The Dupe Era of Software
Also: Game over for Apple's 30% landlord tax (for now), Epic games celebrates. Qwen launches a reasoning model lightweight enough to run on laptops, OpenAI rolls back a model for "over-glazing"
The dupe era of software is here.
With every startup funding announcement comes a flurry of open source clones (read: almost free, certainly cheaper) within the next 72 hours.
It feels like..
1️⃣ Well funded startups validate market demand.
2️⃣ Independent teams go in with a fast-follower strategy at half the price and cost.
If great artists steal....
Today, we have many great artists.
It makes me wonder - will there be a trend towards “build in private” as a counter to the “build in public” movement?
“Build in public” creates general momentum and visibility – and most VCs love “hype” around a product.
But “build in private” means startups can quickly gobble up market share through lean alignment with their target customers.
As an investor, I hear from several founders that “time to market” is their arb, and not the tech. Which means it’s more of a bet on product stickiness and mindshare.
That requires knowing your customers well. And less throwing spaghetti against the wall.
Is it better to be first mover or fast follower?
Caveat: i generally think startup advice is a little like parenting advice, i.e. it could be useful, but it’s entirely dependent on your kid. So take it with a pinch of salt!
In my work at Strange, we invest in inventors - so we run into the “dupe dilemma” less frequently, as the founders we back are typically deep specialists in what they do (read: a relatively small number of people in the world can do what they do). But I find this dilemma interesting to consider!
Have a great weekend.
-ttyl
It’s game over (for now) for the Apple tax as US court rules publishers can freely link to off-store payments. Previously, Apple would take a 30% commission from app revenues. As a celebration, long-time critic of the Apple app tax Epic Games announced that developers on the Epic Games Store will pay 0 % revenue share on their first $1 M per game each year, in their bid to incentivize game publishers to choose Epic checkout instead. Epic Games has had a long-standing battle with Apple - who profited massively by taking a 30% landlord fee from the successes of games like Fortnite, which reportedly makes about $5B a year from its 110M monthly active users.
Meta announced a partnership with Cerebras Systems to power its new Llama API, offering developers access to inference speeds up to 18 times faster than traditional GPU-based solutions. The speed enables entirely new categories of applications that were previously impractical, including real-time agents, conversational low-latency voice systems, interactive code generation, and instant multi-step reasoning. all of which require chaining multiple large language model calls that can now be completed in seconds rather than minutes.
Anthropic-backed Goodfire raises $50 million to access AI’s ‘Internal Thoughts’: Goodfire raised $50 million in a Series A funding round to support its efforts to help enterprises understand and design AI models. “Nobody understands the mechanisms by which AI models fail, so no one knows how to fix them,” Goodfire Co-founder and CEO Eric Ho said in the release.
Perplexity’s CEO on fighting Google and the coming AI browser war: Perplexity Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones. At the same time, the CEO is refocusing his startup on what he predicts will be the next battleground in the AI race: your web browser. Perplexity plans to release its own browser called Comet next month.
Qwen’s 2.5-Omni-3B model that runs on consumer PCs and laptops:Just days after releasing its new, state-of-the-art open source Qwen3 large reasoning model family, Alibaba’s Qwen team released Qwen2.5-Omni-3B, a lightweight version of its preceding multimodal model architecture designed to run on consumer-grade hardware.
OpenAI rolled back a GPT-4o update after users complained of it “over-glazing”, i.e. being way too bootlick-y in its interactions.
Xiaomi’s fully automated factory produces one smartphone every second, operates round the clock, requires no production workers, and runs entirely in the dark.
Lightspeed, A16z, and Sequoia are moving away from the typical VC model, and looking more like private equity.