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Comment by risyachka

5 years ago

It'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.

36 comments

risyachka

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pcmaffey  5 years ago

He 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.

gonehome  5 years ago

Yeah - I don't really like piling on, but Replit and Roam both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.

Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.

Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?

In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.

  • aparsons  5 years ago

    Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering

    • gonehome  5 years ago

      I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it scares a lot of people away from development because of constant issues.

      Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization.

      All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.

      4 replies →

  • mtrovo  5 years ago

    Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).

    I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.

  • dvfjsdhgfv  5 years ago

    Well, these are things that most tech people know, we just don't discuss them because we're polite.

  • boothrowaway  5 years ago

    Word on the street is that the Roam founder Conan is also getting pushed out for dehumanizing women and abusing meth, and being a general jackass. Silicon Valley has the best culture.

    • fastball  5 years ago

      Given that his name isn't even Conan, everyone should probably treat this as the baseless hearsay that it seems to be.

    • gonehome  5 years ago

      I don't know the truth around that either way, but I think Roam is based in Utah at some ranch (even if they're funded by a16z). I wouldn't generalize his behavior to the rest of silicon valley culture.

      I think his brother was also the QAnon shaman horn guy (at least he said as much on Twitter - maybe it was a joke?).

      4 replies →

    • caslon  5 years ago

      Isn't equating "victim of drug addiction" and "harms women" out of line? One is something that isn't really his fault and isn't because of his moral failings, and the other is dehumanizing nearly half of the population.

hashbig  5 years ago

I unfollowed him after he tweeted that Repl.it is the most innovative company in the world.

Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.

  • sudosysgen  5 years ago

    Pfizer doesn't really belong in that list. They applied money to an already made invention and scaled up an existing manufacturing process along with a dozen other companies. Pfizer is not even the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine, nor is it the first manufacturer to express interest, nor did it take any risk.

    I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.

    • xpressvideoz  5 years ago

      I can totally understand why Alphabet is on the list, but what is your reason for regarding Samsung as the most innovative company? Nowadays I've found them struggling to compete with their Chinese and Taiwanese opponents.

      1 reply →

tjpnz  5 years ago

Well the product is obvious and easy to replicate without specialised knowledge. CEO likely realises this as much as everyone else so feels the need to overcompensate with personal marketing (and apparently now lawyers).