
Someone else had your idea first - akharris
http://www.aaronkharris.com/someone-else-had-your-idea-first
======
jacobolus
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.

~~~
jcr
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.

~~~
jacobolus
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.

------
coda_
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.

------
harrylove
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?

------
j_baker
> 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.

See "Theory X":
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y](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.

------
eldude
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]

[1]
[http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2...](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20\(2013\)%20-%20Two%20Ways%20to%20the%20Top.pdf)

~~~
atrilla
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?).

~~~
eldude
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.

------
soperj
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.

~~~
graycat
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.

------
alain94040
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

or

(b) if they failed, why you think you won't fail

~~~
chacham15
> 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".

------
7Figures2Commas
> 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.

~~~
graycat
> I have no idea what the point of this post was.

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.

~~~
lmeyerov
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.

~~~
graycat
> that question

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.

~~~
lmeyerov
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.

------
graycat
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.

------
Zigurd
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.

------
mathattack
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.)

------
baddox
> 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.

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

~~~
baddox
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.

------
kentf
[http://kent.io/the-well-of-lost-ideas](http://kent.io/the-well-of-lost-ideas)

------
lazylizard
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..

------
ccvannorman
As a startup founder, I jump at this question -- not aggressively or
defensively, but enthusiastically, because I know _exactly_ why we're
different/better.

------
krapp
Jokes on them, none of my ideas are any good.

