I'm Alex MacCaw, founder of Clearbit and Reflect, ask me anything. 🔥

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Featured•3yr ago

Hey, I'm Alex and I like writing English and TypeScript. I have founded a few companies (most recently Clearbit and Reflect), was an early engineer at Stripe, and I've also written a few O'Reilly books. I'll be answering questions on November 9th 🔥

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Hi Alex, It's nice to interact with a person like you. What is your favourite book (Written by you) ? and Why?

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3yr ago

1. What is the average conversion rate on the main page of the Reflect website? 2. Do you sell your Motivation browser extension?

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3yr ago

Letterbird

You've implied (e.g. https://twitter.com/maccaw/statu...) that the specific license terms a developer might make their code available under (e.g. non-MIT licenses) should not restrict the use of that code (e.g. in ML/AI applications like Co-Pilot). Is that accurate? If so, do you believe that non-MIT open-source licenses are worthless? Should an open-source developer have _any_ power to control use of the code they create? And following the second tweet in that thread (https://twitter.com/maccaw/statu...), would you say that it's therefore a moral imperative that _all_ software be open source (including all software in all private companies), since _any_ of it may contribute to ML/AI projects that accelerate The Singularity?

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3yr ago

Reflect New Tab for Chrome

@lazyatom Yes, I believe training open source code with ML is fair use, and I expect when it's tested (with the GitHub CoPilot case) that the courts will agree with that. Fair-use has long been enshrined under copyright law. I believe an AI consuming source code is equivalent to a human reading it. It comes back to the same arguments as in the Google vs Oracle case [1] I am a singularity maximalist in that I think we have a morale imperative to bring it about as quickly as possible. I would be quite happy if Reflect's source code (private as it is) is used to train CoPilot. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go....

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3yr ago

Lodago

Hi Alex! I would like to start learning developing, coding languages... But I don't know where to start. Would you have any advice for a beginner? What languages would you recommend most? Is it better to start with frontend or backend development? Thank you for taking the time to answer!

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3yr ago

Reflect New Tab for Chrome

@pauline_rossi Yes, learn TypeScript and Next.js. You will be well prepared for the future with those technologies under your belt. And you can use TypeScript on both the frontend and backend. There are lots of free online courses and resources (YouTube).

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3yr ago

Lodago

@maccaw Thank you very much! Looking forward to start learning all that!

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3yr ago

Where do you get your motivation from? What keeps you moving forward? Maybe it's the discipline?

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3yr ago

Reflect New Tab for Chrome

@fail_men The feeling of creativity. I need it. Sometimes coding feels more like an exorcism - I have to get my ideas out.

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3yr ago

Vouch

Clearbit is a genius product. Curious to know how you got growth going in the early stages? And did you rely on Product Hunt at all to drive that awareness?

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3yr ago

Reflect New Tab for Chrome

@liz_obee ProductHunt was definitely a big driver early on. And so was Twitter DMing people.

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3yr ago

Vouch

@maccaw Awesome, thanks for the insight. Hadn't thought of Twitter DMs. We're live on Product Hunt today with the goal of awareness (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) - hoping it will be a driver for us too!

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3yr ago

Hi Alex! I'm a big fan of Reflect! I have to say that it's such a wonderful and successful product. There is a question that needs your advice :) In the initial stage of a product, how to attract more users to identify the idea of it?

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3yr ago