Beyang Liu: Yes. We are fixing this. So here’s the historical context… A couple of years back we made the really bad decision to eliminate any self-servability in our platform… And at the time, it was just a matter of focus. We were bandwidth-constrained, and a lot of the pull that we saw in the market was for enterprise codebases… Because those are the people for which the pain that we solve becomes existential. It’s like, you feel the pain of context gathering in a small codebase, but you’re still small, the codebase fits inside your editor… It’s not the end of the world. Once you reach a certain scale, then it’s like “Holy crap, we can’t get anything done. This is existential.” So that’s where the pull in the market for us –

Adam Stacoviak: I agree with that sentiment. What I do see though is as it goes to the right, past the bell, into what seems like maybe a flattening of sorts… It’s not quite a flattening, but it seems – it’s down, it’s going down, and we can’t see beyond may. Here it is July, so we’ve got two months, or at least one month in the past - did it continue down?

At the same time, when you look at a market and you just inject - as you mentioned, we were in ZIRP - and you have so much free money, you’re going to have some version of bell in a job market. I suppose the Chicken Little thing that you referenced in the audio version of this, and I think also in the newsletter - because I don’t read the newsletter. I’m sorry.

Kyle Wiens: [00:34:04.14] It’s all about the coalition and the political momentum. I mean, in New York State we had trillions of dollars in market cap registered to lobby against our bill… So it really is “Do we have enough inertia and momentum to overcome these entrenched corporate interests?” And the answer for a decade was “No, we didn’t.” But we kept at it. We kept building, and now we’re at the point where we are overcoming.

Jerod Santo: So, since Bitcoin is back in its bull run… It’s just been a few years in a bear market and then came roaring back from something like $4,000 a year ago, to 60k per coin, and around there today… People are interested once again in this crazy world of cryptocurrencies, and so we thought it’d be fun to explain Bitcoin like you’re five, because it is a difficult thing to explain, difficult to talk about, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous…

[19:57] The first way I would like to explain this is by stealing a tweet from Theophite on Twitter, which I thought that was a hilarious way to explain Bitcoin… Somebody tweeted out “I still don’t get Bitcoin”, and Theophite replied “Imagine if keeping your [unintelligible 00:20:13.18] for 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade in for heroin.” [laughter] That’s pretty classic, right?

So of course, there’s your bear explanation, and there are lots of downsides with Bitcoin specifically around energy use and whatnot… But there is also some real value to the network. And I’m not gonna explain how Bitcoin works like we’re five, but I thought maybe I’d try to explain why some people think it’s valuable like you’re five… So here we go.

Imagine that you’re playing Monopoly with some friends… And one person decides - maybe they’re the homeowner. Usually house rules… They decide that they’re gonna be both the banker and the rule enforcer. Pretty typical. Everything starts off okay, but then the banker starts doing some things that you don’t appreciate as someone who plays the game. For example, they start injecting new money into the game, but not equally to everyone. Just to themselves and some of their friends.

They change the rules about how much money you get for passing Go, what you can go to jail for and for how long, they create over-the-top transfer fees and laws about who can trade with whom, etc.

Eventually, you and a few other people in the game decide that you want to transact without the banker’s rules, permissions, fees and so on. But you can’t use the Monopoly bucks, because the banker runs that whole system of things. So instead, you start a grouptext on your phones. And each time you wanna transfer money to and from each other, you put that in a text. Maybe you text “I’ll send five Schrute Bucks to Kball.” And then you text that out.

Everyone involved in this new way of sending money is in the grouptext, so that’s how you keep each other honest. Bitcoin is the grouptext. The end. What do you think?

Jerod Santo: Some of their marketing teams are amazing, too. Red Bull’s marketing, for instance – and Red Bull’s been around for a long time, so they’re not one of these new ones… In fact, when I was younger, Red Bulls were all the rage, but there was no sort of illusion that it was good for you. It was just going to keep you up all – it’s going to give you wings, and you’re going to crash later, but you’re like “That’s alright, I’ve got to study. I’m going to hit the Red Bulls.” But man, some of the stuff Red Bull does… Just associate themselves with extreme sports, and sponsoring extreme athletes, and marketing in a way that’s really, really effective, and quality… So much so that sometimes I’m jealous of some of the stuff they come up with. Just ideas… It’s really cool.

So like that whole side of if your entire business is predicated on you being better at marketing and branding than everybody else, and that’s really where like the battleground is for consumer sales… You can produce some really good marketing campaigns, right? Like, that just brings out some amazing stuff.

Jerod Santo: Another thing that’s happening is that there’s more opportunities now, in addition to the speculation, because there’s now more use cases. We’re also in a bull run for cryptocurrencies, so that’s gonna bring in more people, of course… But back when Ethereum first launched, you had the DAO use case, the ICO, so you had the crowd investment use case… There really wasn’t much else you could do with these things besides speculate. And then the DeFi thing started to happen - decentralized finance - and I think there’s a lot of snake oil in that whole deal, but maybe it’s just unregulated markets; I don’t know, there’s some features there for lending stuff that’s cool, maybe… And then what happened recently, in addition to the stuff you all are talking about, is NFTs really have become this interesting, wild, new use case for these decentralized networks… And a lot of people wanna mint NFTs and don’t know how to… So what do they do? They hire somebody who can do that for them.

So there’s lots of opportunities to get involved in and around building auction houses, and minting platforms… So this is really brand new. I mean, 2020, 2021… I’m not sure how long it’s been going, but the NFT thing is very real. Now, maybe it’s just a fad, but it seems like a legitimate use case that’s bringing lots of people to the table.

Kent Quirk: I mean, this is the quintessential problem whenever you have – you can phrase it as “How do you eat your own lunch?” It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma. “I have something that kind of works now. Dare I try to replace it with something better?” …done badly, and - full confession, I’ve done it badly - you can try to switch to something and spend so much time doing the switching that by the time you’ve completed the conversion, you’re way behind in the market.

In other cases - you know, I came to go particularly in an organization where we were deep into a node deployment. And this was pre-promises, this is 2014, and we were in callback hell. We were doing some really sophisticated logic that was almost impossible for normal human beings to process, because we were trying to deal with 17 layers of callbacks. And it was a mess. And one weekend I read about go and said “Wait a minute…” and decided to sit down and try and recreate one of our services. We were kind of a microservices model. And I recreated an entire service in Go over the weekend, and came in on Monday and said “How about we switch to Go?” At least for the backend stuff. I mean, obviously not for the frontend stuff, but for some of the backend services… Because it was just so much easier to think about. And this was this was Go 1.6, or 1.7… Or 1.9. I mean, I don’t remember exactly which version. But it was a while back. But even then, the things that I still think make it a good choice were the choices we were making.

[00:11:53.12] But back to the larger question, every time – the company I work for now, we are doing observability in the cloud, Honeycomb, and we are trying to replace our competitors in the marketplace. We go in and we’re fighting with people who already are using some big competitor. And we’re saying “Hey, we can do it better. We can do it cheaper. We can do it faster.” Whatever we’re saying about that particular thing. And then those companies have to say “Well, okay, yes, but I’ve got a sunk cost.” And the question is, can you talk them out of – can give them a future that is looking better than the future they can see with the current thing, even given the cost of transition? You have to take it into account. But sometimes you have to say “Yeah, it’s worth it.”

Jerod Santo: How Alexa dropped the ball

Both Apple’s Siri & Amazon’s Alexa were poised to become top conversational AI systems, but somehow they let ChatGPT (and potentially a wave of new startups) steal the ball. In this post, Mihail Eric (who worked on Alexa from 2019 to 2021), tells the inside story on Alexa’s failure:

We had all the resources, talent, and momentum to become the unequivocal market leader in conversational AI. But most of that tech never saw the light of day and never received any noteworthy press.

Why?

The reality is Alexa AI was riddled with technical and bureaucratic problems.

From their bad technical process, to the fragmented org structures, to a product-science misalignment… this post shares the gory details from Mihail’s perspective. He still thinks it’s anyone’s game, though, and he lays out how he’d organize a dialogue systems effort from the ground-up. In brief:

1. Invest in robust developer infrastructure especially around access to compute, data quality assurance, and streamlined data collection processes.
2. Make LLMs the fundamental building block of the dialogue flows.
3. Ensure product timelines don’t dictate science research time frames.

Cameron Balahan: So yeah, Sameer sort of stole a bit of what I was gonna say, but the way I would have framed it is that I’m excited for Go’s growth. Programming language adoption is just this fundamentally slow thing. Nobody goes back and rewrites what already works, and we don’t want that either… And if you already have a ton of servers written in one language, you’ll probably make the next one written in that language as well… So introducing a programming language and then having it be adopted - it’s kind of a big deal, and it takes a long time. Just seeing Go’s sort of organic growth, especially in recent years, and - like I was saying, the community loves it, and it just keeps self-perpetuating… I think we’ve reached a threshold now where I see it growing even more rapidly, potentially, or at least finding it in more and more places. And I think part of that is maybe in a specific way related to the AI frontier, but it’s really just more generally like just new paradigms of computing; as those as those occur, those are opportunities where sort of new code is written. Maybe new companies come up and they have to choose a stack, and they’re probably going to use the cloud, and they’re probably going to be concerned about the productivity and how quickly they can get their product out, and they’re probably going to be concerned about the total cost of ownership in the long term, and the security and reliability of the products, and they’re going to find that Go is such a great fit for all those things, and the other languages that they maybe learned a while ago, or seen in production in an earlier time don’t fit quite as well. And that’s pretty exciting, because Go really does then fit the bill. And so I’m really excited to see what happens with that. The sort of growth, generally. So AI as a contributor to growth.

Then you asked about kind of a worry, or something like that… I’m maybe not worried, but just sort of wondering about AI. I wonder what this all looks like. It’s obviously very interesting, and I think that especially in the software development lifecycle, there’s opportunities to cut inefficiencies, and make work more productive… Sometimes though it seems like some of that is oversold, and I don’t know where the actual truth is, but I’m interested to see how that plays out. What the impact of having sort of more robust code completion will actually have on software engineering more generally.

So as Sameer said, we keep our tabs on that, because it’s important to understand the market in which we’re in, and what our users want. We want to be adaptable. We want to provide for all those things for our users that sort of keeps them happy, like the productivity and the other things. So I’d say growth generally, but wondering what AI will kind of make of our whole profession in the future.

Jerod Santo: The one about the web developer job market

Baldur Bjarnason chimes in on our collective sense of impending job doom, from the perspective of web developers:

We have the worst job environment for tech in over two decades and that’s with the “AI” bubble in full force. If that bubble pops hard before the job market recovers, the repercussions to the tech industry will likely eclipse the dot-com crash.

Don’t sugarcoat it, Baldur! Shoot it to us straight. Here’s more on how web media is in free fall and that’s bad for web devs too:

Web media is a major employer, both directly and indirectly, of web developers. If a big part of the web media industry is collapsing, then that’s an entire sector that isn’t hiring any of the developers laid off by Google, Microsoft, or the rest. And the people they aren’t hiring will still be on the job market competing with everybody else who wouldn’t have even applied to work in web media.

This would be bad on its own, if it weren’t for the fact that search engine traffic is declining as well. LLM-enabled spam sites are flooding the search engine results which drives down traffic to web media sites in general.

It’s mostly more bad news from here. This one sums his stance up:

It’s reasonable to expect that the job market is unlikely to ever fully bounce back, due to the collapse of web media alone.

It’s also reasonable to expect that the job market might take another sharp turn to the worse because the AI Bubble will run its course eventually. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a genuine innovation or an overblown yarn-ball of dysfunction and wishful thinking, bubbles end eventually.

Both finding a job and hiring for web development will likely only get harder.

There is a section called “So, what should I do?” that I recommend all web developers at least take a look at. One sentiment that I will heartily echo here: this is probably as good a time as any to start a business.

Alex Russell: [10:24] I’m apparently a product manager on the Edge team at Microsoft. But I still work on making web pages faster. And that work started when I was on the Chrome team at Google for a long time… Because we started to see that folks who were trying to build these kinds of richer experiences that we were just talking about were getting beached pretty frequently. Folks would start with high ambitions for the end user, and then because of the tools and techniques and cultural assumptions that they had brought with them from what was in circa 2015-2016 the dominant ideology about how you built nice things on the web, we ended up with teams who had built themselves into a corner with extremely tall piles of JavaScript, in a moment when the market was changing dramatically.

So since 2015 or 2016, we’ve seen just the continued explosion of what happened in 2007 with the iPhone moment. But from – I want to say 2013, 2014, it was pretty clear that diffusion was going to take hold worldwide, not just in wealthy Western markets, and that meant that we were going to see this extreme profusion of cheap devices, where every year, to the extent that Moore’s Law continued to play out, it meant that you could get more transistors per year, per dollar. But that didn’t translate into faster phones for most people; that translated into their first smartphone. And that meant that every year, the same capability got cheaper. And that just grew the market.

And so it’s only now, 2023-2024, that we’re starting to see full saturation, or let’s say replacement of what used to be the market for dumb phones being replaced by smartphones. Feature phone handsets were as late as 2019 half of the entire market in India, and that has finally rounded the bend. And so now we’re in a place where folks are starting to get maybe their second phones based on replacement rates and income worldwide. That’s not what it is maybe where we live, but the global reality is continuing to change… But that change, for most of the last decade, has meant that computers didn’t get any faster. They stopped getting faster. And so our patterns and practices as a culture for people who are building on the web had been set; they sort of cemented in 2013 on this idea of “CPUs get faster, networks always get faster, and that means we can afford more JavaScript every year.” And that has created one gigantic branch mispredict. And that great branch mispredict in the sky has caused us, sort of at a cultural level, to make choices that are not compatible with actually delivering good experiences for most people, including people who are wealthy, but just don’t happen to be at the right time in place right now… And so it’s been fascinating to see this turn to access, and then hopefully away… But I’m excited about HTMX and some of the patterns around it in that context.

On Freund: By the way, countries are one of the biggest hurdles, and one of the biggest needs for technology. So just being able to bill in multiple countries is super-complicated, especially when you have customers that are cross-border. you have Amazon in Germany and Amazon in the US, or something like that, and you need to bill them… It’s super-complicated. And what - we actually went to a lot of billing companies, and we asked them, “Let’s say we decide on a new market we want to open. How long would it take you to add that country’s billing to your system?” And they said, “Well it would take us about two years to add a country.” And we’re like, “We’re going to open a building in six months. Actually build it, and do everything around it… And it’ll take you two years just to do the billing?” And we ended up having to write our own billing system because of that.

Braden Hancock: Yeah, so a few different things come to mind… One of them is that, as I mentioned a couple times, there are different modalities to consider, and the way that you write labeling functions over images is fundamentally different than the way that you write labeling functions for text. So just given where the market pull was initially, we’ve started focusing on text, but we absolutely plan to bring in some of that other research we’ve done as time goes on, over the coming months and years.

I’d say in addition, another area that’s really interesting to us, so where we would have this unique leg up based on the approach that we’re taking, is the monitoring side of things. When you acknowledge that most applications are gonna go deploy, it’s not “Great! I’ve got my model now. Deploy it, and set it and forget it.” Test distributions change, the world shifts. People talk about different topics; different words get different meanings. Covid was not a part of the discussion a year ago, and now it’s a huge part of the societal fabric of what gets talked about on social media.

So the fact that you do very frequently need to iterate on your models, improve them, as well as you’d like to know preferably more than just a single number - the accuracy of my model, is that going up or down? It’s really interesting to see what types of examples am I starting to get more right or more wrong? What subsets of my data are diverging, basically, from what they were when I was trained? What’s really interesting is after you’ve written these labeling functions, there are essentially a whole bunch of different hooks into your dataset.

They each observe different slices of your data that have different common properties, and these could effectively become monitoring tools for you, because you can now observe how those labeling functions increase or decrease in coverage over time when applied on the new data that’s streaming through your application, and inform you when – you could basically set up automated alerts showing you “Now is the time to go and update things” or “Here’s some suspicious activity going on”, based not just on “Did the number go up or down?”, but “We’re seeing movement in different parts of the space where your model is operating. Take a look.”

That maybe appeals more to the technical/nerdy side of things, but I think it’s a really interesting problem, one where you’ve got that information. You have already identified for you these very interesting angles on your problem, and so why not use those to help guide the post-deployment life of a model.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, I noticed that as well, and I was kind of scrolling through the different areas to see what has the most activity in terms of the WHATWG organization, and the console one is like – there’s just nothing; it’s like tumbleweed… A lot of them – like, the Fetch one has some activity, then the Quirks Mode one is completely… In terms of people proposing things, talking about things, merging docs… And then the HTML and then the Fetch and a few of them are super-active. They do have a Console Working Group, or whatever it’s called, but there’s just not much activity going on there.

One other example I wanted to pull in - we had the image lazy-loading, which is a proposal; it has a spec drafted, it’s not there yet… Who knows, it could be years maybe before these things are found in enough browsers to use them… But here’s an example of (I guess) the process working, which is the autocapitalize attribute. This is one that’s been merged… We’ll link to this as well if you wanna read through everything yourself… But it’s past tense - it’s been merged; it’s even on Mozilla Developer Network Docs, all that kind of stuff is finished… And it’s kind of cool watching the way this works.

The autocapitalize attribute is in iOS, specifically on input fields. You can set autocapitalize equal to true or whatever the values are, and it will instruct the device’s keyboard to capitalize first words and whatnot on behalf of the user… Because on mobile devices - you know, these things are more cumbersome.

[44:13] So Apple just added that. They didn’t ask anybody’s advice, they didn’t put it out there as “This is something everybody should do.” They’ve just put it in iOS, and I think it’s been there for years… But it doesn’t exist anywhere else; it’s just there. But iOS is a big enough market share, and so therefore Mobile Safari has enough people using it that it became something that the developers have been adding to their sites. Does anybody use this attribute or had to deal with it?

Mikeal Rogers: I wanna challenge just even the presumptions that you’ve already laid out. First of all, Firefox has lost a lot of market share, and a lot of people don’t really see Mozilla pushing at the forefront of a lot of new standards, because they’re so resource-constrained. A lot of new standards now are being pushed by Chrome and by Edge. I don’t have numbers from Microsoft and how many people work on Edge, but just Chromium, just the web fundamentals - there’s over 500 people at Google that work on it. So they’re investing a huge amount of money, but also that means that it’s relatively inaccessible to just dig in and write some code on Chrome and get that out there. So we are sort of reliant on the fact that – many Google open web evangelists really go out into the developer community and pull in feedback, and we’re really somewhat dependent on that goodwill effort.

On the standards front–

Adam Stacoviak: You know, knowing what I know about both of you as individuals, and then also Render and Fly, I would say you’re very similar, but also very, very different. Very, very different. When I play with Render versus Fly – you’re solving similar problems for the same developer type, application developers, but you’re doing them in uniquely different ways. And that’s what the market needs, because where there’s push, there’s pull. And it’s not a choice of Fly versus Render, or either/or. I think there’s really just – it comes down to the kind of developer you are. There’s still fractures and fragments within the application developer sliver of the market. You’re going to have some who care more deeply about unique things they can abstract away or up into the Fly platform from Linux, and all the different things they’re doing there. I think there’s so much room in the market. That’s why I’ll never – we’ve never been a… We’ve tried to resist. I mean, because sometimes you do pick a favorite, but we’ve really tried to resist picking a favorite. And that’s hard. It’s really hard when you have that responsibility… Because when you kind of have a favorite, it’s like “Well, you know what? I do have a favorite. Can I tell you my favorite?” Maybe I can, maybe I can’t.

But we really try to keep an open mind, because similar to your ethos, our ethos is that we want to share what could be and should be given attention to to developers across the globe. So it’s not like “Oh, this exists and nothing else exists, so use only that.” It’s more like “If you’re a developer, whatever your challenge is, here’s the menu”, so to speak, “of what you can use to solve your problems.” Because at the end of the day, in our Zulip chat room - which is not Slack anymore. We use Zulip now. Not Slack. I don’t know if you know about Zulip.

Zac Smith: And often you financed your phone through the carrier… So I think just consumer behavior was very comfortable with this. And I think the fascinating part for me in a data center is we’re very comfortable with this with the vast majority of our computing called cloud. We get it like that. We don’t have to think about the cable that broke, or this, that. We just get upgraded EC2 instances.

So I think that it’s very – it can translate, but you have to rebrand it in some way, or maybe you have to say it. You can’t just say “Hey, we’ll rent you the server, or the chip.” It has to be a totally different value proposition, or at least presented as like – I don’t know… There must be somebody out there who’s got a creative left brain that can think of a way to say this… Because I think the emancipation for most customers is “Hey man, I’m in the banking business, not in the buying computer business all the time. Could you just really make sure I have access?” And I think that’s been the attractive of public cloud. The challenge is it’s still a bell curve offering. It’s still like a mass market, multi-tenant bell curve offering, and when you have this really differentiated technology coming out of diverse players, like NVIDIA, this is where enterprises make their alpha. They’re like “I want to adopt that now, or at my pace, in my way.” And I think therein lies the opportunity to bring that as a service, consumptive style desire. Maybe it means operated. Maybe that’s just the thing that I’m noodling on. But I think there’s an opportunity to bring that to enterprises, beyond just like a lease. It has to be a better experience than just financing.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. That was kind of like – your question was kind of my question, Jerod, in a way… But more benign. I was gonna say, if you were to not – like, with the whole “rug pull, not cool” situation that’s happening over and over again, what would make… You’ve already said you wouldn’t, but let’s just hypothesize that you might, or you would; what would happen in the market to make you want to no longer bet on open source, and no longer be – what would threaten that for you, I suppose?

Adam Jacob: Right. It’s not like I’m – so what do I know…? And I’ve spent the whole time thinking about it, so I have thoughts. So the first is that when HashiCorp started, and sort of as they grew, for them – and I think they’ve said this publicly – open source wasn’t a thing that they thought about as part of their business model. It was a thing they did, because that’s what all the infrastructure software that they used was, right? They used Chef, or they use Puppet… Mitchell never really liked Chef. But they used Puppet, they used Chef a little bit, they used all kinds of open source stuff… And that market was saturated with open source offerings and tools. So in order to get into that market, it would have been tough to build those tools in and not have them be open source. So they open sourced them. They chose the MPL, which is fine. The MPL, Mozilla Public License, applies to basically individual file copyleft.

Then the next piece of it is how exactly is it that you grow with your own community? So if you think about who’s contributing, how open were you to contributions, what was it like – you know, they’ve never been particularly open to contributions. That was – from the jump, it was sort of either Mitchell’s show, Armon’s show; they made decisions, and you sort of followed them. You can see this with the feature OpenTofu just shipped around state encryption. I don’t know when the first time there was a PR to Terraform that had state encryption for the local data, but it was a long time ago. And that PR was rejected, because it didn’t fit in with the business model. It wasn’t better for HashiCorp. That was a proprietary feature; they want you to use Vault, they wanted you to like tie into the suite… And so you know, somebody had written the code, and done the work, and sent the PR, and got the finger, right? [possibly referring to PR #28603, which was closed by the contributor; see also hashicorp/terraform #9556 —Ed.]

[41:46] That’s a pretty common refrain when you look across the board on their projects, right? They just – they hired teams, those teams worked on the software… This is always what happens. It’s not rare that the primary funder of the project is where all the engineers come from. I promise I’m getting to the answer to your question.

So from the beginning, they were pretty closed. I think one way to think about it would have been you could have started out being more open. So Terraform – there’s a plethora of competitors now in the infrastructure as code space. There’s Pulumi, there’s the CDK, there’s the Azure Resource Manager stuff… Microsoft even built another one, whose name I forget; I’m so sorry, I probably should remember. But there’s a lot of them. And part of the reason that all those things exist is because that ecosystem was so closed, right? So it did grow – HashiCorp, Terraform, lots of people used it, tons of stuff happening there… But if you wanted to build a business on top of it, if you wanted to extend it, if you wanted to collaborate in some way, if you wanted to build a derivative… A lot of those avenues felt pretty closed, because I think they were closed, right? And it meant that as the market grew, there was more space for competition, because it’s not like there was any part of the market that HashiCorp didn’t want. And the growth of that technology and the growth of their open source market covered up the low ASP.

So HashiCorp goes to market, hugely successful with Terraform… Let’s call them base hits on everything else, except for Vault, which was another home run. And Vault’s a home run for ASP, right? So Vault’s more expensive than the others, it’s a security product… like, ka-pow! So now you’ve got Terraform – homerun; Vault – homerun. Everything else is slugging along, right?

They had a press release not that long ago, yesterday maybe, where they were like rebranding the HashiCorp cloud platform, and they were talking about how Nomad was a part of it… And then it was like “But you’ve got to run it yourself. Wa-wa-wa.”

So all of that – the alternate universe theory would have said “What if HashiCorp had been more open? What if they had actually been open to, let’s call it, open governance? What if they had been open to allowing more people to use Terraform? And what if Terraform was a product they produced and they produced exclusively, and they could decide that the side of the market they wanted was the top of the market, instead of the bottom?”, which is the part of the market they care about most. So they could have decided that the price for Terraform initially, for a large swath of the longtail, was essentially free. And they could have decided that the top of that market was very expensive, closer to the ASP that they want now, or that they had hoped to capture… And while they perhaps wouldn’t have grown absolute share as quickly, I would argue that their ASP would be stronger now. And perhaps they could have driven more standardization around Terraform, for example, than they did.

Vault’s a great example of this. Vault’s ubiquitous in the enterprise, lots of people use it, which is awesome… But it didn’t… never became like a standard, in the way that like – think about like Elasticsearch or Redis. Like Redis, pfffft, Redis is like – the protocol of Redis is the protocol for caching. And that didn’t happen for Terraform, it didn’t happen for Vault either. And it’s because they were a little too closed. There was not enough of that ecosystem; you didn’t see the AWS Vault provider. You didn’t see an Azure Vault provider. GCP Vault provider. If you did, Vault would be the standard by which we all get our certificates all the time. But we don’t.

And so now they’re in a much more vulnerable position later in the game. Because now as the game gets later, you’re like “Okay, growth’s slowing. We’ve kind of reached saturation. Competition got harder. Now that competition isn’t with ourselves or with a derivative of us. It’s not “We’re competing with AWS to be the best Vault provider.” It’s “We’re competing with AWS’es proprietary key management systems in order to be better than Vault”, which they aren’t. Vault’s not better than AWS’es proprietary key management stuff; it’s not better than Azure’s proprietary key management stuff, or GCP’s, right?

[46:15] So it’s maybe better if I have lots of stuff in lots of places… But Amazon will get you there. If you’re JPMC [JPMorgan Chase], or you’re Chase, or – they’re the same thing. You’re Citibank, or you’re whatever, you’ll find a way, if that’s what you want to do.

So I think the alternate universe theory is one that says “They should have built a distribution that they sold for money, that was their brand, and they should have operated like an open upstream. And they should have let the rest of the market fill in the gaps.” But that would have implied leaving that space, and having a long-term strategy about how the right-hand side of that dollar equation turns into a giant business. I don’t think they had that strategy. I think the strategy was “This thing’s great. Everybody’s using it. Mash the gas!”, which was my strategy, too. That’s how Chef speed-ran every possible open source business model. We were like “People like it. Goooo!!!” Which – it’s a strategy in arrears only. It’s only when you look in the rear-view mirror that suddenly you’re like “How strategic was I?” In the moment, we weren’t being strategic. You just went for it. It’s not like Mitchell and Armon raised that first round of venture capital, and suddenly they became CFOs, with like a genius – right, no. No. They built software and sold. It was awesome. And they didn’t even think too much about selling it, because it was killing it. Because if you kill it, and the open source part works, you’re picking up leads like leaves; they’re everywhere. You’re just doing stuff, you’re like “Oh, my God. We got an inbound lead from Fidelity, and it just happened. I didn’t talk to them. They just showed up in my life, and were like “Hey, we’re using a bunch of this Terraform stuff. What do you got?” It’s pretty awesome, until it’s not.

And I think that misalignment of long-term incentives is how it could have been different. I think you could have aligned the long-term incentives, not really changed much about the open source part of your growth trajectory, and kept that right-hand side high. And if you had, then I think you’d be able to remain in the community, and of the community, in the way that you hoped you could have.

Daniel Whitenack: So there’s already really great hardware out there for smartphones, and I wonder if something like this is kind of a shock to the market. But in some ways, just as phones with external key buttons sort of morphed into smartphones with touchscreens, otherwise I could see smartphones that are primarily app-driven in the way that we interact with them now being pushed in a certain direction because of these interfaces. So smartphones won’t look the same in two years as they do now, and they won’t follow that same sort of app-driven trajectory like they are now, probably because of things that are rethought… And it might not be that we all have Rabbits in our pocket, but maybe smartphones become more like Rabbits over time. I’m not sure. I think that that’s very likely a thing that happened.

[00:43:37.20] It’s also interesting to me - it’s a little bit hard to parse out for me what’s the workload like between what’s happening on the device and what’s happening in the cloud, and what sort of connectivity is actually needed for full functionality with the device. Maybe that’s something, if you want to share your own findings on that, in our Slack community at Changelog.com/community, we’d love to hear about it.

My understanding is there is at least a good portion of the LAM and the LAM-powered routines that are operating in a centralized sort of platform and hardware. So there’s not this kind of huge large model running on a very low-power device that might suck away all the energy… But I think that’s also an interesting direction, is how far could we get, especially with local models getting so good recently, with fine-tuned, local, optimized, quantized models doing action-related things on edge devices in our pockets, that aren’t relying on stable and high-speed internet connections… Which also, of course, helps with the privacy-related issues as well.

Kevin Ball: I think that point is really key. So React wasn’t just there because it was Facebook. It was fundamentally a better DX. And we went all-in on that, and walked ourselves into a hole where it makes it very hard to claw back some of those user-facing performance, and other things. And that’s kind of where I was trying to get to with like - there’s a fundamental choice that was made in the architecture that pushes that way. And it remains to be seen, from my perspective, if we can get that level of DX without that choice. There are people saying that we can. I think there’s a reasonable argument that we can, but it hasn’t proved out in the market yet.

Nathan Sobo: But just from a personal perspective, it’s not like I surveyed the landscape and was like “Let me find a low-hanging fruit to pick.” It was much more the perspective of “I’ve been trying to do this for 10 freakin’ years, still haven’t managed to do it, and nobody else has either, and so I just have to keep going.”

Now, you’ll have to talk to our investors for their particular motivations, but I can tell you what I told them, and really believe, in terms of what the market opportunity is today, in terms of - again, I think if I were in this for the money, I probably would have started like a crypto token, or something. That would have been a faster route to riches. But I do think it makes sense to build a business model around this.

And for me, the opportunity is really about how we all communicate around code. I mean, I worked at GitHub for nine years. I love GitHub, but I also don’t feel like there’s been substantial innovation, since pull requests came out all those many years ago. And I think it made sense at the time to kind of hang this social layer on top of the version control artifacts. I just think we can take it much further. I mean, that’s what I pitched Chris on, to kind of get hired at GitHub, and we didn’t manage to pull it off… But now I think, based on everything we’ve learned, we’re actually positioned to do that.

[44:00] And so what I really want is a world in which having a conversation about any line of code, whether it was written a couple of years ago, or I just wrote it and I haven’t even hit Save, is something that just feels like at my fingertips; I can @ mention a teammate, pull them in, and start a conversation, so that conversation is really growing over the entire codebase. Because again, you want to introduce a new feature - that probably interacts with some other layer of the system that you may not understand. Already, you need to start having a conversation. But do you do that on a pull request? You haven’t even written one line of code yet. You’re just trying to understand what’s going on.

And so there’s just so many things like that, where it would be a great idea to have a tool that really facilitates interaction around code, and it just doesn’t exist. Like, I don’t know what we did; we’d like paste code into Slack, or like cap things inside of backticks. You’re talking about code that isn’t even there, and then it scrolls off the screen, and it’s gone forever when someone else comes to the code and has the same exact question that you had. Or are you hopping on a Zoom call and now one person’s like dictating through the screen, like “Oh, no, no, no. Okay, open this file; okay, now go to this function…” Whereas already in Zed we’ve tackled the real-time piece of it.

When we want to just have a conversation about code, we’re doing that in Zed. Start up voice, that’s not in Zed yet, so we still rely on an external tool to do the voice for us. But then I’ll just open up a submenu, invite one of my teammates in, and we’re following each other around inside the code, instead of trying to dictate through the screen, like “Go here. That – take that”, because the latency is so high, or whatever. I’m just moving around, and they’re following me, and then they’re moving around and following me…

I remember, when Mikhaila, an engineer on our team - she was like integrating the terminal into Zed; she was interacting with GPUI, and there might have been some APIs missing; she wasn’t quite sure. So we had a conversation, and I toured her around inside the GPUI, which I wrote the majority of, and then I followed her, and she toured me around inside of the terminal code, and then I got a sense of what she was trying to do. And then I jumped back into GPUI, and we wrote the code, added the methods together that needed to exist for her to accomplish what she was trying to accomplish. Then we hop back into her code, which she knew much better than me, and used those methods. And within an hour, with a quick conversation, we accomplished what over pull requests would have taken a week, I feel like.

And so that’s the level of fidelity that we’re looking to bring to interaction around code, starting with real time, but not confining ourselves to that. That’s, I think, the innovation opportunity; it just so happens that the primo kind of iPhone, Apple vertically-integrated product that delivers that experience in my mind is the tool in which the code is written itself. That you shouldn’t be Command+Tabbing out to a browser; that that experience should be tightly integrated directly into the authoring environment, just like it is with Figma, or Google Docs, or these other disciplines, that the place to collaborate and talk about code is where you write it. So we have to build a great code editor. But luckily, I want to do that… So that’s our competitive insertion, and that’s the business part that we want to build.

If you want to use it by yourself, I want you to do that and do it without paying us a dime for it into the future. And I want to build a business around teams using this tool to be more productive by having a better mind meld with each other and being more effective in our communication. That funds the people that just want to use it by themselves for free, and drives more innovation into the code editor space than has ever been possible, ever been funded.

Adam Wiggins: Yeah, so most of the credit for putting that deal together goes to my colleague, James Lindenbaum, as well as Byron Sebastian, who we’d hired as an outside CEO, and great guy, that I now count as a friend… So they put the deal together while I was sort of heads down in product development. But really, what happened was once we started to have this buzz that came with both the sticky product that was expanding in the Ruby community, and also just making waves broadly in the developer world, and at the same time, you had – as you said, all those trends were really just on the up and up and up. Cloud was becoming a very, very hot space, and we had seemed… We weren’t getting into this business because we thought we were starting a cloud company, but indeed, people would lump us as one of the seminal sort of cloud companies. Something similar for - not necessarily Ruby as much, but maybe kind of startups, and companies practicing agile development, and developer tools, and developer experience, which is a term that I’m not sure if we’ve coined it, but we’ve certainly helped popularize it… And yeah, again, those other companies I mentioned, like GitHub, and Twilio, and New Relic. So there was just this huge lift in the market, and then we had - yeah, the timing was just right that we were a big part of the conversation there.

[56:09] So pretty early in the company, we started getting acquisition offers. And I didn’t really know how to think about those, because I hadn’t ever been – even though I’d been a business owner in the past, I’d never been a venture-backed business owner… And yeah, I just didn’t know how to think about it when, for example, Amazon came knocking, and basically said, “Maybe we’d like to buy you, and how does (I don’t know what they said) 30 million bucks sound?” something like that. And it’s just - I didn’t even know how to think about that, and certainly what would that mean for me, my partners, our investors, our employees… “Should we even think about this seriously? We’ve barely even gotten started on the product development, but boy, that sounds like a lot of money, maybe we should at least talk to them… I don’t know…”

So there was a number of these kinds of opportunities that kind of came across our desks, so to speak, and mostly my colleagues there that I mentioned, would engage with that in good faith, because… I don’t know, I guess you should do that probably.

And one that actually went very far was VMware. So we actually were pretty far in the – I don’t know if it was due diligence, or something like that. I think we had a letter of intent. So we were pretty seriously planning to join VMware. Hopefully, it’s been long enough now. I think the NDA has a statute of limitations or whatever, but the price there was 70 million that they were going to buy us for. And this was two, two-and-a-half years in. So that was just - as you said, even that was a huge multiple. And I did see it as, okay – VMware was a company I really respected, and I liked all the people I met there, I like their brand, even though they are much more pragmatic sort of like infrastructure software. But I saw it as like, okay, as we had gotten further and further in this business, and especially once we went all-in on the platform, where the deployment side was important, there was this huge component of infrastructure… And a lot of that was about things like virtual machines, and Zen instances, and stuff like that. And I said, “This isn’t really what I got in it for, and we need to build this expertise on our team”, and we were indeed doing that, and hiring people, and just learned it ourselves as we went, and so forth… But I just saw that as being potentially a really good fit, in the sense that they had that expertise, and we could be the ones that were on the developer experience, application focus, in touch with these kinds of current cutting edge application development practices, like decentralized revision control, and so forth.

So it seemed like a really good fit… And oh, by the way, everyone involved would get rich out of this, right? Obviously, of course, you think about yourself, but also all of our employees, many of whom were – this would be really life-changing for them. Also, the investors who had believed in us. Also Y Combinator, which at the time was an unproven thing.

So I wanted to find a good home for the business to continue what I was doing, and indeed, the way that we thought about it a little bit is – it’s not that different from taking venture capital. You’re getting another source of funding that comes with it, and of course, all sources of funding comes with strings attached. This will come with some strings attached, but it also comes with some real strategic benefits.

So we were pretty far in that discussion, and I think I was ambivalent about it. I didn’t know what to expect from it. I saw a lot of ways it could go wrong, and most of all, I was not done at all building the product. I had way more to say, particularly around what we were calling the polyglot platform, being able to deploy languages other than Ruby, and so forth. So I was really trepidatious about that being interrupted by something like an acquisition like this. But I also saw all the benefits that potentially were there.

[59:49] So that was a VMware deal… And that was eventually interrupted by one of our investors, Steve Anderson, who basically came to our office one day and pulled us into a room and basically said, “You know what? I think this is too cheap.” And we’re looking at him like “He’s crazy, because –” I mean, $70 million… I couldn’t even fathom that number. I don’t know, maybe – again, maybe Silicon Valley these days is just full of like eye-popping numbers if you’ve been around in that, but I’m just some kid from Los Angeles, I’ve started a lot of businesses, but most of them I’m lucky if they get into the millions in ARR, at best. And so just these eye-popping numbers, and him saying “No, there’s more potential here. You’ve gotta hold out” was quite striking. But he was really passionate about it, he made a good case for it, and we basically put together a new financing round that would let us let us continue independently.

Nikita Shamgunov: [01:04:08.20] I think the important thing in the consumption-based pricing and a consumption-based approach is that it aligns the value of the product with the value to the customer, and the customer consumption. And then eventually, it will align this to your sales team as well. If we’re getting paid for something that is not used, eventually it will be turned off; it will be discovered and turned off. But if we are providing value, with more usage we’re providing more value, then the usage will grow.

So in a way, subscription-based pricing does not keep you as honest as a consumption-based pricing. And a bunch of Amazon revenue is people forgetting to turn off EC2 instances. And I’m guilty myself. I’ve done this before, and then in like early Single Store days a $3,000 bill arrives, and I was like, “Oh my God, I just forgot to turn a database instance.” Like, that was literally that. By the way Amazon forgave it to us. But I was ready to put my personal money to this, because I forgot it. And in a consumption-based system, you will never do that.

I think the consumption based model is proven by now by companies like Snowflake and Twilio, which are purely consumption. And I think that’s where the world is going. Give it a few more years and this will be the expectation in the market.

Christine Yen: Yeah, 10:30 AM until like 4:00 AM. It was not sustainable, not good. But new dads are not going to work that; we had no interest in asking that. And so having them be the first two people who are not us really helped us establish from the beginning, “Look, we’re not here to keep your butts in the seats. We don’t want to create a culture where people hang out at the office after work and go out to drink together. That’s not who we are. That’s not how we want you to put your lives into your work. We want you to love what you do and then get to go home.”

In some cases, it was, “Go home at four o’clock, send back on at some point, do what you need to do.” But it was very, “We trust you. You’re an adult. We trust you to be an adult and figure it out for yourself how to manage your time.”

The second thing is, as I sort of alluded to, the company Charity and I met at, Parse, built something that people loved, but struggled to build that supporting business behind it. So from day one, Charity and I came into this being like, okay, it’s not enough to build something people love. It’s got to be a real problem, that people are willing to pay real money for to support continued development and continue growing with that customer. For every engineer for a long time – we may still do this, I don’t know. I don’t interview engineers anymore. But every engineer that we interviewed, we would sit them down and make sure they understood both of these sides are important to building a business. We are not just here for the cool tech. We are here to make something really valuable and solve hard problems and get money in exchange for that. And I’m really proud of the early team that we built, and concretely, really proud of this moment…

[12:31] I remember like a year and a half or two years in when our first salesperson would do these deal reviews, which was, at the time, essentially running through a spreadsheet of just the conversations that were in flight. And this salesperson who invited the whole company, of like 12 people, of which everyone was optional, but everyone showed up, because everyone cared about, “Oh, this customer, or this prospect - this is what they did want to use us for. And they’re going to run into this problem…” And it was like full engagement in the commercial side of the tech. And I love that.

I think being very real about this is what is important to the company, this is what we hope that you will care about as a person or as a prospective employee… And if it’s not a fit for you, then let’s be clear about that up front so you can self-select out. I think those are two things that established who we are and how we want to engage with the market from the very early days.

Gergely Orosz: Yeah. It’s the baller move. And these are the companies who are gonna do well. Because don’t forget, once you do this, you are not just solving your problem for the next 6-12 months when the market is hot, you’re solving it for good, for as long as you want to. And if you can combine it with a win/win – you know, I talk with founders, and they all tell me the same thing, “But what if we hire them and we train them and they leave?” Well, first of all, there’s a lot of what-ifs in that sentence. Second of all, people are typically grateful when they get feedback… And some will leave, for sure, but not as many as you think, in my opinion. And people underestimate the morale impact. When you have a new joiner who’s enthusiastic and they have a lot of energy, they bring up the morale of the team. They actually make the seniors better. So when a senior mentors – I actually had my wife who told me she’s mentoring her first new-joiner, and she said “It’s making me a better engineer, explaining stuff.” So it actually levels up your existing people as well.

And again, I think it’s another open secret; it’s a bit harder to pull off, but it is there. This is how you’re gonna win in this market. And obviously, don’t just do – this is just one thing that you should do. Obviously, keep hiring seniors and try to not lose them… But this way you don’t have to hire 20 seniors, you just have to hire like five, and 20 people with less experience.

Mitch Wainer: Yeah, so when you achieve your goals in life, building a billion-dollar business as an example, building a company that goes public from the ground-up, and you start checking those boxes, and you quickly realize there’s no more boxes to check, it becomes very depressing… And you take a step back and you’re like – you have to kind of think back to your roots and your core of what makes you you. And for me - again, going back to my story from the beginning at age 13, it’s like I’ve always loved building. I just always loved taking an idea, turning it into a reality, taking a concept and bringing it to life. For me, I can never see myself stop doing that. I just wanna continue on that path. And that’s what gets me up in the morning.

I also have a beautiful wife and two kids, they get me up in the morning too at 6:30 AM, 6 AM, that’s a separate story. From a career perspective, I just love building exciting brands, exciting companies from the ground-up, that are game-changing companies. And I’ll talk a little bit about Welcome Homes and Sponsored… Welcome Homes - we’re placing a massive bet, we believe that people in the future are gonna buy homes online, sight unseen. And the younger generation especially - they don’t like calling people on the phone, they don’t like meeting people in-person. They’re much more into texting and social media, and buying things online. Even consumers today are getting more comfortable with higher-end purchases online. That is the trend that is happening today.

[36:08] So looking at the real estate industry and looking at how homes are being purchased and how new homes are being built, it’s a very complex process, and you’re dealing with a lot of different parties… And building a new home is overwhelming for people and many shy away from it. In fact, in the market that we’re in in Westchester, all of homes sold - there’s only 2% that are new homes sold in Westchester on a yearly basis. So 98% of the homes sold in Westchester are existing homes.

It’s a very small market that I think is gonna grow over time as technology and automation and as innovation comes into play to make this entire process easier and more straightforward for buyers, where it’s price competitive, you’re gonna be able to customize your home like you customize a car online, where you get to see a price update instantaneously with the different finishes or materials that you pick in your kitchen, or for your flooring etc. And we know that there’s buyers that want this type of product out there. Once we get the ball rolling and once we start to build 10, 100, 1,000 homes, this is gonna quickly snowball over time. Then the plan is to expand nationally as a next step.

The company has raised some seed capital, we’re hiring a lot of people; if you’re interested in this opportunity, go to our Careers page and apply. We’d love to speak to you. This industry is ripe for disruption. The way mortgages are processed, the way people deal with GCs, with interior designers, with home insurance - the whole industry is so fragmented, and there just has to be a better way. So looking at what we did with DigitalOcean at scale, and simplifying a very complex industry, cloud infrastructure, we’re trying to apply some of the same principles here to the residential real estate industry.

Ryan Singer: Because if you pull on that string, you’re gonna pull the whole rest of the app with you, because of the dependency tree. So that’s the kind of risk of like “We want to do it, but if we try and pursue it, it’s gonna blow up in our faces because of the technical reasons.”

I think the velvet rope case that you’re pointing out is really important too, but it’s a very different type of risk. It’s not a risk that the team is going to run into a scope explosion. The risk is that they’re gonna successfully ship it, and then we’re gonna end up in a market position that we didn’t wanna be in, serving people that we didn’t intend to serve, or getting feedback that doesn’t relate to the core of how we make money, or that kind of a thing.

Chris Anderson: And you know, what happened is that the U.S. government essentially banned the purchase of DJI vehicles. It’s kind of a soft ban, but it’s pretty clear the way the writing’s on – DOD made a hard; the Pentagon made a hard ban. So the government has essentially shut it down, which is really bad, because among the things that they were doing is they were fighting forest fires the Department of the Interior in the Pacific West, California primarily. They used drones for that, to look through the smoke, spot hotspots, things like that… And they were at risk of having this important program shut down. Public safety, fire, police… It was basically a problem. The fleets got grounded.

[43:58] So we realized that this was the best thing for Dronecode. Android only succeeded because Google was there to stick it into hardware and get it out there. Before that, it just didn’t have critical mass. We don’t have a Google for Dronecode, but what we do have now is a market. There’s a vacuum in the market, where DJI is not allowed to participate… And there was demand for an open alternative. The question is who’s gonna turn that into hardware.

We did not wanna get into the full hardware business at all, but we did see that there was demand for it, so what we did is we took one of our Chinese members of Dronecode - a company called [unintelligible 00:44:40.17] in Shanghai - and we commissioned a custom vehicle from them. They were already using the Dronecode software, but we commissioned one that was appropriate for government use, and then we had them ship it over at an incomplete stage. So with the commodity elements - the motors, the batteries…