How the Samwer Brothers Cloned Their Way to the Top
In 1998, Marc Samwer noticed something odd.
The German native was living in San Francisco with his brothers, Oliver and Alexander, when he discovered that nearly all of his coworkers were using an online auction site called eBay.
He hopped on the site and was amazed at how many auctions were going on—and how much eBay was earning on each transaction.
During a Christmas brainstorm, Marc convinced his brothers that the eBay model could work in their home country.
So they contacted eBay with a request for them to expand to Germany.
When they didn’t hear back from the eBay reps, they figured they could just build a similar site themselves, and a month later they launched Alando.
“We took it into our own hands and didn’t wait for the market to be founded,” Oliver said.
Some of the first items sold on the site were the Samwers’ childhood toys—a train set, roller skates, and some old coins.
But soon the site was the most successful of a dozen or so auction sites in Germany.
Three months after launching, eBay bought Alando for €35 million.
The Mental Kaleidoscope
Mark Twain once reflected, “There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.”
It’s tempting to think of innovation only as creating something out of thin air.
But often, the idea is already there; it just needs to be applied in a different environment.
As Twain put it, “We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.”
Many criticize the Samwers for what they consider as stealing the ideas of others and selling them back to the owners.
But it happens more than not, especially in the tech world. Salesforce was inspired by Siebel Systems, Netflix was based on Blockbuster, Facebook was inspired by MySpace, which was in turn inspired by Friendster.
In ‘Steal Like an Artist’, Austin Kleon said, “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing.”
Taking a successful product or service and making it viable elsewhere adds its own value, sometimes more than that of the original.
All it takes is turning the kaleidoscope in a new way.
As Einstein said, “Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.”
Cloning to the Top
After their successful eBay venture, the Samwer brothers used the same approach to produce clones of Groupon, Airbnb, and Pinterest among other companies.
Their startup incubator Rocket Internet has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zynga.
Today, each of the brothers’ net worth is over €1 billion.
