13 ms·

If I’m reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO of the company, he would stoop to

by raunak 5y ago

If I’m reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO of the company, he would stoop to what I interpret as pretty unprofessional communication and petty threats. I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.

vidarh 5y ago
I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them. Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
- tedivm 5y ago
  This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this could have been handled that would have left all parties happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the lawyer power play.
  - ljm 5y ago
    The lawyer powerplay _and_ also disparaging the OP by calling them a difficult intern. I could give the legal peacocking a pass. It's a weird flex, a bit too much ego really, but sure, I don't care if your daddy is cooler than my daddy. Punching down at your intern though, as a CEO? Jeez, talk about poor leadership. I would not work for that man.
- imglorp 5y ago
  Yep it's a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator to suing a customer. Ask Oracle.
- zamalek 5y ago
  > litigious and petty The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    Oracle lives by selling to management. Replit isn’t at a stage where it can do that - it will love and die by developer goodwill until it becomes big enough for management to want to buy it.
  - mikl 5y ago
    Are they, though? I’ve never come across Oracle Linux used for any other purpose than running Oracle software on it. MySQL and Java were very popular before Oracle bought them, and people’s distaste for Oracle has pushed many users towards alternatives like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Google famously wrote their own Java implementation to avoid having to deal with Oracle.
- FlyingSnake 5y ago
  > they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty. This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.
Exuma 5y ago
I think the CEO is absolutely nuts here. With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary. That's my unsolicited .02
- mcintyre1994 5y ago
  What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.
  - Exuma 5y ago
    The area that seemed gray here particularly was the "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to usability and user experience. So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong. I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar" I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
tomp 5y ago
I’d agree with you if this was just a random person, but from this thread (I haven’t read the article) I gather that s/he was actually an intern... surely every intern/employee would sign some kind of non-compete / trade secret / intellectual property agreement? In that case, the CEO is completely justified in pursuing to enforce that agreement! Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Non-compete's are not (practically) enforceable in California, where repl.it is located. https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in-california/ https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
- darrenoc 5y ago
  Why are you reading and replying to the comments when you haven't read the article? You've come at this with a terrible take by inventing a non-existent NDA that would exonerate the CEO. Why bother?
  - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    The article didn't specifically mention "no NDA" either. We've only seen one side of the story here I don't know if I were the former intern in question writing a blog post about this I'd be damn sure to specify that there's no NDA or other agreement in place that would legally prevent him from doing this.
    - darrenoc 5y ago
      There's no mention of any NDA, you've just constructed it as a straw man.
      - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
        This kind of angst is what I'd expect to see on reddit, not here.
rdudekul 5y ago
Amjad the CEO of Replit could be fairly insecure person afraid of losing his company's dominance/marketshare to some simple intern/developer. I am sure he did NOT expect this level of heat. This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
- thinkloop 5y ago
  I wonder, people always reference the Streisand Effect, but for every one of those there are a thousand complaints that go quietly heeded.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- JoeOfTexas 5y ago
  I mean, making a whole blog post about the situation, and then making the top post of hacker news, just kind of keeps the sniper scope of lawyers pointed at himself.
  - cmorgan31 5y ago
    The intern? Yeah he’s fine. There’s no real consequence for that person other than proving he’s a capable employee who can be a bit obsessive. They should work in a tangentially related area of product for awhile and forget it ever happened. Technical hires who can implement your idea is much more valuable in bulk than ideas themselves.
williamtwild 5y ago
I have met many "CEO"s of a 5 person company so they were CEO by title and not by wright.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TrackerFF 5y ago
Well, I wrote a small comment here on replit, and their CEO actually tracked me down by username on another forum, and sent me a PM there. Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Creepy maybe.

by raunak 5y ago

vidarh 5y ago

I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them. Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.

tedivm 5y ago
This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this could have been handled that would have left all parties happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the lawyer power play.
- ljm 5y ago
  The lawyer powerplay _and_ also disparaging the OP by calling them a difficult intern. I could give the legal peacocking a pass. It's a weird flex, a bit too much ego really, but sure, I don't care if your daddy is cooler than my daddy. Punching down at your intern though, as a CEO? Jeez, talk about poor leadership. I would not work for that man.
imglorp 5y ago
Yep it's a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator to suing a customer. Ask Oracle.
zamalek 5y ago
> litigious and petty The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Oracle lives by selling to management. Replit isn’t at a stage where it can do that - it will love and die by developer goodwill until it becomes big enough for management to want to buy it.
- mikl 5y ago
  Are they, though? I’ve never come across Oracle Linux used for any other purpose than running Oracle software on it. MySQL and Java were very popular before Oracle bought them, and people’s distaste for Oracle has pushed many users towards alternatives like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Google famously wrote their own Java implementation to avoid having to deal with Oracle.
FlyingSnake 5y ago
> they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty. This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.

Exuma 5y ago

I think the CEO is absolutely nuts here. With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary. That's my unsolicited .02

mcintyre1994 5y ago
What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.
- Exuma 5y ago
  The area that seemed gray here particularly was the "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to usability and user experience. So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong. I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar" I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago

tomp 5y ago

I’d agree with you if this was just a random person, but from this thread (I haven’t read the article) I gather that s/he was actually an intern... surely every intern/employee would sign some kind of non-compete / trade secret / intellectual property agreement? In that case, the CEO is completely justified in pursuing to enforce that agreement! Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...

jonny_eh 5y ago
Non-compete's are not (practically) enforceable in California, where repl.it is located. https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in-california/ https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
darrenoc 5y ago
Why are you reading and replying to the comments when you haven't read the article? You've come at this with a terrible take by inventing a non-existent NDA that would exonerate the CEO. Why bother?
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  The article didn't specifically mention "no NDA" either. We've only seen one side of the story here I don't know if I were the former intern in question writing a blog post about this I'd be damn sure to specify that there's no NDA or other agreement in place that would legally prevent him from doing this.
  - darrenoc 5y ago
    There's no mention of any NDA, you've just constructed it as a straw man.
    - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
      This kind of angst is what I'd expect to see on reddit, not here.

rdudekul 5y ago

Amjad the CEO of Replit could be fairly insecure person afraid of losing his company's dominance/marketshare to some simple intern/developer. I am sure he did NOT expect this level of heat. This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.

thinkloop 5y ago
I wonder, people always reference the Streisand Effect, but for every one of those there are a thousand complaints that go quietly heeded.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JoeOfTexas 5y ago
I mean, making a whole blog post about the situation, and then making the top post of hacker news, just kind of keeps the sniper scope of lawyers pointed at himself.
- cmorgan31 5y ago
  The intern? Yeah he’s fine. There’s no real consequence for that person other than proving he’s a capable employee who can be a bit obsessive. They should work in a tangentially related area of product for awhile and forget it ever happened. Technical hires who can implement your idea is much more valuable in bulk than ideas themselves.

williamtwild 5y ago

I have met many "CEO"s of a 5 person company so they were CEO by title and not by wright.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TrackerFF 5y ago

Well, I wrote a small comment here on replit, and their CEO actually tracked me down by username on another forum, and sent me a PM there. Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.

ipaddr 5y ago
Creepy maybe.