He touches on that when he goes into his background. He worked on a project in the mid 90s that was duplicated by a competitor and sold to Yahoo.

"I then moved to Sun Micro-Electronics (SME) and that’s where I learned one of my most valuable lessons. I began to build and ship the first HTTP-based (yes, this was a thing back then) stock ticker and called it DigitalTrader in 1996 (http://goo.gl/dQzPTC) It was built in Tcl/Tk and Java/Tk. It auto-updated itself and crawled Quote.com and Yahoo for data. Six months later a competitor duplicated it and Yahoo bought them and put us out of business overnight. Lesson learned: realize when you are doing something that is easily duplicated. "

This is something else. A ticker tape is a niche product (not what I would call "generic"). Also, the lesson learned is about something which is easily duplicated, and this does not have to apply (in general) to a generic product.