I 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.
Nothing worse than petty threats in corporate speak. He must be serious since he was planning to engage with his lawyers rather than just circle back with them.
> 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)
I don’t get what you’re saying here. It’s not a breach of trust to speak publicly about someone threatening legal action against you.
Rather than downvoting your comment I opted to reply to it since it may provide a bit more information for you to base your judgement on about "things being muddier".
As for your last comment about their abilities - forgive me but that sounds incredibly unfair and unwarranted and verges on being a personal attack.
Interesting. Now I think it really might be a (accidental) white box clone. A lot of stuff looks obvious in hindsight, especially if it is the best solution to the problem.
But then I believe this is legal (depending on your jurisdiction).
Amjad, replit's CEO, offered to hire OP, later accused them of copying their "internal designs", then threatened them with lawyers replit's millions can buy, eventually to stonewall and stop replying to their emails. What kind of trust is that?
> Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
That's a valid perspective, alright. One that's minority I sincerely hope.
I'm pretty skeptical. I think a rational actor wouldn't have made legal threats. Even if OP's project does somehow use some secret insight from replit, it's certainly not a threat to replit's business in any way. Legal action would be a waste of time, money, and PR.
Which means that the legal threats levelled against OP are presumably coming from a place of emotion and personal resentment, and I'm very much not prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt to replit under those circumstances.
CEOs get very invested in their projects. It's pretty much expected. It's their entire life. Many of them have invested everything into their companies, and are terrified of failures (there's an awful lot of FAIL out there).
Different Principals have different ways of evaluating threats, and reacting to them. At first glance, this seems like an awful mistake, on the part of the Replit people (Can you say "own goal"? I knew you could!).
Maybe there's more to the tale than appears here, but it does seem fairly straightforward; assuming that the emails shared tell the whole story.
I hope that everyone finds a way past this, and comes out OK.
One thing that I will say, is that the OP seems to be pretty sharp. He's young, and maybe he reacted more quickly and naively than a cynical old bastard like Yours Truly would, but he has done a pretty cool job on his project. It might not be "ship-ready," but it sounds like a great demonstration of his capabilities.
Also, as Elon Musk shows, CEOs can cause tremendous damage, if they go off-script. Being a CEO of a public/funded company is a fairly awesome Responsibility. It needs to be taken seriously.
I'd say that this very thread shows the damage that can be done to the company. Having this pinned at #1 on HN for all this time is devastating. It's actually kind of horrifying. Like watching a slow-motion train wreck. A lot of Replit employees and VCs are going to take it in the shorts from this. He's probably got some 'splainin' to do...
I can't remember the company, but there's a famous object lesson of a UK CEO that destroyed his life's work and corporation, by mentioning an upcoming product too early in a BBC interview.
I've encountered the irrational over invested founders first hand at a previous company. I worked there for about 6 months but it didn't really suit me so I moved on.
The founders seemed to get upset, I still don't really know why, presumably because of the short tenure. They then proceeded to not pay me my last month's wages while attempting to feed me various excuses or just failing to reply to messages.
I eventually got the case in front of a judge (self represented) and discovered that despite them telling me about their lawyers they were also representing the case themselves without any idea about the legal situation. The judge basically laughed them out of court, starting off by pointing out that even if all of their statements were correct they still had no legal basis for not paying the wages. The judge then checked their accusations (that I had lied to them during the hiring process) and found they were not correct.
Despite them having no legal basis the whole process was pretty stressful since until the court case I had been assuming they had some reason to not just settle. (I was mostly worried the recruiter had done something genuinely dodgy during the hiring process.)
I'm still surprised that those people can run a company for more than 5 years.
Yeah, people aren't rational. But when people start behaving dangerously (making legal threats, etc), I think they ought to be acting rationally — especially if they're in a position of power.
So when a CEO makes legal threats against some random dev's side project, seemingly out of a sense of entitlement to the very idea of a polyglot code sandbox, I'm going to be pretty harsh.
What exactly are you skeptical about? It's read to me like you were disbelieving the story because you didn't believe the CEO would act that way. To the contrary, it's entirely plausible (regardless of truth).
We can completely agree that people ought to be behaving more rationally, but empirically in enough cases, they don't.
I'm skeptical that "the situation is muddier than it appears in the blog post." It seems clear to me that the CEO is acting irrationally, and given that, nothing about the story seems out-of-place. So I'm going to be pretty harsh towards the CEO in not extending them the benefit of the doubt, because I don't see any perspective where they're behaving appropriately.
I don't think anyone who doesn't work for you has any obligation whatsoever to consider your image. As a CEO and public face of a company you should go ahead and assume that anyone you threaten or badmouth will go ahead and talk about it online, on the news, or with a bullhorn at the local mall.
He willingly traded some percentage chance at a competitor using an open source project to steal some percentage of his business for this PR nightmare. Personally I think this effort shows the bar for such a project is pretty low so I don't think shutting it down was a good trade off. I think it shows immaturity, bad will, bad faith and honestly its more of a case study in whom not to work for. Most people they would want to hire are liable to have multiple options. They can ill afford to be an undesirable choice.
Based on the commit log in the article, he added support for running code in 79 programming languages in 4 days. I'd say he's probably pretty talented.
It's not the whole picture, but the article links to the full email exchange. It's difficult for me to imagine what missing information would lead to the CEO's messages being appropriate.
My understanding based on the blog post was that it was cautionary due to the threat of legal action. It seems clear that there isn't any doubt - it's caution due to the stakes.
When faced with an irrational actor making legal threats the rational choice might well be to back down even if you're 100% in the right but your loss from backing down is minor, so it tells us nothing.
Talent 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.
I 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"
Yeah, 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.
I thought these type of interpreters ran in the user's browser. Cross-compile the interpreter to JS or webasm, stream it to the user after they click on which language to use. Built-in libraries could be streamed on-demand the same way or they can be bundled with the interpreter. It would solve the scalability and security problem.
Even so, the fact that Repl.it felt so threatened by it as to threaten legal action and bully someone into taking it down speaks volumes to its viability as a competitor. The inability to scale can be fixed - probably not trivially, obviously, but it's very much a possibility.
Or it speaks to Repl.it's CEO's lack of understanding of the technical differences. I wouldn't assume anything about the viability based on this reaction.
They should feel threatened. There's nothing particularly special or novel about what Repl.it is doing, also very little in the way of specialised knowledge required to build a competitor (note that I'm not trying to belittle the individual involved here). That they got $20 million to pursue this product in some ways surprises me given the relatively low barrier to entry.
If the code is well-documented and everything is nicely set up, you just need the right person who has access to VC and an untapped market (e.g. China) to pick it up and spin off from there
Or at least it would save up a lot of boostrapping cost. Otherwise this whole thing indeed makes no sense.
> If the code is well-documented and everything is nicely set up, you just need the right person who has access to VC and an untapped market (e.g. China) to pick it up and spin off from there
I think the idea is that it's trivial to take what you've described and add "a small amount of work that an early-career engineer (even if talented) describes as easy".
Well, the author did post the entire email thread (redacting information that may be proprietary) on Imgur.
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Interesting to see my post fluctuating between -4~4 points in the first few hours before settling down with the downvotes :)
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
>The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with stress and is acting out. It happens.
I agree it's not uncommon for first-time founders/CEOs to see phantom ghosts and lash out; however, we should be careful to not normalize that kind of behavior. Founders often hold mentorship or supervisory positions over their current and ex-employees, so it's harmful when they react with aggression and manipulation.
At small companies, that betrayal of trust cuts deeper than it does in more common manager-employee relationships, IMO.
I disagree, I don't see it that way. The very first email says "Don't worry, I have no intention [..]". That to me, indicates OP was aware they were in a grey area.
The CEO Amjad Masad has been doubling down on his story both here on HN and on Twitter. Also, this is a story told with receipts, and receipts carry a weight of their own. Namely, private emails made public. You can see for yourself whether you'll ever see the other side speak through the language of receipts.
It's also notable that Amjad used to work at CodeAcademy on up-and-going interactive coding experiences. Now he has his own company building up-and-going interactive coding experiences. What did Amjad learn while he was at CodeAcademy, being privy to internal business operations?
Unless there was an NDA or some such (and since this isn't mentioned anywhere in the emails or post, I assume there's not) you can hardly sue someone for re-using knowledge they acquired during their job. How are you even supposed to know what the supposed super-magic super-secret sauce is if you never agreed to an NDA?
If that was the case almost everyone with a GitHub project could be sued to infinity, because almost everyone learns tons of things every day while working.
It is extremely unlikely that there was no NDA. I've literally only ever had one job that didn't make me sign an NDA, and the company had a whopping <10 employees.
Specifically California Business and Professions Code Section 16600,
“every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
In addition such issues must by law be decided in California courts and if they forced the issue into court and lost they would be liable for the cost of his defense.
Even outside of California there are limits to what you can enforce. Judges aren't liable to find that an infinite duration noncompete reasonable.
Another example in Washington State its now impossible to obtain noncompetes for anyone paid less than a rate of 100k per annum as an employee or 250k per annum as a contractor and they are limited to 18 months duration.
If you improperly assert a noncompete you are liable for 5000 or actual damages whichever is greater.
They are probably not asserting a noncompete because it is functionally impossible for them to do so. They would have to assert that he was making use of trade secrets or that in some nebulous way his design belonged to them. eg trade dress
I don't live anywhere near California (Québec), but it's kinda the same idea here (from what I've heard). Basically employees have the right to make a living and the onus is on the employer to prove an injury occured directly due to an (ex)employee's actions.
Still didn't stop everyone I've ever worked for from making me sign them, enforceable or not. I guess it's different elsewhere.
He might have signed one but it would be legally invalid and if pressed in court it would cease to exist in 0.5 seconds it wouldn't be worth the time to present.
As always seem to need a lawyer to be absolutely sure about any complex matter of law but it looks to me like creating even an identical product which this is not would fall within the scope of "any lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind" for clarity I read that as you can't stop a person from doing any of the above from a b and c rather than you can't stop someone from doing all of a b c.
I don't think Repl.it has a leg to stand on they just have a pile of money and the presumption of being willing and able to hire a shark in a suit to ruin someone's life with a baseless suit filed for the sake of harassment.
It's not clear to me that implementing the same concept after having seen and written some of their code constitutes copyright infringement.
If you hire an intern to work on your code base you own merely own the work that person creates for the duration of their internship. Your piddling money doesn't buy you the general knowledge of how such a solution works any more than an auto shop acquires by dint of buying a few hours of labor owns the mechanics understanding of how a transmission works.
Have you ever reimplemented something from scratch, perhaps in a different language, and ended up doing something in the same way as the original code? ... I sure have.
I would think that a few chunks of very similar code, and a well-paid expert testifying, plus the fact that he had knowledge of Replit's code from his employment, would go a long way towards a tough time in court for both parties. (Or, at the very least, that they both need to talk to lawyers before/when they start throwing around legal threats...)
Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.