He blocked me on Twitter for pointing out something (technical) he said was wrong, and then he deleted his tweet. Told me everything I need to know about that guy.

Mentioned in my other comment, but just all the more evidence of a megalomaniac, insecure CEO trying to build a company out of shallow moats and little value creation

He's deleting a lot of tweets as we speak.. I think he got famous

Link to your tweet, please?

What were you responding to?

I don't really remember the context. This was 2+ years ago. He was trying to compare some search results on twitter vs google, when using exact match with one query but not the other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs into their environment. They are simply building a better ux on top of existing open source technology.

> "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.

If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then getting ux right is about gaining more users and making them pay. Technical innovation is about creating something which wasn't possible before and not making a start-up wrapper over existing stuff. In today's misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising, there is less core technical research and more fluff

That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo?

I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.

Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?

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

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

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

This tweet didn't age well. https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1324100838894305281

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

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

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

I don't think this was his brother - I think it was a joke (imo bad taste at the time). I did some research around it and it seemed that his brother does look alike but that other person had a different legal name.

> I wouldn't generalize his behavior to the rest of silicon valley culture.

I get what you're saying here, but they made an entire TV series lampooning silicon valley culture.

Yeah and I liked it - good tongue-in-cheek satire that exaggerated a lot of things that have some basis in truth. It was ultimately a fictional show though and life in silicon valley is a lot more boring than that the vast majority of the time.

Even in that show nobody was on meth iirc.

They did an amphetamine dependency and an opium dependency.

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

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

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

We had a startup called Runnable in 2013 that did a similar thing as repl.it. Coding sandboxes in many languages by spinning up docker containers on the backend [1]. We solved a lot of scaling problems, but I honestly thought the innovation was mostly handled by docker. And that was by 2013.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140702013410/http://runnable.co...

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

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

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

Purely in the phone division, they are not that innovative. But they have their fingers in a lot of pies, and are still #2 in semiconductors, they innovate a lot in display technology, they have their own processors, Samsung Pay was pretty huge and still has a serious impact, they are one of the big lithium ion battery companies, the S-Pen also was really huge for mobile devices in general, their foldable screens have a lot of potential.

Another really big thing is that Samsung funds a lot of basic research also at the university level, which AFAIK none of the big tech companies do.

Are you referring to Pfizer because of the mRNA-vaccine? That has actually been invented by the German biotech startup BioNTech ;-)

The manufactoring at Pfizer is pretty impressive.

It is impressive, but it comes from capital and not innovation. Pfizer is not the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine.

I feel great that others see how ridiculous Amjad is… Replit is cool but has a serious attitude.

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

It's crazy how a little bit of money can turn people into jerks.