I've been in the VC-backed startup space as a lead/principal engineer or technical advisor for the last 4 years.
In that time, I've worked at 1 startup that closed a $100m C, one that closed a multi-million B, one that recently closed a $30m C, and one that started with a $8m seed.
I've started my own startup and worked with founders of other startups on the side advising on the technical side (and once in a while building the initial PoCs).
Some have failed, some have succeeded wildly, some have hit their limits of growth, some have a great product that solves an obvious problem yet get zero traction.
Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there are 3 companies in the same domain doing the same thing; then it simply comes down to insider connections, sales, marketing, and pricing.
In the end, the team that wins isn't always the one with the best product; there is a fair bit of luck and timing, marketing is super important, and having the right leadership team in place makes all the difference. The non-product aspects of a successful business are supremely underappreciated, especially by the technical folks. Bad products can become good products eventually; bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
So it makes sense for YC or any VC to bet broadly because the reasons why a team succeeds and another fails is so intangible with so much luck and timing involved as well that making broad bets -- even if two YC-batch companies are very similar in terms of domain and product -- is just sound business.
Edit: to be clear, these are not my principles (no need to attack me personally); these are simply my observations about teams that have succeeded and teams that have floundered. I left 1 company because because in principle, I disagreed with their loose operational style in a regulated space.
The problem here is not that they stole the idea, it's that they literally just took an open-source codebase and filed off the serial numbers to claim it as their own proprietary work, and they did so in the most comically inept way possible.
From the OP:
PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.
> PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it
This is comical but not the core fuck-up. The fuck-up is they failed to attribute, thereby violating Community’s license.
It might be salvageable if they can convince customers they aren’t dragging everyone who uses them into a legal morass. But that will likely take more funding, and “help me pay lawyers” isn’t a great pitch.
Good artist copy, great artists steal. PearAI tried and failed to copy.
The funny? thing is, this isn't the only YC company I've seen do this.
There's a really great Radiolab podcast Dealing with Doubt[0] that talks about how high level competitive poker has evolved over the years.
ANNIE DUKE: Sometimes you have to be 40 percent sure. Sometimes you have to be 30 percent sure. You know, if there's $70 in the pot and you only have to call $10, you know, now you're in the 15 percent range in terms of how certain you have to be that your hand is good.
JAD: In that case, you can bet this hand that you're really not sure about knowing that while you might lose this time ...
MIKE PESCA: If I do that a million times in my poker life, the law of high numbers indicates that I'm going to be very much a winner in the long run. It might be the very long run, but you should be ahead in the long run.
ANNIE DUKE: Because it's not—it's not about winning the hand all the time, it's about winning the hand enough of the time.
(The podcast is a great listen!)
[0] https://radiolab.org/podcast/278173-dealing-doubt/transcript
Isn't the whole point of VC just throw money at the wall and see what sticks?
It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
Where the product starts and where it ends will be two totally different endpoints that are sure to diverge once they find their domain and business model.
If you are so inept that copying someone else's codebase wholesale is what makes you a viable company, then perhaps you aren't worthy of investing in.
Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people, which as I type this seems like a sad but unsurprising move.
> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
This is the purpose of a VC: to deploy capital in a way that is likely to yield the greatest returns for the investors.
Spoken as if there was only one single binary option for investment!
The strategy implies that the marginal value of the lack of ethics/the personality type to do that is the thing thats worth investment. If thats true, then venture capitalism and perhaps capitalism itself is super fucked: a machine for developing and rewarding the worst impulses of humanity.
Investors cheer when Uber, Lyft, and UPS drivers are treated as contractors.
They frown when they try to advocate for more rights, better employment conditions, and better pay.
Such is the nature of modern capitalism.
The Costco's and James Sinegal's of the world are few and rare; I wish we'd see more companies and leadership teams that valued labor and were more ethical. But a survey of the most successful CEO's (Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al) and companies leads us to believe that such principles are often opposed to the machinations of capitalism.
Yes. That's exactly what capitalism is.
Poe's Law: can't tell if serious or sarcastic.
At any rate, emergent behaviors can arise from complex systems, and thats exactly what I am alleging of (venture) capitalism at this stage of its evolution. If you have differences of opinion, by all means share them.
The American economic system is and always has been designed explicitly to extract the maximum profit from any venture at any cost.
See: children mangled in factories, minimum wage laws, the oil industry, pretty much every OSHA regulation.
If capitalism were at all capable of recognizing any externalities at all, we wouldn't have to create a vast legal system to protect workers, they would be treated safely and fairly because that is an ethically valuable thing to do.
If capitalism were capable of considering morals, ethics, or even the law in general, we would live in a much better world. However, capitalists regularly dodge taxes while extracring wealth from any natural or human resources that exist. They then simply hoard that wealth. Remember we're living in the worst wealth inequality in this country's history. Global warming caused by the oil industry is wrecking the planet. Amazon warehouse workers get docked pay for using the bathroom and AI companies are pointing cameras at drivers to measure how often they blink.
I have no clue how you can look at the world around you and not see the rampant exploitation and value extraction. The US is in a very bad way because of it. Increased poverty, homelessness, starvation.
Hell, just look at our for-profit medical industry. People regularly go bankrupt due to ludicrous and exploitative price gouging. Tell me how ethical capitalism creates a system where hospitals are owned by private investment firms who squeeze the sick and dying for every cent they have and more.
Capitalism does not, and fundamentally cannot consider ethics. Only profit.
There’s also ego and fame at stake. VCs are hardly optimal.
Copying everything EXCEPT the license - they knew THAT needed to change at least.
Good point.
> Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
This was probably the hardest realization I came to in business/startup world.
That's precisely what most investors (at least the ones with any large amount of money) look for. They could care less if your product is good, or if you developed it ethically, or if you treat employees or customers well.
Most would invest in the next Oracle and sleep like babies if given the chance to get in early - even if they had a crystal ball to see how badly it will impact the industry and social fabric as a whole down the road 20 years later.
Especially VCs. They exist to make money. Full stop. The rest is marketing fluff for the naive masses.
Unless, the investor is just trying to fund the most ruthless, least ethical, win-at-all-costs type of people
Just, Devil's Advocate. But isn't that kind of a smart strategy?
Not saying it's "nice", nor even how I would do things. But I'd imagine many, many people get excessively wealthy investing in this fashion.
I’ve never looked into it deeply, but as I understand it the opposite is true. I’ve read in passing that statistically the most successful sales people are kind, insightful and find ways to align with their customers best interests. Likewise, I’ve also read in passing that economies with cultures of respect and collaboration far outperform ones that are very competitive.
Maybe someone has more information about those topics that me?
That's why I pointed it out. It's a perfectly legitimate explanation for this type of behavior. (And, imo, abhorrent and where capitalism-as-harnessing-greed really falls apart.)
As for "smart," I assume there are some not well understood externalities to this kind of behavior, such as erosion of trust or other social ills that are hard to quantify until they reach a critical point.
>As for "smart," I assume there are some not well understood externalities to this kind of behavior, such as erosion of trust or other social ills that are hard to quantify until they reach a critical point.
I think the externalities may be hard to quantify but they are well-understood by now (and are things like erosion of trust, which you mentioned).
Just look at the societal attitudes towards Silicon Valley now vs. 25 years ago. VCs complain about how society now so full of negativity towards technology, but they only have themselves to blame for that. They shit the bed, and people got wise.
> doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses
They copied without attribution. Not okay under Apache.
Starting off by making an obviously hamfisted move matters. It's a headwind to overcome.
Is it possible to overcome? Sure.
Yes, you can heal after shooting yourself in the foot.
(And, of course, removing attribution is violating licenses). However, they're unlikely to face litigation for this. The possible legal consequences aren't the actual consequences they're likely to face.
AFAICT, the attribution's been there since the beginning on their GitHub? (see: About section)[1].
I agree adding their own license was hamfisted, but honestly, if I'm funding a company I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially. The first order of business is almost always proving whether your business should even exist.
The code of note is in the pearai-submodule subrepo. Check out this fun commit:
https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commit/335436b47...
It's claimed to be accidental, but the entire commit history is full of commits saying "remove cont....." that neuter all references to Continue. They didn't even want the name in the commit history.
> I hope they would spend less than <$1 on legal and licensing initially
They claim that they intended to make the project open source all along. Just keeping the Apache license would have been less time consuming than asking ChatGPT for one, with the added benefit of being a real license.
Agreed. Looks like the founder agrees too[1], that was a pointless waste of time.
I mean, whatever floats your boat, but if I'm funding a company, I hope they've spent whatever they need to spend to determine whether or not what they're doing is legal and sensible, even if that involves spending more than $1.
Cloning an open source project and having Chat-GPT write you an enterprise license is not how you "prove whether your business should even exist." It's how you scam rich people into giving you money.
I can all but promise you these "headwinds" that they are facing in terms of negative PR are in fact a net positive. At their stage, any press is good press.
> It doesn't matter so long as they didn't violate any licenses.
It appears that they did violate the license:
https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:
a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License;
c. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;
That's a problem to be resolved by their legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem (e.g. work out some licensing agreement).
The first job of a startup is to understand how to solve a valuable problem. If the team is solving a valuable problem, they can figure out how they want to navigate even violation of licenses.
Everything else can be negotiated.
Sure. We can break into each other's houses. It's illegal but "that's a problem to be resolved by [our] legal counsel and often not even a fatal problem".
Why do you think there is a distinction between civil and criminal law?
There's a reason why big corps don't use copyleft software, if it were as simple as this they would be violating copyleft licenses left and right.
They lose claim to intellectual property rights over their own technology, even the risk (certainty) of a lawsuit over this is enough to kill the company.
And we are not talking about the company being sued for a breach of license. We are talking about this being used in any kind of dispute in court, client didn't pay? They can just allege that whatever they bought wasn't even the property of the startup, so they had no righ to sell it to them, boom good luck collecting your contract payments.
If you are a big company with a lot of business, sure you move on. But a company that is a couple of months old with this liability already? It's doomed.
Denormalize incompetence again.
Reading all your comments in this thread it seems like you don’t give a damn about ethics. Or similar.
It doesn't seem to me, by the contrary. They're describing the harsh reality whether one likes it or not. As it's stated about reality in the Cambridge dictionary: "the state of things as they are, rather than as they are imagined to be". But it seems a good idea to rethink how we use the word "success", even if it's "success" at the eyes of many.
I like the story "The Honest Farmer", retold by Ella Lyman Cabot, I found in "The Moral Compass", pg. 262, edited by William J. Bennett, which introduces the story with this: "The dictionary defines integrity as 'an uncompromising adherence to a moral code' and says the word traces its origins to a Latin term meaning 'untouched'. Here is integrity, untouched and unshaken by altered circumstances."
You've got the wrong impression; I left the startup that closed the $100m C because I didn't agree with some of their practices (or lack thereof).
I'm just sharing my perspective having seen success and failure in the startup space over the last 4 years first hand from teams that have succeeded and teams that have failed.
This mentality, where ethics and morals are ignored, is how we get things like Theranos.
These people stole a project, illegally changed the license, and pretended it was their own. This is basically theft and fraud, and it's kind of disgusting seeing people defend it.
This is such an obnoxious way to look at operating a business and helps explain why the rest of society finds tech bros to be so insufferable.
There’s legality, and bad taste.
Except they did blatantly violate the license of the code they stole and only fixed it after being called out.
I bet they ate their own dogfood by having ChatGPT file the serial numbers off for them.
From: https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-licenses-101-apache-licen...
Anyone who uses open source software licensed under Apache 2.0 must include the following in their copy of the code, whether they have modified it or not:
1. The original copyright notice
2. A copy of the license itself
3. If applicable, a statement of any significant changes made to the original code
4. A copy of the NOTICE file with attribution notes (if the original library has one)
However, you do not need to release the modified code under Apache 2.0. Simply including any modification notifications is enough to comply with the license terms.All good points. Problem is, they didn’t attribute after the copy. And that’s literally all they had to do. Now they stand in violation of that license which I admit I don’t know what that means, but it probably isn’t good. I mean, how do you fuck up piggy-backing off open source? I’ve had many companies piggy back off my own project and it’s whatever, because they attribute to the original codebase. But it’s all whatever. Most these discussions are gonna end up in the trash over the next 5 years anyway as rationalistic machines spread more and more.
Wild take, copying matters. If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market. This very idea that ideas don't matter is hogwash, you can say that idea alone is not enough, but it matters. This is why big companies sometimes get sued by the govt, they copy smaller companies ideas, add it into their already established product for free and stifle growth for the world.
> If you have a great idea, and no capital and I copy you and have more capital (money, social), I can deploy my capital to crush you in the market
Use those tools to your advantage if you are small.
So many people on sites like this hate patents and trademarks, but I have seen patents used in two ways:
* In slapfights between huge companies that don't really matter.
* To protect startups from copying.
These things literally exist to protect startups.
This value is very Chinese. But in the long run, lack of morality will only be harmful to the economy.
I'd say it matters. Life becomes so much harder if you have to justify why your seed/pre-seed startup has a unique advantage, but you're just ripping off the competition. Maybe you have unique hustle. That's a fairly incredible claim - especially in a crowded space like AI.
I think it's at least a warning klaxon. We're entering this market by copying a competitor (not just in UI/UX, but literally byte-for-byte). How are we going to beat them? How do we ensure the same does not happen to us?
AI-powered coding is such a ridiculously crowded arena. I would be pretty apprehensive. Even if I was dead-set on doing an AI startup, I would still look for a different market.
Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible? I say that wholeheartedly considering the time it takes to take something from an idea to a PoC to an MVP. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are plenty of quick slap together projects out there, similar to the one been commented here, they are more like a marketing wrapper of bundles from others people’s work, which is something to be frowned upon… specially if you are technically motivated.
Well, IMHO, when considering a project, knowing that you are solving for a customer demand problem is very different than from a VC minded problem. I personally would never advise or be part of such an “Arrangement.” These are my clear principles, and my success will come or fail, but my integrity will never be questioned.
> Dang, that many startups in that short period of time, how is that plausible?
> bad teams can rarely survive turbulence and it is so hard to tell if a team has the right "vibes" or not.
Their apology makes it pretty clear that this team doesn't have the right vibes:
"We thought the license in the root repo wasn’t that important, so we just generated one that we thought was open."
The license that was generated was the "Pear Enterprise License". These guys thought the license didn't matter so their instinct was to ask ChatGPT to generate one that they "thought was open" and they didn't even blink when it generated one with "Enterprise" in the title.
These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.
It's very possible that they have the wrong vibes and will fail; this is why any VC is smart to bet on multiple teams, even if many are building very similar products. A good portion of those teams will go nowhere and fall apart by themselves. Even the best VC-partner can't always tell how a teams vibes are from the inside until it's too late.
Maybe you're right. I'd like to think that "are these the type of people who turn to ChatGPT for completely inappropriate things" would have made it into the VC screening process, but then again "using ChatGPT for completely inappropriate things" is practically a requirement to get funding these days.
> These guys are either dishonest or completely out of their depth.
More likely both.
The problem is that they took someone else's code, claimed they built it themselves, and then claimed that as evidence for the velocity and capability of their team.
If they had said it's based on X. Or that they're going in a different direction. Or even that they're going in the same direction but will best that other team. Who cares? YC should bet on multiple companies in the same space. It's only logical.
What bothers people is the lie.
Also. They did break the terms of the license. They replaced the Apache license with their own enterprise license. They said they have the rights to relicense the code. Apache requires that they disclose the origin of the code and what modifications they made. And they lied to YC about that, they don't have any of these rights.
It's not sound business to lie to investors. It's not sound business to violate licenses.
Your comment is interesting but seems orthogonal to the problem at hand.
We are talking about a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude.
And that's doing a big disservice to the AI space coming from a high-profile incubator such as YC.
If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a terrible warning.
Maybe the point isnt to invest in the team with the best ideas, but to invest in the most ruthless/least ethical because thats what the investors believe will win the day?
> a company that clearly showed bad intent and dishonesty in their attitude
FTX, Binance, Uber, etc.
The company I was in that raised a $100m C was in a real mess behind the scenes operating in a highly regulated space (one of the reasons I left; I disagreed with certain practices in principle).
Most of this tracks with what I've seen over the years...
Most VCs invest in teams first, products/ideas second.
>Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter
LOL. Why is the West complaining about China 'copying' their ideas and products? It seems hypocritical. Why are Western companies crying foul about China?
As you’re discovering Charlie, the people here have very little business sense.
I dunno man, Charlie so far seems like the type of guy I'd strongly avoid doing business with. But what do I know?
You've probably got the wrong impression. My own startups have failed partially because I'm so bad at lying -- even small white lies. Mostly my own projects are just open sourced or maintained for free for a small community of passionate users. I've realized I'm great at building software, built terrible at marketing, sales, and extracting capital.
Well, OK, that's actually rather commendable.
Still, ripping off open-source projects seems plainly scummy, and is a strong signal of a lack of actual product level competence. Hence my difficulty to find anything redeemable about your take.
> Here is a lesson-learned as far as "copying" goes: it doesn't matter.
There is this tendency among a subset of the tech community to look down on copying. I think this is probably coming from more junior people who recently came out of university where plagiarism is punished, or people in academia such as in PhD programs which are trained to highly value originality.
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. If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.
> In reality they "graduate" 500-1000 startups every year.
I think people think otherwise because they used to be more selective, and haven't noticed just how much their volume has grown over the years. Early on it was a few dozen startups per year, then a hundred or so, and eventually the current state of greenlighting almost two startups every day on average (we're 275 days into the year and YC has racked up 509 companies in this years batches so far). They're less of a startup accelerator and more of a startup shotgun at this point.
Yea I sorta figured YC was more like Harvard in that the brand and selectivity are super important. Isn’t this eating the seed corn?
Harvard admits 2,000 students every year, so it isn't all that different. The reputation is always built/sustained by the outliers rather than the average graduate.
Harvard admits 2,000 undergraduates every year, but it's actually a very large school, granting just about 10,000 degrees per year. The annual commencement ceremony in Harvard Yard only goes through the graduates school-by-school; once dismissed all the graduates decamp to school-specific ceremonies all around campus, where they get their names called and walk across the stage to receive the handshake and (empty) envelope. Perhaps more like YC than you think?
That's still selective compared to the volume of applicants though and the output isn't universally stellar but generally regarded as pretty high. Compared to YC's recent batches with a large number of ChatGPT and other gen AI model wrappers.
It’s game theory. AWS would do the same thing by pitting teams against each other internally. Often times, we would have multiple products doing the same exact thing but slightly differentiated. Of course AWS claims to not deprecate services but they would resource the successful service team and PIP everyone out of the unsuccessful team and bring it back to a skeleton crew. If you wonder why the AWS Product offerings are so F'd and inconsistent it's because of them using management techniques like this.
With how terrible AWS is to use this makes complete sense. I will stick with Azure when I can, which is usually.
I’ve never been able to stomach Azure (as much as I like Microsoft’s tools) because it lacks anything like AWS IAM. Without it having actual, pragmatic security let alone simple, cost effective audit documentation seems like so much more of a headache.
By this point and by that I've read, cloud computing preferences are as subjective as liking any other thing.
I've read here and in a lot of other places that AWS IAM is the worst part of AWS. But I don't know what to believe anymore.
This is true for every VC no? And the whole idea behind VCs? They aren't exactly only aiming to fund the startups they think 100% will be successful, as then they wouldn't fund anyone, so instead they spread out the risk to catch any surprise winners.
Does anyone really look at the line-up of funded startups from a VC and think they're all winners?
Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them. In the first case they will obviously do a ton of due diligence, go over business plans, get board seats, look at code and more. YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it.
The earlier you invest, the larger the risk and looser the diligence.
> Yes but there's a difference between a VC investing a billion dollars in one startup and one investing $100K each in a thousand of them.
Isn't that just the difference between "seed funding" and "Series-A/B/C/$letter" funding? In the former, you want small amounts spread across as many parties as possible, while in the "Series" funding you do higher amounts but more concentrated, as you have more data to invest more in what you think will be the "winner".
> YC on the other hand has a 10-minute chat with the founder and...that's it.
I don't think that's true, but I've never been through the process myself. I know for a fact that the extensive written application is also part of it, that is reviewed by people before any interview even happens. I'm sure others who actually been through the process can add if anything is missing.
Which part of it do you think is not true? The written application is not extensive at all. It takes maybe 1-hour of focused time. That’s all I had ever spent on the written part of the application and I’ve been interviewed three times as a solo founder. And the interview really is just ten minutes long, though sometimes they go a little over the limit.
For sure- it's just that YC didn't used to operate like that. They have morphed from an interesting higher-touch incubator whose involvement was a strong positive signal into a scattershot VC, but not everyone realizes that so being "YC backed" still carries more prestige than is warranted.
YC does not (cl)aim to be every VC.
Most VCs try to avoid having the portcos actively compete with each other (ie they won't back 2 separate ride hailing apps) b/c they'll end up competing for the same pool of customers
It's meant to be a "smart gamble", not "throw money everywhere and see what does well".
Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour, if they don't correct it now it will happen again.
Correct what exactly? Did they release this as their final product as the first milestone?
From what I gleaned the company has barely started and the founder recently(?) quit his job. They raised money on an idea and forked another project, changed the branding, and used it as the base to build a prototype
That doesn't mean this is the end product that YC invested in.
Lots of companies created MVPs this way before using funding and their new runway of time to do it properly.
If they do release it as the end product with little effort that’s basically fraud
> Also the funding should come with a clause to cover this sort of behaviour
Lol if you’re not aware, they came up with the gold standard in simple seed investment contracts used by nearly every pre-series-a startup in existence. Adding clauses like “don’t fork open source code” is just pointless and cumbersome legal bs that does nothing but get in the way.
Less "don't fork opensource code", more "don't bring shame upon the family".
This is bad press for YC as much as it is for this poorly thought-out startup.
I just read this same comment from you on another post! Talk about cloning your comment in posts about cloning code.
There is quality/competency, and there is business ethics.
As an incubator, you own the practices of the companies in your portfolio.
It does not take a lot of rotten fruits to ruin the brand.
> If you look at their recent batches there is an endless parade of thin ChatGPT wrappers.
Possibly related post from yesterday:
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
What does this do to society when people with no product, no use, and no hope of profit are consistently rewarded with free money? It practically incentivizes bullshit.
Well this just goes to the core of your view on the role of luck in life. Are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year and 5 of them are run by geniuses who single handedly disrupt loads of markets. Or are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year full of roughly equally good people 5 of which get extremely lucky and make boatloads of money.
Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.
> Stripe just forked Visa
Clicking a button on GitHub is different from existing in the same industry.
Unless I am missing an Apache licensed code base that powers all of Visa…
> Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.
uhh this is not the same as TFA. this is a very quippy, pg-esque way of excusing the behavior though.
The worst part is that instead of backing out and let's say kicking them out of the batch, YC doubled down praising the (pretty poor imho) justification that may also have been written by ChatGPT, like the license :)
I don’t thinks its the worst, but it did feel in bad taste. YC have put money and trust in them, so why would they kick them down? Would you? They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves (Note: I am not a YC founder or affiliated with YC in any way)
They haven't built anything and didn't even bother to properly rename everything in the original repository.
It's clear they are not deserving of YC backing, nor are they trustworthy, as they seem to have misrepresented their involvement in building the software. They're not in crypto anymore :)
> They haven’t committed any crime so why would they distance themselves
There are bad, socially unacceptable things that are also not crimes (for instance: lying in a lot of contexts). Crimes (for the most part) are just the more extreme bad things someone can do.
If you think the bar for distancing from someone is "committing a crime," your bar is far too low. Unfortunately, that minimal bar is a meme that has been pushed with some success by people who want to get away with shady shit.
Not a crime != OK.
Is your standard for ethics really, "Well it's not a criminal violation of the law?"
There's a question in a (reasonably) dead reply that I want to resurrect:
> Are we to go out and memorize everyone’s personal framework/religion (cause I can tell I’m not going to) or do you have something else in mind except a dead end question that goes nowhere?
No, what I expect is for people to have thought about their own personal framework.
That said, it's worth at least understanding a bit about other people's frameworks, because a) people have been thinking and writing about these topics for thousands of years, and you just might learn something. And b) you are living in a world with other people, people who are not dummies. If your own moral code is, say, "grab the cash and run", there going to treat you differently.
That's part of why most professional organizations will have codes of ethics. E.g., IEEE has a good one for themselves [1] and another one specifically for software engineers. [2] It's true even in areas where making money is the primary goal, like business and finance.
Take the current article as an example. The PearAI founders have revealed something about their moral code. That will matter down the road. E.g., Whenever I'm hiring somebody I'll look at their resume and flag companies with known ethical problems. Maybe that gets them binned, maybe I ask them about it. And when I've founded something, the ethics of my cofounders has been among my highest criteria. That's true for a lot of founders and execs I know.
[1] https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
[2] https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
It'd be unethical for YC to kick them out. PearAI signed an agreement with the startup incubator and presumably didn't misrepresent their product. The main criticism is that YC made a bad business decision by backing a non-innovative product. That's an issue that should be handled privately between YC and the founders, not through public humiliation.
If I get hired at a job I expect my boss to (publicly) back me if another team criticizes my work, then tell me the issues in a 1-on-1. If I have investors I expect them to (publicly) back my business strategy and privately tell me their concerns.
They relicensed the code to their own license[0], which violates the original license, so you could argue they committed copyright infringement.
[0] https://github.com/trypear/pearai-app/blob/e921c7ae272168577...
EDIT: Looks like they have since changed the license to Apache 2.0 but it's still in violation of the original MIT license and does not contain the required copyright notice.
"Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
I hope it's not a new trend: doing some unethical sh*t and justifying that "AI" did that.
I guess handing over creation of a legal document to chatgpt, done in a narrowly selected YC startup which is supposed to be smartest founders around, that's insulting the intelligence of everyone, isn't it?
Edit: forgot to underline: they had all the legal and administrative support of YC yet they gave this task of creating legal document to chatGPT. How can this be even remotely a norm?
The good news is "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Any good lawyer would eat them alive in court if it came to that.
i also think that's why this story sorta went viral, it blended the worst aspects of AI in the tech popular culture by bragging about theft and saying dawg unironically
There's two very separate reasons I find this a bad look for YC.
1. The very cavalier response from the founders about the licensing issue. "dawg I chatgpt'd the license" is not a valid legal defense. Had they immediately owned up to the mistake and said "This was an oversight on our part and we are immediately restoring the content of the Apache license" it would not have been an issue. But Open Source only works if people follow the rules.
2. In general, this is just an indication that YC is not the quality filter it once was. It seems they are more interested in founders online following (the founders are both YouTubers with significant channel sizes) than they are about the business itself.
This reminds me of another clone that YC backed: Athens Research[1]. Supposedly, open-source alternative to Roam Research. The company barely lasted for two years before shutting down[1]. While it's laudable to create open-source alternative, I always believed copying in such cases should be spiritual, not blatant, where even your name is just a derivative of the original.
YC's decision-making has become very questionable in the past few years, and though it's cliche to say this, it just resembles a textbook fad-chasing VC firm. YC latest batch includes LumenOrbit, a startup building data-center in the space[2]. The idea is not only impractical, it's simply pointless. I am no space scientist, but I could smell the BS just from the mission statement. Amazing that smart guys at YC couldn't.
[1]: https://x.com/AthensResearch/status/1591138491379122176
It’s not cloning if they don’t literally fork the code which isn’t possible for Roam research
Forking is not the issue. The real issue is the (mis-)presentation of the additional work and value they bring to the fork. Based on the code commits in the two repos it is minimal if anything at all, while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false.
> while they clearly claimed they have 100 contributors which is totally false.
Here's the post from the founder:
https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840248626284789956
You're absolutely right. This isn't a whoops, or nuance, or config/syntax/grammar error. It is a bold-face lie.
This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.
If you don't want this to happen, release software under a different licensing model.
There are a few confounding factors here:
1. It may be legally permissible, but it is impolite, to change the license away from the well-known Apache software license towards something which has not been legally vetted, and is in fact generated entirely by AI with minimal oversight.
2. There is an open question of what the supposed value add is here from the Pear team, that could not have been achieved by the people whose work they are co-opting.
3. Without a clear value proposition, the oversight given to projects by YC is called into question. I think this is the point most people are concerned by.
Your first point is not true. If Continue wanted a copyleft license, they would have done so. Continue basically said they are fine with people forking and changing the license
They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
"You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;"
> They initially changed the license to make it appear that they wrote the code, which is outright illegal:
The founder was also on Twitter bragging about how they were the "true open source" editor in this space because they already have 100+ open source contributors, when the majority of those were just upstream VS Code contributors whose patches they had merged back into their fork.
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license.
Which part?
Removing attribution is definitely not allowed – see section 4 c of the Apache license.
Distributing under a different license might be allowed if the new license is fully compatible with the terms of the Apache license, which would take some amount of lawyering to work out, and is almost certainly not the case with a bunch of gobbledygook generated by ChatGPT.
This is a conversation I keep having with people who support permissive licenses.
>Oh no, you're allowed to do whatever you want, but you shouldn't.
>>Then why is Amazon allowed to do it if they shouldn't?
>It's not polite.
>>...
So the can of worms here now shifts to piracy. Whenever it comes up, a large percentage of people here on HN support it. "you wouldn't have purchased it anyway", "the original authors don't lose anything".
The same can be said about using the Apache license and the service here in question. In fact, the difference is that it's completely legal.
The original authors don't lose anything.
Not sure what piracy has to do with this.
The point is that you've specifically let people do something then when they do it you're upset they did it.
If you don't want them to do it, don't explicitly allow them to do it. There are plenty of licenses which would have stopped this.
I voted the grandparent up about the license allowing it. But things being allowed isn't a benchmark for them being decent.
I don't think we should stone adulterers. But I also think cheating on your partner can mean you're an asshole.
> Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.
-- Edward Thurlow
A fair point. But having the internet turn on you before you get any traction is also probably going to be a death-knell for an early stage company. It doesn't bode well for their ability to make or raise money.
And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly?
Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
We're not talking about open source code. We are talking about the MIT license.
The two are not the same.
As long as we're nit-picking, we're talking about the Apache license.
But my point isn't about the specific license. It's about one set of people very generously doing lots of labor and publishing the result in hopes of making the world a little better. And then some other people exploiting that for personal gain with no regard for the first group.
That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. For example, Gutenberg enabled the creation of the publishing industry. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain. That moral problem is why copyright was considered important enough to put into the constitution. [1]
Focusing on the specific text of a specific license is missing the point. Both my point and the point of this article, which is why YC is taking heat for backing these guys.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-1/...
>That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain.
This is a _gross_ misunderstanding of what publishing was like in the first few centuries of the printing press.
Copyright laws originated as a form of government censorship and control over the printing press in 15th-16th century Europe. Governments and religious authorities sought to regulate the spread of information by granting exclusive printing privileges to select printers. This allowed them to censor and control what content was published.
It was only when the people who were censored won that copyright was invented to keep them from killing everyone involved.
I never claimed that I was reporting on the whole arc of publishing law over hundreds of years. I was laying the foundation for the next sentence, which is pointing at why this was so important to put in the US Constitution. The relevant text being, "[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Which is pretty clearly about balancing the economic interests of authors and inventors against the public good. Which is indeed at the heart of modern IP laws.
That's twice now that you've replied in a way that to me seems like favoring the argumentative nitpick over the substance of what I'm saying. If I don't reply after this, it'll be because I feel like there's not much point in writing for somebody who I can't get through to.
It is not that simple. Very few licenses are accepted by, e.g., Linux distributions. If you create your own modified license, for example BSD with two additional clauses that prohibit use for AI training and use in startups without significant modifications then no one will use it.
That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
That is the reason why the smug response "You allowed me to do this" isn't sufficient.
That's simply not free software / open source anymore. First of the four freedoms is "to use for any purpose". https://osssoftware.org/blog/free-and-open-source-software-f... And we absolutely don't need any more licenses to compare against. https://spdx.org/licenses/
That is so according to the OSI definition. But conditions and the level of exploitation have changed, so first steps like the AGPL have emerged.
If the Microsoft-funded OSI does not agree, perhaps we need an OSI-2.0.
You will increasingly find developers that disagree with AI exploitation, so a new institution that is not Microsoft-funded would be welcome. That is how the original OSI started before they purged ESR.
> [...] no one will use it.
> That is the reason why people are forced to release under the extremely permissive licenses and hope for moral behavior by their users.
No one is forcing you to release source code under permissive licenses. You're literally saying that you're doing it because you want more users. Congratulations on your imaginary internet points.
Meanwhile Bezos is very much making non-imaginary money off your work.
Not being polite will get you yelled at, as is happening right now, and should not be surprising. Legally there may be nothing and they are welcome to ruin their reputation and suffer the consequences.
I find it baffling in conversations I keep having with people that someone thinks that because something is legally permissible, then it is acceptable. It's the same vein of when people cry "free speech" when they said something reprehensible, as if that somehow should protect them from how people react to their horrible statements.
I think what is driving this is one the of the fundamental problems with the tech industry and its relationship to society: the ingraining of the assumption that because something is legal to do means it is OK to do. They are not and I think there should be more outrage when something like this tries to slide by.
Had me in the first half. If free speech is only strict legal protection with no cultural backing then you still can’t reasonably express contrary views and it’s worthless.
So the fact that it is culturally taboo to, say, use racial obscenities in public discourse (not directed at any particular person) means you think the first amendment is worthless? Because that's a deeply hamfisted belief but is in fact, the world we live in.
In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license.
In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.
Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.
Yes but they don't defend their view about enterprise product, instead saying they "chatgpt'ed" the license and "can't be bothered with legal", which is IMO even worse - I mean, as a founder how can one be so dumb to openly say that? Especially that they have access to YC's legal and administrative support?
Except the original code isn't Apache open-source, it's MIT[0] and still requires copyright attribution.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
It's like someone taking all the money from the 'take a penny, leave a penny' jar, or taking all the books from a little free library, or not putting their shopping cart in the cart return area.
A completely legal violation of the social contract. Or in layman's terms, a dick move.
> This is completely allowed under the apache open source license. I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.
AFAIK, people are not upset about the forking, but everything surrounding the forking, the actual business they "created" and the LLM-generated license.
Otherwise I agree, would be very strange if someone publishes a FOSS project, someone forks it and people get outraged. But I guess wouldn't be the weirdest things social media folks been upset about in the end...
I agree, it had been different with a license like MIT
Both Apache and MIT require attribution. They removed it.
> I'm not sure why people are so upset about it.
1. It reflects poorly on YC.
2. Something can be legal without being moral or ethical.
1. I disagree 2. How is it not ethical or moral? As stated above, you are allowed to resell software based on the Apache license and integrate it into a service. The original authors haven't lost anything.
You are confusing legality and morality. Legality can be an indicator of morality, in that laws tend to flow out of our moral senses. But legality is a lagging indicator, and new circumstances tend to create gaps where things are legal but not moral.
One of my favorite examples here is wire fraud. The rise of electronic communication created all sorts of new possibilities for fraud, but we didn't get the wire fraud statue until 1952. There's a biography of Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, a con man from the 1890s forward, where he crows about many of the things he got away with because of that. A number of the things he did were probably legal before 1952, but that didn't make them moral before and not moral after.
If you get a traffic ticket, you can pay a lawyer to get it knocked down to a non-moving violation, thus saving your insurance rates from spiking. This is 100% legal, but is it ethical? The other poor saps in the court haven’t lost anything, it’s not zero-sum. And yet, it somehow feels dirty to be able to wash your hands of a crime by dint of having money.
A startup repackaging an open source project and selling it as a paid service doesn't "reflect poorly" on whoever is funding them. In fact it will be touted as a massive success story.
It might not to you, but it does to me.
I think it's bad not just from a social perspective (because exploitation acts to diminish the amount of open code) but from an investor one. Forking a repo, committing IP crimes, and then doing some marketing jazz hands is not obviously the foundation for a successful IPO in 5 or 10 years. Indeed, for me it'd be the opposite; I'd call it a sign these founders don't have the depth to go the distance.
It's also brand damage for YC among the more thoughtful sort of founder, which at least used to be an important concern to YC. At 1000 startups a year, though, maybe they've just decided that there's a bubble, and in a bubble it doesn't make financial sense to care about things like quality or longevity. You just shovel out whatever people are buying and worry about consequences later.
"PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
It looks like someone created the following prompt: "Chat GPT write some parody story about current state of startups/VC state in 2024".
Wow, this clone and fork is pretty bad. This is the type of company that is accepted into YC batches now?
Not good for the rep of YC.
I can tell just from looking at most recent YC founders that they're not hackers.
I could be wrong of course. I'm probably wrong. Maybe these people who are attractive, care about popular fashion and becoming popular on tweeter are actually just as capable hackers as all the hackers I actually know (none of whom care about those things). I admit YC probably knows better than me.
But if I'm not wrong, and these people really aren't hackers, it means YC has decided that normies > hackers when it comes to YC. I really don't predict that's going to end well for YC.
I mean, obviously it's a numbers game. There are only so many hackers, but there are a lot of Ivy League people and FANG people. So YC chose to open their gates. Whether this will be a profitable decision is an open question.
Just the first one to be so bold. This happens in every batch AFAIK. YC continually invests in competing companies, sometimes back-to-back batches and sometimes in the same batch.
The article missed another huge aspect. The founder falsely claimed PearAI had "100+ contributors"[0]. Those contributions were to the original repo not to theirs.
Combine this with their other actions and it really looks like they're scammers. Garry Tan's downplaying denial remarks make it look to me like they're trying to save face at YC - since it looks like they've been duped.
It looks like they edited the front page to say it is a fork of continue.
Until recently it said
> PearAI is a fork of VSCode so you'll feel right at home
http://web.archive.org/web/20240903093719/https://trypear.ai...
Isn't this how open-source works. Sure it sucks. However creators can pick a different license, like AGPL, if they don't want something like this to happen.
I saw someone on x/twitter post this:
Neovim is a fork of Vim which is a fork of Vi.
They were pretty clear in their repo that they were forked from Continue. I get that they were rather lackadaisical about the licensing, but that's kind of their brand, and they since apologized.
neovim didn’t seek VC funding and advertise as if they built their own editor.
The first text on neovims page is ”Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability”
Pear never advertised that they built everything themselves. They were very open about the fork
Vim is not a fork of Vi.
>Isn't this how open-source works.
No, it doesn't! Open source comes with licenses that have various requirements.
This article reads like gossip/drama creation
Techcrunch article on BuzzFeed level
Yeah I noticed some pretty obvious spelling/grammatical errors too. I wonder what's going over there?
"...Continue as well as the original project that Continued used, VSCode."
Perhaps spelling/grammatical errors are how you know a human wrote it.
Or at least a human went through the trouble of editing a few errors in.
Oh the humanity!
> OHIO @parenth_: You illegally relicensed Pear to an enterprise, non open source license called "Pear Enterprise Edition (EE) license" even though Continue is Apache 2.0. Your project violates multiple terms in the Apache license. @continuedev you should sue these clowns.
> FRYING PAN & @CodeFryingPan: dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just Imk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
It's perfectly legal to relicense Apache 2.0 license
"it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue, which was covered under the Apache open source license Apache open source license. But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT."
Denormalize incompetence again
Ongoing discussion:
I have been surprised recently how many competing companies YC have founded recently. I know VCs do this all the time but I still find it a bit strange - not sure how I would’ve felt if the same fund backed my competitor. That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …
> That said, YC have always said that they were backing founders not ideas so …
And apparently now that means they are investing in founders who know how to click a button on GitHub and have an active ChatGPT subscription
Do we have public sources on YC’s recent returns, e.g. on its ‘20 or ‘23?
Pitchbook shows -16% IRR for YCCG21 (TVPI .73x, -1810 bps on benchmark) and -5% for ESP22 (TVPI .93x, +25 bps on benchmark). But those were notoriously difficult vintages.
Are there any areas where an AI startup can actually make an impact? All I've seen is either billion+ funded foundational models, or thin GPT wrappers - all with the same probability of being default alive.
It's amusing to see some comments downplaying the significance of 'copying.' Apparently, it only becomes a concern when Chinese companies replicate Western products and ideas. Perhaps it's time to stop crying about Chinese clones.
actually we don’t have to tolerate ripoffs and theft. That’s the principled and helpful response to both problems.
We recently applied to the current YC batch and got rejected. Seeing this just made me die a little inside.
We are a small SaaS that has very happy paying customers and a huge market. We solve a boring problem, with boring technologies and we are not the next OpenAI or Stripe. Yet we have easily a 10,000 X potential.
I feel like YC now prioritizes funding things that can be hyped more instead of actually funding things that can be solid software businesses.
Your profile mentions something with Blockchain? I'm not too sure, but are there any use cases except for Bitcoin stuff? From the solutions I heard there are offen more practicable solutions available compared to using Blockchain tech.
Could you share with me the link of the profile you saw? I did work with Blockchain in the past but this current SaaS has nothing to do with that.
Sure, I saw it in your GitHub bio: https://github.com/Vanclief
I would not be surprised if they got the funding precisely because of the controversy potential.
If continue wanted a proprietary code base, they shouldn’t have open sourced their code. That’s the entire point of close-sourcing your code.
Even the AI companies are turning into slop now. With hyped markets, being rational when you're greedy becomes impossible.
These guys are gonna get a ton of business because of this publicity. Any press is good press.
Developer tooling, especially AI powered, has historically not been the most forgiving industry.
Good point, but they can always pivot, since they're obviously good at marketing. Seems YC made a good choice
Garry Tan in 2019: "we mock the scammers who build nothing real and get fake valuations."
I watched the video promoting Continue.dev and just think to myself, these AI editors don’t actually add much value.
EMacs and Treesitter is much faster way to “find all references to X” in the codebase. Other questions can be answered with the naive grep implementation and marginal brain power.
If all they’re investing in here is to write boilerplate code, well, that takes not much time in the grand scheme of things. Where the value add is actually in the design phase. And, as a result of these tools people are going to just skip those crucial steps.
Am I missing something?
> Am I missing something?
Yes, you are basically posting a modern equivalent of the famous "Dropbox reply". "EMacs and Treesitter...naive grep implementation".
There's value in these tools, that's why GitHub, JetBrains, Cursor all built businesses on top of AI coding extensions. Personally I don't use the "Write this full function for me"-features but use it as a way smarter auto-complete. People don't really use them to jump to "find all references to X" as that's perfectly well solved.
I ve tried to use these editors. I tried using copilot and gemini... They all hinder me more than help. And yet I use chatgpt few hours per day copy/pasting my code between my editor and a browser and it makes me massively more productive.
Why? Because all these editors/add ons overwhelm the model with useless context while at the same time lack actual guidance of a proper prompt. They are all follies giving people false hope they can have stuff "happen" without any skill involved.
JetBrains built a business on top of IDEs long before AI was mainstream.
GitHub built their business on top of Git and collaborative coding. Microsoft (who owns GitHub) built part of their business on Visual Studio (also IDEs) long before AI was mainstream.
So it’s a natural extension to their existing business.
But if you’re selling me on a smarter autocomplete, I can already say from experience that AI can bounce good implementation ideas around, but it ALWAYS takes my intervention to get it right.
I’m happy to pay for an AI service, but I’m not going to pay for an AI service, an AI coding extension, an AI diff util, an AI SCM, and so-forth.
I don’t think expecting someone to know how to set up an editor (or not; there are plenty of turnkey distros like LazyVim) or knowing how to use the most basic of *nix tools is on par with the Dropbox reply.
> there’s value in these tools, that’s why… all built businesses on top of AI
Or is it because those companies realized they would rapidly lose market share if they didn’t? You don’t have to add value to become popular, you just have to make people think they’re missing out. Eventually your house of cards might come crashing down, but in the meantime, you’ve successfully enriched yourself. If you have a competing product that is technically equal or superior, it can be maddening to see the popular kid surpassing you without merit.
> You don’t have to add value to become popular
Nothing in the company I work for got adopted as fast as GitHub Copilot. I think it provides value for myself too. So saying that it doesn't provide value is definitely wrong, and I was skeptical at first too.
YC Startup School needs a course on basic business ethics
This is the standard low effort "here's a collection of random comments from X/Reddit" news article. There is no real substance, and this whole thing will blow over in a week as all the terminally online people move on to the next thing to get outraged about.
Looking through the comments there are a number of people here who are determined to defend the company’s lousy morals. They are missing the point. What the company did was not just shady, it a lousy business proposition all round.
If defending entrepreneurs with questionable ethics is your thing, go back to defending AirBnB, Uber and WeWork. At least those firms had a strategy and made their founders rich. This thing is a dead man walking.
We all know YC may be super random. Just invest on solid teams regardless of product
Mostly just invest in Stanford grads and ex-FAANG. When they talk about founders being outsiders in their videos I LOL.
Prediction: as technology becomes more “mundane” and infiltrates more aspects of life, explicitly copying another business model or business idea itself will increasingly become normalized, even expected. Nowadays this tactic gets a bad name, but in the wider world of business, it’s pretty common to take an idea from one place and sell it elsewhere, or take something that is free and sell it for money. There are a million and one Italian restaurants, but no one gets criticized for opening yet another one (except as a poor business decision.)
And so I don’t think YC or the startup can really be blamed here for basically just finding an opportunity and capitalizing on it. They’re an investment firm, not a nonprofit out to improve the world.
What bothers me more is the deeper sense that many things which are / were free/public/etc. are now explicitly becoming private products competing in the marketplace, and not public goods. No one seems particularly interested in making public goods anymore, which is the deeper tragedy. And when events like this or the recent WordPress debacle occur, everyone is incentivized to shut their doors and stop making things open and accessible.
One of the biggest areas you can observe this in is the news/journalism. Pretty much all of the better quality sources are behind paywalls now, when they weren’t five or ten years ago. This makes business sense and perhaps it’s the only real way journalism can fund itself in the Internet age, but it also means that information is increasingly not accessible for everyone. Something like Wikipedia probably couldn’t even get started today for this very reason.
I’m not sure what the way out is, other than the traditional model of patronage from rich people. Unfortunately that group seems less and less interested in funding “cultural” things like the arts or open source software, probably because they’re increasingly comprised of technocrats with no interest in culture.
What would really be great for YC or another organization to do, therefore, would be to fund this kind of public good. Unfortunately that goes against everything in the startup zeitgeist.
Why do you have to clone the thing when we have super powerful LLMs now? Aren't they supposed to make us all 10x devs and also extremely good with business? At the very least, isn't your chatbot supposed to give you good and new ideas? Because thats why you are selling it?
So the issue with this company is that there isn't any issue. Got it.
I mean most of the "AI" companies are all about copying everyone else's intellectual property, why not just start copying companies wholesale? That seems like real bigbrain time.
Well at least they don't make cruise missiles
Yeah somehow doesn't surprise me at all. The AI space is well on it's way to becoming as dubious as crypto/web3
> YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup
Free market! Competition spurs innovation and drives down cost.
"If YC does not back them, someone else will" -- drug dealer logic applied to VC biz
Everything is getting en-shittified, even YC itself.
This has been a trend for my cohort of college graduates. Graduated right in time for a housing crisis, inflation, layoffs, etc. Can't help but feel at least a little bitter about folks who pulled the ladder up behind them.
The people pulling those ladders never had to working about housing crisis, inflation, layoffs.
The word enshittified has been enshittified.