
Former Google VP Kai-Fu Lee Got a Nickname, Start-Copy Lee - rjyo
http://jyorr.com/post/4622300101/former-google-vp-kai-fu-lee-got-a-nickname-start-copy
======
gyardley
Tumblr's not alone -- Innovation Works also has a pretty decent copy of my
last start-up, Flurry, called Umeng. (For the curious, compare the product at
flurry.com and umeng.com.) I've been watching Umeng for a bit and the services
have slightly diverged, presumably because Umeng's learnt a bit more about the
Chinese market and adapted its product. But the initial product was just a
straight-up clone.

I _am_ a little surprised to see this from as respected a person as Kai-Fu
Lee, who I'd expect to be innovating, but you just have to shrug. This sort of
thing happens in business, and it's not worth getting too excited about.

------
iantimothy
I can't remember where I got this quote from, but early on I learned that
there are basically three ways to beat the US in technology:

1\. The Japanese Way - Innovate By Leapfrogging. 2\. The Indian Way - Innovate
By Piggybacking. 3\. The Chinese Way - Innovate By Copying.

Looking at how things have been over the years, China isn't going to stop a
strategy that has worked across industries.

~~~
plinkplonk
"I can't remember where I got this quote from, "

probably this paper?( by the Lemelson-MIT program - warning pdf)
[http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressreleases/downloads/sustaina...](http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressreleases/downloads/sustainable.pdf)

 _"Innovation to help achieve the goals of sustainable development can start
in many ways, including: “copy-catting” (i.e. Japan, Korea and China first
mimicking manufacturing techniques and then becoming world leaders.); “piggy-
backing” (i.e. India performing service work for rich countries and adapting
information technology to local needs); and “leap-frogging” (skipping over
technologies that are inappropriate in a given place and time and adopting
more sustainable solutions).

....................

“Copycats” imitate ideas, technologies and techniques from other countries and
improve and adapt them. During its first few decades, the United States took
the key secrets of the Industrial Revolution from England, Scotland and France
and launched its own industrial economy. Two centuries later, Japan and then
Korea developed by adapting American manufacturing, raising the quality and
lowering costs. These days, China is doing it with much success, moving up the
innovation ladder at a rapid rate.

“Piggybackers” ride on the backs of rich nations by doing more and more of
their manufacturing and service work at far lower costs. India is practicing
the art of piggybacking right now, using advanced computing and communications
technologies to perform software development, tele-services, and even high-
level innovation at a fraction of the labor costs compared to performing the
same jobs in the United States or Western Europe. A recent study showed that
one in ten U.S. software jobs will be exported to places like India and China
over the next five years.

Finally, “leapfrogs” skip over inappropriate technologies and embrace new
ones, such as Finland’s sudden break from Soviet domination and its rapid
adoption and development of new inventions like wireless networks.

"_

~~~
iantimothy
Thanks for this!

------
erikstarck
While this example is a little extreme in its similarity with the original,
copying a startup idea and implementing it in another market than an English
speaking is not just done in China. Here's an article about a bunch of
european startups doing the same:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/what-do-ebay-facebook-and-
gro...](http://www.businessinsider.com/what-do-ebay-facebook-and-groupon-have-
in-common-these-guys-cloned-them-and-got-rich-doing-it-2011-1)

~~~
lindsayrgwatt
I've often wondered if one of the (many) reasons why there are so few
successful startups coming out of Europe is due to the copying.

I visited Berlin a while back and my buddy was telling me about a bunch of
guys who've built a successful business (dozens of engineers) just cloning
'hot' American products.

It's got to reduce the number of people working on brand new ideas. (I'm not
suggesting that you can't build a great business by copying somebody else's
work, but you won't build a world-changing, super innovative company doing so)

~~~
gaius
Heh, that may be a factor, but I doubt it's the main one. Lots of American HN
users seem to be pretty Liberal in their political outlook, and that's fine.
But consider Germany, with a welfare state that looks after you from cradle to
grave. If you want to start a startup there then you'd _better_ have your EUR
20,000 in capital minimum, and you'd better do all the paperwork and comply
with all the regulations and have the right certificates and diplomas... The
activation energy is just so much higher in Europe, two guys hacking in their
garage can't just go for it without a lot more preparation. If you fail you
won't starve of course, the State will look after you but that's a two-edged
sword - not only is it harder to get started, there's less hunger to succeed,
and everyone will be used to working only 35 hrs/week...

~~~
mhd
Wow. Is this "everything I need to know about Germany, I learned from Fox
News"? Let me pick apart the pieces

1) 20k minimum for startups

You're confusing a few things here. The costs to form a company depend on what
kind of legal form you want it to have. What you're talking about is the GmbH
(basically a LLC), where you actually need 25k of capital. This is by far not
the only form a company can take. If you just want to make sure that every
founder gets its part, you've got a name for the company etc, you can form
something like a UG. If you don't have more than three founders, you can use
some standard forms and everything's done within a few days at most. And even
if you want limited liability and don't have the capital, you can choose from
several other legal forms available in Europe. The British limited company is
quite popular, as you need less capital.

This is hardly a problem for most IT-based startups, who rarely have a lot of
founders or actually trade something (where limited liability is quite
welcome).

2) Diplomas/certificates are required

There are several cases where this is true, but I don't see any that would
affect startups. Yes, if you want to become a hairdresser or want to open your
own carpentry shop, you need to have the proper papers. For a web-based
startup? What kind of papers would those be?

3) 35 hrs/week

That's France. Never mind that the difference between a regular job and
startup hours doesn't _have_ to be that different. And even if you're doing
the stereotypical 100+ hours a week, the difference to a regular job in any
country will be quite high (well, South Korea excluded).

4) Less hunger because of welfare

Hows is that particular to startups? If this were true, people would drop out
of almost any job because it would be easier otherwise. Germans on the dole
don't live in limitless luxury.

I'm not saying that there isn't a tendency to copy things here. The whole
Facebook vs. StudiVZ affair is pretty embarassing. But that's basically one
market niche some companies are filling, it's not really representative of the
whole German startup scene.

Yes, there's no equivalent to the venture capital-backed silicon valley
startup scene. But that's pretty unique in the US, too.

~~~
cdavid
Concerning the 35 hrs/week: it is the legal duration for work above which you
are supposed to pay a higher hourly rate. It is NOT a maximum, and many people
work more than 35 hrs/week (the figures for working hours are pretty similar
between France, UK and Germany, with UK having the lower on average IIRC, but
I cannot find the figure ATM).

~~~
mhd
There's some data on "Eurostat"[1]. It gets quite complicated, depending on
whether you consider full-time, part-time employees, the self-employed, family
workers, sick time, maternity leave etc.

But yes, it seems to hover around 40 hours for most countries. Strangely even
for France, where this is bordering on the illegal... Found an old page where
the Brits are complaining that they're working more than the average, don't
know how they filtered the results to get to that conclusion. The Swiss do
seem to live up to their industrious stereotype, though...

Never heard about a 35+ pay hike in Germany, though. Considering that there's
no minimum hourly wage and most people are paid fixed salaries anyway, this
wouldn't even get you very much. Sounds more like a result of collective
bargaining than a federal law.

[1]:
[http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/product_...](http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/product_details/dataset?p_product_code=LFSA_EWHAIS)

------
kragen
Some other important look-and-feel clones:

Windows (copying MacOS)

Lotus 1-2-3 (copying VisiCalc)

GNU/Linux (copying Unix)

Gosling Emacs (copying ITS and Multics Emacs), which eventually became GNU
Emacs

Excel (copying Lotus 1-2-3, to the point that VisiCalc slash commands still
work in Excel last time I tried them about five years ago)

OpenOffice (copying Microsoft Office)

C compilers everywhere (copying the original Unix C compiler)

Compaq's clone PC (copying the IBM PC, and giving rise to the entire IBM-
compatible market)

Friendster (copying Sixdegrees)

Facebook (copying Friendster, somewhat less faithfully)

Every modern IDE (copying Turbo Pascal)

Every modern search engine (copying Google)

MS-DOS (copying CP/M and a little bit of Unix)

MercadoLibre (copying eBay)

Intel's current x64 CPU line (copying AMD)

Netscape (copying Mosaic)

Internet Explorer (copying Netscape)

Wordpress (copying Movable Type) (I'm not sure who to credit with the modern
blog, with its comment threads, "after the jump", and permalinks. Pyra?)

Being able to copy the look and feel of competing products is crucially
important to allowing innovation to continue. If Personal Software Inc. still
had a monopoly on spreadsheets, it's a good bet that the spreadsheets we use
today wouldn't have progressed much from where we were in 1984. The interface
designs that seem innovative and unique today are either faddish crap or the
baseline from which tomorrow's innovation begins.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Though there is something wrong with directly copying UI elements with just a
text change - that should be completely frowned upon and called out imho.

Other than that - competition is good, and imitation should be seen as you are
doing something good, now just make sure you can keep up or do it better
consistently unless you want your competition to take over the market share.

~~~
kragen
> Though there is something wrong with directly copying UI elements with just
> a text change - that should be completely frowned upon and called out imho.

Almost all of my examples could be accurately described that way in their
first version. Maybe not Windows 1.0, not Facebook, and I think not Wordpress,
and there may have been a couple of other exceptions. MercadoLibre _still_
looks exactly like eBay to me.

~~~
elliottcarlson
That's because it's eBay's Latin American partner and eBay has a 19.5%
ownership interest in MercadoLibre - not to mention eBay sold off iBazar to
MercadoLibre in that process.

~~~
kragen
No, that's not why. It looked like that from the beginning, long before eBay
bought into them.

------
tyng
I'm not against stealing ideas and methods from other companies, internalising
them then IMPROVE upon them. That's part of innovation.

But blatant copying?! Even the UI?! C'mon Kai-fu, I'm sure Innovation Work can
do better than that. The whole purpose of Innovation Work (which is itself a
copy of YC, for those of you who don't know) is to spur entrepreneurialism in
the region, but all I see is setting up a very bad example. I can't imagine
how the founders feel OWNERSHIP in their startups. It's more like a gold rush.

~~~
HardyLeung
I'm disappointed with what Kai-Fu Lee is doing; I guess I expect more from
him.

Disappointment aside, though, this strategy works. Take something that works,
and apply to the China market. Why reinvent the wheel? But I'd argue that they
should do a better job with "copying" -- you don't really want to invite
criticism for no gain, unless the blatantness of copying is part of the
strategy (to show investors that they literally and successfully cut-and-paste
working startup businesses, like an assembly line).

Hmm, now that I think about it, perhaps that's the whole point.

------
wcsun
Ironically, Sequoia Capital invested both in DianDian and Tumblr. Great
Firewall is really good for copying and monetizing startup businss.

[http://fan.renren.it/a/ITxinwen/hulianwang/20110325/79864.ht...](http://fan.renren.it/a/ITxinwen/hulianwang/20110325/79864.html)

------
michaelpinto
Something that we tend to forget is that we learn by imitation — and
industries are no different than individuals. Chinese firms will start to
evolve their software to local tastes and will slowly set themselves apart
from mere clones that don't translate well. That will be followed by free form
borrowing of the best ideas from multiple sites — and that will be followed by
local innovations. And at that point China will begin to export their software
as the world wants to talk to them (much the way you'd join LinkedIn from
abroad if you wanted to do business with Americans).

------
Hipchan
As much as it pains me as a person who values intellectual property, I have to
admit that copying is a valid and important strategy. At least half (anyone
know of a more educated number?) of the development in Asia since the Meji
Restoration consists of pasting Western ideas.

I hope this means that all startups take the internationalization seriously
from the beginning. Hopefully we can get some sort of solid services /
startups / processes that can help internationalize companies much earlier on.

The current crop of localization services are frankly inadequate.

~~~
metageek
> _pasting Western ideas._

There's a difference between ideas and the expression of those ideas; that's
why patent and copyright are separate. What's being complained about here goes
beyond copying ideas, into copying expression.

------
guard-of-terra
Many Russian internet businesses (can't call most of them startups) copy parts
of interface, ideas or business models from American [ex]startups.

They never seem to copy the whole experience as a whole, as it seems to be
with Chinese ones - but useful bits here and there.

On the other hand, when they don't copy they are accused of that anyway
because for some reason Russians value precedence in tech highly.

In all the world the problem seems to boil down to: If there is a business
model that works and the niche is vacant in their market, why innovate?

------
delackner
I'm kind of surprised that anyone is actually surprised or offended by this
kind of stuff. The US would be a backwater farming colony if it hadn't
wholesale stolen the technologies that allowed New England to compete in the
textile industry. That is only the most obvious example.

------
tstyle
In general cloning is pretty bad. If I ripped off a popular iphone app, threw
it on the app store, I'd be dilution the profit of the original creators and
confusing users. I profit at everyone else's expense.

But there is a pretty good chance that Tumblr and Quora will soon be blocked
in China. (All it takes is one blurb by one user on a sensitive issue, which
is how Posterous and blogspot got blocked).

So if we assumed that

1) A product like Tumblr creates value for it's users 2) Tumblr will never be
able to profit from China without the government/network connections

then cloning Tumblr seems like a win win scenario for everyone involved.

If doing a startup is about creating something users want(that doesn't exist
yet or is not accessible for whatever reason), and the spirit of startups is
to do things as efficiently and cheaply as possible, then isn't Diandian(the
Tumblr clone) doing exactly what they are suppose to?

Disclaimer: I founded a startup in Beijing a few months ago, and actually
received seed funding from Kaifu's Innovation Works. I don't work for them,
nor am I trying to defend anyone's actions(Come on guys... even the ICONS?).
Just offering a different perspective from the other side of the the great
firewall of China. ^^

------
dclaysmith
These copy cat sites (and similar ones in Europe) are an interesting test to
the "idea" vs. "execution" argument. I bet that there are other nearly perfect
clones of Tumblr in China yet this one has risen to the top. I'm sure Kai-Fu
Lee is looking beyond the ideas and at teams behind them.

Cloning might not be the most ethical way of building a product but clearly
DianDian identified a market that wasn't being served in China and had the
ability to bring a product to that market.

I love that the discussion of cloning was happening on "Zhihu, a clone of
Quora".

------
BrandonM
_> His first open letter in year 2000 to students titled About honesty and
integrity._

This is the author's big conclusion? He just had to go snarky with it? The guy
once wrote about honesty and integrity. That was TEN years ago; it's not some
big scandal that he has now taken a couple products that were not available in
the Chinese market and brought them to market as quickly as possible.

If you can get away with it, why not make your minimum-viable product a near-
clone of an existing product that works but not in your market? That seems
like a very sound strategy to me. Once he gets some traction and begins to see
what improvements he should make in the context of his market, the product
will begin to diverge.

If Tumblr wants to localize to China with an all-new Chumblr, then we can
start fighting over IP theft. Until then, the guy is simply doing a service.

Blogs used to be superior to mainstream media because they gave the straight
facts while avoiding the sensationalism that plagues modern day media. It's
too bad the latest wave of bloggers are all wanna-be journalists.

------
holdenc
Tumblr will have the last laugh here. There's practically no market for
tasteful online advertising or paid software in China. So, while he might
rack-up users it will be hard to monetize this.

~~~
blader
Tencent is the second largest Internet company in the world, and it monetizes
primarily through virtual goods, including blog themes. Chinese users don't
buy software, but they do pay for online services.

~~~
jff
Tencent is... unbelievable. I saw that huge piece of crap IM client on the PC
of basically every Chinese grad student I knew. I also recently found out that
their QQPlayer media player violates the GPL by including code from ffmpeg
without any attribution or licenses; combine that with the way their IM client
used to, and still may, censor messages, and I'm wondering what the hell else
they're up to! :)

------
yannickmahe
Interestingly, the Chinese word for learning, 学 (xue) also means to imitate/to
mimic.

~~~
est
I am confused, how else can you learn by NOT imitate?

~~~
adolph
The recent post "Teaching binary to 3rd Graders using the Socratic method" is
a good example of a non-imitation teaching/learning method.

<http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2446316>

------
nikcub
The entire Chinese startup scene fascinates me - we don't peer into it often
enough

------
est
Now Kaifu-Lee's <http://innovation-works.com> itself got copied

<http://aodaren.com/copy-works>

------
brown9-2
Why is Google mentioned in the headline? They have nothing to do with this
story. Might as well list all of the schools this guy attended in the headline
as well.

~~~
RickHull
I have never heard of Kai-Fu Lee, and I gather he made his name via Google, so
the context was useful for me.

------
staunch
You've got to love their name: "Innovation Works".

~~~
joelandren
Innovation works, but genius steals.

~~~
zackattack
Do you really believe this.

~~~
ikbear
In China, I really believe this.

------
eneveu
Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal...? ( <http://vimeo.com/4763707> )

------
VladRussian
my understanding may be wrong and whoever knows better please correct me if
so. The copying in Chinese culture isn't a "vice of stealing", it is more like
a "virtue of modesty and respect to the masters". I.e. taking a clean canvas
and trying to paint something original is like an arrogant statement that one
can come up with something better than using that canvas to make a good copy
of a great work of a great master. And only when the one has perfected his
skills and craft, it is appropriate to make original contribution, say
add/modify a couple of details to the copy of the great work.

------
tszming
Idea for a weekend project: A social directory for copycat websites.

------
sradnidge
One wonders if the likes of Google and Microsoft employed Kai-Fu Lee so that
he would be less inclined to fund / promote clones of their products in China.

------
shareme
One of the points missed by the HN knee-jerk crowd:

by Kai-FU funding knock off clones rather than investing in something new that
takes VC money away from other potential successful startups in the startup
scene in China.

------
barista
This guy was formerly at MSFT. The same guy who when quit, Ballmer threw a
chair at him. Not sure if he was worth the chair now.

<http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2005/09/1106.ars>

~~~
elq
did you read that link? Balmer went nuts when
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky> quit

------
msy
Well I'll certainly look at Sequoia a little differently now. The legality and
there's ethicality, I look for both in business partners.

------
happywolf
MS Windows 'borrowed' alot from Mac's UI, and nowadays most smart phones are
copying iPhone's concepts. I feel the hidden interest in this thread is more
on Chinese/China bashing rather than intellectual property.

~~~
bryne
Did Windows clone the Mac UI right down to the color and pixel and then
replace the Apple logo? I think the bashing here is well-deserved, above and
outside the discussion of whether China has a demonstrated economy of copying
(it does).

Also, there's a special place in hell for people who can't just come out and
call a clone a clone.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I agree with your first paragraph, but "a special place in hell"?

~~~
btcoal
I'm not sure why the question mark here.

Are you questioning the meaning of this phrase or its applicability? If the
former, then it is a reference to Dante's The Divine Comedy. If the latter,
then in The Inferno, there is a special place reserved for thieves and
betrayers. In a way, if you are a hacker and you blatantly rip-off the work of
another member of the community, you are betraying said community. So the
innermost circle of hell is reserved for you with Brutus, Cassius and Judus.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
"In a way", yes. We're talking people who killed their own families, and both
Christianity's arch-betrayers (Judas and Satan).

Wikipedia: "The traitors [who are suffering in the deepest circle of Hell -
me] are distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve
betraying a special relationship of some kind. There are four concentric zones
(or "rounds") of traitors, corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal
of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal
of liege lords. (...) the traitors are frozen in a lake of ice known as
Cocytus, with each group encased in ice to progressively greater depths."

