How Three Brothers Made Billions by Shamelessly Copying Ideas
And it worked every time
Some people build rockets. Others build empires. These guys?
They built clones.
Back in 1999, three German brothers, Marc, Oliver, and Alexander Samwer, looked at eBay blowing up in the U.S. and thought, “Well, we can do that. But, you know, German.”
So they spun up a copycat site called Alando. Fast.
100 days later — yes, days, not months — they sold it to eBay for $53 million.
That wasn’t just a lucky break. It was the birth of their entire playbook.
The Copy-Paste Empire
Here’s how it worked:
Find a hot U.S. startup.
Copy it — fast.
Launch it in Europe.
Sell it to the original company (or take it public before anyone sues).
And repeat.
They cloned Airbnb (called it Wimdu).
They cloned Groupon (called it CityDeal — which Groupon later bought).
They kept doing this. A lot. Like, dozens of times. Their Berlin-based company called Rocket Internet is all about this strategy.
Their most famous company is the Berlin-based online shopping marketplace Zalando.
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The Wildest Part
The original companies (like eBay, Groupon, or Airbnb) weren’t even mad. They were… grateful.
Turns out, the Samwer brothers were basically doing their international expansion for them. Something that usually takes a while, costs a ton of money, and needs specific expertise and knowledge of the target market.
The three brothers got all that done.
They built the infrastructure, validated the market, got local users — and then the U.S. companies swooped in and acquired the whole thing like a pre-assembled IKEA startup.
Win-win.
The Bottom Line
Today, each of the brothers is worth over $1 billion. They never “invented” anything.
It’s all come from legally “borrowing” other people’s ideas — at scale. Was it shady? Maybe. Was it genius? Absolutely.
Few people create something new. Most just copy.
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Awesome read! As wise King Solomon said (when he was still wise) - “There is nothing new under the sun.......Is there anything of which one may say, ‘Look at this - it is new?’” (Ecclesiastes 1:9,10)
these guys are machines. We competed against them at one of the companies I worked at.