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Comment by parthdesai | Hacker News Reader

The tech might be amazing, but the CEO comes across as an asshole

Sam is not an asshole. His twitter is great, he's definitely opinionated, and if you haven't had the luck of meeting him you might misread his tone as grumpy. It's not. It's sarcastic/dry humour and honest.

They build good stuff and care.

You can build good stuff, care, and be very opinionated...you can also be all of those things and still be an asshole.

His X.com persona is def that of an asshole.

very kind of you to say tony

being opinionated doesn't mean you can attack people you compete or don't like every other week

He's actually quite nice over zoom so he just comes off as funny on twitter once you've met him.

> he just comes off as funny on twitter once you've met him.

Never heard of the guy before today, but his dickish, edge-lord aura (on X and in this thread) makes me not want to meet him. If I had to choose between buying from him, or some other random dude, I'll hear out the random dude first.

> If I had to choose between buying from him, or some other random dude, I'll hear out the random dude first.

If you have such luxuries, I bet you don't have enough scale to be really profitable for him.

Oh no, how am I ever going to avoid giving my custom to someone who has allegedly cornered the market on - checks notes - a db proxy? Give me a break.

I can think of at least 4 other ways of scaling horizontally without switching DB engines. I'd have to be mightily constrained to have this particular product as the only option.

Sure, I don't doubt your ability to do so yourself. I just question your ability to trust some random unknown figure with your data if you have enough scale. That's quite different, actually.

TBF, I hadn't heard of the guy before this thread either, but I don't hang out in the unexpected-scaling-demand-with-no-infra-team circles, which appears to he the target market.

Perhaps he's quite nice over zoom, but since very few of us are going to meet him in that context, the rest of us are left to judge him by what he posts. And as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Based on what I've read so far, with his shit-talking the competition, he seems like... a bit of an asshole.

https://x.com/samlambert/status/2083235983336865916 very funny

I can fully understand why someone would think that.

There's obviously more to the story than outsiders are aware, but personally it just leaves a bit of sour taste in my mouth when the tech and blog posts you guys put out are amazing.

(I'm a paying PS customer)

Genuine question, since I'm a little out of the loop; why do you say that?

https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098069474205470970?s=20

https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098075451373834681?s=20

nothing i have said is untrue. a founder of a company leaving to compete out of greed is a bad thing and i am glad to call it out.

In case you were unaware, if someone's defense against being called an asshole is to say "well nothing I said was false" they're almost certainly an asshole.

No one accused you of dishonesty.

Did anyone say you said anything untruthful? No, they just called you an asshole. You can both be an asshole and be right.

PS - Just some advice that I learned in sales 101 early in my career...focusing on shit talking the competition generally isn't a strategy that works well.

> You can both be an asshole and be right.

"You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole." - The Dude

> You can both be an asshole and be right.

Only petty people can hold that view.

Unless you are at the basketball court where talking smack is a valid winnign strategy

I, for one, like it when CEOs let loose a bit and show some personality. It's better than everyone walking around talking like a media trained robot.

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