The thing that’s annoying about the question is that it’s phrased in an inherently adversarial way, putting the answerer on the defensive, amping up the stress of an already stressful context and encouraging aggressive blustery responses.
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 agree the question can be asked in ways that are less productive than they might be, but the general approach of, "How is this different from what's already out there?" is always a good one. It lets you know a) if they know what's already out there and b) if they've done a reasonable analysis of it's weaknesses/issues and c) if they have a realistic sense of what specific pain-points their approach will address.
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.
Of course it adversarial. The average VC is in a intellectually weak position whenever they speak to a founder for the first time. The founder has thought about their problem for months, maybe even years, while the average VC might never have thought about it. Suddenly they are faced with responding to the founder and in a manner that allows them to control future negotiations. If they are average they will try to control the situation with aggressive questions that attempt to throw the founder off guard. In this sort of tactic they have far more experience than most founders.
Do you think your opinion on the question as being "aggressive" or
"adversarial" is a matter of personal experience?
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 obviously depends a lot on tone of voice, context of the relationship between the two people, etc. I just know that I’ve occasionally showed something new to someone, or announced I was working on something, and their immediate response was along the lines of “oh, I saw that years ago when X did the same thing” or “Y tried that and it didn’t work out” or “doesn’t everyone already use Z’s version of that?” with a dismissive or aggressive sort of tone.
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.
Having read the entire article, I'm a little confused.
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.
Quid pro quo: what percentage does originality contribute to success and greatness? Is it more than 20%? How did you arrive at the percentage? Does the percentage change based on the vertical, the market, the greater market cycle, the country, the entrepreneur, et cetera? If so, how?
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?
> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things.
There are a lot of comments here about the adversarial nature of a such a question, and they're completely correct: Asking this question is an assertion of dominance. They're also not wrong that assertions of dominance tend to backfire and elicit indignation.
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]
I think I disagree with your comment regarding programmers: Linus is admired for such strong opinions, close to impoliteness, for example.
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?).
1. Linus is in a dominant position. Dominance doesn't invoke indignance when it's directed toward non-tribesman or by the alpha (the paper discusses this). What's interesting about this, is you can read whether someone perceives Linus to be an/the alpha based on whether they reject or accept his behavior. Further interesting, if they accept his behavior, they are likely self-associating with whichever tribe they consider Linus to be the alpha of (e.g., programmers, Linux, OSes, etc...).
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.
Depends on how far you dumb down the idea really.
No one would be telling Steve Wozniak that someone else had his idea for a very innovative way of developing a computer in the late 70s, but if you say your idea is "a computer" then yah, someone else had that idea.
Still, necessarily
there was a first person (or a tie with
several people) for the idea of a computer.
So, maybe the claim in the title was
true for Wozniak but definitely
it is false for someone and, thus,
a false statement.
I think the author got it wrong. I also ask that same question "isn't X or Y already doing this?" to most startups that pitch me. I'm not trying to make the founder feel bad, or sound smart, or anything like that. I say this because I want to find out what they do different. I'm signaling that I'm already aware of those other companies, and I want to know:
(a) if they are already successful, how you'll beat them
> I also ask that same question "isn't X or Y already doing this?" to most startups that pitch me. I'm not trying to make the founder feel bad, or sound smart, or anything like that.
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".
> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things.
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.
>"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.
"
>"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?
I 100% agree with the title and 90% disagree with the reasoning. In doing a Ph.D., it's surprising that you didn't find that most ideas are incremental -- most bibliographies are long! I found that to largely carry through to startups.
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.
Mea culpa; I actually restated the article. (FYI, the article explicitly states the title is a question coming in the form of a challenge that must be responded to.)
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.
For the title here, I've heard that before.
Let's see:
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.
There are a couple missed points in that article. First, those kinds of somewhat aggressive questions are far more likely to be asked by the young MBAs VC firms hire to poke holes in business plans and do other grunt work. This is how they have fun. VC partners seldom need to publicly stroke their egos. Secondly, of course someone else had that idea first. The future is here. Your "idea" amounts to creating a local maximum in future distribution because you can execute on that idea particularly well.
So don't get insulted by the person asking, or by the question itself.
It is a good question, and just a different way of asking, "Who is your question and how are you different?" and "How much do you know the history of the market you're trying to disrupt?"
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.)
> 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. That's an assumption born in certain models of markets, but it's completely wrong when looking at startups.
Which models of markets? As far as I knew, one of the fundamental points of modeling markets is that they aren't zero-sum.
Mature, well-developed markets are close to zero-sum. Think Wall-Mart or McDonald's mature: niches where there are old, aggressive, amazingly well-optimized players, generally two or three in number, who occupy the landscape so completely that for one to grow the rest are probably going to have to shrink.
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.
I don't think your example is at all zero-sum, because the overall size of the economy can and generally does grow, and thus even the most well-entrenched markets like discount department stores or fast food can and do grow. Perhaps it's true that a market with a few well-optimized firms, each of which can't increase their market share without taking it from another firm, but even then, the market size can grow.
its like this. say a friend says he wants to build a system to enable smartphone turn by turn navigation indoors.. my first thought would be..apple/google/mall developers/nokia all have more millions than we have dollars and what have they done about it? why you? what advantage do you have over them? or what has changed in the circumstances or context to make this indoor navigation thing interesting? i guess thats a rather adversarial way to phrase things, but are questions i actually want to know the answers to..
As a startup founder, I jump at this question -- not aggressively or defensively, but enthusiastically, because I know exactly why we're different/better.
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.