Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Pablo Picasso supposedly said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." It's probably the most useful business advice ever accidentally given by a painter.

Let me tell you what it actually means, because most people hear "steal" and picture a plagiarist. That's not it at all.

You don't have to invent everything

When you start a company, there's this romantic myth that you have to invent something nobody's ever seen. You don't. Almost nobody does. The smarter move is to look hard at what your competitors do well, take that, throw out everything they're bad at, and then, this is the important part, add your own twist and turn it into something genuinely new.

Copying is tracing someone else's painting. Stealing, the Picasso way, is absorbing everything good about it and making something better that's unmistakably yours.

Our first stack was a monster

Here's how I learned this the hard way. When we first started Hyppo, our stack was the single ugliest thing in existence. I'm talking 30-something different tools, all duct-taped together, hemorrhaging money in software subscriptions, breaking every five seconds. The back end was a horror show.

But that mess was secretly the best education I could have asked for. Running my actual company on all those competing tools meant I got to see exactly how each one behaved in the real world. This one breaks right here. That one doesn't even have an API, so we have to hack around it. This one nails the exact thing everyone needs, that one completely whiffs on it.

You cannot get that from a demo or a pricing page. I got it from living inside their products, at my own expense, every single day.

Then we built ours

By the time we built our own product, I had a stupidly deep understanding of the entire landscape. So I did the Picasso thing. I took everything those tools did well and built it in. I took everything they did badly and threw it in the trash, where, frankly, a lot of it belonged.

And then came the part that actually matters. Because I understood the whole space so deeply, and because I think hard about architecture, how the pieces should really fit together, I could connect the dots in a way nobody else had. I kept finding gaps, real problems not one of our competitors had solved, and we plugged them.

That's the line between a plagiarist and an artist. A plagiarist just copies and ships a worse version. An artist takes what works, adds a genuine twist, and fills the holes everyone else ignored. The twist is the whole game.

A funny little example

Here's one in miniature. I was at lunch with one of my mentors, Rich. The man is an AI genius. I never leave a conversation with him without learning something.

Fun fact: I stole the entire idea of writing these blog posts from him. And at that lunch he handed me another one. He told me that adding an audio recording to a blog post roughly doubles your views, and adding related posts at the bottom roughly triples your engagement.

So if you've noticed my posts now have an audio track you can listen to, that's exactly why. I straight-up stole it. And you know what? Rich loves it. Because good ideas are meant to spread, and the people who actually have them usually love watching them travel.

Why most tech startups die

Now here's the flip side, and it's the whole reason this matters. In my opinion, a huge number of tech startups fail for one dumb reason: they build in isolation. They lock themselves in a room, fall in love with their own cleverness, and build something nobody actually wants.

I get the temptation. I love digging into the weeds and solving hard technical problems as much as anyone alive. But brilliance aimed at a problem no one has is just an expensive hobby. You have to find out what the market actually wants first, and the fastest way to do that is to study the people already serving that market.

The 80 and the 20

There's a rule for this, and I always mangle the name, so I won't pretend to be sure what it's called. But the idea is dead on: the last 20% of anything is way harder than the first 80%.

The first 80% is the "copy" part, and it's honestly the easy, fun part. Go look at your competitors. Better yet, use their products. Figure out what they do well and take it.

The last 20% is the "steal" part, and it's where the real work lives. Now that you have what they do well, you have to improve it and plug the gaps they either botched or never bothered to address. That last stretch is hard, it's slow, and it's exactly the part that separates a real company from a clone. That, to me, is the entire job of a startup.

The whole thing in one line

Look at what your competitors do well. Steal it. Throw out what they're bad at. Then build your own thing to fill the gaps nobody else will touch.

Do that, honestly, and you'll do very well in life. It's working out pretty nicely for us over here. I'll go ahead and say it: I think we're the fastest-innovating company in our space, and we punch well above our weight. But that's a story for another article.

Want to actually out-build your competition?

That's the entire craft, and it's what we do at HyppoAI.

Build it right