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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
Well said! That last sentence was very elegant.
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"
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.
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)_/¯
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.
> . 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.
Sounds like YC could improve in their due diligence.
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.
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.
> highly regulated Fintech companies like Coinbase
Um.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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--
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.
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.
>mistakes happen
Mistakes are made without intent. That's not the case here.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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 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
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.
FOUNDER MODE DAWG
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would not go anywhere near a product whose founder talks like that.
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.
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
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?
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
Its just a prank bro.
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
> 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.