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Alex MacCaw

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

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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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Uladzimir Yankovich
1. What is the average conversion rate on the main page of the Reflect website? 2. Do you sell your Motivation browser extension?
James Adam
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?
Alex MacCaw
@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....
Naveen S G
Clearbit is a very good product. I use its website visitor tracking utility.
Pauline Rossi
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!
Alex MacCaw
@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).
Pauline Rossi
@maccaw Thank you very much! Looking forward to start learning all that!
Failmane
Where do you get your motivation from? What keeps you moving forward? Maybe it's the discipline?
Alex MacCaw
@fail_men The feeling of creativity. I need it. Sometimes coding feels more like an exorcism - I have to get my ideas out.
Elizabeth Obee
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?
Alex MacCaw
@liz_obee ProductHunt was definitely a big driver early on. And so was Twitter DMing people.
Elizabeth Obee
@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!
Carly Chen
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?
Sarita Chahar
Huge fan of your apps! Wanted to know if you are interested in selling any of them?
Nancy Talton
Huge fan of your apps
Joshua Dance
What is your favorite app currently?
Alex MacCaw
@joshdance Visual Studio Code and GitHub CoPilot
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