Adam Stacoviak: Are there ways that – let me ask this question then… If you could make money in some way from Phosphor, would you? Are you opposed to the idea of making money from it?

Zeno Rocha: Man, I always hated that idea of making money with open source, and looking back now, I think “Oh my gosh, why did I even think about it like that in the first place?” I think there’s always this distinction of “Oh, open source is like everything free, and that’s it”, and the opposite of that is “Okay, let’s make money, let’s sell.” I always hated salespeople, that sort of thing. And what changed was actually curiosity; I think that’s the best way to describe it.

Back in 2019, at my regular job, my 9-to-5, I wanted to learn more about sales and understand how the business worked, and I was like “Yeah, I can read some books, I can try to figure out how the sales pipeline at my company works”, but I think the best way to learn is by doing it yourself. So I looked at all my open source projects, and I received an email from the Google Search Cosole, with all the sites that I have on my analytics, and I saw there was like a million page views on the Dracula site… And I was like “Oh my gosh, there’s something here.” So I decided to take a shot on that project in particular, and that’s how it all got started, like “Okay, I’m gonna try this sales thing work, and if it works, great; if it doesn’t, that’s fine. I’m gonna survive.” It was pretty much like that.

Chris Lamb: Well, one advantage is I don’t have to use my imagination; some of them already happened, although in small isolation. For example, someone used social engineering to offer a backdoored iOS software development kit for download; or maybe they bought a Google ad that looked like the “Download here” - that kind of thing. So a whole bunch of developers downloaded this, and it worked completely like the normal iOS SDK, except it would replace their adverts (any adverts that the developer added) with the attackers adverts. The idea was just to make money.

So these developers making their iOS apps - they were happily making them, brilliant and fine, and then they went to upload them to the Apple Store and they signed them. So the signing process is completely accepted, Apple said, “Yes, this is you. The signing stuff checks out absolutely fine”, but because their software development kit was backdoored, at the very last moment it would just simply replace the adverts with the ones from the attacker, and they only really noticed when they weren’t really getting any ad revenue back.

But you can quickly imagine what would happen if the code wasn’t necessarily to just replace adverts, which sort of sounds a little bit harmful, [unintelligible 00:30:29.07] but what if it was sending your address book, or things like that? The original developer would swear blind they’re doing nothing wrong, and from their point of view they are innocent - apart from perhaps some rather lackadaisical security on their part, but you wouldn’t really know who to point the finger at.

That’s pretty much the worst case, where you have no idea who these attackers are, you have no idea where this software is going; it sort of seems to bypass a lot of security features that were put in place, like the signing, which is entirely designed to prevent arbitrary code being uploaded to these repositories, and things like that. That’s pretty much the doomsday scenario.

Another thing that makes reproducible builds quite salient in modern times is that some of the Snowden revelations refer to using backdoored compilers in a similar way in order to infect machines, and things like that. This is something that the NSA – we know for certain they’ve been looking at it, because of some documents released via Edward Snowden.

So yes, the doomsday is sort of here already in a sense, but we just don’t really know how pervasive it is.

Dax Raad: Yeah, so - yes, we are a business, and we’re doing this not for any altruistic reasons. We’re here to try to make a lot of money. That’s straight up why we’re here. So the reason we are open source is because we actually believe in the model, like strategically. The thing I said earlier is we’re not trying to create some idealized platform for doing development, because we fundamentally don’t believe that those types of platforms work at scale. Everyone just needs to do things a little bit different.

[14:06] And yes, maybe your idealized version is like a much better experience than SST, but the reality is that technology is always shifting, there’s new frameworks coming out… You just can’t predict this stuff. So I fundamentally believe something like this needs to be open source, because we need help integrating with all kinds of things. So we’ve integrated with every single meta framework; not every single one, we’re not done with this. We’re continuing to do more and more of this, but integrating with things like Astro, with Remix, with Next.js… I didn’t know any of this was going to – or I didn’t know that a lot of this was going to exist years ago, right?

So we believe in the open source model; whenever there’s a feature that we want to build, if it can be built in an open source way, we’re going to put it in a framework. Our business model for making money is there’s certain things you need once you go to prod that doesn’t really make sense to be part of the framework. Our strategy is pretty simple - when our users go to prod, there’s additional services they’re using to round out the product experience. It might be anything like error reporting, maybe they’re using Sentry to catch exceptions. It might be something they’re using for logging. And we’re starting the process of this now, we’re building complementary, completely optional services that integrate very nicely with SST. So because we deploy all your infrastructure, we know exactly what to monitor for exceptions; no configuration will catch all your exceptions, will alert you to do all that, kind of Sentry-like experience for that.

So we can do these complimentary things. Even those things, we’re actually building in an open source way. So if you want, you could go self-host that whole control plane and do everything. We don’t think anyone is actually going to do it; we’re open sourcing it more so people can learn from how we build things. But that’s open source… But obviously, we’re gonna have our own hosted version of that, that people sign up and pay for. And this model has been like – it exists in a bunch of other places, and I think it’s well proven. The thing we look at is in the Laravel ecosystem - Laravel is the framework, kind of similar to Next.js, or something like that, just a lot more like complete… And then Vapor is a deployment platform for Laravel projects, which you pay for, and it contains a bunch of production-level features you need. So we have no shortage of ideas for stuff there, so we’re not super-concerned about the monetization part. Just given where our framework sits, there’s just like infinite opportunities.

Jason Bosco: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think search, like we were discussing in the beginning, is something that is an evergreen problem, something that didn’t start yesterday, and is not going to stop being a problem suddenly. So I’d say definitely something that we consciously chose is to choose a market that’s big enough, so that even if we capture a very tiny portion of that market, it’s still a good investment of our time.

So the space was such that there are not actually that many search players in the market. Now, there are a bunch of closed source SaaS search providers, which more likely than not many of them are maybe using ElasticSearch, for example. I’d say Algolia is at least one that I know of that has built their own search algorithms. But for the most part, people just use Lucene, and build on top of that.

[56:09] So the space didn’t have too many players, so that was the second thing. The first thing was the large, evergreen problem that’s not going to go away, and the second thing was not many players in the market trying to solve this problem. So I think that’s why we were like “Okay, maybe we’ll find our way through to making money with some business model eventually”, that’s the thought we had in mind. We probably wouldn’t have – if it was any other SaaS product, I would say, like a SaaS closed source product, or even an open source product in a different market, we would have probably done a little bit more research before jumping into it as building a business around it. But I think this space was, again – and oh, I should say, the third thing is search, as we’ve learned, is also a very hard problem to solve, which is why you don’t see many search engines around in the market. And if you want to call it like the technical mode, I guess, is a huge gap to jump, to figure out search as a problem domain, get up to speed with it, and see what everyone else is doing, and then seeing where you can improve it. That is a huge chasm to jump before you build a product, and even if you do that a couple of weeks, polishing it and then bringing it to market, and then telling developers “This is why your product is special”. So it’s a lot of effort to cross that big gap. So all of this was in our mind, for sure, and we thought this is a good bet, worth taking.

All of the other ideas we’ve had, our focus was always going after very niche things, like things that no one else would probably have an interest in going after, mainly because it’s so niche, and it’s not really directly related to the day to day technologies that you might be using. We basically took boring, old spaces for all the other past products… And this one was modern, cutting-edge, and the target audience happened to be developers who - you know, we both are first engineers, my girlfriend and I are engineers, so we were able to speak the same language as our target audience… So all of these put together made it seem like this is like a once in a lifetime type of an idea that we just have to execute on.

Mikeal Rogers: It’s just there’s this view, once you have an event of a particular size, especially an event that is making any kind of money. The community events are not making money. But any of these bigger events that are run by media companies, or foundations, or whatever, there’s an expectation that “This should be a fairly open place that we can go to present our ideas, and there should be a somewhat fair process for getting things in.” And I think that that’s the right thing for those events, but it’s not necessarily the event that I would prioritize going to. I would prioritize going to an event where people trust the organizer so much that they’re gonna go no matter what, and they’re gonna trust that organizer to find great talks.

Alex Ellis: And they sell SIM cards in stores. One of the things that was kind of a joking point for them was that they’re getting less than excellent customer service because they would click the button and the system would kind of choke. And that was because they were trying to run these things synchronously. Well, by moving into OpenFaaS and using the asynchronous capability that’s built-in, they could run these processes in the background and free up the system to do the next thing for the customer. So for them, they’ll totally be making money out of that, with their customers.

But now I think we’ve gotta be really careful when we use this term “project” and “product” and monetization. The project, from my perspective, would really benefit from sponsorship, especially from some of the larger companies that are making use of it, and it’s profitable for them, and they’re making big savings… But this isn’t always the way the world works, as you see with some of the other big open source projects.

I did start a Patreon campaign, and try as I may, I’ve still not got anywhere near even minimum wage levels of someone flipping burgers (not even 10% of that probably) to be able to support even myself, on a minimum wage. That’s how hard it is.

[01:00:06.21] So I don’t have all the answers, but the project is doing really well. There are people that are really committed to it, and it has growing traction. We spoke about LinkedIn - I get several people, from directors to VPs, reaching out every week, saying how they’re evaluating OpenFaaS, maybe using it in a PoC, or they wanna connect back to the community in some way…

So if there are people out there who have ideas, concrete ideas, I’d love to know. This is something that I’m working on and I’m trying to figure out at the moment.

Adam Jacob: I mean, you see this in startups all the time, where the requirements to be a founder are pretty minimal, if we’re being honest… And so founder bad behavior. It’s not hard to go look at founder bad – like, they’re making Hulu movies or whatever about people’s bad behavior, and the fraud that they commit. And it’s kind of the same, where there’s access to money, compelling ideas… It can be tempting to sort of blur the lines. Because if you’re running or you’re founding a startup, you’re always hyping a little what you’re doing. You’re always a little telling a future story about what could be, or why it’ll be exciting… And then there’s the reality, and there’s a fine line between elegantly talking about what you think is true and what can happen, and lying.

And I think in the middle there was all the consolidation of ISPs that happened, and that was another interesting era… So I worked for an ISP that was run by the Arizona Public Service company, which is basically the power company in Arizona, and we brought phone lines to a bunch of rural parts of the Southwest, that had no phone lines in the ’90s, because the power company had a pop in there, so they could deliver power. They had power, but no phones. And so we brought them phones so that they could get on the internet.

And that consolidation – the guy I worked for was a nuclear scientist, who had been running the nuclear power plant not that long before. He was fantastic to us, but he let me be the – I was in the first crop of Red Hat certified engineers. It was me and four people from IBM. And that was because my boss at the time sent me off to get trained or whatever. But yeah, you wound up with this – it was a very interesting arc. And then as the consolidation happened, so everybody sort of pooled together all the ISPs into super-ISPs, then what you started to do is the focus shifted toward what you were going to do on the internet, right? Because now everybody was here, so now you had that sort of first generation of internet companies. And that era - rife with fraud. Crazy amounts of fraud.

So I worked for a company, Infospace… This is a story I can tell, because f*** that guy. So… Maybe I shouldn’t. Now that I’m saying it, I’m like “Oomph.” But anyway, he was a bad dude. Naveen Jain, who ran that company, was some degree of awful kind of all the time. And they didn’t really have a business model, but there was a moment in time where Infospace had a market cap that was bigger than Microsoft.

Jerod Santo: So Will, I’ve been pitching your business ideas… Or just one. I’ve just been re-pitching you an app store idea over and over again, until you launch it… But we are curious, because you have raised money, you’re making a real go at this thing… And whenever you convince somebody to part with their hard-earned money, they have some sort of an idea of what that money could turn in the future, which is more than what it is. So surely, you’ve put some thought into what Textual could be, not just as an open source platform, or framework, whatever you’re calling it, for building these TUIs, but also so much more. So can you give us some version of that pitch? Like, what’s the big-picture idea?

Nader Dabit: …they’ve now enabled payments within the game. [laughter] But what is the problem with that? Well, I wouldn’t say that this is a problem, it’s more of like a limitation. The limitation there is like when the kid outgrows the game, then you’ve now dumped a thousand dollars into this thing and nothing has come of it. Maybe they’ve had a great time, and maybe that’s enough; that is a good thing, right? Maybe having fun is good enough. But what if instead, people can actually take the value that they’ve put into the platform, and maybe get some of the return of their investment back? Or maybe they can give it away to someone else and have them use it, and have a really, really easy way to do that.

So Axie Infinity kind of took those ideas of what Fortnite has, along with some of the Web3 ideas, and they’ve built this game that allows players to earn in-game currency; and they can also buy it. But they can also resell that on a liquid market. So as you play the game, you’re getting paid, essentially, to play… And it’s not a ton of money for maybe someone like a software engineer, but for people in other parts of the world, they’re actually able to quit their jobs, and they’re making more money, sometimes orders of magnitude more money just playing this game, than they would be able to working in like a local area, using their skillset.

So when I started learning about stuff like this - this is an example that kind of excites me, just because it’s so revolutionary… And applying these same ideas in a bunch of different areas maybe in the future is also really exciting. And I think the idea is – like, having the combination of the technology to make it happen, the actual implementation that’s successful, and then all of the different areas that have yet to be applied is very exciting, because that means we’re kind of still early in on making these changes, but we can see that they are actually things that can be applied, and they can be successful.

So yeah, that’s kind of like – I don’t know if I went too far into a tangent there…

Daniel Stenberg: Yeah, I think all these other things around the project that isn’t code also makes it fun… I mean, some of the oldest other contributors or maintainers in the project - they’ve been around for… I think the oldest guy has been a little over 15 years now. So some of those are really my old friends by now, so setting up a little conference to me over a weekend and just talk curl for a weekend - I can’t think of much other things that are more fun to do in a weekend… So that’s just awesome.

And of course, making – one thing about becoming more known, and things like getting awards and prizes makes people get your eyes open and see us in a slightly different light or angle… Suddenly, people approach us with money, or ideas, and they can print stickers for us, and hand them over, or they can borrow us their conference rooms for a weekend, or stuff like that. So stuff also gets easier when you become known, or people realize the impact and people get friendly… We get friends all over, so that is fun.

So of course, I like curl and I like working with it, and of course I then try to sort of bring up those fun moments, like celebrating 20 years of curl, or now we have 32,000 questions on Stack Overflow, or now we have 1,700 contributors in the Thanks file, and stuff like that. I wanna help out the other contributors and everyone, to make sure that they feel appreciated, and that we all appreciate what they do… I think it’s fun.

It also goes back to this constant question… I say, “Yeah, I’ve been working with curl for 20 years”, and then they’re like “Well, I used it 10 years ago, and it worked exactly the same. What have you been doing?” [laughter]

Gergely Orosz: Yeah, and I feel also that, going forward for the next couple of years, the kind of mainstream advice might apply less. The mainstream advice until now, like if you wanted to have a really successful and profitable career in tech was learn how to code, if you have the opportunity go to university, just because now you have a pedigree, try to get into one of these big techs as soon as you can, and then jump around from there; if you cannot get straight into like Facebook or Google, try to go at a tier lower, like Foursquare, or Yelp, who have really good cultures, but they’re not as well known as some of you others, and then tried to like hop your way up. And once you’re there and you made it to staff engineer at Facebook, you’re probably making so much money that – I mean, if you’re spending it all, you’re crazy, because you should have just saved some of that for a time like now. And then the advice kind of ends there. And I do talk with people who are 5 or 10 years into their career, or let’s say more like 8 to 10 years, they made it to staff engineer at one of these companies, and they’re like “What next? Because I’m now making so much money I cannot go anywhere”, which is not a bad problem to have, but they just feel a little bit trapped, because they went there so quickly. And compare this with people who kind of got there after 30 years, in the past. I know people who retire from similar situations, at the end of their career, as a staff or a principal engineer as well.

So this used to be the traditional advice, and it kind of worked for so many people, because big tech was hiring so many people. This was kind of achievable for most people. And this route will always be there. I’ve seen this in investment banking. When I joined JP Morgan in 2010, I worked on the front office… And banks are really good; they have front office, middle office, back office, and it’s based on how much money you make. The front office is making all the money, middle office is supporting the front office, and back office is just a cost center, like clearing stuff. So I worked with traders, and what I noticed is – I was on a desk, we had like ten traders that we were supporting, and we were building software for them… And when I joined, we had 10 traders; a year later we had 6, and they never got backfilled. And these were the traders who were making dollars in the millions in compensation per year, or at least a million; they were making these outsized bonuses.

And I asked the traders like “Hey, how was it like?” and they were like “Yeah, back in the day this desk used to have 30 traders.” And I asked “What is it like?” “But we’re just kind of getting fewer…” Because when they let people go, they actually hired like two software engineers to do algorithmic trading, or just the same thing, but for cheaper, or similar stuff. And then they told me that to become a trader, it used to be pretty easy back in the day. Or not that easy, but you just needed to go to a good school. But now you have to go to a good school, you need to have the connections, they will tell you what the interview is like, and some of the interviews are ridiculous. Back then they claimed that there were some reflex tests, and all that; they will tell you what it’s like, so you can prepare. So basically, to get that job, you needed to have pedigree, you needed to have connections, often family connections, and then you had a chance at an interview, where you had to do really good, you needed to be really good.

I think this is slowly going to happen with big tech, where they will be hiring, but you will need a pedigree. They’re not going to hire you off of a bootcamp or nothing; or a previous company. And then you’ll also need to do well there. So it’s just gonna be a lower funnel.

[57:48] And the other advice - so this advice will still be there, but it’ll be harder to do… But the other advice that no one will talk about is what you said, is ignore the mainstream and look into interesting sectors. And this will be hit or miss, but there will be some people who will do great at these no-name companies that no one knows about; some will be absolute flops, but some will be just really fun, where you get to grow, you get a pretty good compensation, and you grow with the company, and you’re solving for a really interesting challenge, and maybe that also gives you ideas to potentially start your own company, or partner with something… Or just stay at a company for a long time.

I’m now into the industry long enough that I have these weird kind of reflections… When I worked on kind of industries or areas that I might have like looked down a little bit on, for example the government sector… When I lived in Edinburgh, more than 10 years ago - it was maybe like 12; I don’t even know. It was more like 13-14 years ago… I built an app called Edinburgh Bus Tracker on a Windows phone, because I went every day to work, and there was an app for iPhone, and one for Android, but none for Windows phones, and I was I just wanted to know when my bus would arrive. So I built this, but in building it, I had to reach out to the local council, and they had a tech team who were building this API. And I kind of talked with them, and they made some changes to their API… And I just built it, and I forgot about it… And now, I think just six months ago, a guy wrote to me saying, “Hey–” I think I tweeted about this app that I did, and he said like “Oh, I’m still here, and I’m still building the API, and it’s really cool…” And I was like “Hold on… You’ve been there for 12 years, working at the council, on the API team?” And I started just talking to him and he was like “Yeah, it’s actually really good. It’s just a really friendly place. It kind of feels like family, and we get to experiment a lot when we do these things…”

And in my mind, if you would have asked me – like, I was always someone who just wanted to climb subconsciously a ladder. I always wanted – not climb, but I wanted to prove myself that I’m good enough for the next thing. But now I’m reevaluating of like “Hey, this person - he’s a software engineer, he works at a job which probably pays the bills, it is really important for the community… He gets to have a lot of professional freedom… People are using it… So you know what - there’s not just one way to have a fulfilled professional life” and I think that’s what a lot of the career advice focuses on, like “Just go higher, and higher, and higher, and more, and more, and more.” And that person is definitely not afraid of any layoffs, right? Like, everyone else who’s stressing – that’s gonna be the last place that is impacted, for obvious reasons.

So I think one thing that I’ll take away from this is try to talk with other people outside of your bubble, other software engineers, or if you’re an engineer manager, other engineering managers, and just approach those people with curiosity, because I think this is how my worldview is changing a little bit - I get more empathy - and you also just build up a better network, right? You just get to know those people, and I think you’ll be a bit more grounded. Tech is still really big, and there’s so many people doing so many different things… And by talking with different people, this is how you might find out that absolutely boring industry that is actually really exciting, and now’s a good time to jump into it, now that big tech is just really – everyone is focusing their attention right there.

Erik Kennedy: And maybe they keep the brightness pretty high… But those two levers, just moving the hue, injecting a little bit of green in, and just kind of lowering the saturation - those are things that Facebook does at a different amount than Twitter; Twitter does at a different amount than LinkedIn. But the net effect is they all end in a slightly different blue color, where they all could have started from the same place, saying “Yeah, we want this universal, dependable brand for everybody, but we’re just gonna have it be a little brighter and funner than what you might think of as this default blue.”

So from there, when you’ve kind of said “Here’s the brand adjectives”, then that’s when I would start playing with colors and fonts. Those are two of the first things that I’m really gonna need to decide. And for beginning designers, you always have the option to just say “I’m really gonna not use hardly any color.” There’s always the strategy of just going as grayscale as possible. And if you look at most of the apps and sites that you use that look really well designed, it’s really not like they’re gonna have four or five different colors that are all featured prominently throughout. It’s usually just gonna be mostly grayscale, with one color, and that color has some variations on it. And maybe, yeah, you need a red for your error message, or whatever, and a green for your success message. But for the most part, it’s pretty simple. It’s just those little variations.

But like I said, this is the point at which I would open up Sketch, once I kind of know those brand adjectives, and I would do what the design community calls style tiles. Style tiles basically just means like make little bits of your UI that you’re not trying to make them look exactly like the finished product, but you’re just trying to suss out “Alright, if I pick this serif font - I’m just gonna make a button and see how that button looks. Then I’m gonna try and address some questions… I need this serif font to be in all upper-case, because it just looks incongruous to have a flat, perfectly rectangular button with this fancy font.” Or maybe it’ll make me think “I’ve gotta change my font to something else.”

But for a little more on style tiles, I think I have a blog post that covers it in some detail, called “Five practical exercises for learning UI design for free”, something like that; you can just google that. I think I give some examples of style tiles that I’ve done where I’ll play with some of the type, I’ll see what a header would look like on the site, and then I’ll see what the body font would look like on a text page… Say it’s the About Us page, or the Contact page. Or, speaking of Contact page, most sites need to design a form; so I’ll just try putting a few form components together…

And I don’t mean to say that the whole purpose of this is to create your design system, or your design library. It’s not about making every component in advance. It’s more about just trying to get little bits of interface that you think you might actually use in the real thing.

Here’s an example - I’m on that blog post that I was just mentioning, the five practical exercises for learning UI design for free; one of them is style tiles. If you skip to that, I show this one that I made for a company - I don’t think they’re around anymore, but they were a Y Combinator company a few years back called Instavest. They were this investment company, and they had a unique way for allowing users to invest in stocks. And a couple of the things I was playing around with for style tiles were like, I have this little chart widget where I have a line chart on this dark blue, and then I had just a couple colored rectangles to play with, like what colors might look together…? Since it was a site related to finance, I was like, “Oh, maybe we’ll go with a green.” Green has strong financial connotations, especially in America.

[32:07] Then I had a couple things where I’d just put little bits of text that may very well appear on the site, but it was real copy from the site. I put “Find world-class investing ideas” or “Make money twice on your best stock tips.” Those were things that were kind of relevant to the business… But the point is all that stuff that might really appear on the app or the site - I wanna just start playing with those and kind of feeling out like “Is this giving me the brand that I want? Is this making me feel the adjectives that we’ve agreed that one should feel when they land here?”

Jerod Santo: I would say both, maybe… I mean, it makes sense if your course work and the other stuff that you’re doing, your product is giving you enough of a runway to do this… I think it’s awesome. I think it’s great that the natural desire is like “Well, can I just maximize my income by pouring myself more into these things that are generating revenue?” and so you’re deferring that and saying, “Well, maybe there’s a financial upside, and deferring that for now, and maybe Tailwind becomes bigger than anything that I could imagine on the course side…”, but more than that, your goal is to – I don’t know, the old Steve Jobs, kind of put a dent in the Universe idea, of like “Well, let’s make a real solid run at this”, since you have the financial freedom to do so. I would just say that’s awesome.

In my mind, I go back to Semantic UI with Jack Lukic, because he’s struggled with this so much. That framework blew up. It was number one on GitHub probably for years, until – what came around? Was it React? I can’t remember what’s number one anymore… Maybe Kubernetes. I don’t know. [laughter] Very popular. He kind of - for a lack of more eloquent words - buckled under the stress of just the number of people… Like, the number of people using it was so many, and he’s trying to figure out “How can I be sustainable?” And he’s making a little bit of money over here, and he’s doing consulting over there… It’s been a long struggle for him, and so we can see what success can look like in terms of lack of sustainability. So I think it’s awesome, first of all, that you’re giving it a good shot… And it makes me wanna get on the Tailwind bandwagon, because here we have a person who has put years into it, and is gonna continue to put time into it, and love into it, and it’s the thing that will persist, at least for a little while.

On the sustainability front - I don’t know. Stac, it seems like you might have some ideas for him. Maybe you could–

Jerod Santo: …but just was awesome. I mean, I loved making that, and I love listening to it as well. Like, this talk show format for me, for my money, is one of our best ideas. And I think we’ve proven, at least so far, it’s sustainable. We can have something to talk about every week, and it’s enjoyable. But it’s The Changelog enough that it’s not like an entirely new thing. I’m just happy about that, I’m excited. I think that there’s a lot of potential there that we haven’t tapped yet. And the fact that our audience hasn’t been turned off by it… In fact, in terms of downloads, it’s kind of outperforming interviews at this point, a little bit.

Gina Helfrich: It’s interesting the different flavors of that conversation, and it depends a lot on the specific project and how it’s situated and structured. Some projects are really in need of money, and they have a very clear idea of what they would do with it. Some projects are wary of taking money, even though they have clear ideas of what they could do with it, but they’re concerned that it would introduce a bunch of friction and open some cans of worms that they don’t really wanna deal with necessarily… And how can some of these larger or more widely used projects receive back some sliver of the productivity and profit that they have enabled other organizations to create because of the type of open source license that they operate under.

If you think, for example, about the amount of money that some place like Google is probably making because they use our tools, it just feels a bit sad that not that much of that money comes back to the projects. While they do support the projects, it’s like, on what ratio, you know?

Feross Aboukhadijeh: So I was thinking of different things I could do, and one of the things I was really curious about was could I do computation using WebGL, or workers, to do useful work on people’s browsers? Sort of use it as a distributed computer. So I looked into that, and the browser wasn’t really quite fast enough, so I then discovered WebRTC, which lets you do peer-to-peer connections between browsers… And the idea that I had was “Why don’t we connect a bunch of sites together and build something kind of like a torrent network, where the resources for a site can come from the other people on the site? And we can reduce the cost of running a site.”

So I ran with that idea for a little bit, and tried to make a company out of it, but I learned a ton about how not to do a company, I guess… One of the big problems we had was just being too focused on building stuff, writing code, and not really talking to customers and seeing if there were people who would ever wanna buy this stuff… So a little bit of time went by there, and we didn’t really have any customers, but we spent about a year just building a bunch of really cool technology, learning all about WebRTC and making some cool demos… And in the end we got acquired by Yahoo!, which was a good outcome for us, because we didn’t have any customers, and we worked on this thing for about a year… So it was a really exciting outcome, where we got to go and just basically join the video team at Yahoo! And made a little bit of cash, obviously.

And that’s actually what enabled me to spend a lot of time on open source later, and not worry about having a job. I could just fully devote myself for years just working on stuff and giving it away, and not having to be worried about making ends meet.

Anyway, getting back on track - so right about when that happened, I gave this talk at RealtimeConf, and I was talking about WebRTC, and how cool it is, and what you could build with it… And at the very end of that talk I mentioned the idea for WebTorrent, because I knew that Yahoo! was gonna have the technology we had worked on, and my concern was that some of the ideas of connecting everybody’s browsers together and making a really amazing peer-to-peer network that can decentralize, control things - that was a cool idea, and I didn’t want it to die with this acquisition.

So I was like “What if we rebuilt PeerCDN, basically?” Rebuild it from scratch, but instead of saving money on bandwidth, we made a goal of decentralization, and we made it match the BitTorrent protocol as much as possible, because we know that already works, and that has a lot of users, and there’s all this content on there, and there’s a big community of people… So we could just make this – basically, bring the BitTorrent protocol and put it into the browser. It was just an idea that I thought would be cool to work on, and I wanted to start working on it… So I threw in a slide at the very end of the talk, the last one minute or 30 seconds, and I said “I have this idea to make BitTorrent on the web. Here’s what it would do. If you think this is a cool idea, come talk to me.” I threw it out there, this thing that would – I wanted people to come, I wanted to find collaborators.

[20:16] But one of the people in the audience misunderstood what I said, and I did have a GitHub repo up with a readme in it, that just said what the project would do one day… And he tweeted it, and he had quite a few followers who clicked through this link and said “Dude, there’s no code here. What is this project?” So then he messaged me and was like “Dude, I thought you had code. What did I tweet this out to all my followers? There’s nothing here.” And I was like “Dude, you could have looked at the readme, man. It was clear that it was just an idea.” [laughs] So this guy basically launched WebTorrent for me, before

there was actually any code.

I think it was a good thing that he did that, because I don’t know if I would have built it otherwise. It was just this idea – it wasn’t clear whether people would wanna use it, or anything like that. But because of the reaction - all the people who started opening issues and saying “This is a cool idea. I really think you should do this”, I got really motivated, and I really wanted to actually build it at that point.

Caleb Porzio: [31:53] Like, I’m buried up to my eyeballs in GitHub issues and PRs and everything… Yeah, shouldn’t the work I’m doing right now justify the payment in itself? So that was sort of my position. It was like “Alright, Daniel, let’s argue this. I think that there’s this crazy thing where nobody’s paying these open source maintainers, and I’m in that place right now, where I’m kind of living unsustainably… But I don’t wanna be the one to go on Twitter and be like “Hey, everybody should pay me money.”

So we started talking about some different ideas, and this really emerged from that discussion. There was a moment in that discussion where I was talking about Sushi, which – that’s kind of a funny package as an example for this… But I was talking about Sushi, and like “Yeah, I think I’m gonna open source it…” So I posed to him this problem, I’m like “I like open source. I love the open source movement. I love everything about it. And something about charging for software and not making it open source feels weird to me. I’ve benefitted so much from people sharing projects…” So I don’t wanna just say “Hey, this package is only available to my sponsors. It’s one of the rare packages that I just keep to myself.” I could do that, but something just felt off about it… And I’m restricting the growth of it. There’s so many reasons that that’s just not satisfactory. Every time I come to that decision in my head, I go “You know what - I’d rather not have the $200, or whatever, and I’d rather just everybody use it. I don’t know…”

Drew Wilson: Yeah. Clerk.com/billing is where you’ll go for that page… And what’s really cool about Clerk is that it makes authentication super-easy. Kind of like Stripe did 15 years ago, or whenever they started. They made this pitch that “We want to own the credit card data at your company, and you’re no longer going to have ownership ownership of it. We’re going to own it, but we’re going to build some really cool software around it to make it really easy to use, and build in a bunch of fraud and safety and monitoring protections for you.” And they actually won that argument. People stopped using whatever they were using to reconcile credit cards on their own, and they gave all that data to Stripe. And Stripe built some really cool APIs and stuff around it to make it really easy, and actually easier to access than if you’d done it on your own.

And so Clerk’s doing the same thing with the user table… Which is for a lot of engineers a harder thing, but as we scale engineering into, and as it goes downstream into less and less technical folks, with AI now happening, they don’t really care. They are happy to give up their user table to Clerk, to say “You handle the user record, because you’re going to build this amazing software around it, these cool APIs, these cool UIs… You’re just going to make it where I don’t even have to think about this stuff.”

So Clerk’s done a really good job to date on that argument, and winning folks over, and showing how much better it can be to build your app on Clerk that not build your app on Clerk. The next major step to that user, from a company perspective, is like “I want to make money off this user.” And so that’s where this new product billing comes in. So it’s really the second product that Clerk will have ever offered off, and now they have billing.

[01:21:59.11] So everything that we’re building at Clerk in terms of billing is all native to Clerk. So we’re not actually using Stripe’s billing product. We’re just using Stripe for payments, and eventually PayPal for payments. And you’ll be able to pick between them. For right now though, all of the recurring billing logic, all of the invoices, the payment attempts, the emails, all that stuff is native and built into Clerk. And what that means is we can tailor these plans that you create, these subscription plans you’re going to create to SaaS, and we don’t have to account for every other type of business like Stripe has to. So we can get very narrow-focused to make the UI and the UX way better.

Then separately, there’s this idea of entitlements. Okay, someone signed up for a bronze plan, and this is a person who signed up for a gold plan. Well, what do they have access to? Well, usually, if you’re using Stripe or some other system, you’ve got to then build out these entitlements in your app internally, and you have to somehow reconcile them and keep them in sync with the plans that they’re signing up with. And you have all these if statements all over your code saying “If bronze plan, and it has this feature, and if that entitlement, do this, that, and the other thing. But if this…” etc. So it gets crazy. And so at Clerk, what we’re doing is we’re merging those all into one thing. So when someone signs up, or when you’re creating your plan, you can assign features to it and entitlements, and you can set the parameters on those, and you can have them be the same on gold, and on platinum, by just adding the features to both of them. Or you can slightly tweak that feature to have this number of credits, versus that one has this number of credits… You could do all that right from the UI inside of Clerk. And then in your codebase, you just use our has function [unintelligible 01:23:45.20] the name of the feature. And then it will automatically check to see who are they logged in as, and if you’re in an organization situation - because clerk also supports orgs - where you have roles, this has function will automatically look at the role this user is logged in as. Are they logged in as an admin, or a member? And maybe admins have the thousand credits and members only have the 50. And it will just automatically figure that out for you.

So then the entitlement scenario on actually building out your app becomes way easier than it ever would anywhere else. And I mean that sincerely, because that is the truth. So it ends up becoming just a way better experience as an engineer, and you can get to making money so much faster.

Zeno Rocha: [00:32:05.24] Yeah, it got real really fast. And then my mentality was “Okay, am I really ready to quit? Because I have a daughter, I have a wife. I’m supporting my parents. I can’t just leave.” The idea of quitting my job was so crazy, like, to pursue – even though I had Dracula making money on the side… It’s not like “Okay, I’m gonna be screwed.” But just that idea was pretty wild.

So when they called us for the interview, I was like “Man, is this idea –” It was called [unintelligible 00:32:40.11] back then; not even Resend. Crazy name… Just the only domain that we found. Like, “Is this idea dependent on getting into YC or not?” That was a huge debate internally that I was having. So then what I did to resolve that was like “Oh, let me talk to some friends that I know, that know other angel investors.” So then I talked to them, and then I talked to the CTO of Plaid, and other angel investors. And then I pitched them the idea, and they were like “Oh yeah, we would invest.” And then I was like “Okay, hold on… I’m not taking your money right now. Thank you.”

Jerod Santo: Gatsby’s was even a little bit weirder, because it wasn’t just that, but it was like, “As your site grows, Gatsby gets slow. If you pay us, we’ll make Gatsby faster.” That was even weirder. So it was like, it should already be just the way Gatsby works… But it required this very complicated caching solution that was all in their proprietary code, which would just make Gatsby work the way it was supposed to, I guess, in the first place… Anyways, it was a strange thing.

A lot of these I think it’s too early to tell. Deno KV is out there, Deno is still alive and well, but are they making money off of it? Who knows…? Next is a little bit different, the way that its relationship is with Vercel, in terms of it not being – maybe it’s the same. I don’t know, it seems a little bit different. It’s kind of like the cart and the horse, which one came first. Or that’s the chicken and the egg. I don’t know, I’m mixing all my metaphors. But I tend to agree. I wonder how attractive this is to enough people for it to move the needle, I guess, for Fred and the Astro team… And it seems like it’s an experiment. And sometimes you have to experiment when you’re trying to find ways for monetizing that makes sense. And so I wish them luck with this. I would tend to just reach for something that’s just open source, and maybe I sign up for a service for it, like in terms of a database. But I get it, where it’s batteries included, it’s like tightly integrated with Astro if you’re already using Astro, it’s the Easy button, generous free tier, so I can kind of get started with no money down… The way they’re planning on charging is based on storage, so it does do kind of that dynamic scaling, to where when you’re not using it, it scales down, serverless style, like Neon and others… So that’s cool. But then they charge you per gigabyte of storage, basically. That’s the idea. So in Nick’s case, if he was using it, and all these hackers came by on his PHP script, and just shoved comments into his AstroDB like crazy, he’d be paying out the wazoo to these folks. But if you’re a better programmer than Nick, you might be able to avoid that fate.

Kyle Wiens: Yes, two under underlying factors. One, they’re certainly very bottom line-focused. And the money in this case isn’t really them making money taking your phone, and then paying them for repair. The money is upfront in Apple Care. Apple is the second-largest extended warranty company in the world, and that’s where the profit is, is in scaring you away from other repair options, and making you think there really isn’t another choice. So when you buy the device, “Let me spend the extra money up front and get into Apple Care.” And then you’re in their ecosystem, and then you’re gonna go back in, they’re like “Oh by the way, there’s a deductible then, when you take it in.” So you’re really just paying up front for the option to have a discount repair later. But that’s really where the money is at.

So absolutely, there’s a bottom line focus. But there’s also a cultural component to this that isn’t completely nefarious. I disagree vehemently with it, but it’s not at its core unethical. Apple wants to control the customer experience. They want to really optimize for the best possible customer experience. This has driven a lot of the innovation that we’ve seen from them. And they think that they can deliver a better repair, total lifetime ownership experience themselves, than if you’re fixing it yourself or if you’re taking it to a local repair shop. They think that their Apple Store ecosystem is better. And this is an area where I just really disagree with them. If you look at what is the most optimal outcome for a customer, it’s not happening to live close enough to one of the 500 Apple stores that I can go in and get my device fixed quickly. Right? I’m in Chattanooga, Tennessee right now - it is a two-hour drive to the closest Apple Store. Good luck. I’m not gonna do that. And there’s so much of the world that’s not near an Apple store. And I think them being in Cupertino, they’re in this bubble where they don’t realize what most of the real world looks like. Is there an Apple Store Wyoming? What are you supposed to do if you have one of these devices, and it breaks, and the repair shops can’t fix it because of these parts pairing shenanigans?

[00:16:19.26] So they’re myopically focused on this idea that they can create a better customer experience, and then on the other side they’re basically delivering the McDonald’s of repair; like, it works much of the time, for many people, but it certainly doesn’t deliver what everybody needs.

Daniel Vassallo: I went in thinking it was temporary. I think I always had the inclination that eventually I will want to work for myself. I grew up in a family of self-employed people, and I always sort of felt it’s also in me that I want to control how I work, what I work on, and so on and so forth. When I joined, I thought this was temporary; I just want to see how the sausage is made in a company like AWS, and I wanted to learn, and so on and so forth. But I think I fell a little bit into the corporate trap of – you know, I kept getting promoted, I kept being treated reasonably well… They offered me to move to Seattle, I came… Again, they kept increasing my pay beyond my expectations; when I was about to leave at one point, they almost doubled my salary. It was very hard to think of an alternative that would have been better financially. Like, if I had to leave to work on my own, just the gap in time until I start making money probably would – again, if you’re thinking just financial expectations, it made it very difficult.

And again, it wasn’t – despite Amazon’s reputation, it wasn’t harsh work, or super-long hours. Yes, it took all my creative energy, that’s for sure, and it was always something on my mind… But for a while, there was a period when I started to think “This isn’t for me. Maybe I’ll move companies. Maybe I’ll go work at a different company eventually”, but I thought this was what I was going to be doing… Until I think at one point – it was actually, to be honest, a post by DHH, that I think triggered in me to consider… I think it was in 2015, November 2015, I was on vacation, I was sort of somewhat, again, a bit confused about the discrepancy between sort of me thinking I’m going to stay as a full-time job and the situation I was in… And there was this great post by DHH [unintelligible 00:36:28.13] The topic was mostly about considering, again, the all-in venture capital approach of making software, where DHH was recommending people to reconsider that approach, and start something smaller, more prudent, more modest, and so on and so forth. And again, I felt it was much more empowering to me. As I was reading that, for some reason, even if it wasn’t the intention of the post, it made me realize that a career as a full-time employee wasn’t for me. I started thinking of all my peers, my bosses, my bosses’ bosses, and I realized that they were living a lifestyle that I didn’t envy at all. I don’t want to become one of them. Probably they were worse off than I was.

So no matter how much more I was going to get promoted, or how much more money I was going to be making, I was still going to be working on somebody else’s terms, on their own schedule, without lots of control over my time. And I’m not saying this is the right thing for everyone. I think it’s important for us to recognize our personality. But for me, it dawned to me that this was wearing me out mentally, probably even physically, and I needed to find another arrangement.

So after that, it was mostly – I spent another couple more years there, just figuring out when’s the right time to leave, and at one point I wrapped up a project I was working on and I just took the plunge without anything concrete there. Long story short, nevertheless, I think I did learn some things, that I probably should have left sooner, in hindsight…

[38:03] But my takeaway for me personally is that I realized almost for sure that the full-time work arrangement, nine to five, Monday to Friday, 40-hour workweek wasn’t going to work for me, even in the most ideal situations. Even when I have a reasonably cushy job, well respected, highly paid, getting promoted, without any major dramas or challenges. Even when everything was well, it was still a problem for me, right? And that sort of made me realize that I can’t just be trying to optimize this… Putting lipstick on the pig, or what do they call it?

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. It’s less to talk crap about somebody, but more like this– the reason why I asked your opinion was less to say what do you do and don’t like about them, and badmouth them, or even praise them necessarily, but more this idea– because you said I have to add value to kind of get new sales, to get you to give me another year’s of your money, I have to keep adding value. And you start from a simple place, but yet to add that value, you have to add complexity, because I mean, features come and they add complexity, and things like that… And so you’re almost forced, just by way of making money, because - I mean, you can’t add users; maybe your total adjustable market might not ever grow, because it’s a pretty simple app. The Mac is only so big in terms of a user base, and there’s only so many people who need WriteRoom, TaskPaper, iA Writer, Bike. I mean, at some point, you’re going to run out of an addressable market. It’s just interesting how you take something very simple that you love, like you said, version one, and you get to version four, five or six or whatever the number is, and you’re like, “It’s kind of bloated. It’s kind of like, I don’t like this app anymore.”

Arnaud Porterie: [24:02] As long as you’re working for a company, the ultimate goal and the ultimate Why is always to make money. However, of course, there is hopefully a deeper mission and something that people believe in, and believe they’re doing for the greater good.

On a daily basis, you’re not gonna motivate anybody by telling them that what they’re doing is strictly to create shareholder value. This is not a motivational engine for any employee I’ve ever known. Thankfully, there’s way more proxies to this that are actually actionable by engineers, and that are actually related not so much to making money, than to customer satisfaction. And I think one of the trends that we’re seeing right now that I think is extremely positive is with a product team organization model, with this idea that teams should be autonomous and should have a complete control over a vertical of the business, and complete control on one aspect of the business - that helps put engineers closer to their customers, which I think is absolutely key. And this is true whether the customer is external or internal. And I think this is the major Why. In my mind, what should be the most important engine to any engineering team is truly the empathy and the customer satisfaction.

Adam Wathan: It’s definitely exciting. I didn’t know what I expected, I guess. I didn’t really intend to build a business around it. But what seems to happen was the CSS framework was taking off, and it felt like “This is the thing that I’ve worked on that has had the highest potential for impact”, you know, in terms of how many people can benefit from it, and stuff. So of all the things I’d worked on, this was the thing that I’m most likely to be known for.

[24:07] Unlike a lot of other open source type tools, there are established precedents for people making money on CSS framework-related stuff. Bootstrap has a theme store; ThemeForest is an enormous business on its own. So there’s a pretty straightforward path to trying to do some sort of commercial stuff around it… So it felt like we should try to do that.

I think the approach that we ended up taking - we’ve released this product called Tailwind UI, which is designed to just be like a giant directory of examples of different UI patterns and components built with Tailwind CSS. It’s a little bit different than some other traditional theme store approach, I think, but it’s kind of rooted in the same sort of idea. People who are building stuff are not always good at design, or not even always good at taking a design and converting it into real code… And there’s history proving that people will pay for that sort of thing, so that seems like a good way to try and fund the development of our open source stuff.

So we released that product in February of this year, and… That combined with the Refactoring UI book, which was also - me and Steve did that together - those were all under the same company. Those two products together are sort of what pay the bills and allowed us to work on Tailwind, and work on Headless UI, which is another open source tool that we have been working on… And [unintelligible 00:25:37.13] God knows how many other things that we work on, that aren’t coming to mind right now…

But for the most part, out of the six people that work at the company, 90% of the time is spent working on open source-related stuff. I think only Steve and one other person spent the bulk of their time working on the paid stuff, so it’s really cool to be able to commercialize it, in a sense, without forgoing work on the thing that got us here, in favor of working on the commercial stuff… Because I think that’s always the risk. Everyone always says when you’re building an open source tool, the way you should monetize it is by building some commercial business around it, and then you can work on the open source stuff using the money from that. But that’s presuming that you’re gonna be able to invent some business that only takes 15% of your time, but pays you a full-time salary somehow to work on all the open source stuff… They make it sound a little easier than it really is.

Gergely Orosz: Yeah, absolutely. With pricing, again, I experimented. I’ve read about how you can maximize value by adding additional content, and my original thinking was “Well, let me do the book”, and the book comes with resume templates, it comes with multiple formats… So an idea that I originally had is “Well, maybe I could just give a PDF, and then for more expensive you get like resume templates and multiple formats. And then for the last tier I’ll just do a video.” The video is me – some people prefer this with me talking through the whole content; I’ve created specific slides for it. In about two hours I summarize the book, and I add just my take on it.

The way I think about it is people will get it either who like me or want to support me, or people who just don’t wanna spend – reading this book will probably take you hours, and they just wanna get a shortcut, or they wanna get that as well. And I didn’t know how this would go…

But then, again, the first principle with this book - I wanna help, and I don’t wanna focus mostly on making money, even though there’s some money to be made there… So I decided “I’m not gonna penny-pinch.” The book will come with everything - the templates, the formats, all of those things… And then for the video, I originally just wanted to do the video, and I had a section in the book where I looked around all the resume sites, the research on most of them… And the reason you find poor quality advice - it turns out there’s a whole SEO industry behind this. Those sites make money from memberships, they have a customer lifetime value, and they optimize with content writers for everything. When you search for “software engineering resume”, you’ll go to a generic site that has content writers for software engineers, accountants, all that stuff.

I accidentally came across a site that was founded by a software engineer at Dropbox. Their site – so all the templates and all these resume sites, they’re selling for you, the consumer. They want you to pay, so they’ll give you a resume that looks nice, and you’re gonna be very happy with it. As a hiring manager, they’re terrible. They’re hard to scan, and they include bias. For example, photos include bias. Never, ever add a photo, unless you’re in certain countries. And you’re paying for that; you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. But again, the resume site doesn’t optimize for long-term things.

So I came across this site which had clean templates. This site had hiring manager recommendations from the likes of Slack, and they also had real resumes of people who used these resumes, and I reached out to them saying “Alright, well, you’re doing something pretty cool. What’s up?” So we talked with the founder; they were also on Indie Hackers, by the way… And they’ve created the site because they were frustrated with – when they were applying for Dropbox, the founder, previously, he just wanted a site where he can have a PDF, and he can send a web link and he could track when someone opens it. So they built the site, it took off on Product Hunt accidentally, and it was a side project… And now he left Dropbox and I think his co-founders might still be working somewhere; or maybe they’re not. But now they’re looking to turn the business into a more ethical resume site, where they do give you for your money a service of really clean templates, of web-based resumes, where you can just send the link and click-tracking on some of these things.

I really like this, and I liked how they were transparent. I liked how they seemed to be doing something similar to what I do… And I also don’t wanna say in the resume “Advice business”. I don’t wanna do reviews, I don’t wanna do long-term too much to do with this, beyond having this resource… So I figured, “Can we partner?” People who want these templates can go there, and you can get a discount. I’m not making any money off of it. They give a discount. I just like what they’re doing.

Carlisia Thompson: Yeah, I really like this idea of thinking about the packet and the life of a packet, because - I wonder if it’s just me, but whenever I think about distributed systems, in my head I think about nodes, and computers, and systems… And I have to make an effort to remember the reason for this whole thing to exist is to transport data from one point to another. So it’s just data going back and forth; that’s what we’re talking about.

So this whole infrastructure – most of the things that we’re going to talk about today is the pipeline that’s the conduit for this data to be going back and forth. And yes, so when you start thinking about the data, the packets, and the lifecycle, replication, then you start clueing in, “Okay, what do I need to monitor? What are the trade-offs and what’s more efficient?” Then you can make better decisions, if you have in mind, in the forefront, that data is the gold here. The infrastructure is the thing that gets us there, it gets the gold moving, and making money for us… [laughs]

Johnny Boursiquot: Before I answer, when you start talking to folks about what does cloud native mean, inevitably the conversation drifts into “Well, you need to decouple components, you need to transition from your monoliths to microservices and nanoservices, and serverless”, and all these things that are supposed to work with each other, and all that stuff… There’s an inevitable push towards breaking apart. And very seldom are you told why you need to do that, which is why there’s such a backlash around microservices and all these things. It’s trendy to have microservices, two-pizza teams, and all this stuff, but there’s a reason why you break up a monolith… One of the reasons being to be able to independently scale one piece that has higher demand on it than another piece.

[16:11] Because without that, you’re forced to now scale your one application vertically. You need to beef up the server, add more RAM, more CPU power… That’s called vertical scaling; you need a bigger server to run your one thing. Whereby if you have smaller components - well, this component only requires two logical CPUs, and another requires eight logical CPUs, then these things will have to live in the same box. You can sort of distribute that. You can scale these things independently and horizontally. So that is one of the great benefits of having this break-up into small components.

So that was my first true realization of what – I guess even before cloud native… I think the term cloud native, if I’m remembering correctly, came either around the same time as cloud native, or it was before it; I can’t remember exactly. But I think the idea, the promise of microservices in cloud native in connection to that is have enough flexibility. It’s all about flexibility. Because at the end of the day, we’re doing this not because it’s cool to break things apart into smaller pieces; we’re all engineers and supposedly we all like Lego pieces to play around with and assemble things together - that’s all well and fun and all that, but at the end of the day we work for businesses, and businesses have the goal of making money, and one of the ways to make money is by being innovative and being agile… And I’m really using the lower-case word agile here, to be explicit… [laughter]

So the innovation comes in terms of speed, get to market first, or go to market quickly, to respond to market demand, and that kind of thing… When you have smaller pieces that you can orchestrate and put the horsepower where you need it kind of thing - all these things feed into the innovation. And having developers who can work on different pieces of the platform - it’s not one big thing, and then you have to worry about deploying that one big thing; you have release managers whose entire job is to just move things around, and just prep things for release… You can have that flexibility of teams being able to ship things independently, and still have some sort of interconnectivity within these things. That’s the flexibility; that’s really why we have cloud-native applications. Not because it’s cool to break out of a monolith into microservices, not because it’s cool to run infrastructure.

Kurt Mackey: No, actually… I’m not sure I’m supposed to say this, but I don’t care. We weren’t making very much money off of Redis. It was a cool thing to host, and we did it because we liked it, but it never was a very commercially successful thing for Compose. But we also launched it right before we sold to IBM too, which was like “This is cool! We just launched it!” So I don’t, for that reason… I don’t particularly feel bad about making money off MongoDB, because they made money off MongoDB as well.

We actually tried to make RethinkDB – RethinkDB I think we were helpful for, because they kind of needed the story of “Someone will run this for you”, and they weren’t gonna build it themselves. But like I said, it does sound mildly hypocritical, because I think most of the good stuff that happened to me has happened on the backs of open source.

Anyway, that’s the long-winded way of saying for this company we basically just had this idea, and at one point it was like “We should give equity grants to open source authors of tools that we really get value out of.” And it’s interesting, because startups give equity grants to people all the time; if you’re a startup and you go hire an executive recruiter to hire you a VP of marketing, that recruiter is gonna get some fractional personal ownership of your company, because that’s just the way that basically businesspeople negotiate this stuff. A lot of startups have advisors who literally are just answering emails and doing nothing else of value for the company, that have equity grants.

So we basically just looked at it and it was like, you know, the open source authors are every bit as advisory as these advisors, so we started to use just the normal advisor paperwork to create an advisor agreement. We took out a lot of non-compete stuff, because it wasn’t that kind of relationship, but it was a standard advisor agreement, with just the same kind of shares that I have, just a smaller percentage. We’ve offered it to four people at this point.