[brooknam]

Having seen a startup in Austin, TX go through this same kind of thing, I would guess its more common than the author makes it sound here.

The best defense is to build a technology that isn't cheap to reproduce. There is no better moat than killer IP.

[AznHisoka]

This is not practical advice. Not many people here are building the cure to cancer. The best defense is to build a self-sustaining business where you don't need to sell it.

[wyclif]

This is true. The classic example IMO is Amazon: they didn't have "killer IP." Their "moat" was their mastery of fulfillment and distribution, and owning all the links in that chain.

[rokhayakebe]

Most likely, technology is only expensive to build the first time, or, at least, the cost decreases from there.

[ootachi]

Very few startups these days are building a technology that isn't cheap to reproduce.

[roel_v]

"The best defense is to build a technology that isn't cheap to reproduce."

Actually that's the single worst defense. What can possibly be so expensive to produce that it can't be cloned, yet cheap enough to be possible to sell with profit? The fact of the matter is that most software is quite simple, and when it solves a particular problem in an innovative way, there is no way to capitalize on that because there's no way to enforce exclusive use (give or take a few counterexamples left or right, like a super special secret server-side recommendation algo or something like that, but those are outliers).

[pnathan]

Conceptually, if very smart people did it, and other very smart people say it can't be done... that's what you're looking for for a deep moat. Usually that's going to be some sort of new mathematical principle in software.

It's excruciatingly hard to get funding if you do come up with that sort of idea, because the experts all say its impossible. ;)

[idiopathic]

"Conceptually, if very smart people did it, and other very smart people say it can't be done"

Don't forget the third part, which is what the author described, i.e. "not very smart people say they can easily do it themselves". They do not have to be able to do it, they just have to be able to convince the CEO to spend $1 million in salary on the internal delivery time to try to do it.

[mirsadm]

I can't really think of any recent companies that have killer IP. The difference might be an elegant solution vs someone from high school copying samples from codeproject/stackoverflow.