Comment by rd
5 years 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yep it's a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator to suing a customer. Ask Oracle.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
The tone here is "uhhh, I did this thing and it turns out it might be bad but I dont think so". Tbh, the tone he kept here is quite well mannered comparing to the situation at hand.
The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If "let’s see what else can I maake with this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs away.
I understand your perspective.
What do you make of the comment about "hardest intern we've ever worked with."
I understand the CEO is feeling very emotional and is clearly manipulating/exaggerating, but I would imagine he wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated.
Do you believe any part of that statement might be true?
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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.
Honestly there is nothing technically or legally wrong but I would say this was bad faith by the intern in a minor way. Like, its just not nice nor smart to do things that act against the interests of those that have put faith and trust in you. In this case, he's created a web site that at a surface level makes Replit look trivial to implement - boasts that in a weekend or two he's supported massively more languages. And absolutely, part of his knowledge as to how to do it came from what he probably learned there. So intentionally or not, he's done something that hurts the interests of his former employer.
So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.
On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.
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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.
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The author's excuses about "not intended to compete" or "it's free and open-source" (paraphrasing) aren't relevant when it comes to whether he stole anything or is competing. That said, the CEO is out of line IMO.
I agree about the tone, but I think it comes from youthful inexperience and a lack of (legal) knowledge. OP has no idea where the line is, what the lines are, or what professional legal defense would actually require/entail. And so they're stuck trying to rationalize every possibly-defensible point in the court of public opinion.
Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.
Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP's employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.
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.
I wonder, people always reference the Streisand Effect, but for every one of those there are a thousand complaints that go quietly heeded.
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.
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.
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.
Creepy maybe.
I have met many "CEO"s of a 5 person company so they were CEO by title and not by wright.
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...
Non-compete's are not (practically) enforceable in California, where repl.it is located.
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
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?
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.
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