You are hereCurebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals: “Stupid, Lazy, and Disrespectful”
Curebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals: “Stupid, Lazy, and Disrespectful”
That’s awkward: Just as it was announcing a $1.2 million round of funding, online referral startup Curebit was caught lifting designs and code from 37Signals, the company behind popular collaboration tools Basecamp, Highrise, and others.
The copying was called out on Twitter by 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson, who, after an exchange with Curebit co-founder Allan Grant, called the Curebit team “fucking scumbags.” It probably didn’t help that Grant’s initial responses didn’t seem particularly contrite — he defended the copying as a “quick test” and at one point told Heinemeier Hansson, “Chill dude ” (VentureBeat has a good blow-by-blow account of the initial controversy.)
Now, however, Grant has posted an apology on the company blog — in fact, it attracted so much attention that the blog is crashing. He also published the text on Hacker News:
Recently we launched a site with several pages copied from 37signals’ Highrise. We did more than take inspiration from their design – we actually used html & css code, and hotlinked to images on their site. We apologize to David and 37signals for ripping off their work. It was stupid, lazy, and disrespectful of their creative efforts. It’s particularly painful for us to have done this to 37signals because they are big heroes of ours. We just hope they will accept our apologies.
Grant sent me an email emphasizing his admiration for 37Signals, admitting that he “crossed the line,” and concluding, “I would caution other startups from making such mistakes in an effort to ‘be lean.’”
The controversy attracted particular attention because Curebit was incubated by Y Combinator and raised money from 500 Startups (among others), something that Heinemeier Hansson didn’t hesitate to point out.
It looks like a reader at Hacker News (which is run by Y Combinator) created a post asking for YC co-founder Paul Graham’s opinion. Graham killed the thread, saying that it violated the site’s guideline to “not use posts to ask us questions,” but he also wrote, “I think they shouldn’t have done it, and that they compounded the problem by not taking the initial complaints seriously enough.”
Meanwhile, back on Twitter, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure said he spoke to the Curebit team and “strongly asked them 2 re-evaluate thr policy on design & content; hope they take that 2 heart” and later added, “new founders aren’t children, just inexperienced. furthermore investors aren’t parents, just uncles & aunts. and we all make mistakes.”
Y Combinator alum Curebit, an online customer referral platform that leverages social media for “word-of-mouth” advertising, has just raised $1.2 million in funding. The investors include 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures, and others.
Word-of-mouth is the tried and true way to spread the word about your business, news, or product updates. For businesses, allowing your customers to tell their friends about how awesome your product or service is can be a great way to increase your brand recognition and attract new customers to come in and check out what you’re doing.
Collaboration software developer 37signals has bought Ember, an iPhone app for Campfire, according to a blog post. on the company’s site. 37signals develops Campfire, which is a popular real-time group chat tool used by developers and businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Wow. Silicon Valley-based startup incubator Y Combinator is getting just over one application per minute, according to a Tweet from co-founder and partner Paul Graham. Today is the last day for applications for the next Y Combinator class, and clearly founders are in a rush to get their applications in.
In recent months, there’s been some hand-wringing about a “Series A Crunch” — namely, a glut of startups raising seed and angel funding, then struggling once they need a proper Series A. But in a recent interview, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure said those complaints are misguided.
YCombinator-backed hacker recruiter platform Hackruiter has raised a modest seed round from investors SV Angel and Founder Collective. The company raised $200K but could have raised much more, because it is already profitable co-founder David Albert tells me.
Finding the right cofounder is often the hardest part of doing a startup, as most anyone with experience will tell you.
Braintree, an online payments provider, is announcing that Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris has joined the company’s board of directors and invested in the company following a $34 million investment from Accel Partners earlier this year.
Design sales site Fab.com is growing fast; adding nearly 200,000 new members the past 30 days alone, and processing ten thousand plus orders per week. That’s impressive for a startup that started an entirely new business centered around online flash sales of design items from scratch in June. Of course to mitigate this growth, the company has to make a few key hires in operations and finance.
One of the most popular sessions from our last Disrupt conference was Paul Graham’s Office Hours (watch the video below). And next week at Disrupt SF, he will be back giving startups advice onstage. Graham and his partners at Y Combinator are famous for their office hours, where startup founders can ask questions about anything from product design to company strategy.