As an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.
> I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense
It's worse than that; this whole kerfuffle came to people's attention after the founder posted a brag tweet about leaving a $300k job at Coinbase to go YC. Only to claim ignorance about the license and everything else later.
"Sorry officer I didn't know I couldn't just rewrite a license to whatever I wanted despite having ample access to legal resources. Yes officer I am a CEO. No officer I will not remain silent."
Terrifying, always afraid to touch unlicensed code. Tried to give most of my public code extremely open licenses because I’d assume some guy crawling the internet for a piece of code probably has enough stress in his life.
No no who says we're smal indide hackers. It has to be that we're the genius god gifted visionaries fixated on a future for humanity that is invisible to mere mortal peasants hence mistakes are inevitable.
> PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it.
More specifically PearAI forked the OSS code editor Continue, which was itself funded by YC, and got YC funding for it. Also the editor they forked is itself a fork of VS Code, but is not to be confused with Void Editor, which is a third YC funded VS Code fork with AI features. It's YC funded VS Code forks with AI all the way down.
This is crazy. And then I hear about solid products/companies that don’t get any/very little funding at all because it has no “AI” and it baffles the mind.
Funders are betting on founders. They see somebody willing to take shortcuts and ride hype trains, turn good faith projects and pass them off as their own innovation, and the see the kind of sociopathic organization that has the potential to "become the next Uber."
They aren't funding the viability of the product, they are funding for a take of future earnings of the morally bankrupt or the righteous will of the hopelessly naive. In either case, it's all about how effectively they can affix a leash.
YC filters for companies for gorillion dollar missions / solve gorillion dollar problems.
A mission that is, "I have an AI, input is business plan, output is entire IT infrastructure" is what YC sees here. i.e. programming as a field (quite a cost center) is no longer needed, ironically. Because of that the bar is low. Honestly if anyone is reading this, if you find a very clever novel way to go after this, surely you would be funded
My mistake, I haven't used Continue and was led to believe they have their own VS Code distro. PearAI forked VS Code and forked Continues VS Code extension and smushed them together then. They also just wired Continues code up to Claude/GPT4 so the models aren't novel either.
Which I suppose isn't necessarily a gotcha, it's totally possible to be a user of software and figure out ways it could be improved. But the way they pitched themselves was they're building an AI code editor, whereas it seems like they're just making some changes to a free, open-source project.
If I had any guess, the reason they got accepted is from their YouTube followings, and this was essentially a marketing experiment. These guys have audiences of young aspiring developers who could be potential customers if their favorite youtuber were to start claiming they "built" an AI code editor. Not a crazy idea but certainly doesn't smell of an attempt to make an honest and good product.
This is an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal.
I wonder if it's possible to get funding for a fork of an already funded fork that you launched recently.
Might even be an easy money glitch: every couple of years or so you fork your YC funded code editor, get YC funding for the new fork, and cruise on that money for a while.
> ...an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal
To that I say “fork yeah”, the old GitHub slogan. I haven’t seen Continue complaining about it. It’s far less toxic than Sentry or Hashicorp which are on the other side of the issue. Pear could have been a bit less blatant I guess, but I think it’s fine that they took advantage of the license.
Edit: I just realized the old t-shirt slogan of GitHub was “Fork you.” Even better.
It was open source for about 10 years. They built themselves a name by being open source. Then they went and changed their license to a non-OSI-approved license. https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/ Not everyone went along with it, but a lot did.
Seems like YC should pair more of these smaller companies together, I honestly don’t know if that would help or not. Most YC funded projects aren’t really profitable to begin with.
It’s like somewhere in between getting grant funding for a university project and real corporate work.
I mean, this was precisely PG's genius - taking the right set of unwashed nerds, pairing them up appropriately and then mentoring the end result. That model gave birth to Reddit and Auctomatic.
I don't get it either - why spend $2m on 4 YC companies under different group partners, creating a hunger games of sorts, instead of convincing all of them to combine their talent for $500k. Sure, egos will be bruised and they might fight over who's boss, but the chances of the final product succeeding would be much higher.
I just forked the vs code repo and didn't screw up statements on a license for a business model. I'm clearly the superior hedge and I'll be waiting for my check.
But seriously, this has got to feel pretty shite for continue. What is their impetus to roll out new features when they know that pear can focus on only the icing on top of that milestone, inherently making continue look like a less polished version of pear, when in fact they were the innovators?
I think what we have here is an antisynergy of the incentives baked into open-source and capital speculation. It’s a recursion bug that undermines the incentive structure, and YC was foolish to be so disloyal to their partners.
I don't see many AI companies reaching billion dollar valuations and I don't see any AI company retaining billion dollar valuations in the next five to ten years.
you're obviously joking, but it'd be interesting if you actually tried :)
people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try. you can jokingly quip that you'd be better at forking vs code, but at the end of the day they're doing it - not "waiting for their check" - and you're making fun of them on the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try.
Are they? Seems like based on this YC alum [0], the reality these days is otherwise.
You're right, I am joking. I have my own ventures that carry some dignity. It's also premature for a claim that they are "people who try" as they have not produced anything except mistakes and apologies.
Also, maybe consider you're spending your time baselessly defending strangers on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It does dispel the myth that YC is simply investing in founders. They are really investing in the ideas that the partners like and then finding teams who are capable of delivering on it.
Which is of course fine but you see Dalton's Request for Startups and I've not seen only a tiny handful in the last two batches.
Due to YC's large batch sizes and the consolidation of industries such as AI, increasing numbers of YC startups are now directly competing with each other.
When 98% of your "product" is a thin wrapper around chatGPT, you will of course end up competing against every other product that is a thin wrapper around chatGPT.
Not really. The medical ChatGPT wrappers don't compete with the legal ChatGPT wrappers or the code editor ChatGPT wrappers. It has been argued (ad nauseam) that ChatGPT itself competes with all the wrappers, not that the wrappers compete with each other.
They don't compete right now, but surely the architecture of the system will be quite similar, or solve very similar types of challenges. So it should become easier to jump domains when these solutions mature.
A legal wrapper will use domain specific legal expertise to structure and develop their product and functionality. It will likely have many functions that are specifically optimized for the legal use case.
If a wrapper can easily move across many domains, then the wrapper likely adds little value to the base model.
They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack re: how buttoned up they are about licensing. Particularly when they appear to have started sharing source code before YC's investment, and the last time I spoke to an attorney who advises on open source licensing he was expensive.
> They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack
Reading the room, people are upset about grifters, scams and fakery in general. The outrage is obviously built up over seeing our industry decline to buzzwords, bait and switch, and general enshittification. This is just one particularly clear-cut instance of opportunistic grift caught in the act. It’s like that IoT juice press – it’s not that harmful, but it’s a symbol of what people hate.
I'd take you up on that bet. The AI can get as good as you want, but the reason you get a human to write and verify legal documents is so there's someone accountable. Their own job and reputation is on the line if they're doing bad work. Unless the company providing LawyerBot As A Service and writing everyone's legal documents is going to take all accountability, but that's a massive liability.
imo, the way you first do something + your first responses to serious criticism are the most telling regarding character. because afterwards, you can just play the act of "we're sorry because the backlash was really big and we have to clean up".
They are experienced software developers coming from $300K jobs at Coinbase. As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0. As former employees at highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase they know better than letting ChatGPT make up new legal texts.
They are cynical manipulators hiding behind a made up fictive "careless Gen Z tech bros" image.
I mean... crypto companies are well known for being chock full of decent and honest employees who aren’t zealots or bandwagon jumpers in any way, shape or form.
Just like a lot of recently created “AI” companies.
> As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0.
I’ve worked at a company with hundreds of devs where I caught an obvious error (a reference to a section that did not exist) in the pre-employment agreement. To imply that most devs are carefully reading documentation in general, much less legalese, is laughable.
But when you're starting or running a business, carefully reading contracts is a critical activity for the success of the business. If the founders can't do this themselves, they should have their attorney do it for them. And if they don't have an attorney, that's a critical error as well and they need one ASAP.
Coinbase internally had the `oh anyone who wants to work on crypto would want to work at Coinbase, you are already at Coinbase, wow, look at you, such a good place you have for yourself` speech given out relatively often. Even after employees commented on how they think they are being underpaid.
The compensation is on the low-end when it comes to what Coinbase pays to its employees. They wronged their hires on multiple occasions with dilutions too. Many of these employees had strike prices that were above what Coinbase IPO'd at. They were relying on their options, otherwise their base pay was undermarket.
This outrage talk is ridiculous, you don’t have the morale high ground to judge people, they didn’t break anything, taking VC money isn’t bad, the incident was caused by sore losers looking for drama, etc etc
If that is indeed what got funded, those changes appear to be extremely minimal and benign and I can understand why people would have an issue with funding this.
Well, I looked through the work and it's mostly random config/frontend changes. I don't see a lot of meaningful work done? Whether LoC matters or not, it doesn't change that pretty much nothing was changed.
Let's take it to the extreme - how much would you fund a "tech startup" that doesn't have any of its own code at all, but rather just has its founder manually press buttons on a third-party tool's GUI?
Note that I'm not asking whether it's ethical, or even if the service is worth it to a customer (maybe the founder really is good at pressing the right button at the right time) - but would you as a founder fund it, knowing that there's pretty much no barrier-to-entry whatsoever?
I don't know much about this codebase and I am probably one of the dumber people on this site (that's ok, I'm happy and eat well), but take a closer look at some of these commits:
Now to be fair I've never been paid 270k by coinbase so presumably these guys are a lot smarter than me, but I'm still really confused why they got funded.
Your mistake, the right way to do this is to optimize 100% for the leetcode interview and 0% for how to do a job.
You get hired and undercontribute for nine months before putting in notice after you win another interview, which is easier this time because you won one before and got the pedigree.
There is a whole generation of people who write solutions to assignments and have no idea how to create software. These commits are what happens when they don’t receive a prompt requiring a from-scratch implementation of a topological sort.
I applied to YC in the last batch and got rejected. Not to sound like sour grapes, but it seems like YC loooves students from certain universities, which kinda sucks for us commoners who didn't go to these places.
Not to mention the whole hype around AI is unbearable at this point. Seems very likely that deserving products/ideas are getting rejected because they aren't doing AI, or because their founders didn't go to Stanford. Oh well, that's just how it goes.
Yep, thats how they work, there's a ton of data to back it up.
Unless you are from few *US* unis, you have zero to none chance of getting in, unless you have significant traction already, in which case you may as well go to any investor and they will fund you.
And if you are among those lucky few, they will fund you with the most shitty idea you have, or even without any at all.
>unless you have significant traction already, in which case you may as well go to any investor and they will fund you
This is the part that really bothers me unfortunately. I honestly grew up thinking that YC invested in people and ideas more than traction. If I had traction, I could raise money from anywhere. YC does invest in people without traction, but you have to be a certain type of person, from a certain background, and from certain institutions.
That's great, but just look at the profiles advertised on the front-page there: Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, etc. Nothing against them personally of course, but I really think this is the trend YC is going towards these days. It's the old school institutional prestige back, but this time it's blended together with SV startups.
> I got 3-4 emails telling me to strongly consider finding a co-founder
A lot of YC's advice is terrible, such as their advice on finding a cofounder.
You can easily tell when they give bad advice: ask them for their dataset. When they don't offer it, consider doing the opposite of what they tell you.
Now, some of their advice is great, when it is data backed an easily testable like Jessica Livingston's "I don't know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users."
Now, what's a version of their "find a co-founder" advice that doesn't suck: "I don't know of a single case of a successful founder that wasn't building things all the time with many different people."
Don't find a co-founder or two, find dozens of "building buddies" who you just build shit with. Every now and then you can form a legal entity and be "co-founders", but the more important thing is you just create stuff together.
I think this comes from Github asking people to choose a license when they first create a repo, they may be just viewing it as some sort of automatic box to check when making a new repo. I think these guys honestly have no idea what a license even does or what copyright is, based on their other statements about it. I bet they don't even have any idea of the differences between GPL vs Apache/MIT/et al vs AGPL, SSPL, etc. and that's been discussed to death on here and all over the open source world.
All YC companies put together are losers compared to Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web.
Do you want to have short term profits or change the course of humanity?
If you want to be a loser and use licenses so you can exploit bad laws to harm your fellow human, go ahead. Just don't expect not to get called out on it anymore.
I use a license to absolve myself of legal liability and to cuck private forks because it's really funny. If that means I don't get to be the Tim Berners-Lee of having my ass reamed for commercial applications, I'll be one happy loser.
If you're a winner loser lawyers will come after you no matter what, and "licenses" provide you with absolutely no protection.
But all lawyers will tell you you need a license, because they are losers who can't build real things, and need to convince you that you need them (you don't).
Lawyers lick my boot. Free software licenses are a nightmare to litigate, take too long to process, and don't reward damages in the first place. For every free software program that gets dragged into court, 500 independent businesses are sued for false advertising or letting ChatGPT write their TOS.
I sleep like a baby because I know that there isn't a bar qualified lawyer in America dumb enough to sue me. Cry about it, it's not my problem because I'm not a sniveling corporate sycophant.
His apology would sound more authentic and consistent with his previous communications if it were in all lower case with lots of kewl words like "dawg" and abbreviations like "lol" and missing punctuation like kids these days use in their text messages.
Those capital letters and correctly spelled words and full stops come off as so passive aggressive.
Otherwise it painfully looks like he tasked ChatGPT to generate his apology as well as his license.
this says more about YC than this particular founder (lots of these types nowadays): i.e. their process, their due diligence, who is advanced from 1000's of applications.
People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year. They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb.
there is a culture of "gaming" that is in fact promoted by YC.
one of the questions they had was to show an instance where the founders "hacked" or "gamed" a system.
ie, game the test, game the admission, game everything.
and some folks see this as "hustle".
eventually their own process gets gamed.
gaming incentivises a culture of "pretension" - you dont know sh* but you fake it. fake it til you make it. copy code-repos, trample over licenses, whatever, who cares as long as you are getting ahead.
I think it speaks to beginner mistakes on the part of the founders.
There are some exceptions but the typical demo day is absolutely stitched together from other peoples’ work. The difference is most hide this fact, instead of working in the clear on “open source” without understanding that it is meant to be a contribution from you to the community, because to finance bros that sounds like a joke.
The whole thing has gotten so washed out that they either thought that this is what people actually do, or they thought no one was going to look at their repo (for a coding product!).
i really used to be wowed by their products and see their immediately utility like stripe and dropbox. now everyone is going founder mode, become an influencer type first and be a (mostl likely AI) guru people might want to follow
Apologies if this is a dumb question, but PearAI, Continue, and Cursor all seem like different versions of GitHub Copilot to me. Am I understanding that correctly? Why are we funding so many 'GitHub Copilot's?
1) management types who have never coded love the idea that coders can be replaced or minimized by said tooling. hence hey fund any and all projects.
2) coders excited by llms reach out to the nearest projects they can relate to, namely, code assistants, test generation assistants, doc generation, and generally any automation in the coding workflow. so, you will see a lot of me-too tooling.
Venture capital is trying to fund companies that have the potential to grow their valuation many many many times over in a relatively short amount if time.
AI is obviously very powerful and has the potential to change things quickly IF it turns out it can be good at important tasks that people will pay for. If someone finds a really good use case then they can scale that with essentially no problems until the vcs are fat and happy.
Pouring money into AI garbo also feels like a hedge to investors when they see it as just funneling down to their other investments.
Together these things end up looking like an attractive vc target so we see a ton of these "companies" that are a bag of prompts on top of a different company's code/model.
Cursor user and former Copilot user here. The difference is significant. Being able to use Claude alone is worth the switch, but the UI of these newer tools are far better than Microsoft’s implementation.
They didn't fix the licenses. Microsoft VSCode was originally MIT licensed, which PearAI is now relicensing as Apache, and has removed the Microsoft copyright clause in their root repo.
Similarly, with their extension repo which they forked from Continue, they now have two LICENSE files, one from Continue, one from PearAI, both Apache. This could be argued to be almost correct, but it would be clearer if they did it correctly and had one LICENSE file there with both copyright clauses from both PearAI and Continue.
Additionally they don't seem to use any contributor agreements, so people who contribute to their repos will maintain their own personal copyrights. That means that the copyright clauses on the licenses are technically invalid as the repos contain works from various individuals who have not given their permission to license their works in any way.
Disregarding the legal aspects, what they are doing is morally clearly wrong as they are crudely exploiting the works of others without contributing back to them in any way.
Maybe, as a prerequisite for VC funding in the modern world, tech founders should have to show a functional knowledge of open source licensing. It seems to be the cause of a lot of grief in recent years.
I ran into this guy's youtube channel when trying to get a tech internship last year. He's a giant grifter — memorizing leetcode problems while failing his core cs classes at a prestigious university. I'm frustrated with my own career so seeing people like this (who are so unworthy?) get 270,000 jobs out of college and a half million dollars in funding for... copying code... make me want to quit the industry.
tech is increasingly dominated by grifters, as they tend to sound more convincing than the classic hacker and are tend to have "fluid morals", which is important if your goal is to take a billion dollars from VC money by lying your way to riches, then become an investor in the next wave of <insert hype space here>. It's a self-selecting game.
This why I'm looking to get out of the industry entirely. It's reached the point where I no longer want to tell people what I do for a living. It's become embarrassing, and I tire of having to defend myself about it.
It's not embarrassing if you write and ship free software. You can still operate in the software industry, succeed against corporate interests, and provide value to other developers without selling your soul to the devil. The fatalism of "all software is bad" is a tautology that seems correct, but is only validated by commercially successful (and often monopoly-abusing) businesses.
Doesn't shock me considering the hard work -> nice life pipeline is in shambles in the US and it wouldn't surprise me if that's true for other countries too
And we also chose to extend the presence of gambling in society - quite literally with sports gambling - but also adjacently with crypto markets and stock market apps
Tech has always had advantages around being able to slack off if you were good since it was a white collar desk job, but you could justify that to yourself as a sort of implied retainer arrangement. So it wasn't directly grifting or stealing.
Some people get a taste of real money relatively easily (like a $200k+ salary for slacking off) and want more though, maybe because they're afraid that good situation can't last and they need maximum value extracted before they're "found out".
And we are just not seeing major downsides to grifting unless you run afoul of the law, which can be slow to prosecute if you are on a bleeding edge like AI (like it was for crypto).
He graduated from a mid-tier - generous assessment - university in Canada. Maybe he's a grifter, but given the companies he's managed to work at, he's clearly competent. Even if you memmrize solutions you still need to perform.
This apology is well done. It's humane, humble, acknowledges specific wrongs that were social failures and technical/legal failures, and explains the fixes going forward.
Whatever you may think of Pear AI, or startups playing too fast and loose, IMHO this apology sounds sincere and worthwhile.
I disagree, here's a line which rubs me the wrong way: "We tried to be transparent about what we’d done as much as possible since the beginning of our journey, but that wasn’t good enough." Couple this to "talking about it so publicly online, made it look like we were stealing the work of others as our own."
Contrast that to their comment about "100+ contributors".
It feels like typical deflection.
Also egregious is "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
It's hard to trust someone who would think this in the first place.
They're manipulating the reader into thinking it's their unachievably high moral standards that is to blame here: "...but that wasn’t good enough".
You can't "tried to be transparent about what we’d done" and "made it look like we were stealing the work" at the same time.
Either you announce yourself as "Pear, the VS Code Fork that will change the way you code", or you try to be very low key about it yet hope to retain plausible deniability when people call you on your BS.
> In summary, the apology appears mostly sincere but is tinged with some defensiveness and rationalization, which might affect how it's received, especially by those who were most upset by the initial actions.
Maybe they should pivot to developing an AI powered suite of software license generation and code rebranding and serial number filing and non-apology apology writing plugins for VSCode, so they can say they eat their own dog food.
I can't wait until this trend of reaction video goes away. The constant repetition and setup. It's like an unedited first draft of America's Funniest Home Videos
Maybe they should do a startup that offers apologies for screwing up fundamentals of a business project instead. That seems to be the tangible thing they can deliver.
I don't think it reflects well on the founders. The explanation about the license is either a lazy lie, or it shows they're incompetent.
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue does.
So why didn't they copy the license like they copied the rest of the code?
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
Why would the license not be important? And why would they think that the one they generated was open? If they were going to blindly copy and paste from chatgpt, why wouldn't they blindly copy and paste from the original codebase instead, which is already known to be open.
Software licenses are a core part of any software company's business model, so I don't believe for a second that these YC-backed founders didn't realize what they were doing.
... With that said, Apache and all other "OSI approved" licenses are open to being exploited like this, so I don't think they're necessarily in the wrong. The apology, however, is 100% bullshit and I wouldn't trust these people with anything.
Meh. Just another variant of the standard corporate "we did everything 100% intentionally but are now backtracking because of public outcry". It isn't a "humane, humble" apology but a PR statement.
I'm not really getting that vibe from it, stylistically. I especially feel like ChatGPT (for all its unending shortcomings) would have gone with something more tactful than "that wasn't good enough" -- but this is precisely the kind of thing an undersocialized Computer Guy would actually say with good intentions. In conclusion, while the motivations of the original poster and the provenance of the apology letter text may be debatable, it is important to rem--
Eh, I hadn’t heard about this and now have. Which is wild since I was asked by someone considering trying them just yesterday and I said I frankly had no opinion. Revising that to a negative—I’m not bullish on founders more interested in tweeting than building.
yeah exactly. mistakes happen, they were definitely too influencer-brained in the launch, but its how you handle the feedback that shows your mettle.
still doesnt make pear an investable idea, but the founders showed some humility/ability to read the room here.
conversely, people who dunked on -them- too much showed either their lack of knowledge on open source/startup norms, or their ability to disingenuously ignore that for internet points, and provided many opportunities to be muted.
Here is a clear as day example of a startup who were completely reckless and indifferent to (a) the principles of open source and (b) the concerns of the developer community.
And instead of criticising them you've turned the tables and now the fault is with people like me who are doing this for internet points. Instead of defending what underpins the entire software industry and has contributed so much value to the world.
I've contributed hours / days of coding to continue.. so to say what PearAI did makes me furious. Is an understatement.
This apology is even misleading of what they actually did. They didn't fork they copied and they changed the license. Fork properly keep attribution to all the developers who have worked on continue; and keep the license..
Having advised a company who applied to YC with traction, proven MRR, and a serious team behind, I can’t say it is certainly the case. But having seen a number of companies coming out of the latest batch, it only smells like YC has been drinking from the punch bowl that is HackerNews’ front page hype train.
I suspect the criteria is something like every engineer is going to end up w/ a subscription to some tool like this because the return on investment is so high. Saving 1 hour of work a month easily justifies spending $50. There's no clear winner yet, so let these folks -- who did work on dev tooling elsewhere -- take a stab at it.
It’s a good theory. But in practice, it’ll become ever so easy to build something similar, and there’ll be numerous free options to choose from. Good enough free options. And quite probably the bigger fish will start buying the smaller, until it naturally becomes a monoculture. All major editors already have free AI extensions, including the legacy ones like Vim. The only subscription you might need is to the LLM. A way better bet would be to make a model over a specific programming language, you’d have unfairly superior end-to-end development quality and performance, plus a niche to cultivate. My opinion is that the age of general models will not last. You will never be able to run the most capable one on current consumer hardware, yet, you will be able to run a specialized model. All in all, it seems like this generation of AI products will be cemented as progress on AI interfacing, that it, the AIs UIs.
Yeah if such a tooling is what you're building, YC is really really great for that. Some 4000 companies are your immediate clients. Well, most of them. And it is not like that another $50 a month is going to shorten the runway of any startup running it into ground.
Rather, you now have company in your portfolio with paying customers right off the bat that it would not have otherwise or would have taken longer than usual.
Nothing wrong with forking, but I am confused that people who obviously do not understand the very simple practices of open source licenses (and if you don't understand; chatgpt does) can be expected to build anything. I don't mean the legal ins and outs of these licenses; I mean the root license 'we thought is not a big deal' and so on. This is so basic that I wonder if anyone actually spoke to them before transferring the money; to write code and make a good product, you need skills that vastly eclipse such kindergarten level license practices.
Is it typical for VC to just throw money at projects without any sort of oversight/auditing of, oh jeez, IDK, Licensing/Legal issues?
I suppose they figure they can just buy it out in court appeals or something if someone were to take a grievance up with that.
How does Graham, et al justify this lackadaisical attitude... "You win some you lose some"? "It all comes out in the wash"? I guess if you got masses of money to throw away you don't particular care about the legal ramifications? It's just an entry in the books.
How did YC not smell that as a flag, and why should anyone TRUST YC after such a misstep? Or other VCs, not to dish just on YC... How many other situations like this are out there?
Are they going to work to verify licenses with all their projects? Or just wait til disaster erupts and someone finds out they done messed up (oh I know the answer based on the SV motto "ask forgiveness instead of permission").
I am slightly snarky with my attitude, but this is serious shit, and it matters, because the social contract matters, SV Homo Superior Morality be damned. This is the kind of attitude that leads to bank collapses, because they're so busy huffing greed and damn the consequences. In this case, it's obviously not nearly as catastrophic, but it gets tiring to see this attitude that they get to reap benefits while externalities? Those are for the little people to pay.
Traditionally YC invested in the potential of the team, not the details. One purpose of the YC program is/was to fix minor issues including legal ones.
Using a random number generator to write the legally binding license which you will be legally held to in a court of law is not a "minor issue" and not even something that's necessarily "fixable".
I am not a lawyer, but I guarantee you running this strategy past any lawyer will at best get you laughed out of the room.
This reads exactly the same as when people make irresponsible claims like "I know tons of people that don't have home insurance and they were fine. Therefore insurance is a scam"
Anyone defending these crypto scammers is the sucker they are looking for.
I instantly disliked them from their announcement. Huge crypto bro scam energy.
Even that aside I decided to give them a chance and look at their product. Oh its just a combined fork of two other products. Well even so I gave it a chance and installed it. Maybe they are just marketing? The product is incredibility underwhelming, just another bland AI "Me too" clone product.
Then I see that they actually are crypto bros from coinbase....They have been drinking from the kool-aid mines of crypto too long their compass is gone. This is just them trying to shamelessly "value extract" one of the last bastions of real production. What creeps.
Plus all the other drama they have been involved in ... They are the exact antithesis of the startup world. Poison in the well. I hope they fail because they deserve it and this community deserves better than being exploited.
I don't know about outright crypto scamming (unless you consider working for coinbase to be crypto scamming), but I got the impression they're just trend chasers more than anything. They're into a branch of "software dev" youtube that has grossed me out for a while, where it's just promoting software development as an aesthetic. They relentlessly force buzzwords like "startup," "software engineer," "quit my job," and giant salary numbers into video titles and thumbnails. They do "day in the life of a software engineer" video that's usually just showing off the cushy lifestlye, and explaining something like a gRPC call in a way that makes it sound way more complicated than it is. I scrolled the guy's YouTube channel and seemingly he quits 6-figure jobs every few months if his video titles are telling the truth.
His original tweet was using the exact same tactics as his video titling with bold words shouting "I QUIT MY $270,000/YEAR JOB AT TRENDY TECH COMPANY" that I think a lot of people outside of aspiring first-year CS students aren't falling for after we've been exposed to so much BS grifting out of silicon valley the past decade+.
>unless you consider working for coinbase to be crypto scamming
I do. I don't believe anyone working in the crypto industry is anything other than a sociopath or incredibly naive. They clearly are not naive since they are pumping their own product with deliberate and IMO false intent. How many times do we have to watch bad actors with their hands in the cookie jar before its a pattern?
>so much BS grifting out of silicon valley the past decade
Yet here they are still getting money. The real downer is that every one of these people are draining limited money that could have gone to someone genuinely trying to do something.
I think this is a fine...day 1 "oh man did we dog that one" kind of post. Yah, they really screwed up. In a disqualifying way. But they can recover and you'll only know if you keep following them. Certainly they could say more and be more reflective - should one use chatGPT for a license? There are so many more people they could apologize to in a specific way.
I also believe this could be an inciting incident that leads them to think differently and approach things differently. They could also go right back to their old ways. But I think this is a pretty good day-one response.
as Garry Tan said that they invest in founders not their ideas. The cofounder is xCoinbase, Tesla and has some decent social following. That was enough for YC partners to say yes without indulging much into the technicalities of the business and idea.
It would not have been a problem if they started small (like many open source stuff normally is) and someone would have noted their errors to them. On a small scale. Allowing them to learn.
VC funding turbocharged yet another AI bullshit something-something right into a wall.
Even more ridiculous: someone is giving money to a company that is essentially a patch/extra feature to an existing editor. Imho that is not a "company".
It's weird to see the feeding frenzy on these two guys. It's like watching piranas. It's brutal and savage in a primitive way, like watching chimpanzees engaging in cannibalism or something like that. It's basically the Two Minutes of Hate from 1984. Thousands of people with inner monologues consisting only of "PUNISH PUNISH PUNISH".
That’s not something I’d be putting forward either, anywhere.
In my opinion, it’s just a way for them to be putting forward their “value,” which actually feels dishonorable.
Why would you believe anything this person says after that? Default assumption #1 is any writing they output is an LLM product and insincere. Assumption #2 their actions are taken with little thought or intentionality.
> "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal"
This one line tells me that's an outfit that should be avoided entirely. It's either unfathomable incompetence, or a strong aversion to doing things properly. Either way, it says nothing good.
Modern Silicon Valley, YC included, has abandoned its pretences of encouraging meritocracy, product quality and competing in a free and fair market. It's personality hires and ideological alignment over substance these days.
Airbnb and Uber succeeded by simply pouring cash into funding legal challenges, and waiting for cities to give up. OpenAI can't chase after Middle Eastern cash fast enough. Musk and Thiel are openly backing the most brazenly corrupt presidential candidate in US history.
The wild thing isn’t that they ChatGPT’d license. That’s incompetent but forgivable, maybe even smart.
The move that dials the dumbassery to eleven is using it as a defence. On Twitter. Like, Exhibit A for any lawsuit that company is ever in will be this tweet: it demonstrates a proud disrespect for law and contracts. That’s high-proof mens rea if I’ve ever seen any.
Why is that forgivable? Any serious venture would have a involved, you know, some kind of legal expert to do a license. Getting that wrong at any stage has serious repercussions and can effectively end the whole project.
I was given three pieces of advice on starting up my own business and they were good:
Because legal naïvete is common and isn't a good predictor of founder ineptitude. Is it better to be legally savvy? Of course. But thinking you can wing it with a license agreement because it's boring and unfamiliar and you're rather focus on building your product is understandable. (In some cases, it might even be the right call.)
> Claiming legal naivete is acceptable and sometimes even commendable is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read on here
I'll stand by it. Most Americans are legally naïve. Most founders are, too. A start-up has to make trade-offs--it's far from clear such licensing agreements are make-or-break at the angel or seed stage.
Once that's pointed out to you, you hopefully either hire a lawyer or mitigate your legal cross section until you can afford one, e.g. by using template license agreements instead of rolling your own. But until you've been given that feedback, it's not some bizarre conclusion someone can come to. Most small businesses, for example, are formed perfectly well without much legal sophistication.
Template license agreements have been presumably written or reviewed by a contract lawyer somewhere along the line. I certainly wouldn't judge a founding team that chooses to use vetted legal templates - that's a reasonable choice early on when money is better spent on product than expensive lawyer hours.
However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy.
> However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy
Sure. Not disputing it isn’t incredibly stupid. But if, on having that pointed out, the founders had admitted it was a dumb thing to do—they had acted thoughtlessly and recognised as much—I’d be willing to forgive them the error. Hence, forgivable.
This just completely blows my mind. Who in their right mind thinks that generating legal content without even proofreading it is a good idea? It would've probably been less bad if they omitted a license altogether. At the same time, wasn't it recent news that a company that touted AI-assisted lawyers turned out to be no lawyers and just an LLM? The world of today is weird to me.
GenAI usage has definitely has opened my eyes that the average person seems to think legalese is complicated for no rational reason, and it just needs to sound right.
"we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal"
Attribution is one of the most basic precepts of decency. Not even "open source" or "free software", just basic decency. Mistakes happen and that's okay, but being all derisive about it initially, and then trying to spin that as "we learned about licensing" after people call you out on it is hard to take as genuine.
A genuine good faith response would have been "oops, what a silly embarrassing mistake" and then spending all of 30 seconds fixing it.
These people "like" open source only as means to extract value. They are only "part of the community" when it suits them. Nihilistic cryptobros considering everything that's not nailed down as a wankdoll to be abused and extract value from – who would have expected?
Wow, that post from the founder is as bad as it gets. Impressive amounts of arrogant, dumb, dismissive, and rude in a single tweet. I can see why yesterday blew up their face.
The "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" is especially hilarious given the paltry amount of coding they have actually done so far.
Yeah, I quite confused how these guys got money and I am sure this 'product' won't amount to anything. But some comment on twitter was correct; it's a launch people will remember; that's good I guess.
It was a well planned and executed publicity stunt:
1. Maximize attention on social media by being super obnoxious and arrogant ("dawg I ChatGPT’d the license")
2. 1 day later while the chatter is still going, write a mea culpa and take on the poor victim role ("grew up in a single mother household on government subsidies")
3. --> Repair most of the reputational damage but keep all the attention.
None of this is illegal, but it's exploiting a system of mutual trust and I wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody acted like that.
P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” which is almost as good as Oscar Wilde’s version, who put it like this: “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
I was just commenting about this yesterday on here. I am still aghast about some of the drivel that YC appears to be funding. Is this an anomaly or is scale causing them to vet companies less?
Can I get more YC funding by forking Redis, adding OpenAI, and calling it an AI In Memory Cache?
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue uses …. we got this right in one of them and wrong in the other. We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
99% of the people here would make this mistake.
and to be accused of taking something if you are giving attribution would just be absurd
OSS community has some lame and immature aspects
These guys might have gotten defensive but its obvious how to communicate, to me
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
You know what's even easier than having an LLM generate your license? Copying one that already exists. I know a cool one, it's called Apache 2.0
This person took on (a little) additional work to do this. Since they used Apache 2.0 in one of their repos, they seem to grasp the concept of public licenses. If this truly was pure incompetence, it would have really been major.
Now you've lost me. It's fine to be legally naïve. But you should have the self awareness to know you're winging it. When someone gives you feedback, especially for free, it's a damning personality trait for the first reaction to be petulance.
I'm sorry but if you think 99% of people here would consider this an acceptable approach to licensing I think you have a weirdly low opinion of this forum:
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
No part of this sentence makes any sense to anyone remotely informed about licensing.
“making the same mistake” doesn’t equal “considering it an acceptable approach”
the reaction was attributing it to malice, when it obviously was incompetence
that should have been 1 tweet or github issue opened asking them to change it, and it would have been corrected or not. firestorm if they didnt take it seriously
instead of whatever all this drama was pre-emptively
99% of people here would… have spicy autocorrect generate some legalistic-looking nonsense, for, based on the above, _absolutely no reason at all_ (given that they’re claiming they believed that it was still under Apache 2.0)?
They didn't "fork" it, but rather implemented the ideas in it, that's science and engineering as intended. For open source software projects on the other hand, the intended behavior is contributing directly, and forking is a distant plan B.
The product OpenAI got mega traction with was based on the GPT series of papers, all of which were published by OpenAI and all of which are major advancements in research.
Also OpenAI was founded before the transformer paper and spent most of their early years focused on RL style research and products - just look at what they published pre 2019.
I don't understand all the outrage. I would even go as far as saying that Y Combinator knows that they forked that other editor and they are evidently thinking that there will be some big hits in this space and are shotgunning into different projects thinking at least one of them will hit big.
Context: PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it. (relevant discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032)
As an aside, I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense that has been popping up more lately in various contexts. The whole incident started because they got venture capital for their fork and were in a startup accelerator for several months: that's not moving fast or being indie.
> I'm starting to get annoyed with the "we moved fast and broke things, we're smol indie hackers" defense
It's worse than that; this whole kerfuffle came to people's attention after the founder posted a brag tweet about leaving a $300k job at Coinbase to go YC. Only to claim ignorance about the license and everything else later.
"Sorry officer I didn't know I couldn't just rewrite a license to whatever I wanted despite having ample access to legal resources. Yes officer I am a CEO. No officer I will not remain silent."
Terrifying, always afraid to touch unlicensed code. Tried to give most of my public code extremely open licenses because I’d assume some guy crawling the internet for a piece of code probably has enough stress in his life.
No no who says we're smal indide hackers. It has to be that we're the genius god gifted visionaries fixated on a future for humanity that is invisible to mere mortal peasants hence mistakes are inevitable.
That's in general not specific to any situation.
> PearAI evidently forked an OSS code editor, then later got funding from Y Combinator for it.
More specifically PearAI forked the OSS code editor Continue, which was itself funded by YC, and got YC funding for it. Also the editor they forked is itself a fork of VS Code, but is not to be confused with Void Editor, which is a third YC funded VS Code fork with AI features. It's YC funded VS Code forks with AI all the way down.
So fork of the fork got funded. Interesting. Now I believe it is true that "you don't have to have even a product"
This is crazy. And then I hear about solid products/companies that don’t get any/very little funding at all because it has no “AI” and it baffles the mind.
Funders are betting on founders. They see somebody willing to take shortcuts and ride hype trains, turn good faith projects and pass them off as their own innovation, and the see the kind of sociopathic organization that has the potential to "become the next Uber."
They aren't funding the viability of the product, they are funding for a take of future earnings of the morally bankrupt or the righteous will of the hopelessly naive. In either case, it's all about how effectively they can affix a leash.
Rent-seeking over value-creation.
YC filters for companies for gorillion dollar missions / solve gorillion dollar problems.
A mission that is, "I have an AI, input is business plan, output is entire IT infrastructure" is what YC sees here. i.e. programming as a field (quite a cost center) is no longer needed, ironically. Because of that the bar is low. Honestly if anyone is reading this, if you find a very clever novel way to go after this, surely you would be funded
This sounds like the preamble to a Michael Lewis story to the next tech bubble.
> OSS code editor Continue
Are you talking about continue.dev?
That's not an editor itself, nor is if a fork of VS Code; it's an extension for VS Code (and JetBrains).
My mistake, I haven't used Continue and was led to believe they have their own VS Code distro. PearAI forked VS Code and forked Continues VS Code extension and smushed them together then. They also just wired Continues code up to Claude/GPT4 so the models aren't novel either.
Maybe you're thinking of Cursor, which did fork VSCode.
Also of note, someone linked a video from 3 months ago where one of the co-founders was talking about using both Cursor and Continue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0OylwLzBQw&t=257s
Which I suppose isn't necessarily a gotcha, it's totally possible to be a user of software and figure out ways it could be improved. But the way they pitched themselves was they're building an AI code editor, whereas it seems like they're just making some changes to a free, open-source project.
If I had any guess, the reason they got accepted is from their YouTube followings, and this was essentially a marketing experiment. These guys have audiences of young aspiring developers who could be potential customers if their favorite youtuber were to start claiming they "built" an AI code editor. Not a crazy idea but certainly doesn't smell of an attempt to make an honest and good product.
This is an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal.
I wonder if it's possible to get funding for a fork of an already funded fork that you launched recently.
Might even be an easy money glitch: every couple of years or so you fork your YC funded code editor, get YC funding for the new fork, and cruise on that money for a while.
(all of the above is said tongue in cheek)
> ...an interesting business model. Continue building on top of YC-funded forks, and you basically end up with a product that was funded by billions, but your own contribution to it was minimal
Don't give blockchain bros any ideas...
Forkchain? Proof of Fork? Hmmm… there’s something there
Well said! That last sentence was very elegant.
To that I say “fork yeah”, the old GitHub slogan. I haven’t seen Continue complaining about it. It’s far less toxic than Sentry or Hashicorp which are on the other side of the issue. Pear could have been a bit less blatant I guess, but I think it’s fine that they took advantage of the license.
Edit: I just realized the old t-shirt slogan of GitHub was “Fork you.” Even better.
Is Sentry based on FOSS?
It was open source for about 10 years. They built themselves a name by being open source. Then they went and changed their license to a non-OSI-approved license. https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/ Not everyone went along with it, but a lot did.
Tell us of the time you hacked a real-life (non-computer) system
Seems like YC should pair more of these smaller companies together, I honestly don’t know if that would help or not. Most YC funded projects aren’t really profitable to begin with.
It’s like somewhere in between getting grant funding for a university project and real corporate work.
I mean, this was precisely PG's genius - taking the right set of unwashed nerds, pairing them up appropriately and then mentoring the end result. That model gave birth to Reddit and Auctomatic.
I don't get it either - why spend $2m on 4 YC companies under different group partners, creating a hunger games of sorts, instead of convincing all of them to combine their talent for $500k. Sure, egos will be bruised and they might fight over who's boss, but the chances of the final product succeeding would be much higher.
Don't see a problem with YC "dutching" and spreading their bets across multiple forks/teams.
I just forked the vs code repo and didn't screw up statements on a license for a business model. I'm clearly the superior hedge and I'll be waiting for my check.
"Fork you"
What you need is a good value added Spork.
Nah, go fork yourself.
But seriously, this has got to feel pretty shite for continue. What is their impetus to roll out new features when they know that pear can focus on only the icing on top of that milestone, inherently making continue look like a less polished version of pear, when in fact they were the innovators?
I think what we have here is an antisynergy of the incentives baked into open-source and capital speculation. It’s a recursion bug that undermines the incentive structure, and YC was foolish to be so disloyal to their partners.
I have no clue man. Dial me in when you do.
I don't see many AI companies reaching billion dollar valuations and I don't see any AI company retaining billion dollar valuations in the next five to ten years.
Yeah, building on AI is tricky, because no matter what you are up to, gpt12 is coming to eat your lunch lol.
I think the safest bet is in niches where you bring unusual or hard to obtain datasets to the table. Training data is the only moat.
you're obviously joking, but it'd be interesting if you actually tried :)
people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try. you can jokingly quip that you'd be better at forking vs code, but at the end of the day they're doing it - not "waiting for their check" - and you're making fun of them on the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> people seem so caught up in founders' particular ideas at the pre-seed stage and forget that YC is investing in people - specifically: people who try.
Are they? Seems like based on this YC alum [0], the reality these days is otherwise.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032
You're right, I am joking. I have my own ventures that carry some dignity. It's also premature for a claim that they are "people who try" as they have not produced anything except mistakes and apologies.
Also, maybe consider you're spending your time baselessly defending strangers on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When there's gold rush, sell shovels: create a startup with an AI product for defending other AI startups' blatantly unimaginative idea.
It does dispel the myth that YC is simply investing in founders. They are really investing in the ideas that the partners like and then finding teams who are capable of delivering on it.
Which is of course fine but you see Dalton's Request for Startups and I've not seen only a tiny handful in the last two batches.
Due to YC's large batch sizes and the consolidation of industries such as AI, increasing numbers of YC startups are now directly competing with each other.
When 98% of your "product" is a thin wrapper around chatGPT, you will of course end up competing against every other product that is a thin wrapper around chatGPT.
As someone (not YC funded) who is developing exactly such an app, I've wondered about this ...
Not really. The medical ChatGPT wrappers don't compete with the legal ChatGPT wrappers or the code editor ChatGPT wrappers. It has been argued (ad nauseam) that ChatGPT itself competes with all the wrappers, not that the wrappers compete with each other.
They don't compete right now, but surely the architecture of the system will be quite similar, or solve very similar types of challenges. So it should become easier to jump domains when these solutions mature.
This seems completely wrong.
A legal wrapper will use domain specific legal expertise to structure and develop their product and functionality. It will likely have many functions that are specifically optimized for the legal use case.
If a wrapper can easily move across many domains, then the wrapper likely adds little value to the base model.
> . It has been argued (ad nauseam) that ChatGPT itself competes with all the wrappers, not that the wrappers compete with each other.
This makes more sense now that I think about it.
VCs will frequently invest in competing startups to hedge their bets.
"We moved fast, stole someone else's work, claimed it was our own, sold it to investors, we're smol indie hackers, just like you uwu."
UwU
Sounds like YC could improve in their due diligence.
Maybe they hired the Sequoia people that vetted SBF.
[dead]
They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack re: how buttoned up they are about licensing. Particularly when they appear to have started sharing source code before YC's investment, and the last time I spoke to an attorney who advises on open source licensing he was expensive.
> They appear to be 2 people. I kinda of think folks should cut two people, one of whom just publicly apologized, a little slack
Reading the room, people are upset about grifters, scams and fakery in general. The outrage is obviously built up over seeing our industry decline to buzzwords, bait and switch, and general enshittification. This is just one particularly clear-cut instance of opportunistic grift caught in the act. It’s like that IoT juice press – it’s not that harmful, but it’s a symbol of what people hate.
Nah. YC should cut them. It doesn't take an expert to know that you shouldn't ask AI to generate legal documents for you.
My bet is: this won't age well.
It's like saying 25 years ago that it doesn't take an expert to know that you shouldn't put your credit card on the internet.
I'd take you up on that bet. The AI can get as good as you want, but the reason you get a human to write and verify legal documents is so there's someone accountable. Their own job and reputation is on the line if they're doing bad work. Unless the company providing LawyerBot As A Service and writing everyone's legal documents is going to take all accountability, but that's a massive liability.
Whether AI becomes capable of doing this 25 years from now has no bearing on the current idiocy of the founders.
I kind of see your point, but they're clearly learning on the job, and AFAICT the mistakes didn't damage anyone else too badly.
imo, the way you first do something + your first responses to serious criticism are the most telling regarding character. because afterwards, you can just play the act of "we're sorry because the backlash was really big and we have to clean up".
>they're clearly learning on their job
They are experienced software developers coming from $300K jobs at Coinbase. As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0. As former employees at highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase they know better than letting ChatGPT make up new legal texts.
They are cynical manipulators hiding behind a made up fictive "careless Gen Z tech bros" image.
They're VC funded software developers, gods in the image of mere mortals. There's probably nothing they are not experts in.
> [they worked at] Coinbase
I mean... crypto companies are well known for being chock full of decent and honest employees who aren’t zealots or bandwagon jumpers in any way, shape or form.
Just like a lot of recently created “AI” companies.
Crypto scammers turned AI scammers, the world continues to turn.
> highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase
Um.
> As experienced developers they know the requirements in the Apache License 2.0.
I’ve worked at a company with hundreds of devs where I caught an obvious error (a reference to a section that did not exist) in the pre-employment agreement. To imply that most devs are carefully reading documentation in general, much less legalese, is laughable.
But when you're starting or running a business, carefully reading contracts is a critical activity for the success of the business. If the founders can't do this themselves, they should have their attorney do it for them. And if they don't have an attorney, that's a critical error as well and they need one ASAP.
Coming from Coinbase isn't such the prestigious signal of integrity and hard work that that they seem to think it is.
Coinbase internally had the `oh anyone who wants to work on crypto would want to work at Coinbase, you are already at Coinbase, wow, look at you, such a good place you have for yourself` speech given out relatively often. Even after employees commented on how they think they are being underpaid.
The compensation is on the low-end when it comes to what Coinbase pays to its employees. They wronged their hires on multiple occasions with dilutions too. Many of these employees had strike prices that were above what Coinbase IPO'd at. They were relying on their options, otherwise their base pay was undermarket.
They are new grads
This outrage talk is ridiculous, you don’t have the morale high ground to judge people, they didn’t break anything, taking VC money isn’t bad, the incident was caused by sore losers looking for drama, etc etc
They very clearly did break something because a lot of people got upset and said they broke something, and then they admitted they broke something.
So I took a quick look at the codebase.
Here are the commits from the founders:
* https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commits?author=n... (71 commits)
* https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commits?author=F... (21 commits)
This is what got funded... I leave it to folks to decide if the changes to date are meaningful.
If that is indeed what got funded, those changes appear to be extremely minimal and benign and I can understand why people would have an issue with funding this.
Chrome + Electron codebase is a gazillion lines of code.
If someone builds an electron app and gets VC funded, is that somehow unethical?
Lines of code is irrelevant. Only issue is if they are building on top of a codebase whose license they have violated.
Well, I looked through the work and it's mostly random config/frontend changes. I don't see a lot of meaningful work done? Whether LoC matters or not, it doesn't change that pretty much nothing was changed.
> Lines of code is irrelevant.
Lines of code is a proxy for "how hard would it be for someone else to do what these guys are doing but better" and the answer here is "not very".
> Lines of code is irrelevant.
Let's take it to the extreme - how much would you fund a "tech startup" that doesn't have any of its own code at all, but rather just has its founder manually press buttons on a third-party tool's GUI?
Note that I'm not asking whether it's ethical, or even if the service is worth it to a customer (maybe the founder really is good at pressing the right button at the right time) - but would you as a founder fund it, knowing that there's pretty much no barrier-to-entry whatsoever?
I don't know much about this codebase and I am probably one of the dumber people on this site (that's ok, I'm happy and eat well), but take a closer look at some of these commits:
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/bf67ece35...
Just dd a promptfrom one object and p it to another.
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/c59d90a4c...
change a keyboard shortcut lol
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/489004ae0...
manually set font size in 3 places but remove the variable that would still be valid in 2 places???
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/9bbee4c3d...
made an error message longer
Now to be fair I've never been paid 270k by coinbase so presumably these guys are a lot smarter than me, but I'm still really confused why they got funded.
Your mistake, the right way to do this is to optimize 100% for the leetcode interview and 0% for how to do a job.
You get hired and undercontribute for nine months before putting in notice after you win another interview, which is easier this time because you won one before and got the pedigree.
There is a whole generation of people who write solutions to assignments and have no idea how to create software. These commits are what happens when they don’t receive a prompt requiring a from-scratch implementation of a topological sort.
Hilarious that the font PR was meant to "reduce font size" yet he managed to actually increase it.
What am I doing with my life, I should've been a grifter.
I applied to YC in the last batch and got rejected. Not to sound like sour grapes, but it seems like YC loooves students from certain universities, which kinda sucks for us commoners who didn't go to these places.
Not to mention the whole hype around AI is unbearable at this point. Seems very likely that deserving products/ideas are getting rejected because they aren't doing AI, or because their founders didn't go to Stanford. Oh well, that's just how it goes.
Yep, thats how they work, there's a ton of data to back it up.
Unless you are from few *US* unis, you have zero to none chance of getting in, unless you have significant traction already, in which case you may as well go to any investor and they will fund you.
And if you are among those lucky few, they will fund you with the most shitty idea you have, or even without any at all.
>unless you have significant traction already, in which case you may as well go to any investor and they will fund you
This is the part that really bothers me unfortunately. I honestly grew up thinking that YC invested in people and ideas more than traction. If I had traction, I could raise money from anywhere. YC does invest in people without traction, but you have to be a certain type of person, from a certain background, and from certain institutions.
I went to a state school (and not a prestigious one) and I got in ~a year after graduating, I don't think this is super accurate
I'm a solo founder and during the application process, I got 3-4 emails telling me to strongly consider finding a co-founder using https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching.
That's great, but just look at the profiles advertised on the front-page there: Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, etc. Nothing against them personally of course, but I really think this is the trend YC is going towards these days. It's the old school institutional prestige back, but this time it's blended together with SV startups.
> I got 3-4 emails telling me to strongly consider finding a co-founder
A lot of YC's advice is terrible, such as their advice on finding a cofounder.
You can easily tell when they give bad advice: ask them for their dataset. When they don't offer it, consider doing the opposite of what they tell you.
Now, some of their advice is great, when it is data backed an easily testable like Jessica Livingston's "I don't know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users."
https://breckyunits.com/advice.html
Now, what's a version of their "find a co-founder" advice that doesn't suck: "I don't know of a single case of a successful founder that wasn't building things all the time with many different people."
Don't find a co-founder or two, find dozens of "building buddies" who you just build shit with. Every now and then you can form a legal entity and be "co-founders", but the more important thing is you just create stuff together.
The piece of this apology that I have trouble understanding is this:
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
The root repo already had an Apache license in it. If you thought it wasn't important, why replace it in the first place?
I think this comes from Github asking people to choose a license when they first create a repo, they may be just viewing it as some sort of automatic box to check when making a new repo. I think these guys honestly have no idea what a license even does or what copyright is, based on their other statements about it. I bet they don't even have any idea of the differences between GPL vs Apache/MIT/et al vs AGPL, SSPL, etc. and that's been discussed to death on here and all over the open source world.
[flagged]
The majority of businesses that rely on exploiting weak licenses coincidentally agree.
Licenses are for losers.
All YC companies put together are losers compared to Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web.
Do you want to have short term profits or change the course of humanity?
If you want to be a loser and use licenses so you can exploit bad laws to harm your fellow human, go ahead. Just don't expect not to get called out on it anymore.
I use a license to absolve myself of legal liability and to cuck private forks because it's really funny. If that means I don't get to be the Tim Berners-Lee of having my ass reamed for commercial applications, I'll be one happy loser.
If you're a winner loser lawyers will come after you no matter what, and "licenses" provide you with absolutely no protection.
But all lawyers will tell you you need a license, because they are losers who can't build real things, and need to convince you that you need them (you don't).
Lawyers lick my boot. Free software licenses are a nightmare to litigate, take too long to process, and don't reward damages in the first place. For every free software program that gets dragged into court, 500 independent businesses are sued for false advertising or letting ChatGPT write their TOS.
I sleep like a baby because I know that there isn't a bar qualified lawyer in America dumb enough to sue me. Cry about it, it's not my problem because I'm not a sniveling corporate sycophant.
> Lawyers lick my boot...I sleep like a baby because I know that there isn't a bar qualified lawyer in America dumb enough to sue me.
I'm right there with you.
> Free software licenses
Licenses are for losers. All licenses are for losers. Public domain or you are a loser.
No, the root repo had an MIT license from Microsoft in it. And they have now changed it to Apache, and removed the Microsoft copyright clause.
His apology would sound more authentic and consistent with his previous communications if it were in all lower case with lots of kewl words like "dawg" and abbreviations like "lol" and missing punctuation like kids these days use in their text messages.
Those capital letters and correctly spelled words and full stops come off as so passive aggressive.
Otherwise it painfully looks like he tasked ChatGPT to generate his apology as well as his license.
this says more about YC than this particular founder (lots of these types nowadays): i.e. their process, their due diligence, who is advanced from 1000's of applications.
People look at the top 5 YC success stories and think every company they fund is of that standard. In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year. They aren't all winners. In fact I'd wager Pear AI is a lot closer to the norm in terms of quality and competency than, say, Stripe or Airbnb.
there is a culture of "gaming" that is in fact promoted by YC. one of the questions they had was to show an instance where the founders "hacked" or "gamed" a system.
ie, game the test, game the admission, game everything. and some folks see this as "hustle".
eventually their own process gets gamed.
gaming incentivises a culture of "pretension" - you dont know sh* but you fake it. fake it til you make it. copy code-repos, trample over licenses, whatever, who cares as long as you are getting ahead.
I think it speaks to beginner mistakes on the part of the founders.
There are some exceptions but the typical demo day is absolutely stitched together from other peoples’ work. The difference is most hide this fact, instead of working in the clear on “open source” without understanding that it is meant to be a contribution from you to the community, because to finance bros that sounds like a joke.
The whole thing has gotten so washed out that they either thought that this is what people actually do, or they thought no one was going to look at their repo (for a coding product!).
YC now reminds me of those tech influencer frat houses.
Where it's all about the hustle, founder mode, the scene and whatever you can get away with to make money and take advantage of people.
i really used to be wowed by their products and see their immediately utility like stripe and dropbox. now everyone is going founder mode, become an influencer type first and be a (mostl likely AI) guru people might want to follow
Nitter tweet link: https://nitter.privacydev.net/CodeFryingPan/status/184083133...
Apologies if this is a dumb question, but PearAI, Continue, and Cursor all seem like different versions of GitHub Copilot to me. Am I understanding that correctly? Why are we funding so many 'GitHub Copilot's?
Here is my theory.
1) management types who have never coded love the idea that coders can be replaced or minimized by said tooling. hence hey fund any and all projects.
2) coders excited by llms reach out to the nearest projects they can relate to, namely, code assistants, test generation assistants, doc generation, and generally any automation in the coding workflow. so, you will see a lot of me-too tooling.
"We" aren't funding anything.
Venture capital is trying to fund companies that have the potential to grow their valuation many many many times over in a relatively short amount if time.
AI is obviously very powerful and has the potential to change things quickly IF it turns out it can be good at important tasks that people will pay for. If someone finds a really good use case then they can scale that with essentially no problems until the vcs are fat and happy.
Pouring money into AI garbo also feels like a hedge to investors when they see it as just funneling down to their other investments.
Together these things end up looking like an attractive vc target so we see a ton of these "companies" that are a bag of prompts on top of a different company's code/model.
Cursor user and former Copilot user here. The difference is significant. Being able to use Claude alone is worth the switch, but the UI of these newer tools are far better than Microsoft’s implementation.
>write an apology that really sounds genuine and heartfelt. include some poetic turns of phrase, and be produced in the style of a viral tweet
They didn't fix the licenses. Microsoft VSCode was originally MIT licensed, which PearAI is now relicensing as Apache, and has removed the Microsoft copyright clause in their root repo.
Similarly, with their extension repo which they forked from Continue, they now have two LICENSE files, one from Continue, one from PearAI, both Apache. This could be argued to be almost correct, but it would be clearer if they did it correctly and had one LICENSE file there with both copyright clauses from both PearAI and Continue.
Additionally they don't seem to use any contributor agreements, so people who contribute to their repos will maintain their own personal copyrights. That means that the copyright clauses on the licenses are technically invalid as the repos contain works from various individuals who have not given their permission to license their works in any way.
Disregarding the legal aspects, what they are doing is morally clearly wrong as they are crudely exploiting the works of others without contributing back to them in any way.
270k USD job but couldn't hire a lawyer to fix their license situation.
Maybe, as a prerequisite for VC funding in the modern world, tech founders should have to show a functional knowledge of open source licensing. It seems to be the cause of a lot of grief in recent years.
I ran into this guy's youtube channel when trying to get a tech internship last year. He's a giant grifter — memorizing leetcode problems while failing his core cs classes at a prestigious university. I'm frustrated with my own career so seeing people like this (who are so unworthy?) get 270,000 jobs out of college and a half million dollars in funding for... copying code... make me want to quit the industry.
tech is increasingly dominated by grifters, as they tend to sound more convincing than the classic hacker and are tend to have "fluid morals", which is important if your goal is to take a billion dollars from VC money by lying your way to riches, then become an investor in the next wave of <insert hype space here>. It's a self-selecting game.
This why I'm looking to get out of the industry entirely. It's reached the point where I no longer want to tell people what I do for a living. It's become embarrassing, and I tire of having to defend myself about it.
It's not embarrassing if you write and ship free software. You can still operate in the software industry, succeed against corporate interests, and provide value to other developers without selling your soul to the devil. The fatalism of "all software is bad" is a tautology that seems correct, but is only validated by commercially successful (and often monopoly-abusing) businesses.
Doesn't shock me considering the hard work -> nice life pipeline is in shambles in the US and it wouldn't surprise me if that's true for other countries too
And we also chose to extend the presence of gambling in society - quite literally with sports gambling - but also adjacently with crypto markets and stock market apps
Tech has always had advantages around being able to slack off if you were good since it was a white collar desk job, but you could justify that to yourself as a sort of implied retainer arrangement. So it wasn't directly grifting or stealing.
Some people get a taste of real money relatively easily (like a $200k+ salary for slacking off) and want more though, maybe because they're afraid that good situation can't last and they need maximum value extracted before they're "found out".
And we are just not seeing major downsides to grifting unless you run afoul of the law, which can be slow to prosecute if you are on a bleeding edge like AI (like it was for crypto).
at this point if you're not grifting you're left holding the bag
He graduated from a mid-tier - generous assessment - university in Canada. Maybe he's a grifter, but given the companies he's managed to work at, he's clearly competent. Even if you memmrize solutions you still need to perform.
> you still need to perform.
Have you worked at a big tech company? Because no you don't.
This apology is well done. It's humane, humble, acknowledges specific wrongs that were social failures and technical/legal failures, and explains the fixes going forward.
Whatever you may think of Pear AI, or startups playing too fast and loose, IMHO this apology sounds sincere and worthwhile.
I disagree, here's a line which rubs me the wrong way: "We tried to be transparent about what we’d done as much as possible since the beginning of our journey, but that wasn’t good enough." Couple this to "talking about it so publicly online, made it look like we were stealing the work of others as our own."
Contrast that to their comment about "100+ contributors".
It feels like typical deflection.
Also egregious is "We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open." It's hard to trust someone who would think this in the first place.
They're manipulating the reader into thinking it's their unachievably high moral standards that is to blame here: "...but that wasn’t good enough".
You can't "tried to be transparent about what we’d done" and "made it look like we were stealing the work" at the same time.
Either you announce yourself as "Pear, the VS Code Fork that will change the way you code", or you try to be very low key about it yet hope to retain plausible deniability when people call you on your BS.
That could go either way. Is there evidence that they “tried to be transparent” or is it a smokescreen? (I don’t know anything about them.)
I agree. They aren’t sincere. They are only sincere when they get caught by others with morals.
Clearly they are using “moving fast” as an excuse because they have no moral compass
Smug self entitled YC people thing they are doing amazing things because YC says so.
It's just such a hollow response. They know exactly what they did, and this apology doesn't obviate any of the problems with their product.
Really makes you wonder what YC even looks for in a business these days. They're certainly neglecting their due diligence.
the self-pitying statements at the end particularly, at least to me, are classic symptoms of a narcissist's non-apology apology.
Exactly. Feed their apology into ChatGPT and ask if it seemed sincere
I did:
> In summary, the apology appears mostly sincere but is tinged with some defensiveness and rationalization, which might affect how it's received, especially by those who were most upset by the initial actions.
Maybe they should pivot to developing an AI powered suite of software license generation and code rebranding and serial number filing and non-apology apology writing plugins for VSCode, so they can say they eat their own dog food.
It deserves to be on a list like this although it is D tier at best;
I Ranked the Worst Influencer Apology Videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYeR7hvpTfw
I can't wait until this trend of reaction video goes away. The constant repetition and setup. It's like an unedited first draft of America's Funniest Home Videos
Maybe they should do a startup that offers apologies for screwing up fundamentals of a business project instead. That seems to be the tangible thing they can deliver.
I don't think it reflects well on the founders. The explanation about the license is either a lazy lie, or it shows they're incompetent.
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue does.
So why didn't they copy the license like they copied the rest of the code?
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
Why would the license not be important? And why would they think that the one they generated was open? If they were going to blindly copy and paste from chatgpt, why wouldn't they blindly copy and paste from the original codebase instead, which is already known to be open.
Software licenses are a core part of any software company's business model, so I don't believe for a second that these YC-backed founders didn't realize what they were doing.
... With that said, Apache and all other "OSI approved" licenses are open to being exploited like this, so I don't think they're necessarily in the wrong. The apology, however, is 100% bullshit and I wouldn't trust these people with anything.
Sincerity is what counts in this business kid and if you can fake that you'll go all the way to the top.
“We flubbed the license” is the opposite of taking responsibility. “Flubbed” sounds like a minor oopsie!
Meh. Just another variant of the standard corporate "we did everything 100% intentionally but are now backtracking because of public outcry". It isn't a "humane, humble" apology but a PR statement.
This apology was written by ChatGPT. Never trust someone in founder mode, they’ll con you in every way possible to keep that funding coming in.
I'm not really getting that vibe from it, stylistically. I especially feel like ChatGPT (for all its unending shortcomings) would have gone with something more tactful than "that wasn't good enough" -- but this is precisely the kind of thing an undersocialized Computer Guy would actually say with good intentions. In conclusion, while the motivations of the original poster and the provenance of the apology letter text may be debatable, it is important to rem--
Eh, I hadn’t heard about this and now have. Which is wild since I was asked by someone considering trying them just yesterday and I said I frankly had no opinion. Revising that to a negative—I’m not bullish on founders more interested in tweeting than building.
yeah exactly. mistakes happen, they were definitely too influencer-brained in the launch, but its how you handle the feedback that shows your mettle.
still doesnt make pear an investable idea, but the founders showed some humility/ability to read the room here.
conversely, people who dunked on -them- too much showed either their lack of knowledge on open source/startup norms, or their ability to disingenuously ignore that for internet points, and provided many opportunities to be muted.
I think this comment is pretty disgraceful.
Here is a clear as day example of a startup who were completely reckless and indifferent to (a) the principles of open source and (b) the concerns of the developer community.
And instead of criticising them you've turned the tables and now the fault is with people like me who are doing this for internet points. Instead of defending what underpins the entire software industry and has contributed so much value to the world.
>mistakes happen
Mistakes are made without intent. That's not the case here.
The editor they forked, Continue, is also funded by YC.
I've contributed hours / days of coding to continue.. so to say what PearAI did makes me furious. Is an understatement.
This apology is even misleading of what they actually did. They didn't fork they copied and they changed the license. Fork properly keep attribution to all the developers who have worked on continue; and keep the license..
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
_Generated_? Oh, yeah, that’ll go well.
Of all the comically inappropriate uses of LLMs I’ve heard of, _writing legal documents_ has to almost number one, behind perhaps only medical use.
I'm wondering how and what's the investing criteria for YC.
Maybe there's a billion dollar company in that or a sustainable business model because consumer hardwar may never be able to run LLMs.
But I really don't know because otherwise I'm sure pretty stable, serious ideas with proven demand would be rejected outright.
Having advised a company who applied to YC with traction, proven MRR, and a serious team behind, I can’t say it is certainly the case. But having seen a number of companies coming out of the latest batch, it only smells like YC has been drinking from the punch bowl that is HackerNews’ front page hype train.
I doubt Sustainable business model features anywhere in the YC requirements. It’s the antithesis of the entire throw VC money at it to grow plan
I suspect the criteria is something like every engineer is going to end up w/ a subscription to some tool like this because the return on investment is so high. Saving 1 hour of work a month easily justifies spending $50. There's no clear winner yet, so let these folks -- who did work on dev tooling elsewhere -- take a stab at it.
It’s a good theory. But in practice, it’ll become ever so easy to build something similar, and there’ll be numerous free options to choose from. Good enough free options. And quite probably the bigger fish will start buying the smaller, until it naturally becomes a monoculture. All major editors already have free AI extensions, including the legacy ones like Vim. The only subscription you might need is to the LLM. A way better bet would be to make a model over a specific programming language, you’d have unfairly superior end-to-end development quality and performance, plus a niche to cultivate. My opinion is that the age of general models will not last. You will never be able to run the most capable one on current consumer hardware, yet, you will be able to run a specialized model. All in all, it seems like this generation of AI products will be cemented as progress on AI interfacing, that it, the AIs UIs.
Yeah if such a tooling is what you're building, YC is really really great for that. Some 4000 companies are your immediate clients. Well, most of them. And it is not like that another $50 a month is going to shorten the runway of any startup running it into ground.
Rather, you now have company in your portfolio with paying customers right off the bat that it would not have otherwise or would have taken longer than usual.
Nothing wrong with forking, but I am confused that people who obviously do not understand the very simple practices of open source licenses (and if you don't understand; chatgpt does) can be expected to build anything. I don't mean the legal ins and outs of these licenses; I mean the root license 'we thought is not a big deal' and so on. This is so basic that I wonder if anyone actually spoke to them before transferring the money; to write code and make a good product, you need skills that vastly eclipse such kindergarten level license practices.
That’s on YC, if they are fine funding trivial forks of open source projects that doesn’t reflect good on them, but I don’t really see the issue here
Is it typical for VC to just throw money at projects without any sort of oversight/auditing of, oh jeez, IDK, Licensing/Legal issues?
I suppose they figure they can just buy it out in court appeals or something if someone were to take a grievance up with that.
How does Graham, et al justify this lackadaisical attitude... "You win some you lose some"? "It all comes out in the wash"? I guess if you got masses of money to throw away you don't particular care about the legal ramifications? It's just an entry in the books.
How did YC not smell that as a flag, and why should anyone TRUST YC after such a misstep? Or other VCs, not to dish just on YC... How many other situations like this are out there?
Are they going to work to verify licenses with all their projects? Or just wait til disaster erupts and someone finds out they done messed up (oh I know the answer based on the SV motto "ask forgiveness instead of permission").
I am slightly snarky with my attitude, but this is serious shit, and it matters, because the social contract matters, SV Homo Superior Morality be damned. This is the kind of attitude that leads to bank collapses, because they're so busy huffing greed and damn the consequences. In this case, it's obviously not nearly as catastrophic, but it gets tiring to see this attitude that they get to reap benefits while externalities? Those are for the little people to pay.
Traditionally YC invested in the potential of the team, not the details. One purpose of the YC program is/was to fix minor issues including legal ones.
Using a random number generator to write the legally binding license which you will be legally held to in a court of law is not a "minor issue" and not even something that's necessarily "fixable".
I am not a lawyer, but I guarantee you running this strategy past any lawyer will at best get you laughed out of the room.
People have come up with tons of clown licenses over the years and they didn't cause lawsuits.
This reads exactly the same as when people make irresponsible claims like "I know tons of people that don't have home insurance and they were fine. Therefore insurance is a scam"
> Is it typical for VC to just throw money at projects without any sort of oversight/auditing of, oh jeez, IDK, Licensing/Legal issues?
YC has a long history of funding companies that blatantly break laws such as AirBnB and Uber, so I wouldn't expect they'd be bothered by this.
YC will expect them to pivot a few times, if things go south. No harm done. /s
Anyone defending these crypto scammers is the sucker they are looking for.
I instantly disliked them from their announcement. Huge crypto bro scam energy. Even that aside I decided to give them a chance and look at their product. Oh its just a combined fork of two other products. Well even so I gave it a chance and installed it. Maybe they are just marketing? The product is incredibility underwhelming, just another bland AI "Me too" clone product.
Then I see that they actually are crypto bros from coinbase....They have been drinking from the kool-aid mines of crypto too long their compass is gone. This is just them trying to shamelessly "value extract" one of the last bastions of real production. What creeps.
Plus all the other drama they have been involved in ... They are the exact antithesis of the startup world. Poison in the well. I hope they fail because they deserve it and this community deserves better than being exploited.
I don't know about outright crypto scamming (unless you consider working for coinbase to be crypto scamming), but I got the impression they're just trend chasers more than anything. They're into a branch of "software dev" youtube that has grossed me out for a while, where it's just promoting software development as an aesthetic. They relentlessly force buzzwords like "startup," "software engineer," "quit my job," and giant salary numbers into video titles and thumbnails. They do "day in the life of a software engineer" video that's usually just showing off the cushy lifestlye, and explaining something like a gRPC call in a way that makes it sound way more complicated than it is. I scrolled the guy's YouTube channel and seemingly he quits 6-figure jobs every few months if his video titles are telling the truth.
His original tweet was using the exact same tactics as his video titling with bold words shouting "I QUIT MY $270,000/YEAR JOB AT TRENDY TECH COMPANY" that I think a lot of people outside of aspiring first-year CS students aren't falling for after we've been exposed to so much BS grifting out of silicon valley the past decade+.
>unless you consider working for coinbase to be crypto scamming
I do. I don't believe anyone working in the crypto industry is anything other than a sociopath or incredibly naive. They clearly are not naive since they are pumping their own product with deliberate and IMO false intent. How many times do we have to watch bad actors with their hands in the cookie jar before its a pattern?
>so much BS grifting out of silicon valley the past decade
Yet here they are still getting money. The real downer is that every one of these people are draining limited money that could have gone to someone genuinely trying to do something.
I think this is a fine...day 1 "oh man did we dog that one" kind of post. Yah, they really screwed up. In a disqualifying way. But they can recover and you'll only know if you keep following them. Certainly they could say more and be more reflective - should one use chatGPT for a license? There are so many more people they could apologize to in a specific way.
I also believe this could be an inciting incident that leads them to think differently and approach things differently. They could also go right back to their old ways. But I think this is a pretty good day-one response.
"disqualifying" and "can recover" are mutually exclusive concepts
Garry Tan in 2019: "we mock the scammers who build nothing real and get fake valuations."
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296685
as Garry Tan said that they invest in founders not their ideas. The cofounder is xCoinbase, Tesla and has some decent social following. That was enough for YC partners to say yes without indulging much into the technicalities of the business and idea.
I would like to thank the Gov of Canada for subsidizing this apology.
FOUNDER MODE DAWG
Good apology but yikes what a plan. Also not sure adding a few more features will do much to resolve the issue either
It would not have been a problem if they started small (like many open source stuff normally is) and someone would have noted their errors to them. On a small scale. Allowing them to learn. VC funding turbocharged yet another AI bullshit something-something right into a wall. Even more ridiculous: someone is giving money to a company that is essentially a patch/extra feature to an existing editor. Imho that is not a "company".
>We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
>"Only A players make it in this game"
It's weird to see the feeding frenzy on these two guys. It's like watching piranas. It's brutal and savage in a primitive way, like watching chimpanzees engaging in cannibalism or something like that. It's basically the Two Minutes of Hate from 1984. Thousands of people with inner monologues consisting only of "PUNISH PUNISH PUNISH".
When you make code open source, with an open commercial license and someone takes that code to make money or funding, they don’t owe you anything.
A license like MIT explicitly allows commercial use.
If you don’t want other people to make money, don’t use an open license.
If you want to make money, then charge people for it.
Choose a license that aligns with your needs. Be prepared to sue if someone violates the license.
Sure, but people don't owe them respect. illegal != immoral.
Cry me a river on your 270k you left behind to pursue even more greed filled goals
That’s not something I’d be putting forward either, anywhere. In my opinion, it’s just a way for them to be putting forward their “value,” which actually feels dishonorable.
>dawg I ChatGPT’d the license
Why would you believe anything this person says after that? Default assumption #1 is any writing they output is an LLM product and insincere. Assumption #2 their actions are taken with little thought or intentionality.
He deleted the tweet, so link with pic (I don’t endorse the generational dig in this tweet): https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1840515897804623882
> "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal"
This one line tells me that's an outfit that should be avoided entirely. It's either unfathomable incompetence, or a strong aversion to doing things properly. Either way, it says nothing good.
Modern Silicon Valley, YC included, has abandoned its pretences of encouraging meritocracy, product quality and competing in a free and fair market. It's personality hires and ideological alignment over substance these days.
Airbnb and Uber succeeded by simply pouring cash into funding legal challenges, and waiting for cities to give up. OpenAI can't chase after Middle Eastern cash fast enough. Musk and Thiel are openly backing the most brazenly corrupt presidential candidate in US history.
The wild thing isn’t that they ChatGPT’d license. That’s incompetent but forgivable, maybe even smart.
The move that dials the dumbassery to eleven is using it as a defence. On Twitter. Like, Exhibit A for any lawsuit that company is ever in will be this tweet: it demonstrates a proud disrespect for law and contracts. That’s high-proof mens rea if I’ve ever seen any.
Why is that forgivable? Any serious venture would have a involved, you know, some kind of legal expert to do a license. Getting that wrong at any stage has serious repercussions and can effectively end the whole project.
I was given three pieces of advice on starting up my own business and they were good:
1) Get a lawyer
2) Get an accountant
3) Listen to every word they have to say
> Why is that forgivable?
Because legal naïvete is common and isn't a good predictor of founder ineptitude. Is it better to be legally savvy? Of course. But thinking you can wing it with a license agreement because it's boring and unfamiliar and you're rather focus on building your product is understandable. (In some cases, it might even be the right call.)
Claiming legal naivete is acceptable and sometimes even commendable is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read on here.
> Claiming legal naivete is acceptable and sometimes even commendable is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read on here
I'll stand by it. Most Americans are legally naïve. Most founders are, too. A start-up has to make trade-offs--it's far from clear such licensing agreements are make-or-break at the angel or seed stage.
Once that's pointed out to you, you hopefully either hire a lawyer or mitigate your legal cross section until you can afford one, e.g. by using template license agreements instead of rolling your own. But until you've been given that feedback, it's not some bizarre conclusion someone can come to. Most small businesses, for example, are formed perfectly well without much legal sophistication.
Template license agreements have been presumably written or reviewed by a contract lawyer somewhere along the line. I certainly wouldn't judge a founding team that chooses to use vetted legal templates - that's a reasonable choice early on when money is better spent on product than expensive lawyer hours.
However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy.
> However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy
Sure. Not disputing it isn’t incredibly stupid. But if, on having that pointed out, the founders had admitted it was a dumb thing to do—they had acted thoughtlessly and recognised as much—I’d be willing to forgive them the error. Hence, forgivable.
Disregard for law and not knowing the law are two different things.
ChatGPT'ed license signals to me that whoever does that thinks law is not a serious matter rather BS that can be generated via BS generator.
> ChatGPT'ed license signals to me that whoever does that thinks law is not a serious matter
Reasonable people can both respect the law and think license agreements are meaningless gibberish.
They're wrong. But not uncommonly--and I'd argue, not unreasonably--so.
If one can't get a suit to churn put a license while with VC, I don't know how else cloud it get any easier.
I would assume it would be just an email away for a YC statup.
This just completely blows my mind. Who in their right mind thinks that generating legal content without even proofreading it is a good idea? It would've probably been less bad if they omitted a license altogether. At the same time, wasn't it recent news that a company that touted AI-assisted lawyers turned out to be no lawyers and just an LLM? The world of today is weird to me.
GenAI usage has definitely has opened my eyes that the average person seems to think legalese is complicated for no rational reason, and it just needs to sound right.
Same for computer code.
… Actually, the FoTL/SovCit crowd must be _loving_ this. An endless supply of legal-flavoured bullshit at the touch of a button.
"we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal"
Attribution is one of the most basic precepts of decency. Not even "open source" or "free software", just basic decency. Mistakes happen and that's okay, but being all derisive about it initially, and then trying to spin that as "we learned about licensing" after people call you out on it is hard to take as genuine.
A genuine good faith response would have been "oops, what a silly embarrassing mistake" and then spending all of 30 seconds fixing it.
These people "like" open source only as means to extract value. They are only "part of the community" when it suits them. Nihilistic cryptobros considering everything that's not nailed down as a wankdoll to be abused and extract value from – who would have expected?
Yikes. I'm older and this kind of behaviour isn't new at all.
The detrimental English usage however is.
Wow, that post from the founder is as bad as it gets. Impressive amounts of arrogant, dumb, dismissive, and rude in a single tweet. I can see why yesterday blew up their face.
The "we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" is especially hilarious given the paltry amount of coding they have actually done so far.
I would not go anywhere near a product whose founder talks like that.
Strong grindset dawg.
Truly our next sigma, no cap.
Is it supposed to hurt using those words?
You are really bringing the rizz.
Yo dawg, we heard you like ChatGPT so we ChayGPTd how to ChatGPT a whole new ChatGPT
stale memes are the best memes
Yeah, I quite confused how these guys got money and I am sure this 'product' won't amount to anything. But some comment on twitter was correct; it's a launch people will remember; that's good I guess.
Its just a prank bro.
It was a well planned and executed publicity stunt:
1. Maximize attention on social media by being super obnoxious and arrogant ("dawg I ChatGPT’d the license")
2. 1 day later while the chatter is still going, write a mea culpa and take on the poor victim role ("grew up in a single mother household on government subsidies")
3. --> Repair most of the reputational damage but keep all the attention.
None of this is illegal, but it's exploiting a system of mutual trust and I wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody acted like that.
P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” which is almost as good as Oscar Wilde’s version, who put it like this: “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Thus is the new norm. It plays well with how the platforms distribute content. I have faith that history will not remember those.
I was just commenting about this yesterday on here. I am still aghast about some of the drivel that YC appears to be funding. Is this an anomaly or is scale causing them to vet companies less?
Can I get more YC funding by forking Redis, adding OpenAI, and calling it an AI In Memory Cache?
Can I get more YC funding by forking Redis, adding OpenAI, and calling it an AI In Memory Cache?
No. But, maybe if you call it RediAI
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I am not familiar with this product or person but this reads like a sincere apology to me. Does anyone closer to this controversy have an opinion?
> Our intention was to use the Apache 2.0 license like Continue uses …. we got this right in one of them and wrong in the other. We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
99% of the people here would make this mistake.
and to be accused of taking something if you are giving attribution would just be absurd
OSS community has some lame and immature aspects
These guys might have gotten defensive but its obvious how to communicate, to me
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
You know what's even easier than having an LLM generate your license? Copying one that already exists. I know a cool one, it's called Apache 2.0
This person took on (a little) additional work to do this. Since they used Apache 2.0 in one of their repos, they seem to grasp the concept of public licenses. If this truly was pure incompetence, it would have really been major.
> 99% of the people here would make this mistake
Doubtful. That said, some may.
> guys might have gotten defensive
Now you've lost me. It's fine to be legally naïve. But you should have the self awareness to know you're winging it. When someone gives you feedback, especially for free, it's a damning personality trait for the first reaction to be petulance.
Speak for yourself. I don't trust AI generated code, let alone a software license.
I'm sorry but if you think 99% of people here would consider this an acceptable approach to licensing I think you have a weirdly low opinion of this forum:
> We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open.
No part of this sentence makes any sense to anyone remotely informed about licensing.
“making the same mistake” doesn’t equal “considering it an acceptable approach”
the reaction was attributing it to malice, when it obviously was incompetence
that should have been 1 tweet or github issue opened asking them to change it, and it would have been corrected or not. firestorm if they didnt take it seriously
instead of whatever all this drama was pre-emptively
> 99% of the people here would make this mistake.
99% of people here would… have spicy autocorrect generate some legalistic-looking nonsense, for, based on the above, _absolutely no reason at all_ (given that they’re claiming they believed that it was still under Apache 2.0)?
I mean, this place is bad, but not that bad.
> 99% of the people here would make this mistake.
Unless the quality of HN has dropped to such catastrophically low levels that TikTok comments section infested with bots is higher, no.
Seriously, this is ignorance at its finest.
99% of the tech people here think they need a license for <reasons> but simultaneously the license of code they are using is meaningless?
Cmon guy
OpenAI forked googles paper, started as open source, then went closed source. They are one of the most valuable companies in history.
They didn't "fork" it, but rather implemented the ideas in it, that's science and engineering as intended. For open source software projects on the other hand, the intended behavior is contributing directly, and forking is a distant plan B.
The product OpenAI got mega traction with was based on the GPT series of papers, all of which were published by OpenAI and all of which are major advancements in research.
Also OpenAI was founded before the transformer paper and spent most of their early years focused on RL style research and products - just look at what they published pre 2019.
Implemented a paper, yes. But without a dataset, its pretty much worthless.
I don't understand all the outrage. I would even go as far as saying that Y Combinator knows that they forked that other editor and they are evidently thinking that there will be some big hits in this space and are shotgunning into different projects thinking at least one of them will hit big.