On Monday the Samwer Brothers’ accelerator announced significant funding for Paymill, namely €10 million ($13 million) from regular Rocket investor Holtzbrinck Ventures and first-timer Sunstone Capital. The cash will go towards boosting Paymill’s technical platform and customer services.

As with Stripe, Paymill’s raison d’être is to give developers a simple, API-driven way to integrate payments into their sites without having to bear the responsibility of handling sensitive payment details.

However, there’s a pretty big difference, and one which should be familiar to observers of the Samwer Brothers’ standard methods: internationalization. Stripe is available in the U.S. and Canada. Paymill, which launched a mere five months ago, is available across 34 countries in Europe and elsewhere.

As has been the case particularly in the last year or so, Rocket’s cloning ways have proven highly lucrative in terms of investment. Barely a month goes by without the company or one of its many ‘startups’ slurping up tens of millions, with the most enthusiastic investors these days being JP Morgan and Sweden’s Kinnevik.

Indeed, so great is the momentum behind Rocket right now that there’s even a rumor of the company going public. That report is unconfirmed (I’m awaiting a response from Rocket, though not holding my breath) but it does seem remarkably detailed.

Of course, if Rocket does float, it won’t be the Paymill and Payleven stuff that’s high on investors’ priority lists: it will be the dozens of cloned e-commerce operations that Rocket is ramming into Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But, that said, there’s clearly plenty of cash flowing into those more technological plays, and there’s no reason to see that stopping anytime soon.

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Lamoda is of course a Russian version of Rocket’s Zalando, which is in turn a clone of Zappos. JP Morgan has already invested in Zalando (figure unknown) and the Brazilian version, Dafiti ($45m), and is fast becoming a serial Rocket backer. It will have a way to go before it matches Kinnevik though – they’ve put in over half a billion so far this year.

With the JP Morgan news, and with super-new Square clone Payleven having rolled out to Brazil, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK late last week, I think it’s time to address a rather important question.

Is cloning really so bad?

It’s not hard to find those who maintain it is. Witness Jason Calacanis’s rant in February, which justifiably championed originality and decried the Samwers for giving Germany a bad rep.

But it’s a subject I find more complex the more I think about it. Here are what I consider to be the main issues at play:

Territoriality

Let’s take Square as an example. Currently only available in the U.S., it has been cloned by Payleven, iZettle and others, all of which are targeting other markets.

Is this wrong? Should those other countries all have to wait for Square to get its act together and expand overseas?

Much as I love originality, I find it hard to see this as a clear-cut issue. A good idea is a good idea, and I personally don’t think ideas should be protected as intellectual property. That’s never how innovation has worked. Even Saint Steve sang the praises of “stealing great ideas”.

And it’s not as if every innovation coming out of the U.S. is guaranteed to make it overseas at all. After all, the U.S. is a huge market in itself.

Another thing to consider here: if you’re going to clone, it really matters where you do so. Rocket has largely (though not entirely) stayed clear of the U.S. up until now. It’s hard not to wonder how much of that is to do with the potential legal troubles they could face in the country where so many of their cloning ‘victims’ are based.

Speed of execution

It took Rocket a couple of years to clone Square. It took them less than a year to do the same to Stripe, which now has a copy in the form of Paymill.

It’s easier to come down on the cloner’s side when you’re looking at something like Lazada, Rocket’s Indonesian answer to Amazon. Amazon is hardly a fledgling, and it’s not available in Indonesia, so… duh. Someone did a clone there. Wouldn’t you?

But when the original company is barely teething, it all starts to look quite unfair. The Samwers’ MO is to roll out new business models at the speed of light, and there’s no way on this earth that a fresh startup can hope to compete on an international scale, no matter how bright their idea is.

That’s a real problem. The answer, if there is one, is for every startup that thinks it might get cloned to go international from the start. Easier said than done, I know, and it depends very much on the nature of the business. That said, Ifeelgoods chief Michael Amar wrote up some interesting suggestions on this topic for VentureBeat yesterday – it’s definitely worth a read.

Look and feel

Lazada may have some legitimacy in terms of timing, but boy does it look like Amazon. Again, that’s a problem.

There is no justification for making a clone look like the product it’s copying, unless that design is obvious and essential to functionality. Copying colour schemes and layout is not cool. And copying actual code from a rival is just plain stupid.

There are many reasons why that kind of copying is ill-advised. It betrays laziness, for one thing. It also sails close to actual ‘passing off’: trying to create the impression that you are, or are affiliated with, something you’re not. Also, copying code usually involves copyright infringement.

Everyone copies

How many startups copy? Almost all of them. Rare is the new company that’s built its idea from scratch, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all stand on the shoulders of our forebears.

Google wasn’t the first search engine: it was just much better than its predecessors. Same goes for Facebook and social networks, and Apple and smartphones. What those companies did, though, was to take a concept and innovate on top of it.

There is nothing stopping clones from being creative after their birth, if they want to be. Whether they do or not is another question, and one that ultimately comes down to the character of the cloners.

In short, cloning is a big gray area. If you believe ethics are fundamental to business, it’s clearly going to be off-limits, but if you are more flexible on such things, it’s difficult to deny the attraction.

And if you, like me, get queasy at the thought of ripping anyone off, then consider this: effectively stopping this sort of behaviour would require a globally enforceable intellectual property regime that protects ideas. That’s not going to happen. But, even if it were practical, would you really want it?

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Rumors had been brewing for a few days, but on Friday the Turkish site Webrazzi reported that Rocket was closing down its Istanbul offices, laying off hundreds of workers and looking to close or sell off its Turkish sites. That was followed by several other reports quoting Rocket execs that confirmed the move.

I’ve asked Rocket for direct confirmation but, perhaps unsurprisingly, have not yet heard back. For the record, those properties — still listed on Rocket’s corporate site — are Eleseri (jewellery), Evimister (homewares), Sporena (sports apparel), Zidaya (clothing), and a local branch of the Westwing home and living shopping club.

But wait: Turkey is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, so why is Rocket withdrawing?

According to a source quoted by Venture Village, the margins were just too low. If that’s the case, Rocket clearly doesn’t hang around when it comes to evaluating a likely failure — GoDaddy’s records suggest the domain for Zadaya, a Turkish equivalent to Rocket’s hugely successful Zalando, was only registered this February.

Then again, the Samwers’ operations tend to have a reputation for almost capricious hiring and firing. For recent evidence, I’d recommend reading a blog post written by a disgruntled employee in the Philippines last week (warning: contains the phrase “everything was like a Hitler-decision”, which is unlikely to go down well with German employers) .

Whatever the reason for Rocket sailing off into the sunset, it represents something of a blow for the Samwers’ reputation as kings of internationalization – it seems they can’t do it all, after all.

Maybe that’s why Rocket has joined hands with Millicom for its expansion into Latin America and Africa: if they’re going to set up as quickly as possible, as is the Samwer way, they now see the benefit of teaming up with someone that has the local knowledge they lack.

Still, it’s not all bad news for Rocket. When they do it right, they really do it right. Just look at JP Morgan’s investment in Zalando yesterday – Rocket’s successes are now attracting the attention of the biggest names in the business.

And that, after all, is the game Rocket’s playing with its myriad clones. Set up quickly, cut your losses quickly, focus on the wins. Rake in the millions. And repeat.

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It’s the third of the Samwer brothers’ payment service clones – BillPay already copies BillMeLater and PayLeven apes Square. Like those others, Paymill hews closely to its source material – for instance, Stripe offers developers a simple RESTful API for quickly integrating payment functionality without the hassle of handling card details, and so does Paymill.

Several German online stores have already implemented Paymill, namely DieJeans.de, Tailory.com, Flakegolf.de and mywineportal.com.

Stripe takes a 2.9 percent cut, plus 30 U.S. cents, per transaction. Paymill takes 2.95 percent and 28 euro cents, or 35 U.S. cents. So the Rocket option is a bit pricier – but, then again, it’s available outside the U.S., which Stripe is not. Right now, Paymill is a Germany-only affair, but the likelihood of it staying that way for long is roughly equivalent to that of the Beatles reforming – the homepage is in German, but the documentation is auf Englisch.

I doubt it will be long before we see Paymill raise serious funding, and I’ll stick my neck out and say the cash will come from regular Samwer investors Kinnevik and/or Holtzbrinck Ventures.

Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison had better get a move on with their international expansion.

In their favour, it must be noted that Rocket is yet to create a palpable success in the payments field – their many triumphs have mostly been in straight-ahead e-commerce. On the other hand, when they do figure out how to execute on an idea, they do it fast and comprehensively. Nobody on this planet internationalizes as aggressively as Rocket does.

Emerging markets

Speaking of which, Rocket had a second major announcement on Tuesday: the signing of a deal between it and the mobile operator Millicom, which offers services in Africa and Latin America.

As with all clever carriers, Millicom is big into the diversification game right now, and its deal with the Samwers certainly gives it that. The two outfits are going to “jointly develop franchises in the online sector in Latin America and Africa”. Millicom will have the option over the next four years to gradually buy up controlling stakes in Rocket’s Latin America Internet Holding and Africa Internet Holding subsidiaries.

The two holding companies control eight operating businesses now, and are “required to launch a number of new businesses in Latin America and Africa over the next three years”, according to the statement. Millicom gets 20 percent of both companies when the deal closes, and is expected to up that to 50 percent within two years (the first instalment of €85m will head Rocket’s way in the fourth quarter of this year).

As usual, this is a story of the German company pushing into markets that are largely ignored by the Americans. As Millicom chief Mikael Grahne put it:

“Rocket Internet has a proven track record of rapidly developing successful operations in the online and e-commerce sectors. Millicom has a strong know-how of operating in the fast-moving consumer goods industry in Latin America and Africa… We believe that online services in emerging markets have the potential to go beyond the convenience they successfully brought in developed markets.”

And yes, the two holding companies are working on Rocket’s payments services. Payleven, the Square clone, is already listed as being operational in Brazil.

Will Paymill be close behind? Maybe, maybe not.

Stripe and Paymill make the most sense for new sites that aren’t already plugged into a more complex payments system, and the emerging markets are, by nature, fertile ground for this. Then again, these services will thrive best in a credit-card culture. What makes sense in the U.S. market may not actually be primed for internationalization just yet.

As I’ve said before and will doubtless say again, Rocket is yet to prove itself when it comes to anything other than straight e-commerce. But that doesn’t mean it’s not trying. If there really is an international market for this stuff, the Samwers will probably be the first to nail it.

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Rocket Internet, Team Europe and the Otto Group are duking it out in South-East Asia, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere. But moves into the U.S. market have been tentative at best.

Berlin-based Delivery Hero is an online food-ordering service that came out of Team Europe’s incubator. In less than two years, it’s rolled out to almost a dozen countries, from Australia to Mexico. Earlier this year it was talking 84 percent growth in one quarter.

We talked with Delivery Hero CEO Fabian Siegel about internationalization…

Meyer: Last time we checked, Delivery Hero was growing pretty fast…

Siegel: ”It’s built up much faster than any of us thought. We started the business with a focus on building a German market leader, and it really worked, so we doubled down on it. People have been doing [online food-ordering] for 12 years and it was too early, or too complicated, or the market was too small. But it’s a big market and it’s happening today. In the markets where we operate, 80 percent of people order food over the phone – the channel switch is just starting now. In three to five years, it will all be online.”

Are there cultural differences between markets that you have to take into account?

“We do see cultural differences in terms of where people order food and what they order. In general, people who have an elaborate food culture don’t tend to order so much food, such as Italy and France. It’s not whether online ordering is different, it’s whether food ordering is different. The U.S. is the country that has the biggest proportion of people ordering online.”

So are you planning to go into the U.S. market?

“It’s a very bold play. You have three players there – LivingSocial, Seamless and GrubHub – and right now we see we can deploy our capital more efficiently elsewhere. We see ourselves competing with Just-Eat – we only overlap with them in the UK and Switzerland. In the UK, we’re growing rapidly. We bought HungryHouse.co.uk when it had 3,000 restaurants. Now they have 7,000. What took them three years to build took us six months to double.”

What’s the key to getting restaurants on board more quickly than your rivals can?

“We’re doing it over the phone. You can call more people than try to meet them.”

Do companies such as yours try to get restaurants into exclusive arrangements?

“People sometimes try it, but we don’t think it’s OK for the restaurant. Restaurants hate it; they feel like you’re trying to force them into something.

“It’s a land grab. It’s about being faster and able to raise a lot of capital quickly. In each market, we’re either number one or two – in Sweden, Finland, Austria and Poland we’re dominant, and in other markets like Germany and the UK we’re strong number two. Other markets are too early.”

I’m getting a strong sense these days that, particularly in e-commerce, certain German companies are becoming very expansionist. Rocket Internet, for sure; Team Europe; Delivery Hero… is that the case?

“We’re in the second or third generation of internet startups here. The Samwers started Alando first only in Germany. You’d always start with one country, and when you’re done there, you want new challenges. The new startups are immediately global.

“Berlin has built an infrastructure of massive customisation. It’s not just Rocket etc – Fab.com and Airbnb use Berlin as their hub for a global rollout. There’s a uniqueness the city has to offer in terms of talent and close communication, and you have the experience. People here have already launched in South-East Asia; they can do it with another business model.

“You don’t see another hub in the world where this is being done repeatedly. It’s great for us to hire people from Rocket or Zalando who’ve done it before. You don’t see that in any other European capital, or in the U.S. – the U.S. is a huge market, so why take the risk [of international expansion]?”

So, in e-commerce, is it shaping up to be about the U.S. market and the non-U.S. market, with companies such as yours opting for the latter?

“We have opportunities in the U.S., but there’s already three big players. There are so many markets where the only competitors are local players with no access to capital.

“For U.S. companies, why bother getting distracted by something outside the U.S.? They leave the rest of the world open, and naturally companies take it. Most of them happen to be Berlin-based companies. This is primarily for e-commerce companies – I mean, look at SoundCloud.”

You returned a couple of years ago from an eight-year stint in the U.S. How does the difference strike you?

“When I left in 2002, there was no Berlin scene. There were more startups in other cities in Germany, and there was no European hub for startups. Eight years later, Berlin is the hub for Germany and on a European scale it’s one of the – if not the – places people start up. Again, look at SoundCloud. It’s the combination of cheap cost of living, and a city that feels like Brooklyn a big – it’s not so dense.

“You can attract talent from around the world that come here with no big risk. It’s very well-connected from a travel perspective – all these budget airlines really help the European startup scene. You have capital based in London, talent from Eastern Europe, and at some point you get this critical mass of people working with the industry. For that I’d give Rocket a lot of credit – these guys created the talent pool. 15,000 employees – they trained these people how to build web companies. It wasn’t there when I left.”

That said, is there a risk of a Berlin hype bubble?

“I don’t see a bubble here. Access to capital is still very restricted here, which reduces the risk of a bubble. You don’t have a real angel network. The problem here is that people can come up with the first €50k, then there’s this funding gap. I don’t know when we might get there, because we don’t have the exits here.

“There’s no true venture capital in Europe – VC involves taking risks. In the U.S., VC firms are investing into tech teams – here they’re only investing in e-commerce because they think they understand it.

“Incubators fill the gap here. In the U.S. they don’t need that, because they have enough capital. That’s the biggest difference I’ve seen – here you have institutionalised entrepreneurship, incubators, whereas in the U.S. you just have entrepreneurship. Delivery Hero was built out of Team Europe. It was a luxury, in that you can just focus on building the business.”

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On June 22, the U.S. site informed its users that it was “going on maternity leave”, and had therefore suspended everyone’s subscriptions. Then, on July 6 there was another message, apologizing for delays in sending customers their boxes and blaming the delays on “a logistics issue that was followed by the holiday”.

Cue howls of outrage, including several people complaining about being sent the wrong box, and about Petitebox not responding to customer service requests. The name of key U.S. competitor Citrus Lane was invoked approvingly more than once.

Fast forward to today, and it seems the German version of Petitebox has also gone AWOL, only this time calling it a “summer break.”

But what’s that scrabbling I hear?

Is it the site coming back to life under a different name, after infuriating many of its previous customers? Apparently so.

According to comments made by the Petitebox team on that recent Facebook thread, the service is going to come back – sort of – as a sub-brand of Glossybox, Rocket’s cosmetics subscription service.

It’s not clear whether Glossybox Baby, as it will be called, will be a Germany-only play or whether it will also roll out in the U.S. It looks set to be a slightly different model – rather than being a monthly subscription, it will involve the sale of individual gift boxes that correspond to the stages of pregnancy, childbirth and baby shower, according to reports.

There’s possibly a lesson to be learned there about the limits of subscription services, but there seems to be an even bigger lesson about the limits of Rocket’s logistics.

After all, developing web services that connect people to physical products is meant to be Rocket’s field of expertise — the basis of so many of their clone operations. And Petitebox was one of the company’s few businesses trying to make inroads into the U.S. market, alongside 21Diamonds, DropGifts, Glossybox and Wimdu.

Although I suspect their real push into the American market is yet to come, this shows that there are cracks in the strategies of the formidable Samwer brothers: if Glossybox Baby does make it to the U.S., it will look a bit like a name-change designed purely to gloss over a poor first impression.

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A significant chunk of that fund comes from Germany’s Otto Group, the largest mail-order company in the world. Otto itself is playing coy, saying only that it’s “a double-digit million sum”, but Der Spiegel has the figure at $20m.

Despite the slowdown in Brazil’s economic growth – the government lowered its GDP growth forecast for the year from 4.5 percent to 3 percent a few days ago – it still makes complete sense for Otto to be targeting Brazil’s burgeoning startups.

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, as Otto spokesman Robert Haegelen told me, the Brazilian boom of the last few years has expanded the middle-income class, but the country is still in the process of adapting to shopping over the internet – plenty of growth still to be had there.

Secondly, as of earlier this year, Otto is already deep into Brazil, much the same as it is with the developing Russian, Chinese and Indian markets.

Growing ambitions

Indeed, when Otto released its latest results a month ago, it noted that its annual Russian revenues had reached €487m ($590m) and said it hoped to beat that figure in Brazil within five years. Otto has all three of its main businesses running in the Brazilian market – namely multichannel retail (mainly fashion), services (helping retailers become e-tailers) and financial services (Otto’s EOS operation).

“Brazil is a strategically important market for us,” Haegelen said. “Our aim to see what is happening in the e-commerce market, to be really up to date with the evolving models in order to be able to adapt our own business, and of course e.Ventures is aiming to make exits if they are profitable.”

Other German companies, such as Axel Springer’s KaufDa, are also targeting the Brazilian market.

e big one there is, of course, Rocket Internet. Haegelen downplayed any idea that there was a “one-to-one competition” between Rocket and Otto in Brazil, but conceded that the country did provide an extra battleground for the two teutonic outfits.

That battle will be fought for the Brazilian online fashion market, at least in part. Rocket’s big play there is Dafiti, while Otto barged its way in back in May by forming a joint venture with Brazil’s Posthaus. Rocket also has financial services ambitions, providing another opportunity for the two German outfits to square up to one another in São Paulo and Rio.

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But now the Samwer Brothers have taken all the fun out of such hunts. A revamp of the Rocket website (and logo) has just gone live, openly and helpfully displaying the full roster of their 59 companies, and listing more than 40 countries in which they operate. They’re even in Burma.

Even considering that many of the firms are very similar, that’s a huge jump in names, compared to the 38 we were able to identify in April. It’s also a significant drop in countries, although that may be a matter of where you count — for example, several countries where the Airbnb clone Wimdu operates are not on Rocket’s list.

Rocket’s rapid expansion comes as no surprise, for two reasons. Firstly, the copycat incubator’s modus operandi is to establish a base in a country, then keep using it to roll out new business ‘ideas’. Secondly, Rocket is pulling in investment like there’s no tomorrow. Even the relatively staid likes of Deutsche Telekom are sending money the Samwers’ way.

Speaking of investors, the new site confirms Kinnevik as Rocket’s BFF and neatly sets out 13 of the company’s “selected exits”. It also lists an astounding 28 offices around the world. And, if you’ve been looking for a mugshot gallery of all the MBAs Rocket puts in charge of its operations, eat your heart out.

From a journalist’s perspective, kudos to Rocket for doing this. But what does it mean?

The Samwers seem to be doing two things here. Firstly, they’re showing off — and why not, when you have a portfolio like that? Secondly, they’re rebranding themselves, maybe trying to move on from their frankly tarnished image. Notice how the new site is all in English. Unless I’m missing something, there isn’t even an option to read it in German.

This is Rocket showing how far it’s come and how global it is, perhaps even how powerful it is. But for which audience? Are we getting nearer to that inevitable U.S. push? It’s hard not to get the feeling that something big is in the works.

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The Samwer brothers have done it again. They’ve just become shareholders in the U.S. carer-finding site Care.com, by selling it their own version of the same concept, Betreut.

Care.com – which lets people find carers for children, elderly people, pets and others – was founded in 2006 and Betreut the following year.

We know the pattern by now: this latest win for the Samwers’ Rocket Internet – notorious for mimicking U.S. sector leaders by starting local European equivalents – follows earlier successes along similar lines, namely the sales of Alando to eBay and CityDeals to Groupon.

There are no public figures for the value of the deal, but the Samwers were majority shareholders in Betreut, with others including Mutschler Ventures and regular Rocket sidekick Holtzbrinck Ventures. A Care.com spokeswoman said that all existing investors in Betreut are now investors in Care.com, and that the Samwers do not have a majority stake in the new venture.

Care.com founder Sheila Lirio Marcelo says in a statement:

“We have always believed that care is a global issue. By bringing together Betreut and its extensive international operations with Care.com, our leadership position in the U.S., and our new operations in the U.K. and Canada, we are creating a dynamic portal for families around the world that provides best-in-class services to help families find the local care they need.

Betreut has operations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia. According to the company’s spokesperson, the name will stay the same in the three German-speaking countries, but it may change to ‘Care.com’ in the others.

In terms of scale, Care.com was obviously the bigger operation but Betreut was no slouch either, adding two million families and providers to Care.com’s five.

Betreut’s current co-CEOs, Steffen Zoller and Manuel Nothelfer, will “continue to manage the organisation”, according to the statement.

“By blending Betreut’s European expertise with Care.com’s U.S. expertise we hope to become even more adept at speaking to each market’s care challenges and providing a solution for care beyond boundaries,” Zoller said.

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While pulling out may look like a signal, it doesn’t seem that Fashion For Home is a failure. Indeed, it was one of the few Rocket ventures that was active in the U.S. market, and the sale of shares to Holtzbrinck Ventures and new investor Acton Capital was announced along with a new “lower double-digit millions” funding round for the site.

So why pull out?

Fashion For Home is a designer furniture company. So, to some extent, was Bamarang, the Fab.com clone that Rocket culled last month. Ironically, Ollie Samwer’s infamous ‘Blitzkrieg’ email from December highlighted furniture retail as one of the few e-commerce areas worth focusing on.

So what does Rocket still have in the way of furniture retailers? Lots.

Most relevantly, there’s Home24, which reportedly got major new financing in May (hello again, Rocket regulars Holtzbrinck and Kinnevik). Then we have Westwing/Dalani/Heaven and Home – the same store with different names for different territories – which, like Bamarang, is mainly a flash sale operation, but one that often deals in furniture (and is yet again financed with the assistance of Holtzbrinck and Kinnevik). Also don’t forget Mobly, Rocket’s Brazilian furniture venture.

While a big portfolio is impressive in its own way, redundancy makes little sense. In the cases of both Fashions For Home and Bamarang, Rocket’s withdrawal came in the context of having potentially stronger alternatives to concentrate on instead.

This approach stands in sharp contrast to some other Rocket plays, such as Pinterest copycat Pinspire that are not so much about e-commerce and more about chasing and ripping off the latest fad. That particular experiment is reportedly failing, raising the question of how good Rocket is at doing stuff that falls outside of its core competencies.

I’m talking about businesses that can’t simply be tacked onto Rocket’s international distribution network, which works so well for straight e-commerce. Yes, in the past it’s done well with CityDeal, but how much of that was to do with selling it to clonee Groupon within half a year of launch? There is also eDarling, but that business has also benefited from a partnership with the site it copied, eHarmony.

In other words, let’s see how plays such as Square clone Payleven pan out. In that kind of territory, the Samwers are yet to prove themselves.

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