[andygcook]

I wouldn't say there was no real benefit and only risk to being an "open startup". Sharing what you're doing and how it works is a marketing strategy, pure and simple. Up until recently, it was a low effort, high reward marketing channel to sell to other founders. Now with ruthless competition and the ease of cloning a service, it is becoming low value and even risky.

[Existenceblinks]

"open" triggers people to think the other way, but it's actually the same as what we know really well, it's a popular strategy among scammers. 'Look at my expensive sport car' this is a success, thus, building pseudo trust.

[timr]

Low-effort, maybe. But it was always high risk, and the reward was unclear except for a few players who did it successfully ("successfully"...it's not like any of these startups became titans) and marketed it well. Probably the marketing was the secret there, not the "open startup" part.

In the startup world, a lot of trendy ideas get repeated with little/no thought put into their actual risks and benefits for a particular situation. Remember when everyone was certain that feeding their team lunch in the office was the secret to winning? Today the hype is that you don't even want to have an office.

YMMV.