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Ask YC: Discussing your secret weapon?

3 points by mooneater ↗ HN
In his essays, pg intentionally draws our attention to Lisp as a primary advantage for Viaweb. It was their "secret weapon".

Would you reveal your company's secret weapon? Or only after you exit?

13 comments

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kajecounterhack
A secret weapon is only a secret weapon if its secret.
dkokelley
How about, "A secret weapon is only a secret weapon if everyone knows about it but nobody knows how you plan to use it."
icky
... and a weapon!
ivankirigin
Huge hunter killer robots. With lasers for eyes.
pchristensen
Note to self. Never start a startup in Ivan's industry.
webwright
Funny thing about startup secret weapons... No one is particularly impressed until they get chewed to pieces by them.

If PG and co sent a letter on Viaweb letterhead to their competitors describing the various and sundry advantages of Lisp, what percentage of them would've done anything but laugh?

99.999% of the time, stealth mode is a huge waste of energy.

(please assume a standard "IMO" ahead of all of the above statements)

rcoder
Personally, I think that you should be worried if you think that secrecy is your best chance at a successful business, at least on the technical side of things. Unless you really, truly employ the best programmers in the world, chances are that you haven't come with anything truly novel, so thinking that you have some "secret sauce" that no one else could replicate is just going to make you complacent and slow.

The things that turn a technically-competent team into a bunch of ass-kicking code-ninjas are good tools, a nimble process (not necessarily XP or "agile programming"), and deep knowledge of the problem domain. None of those are particularly dependent on secrecy, and in this day and age, there's a strong argument to be made for the marketing, recruitment, and simple bogofilter potential of transparency and peer-review.

jamesbritt
> Personally, I think that you should be worried if you think that secrecy is your best chance at a successful business, at least on the technical side of things.

Sure, but that's an obviously untenable extreme.

Assuming you do not expect secrecy to save your ass, what's the business advantage to choosing to reveal information?

And is all information equal?

For example, if I tell people I'm using Haskell for my startup, I don't expect it will alter my prospects much. However, if I believe I've located a niche market that is under-served, I hope I won't be so naive as to think no one else is thinking the same thing, but announcing that fact seems unlikely to reduce possible competition.

Why would I volunteer that information or not try to keep it secret?

pchristensen
Good point. I think that for practical purposes, the opposite of secretive isn't broadcasting, just ignoring. For instance, for a web startup, the city you're located in isn't anything worth keeping secret, but it's also not very valuable to reveal either. With pretty much any aspect of a startup, you can ask "Do I benefit from keeping this secret?" and "Do I benefit from broadcasting this?" If neither of those are yes, then just move on.
rcoder
I think we're agreeing more than disagreeing here. My assertion was that business domain knowledge and internal workflow were far more important than programming languages or algorithms as a determinant of business success.

Revealing the market niche you hope to fill isn't revealing your secret weapon -- not in the Viaweb/Lisp sense, anyway -- it's giving away free copies of your business plan.

kogir
PG attributes much of Viaweb's advantage to Lisp but I'm convinced that even if competitors has used Lisp they wouldn't have attained the same results. The real thing that worked at Viaweb was smart people working in a focused environment doing things in the most efficient way they knew how.
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brl
Our secret weapon is Blub.