Sam Altman: “Copycat startups rarely work”

You know, people worry about copycat startups a lot, and I don't think you need to. We did a study on this as well once. There are very few startups that are true copycat startups that go on to be successful. The copycats almost always fail. They're always a year or two behind. The people aren't as good. They don't have the same sense of mission. So there are some examples. You know, there's some debate about who copied who in Uber and Lyft, but that is an example of where you have two serious players with the same idea. It doesn't happen that often. Usually it's a pretty new idea. People. You could sort of say Facebook was a copy of MySpace, but it really wasn't. Honestly, it was a pretty new idea. You could sort of say Google was a copycat of the 12 search engines before it, but again, it really wasn't. They had this one big new technical idea that made it super different. So there are a few things that are more stressful as a founder than having a copycat launch, but they don't really cause problems. It takes many years to learn to ignore them. But I believe that is the right answer. One rule that we have at Y Combinator is that we won't talk to you about your competitor that you're stressing about until they're beating you in the market, because it almost never happens. Now, there is one subset of this which is copycats in other markets. And the normal version of this is, let's say a French company looks at a US company and says, oh, that's great, I'm going to copy it in France. That doesn't work either, or at least doesn't work for long. Usually the company that started first will eventually muscle you up.