”It doesn’t matter if they copy us yesterday, because we are doing something different today.” - Maya Horgan Famodu

”It doesn’t matter if they copy us yesterday, because we are doing something different today.” - Maya Horgan Famodu

Maya Horgan Famodu, founder of Ingressive Capital, a venture capital firm in Nigeria while talking about copy cats in the VC industry said, “ideas are one thing and execution is another thing”. 

With a lot of people trying to get business ideas and innovation, the stealing of ideas are inevitable. But then, ideas are not what makes a business awesome, it takes experience, learning and executing to actually build the real deal and neither comes easy.

According to her, why a Y-Combinator, Founder Group and a lot of other investment firms write out their entire investment processes, publicly share their investment decks and other documents that do not infringe on the company’s privacy is because they are the source.

It is not about the information being shared, it is rather about their abilities to execute, the decision process and more, which of course can not be stolen.

Maya said that even if someone had to sit with her for an hour, take all her ideas which is not that complex or big of a deal because someone must have thought of it before and someone will think about it again, she is the secret source.

Her team, their expertise, mode of operation and personal experiences are not dispensable. 

So while someone else is trying to build off those ideas, they still can’t compete because the team keeps learning, growing and acquiring more information, that it does not matter who replicated those from before.

While giving an advice on the topic, Maya said, “you are the source, even if you were dropped somewhere new and had to start all over again, the way that you operate is the secret source.