Jeff Leventhal, the CEO of our portfolio company WorkMarket, emailed me yesterday. He said:
i would love to see an avc post about copycats like samwer bros. what do u think of this form of entrepreneurs, etc?
I looked back over my archives and I guess I've never addressed this topic here at AVC. So here goes.
It's a free market out there. People can do what they want. That's even more true globally. If you are successful, you will be cloned. That's life. In fact, it's a sign that you've made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.
That said, I am not a fan of this behavior and approach to making money. It is devoid of any creativity. It doesn't inspire me. And we avoid doing it and investing in those who do it. As Jeff said to me in an email reply, "the problem is that people make money doing it……..these people should just internally understand that they are not entrepreneurs and not creating true value." I agree with Jeff on that.
Some will say "but you are an investor in Zynga and they copy others' games." I accept that critique but we committed to invest in Zynga when it was just poker on Facebook and that was an entirely new idea. They grown by adapting other games to their social model for sure. That's the history of the games business by the way. Even so, I'm not attracted to or inspired by this approach to making money.
Our approach at USV is to invest in the category creator, the innovator, the market leader. That's what attracts us to startups. And when the category creator executes well, we have found that it can win the market by a long shot and produce fantastic returns.
There are a few examples of USV portfolio companies that were not the category creator. Lending Club is a good example of that. We invested in Lending Club because they innovated around the peer to peer consumer lending model and came up with the winning approach and they are now the clear market leader. That was a late stage investment made out of the Opportunity Fund. I suspect that we will do that kind of thing more frequently in our Opportunity Fund investments.
But in the early stage sector, we are drawn to entrepreneurs who have new ideas, novel approaches, and big visions with long roadmaps. We are not drawn to those who seek to knock off another company and execute it better or in a different geographic market. If that is what you are doing, I am certain you can find investors and I am not looking down on your approach. But we are not the best investor for you and your project.
