
Rocket Internet: Attack of the online clones - antr
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/rocket-internet-attack-of-the-online-clones-9932262.html
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kken
These guys operate on the premise that ideas are cheap and exeuction is all
that counts. The excell at execution like hardly anybody else.

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sytelus
No, their premise is that ideas as well as execution is cheap to _replicate_
once it's already done by someone else in many of the cases. These people are
actually copy pasting all the way down to HTML and CSS. All the design work
and nitty gritty of how user interaction should look like is already done for
them. They already know how it was bootstrapped, why it is successful and what
users would expect from it. In other words they bypass most of the risky
unknowns that causes large number of startup to fall. Backend is sure not
replicable but given that they operate on smaller scales, most applications
such as AirBnB would boil down to creating simple database and shuttling data
back and forth which becomes college-level project that can be done quickly
and thrown in market. I would not expect them to clone startups that is heavy
on CS skills such as those requiring machine learning or computer vision or
large amount of computing power. They would mostly go for startups where
formulation of user experience is key and implementation is basically a
relational database with UI doing simple read/writes.

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andy_ppp
I worked for Rocket Internet for a couple of months in 2012... Interesting
organisation but a proper startup should be able to beat them easily at most
things.

These guys have all the things that you lack as a startup; money, people,
MBAs, finance department, legal, crazy people, good people, indifferent
people. Did I mention these guys have loads of money. And they spend it on all
the wrong stuff.

The things they lack are a soul and good product vision. People can smell
that.

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barbolo
Rocket Internet: Building companies without a soul

