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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Those resellers are not trusting those other businesses, they have in place legally enforceable agreements. There's a difference.

I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make, so let me parody your stance and you can explain where I'm wrong.

* I create and provide a service

* Said service has an interface

* You spot a service you can provide based on my interface

* You build a business using that interface

* You are successful

* I notice you're successful and build a clone

* I launch my clone and make the interface unavailable to you

* Lots of your customers switch to using my replacement

* You go out of business.

Is that all OK in your opinion? If not, what's wrong?

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What's wrong is the lack of contract or agreement. If you jump on a business opportunity without formal contracts, it's your own fault. Generally speaking, if defense and risk mitigation is not your first thought when evaluating opportunities, you probably should stick to applying your technical skills, working for people who understand those things.

But of course, MBAs are for suckers who know nothing and should just cease to exist. At least that's what I keep hearing on HN.

So, what I hear you saying is this:

    Never, ever *trust* a company: always have
    formal contracts.  If you can't get formal
    contracts, don't work with them or rely on
    them.

That seems to match what I said, which was:

    Never, ever trust another company
    for your business model.

You seem to be saying exactly the same thing. You seem to be saying: Put formal contracts in place. If you trust someone then you don't need formal contracts. If you need formal contracts, you don't trust them.

Am I missing something?

It really does seem to me that we have pretty much exactly the same viewpoint - there is a risk analysis to be done, and risk mitigation is critical. My risk analysis says that if someone else is in a position to screw you over completely, don't proceed on blind faith. Instead, have contracts or agreements in place. In other words:

    Don't trust them.

We're back to what I originally said. Do you disagree with it? It seems like you're actually in complete agreement.

If you read carefully the discussion, you will see that my point is not that what you said is untrue. My point is that what you said is a "thought-terminating cliche". It's a over-simplified one-liner. Just look at how much had to be written in order for it to be more clear and valid. There is no trust in business relationships. How do you trust a legal entity? The people there change all the time, goals become misaligned, etc.

And if you look at the comment wherein I used that single line, I then went on to add this:

    Certainly I'd be incorporating an exit strategy,
    and my game plan would be to leverage off FB to
    start with, to grow as fast as possible, develop
    my own community and eco-system, and then be able
    to shed FB and replace it with something else.

Is that not enough of an expansion of the thought, pointing out that using FB (or whoever) is valid to start with provided you have some sort of exit strategy?

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