Jerod Santo: [01:18:05.14] For sale. Right.

Jerod Santo: Oh. It’s not for sale.

Jerod Santo: No, I think that’s a great perspective, and a specific explanation that I haven’t heard previously, so I definitely appreciate it. I’m mulling on it. I think I agree with most of what you said. And the implementation versus interface dichotomy is one that I hadn’t considered that explicitly, and I need to think through it more. So I appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Question is, what happens? You know, Apache 2.0, your heart and soul is into this thing… What do you do? How do you respond if and when AWS comes by and says “TigerBeetle by AWS, for sale now”? Does that scare you? Does that threaten you? What do you think about that scenario? Because that’s what a lot of people are concerned about most specifically.

Jerod Santo: There’s gonna be some black magic for sale. You know, “Here’s how you really do it.”

Ryan Dahl: Yeah, we are looking for legal help. So if anybody listening is an IP lawyer, and is willing to contribute some time to help us put together this petition to cancel the JavaScript trademark, that would be very welcome. I think the email is lawyers [at] JavaScript.tm. Yeah, we’ll start undertaking this process once I get Deno 2 out, so in a couple of weeks here we’ll try to do this.

And yeah, I mean, this is just generally trying to make the world’s default programming language better. It’s not necessarily a product, there’s nothing nothing for sale here, obviously… It’s just trying to rectify the situation. I have no intention of renaming the Deno company to the JavaScript Company, or anything. I just don’t like this weird situation where I can’t say that Deno is a JavaScript runtime. That’s silly. That is not what trademarks were intended for.

Ryan Dahl: Yeah, we are looking for legal help. So if anybody listening is an IP lawyer, and is willing to contribute some time to help us put together this petition to cancel the JavaScript trademark, that would be very welcome. I think the email is lawyers [at] JavaScript.tm. Yeah, we’ll start undertaking this process once I get Deno 2 out, so in a couple of weeks here we’ll try to do this.

And yeah, I mean, this is just generally trying to make the world’s default programming language better. It’s not necessarily a product, there’s nothing for sale here, obviously… It’s just trying to rectify the situation. I have no intention of renaming the Deno company to the JavaScript Company, or anything. I just don’t like this weird situation where I can’t say that Deno is a JavaScript runtime. That’s silly. That is not what trademarks were intended for.

Simon Wijckmans: [14:06] Well, but this is the scary part. People heavily underestimate how many third-party scripts they have, because - well, if you use some proxy, and they add a script to your site… Well, you may not know, right? And this is another unfortunate truth about this. If I talk to prospects about just generally their situation, they often don’t even recognize the scripts that they have on their own website. In many cases, I have even seen analytics companies that don’t even exist anymore. And some of them are nice enough to keep maintaining that domain name, and they just keep it so that it doesn’t get used for bad things… But there’s also a few out there that are like – there’s literally domains out there for sale every day, that are still in people’s website, embedded as a third-party script, or as a third-party image, by any means. Yeah, same thing.

Break: [14:53]

Kilian Valkhof: Yeah, yeah. So there’s two ways of running a portal. One is on your local network, and that means that it stays on your device, and it just makes it available to all the other devices in your same network, and it shares your IP address. So that’s essentially useless outside of the network. And then the other is a public URL. It’s like a funny three-words sentence, [unintelligible 01:26:35.11] kind of like a for sale preview or a Netlify preview…

Adam Stacoviak: So that customer you mentioned, that called upon you, in that case where it wasn’t a strategic alliance, or in alignment… Did you tell him no? “No, we can’t sell it to you”? Is that what you do when there’s no alignment, you say, “We’re for sale, but we can’t sell to you”?

Jerod Santo: This is why we’re flat – what do you call yourself, a flatlander? That’s why we’re flatlanders, you know? 3D is just a different breed. Is this game engine going to be open source? Is it going to be for sale? How’s it going to be released?

Dustin Bluck: …compared to alternatives… So I worked for Instagram for a long time, and I’ve been self-employed the last few years. So one thing I could do is just go back to Instagram; that will pay a lot more money than Castro will pay me, right? So why did I buy it? I was working on a podcast app on the side, sort of just for my listening. I used it for a year before I released it. And then I do like mobile consulting for eCommerce companies, which pays the bills, but isn’t the most exciting thing in the world… Working on the podcast app was a lot more rewarding. I saw some posts about it that it was not doing so well, and then I think they actually posted it was going to be for sale. So yeah, it just sort of fell into my lap. I think I caught the guy at the right time, and I just did it. It makes a lot of sense for me to run an app, it makes a lot more sense than opening a restaurant, or doing whatever; going to a farm, whatever the alternative to like going back to big tech would be. It makes a lot more sense for me to run an app. So yeah, I’m able to do it, it’s interesting to me, it’s a space I really like… Yeah, so it just kind of made sense.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, there’s no one size fits all. I do think that maybe when it comes to software products, it may be that the successful ones, because of the profit margins on software sales, which you all are enjoying… Like, every marginal sale for you has not nowhere near as commensurate work on your side, right? You have support, but you could just sell them to the hills. And so when you start to actually get over that hump, and the flywheel is rolling - well, it’s hard to stay small at that point, because…

[01:15:53.27] The other one I’m thinking of is – and they actually sell hardware, so it’s slightly different, but it’s similar… It’s Thinkst, with their canaries. We had Haroon Meer from Thinkst on the show last year, talking about Canary… And they’re relatively small, and making really good money selling these security devices into enterprises. They’re like honey pots, basically. And they have a hardware aspect, which means that their margins aren’t as good. But once their sales got rolling, they’re making really good money. And he has to try hard to stay small, because it’s so easy to chase every opportunity when you have capital to spend.

And so maybe that’s why people end up chasing larger growth, is because, once you’ve conquered the mountain, then you’re like – wasn’t there an old saying about a guy who cried because he had no more mountains to conquer? Was it Alexander? I think it was Alexander.

Cory Doctorow: Amazon is the phone company, they don’t have to care, and they will keep your business even if they steal from you. And so I won’t allow my work to be sold with DRM. And so even though my books are New York Times bestsellers, published by Macmillan & Company, one of the big five publishers, none of my books are available on Audible. Audible refuses to carry my books on a DRM-free basis. And the problem is that because Audible is 90% of the market, no one searches anywhere else for an audiobook. So if you go to Audible and you don’t find my books, you’re like “Weird. I guess Cory doesn’t have any audiobooks.” And my audiobooks, to be clear, they’re for sale everywhere else. I really like a store called libro.fm, that sells DRM-free odd eBooks. Libro is organized as a public benefit company, and they do a rev share with a local bookseller, the way bookshop.org does. So you tell them who your local bookseller is, and they’re like “Oh, well, you’ve probably found this book by going into the store and browsing it, so we’re going to split the profits with this bookseller.”

Stephen O’Grady: Yeah, so you know, we decided pretty early on, within the first month, that you can’t go down the pay for play, your opinions for sale model, right? Because once you do that, you just don’t – we were talking about reputation earlier. Once you do that, you just don’t get it back, right? And so we have always tried to be, if anything, honest and transparent. We’re diplomatic about it; we’re not going out and posting hot takes on companies and so on… But in other words, if we think that a company is doing something wrong, we say that “We’re doing it wrong.”

We got an interview years ago, and it was like “Do you think you should be under less scrutiny from a transparency and an honesty, and ethical standpoint, than larger analysts firms?” And we’re like “No.” We’re much smaller. We should be under, if anything, more scrutiny. And they said, “Well, I don’t understand. How does that function?” And it’s pretty simple. We post a sort of list at the bottom, “These are the people who are paying us, and these people aren’t.” Developers, they may or may not care about licenses, but they’re smart. And if we came out and we’re basically consistently saying great things about our customers, and bad things about the people that aren’t paying us, then our reputation is gonna be gone pretty quickly.

So we’re fortunate… Clients are not always thrilled with the things we put out, but they also understand that that’s part of – it’s part of what makes us, hopefully, a trusted asset. We’re not coming out and just like “Hey, this is the greatest thing the world, because so and so paid us.” It’s not a model that works.

So like I said, we have certainly gotten our share of emails, like “What did you just write?” or whatever, and the interesting thing actually is that very frequently we’ll post something critical, and we’ll hear from a whole bunch of people within the company. They’re like “Yes, please keep doing that. Because I’ve been saying this, and no one’s listening…” So yeah, as I said, I’m sure we could make a lot more money if we just sold out, at least for a little while, until your reputation’s shot but that’s not the way we do things.

Demetrios Brinkmann: I’ll share the link with you. We’ve got special – they only pop up for sale during the conferences… So you can’t get them now, but hopefully about a week before the conference starts we’ll start selling them again. And yeah, that’s it. That’s what I’ve been up to. Not too much, you know… Just trying to stay relevant.

Jerod Santo: While we’re on the topic of open alternatives, Codeberg is worth a gander. It’s a collaboration platform and Git hosting for open source software, content and projects. Codeberg is not run by a company, but a non-profit based in Berlin. The service boasts about its community roots and commitment to privacy. They say your data is not for sale. All services run on servers under our control. No dependencies on external services.

Shawn Wang: But I would say that probably OpenAI is not for sale. Like, they have this world-conquering ambition that would just not let them settle for anything less than global domination… Which is a little bit scary, right?

Natalie Pistunovich: Yeah, a lot of people have been asking whether these are for sale… Next to the pink gophers, next to the T-shirts, and next to the blue plushies… And so far we’ve been saying no… And we have come up with an idea. We really love GoBrige.

Adam Miller: Yup, that was my not-so-fun learning lesson in the business world. I had a 50% partner that I brought on, and after about a year and a half of publicly operating business, we realized we were not getting along. And I did not have enough money to buy him out, so he bought me out. That’s the very abbreviated version. And we can certainly go into more of it, but… It was a lesson in kind of personalities and people, and it sounds so cliché to say “People matter, that’s the most important thing”, and that’s a lesson I really, really learned… And something that I think I’ve applied well going forward. Making sure you work with people, especially partners, that are like-minded, care about the same things. I learned that lesson the hard way. I paid my first lawyer when I was 21 years old on a credit card, because I didn’t have enough money to put him on retainer. Our business was making a lot of money for the size that it was, but I didn’t take any money out of it. All that money was getting reinvested right back in. So I was bootstrapping, to say the least.

At one point early on in the business - it was a Tuesday, payroll was on Friday, and we had like $11,000 in the bank account, and payroll was like 22,000. I forget what the exact numbers were. We didn’t have enough money in the bank accounts to make payroll. So it was a Tuesday, and I listed my car for sale, my Subaru WRX; it was my favorite little fast car. And I sold it on Wednesday, and I took 500 bucks out so I could pay my personal rent and buy groceries, and put the other money in the bank account and made payroll. A month later I was able to buy myself a truck, so it all worked out.

[24:21] But yeah, it was only – businesses was doing well, but we didn’t take any money out of the company, and so hiring a lawyer on a credit card certainly was a challenging moment. And then we had about nine months of legal issues. And business partnership breakups happen all the time. That’s something I’ve learned since I went through that experience. But mine was a pretty – it was a pretty, pretty rough one. So I learned a lot.

John Nunemaker: Yeah, that was pretty cool. That was actually kind of like a – I won’t say accident, too… Because I was kind of maintaining it, because everybody else had kind of moved on, and so I just kept it running, and occasionally would add things to it, and stuff; honestly, in my free time. And I remember we started getting a couple support requests here and there, people wanting to buy it… They were like, “Hey, is it for sale?” And I remember asking, and everybody’s like “I don’t know if it’s for sale. We’d have to vet the buyer.” And that kept coming back. So finally, I was like, “Alright, this isn’t gonna happen. It’s just dying right now. So if we don’t do something with it, it is gonna permanently die”, and I was like – I just like it, again, because looking back, it’s the theme or the thread that ties a bunch of that story together. So I was like, “You know what - I’ll vet the buyer. Are you guys okay if I vet the buyer?” And everyone was like “Yeah, that sounds fine.” “Everyone” being my manager, and other people, levels up. So I was like, “Alright, I’ll vet buyers.”

And then as I was thinking about that over the weekend, I remember I was like, “Why don’t I just buy it? I’m already maintaining it basically in my free time. I wouldn’t be any different, except now I would have ROI if something good happens to it. I’d have ROI.” That, again, comes back to impact. So I think on that front, that’s kind of where – so I was like, “You know what - let’s try it.” Again, I don’t think I’ve thought about it until like we’re talking about it now, but… Common thread - you never know it until you ask. So worst-case scenario, when you negotiate, they say no.

[51:57] I remember I think I offered – I don’t even remember. At that point it was losing like $1,000/month or more, just from hosting, and AWS bills, and stuff, and I was like, “Alright, I’ll give you $5,000.” So basically, this shows that I’m real, I’m genuinely offering for it, and I will take on the burden of $1,000/month, vetting the buyer, all the problems that could possibly arise from selling it, and any possible negative impact of closing it down, or any of that kind of stuff.

I sent that up the tree, and at some point they were like, “Yes.” They dropped the price to like – I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about any of that kind of stuff, but it was like an order of magnitude lower. They were just like –

Adam Stacoviak: He’s also famous for the shortest story, I believe, ever… “For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.”

Peter Cooper: I kind of get the point; I probably don’t realize necessarily to what extent. Because my interactions with the different communities tends to be reasonably detached. I only attend a certain number of events, just because I travel extremely poorly… So I don’t often get to walk the streets, as it were, and hear from readers in the flesh very often. I don’t even do calls like this very often, because I tend to find it as a thing that is quite difficult to do… So I operate in a very detached kind of way… But I see other people do very similar things, like industry analysts, for example. That’s a really interesting can of worms to dig into if you ever get bored one day.

If you look at what some of these industry analysts do, at places like Gartner for example they write entire papers about how different companies are using JavaScript, or what web frameworks developers are using in the real world type stuff… And then they offer these for sale for hundreds of dollars, or thousand dollar subscriptions to big companies. I’m sure some of you have had run-ins with people from those types of places, where they’re grilling you with questions… At least the people I talk to that work at startups are like “Oh yeah, my boss told me I’ve gotta speak to this analyst, and he just gave me all these pointless questions, and produced this crappy report.”

I hear that a lot, but the reason I kind of am okay with doing it is because I do actually code, and I’ve worked with customers before, and I’ve built projects with software, and I’ve sold them, and all that type of stuff… So I feel like I’ve got enough skin in the game; I’ve released libraries, I build libraries and I do open source… I’ve got enough skin in the game that I kind of hopefully understand what that power is and how it relates to newer developers, even though I don’t necessarily have the same day-to-day developer experience as everyone else.

Andrew Stanton: Etsy has over 16 million results, and most of them - or a good portion of them - are handmade, customized, one of a kind. We have a big vintage basis where you only have an example of one. So unlike Google, or Bing, or Yandex, or any of these massive search engines where you’re constantly returning that top result, we had this constant turnover in inventory, and our inventory is just growing every day.

The other problem with Etsy is that we don’t have skews. Amazon is able to leverage a lot of the structured data that’s provided to them by the manufacturer; we basically rely on our sellers to figure it out, and our machine learning algorithms to try to tease apart the different pieces in there into the type of information which is actually useful to the buyer.

To give you an idea of why search is needed - before, back in the late ‘90s, inventories were so small you could properly navigate through it. You’d go through a dropdown box at the top, and click on Jewelry, and then you’d see all 200 items that were for sale. If you go on Etsy right now and you type in “jewelry”, you’ll get 18 million results. There’s no human out there that is gonna go through all 18 million results. So that’s where ranking and search and personalization - all these different elements kind of come together to try to hone down that 18 million total result set to something that’s actually digestible by the buyer.

Nick Nisi: Tickets for sale. It’s August 9th. Our early bird tickets are going right now, and you can pick them up at NEJS.com. I would say that our CFP is still open, but by the time this goes out, it will not be. But that’s okay, because we’ve got a lot of awesome proposals that have been submitted, and really looking forward to the painstaking task of having to say no to so many of them… Because that’s always the toughest part of being a conference organizer.

Otherwise, it’s August 9th at the Henry Doorly Zoo, the number one zoo in the world, according to many places…

Jerod Santo: And I’m sure the Brave team has marketing folks and people who are interested in helping educate the general public of these things. It’s nice that it’s a – it comes along for the ride. The primary sale for Brave as end user is your privacy, your security and your speed; a good browser where you’re not the product is their pitch on the homepage… It’s not BAT and the attention economy; that’s kind of the inside baseball that you find yourself into. And it’s somewhat a nice, viral marketing scheme from a publisher’s perspective, because now you have people giving publishers money, all of a sudden “Hey, here’s a publisher that’s aware of it.” Well, what do publishers do? They publish stuff, so they’re gonna write about it if they’re getting some sort of payments from people browsing their websites using this browser.

Jason Lengstorf: I mean, I guess it depends on what we ultimately end up offering for sale. It feels very blue ocean in a sense, because Gatsby has some maturity that a lot of other projects in the ecosystem – they just haven’t been around this long. That being said though, there’s some really exciting stuff happening in the Vue space; we’re seeing things come up there where we’re like “Oh man, we should build that.”

[35:47] So I think that we’re gonna see some stuff… I think VuePress is one of them, there’s a – I can’t remember the name of it right now, but there’s like an e-commerce Vue platform that’s offering a really similar kind of solution to what Gatsby does… We were like, “Oh man, that’s also a really good idea.”

I think there’s not a ton of competition now, but we’re seeing things coming out. React Static is an excellent tool. We’re seeing just some really, really fast builds; the stuff that Tanner is working on is really exciting… So there’s competition, but there’s no formal competition. I don’t think there are businesses that are specifically pursuing like “Can we auto-generate massively performant sites and do this at scale?” I think that that is a very, very limited window though, because I think it’s coming.

Sean Griffin: Actually, I’m not sure if this is gonna be a thing or not, if I could just plug this and maybe you’ll cut it if it doesn’t end up happening… Also, if you’re interested, I have these really cute baby Ruby stickers which are for sale on DevSwag and there’s a link in the show notes if you wanna support my development of Rails and Diesel.

Kelsey Hightower: So for people that are hip-hop, they know Chance The Rapper has a line in one of his songs that he talks about how he makes music, and he does it for freedom. Chance is known for not ever releasing an album that was for sale. It was streaming only and given away for free on the internet, and he won a Grammy. So he really broke the barrier. A lot of artists have released digital stuff before, digital albums, but that’s really just changing the format. Chance The Rapper has this huge heart where he really cares about people having access to his music, quality music; that album is legendary in the hip-hop community already. So listening to that song, I just tweeted “I don’t write code for free, I write code for freedom.”

Just my personal background - when I decided to write code myself, I turned on GitHub on purpose, because I want other people to get a use for it. So it’s not like I’m trying to build a company out of it; I’m not necessarily having a business model that I choose to go after… It’s really my freedom to express myself; the fact that I learned how to program means that I’m free to build my own tools, and it’s also to inspire other people, like “Look, you actually have the power to do this.” Most programming languages that I know of are free - you download it, you can get them running on the most underpowered machine, even on your mobile device, and you can write any code you want. Honestly, that’s freedom to me. It’s not about people giving you money, or whatever; it’s the freedom to express yourself, and then we have all these outlets: GitHub, Changelog, where you can go and talk about your projects… There’s no other industry where you can actually express yourself at such a low cost.