
A Y Combinator Company Copied Our Design and Data Viz: We've Arrived - antr
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/ycombinator-copycat/
======
gadders
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998008)

~~~
johngd
I think the more interesting part is the comments that crept out of the wood
work days after the article was posted to HN.

hautit 5 days ago (1 comment - account created 324 days ago) Get over it,
CBInsights, your UX sucks.

theUXclub 4 days ago (brand new account)

CB Insights, cheap and creepy as always. A 'low-drama' group of people that
decided to tweet and share the story all over the place claiming something
like 'Look! They copied us!'\- Your UX is bad as hell, I wouldn't be very
proud. Plus, your site is Bootstrap (a framework created for people who have
no skills or time to invest on CSS or design), did you also invent it and they
copied you as well?

frumpywooly 4 days ago (brand new account)

"...12 folks from their team have signed up for our free trial since September
including the CEO, head of product, designer, product manager and a senior
ruby developer." CBInsights, creepiest company in America

~~~
coldtea
So, not only plagiarizers but active smear campaigners too...

~~~
vdaniuk
>smear campaigners

Wow, multilevel irony!

CB Insights actions, arguably, constitute a large scale smear campaign that is
not adequate to the original transgression of the startup.

Your comment, arguably, constitutes a low scale smear campaign as you have no
proof that startup founders have posted those comments. Any other CB Insights
competitor/enemy could use that opportunity.

So much drama out of a non-issue.

~~~
coldtea
> _CB Insights actions, arguably, constitute a large scale smear campaign that
> is not adequate to the original transgression of the startup._

"Blame the victim" much?

They just reported it on the web AFAIK. What else would be "adequate to the
original transgression of the startup"?

> _Your comment, arguably, constitutes a low scale smear campaign as you have
> no proof that startup founders have posted those comments._

Sure, no hard proof. I only have a guess, based on decades of living in a
human society, that accounts that were created days before, and that say the
same things, and in favor of the transgressor, are somehow related to them...

Is there any competing theory? Random internet people that decided to sign up
to HN just to vent against a company?

~~~
vdaniuk
Yeah, a competing theory that I've included in my original comment. Anyone
with a grudge against CB Insights could have registered those accounts.

>Random internet people that decided to sign up to HN just to vent against a
company?

Obviously, trolls exist. Copyright/plagiarism/"inspiration" discussions are a
feeding grounds for those kind of people.

That's two competing theories. And yeah, it's ironic to state with confidence
that someone is "actively running a smear campaign" with no plausible data
confirming the statement.

------
danso
Jesus, besides the merit of CB Insights' claim, this whole thing reeks of
incompetence. You're a YC-funded startup and you can't do your own visual
design? I'll admit that when I need ideas/designs, I'll often head over to the
D3 gallery page, copy the relevant parts of the code, but at least modify it
so that it looks different, and actually meets my needs. What's comical is not
only did they purportedly rip off a design, but they ripped off a pretty
prosaic one. And I don't know what's the worser sign of their operational
capacity, that they signed into a competitor's product to take code/get
inspiration, or that they couldn't even be bothered to come up with fake email
addresses, or that it required 12 employees to go in and successfully make off
with the designs.

Edit: Also, as a data-handling-person, the startup's defense that their
inspiration is "only the way data is displayed" is annoying...data display is
_very_ important...but also, data display is the first thing people see, and I
imagine is the thing that makes it into slidedecks in lieu of actual proof of
quality of data analysis and data research...if you have the resources to be
great and different at the "backend" part of data work, you most definitely
have the ability to not just borrow someone's design...as good data display
often follows a bespoke understanding of the data itself.

Also, I must credit HighCharts and its well-documented API as getting me
through various crunch-time _oh-shit-I-need-a-web-graph-right-now_ situations
[http://www.highcharts.com/demo](http://www.highcharts.com/demo)

~~~
api
The thing that irritates me is that naive users would assume CB Insights were
the ones who copied, as they don't have the YC brand.

Not YC's fault per se... just how people generally use brands as a shorthand
for merit. At this point YC is almost more like a meta-corporation with its
individual startups as departments.

~~~
avn2109
>> "At this point YC is almost more like a meta-corporation with its
individual startups as departments."

Yup, that's the idea. It was designed that way from square one. Deconstruction
and postmodernism are the spirit of the age, after all.

~~~
api
It's quite interesting.

There's one attribute of capitalism that I think is largely responsible for
its success, and is likely the single largest factor that contributed to the
USA's victory over the USSR:

 _Capitalism allows permission-free innovation._

In my opinion, markets get too much credit and are actually secondary to this.
A market is just a way of performing goal-directed gradient descent and
aggregating decision making. Markets are _not_ by any means "efficient," and
are highly vulnerable to getting stuck at local maxima like any other gradient
descent algorithm.

I think the ability to engage in permission free innovation is actually a much
more significant advantage than markets. You could nix the market and
implement some kind of socialism and I think you'd still have a fast,
innovative economy if you allowed people to negate the bureaucracy. I'm not
saying markets don't have advantages, just that they're not a panacea.

I saw this when I worked as a government contractor. There was an incident
within the org where I worked that had the effect of temporarily suspending
the bureaucracy, and for that brief period of time it innovated like a small
agile private company! Everything felt like it went vertical. Then the
bureaucracy came back and all innovation halted. Now you had to ask
permission, so nothing could happen.

Thing is: as the size of a corporation approaches "big," its internal
procedures and politics start to resemble government. Microsoft, IBM, and yes
even the venerable Google start to look a lot like government agencies
internally. As they grow they take on a lot of government's problems, like
sclerotic bureaucracy.

The meta-corp model avoids this by allowing individual "departments" to
function with an extreme level of independence. It uses mechanisms like equity
finance to capture upside while creating enough autonomy to allow permission-
free innovation.

------
xianshou
Practially speaking, design is legally indefensible as intellectual property -
if you actually paid lawyers to make a case for you, you'd only be depleting
your own war chest to make your copycats go through the relatively small
hassle of a redesign. The only effective way to counter it is loudly naming
and shaming the companies responsible.

Kudos to CB Insights for doing exactly that. Not only will it make the copying
more trouble than it was worth to Techlist, but the threat of public
embarrassment will help deter copycats in the future.

~~~
teachingaway
I disagree. A design patent for a user interface would do the trick. So would
some clever copyright registrations.

[http://adlervermillion.com/user-interface-design-
patents/](http://adlervermillion.com/user-interface-design-patents/)

Not every lawyer knows/understands IP and user interface design. But if you
find a lawyer who specializes in the two, and you lay the groundwork _before_
your design is copied, you should have a strong legal position when the
copycats arrive.

For an early-stage startup, it may not make sense to sink a ton of $$ into
design patents. But companies with more revenue/capital should think about it.

~~~
dkrich
I disagree from a practical, as well as financial standpoint.

It's _very_ difficult to patent a software interface design as you have to
prove a lack of existence of prior art and the patent must describe the
specifics of what you are patenting.

These days there's very little new under the sun. I don't see anything
remarkably unique about that particular interface. I'm certainly not saying
that it wasn't lifted by their competitor, but that analytics dash also bares
a striking resemblance to Google Analytics and a host of others, not to
mention Microsoft Excel. Okay, it's blue and has large Helvetica numbers- is
that what you're going to patent? Okay, I'll change mine to a green color
scheme with Arial fonts. Your patent is no longer enforceable, and your IP
attorneys who tend to be paid quite well will charge you tens of thousands of
dollars to prove that.

I can imagine it feels like a major violation and annoying to be ripped off,
and I don't condone that strategy, but I doubt that CB's competitive advantage
is a color scheme and some data labels. A design patent would have basically
no value in this scenario.

------
asanwal
Anand, CEO of CB Insights here. Surprised to see this here again (prior
discussion - [http://cbi.vc/1DhMQT3](http://cbi.vc/1DhMQT3)), but if any
questions, feel free to ask. I'm at a conference but will try to reply during
breaks.

If you're really bored :) and want to read more on this, Connie Loizos of
StrictlyVC dove in a bit more ([http://cbi.vc/1vk4lLY](http://cbi.vc/1vk4lLY))

~~~
not_that_noob
You're a genius. Getting this much free publicity AND painting a competitor as
incompetent and second-rate.

YC should have invested in you :)

~~~
asanwal
Ha.

Our master plan is to get a Sequoia Capital portfolio company to copy us. Mu
ha ha ha.

------
davemel37
When did YC companies change from being the little guys/underdogs to being the
big strong evil Lord Business?

I don't know if it's schadenfreude, or simply that HN is full of people who
resent YC because they didn't get in (myself somewhat included)

But, this propensity to try to destroy someone who wronged you, without a
pragmatic outcome you are trying to achieve, other than to be punitive, goes
completely against my own moral compass, and It really bothers me that no one
else here seems to agree.

and the excuse that "we have a right to know" or that "if they did this, what
else are they dishonest about...we need to know who they are to protect
ourselves." etc... are all built on a house of cards with a foundation called,
"we like to watch the mighty fall."

I try to never bring up religion, but there is a beautiful Jewish Law called
Shemiras Halashon (guarding your tongue) that bans "Gossip, bad mouthing
people, and talking about others in a way that can be construed negatively,
even if its true... unless there is what's called, "Toeles" which is a set of
criteria the story must meet to be justified to share...
[http://www.torahmediaatlanta.com/assets/Uploads/MiriamFeldma...](http://www.torahmediaatlanta.com/assets/Uploads/MiriamFeldman/5-partShmirasHalashonSeries%205771/Shmiras%20Halashon%20%2801%29%2011-03-10.pdf)

This idea that our words don't hurt is a falacy, and while I am certainly
guilty myself... when it's an egregious effort to be punitive, with no
pragmatic goal...it just seems wrong to me.

~~~
omni
Punishment has a very simple pragmatic goal: to discourage this behavior from
other people in the future.

~~~
justin66
In this case the "punishment" (seriously?) had the immediate effect of forcing
them to change the design they stole.

~~~
davemel37
Yes,but not immediately, the initial reaction of the perpetrator was to defend
the decision on twitter, thats what happens when you attack someone, they go
on the defensive...

..but that same objective could have been achieved privately. A nice email
from the victim stating that they see they copied their design and would
greatly appreciate them changing it ASAP...would have likely yielded a quicker
and cleaner result.

Regardless, my initial comment was less addressed to the victim here, but
rather to the HN community for pouncing all over it.

~~~
justin66
I don't disagree that people get weird about YC companies here, but let's be
honest: YC can take it. This startup can take it. A week of bad publicity is a
minimal amount of adversity compared to what they'll endure in the future, and
there were a few lessons they needed to learn. What we're seeing isn't some
kind of lynch mob, it's a few people shooting the breeze on the internet.

More importantly, I think the notion that a victim - a real victim, making a
truthful accusation - is obligated to remain silent is very badly thought out.

------
siruva07
No surprise -- YC promotes launching fast and copying / plagiarism facilitates
that.

This has happened before with a YC company
([http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-
copy...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-
copying-37signals/)) and YC companies are also known to copy (often verbatim)
legalese from a bigger competitor and find / replace with their own company
name.

Having started two companies, as a non tech founder, I can understand why they
did this _at the start,_ as there are many other more important things to do
than CSS and TOS. But this isn't an excuse as soon as they had the resources
to make the change.

~~~
chaostheory
> YC promotes launching fast and copying / plagiarism facilitates that.

You don't copy someone's unique look, when they don't want you to copy them.
There are so many inexpensive ($12 - $49) CSS templates that look good enough
or even cool, that what happened is both inexcusable and just stupid. Most of
them are already built to use either bootstrap or foundation as well, so it
makes the launching fast part trivial.

------
daemonk
Playing devil's advocate here. How much change in the design would people
think it is not a rip-off? If they changed the color scheme? If they changed
the font? The type of visualization shown seems pretty standard (looks like a
treemap plot?). I don't want to denigrate the importance of stylistic choices
as they are very important in data visualizations, but it seems like a pretty
standard visualization.

Perhaps it is the dimensions they chose to represent out of the data that was
a rip-off? Ripping off methods of visualizing subtle aspects of the data that
conveys information would be a more egregious offense to me.

~~~
atestu
Hey I made the CB Insights design. I completely agree the viz is standard (the
treemap was my first d3 viz actually!). A lot of people are stopping at the
charts and saying "well it's just a bar chart and a treemap, get over it!"

To me the fact that the entire layout outside of the chart, even the copy is
exactly the same is the main offense. Even the table below the chart (when you
click to see the data) is exactly the same. It would have taken them 20
minutes to just shuffle things around, but no they just replicated it.

We put a lot of time in figuring out the best way to present information so
that users don't actually have to spend a lot of time to get answers. They
skipped that part and stole our work.

------
rubiquity
> _Our terms of service which all these users agreed to prohibits this
> explicitly – You may not access the Services if You are Our direct
> competitor, except with Our prior written consent._

Is that something that is actually defensible?

~~~
loumf
Why wouldn't it be? They say you have to agree to it to get access, so the
copiers that made accounts agreed to it.

If you mean, "would be defended" or "could know about it", then probably not.
It just adds more to the name and shame tactic they decided to do.

~~~
thu
Here in Belgium, there are terms that people put in their legal document that
shouldn't be present and would be considered invalid (as if they were not
present) irrespective of the fact you agreed to them.

Examples that come to mind: prohibit people renting an apartment to have a
cat, reduce the time you have to return a product bought online (and get a
refund) to less than the legal time, ...

------
macmac
Would be interesting to get Y Combinator's take on this.

~~~
anon1385
This is hardly the first or worst example of a YC company copying something.
For example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523024)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3529607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3529607)

Being prepared to do this kind of thing is a core part of the YC values:
[http://paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://paulgraham.com/founders.html)

>Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to
have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good.
Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about
observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil.
They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be
redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

~~~
semperfaux
While I've never been particularly interested in YC itself, that quote is
something I'd never read, and honestly it's really sad. That he straight up
admits that he's looking for people who are [synonym for evil that doesn't
make him look as bad] is really telling and sad.

Maybe I'm just too idealistic in general -- entirely possible -- but when I
read "breaking rules, but not rules that matter," I wonder who gets to decide
which rules matter. Because someone obviously thought they mattered enough to
_be rules in the first place._

~~~
argumentum
So basically you support Adolf Eichmann's claim that "following orders" was a
legitimate excuse for participating in the Holocaust? Either that, or you do
not understand PG's argument.

~~~
macmac
Godwin's law in action right there.

------
nhangen
Disappointing that the YC staff has not commented on this. It also fell very
quickly from page 1...

------
kumarm
Wow Techlist didn't steal from a Billion Dollar company, They stole from a
Bootstrapped Startup.

~~~
zmh
It could go either direction. There was an startup Innopage in Hongkong news
these two days claiming that the design of its iOS App "Worthy" was copied in
merely 2 months by China's Alibaba after the latter sent a 10-member
delegation team to visit Innopage in Hong Kong. Alibaba responded that "there
is no factual and legal basis." What can a startup do?

(The following articles are all in chinese) Founder Keith Li's article:
[http://www.grandline.hk/2015/02/%E4%B8%80%E5%B0%81%E6%B2%92%...](http://www.grandline.hk/2015/02/%E4%B8%80%E5%B0%81%E6%B2%92%E6%9C%89%E5%90%91%E9%A6%AC%E9%9B%B2%E5%AF%84%E5%87%BA%E7%9A%84%E5%85%AC%E9%96%8B%E4%BF%A1%EF%BC%9A%E9%98%BF%E9%87%8C%E5%B7%B4%E5%B7%B4%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E6%8A%84%E8%A5%B2/)

News:
[http://startupbeat.hkej.com/?p=1197](http://startupbeat.hkej.com/?p=1197)

Alibaba's response:
[https://thestandnews.com/finance/%E8%A2%AB%E6%8C%87%E6%8A%84...](https://thestandnews.com/finance/%E8%A2%AB%E6%8C%87%E6%8A%84%E8%A5%B2-%E9%98%BF%E9%87%8C%E5%B7%B4%E5%B7%B4-%E7%84%A1%E4%BA%8B%E5%AF%A6%E4%BE%9D%E6%93%9A/)

------
kcole16
It's cool to see the startup growth analytics industry heating up. I thought
Mattermark was first, but it looks like CB Insights was founded before them.

Regarding the plagiarism, I think this will blow over pretty quickly. Not a
fan of what they did, but as long as they weren't stealing data, it isn't
unforgivable. UIs are almost always influenced by one another, they just made
the mistake of following their inspiration too closely.

------
jbob2000
This was posted last week. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998008)

------
cpfohl
I've used tree-maps for data visualization before too...I've never heard of
cb-insights though. Furthermore, I've written an additional piece of code that
let's you decide what colors to use...so it _could_ be blue and white...

While I agree that there's some suspicious similarities in content
(potentially plagiarism, although you're in the same vertical...) and style,
the use of tree-map visualizations isn't plagiarism, nor is using bar-charts
with a line on top.

~~~
dandare
Obvious plagiarism is obvious. It has nothing to do with tree-maps in blue
palette.

------
biomimic
Looks like you both copied an original source and wanted to save time by not
modifying the original lib source.

------
romaster
When I read the article my first thought was... So go to war. Don't be proud
that you bootstrapped and they got funded. Go to war.

Go to the VC community and raise a ton. You have proof of a strong product and
yet you are not capitalizing on first mover advantage. You are asking these
guys to copy you and trump you.

Go to war. Raise. Build. Grow. Expand. Offer more things free to limit
competitor entry points. Offer even better metrics. Go to war.

Good luck.

------
ndreckshage
Everyone is copying everyone. Grow up.

~~~
coldtea
"Everyone is rippinf off everyone. Grow up".

Here I fixed that for you. Works great in other contexts too:

"Everyone is abusing everyone. Grow up".

------
timme
Generic charts with a blue/orange color scheme. Clickbait bullshit.

------
echoless
The article's passive-aggressive tone is overbearing. Why can't they simply
present the evidence, say they are very disappointed with the YC company for
stealing their design and be done with it?

------
seivan
Oh shocking that a tech "journalist" does shady stuff. Pretty much expected of
"journalists" these days.

~~~
johansch
Who's the 'journalist'?

------
shadowmint
again? really? I guess it didn't get enough attention a week ago, let's
rolllllll it all out again.

ffs. _The article itself_ links to the previous discussion
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998008))

~~~
coldtea
So? Things are posted on HN twice (or more) all the time.

I, for one, missed the original discussion.

~~~
shadowmint
Well, I guess the 'previous thread' comment being the _most upvoted comment_
in this thread is kind of telling.

You do the math.

------
toblender
Funny that segment design looks exactly like disk space analyzer for mac...
[http://lifehacker.com/5915508/the-best-disk-space-
analyzer-f...](http://lifehacker.com/5915508/the-best-disk-space-analyzer-for-
os-x)

~~~
mkolodny
No it doesn't. There's a big difference between taking inspiration from
somewhere, and copying it.

CB Insights and Disk Space Analyzer use blocks to visualize size, but that's
about as far as the similarity goes. This company not only copied CB
Insights's color scheme and layout, but also the text "The color represents
the amount of funding and the size represents the number of deals."

------
johansch
So, has the wholesale design/concept cloning of (mostly) american startup web
services become an everyday-thing in Singapore too now?

(In addition to e.g. China and Russia.)

~~~
coldtea
Dunno, but it seems racism has come to HN now.

------
pirsquare
There is nothing wrong with companies "copying/stealing" designs. But it is
wrong when you are criticizing others for doing so while you are doing it.

See TechInAsia previous rants on "copying designs":

[https://www.techinasia.com/flightfox-copy-rip-off-
nomadlist/](https://www.techinasia.com/flightfox-copy-rip-off-nomadlist/)

[https://www.techinasia.com/china-startup-copy-
listener/](https://www.techinasia.com/china-startup-copy-listener/)

------
dreamweapon
What gets me about this whole flap is that I just don't see anything
particularly interesting or innovative in the UX design for that page CB
Insights is so fiercely proud of. So it's a heatmap combined with slider --
how original is that?

As if everyone hasn't been stealing from everyone else's UX, like, all the
time, since the public internet became a thing.

------
davemel37
The CEO of the YC company apologized in the other HN thread and said they are
changing it...why is this still a story.

To be fair, I would be upset and annoyed like CBI, but on a pragmatic
level...what more do they want.

No good comes out of publicizing others shortcomings (no matter how much they
deserve the public shaming). This should have been handled privately...not
through Twitter and HN.

If they insisted on doing something publicly why not spin it in your favor and
make a slogan, "Data so awesome, our competitors steal it like a possum."

------
neumino
Everything blows about this post.

\- Are blue treemap your only value CBinsights? Well if you felt like you had
to write about it, so maybe...

\- Also public shaming using "Y Combinator company" instead of naming the
company is shameful. Don't lump together all the YC companies for your own
greed of getting attention.

\- Your TOS blows. Close their account and send them a mail if you didn't want
them to use your product.

~~~
ottertown
I pretty much agree with this. They created a D3.js treemap and probably even
used a standard Colorbrewer blue color scheme, as seen in this d3 example:

[http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063582](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063582)

Was it terribly uncreative for the other YCombinator company to do the same
thing? Yes.

Was it plagiarism, copying, or unethical? No way. You did not invent the
treemap nor a strong blue on light blue color scheme. Your UX is not unique
enough to claim design infringement here.

Lastly, your TOS is probably the most alarming part of this story. You should
not be so afraid of competition that you attempt to prohibit 'competitors'
from using your product.

------
raverbashing
No, the design is not copied. Period

This is like saying a blog copied another blog because they're showing
sequences of articles in a vertical column that scrolls.

That style of heat map is not unique nor exclusive to a site. Nor it is to use
shades of blue.

Oh wow they have a blue bar graph with a red line, "they're stealing our
IP!!!!"

"Oh the fields are the same" Similar software needs to deal with the same
data, obviously.

This article is enlightening. It's free publicity for the Y Combinator
company, and I'd take them more serious than a company that greatly overstates
their IP.

~~~
rev_bird
But they _said_ the design was copied. Also, non-trivial parts of the design
are in the _exact_ same positions in both examples -- it seems to me like the
question isn't even if the design was copied, but more of whether we should
care.

~~~
stingraycharles
And on top of that, the exact same capitalization and abbreviations are used.
At least they took the effort to rename "last year" to "last 4 quarters" in
one occasion..

------
peter_d_sherman
Hi everyone.

Forgive me for saying this, but "The more the world changes, the more the
world seems to stay the same".

Didn't something very similar to this happen a long time ago with the Apple
vs. Microsoft "Look And Feel" copyright lawsuit?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp).

And as it turns out, both parties probably copied design elements created by
Xerox PARC... which were probably originally created by some researcher(s)
there who read scholarly articles by other researcher(s) who probably wrote
about the possibility of things similar to the created design elements
existing in the first place...

So who invented what, when?

I sure as heck don't know!

But what I think is amazing is how _computer history tends to repeat
itself_... <g>

