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VC 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.
Out of curiosity, how hard is "very hard"?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed... 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…
Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
Amjad is incredibly unprofessional. Years ago I worked in ed-tech and one of our sales reps replied to a tweet, from a Replit user complaining about some feature on Replit. Amjad damn near bit his head off and said some really nasty things to him. My coworker was this meek religious dude honestly trying to just send a teacher a helpful link. I personally would never work there and have steered several great engineers…
Oh, so one of those "I'm a contrarian, therefore I'm awesome" type of people?
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.
Agreed... 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…
An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of experience I had building it the first time.
Whipping out the lawyers and bragging about his funding is idiotic and childish, but I think asking for the project to be taken down is completely reasonable. (on that note- I kind of think at this point that you have to be a megalomaniac to be a funded startup founder)
Let's assume that this person did just copy the replit design (which I don't believe they did), so what? If it was able to be "cloned" in a weekend or two, clearly it wouldn't really be sufficient to take down replit, so it seems that the CEO of replit just thinks that if you've ever worked for their company, any time you work on any kind of vaguely-similar REPL software, you should be taken down.
It's not like this is unique; corporations just seem to immediately assume that anything you did after seeing their brilliant and elegant code must be the reason for your success.
I bully a lone open source dev, everybody get fired up, I go front page HN, maybe as the bad guy, but now people hear about me, and total sign-up increase.
Would be devilish, maybe would work?