet good for, say, Mach 3+ (turbojet engines tend to get too hot even trying to go that fast, e.g., the MIG 25).
Then, also have 80,000 feet, and a little math will show that tough to shoot it down. Fly for 2000+ miles without refueling, and now we've got something Ike will want.
How to do that? Will it work? Okay, just check Kelly's engineering. Checked! Project approved. Now: Right, risk over, the rest is routine, low risk, high payoff, and we get the SR-71.
For at least the last 70 years we in the US have had many projects that have closely followed just this pattern: Given a big problem, look for a technical solution, find a candidate, check it. Pass the check and, e.g., get the F-117 (Saddam, sorry you wasted all the money on air defense -- you never even scratched a single F-117), ....
Okay, for now, for the technical part, exploit Moore's law, available infrastructure software, and the Internet. Given that, have the problem be to deliver valuable information of some kind. So, the solution is to be a case of information technology.
So, now how to get the solution and know it's good? Sure: Especially appropriate for information technology, turn the task of getting the solution into a math problem where when we check the math we are rock solidly sure we have a solution to the technical problem and the last we need for the big bucks -- all risk gone, the rest is just routine, low risk, and high payoff.
Thankfully for US national security the US DoD believes this approach and is really good at it. Sadly for our economy, Silicon Valley, in spite of its origins, does not and, instead, wants traction for a smartphone app for, say, teenage girl gossip.
The DoD isn't too different from VCs here. Thesis-driven, big checks for big projects, insider community, etc. When not fast-tracking someone with a strong record, the same questions come up, or, as with many seed investors, due diligence is not worth the time.
Take the set of all people who have had that idea and pick the ones who had the idea, say, since the big bang ~13.7 billion years ago, first. Then for those people, no one else had their idea first. Contradiction. Claim is false. Done.
Not complicated.
What's more complicated is why such a claim would be made, and a conjecture is that someone wants to denigrate ideas and the people who have them.
So don't get insulted by the person asking, or by the question itself.
If someone claims to be disrupting a market that they know nothing about, there are potential warning signs. (This isn't to say that outsiders don't have great ideas, just that it's tougher.)
Which models of markets? As far as I knew, one of the fundamental points of modeling markets is that they aren't zero-sum.
It isn't a perfect zero-sum, and even in those markets companies are always looking for new ground to colonize, but it's close enough that to first order it makes sense to analyze things in zero-sum terms.
And it's also the antithesis of start-ups in most cases, which are frequently attempting to create new markets where none existed by serving needs that no one knew they had.