[jnrivasseau]

Agree with Paras there, VWO was not a follower, they started at the same time. These things are actually funny - I even started Kameleoon before Optimizely (early 2008), but we developed our visual editor first and did not apply it to AB testing at the beginning. We made a (successful) pivot at the end of 2011 and have been focusing on CRO since, becoming competitors to Optimizely & others.

Calling Optimizely's competitors simple followers is clearly an over-simplification and a bias from the VC/SF crow indeed. As Paras pointed out, every actor in the field had their firsts in the market (some of Kameleoon's examples: our anti-flickering technology, our aggregation features in our reports / data engine, our automatic cross-device history reconciliation or our full ITP support). In many ways, Optimizely tech is now trailing behind today.

However it's true that Optimizely (and to a lesser measure, VWO) did a lot from the marketing side to develop the market, and we benefited quite a bit from that. We're definitely grateful to them :)