Jerod Santo: On acid, yes. Which - maybe those are the models he’s working with. But you know, a thing that you don’t ultimately know what it’s going to do. Now, you can train, and fine-tune, and guard, and watch agents watching agents all you want… However, we’ve seen at scale the internet operating, distributed systems at scale - things go wrong in ways that are sometimes very quick, very catastrophic, and compounding and cascading.

[00:52:09.02] One thing that I think about is some of these stock market trades, when you have quick corrections or crashes is because you have software making margin calls and trading with software programs, and eventually what happens is the New York Stock Exchange actually just stops everything and is like “Let’s chill out here.”

Glauber Costa: …and many, many other things. I mean, the level of contributions that we started to get… We started getting like people running this on the browser. A week after we announced, it was running on the browser already; just like this, compiled to WebAssembly. All from contributions from third party people.

Again, LibSQL, we did get a lot of contributors, but they were all contributing to the drivers, to the server… Things at the margin. Which - they’re important as well for an open source project, but with Limbo, we actually managed to see our dream, the 10-minute dream come true. Like, we’re going to build a community of people coming here and writing this database with us. So we revisited – now it’s no longer a 10-minute dream that went away. We truly believe now that once we get the momentum going, we can replace SQLite. And that’s the goal.

Tom Occhino: But what we would have to trade off is our time spent building an enterprise-grade development platform and framework-defined managed infrastructure, to building actual infrastructure. And I think at least for now, we don’t see the need. We actually believe that what’s happening is - and I don’t mean to aggrandize it, but there’s this human progress thing that’s happening. In the early days of the internet, there were a small set of individuals that had to rack-mount machines. And then - I just remembered the stories from early Facebook, where we literally would drive to data centers and plug machines in. Then, eventually AWS comes along, and things like at GCP, Azure DevOps, and they say, “Hey, now anybody can provision compute from the comfort of your own home or office.” And then something like Vercel comes along and says, “You don’t really have to think about provisioning your own compute. We’ll kind of do it for you automatically.” So I think that arc is human progress.

[01:00:03.22] So now, the way that it would make sense for us to want to provision our own machines and actually rack-mount our own machines is if we get to a place where that’s actually the only way for us to optimize our margins. And we have so much efficiency left. We have so much opportunity to, just in the software layer, make our margins and our product offering – you know, better margin and more compelling product offering, so that we don’t need to look at hardware yet. So no active explorations into hardware.

Zac Smith: Well, I think that they might not own it, but they’re going to cause it to occur as customers. I think they’re very different businesses. Some are high margin, high growth, the other ones are used to being regulated, non-growth businesses… I think the big shift we’re having right now is that energy has gone from – basically, we reached peak load in the ‘90s, and it’s been slowly decreasing, or like growing very minimal, to it’s actually growing by a few percentage points a year, which is crazy, and we’re not used to it. So we might see some energy businesses go private, and turn into like growth businesses, basically. I mean, you can see Constellation, which is the nuclear operator doing that. If they figure out that they can build 10 or 20 more new nuclear plants, which hasn’t happened since like the ‘60s, it’d be a growth business.

So I think we’ll probably just see a lot more – well, we’ve already seen it, even in Ashburn, Virginia, which is the largest data center market in the world… Just the local planning board saying “Hey, I’m not going to approve this building permit, because you’re going to bring in 500 diesel generators, or you’re going to use our water. You’re going to use 50 million gallons of water a month. We don’t want that, actually. That’s a municipal thing that we need. We want no diesel generators next to our school, and we need the water for our other stuff.” And so I think these things are mixing, only because it’s just become a bigger part of our lives. And it’s a critical part of our lives, not just a nice to have. It’s a must have, I think, in most ways. So that just means more involvement between public policy and private companies.

And maybe that results in just straight up regulation, or maybe that just results in better partnership, or that being on the talking points of our next local election, is how we’re going to support or not support these types of initiatives. And I think that’s become – the lingua franca of digital infrastructure is like way more available than it was a couple of years ago, where even though I’ve been in this industry for 25 years, my mom didn’t know what a data center was, and now she knows all about data centers and chips, and it’s not from me.

John Nunemaker: I think I would do it. I just would have to learn more about how people do that. And even in that, again, that podcast episode about like buying five – I can share the link later, or whatever… But it’s like buying five manufacturing companies; in that scenario, that guy was like – they do kind of like a PE model, where basically they’re like “Look, we come in and we run it”, and there’s six partners in the group, and each of those partners will personally guarantee one business. And so right now they have three, guaranteed. And when they do that, they do two things. So one, they charge a management fee to the business based on EBITDA. So they buy businesses that already have good profit margins, they take a slice of that profit margin for everyone who’s in the management group, and then they’ll also do - whatever, first 8% preferred return, in the event of a sale, goes to the investor, and then after that it’s like split based on equity and all those kinds of things. And they bring in basically different people in every single deal.

So I wouldn’t say different people from the standpoint of like “Well, Adam’s in this deal, and Garrett’s in this deal”, or stuff like that. It’s more like “We’ve got five people each putting in like 100,000 or 50,000, so now we have 250k, 500k, and then we’re going to personally guarantee, do an SBA loan for the other half…”

[01:26:13.23] So their debt to whatever ratio is basically like half. Because again, if the business went all the way in half, you’d still be able to run it, which is pretty rare for a business that’s been around for – they stick to 30, 60, 80 years. 30 plus employees, so they know that all the knowledge is not with one owner in a 10-person company, or things like that. So again, a different scenario here, where we have software and leverage and stuff, and it’s less of less of a concern. But I’m like, that idea is really fascinating to me.

The group, the six, each have a share in each of the companies they acquire. One of them runs each of the companies they acquire, one of them personally guarantees… Not necessarily the one they’re running. And then they also kind of – for lack of a better word, they shard their investors across all the deals as well, so no investor is heavily invested in one of them. And I’m like “I actually really liked that model.” I think that’s sick. Because now they’re doing the SBA loans, which means they can personally guarantee, but not actually put up the collateral, so you don’t run out of collateral and run out of money… But I don’t know all that financial stuff yet. I haven’t done any of that, so I’m like, I’m just going to start simple. And I’m like “Look, I’ve got some friends, they had a little bit of cash too, I’ve got the collateral, let’s put it together, make it look a three to five-year payoff.” If it’s an eight-year payoff and we take more cash out, that’s fine. It’s just, ideally, I don’t want to have my house on the hook forever. Or maybe I pay off the loan at some point… Like, let’s say Box Out does sell, for some reason. We’re not planning on it now, we’re not talking to anybody, we don’t have any interest in that… But if somebody came along with the right price, we’d be like “Sure.” That happens, now I’ve got some cashflow, so maybe I pay off the loan, get the lien off my house, and then I loan it back to the business at a lower interest rate, or something like that, so that the lien is basically gone from my house, but there’s still some amount of leverage of using other people’s money to make money, which is kind of an interesting concept, I guess. Again, I’m all a rookie. I don’t know any of this stuff. I’m just flapping the stuff that I’ve been researching for a couple of years, and then heavily for a month or so… So I don’t know, but that’s just what I think in my head.

Adam Stacoviak: [00:17:47.25] There’s a margin of haters, let’s just say, towards Kafka. And it is open source, and I’m just curious… You may be in that bucket of margin of haters, because you’ve created WarpStream, right? So you’re kind of - not for, you’re kind of against, at least from an economic standpoint. And maybe a DX standpoint, and many other standpoints. The point I’m getting to is why not just improve Kafka?

Adam Jacob: Yeah, it was nuts, right? And it was really condensed. And the Ruby-based Chef server just couldn’t do it, and I remember going to Facebook with the Erlang Chef server on a USB key that had a little – whatever, it was like a little bear’s head on the end of it. And I brought it to Facebook, and we installed it and ran it, and we thought that it didn’t work at all, because the load was flat, and there was no utilization, and then everything finished and it was fine. So the Erlang just literally ate all the load and just didn’t care [unintelligible 01:09:43.18] It was incredible. The first time that we’d used it outside the lab, it was truly incredible.

So we were like “Hey, if you want the good one, pay us for the good one.” And then it becomes hard to maintain both, so then you’re like “Well, maybe we should just open-source the good one too, but then we’ll hold back some features. Maybe it’ll be security features.” Then maybe it’ll be – well, and then what we actually should do is… Like, you can’t hold back basic security. That makes you kind of a jerk. So maybe we’ll build like a dashboard, a better web UI, we’ll monetize that… Maybe it’s security and compliance, we’ll do that, we made some acquisitions, brought in the [unintelligible 01:10:19.12] folks… That was great. They were awesome. Their code was incredible. They helped. We tried every variation of open core possible, and then in the end switched to a model that looked like Red Hat’s, which was the most efficient by a dramatic margin.

Adam Lisagor: Yeah. It’s really striking that right balance of they’re early enough that there’s still room on their cap table, but they’ve got enough resources that they’re not expecting a video for free. So a good ratio is like 75% cash, 25% equity, and then basically I’m foregoing – I’m going a little bit out of pocket and I’m foregoing all of our profit margin. Basically, it can end up as a breakeven, close to a breakeven for me in terms of hard costs. And then if they do well, I have all that upside.

So it was a model that proved out pretty early in small ways, and then there have been a couple that proved out in bigger ways. And it’s the reason, to be honest, that I identified within the last few years, that I want to be in the growth business. Owning a creative studio is not that; even if you get acquired, it’s not a high-growth acquisition.

So I decided, not just because of money, but I really like the idea of building something that scales… And I’m not scalable by myself as as a creative director. My team isn’t scalable. We could add 10 more people to the team, and that’s not the kind of scale that I’m talking about. But software’s scalable, as we all know.

Adam Stacoviak: Thank you. I will say more about that. There is a book… Let me make sure that this ChatGPT is not hallucinating on me in terms of the author of the book. And I learned it from this book called Margin, literally. And it’s by Dr. Richard Swenson. And loosely, margin is defined as the space between our load and our limits. So in terms of some of the things we talked about on the podcast, there’s a certain amount of capacity someone has. And sometimes you’re at your margin; you have no additional contingency, no additional capacity, and so the spiral may or may not happen as a result of that. So I was just curious if you had that, because it leads to stress, burnout, anxiety, catastrophizing… All these things we talked about in the main show, is this idea if you can manage your margin, ensure you have room, so to speak. You mentioned anxiety about an email. Well, maybe if you had less to do and your margin was more, you might not have that anxiety. So I was curious if you knew about this concept of margin.

Justin Garrison: Well, they care about value, right? The value is that key piece there. And I love the – Bill Gates a long time ago defined what a platform is, and I always go back to this, because I think a lot of platform engineering teams need to focus on that value piece. Bill Gates said something along the lines of “A platform is when the customer’s value exceeds the creator’s value.” The person who created the platform gets something back out of it, they get financial gain or whatever, but the people who build on top of it get so much more value out of what they’ve built. And that’s a platform. That is when it actually becomes “Oh, the people on top of it are getting more value from it.” And that’s the thing that – yeah, you have to focus on that portion of it first. Because if you’re trying to preoptimize things, or say like “Oh, I can get a bigger margin over here”, or whatever, those are all the things that are going to distract you from “What are your customers getting value out of what you’re doing?” And if you are lowering the prices, maybe that’s the right value. But if they’re not asking you for that… Right? If you’re saving them time, then focus on how to save them more time.

Adam Stacoviak: It’s a warning to consider your big changes. Yeah, I think it is a – I don’t consider it a warning. It’s more like a red flag. I guess that’s a warning, I don’t know… It’s not like a negative warning. It’s just more like “Hey, if you’re making a big change, consider there’s other big change you haven’t considered.” And don’t go in with zero margin. Have some margin. When you go into a room, plan your exit. Or consider that you might need to exit.

Adam Stacoviak: [00:08:19.24] Yeah, it’s funny, that does happen to get back into policy. You would think, I suppose left to their own devices, companies are going to try to protect themselves. I can understand that psyche, for lack of better terms, when it comes to a company. Because a company is not a person, it’s a persons, but very much masquerades as a person based upon just simply how corporate law works. The formation of an LLC is a limited liability company, a corporation, etc. it has its own DNA, but it’s not a person, it’s persons, but it’s ran by people, and they have their own way of thinking… And in some case, they’re very psychopathic when measured against typical psychology and human behavior… But it’s really a shame that it has to go to the policy level to sort of make these folks not be planned obsolescence-focused.

And then recently - this is just days ago, and you’re aware of this, so fill in the gaps for me, but… The State House passed Oregon’s Right to Repair act, SB 1596, by a margin of 42 to 13. That’s a significant margin.

Mat Ryer: Let’s take Python. Gophers say? [win alert] Yes, you got it. The fourth one. It gets you 20 points, because six people said it. Excellent. So let’s check in with the scores, see how we’re doing here. Team One has 63 points. Very respectable number of points. But in the lead, by quite a margin at the moment, Team Zero has 119 coins. [applause] It’s all still to play for, because our next round is what I like to call Double Points.

[00:18:05.18] We asked gophers “If you weren’t in tech, what job would you have?” That’s how we asked them as well. If you weren’t in tech, what job would you have? Wiktor and Val, you’re going head to head to try and crack the case.

Jerod Santo: Show us margin. [win alert] It’s on there at the number five slot, with seven responses.

Adam Stacoviak: I need to read this book, because I’m not sure I agree with it. I think organizing folks, and DevRel, and that in particular - there’s a certain amount of mind margin that you have as a value worker, let’s just say, to use the language you’re using… And if I can put people in place to organize those people better, and drain them less, then I get more value from their actual work. I still feel like those are valuable. Those are not BS jobs… Personally.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, exactly. The Joneses. Whether it’s skills, or materials, this idea to keep up, essentially. And we said that early on too, with our tagline - “Open source moves fast. Keep up.” And it was meant to be kind of snarky, because it was kind of hard to keep up. And I think we ended up – especially as new devs, you end up chasing different squirrels, and shiny objects, and you’re not really sure which skills to build, and you’re three years deep, and you’ve got a smorgasbord of like maybe mediocre skills… No offense to the people who have done that, but – just because you’re chasing things. But this idea of like staying 10% behind the people that are innovating and pushing forward… Kind of maybe staying in the jQuery lane; maybe you shouldn’t do that, and maybe that’s probably not good advice today, but just the idea of staying a little bit behind the trendline, so to speak, so that you have maybe some margin, some space, some operational space to maneuver… Whereas somebody who’s sort of steeped deep in something that’s basically dead or dying, and they’ve invested fully - well, they’re all in on the wrong thing, basically, and you still have the chance to sort of diversify.

Jordan Harband: Yes, by a large margin.

Adam Stacoviak: They said that the window to which they had to construct these pyramids, to do it in the timeframe that they suggest they did it, where they had to cut and move these large blocks - I don’t know if they’re granite, or what the heck they’re made of; sandstone, or something just unimaginable… They’re just so big. The degree of accuracy of the cuts, when they had to move them into place and construct these things, the margin of error was within like minutes. So the accuracy to which they built them in the time they suggest they built them is just – you have to think, like, how in the world could they do it? Because even in modern technology, we cannot replicate how to build such constructions. Like, it just hasn’t been done.

Jerod Santo: Because I was the most unpopular of the three of us, which makes me the winner… Not that anyone’s keeping score, but I won by a wide margin… Although 57% of people did agree with me, which is less than you guys, but still more than 50. I also got more votes on mine, so I think it struck more of a chord. That’s on Twitter. Over on Mastodon, 50/50. 94 votes on Mastodon.

Stella Biderman: And it was a really big deal when it came out. It was the largest model of its type in the world by a sizable margin; it was about four times the size of the largest open source model of its type in the world… Yeah, and the Pythia models we trained on 120 A100 GPUs, for a couple of weeks, which is certainly a lot of computing resources, but it’s not like mind-boggling amounts of compute. There are lots and lots of companies that have that, that could – it’s less about it actually being too expensive, and more about kind of having the political will to actually go do it.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, what I’m getting at really is the specifics less so, but more so the buffer it creates. And part of this show is just to not so much – it’s kind of to chronicle somebody’s story like you, but also to sort of share a path that is possible. So you had an early exit that gave you buffer to essentially camp out and be curious. You didn’t have to worry about earning money. I’m sure you were temporarily financially independent, even if it’s not long-term, right? You had some buffer; that’s what I mean by the buffer - you had this margin to play with. And within that margin, you just didn’t go and sip MaiTais and sit by the pool… Not that that’s a bad thing. Maybe you did it for a day or two, and you were like “You know what, I’m just going to recharge, I’m going to regain my margin, I’m gonna rediscover myself, do a little retrospective, but I’m gonna get back to work, because I have curiosity to pursue.” But it’s this buffer that that moment created for you, that enabled that next leap. And that’s kind of what I was trying to figure out there, is how much did that acquisition and all that play into that ability to create that buffer to get you where you’re at now?

Adam Stacoviak: For sure. Yeah. What’s got your full attention, that somebody else would be like “Yeah, tell me more about that”, and you just cannot stop talking to them about it. But I think energy is sort of key, because without energy, obviously, we don’t have energy, and so we need that to move forward, to be excited, to be motivated, to be curious… So it’s a key part.

But again, back to this “Is it an innate ability, or is it something that you can sort of practice and learn?” And I think energy is not something you just simply have, it’s something you cultivate, right? It’s something that you be aware of. Like, we’ve said, the “No a-hole rule”, for example, is a good book. Knowing people that are around you that take rather than give, that pull you down, rather than lift you up. And so if you’re examining ways to kind of maintain or increase your energy, locate the things that take all of your time, locate the things or people that take all of your energy, and you’ll begin to get back margin in order to have.