

Ask YC: Discussing your secret weapon? - mooneater

In his essays, pg intentionally draws our attention to Lisp as a primary advantage for Viaweb.  It was their "secret weapon".<p>Would you reveal your company's secret weapon?  Or only after you exit?
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webwright
Funny thing about startup secret weapons... No one is particularly impressed
until they get chewed to pieces by them.

If PG and co sent a letter on Viaweb letterhead to their competitors
describing the various and sundry advantages of Lisp, what percentage of them
would've done anything but laugh?

99.999% of the time, stealth mode is a huge waste of energy.

(please assume a standard "IMO" ahead of all of the above statements)

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rcoder
Personally, I think that you should be worried if you think that secrecy is
your best chance at a successful business, at least on the technical side of
things. Unless you really, truly employ the best programmers in the world,
chances are that you haven't come with anything truly novel, so thinking that
you have some "secret sauce" that no one else could replicate is just going to
make you complacent and slow.

The things that turn a technically-competent team into a bunch of ass-kicking
code-ninjas are good tools, a nimble process (not necessarily XP or "agile
programming"), and deep knowledge of the problem domain. None of those are
particularly dependent on secrecy, and in this day and age, there's a strong
argument to be made for the marketing, recruitment, and simple bogofilter
potential of transparency and peer-review.

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jamesbritt
> Personally, I think that you should be worried if you think that secrecy is
> your best chance at a successful business, at least on the technical side of
> things.

Sure, but that's an obviously untenable extreme.

Assuming you do not expect secrecy to save your ass, what's the business
advantage to choosing to reveal information?

And is all information equal?

For example, if I tell people I'm using Haskell for my startup, I don't expect
it will alter my prospects much. However, if I believe I've located a niche
market that is under-served, I hope I won't be so naive as to think no one
else is thinking the same thing, but announcing that fact seems unlikely to
_reduce_ possible competition.

Why would I volunteer that information or not try to keep it secret?

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pchristensen
Good point. I think that for practical purposes, the opposite of secretive
isn't broadcasting, just ignoring. For instance, for a web startup, the city
you're located in isn't anything worth keeping secret, but it's also not very
valuable to reveal either. With pretty much any aspect of a startup, you can
ask "Do I benefit from keeping this secret?" and "Do I benefit from
broadcasting this?" If neither of those are yes, then just move on.

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ivankirigin
Huge hunter killer robots. With lasers for eyes.

~~~
pchristensen
Note to self. Never start a startup in Ivan's industry.

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kogir
PG attributes much of Viaweb's advantage to Lisp but I'm convinced that even
if competitors has used Lisp they wouldn't have attained the same results. The
real thing that worked at Viaweb was smart people working in a focused
environment doing things in the most efficient way they knew how.

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kajecounterhack
A secret weapon is only a secret weapon if its secret.

~~~
dkokelley
How about, "A secret weapon is only a secret weapon if everyone knows about it
but nobody knows how you plan to use it."

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brl
Our secret weapon is Blub.

