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

@joshdance Visual Studio Code and GitHub CoPilot

@__tosh I have mixed feelings on this. There is a similar question around how do you know when to pivot or not. It is hard to know to be honest. I know examples of people who pivoted five times and on the fifth time built a massive business. I also know people who stuck with the same idea idea for years, and only in the fifth year of business did it take off. I guess it depends on the problem you're trying to solve. With Reflect, for instance, it is an extremely hard problem - it requires many years of work to even begin solving.

@kureikain I pretty much just use my Twitter account and a newsletter. I have ~30k followers on Twitter, and 20k emails in Reflect's database (using customer.io). Our strategy is very basic - we just launch and launch and launch, blasting those channels each time. The truth is, I'm not that good at marketing yet. This is one of my main areas of improvement for next year. Reflect's product is too cheap to make it profitable to gain customers by advertising, so we need to come up with other ideas.

@kureikain @maccaw How do you feel about Twitter these days? Do you think it still remains the top social network among founders/tech people? Have you ever considered switching from Twitter to LinkedIn or may be even Threads?

@maccaw Love the honesty!

@altryne The hardest times were, in order: 1) Performing a layoff of 20% of Clearbit during COVID 2) Getting my first Green Card application denied and being forced out the US 3) Clearbit getting a frivolous lawsuit 4) Coming to the conclusion that I should no longer be CEO of Clearbit 5) Getting a notice from the city of San Francisco that our office wasn't zone correctly and we needed to vacate (I loved that office) Along the way there's been folks that believed in me, and folks that haven't. I've always had a quiet inner confidence that propelled me regardless. In general, most of the problems above resolved themselves with time. Here's a good mental model when it comes to problems: will I still be worried about this a year from now. If so, it's probably important and worth worrying about. If not, resolve it and move on.

@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....

@stpe After I left I did a lot of writing. About my experience, my learnings, and what I wanted out of life. It was very cathartic. I also did a lot of therapy. I jumped into Reflect quite quickly because it was smack bang in the venn diagram of things I wanted to do. I wanted to build a tool I used every day, that was UI heavy (I love designing), an Electron app, and something around writing. Sometimes I worry about being ambitious enough. But then I think about the leverage in improving people's thinking through note-taking. That is enough for me.

@vedranrasic Going from 0 to 1 M ARR was a combination of us: a) increasing our pricing and b) creating a Salesforce integration and c) hustling. Going from 1 to 10 was quite straightforward after we hired a sales team.

@aprilzero Yes

@moe3615 You are very kind! And to anyone reading the above comment, I swear I didn't write it with my alt 😂 To your question: I think, when you've been wrong as much as me, it gives you a degree of humility. We're all pretending we have all the answers, but in reality nobody really knows what's going on.

@mxstbr I would absolutely make the decision again. Indeed, I would leave even earlier, maybe at around 30 employees, and set the expectation with the team upfront. I have learnt what I love which is a day of coding without meetings. So I should just stick with that. r.e. the board - I can tell you the hardest thing about not being an operator in the company is that you feel quite impotent. You can provide advice (as best you can), and feedback, but ultimately it is the CEOs job to make the decisions.

@alexander_nevedovsky I believe all humans have to feel creativity in their lives to be happy. Different people feel this feeling in different ways. Some people by writing books, some by acting in musicals, some by managing large teams. I feel it by writing code. At Reflect I write code every-day and I feel happy.

@alexander_nevedovsky 👍

@bruno_belcastro_pinto That is a question with lots of answers. I'd going to cheat and point you to the resources I've written - they contain a lot of my learnings: - https://themanagershandbook.com/ - https://www.amazon.com/Great-CEO... - https://open.spotify.com/show/71...

@maccaw Thanks Alex!

@jared_lambert1 With both businesses I immediately felt product market fit. It's hard to define but you know it when you know it.

@sasha_mackinnon You were so right about this.

@rrhoover I would also really want to know the answer to this question 🫶

@rrhoover Hey Ryan 👋. The reason I decided to crowd-fund over taking traditional venture capital is to do with incentives. Reflect's goal is not to be bought or IPO. But venture's incentives are all aligned with these outcomes. A community round, where you set the slow-growth expectation upfront, has much better aligned incentives. We even went a step further and aim to pay our investors a dividend. Now we have perfectly aligned incentives and expectations with our investors.