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A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern's weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be replicated in a few days, I t
by yellow_lead 5y ago
A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern's weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be replicated in a few days, I think this open source project is the least of their worries.
- Ocha 5y ago100% agree. If this threatened them, it means they are not doing well.
- threatofrain 5y agoOr it may simply reflect the personal style and values of the CEO Amjad Masad notwithstanding their company position.
- heavyset_go 5y agoOr both.
- le-mark 5y agoClearly their investors should have funded the intern!
- threatofrain 5y agoThat's part of why someone is a threat to your moat. You don't assume that a good rival effort will go unnoticed by investors and customers.
- whymauri 5y agoThey offered to hire him before insinuating he was a bad/demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to make the intern feel bad. This isn't the first time I've seen a founder resort to this exact type of behavior before threatening legal action.
- archibaldJ 5y agoI would play devil's advocate here and say that the situation is probably muddier than it is presented in the blog. Also there appers to be a level of trust here (at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which though is the most entertaining path it can take) Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
- debacle 5y agoTalent or not, having the passion to put together a crazy project like this that has no real practical use but is very interesting - I would want to hire that person over someone with a bit more skill.
- archibaldJ 5y ago> that has no real practical use Well this can be developed into a great replit competitor
- opnitro 5y agoI don't think this is true. As the author notes, he doesn't have any ability to scale due to simplistic design decisions he made. As the author notes, the hard part of this business is not "write a webserver that takes a program from a user and runs it"
- dsr_ 5y agoIndeed, a great deal of current security work is on the problem of not running other people's code.
- opnitro 5y agoYeah, the entire premise of this kind of company is asking strangers to give you arbitrary code and then running it. I imagine there ares some important design decisions there that are not trivial to replicate. At it seems the author made _no_ attempt to replicate them, as he said anyone could knock his server over easily w/ a fork bomb.
- risyachka 5y agoIt's kinda funny how their CEO writes on Twitter all the time that they are the best company in the world, with the best product, do most innovations in tech etc and 10 minutes later he is threatened by a small open-source project that wasn't even created to compete.
- pcmaffey 5y agoHe blocked me on Twitter for pointing out something (technical) he said was wrong, and then he deleted his tweet. Told me everything I need to know about that guy.
- teddyh 5y agoLink to your tweet, please?
- pcmaffey 5y agohttps://twitter.com/pcmaffey/status/1117437322927247360 https://twitter.com/pcmaffey/status/1117437322927247360
- Jorengarenar 5y agoWhat were you responding to?
- pcmaffey 5y agoI don't really remember the context. This was 2+ years ago. He was trying to compare some search results on twitter vs google, when using exact match with one query but not the other.
- advanced-DnD 5y agoHe's deleting a lot of tweets as we speak.. I think he got famous
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- TAForObvReasons 5y agoThey were funded by YCombinator. Should we expect other YC companies to go after open source projects?
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoI would love to know how YC does their DD because it seems like it’s the most shallow and uninformed, meme-driven process.
- lapp0 5y agoIt appears there's at least a little nepotism and/or incompetence at play, considering crap like Dreamworld got YC'd https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickstarter-fiasco/ https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
- toyg 5y agoTbh, YC is not a public taxpayer-funded institution: they are free to fund whomever they like, be it nephews, spouses, or relatives.
- lapp0 5y agoOf course, but they're liable to damage their reputation as a VC firm if they continue funding garbage without vetting it at all, just cause someone's techbro buddy asked nicely for YC's backing.
- moogly 5y agoAnd we're free to call it for what it is: nepotism
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mfer 5y agoVC funded companies aren't some tech billionaire funding a cool new project. VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
- MattGaiser 5y ago> VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return. Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend project built in a few days, it means that a serious competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks. The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants crawling in front, your store has larger issues.
- ben0x539 5y agoIt doesn't have to be surprising to be entertaining!
- mcguire 5y agoOut of curiosity, how hard is "very hard"?
- throwaway744678 5y agoIt sits next to the midpoint between "hard" and "very, very hard"
- shkkmo 5y agoIt's a midpoint only on a logarithmic scale.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago"People try very hard to protect that investment and that's why gangsters tracked down where you live and broke your legs" If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not gice them a free pass to act immorally.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wolpoli 5y agoThe CEO is actually worried that this weekend project will make it hard for replit to raise fundings from investors because it makes it look like there is no moat to hosting hundreds of programming languages. The investors don't know that the code here doesn't scale.
- mypalmike 5y agoAlso, there is no moat. As far as I know, there are no major protected intellectual properties, technical or business learning curves, regulatory hurdles, intensive capitalization requirements, economies of scale... I suppose there may be some amount of network effect, but not so much that it's hard to imagine a competitor struggling to overcome it.
- wolpoli 5y agoYou are right. Other than the brand name recognition and the existing business relationships, I can't think of anything that would be tough for a funded competitor to replicate.
- zmmmmm 5y agoDoesn't seem to stop a lot of products when they target B2B or enterprise for whom the value proposition is actually the marketing, support, layers of regulatory compliance etc that they add. LastPass is an example. Whether Replit is doing that I don't know, but its a real model. Not, however one that is vulnerable to weekend projects.
- brabel 5y agoAgreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing... whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it... and while everyone is pretending they would never be afraid of an intern stealing their business, I doubt many of them saying that have been through this experience and know how it feels like running a business and trying to stay on top of all the scams and bullshit that will get in your way, including from previous "allies" like ex-employees who think can do better. Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there. This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge , I would be totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that. Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it's open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)! If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all means go ahead and act reckless, but you'll need to come up with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that's business as usual in the corporate world.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoOf course he's naive. He's just out of college, would you have been more savvy at that age?
- anticristi 5y agoGosh, I wish I received 20 million in funding for that idea that needed three days to be technically replicated by an intern. My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as "WTF" in court. Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not "due diligence". Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do. The world would move on and be a better place for everyone, except unprepared CEOs.
- Buttons840 5y agoHow long would it take an intern to replicate Twitter? Is Twitter worth millions? I think so. I think it's really easy for tech teams to do things in a sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems of their own making and start to think they're doing really great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage for the company. More companies need to face the fact that their software can be easily replicated and that the value lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can't replicate in a weekend.
- MikeDelta 5y agoReplit is crushing it on reputation at the moment.
- ipaddr 5y agoCreating a facebook clone has been done by many and some like vk have achieved regional success but they are in that unique position because of brand. Facebook started to be used as a word I'll facebook you meant I will write you. That is similiar to I'll google that means to search for something. Facebook playbook for market rise is legendary. The limited rollout, the college based communities based on your edu email created this campus privacy and campus group. Starting off with the ivy league schools and slowly working into other schools created this demand as people talked. By the time facebook opened to the general public they had such a buzz. When they rolled out to this group they included one killer feature.. they allowed you to give your hotmail email/password and they would get a list of your contacts from your email and invite them to facebook. That brought in your aunt, brother, old friends to facebook. That created a network effect. Throw in the whatapps story and instagram story and an election/congressional hearings and you have facebook today. The code part seems so minor. Retracing their steps is impossible. The path to facebook killer is a huge challenge to think that could only be done in a weekend is crazy.
- cryptica 5y agoThe whole startup space is disgusting. There are a bunch of lucky founders 'chosen ones' who get a ton of VC funding; as soon as they accept VC funding, users 'magically' start pouring in (cabal/manipulation?), which attracts more funding... Then some megacorp acquires the startup for millions of dollars. Easy peasy. Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they're entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially selected spoiled brats with rich daddies/friends enriching themselves by destroying society.
- mitko 5y agoI wouldn't underestimate the potential of that project. I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project. IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost
- 29athrowaway 5y agoSounds like the plot of the movie Antitrust.
- EarlKing 5y agoOnly if you equate sternly worded letters from the CEO with a visit from murderous thugs who steal your stuff.
- sudosysgen 5y agoI don't think threatening an extortionate lawsuit that's going to cost 100k$ is morally any better as stealing 100k$ worth of stuff and destroying it.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago"You don't need to remind you the essence of competition is always been quite simple, any kid working in a garage anywhere in the world with a good idea can put us out of business". Harassing independent developers working is an important component of the Antitrust plot. And that's what the replit guy is doing. Milo: It would be open source, we offer it free to everybody, just charge for tech support. Gary: Wow, free. It's a cut-throat business we're in Milo. It's just a matter of time before someone borrows your technology, improves it and makes a billion dollars on it. What would you do with a billion dollars Milo? ... The question really is, How many of the people you share discoveries with will be altruistic? and how many will make fortunes of your generosity? The movie shows the conflict between open source and proprietary software. Between altruism and financial opportunity.
- imhoguy 5y agoI think I am going to make Riju clone next weekend, got a name even: Disreplty.
- lynxaegon 5y agoI think we should flood the internet with replit clones :) How much money would they want to invest in lawyers?
- OJFord 5y agoHonestly there's no need? There's thousands anyway? As OP says any value add is about accounts and sharing and whatever, the code-running in a browser functionality is two a penny.
- weezin 5y agoreplitsuperiority would be a good one too.
- Bellamy 5y agoExactly my thoughts. CEO knows anyone could replicate the project. I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
- gorgoiler 5y agoI didn’t read it as being scared — more like moral indignation that a member of the team left, then published a clone. Just don’t do that, it’s in poor taste.
- davidhariri 5y agoMy reaction as well. I’ve used Replit lots. It’s great! No offence to Radon, but I would not consider his project a threat to Replit. The best case scenario is it’s a price-sensitive OSS alternative which would naturally have a much much smaller market. Interesting that the CEO was so threatened by this.