I've known many entrepreneurs who have jumped to the conclusion that their idea was stolen based on the problem they are trying to solve. Then, they see similarities in the design that reinforce their confirmation bias.
The article talks about this huge problem...the genesis of his idea was this problem that 100s of people, in the airline industry, at Delta, all faced - including their technical teams, operations leadership, executives, etc. With all of those folks facing the same problem, it's not unexpected that some come with the same general solution. Practically speaking, whether it was the pilot or the technical team at Delta, anyone building a chat solution would be familiar with the same chat UIs; at some level, when have any of us used an app that had a truly unique design? Many would argue that the UX best practice is to use familiar elements, from popular apps, so not to have to re-educate the user.
That doesn't mean they didn't steal the app. However, in my experience, people with all sorts of ideas hit up executives at big companies all the time. That repetition is the basis for brand marketing. It's likely they were pitched a similar solution to that same problem both before and after that person met with their team.
Barring some egregious fraud, not mentioned in the article, or some major bad acting, it seems like a hard argument to make.
This happens more than you would think. Sales people for every startup relentlessly hound execs. Every major tech company / vendor has an innovation team / teams / parnerships that the respective relationship managers try to get in front of execs. It's endless.
That's not to mention all the strategy consultants / management consultants love to bring their own innovative ideas to the table.
>carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of [his] proprietary QrewLive communications platform
Not to say it isn't a good idea but the limited description seems like an idea that I imagine more than one person could have come up with.
That's not to justify the company's actions, but if that is the app I'm not sure how novel a thing we're talking about here and maybe the needs that weren't met were simply back-end tech based and not idea based...?
How many 'roughly the same idea but X' start ups are out there? and it's not always the first that succeeds.
It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration.
That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
No expert, and yes I agree it might be a sharp practice if they substantially lead him to believe they would deal with him, but is this not the purpose patents serve?
The app as described in this article at least is incredibly generic - I'd imagine the Delta board members could independently arrive at the conclusion such software features would help and also determine that there may be other options to select that fit their operational requirements better. "Role based text messaging" sounds a lot like a workplace chat app...
Of course they could independently arrive at those ideas, they could independently try them out and see if they are worth it. But why invest what might end up a few hundred man hours in management meetings and trials when you can outsource it to some idiot who didn't even think about getting paid for the initial trial and error phase of the project.
Don't talk to people unless you get paid for the time you invested, the guy behind AppGet had to learn that the hard way, as did hundreds of service companies that got used to outsource initial project planing without ever hearing back from their potential customers.
You can spin that both ways - a company Delta sized may want to partner with a company who have track record in providing support and services to a Delta sized firm, vs a pilot's side project... For Delta, long term support they can count on for years will surely matter.
Especially for "role based chat", there are many mature enterprise offerings in that space already. It's arguably only pertinent to evaluate all options aside from the single one presented by an employee trying to sell a side project.
> For Delta, long term support they can count on for years will surely matter.
Of course, so why even involve the pilot at all if his App idea was obvious and he could never hope to provide the services required by Delta? Clearly at least some delta managers thought they would get some value out of those meetings.
Do you think a company is obligated to purchase every idea an employee cold sells them?
It strikes me as incredibly unlikely in 2016 Delta management at some level weren't aware of the concept of workplace messaging software. Besides this one employee, there were loads of companies trying to sell this in 2016 too (Yammer, Slack, HipChat, etc, etc) as well as the usual enterprise vendors.
No, I obviously don't think that, and are you trying as hard as possible to actually ignore the real events?
You're talking about IN THEORY. There's a difference between NOT purchasing something and completely stealing someones idea / design. How is that not clear to you?
But how can you steal an idea that is already widely available for sale from others in the marketplace? Your assertion they "completely stole someone's idea/design" is equally theoretical here.
If I purchase a washing machine from Hotpoint, I don't steal the idea of washing machines from their rivals. Thanks for the capitalization, I'd never have understood your "theory" of events without it.
The other big component of this that's missing to me is how much he was asking delta to buy it for. If he really invested 100k into it and was asking for some reasonable multiple for his code+idea then it's probably disingenuous of them to not just pay him for it (and maybe pay for him to help dev it).
That said, maybe he asked for something absurd like a billion dollars for what was effectively "a good idea." Hard to know without that and the fact that the information isn't in here leads me to believe that the answer doesn't land in his favor.
That 100k number is probably some combination of his time, some investment into server/hosting resources and some money spent on a contractor for development. The 100k cost number seems entirely reasonable, I'm just worried we're missing a part of the story where he asked Delta to pay him X for it and perhaps X was an entirely unreasonable number.
Nope, it's all seniority based bidding. Airlines are one of the few industries with a strong enough union you can sue your employer for a billion dollars and keep working.
My uncle flew A340-600s on that route for years and had a great time. Due to crew rest requirements and seniority, he only flew 2-3 times a month and had a house on both ends. Unfortunately, he also ended up with a family on both ends and that didn't end too well...
Even better when you consider that some pilots are not domiciled in their route's origin city and for some airlines get paid by blocks of time. I recall a friend talking about pilots that lived in lower-cost areas, commuted to LA for work, then flew SFO - LAX routes, and got paid for their time in-between flights in those cities. They made more money off the plane than on it.
He’s union, they can’t do anything to him. However, given the recent cases of the murderous disgruntled pilots (Germanwings and Malaysia Airlines) I wonder if they’ll be able to bench him with pay out of precaution. I know I sure wouldn’t want to fly on his flight.
You get on your flight to Phoenix and the flight attendant says, “your pilot is Bob Smith, by the way funny fact, he is suing Delta for $1 billion! Pretzels will be coming shortly.” That won’t give you any pause?
No, why, does suing others and expecting a payday somehow imply that the plaintiff is likely to be suicidal?
Or is the implication that the airline is likely to blow up their own airplane and kill hundreds of passengers just to swap one major lawsuit for hundreds of major lawsuits?
Well, from the perspective of non-shattered people, wanting to go through the hell and horror that is our justice system could lead outsiders to believe shit's not going great for them to begin with.
If I had a nickel for every person who thinks they have an “original” app idea I’d be a millionaire. I’m skeptical there can be any novel tech in a chat tool someone spent $100k to build.
But let’s be generous here and assume his story is 100% true; his app was stolen and it is worth $1 billion dollars to the company.
Why waste time in a stupid legal battle when you could be selling your app to one of the 5,000 other airlines on earth that likely have the same need? Delta has just proven how useful it is based on the fact that they built it themselves!
I highly doubt Delta will be selling internal tech to competitors, so the market opportunity should still be there.
If the founders’ time is best spent in a lawsuit with a single potential customer instead of selling to other customers, I’d say that’s a sign it was never a viable business to begin with.
Sounds like he got "brain raped" (term from Silicon Valley show), where they get you into a meeting and coax you to explain all of your secret sauce and then build a parallel product.
It is clearly morally wrong, but is it illegal? Does someone here have a legal sense of this?
Reminds me of the classic HN post "Google tried to patent my work after a job interview" and the included top level comment by the developer of SpeakerBox explaining how they got the same treatment.[0] Google invited them for a meeting about integrating the tech to the Moto X, then after a technical explanation showed them out with a smarmy challenge that the 'race is on' and subsequently filed patents on similar technology.
Alternately he had an idea simultaneously with others having the same idea [1]. An obvious idea. It's entirely possible that his pitch and purported meetings had nothing to do with the eventual app. It's why many firms and creative groups have a strict "don't tell us your `ideas'" policy.
In this case his idea was "role-based" communication. He came up with this (2016) as Slack and other role-based solutions were storming across the market.
[1] - a common problem coupled with advancements in the field/technology often yield many people "inventing" the same thing simultaneously, because it's an obvious next step. It's why we're so negative of the countless useless "on a computer" patents, "on a network", etc.
> It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration.
> That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
That doesn't disprove that "two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something".
It's entirely possible, if not probable, that there was independent efforts to build out "role-based" communications. Some employee comes along and says "Look, I've already developed an app do you want to buy it?". They talk with him and decide that what he has built isn't worthwhile and move on. Suddenly he thinks he has intellectual ownership over the entire premise (hence the hilarious $1B claim).
It doesn't work like that. Indeed, stories like this are why many firms simply don't want to listen to any pitches, because people often have a pretty outsized notion about their "inventions".
Again, maybe they really did rip off his idea. Maybe in 2016 they really had no idea of broadening their communications approaches (or I guess narrowing in this case). His lawyers can demand the pertinent records and that's what a court case is for. But just seeing this reminds me why I'm very clear in a lot of situations that I don't want people's ideas/inventions, because in almost every case they've been considered but now the person thinks they invented it and have ownership over it.
Its also possible that after pitching it to them, Delta explored the competitive solutions for the same issue and bid it out to some other vendor, perhaps their dispatch software vendor or one who could integrate with that software.
I once was going to work for a friend's startup but we didn't see eye to eye on everything and decided to not work together. As a joke I said I would go work for the competition which ended with a 2 hour interview in a town an hour away with the competition. They offered me a job doing backend work however I wanted to develop frontend so I didn't take that job either. What interested me is that in a 2 hour interview I learned everything about my friend's competition's business model and future plans. I've never done it since but if someone wanted to know what another company is doing apply and ask a bunch of questions during the interview. Asking too many question during an interview isn't a thing.
>Asking too many question during an interview isn't a thing.
Not so sure about that. I recently interviewed where I asked something along the lines of, "So what would my daily responsibilities look like?" They refused to tell me what I would be doing day-to-day. No specifics on technologies, platforms, would I be helping internal/external groups, etc. Could not even get them to elaborate on specifics in the job posting itself.
I have a buddy who interviewed at a company in the Valley back in around 1998. They also refused to tell him what his daily responsibilities would be like. He said to himself, "I'm not going to waste my time parsing f'in Apache log files!", and turned them down.
That company? Google. He would've been employee # < 100, and comfortably retired in 10 years.
Now we're coming full-circle back to the start-up posted on HN the other day that was going to send "expert" applicants in to evangelize specific products and technologies in interviews.
I think people are generally way to over paranoid about this. In my field of quant finance this is particularly acute. People refuse to talk about even what markets they’re trading for fear that their competitors will steal their edge.
I’ve seen enough to know, that your secret sauce probably isn’t as secret as you think. Even in the ridiculously tight-lipped world of quant trading, it turns out that everyone’s mostly doing the same few basic ideas with not much more to distinguish than a few peripheral variations here and there.
In general execution ability, not having the best idea, tends to be the main driver of which teams win. If a third party does think your idea is brilliant, then stealing it from you is a pretty moronic way to capitalize on it. You’re creating a motivated competitor from day one who by definition has a lot more domain expertise.
It’s much simpler to just cut the guy a check for equity in the company.
Might be different for different fields: if a firm with initially lower domain expertise but greater development & implementation resources can get sufficient understanding of a good idea to generate a practical solution themselves, they might gamble that by the time the originator of the idea gets the funding and resources to be of any significance in the market, they will have achieved a runaway lead with their mimicked version.
I'm not sure anything is 'clear' in the situation.
He could have had some implementation of some kind of basic messaging functionality, which for any number of reasons they may have decided to implement themselves, which is pretty rational for a whole host of reasons.
If an employee is trying to sell a 'side project' to a Corp. they are acting effectively as a 3rd party and should expect to be treated as such.
If there was some material, core IP that was infringed upon, maybe there's an issue, but otherwise some kind of independent implementation is probably within bounds.
I can't speak to what extent there was 'carbon copy' of features, or even if that is lawful or what not.
Think of it like this: company ABC pitches their app to Airline. Airline decides to roll their own, and the feature base seems quite similar. That's pretty normal.
Trade secrets are that, but if you willingly disclose, that's on you.
I recall as story about a manufacturer, building a new plant. He took "reasonable security precautions" to protect its design, fences, guards while being built. A competitor hired a plane, flew over, took detailed photos. It was later ruled that the trade secrets were intact, thus could not be used.
It's possible the codebase was a patchwork of Bootstrap, PHP, Wordpress, and jQuery UI plugins that could buckle under a production load. It could have been a good idea poorly executed; we just don't know right now.
Even if it was a well built app, anyone that's built an app for an F500 company, knows the hoops you have to jump through for things like compliance.
There's a good chance the app did what it was supposed to just fine, but Delta couldn't sign on because it didn't have Reporting Requirements, SOC2 Compliant or a litany of other things that an Enterprise would require to sign on.
I'm willing to bet they did offer him some $$ for the App. He probably asked for $X. Delta countered with $Y.They couldn't come to an agreement so conversations ended and Delta built the same kind of app in-house. Then the guy sues them.
I work for a company that sells a SaaS product, it's not unlike many others, but we win sales based on how flexible / well we integrate with our customer's wonky systems.
What our application does is roughly the same as anyone else's ... but for many customers ease of integration with their systems is the make or break point.
This is a good point. I am currently consulting for a F100 healthcare company, and everything they do is driven by compliance. It's the first and last thing that gets talked about in almost every meeting.
> the codebase was a patchwork of Bootstrap, PHP, Wordpress, and jQuery UI plugins
So like most enterprisey software. You'd be amazed how much enterprise software has a customer of 1 and any bugs the end users have a workaround simply because they are a captive audience that had this steaming pile foisted on them.
I caught a glimpse of the app when an air stewardess sat down next to me on a Delta flight. We had a nice conversation and then she looked me up by seat number and congratulated me on my Delta track record. I believe you could also save notes on each passenger.
I thought that was both pretty cool and also interesting that they all had tons of data on any customer within a few clicks.
It's also possible that they took his idea seriously but not him seriously. They might have thought "this guy's idea is good but he's a pilot hacking some sloppy code together in his spare time, we'll go with a 'REAL' software firm so our pilot can focus on piloting." It may just be a matter of an employee convincing his employer of the need for the app and then getting outbid by a smooth talking enterprise salesman.
Is there any IP created because you generated a particular program / interface? Perhaps not the code itself but the end product? In the early stages of my career we were advised to never test out a competitors product for fears that we would inadventently copy something of theirs that was protected, but at my current company we compare our product to our competitors regularly. No risk there?
Going from the link to the outage in 2016 where " A widespread computer meltdown is at the heart of the problem" this smells of ransomware attack and the $100K "proprietary QrewLive communications platform" seems more like a multi-role backup and ERP solution than just a simple chat application that the article implies.
This is why design patents exist. If you think your design is special, get a design patent for it.
Boeing paid a lot of money over the years to use the design patent of engines in the back used on 727s. Personally, I thought the patent was ridiculous, but that's how the patent system works.
> He told the CEO that he had a solution for issues like that, which resulted in several meetings with executives who gave him verbal assurances that they were going to acquire his app.
Another great example of the lawyer's mantra: get it in handwriting!
> Even if it's true, so what? Is it illegal in America to borrow ideas?
In some cases, yes.
> It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay.
It’s more like the wet guy listening to your pitch, playing with the product to see how it works and then declining as he goes to make an identical one to avoid paying you.
The article talks about this huge problem...the genesis of his idea was this problem that 100s of people, in the airline industry, at Delta, all faced - including their technical teams, operations leadership, executives, etc. With all of those folks facing the same problem, it's not unexpected that some come with the same general solution. Practically speaking, whether it was the pilot or the technical team at Delta, anyone building a chat solution would be familiar with the same chat UIs; at some level, when have any of us used an app that had a truly unique design? Many would argue that the UX best practice is to use familiar elements, from popular apps, so not to have to re-educate the user.
That doesn't mean they didn't steal the app. However, in my experience, people with all sorts of ideas hit up executives at big companies all the time. That repetition is the basis for brand marketing. It's likely they were pitched a similar solution to that same problem both before and after that person met with their team.
Barring some egregious fraud, not mentioned in the article, or some major bad acting, it seems like a hard argument to make.