Comment by bccdee
5 years ago
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.
The company was the Osborne Computer Corporation and announcing a product successor too early is called the Osborne Effect
Now I remember.
We actually had one of those things, at the company I worked for. It was a monster, and had this tiny little screen, and a couple of 8" drives.
> I think a rational actor wouldn't have made legal threats.
The problem with applying the "rational actor" test here, or anywhere really, is that to a first approximation people are not rational actors.
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.
> 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.
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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.
Welp, I think you posted 4+ more times than intended while HN was having server issues. Maybe dang can fix it or you can delete them, lol.
Besides that, 100% agree on the personal investment/grandeur trap for founders.
Yes, it was our fault (specifically mine), not ChrisMarshallNY's. I've marked the previous comments dupes and left the latest one.
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