Play by Your Own Rules
I'm not saying Gowalla originally copied Foursquare, but this blog post got me wondering -What are some notable examples of a "copycat" startup actually overtaking the original "innovator" startup? Because I'm having trouble thinking of any off the top of my head. (And I'm not talking about cases like Facebook overtaking MySpace or Google overtaking Yahoo where a fundamentally different company overtook a long-dominant incumbent)Foursquare beat out Gowalla, Google+ never had a chance against Facebook, Groupon beat out Living Social, Pinterest beat out all its copycats, Square has managed to stay ahead of the competition, same with Dropbox, Evernote, Y Combinator, Airbnb, LinkedIn, etc. I could go on but you get my point.There seems to be a lesson in here somewhere...