Bryan Boreham: Well, I have often thought that a hedge fund which the investment strategy was just exactly whatever the opposite i from whatever I’ve invested in, that would be a great product.

Matthew Hodgson: Okay, so that must have been back in March, I guess… At the beginning of the end times, pandemic-wise that we caught up… And then it was in April that we announced that Automattic, the guys behind WordPress had come onboard Matrix, with a strategic investment in Element, the for-profit that we use to keep the lights on for Matrix development and hiring the core Matrix team.

[54:00] So it was really exciting… They put just under five million dollars into funding Matrix, with the hope of basically building an opportunity both for the WordPress ecosystem, and likewise, in Matrix supporting WordPress.

Now, since then, things haven’t moved quite as fast as I would hope, which is entirely my fault and our fault on the Element side, for going and hooking up the WordPress world with Matrix. But the intention is still very much to get better integration for Matrix within WordPress and vice-versa. And occasionally, I have some really nice people at Automattic pinging me, saying “Hey! So, do you know that call, where we were gonna be working on those integrations? Please, can we have it?”

So we’ve been running late on sorting that out. But the Automattic folks have been lovely to work with, and incredibly helpful strategically in helping advise us on growing Element. In fact, very similar relationship to the one we have with Sid, in terms of providing mentorship of how you build a massive, multi-billion-dollar open source company in a sustainable and ethical manner, rather than the traditional capitalist approach.

[unintelligible 00:55:17.25] had already been supporting Matrix for many years as a donor on Patreon. He was one of our secret thousands of dollars a month in supporters for like 2 years or so. So he obviously believed in what we were doing, and I occasionally ping him and sync and then he said well “Hey guys, [unintelligible 55:47] can I support more concretely, and get involved, and drive the overlap between the two companies?” And as I said, it’s been good. He was very helpful and basically gives us a safety net in terms of financing through the pandemic and whatever uncertainty lies beyond, whilst also going and finding useful parallels between the two projects.

I can’t really think of any other companies other than Automattic and GitLab who have sort of used the same model here, of taking an open source project and sustainably providing services and support around it for a larger ecosystem. I mean, that’s obviously lots of open source companies out there, but once you have an ecosystem like the WordPress one, or for that matter for the GitLab environment, it’s fun to be able to learn from these guys.

Mikeal Rogers: Yeah, and one thing to note about it is that it’s a member organisation and there are dues that are paid, right? So it really is heavily focused on larger companies that can understand enough that they have the strategic investment to send people, and then sending people is also not cheap… I mean, they do like five meetings a year or something, it’s crazy.

It’s really easy to justify being there if you write a VM, right? And it’s really easy to justify it if you’re Facebook or Airbnb or these companies… But as they’ve sort of expanded - and as JavaScript has expanded, a big part of what they’re really building for is for Babel, and they’re building for Node.js, and they know that they’re building for these systems before they actually get representatives in. But their view of what these tools are and how they get built out and how easy or hard it is to get features in is wildly different from anybody with actual experience in those tools.

For the longest time, it’s been very hard to get people from these tools into those meetings, because it’s expensive. So this is like a great use of funds that you raise and things like that, because you can actually send community people to this kind of stuff.

Zach Leatherman: So Eleventy has had an Open Collective for a very long time, and that was prompted by a conversation with Rob Dodson, who used to work at Google. He was instrumental in implementing web.dev on Eleventy. One of Google’s big web development properties runs on Eleventy right now, and he suggested very strongly that I should start an Open Collective to help with that sustainability story. So we’ve had an Open Collective for quite a while, and in some regards I would say it’s a little controversial that we’ve had an Open Collective. I wouldn’t say it’s super-controversial, but the way that I’m using the Open Collective right now is I don’t feel like the best way, especially given the new arrangement with Netlify.

Originally, I was using the Open Collective, given that I had a job and I was working at Netlify and I got some time to invest in Eleventy features prior to this arrangement. I was using the Open Collective as like a sort of fallback nest egg, so if I were to lose my job, then I would look for a new job, but also use that, and work on Eleventy full-time in the meantime. And that’s still kind of my plan moving forward.

We’ve used the Open Collective funds for some things, to pay for the different bills that come in on the project, but… Yeah, that’s kind of the mindset that I’ve had for the Open Collective right now. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it, but I feel like having some reserves in that regard is a good investment as a fallback strategy for the project. So that’s kind of how I thought about the Open Collective prior to this Netlify arrangement, and I feel like that might change a little bit.

Jerod Santo: Yeah… Well, there’s another factor there, which is we had a decade of hyper-growth, 0% interest rate-based investment, and the free tier for a startup is an epic win for growth. I mean, it’s a massive way to get lots of people. I think – was it Jason Bosco from Typesense, Adam, that we talked to about how they didn’t have a free for open source, or a free for whatever offering with their cloud, and how that is one way of going about getting a whole bunch of users, that you could just buy them, because you have investment money… And like those times are changing. I think that’s more of the – I don’t know if cynical is the right word, but maybe the hairier side of what those things are. Of course, we wanna always just be like “We love developers, we love open source, and we want to see people tinker and have fun, and here it is…” And I do believe that is sincere in many cases; it is also a hyper-growth strategy that’s afforded by large investments, and continues to run based on larger investments, which eventually run out, or need their money back. So like you said, eventually Salesforce is like “This doesn’t make sense for Heroku anymore, and so we’re not going to do it.”

Ahmad Nassri: Well, I’ve been mostly working from home, as the rest of the world has been… But I’ve been lucky that I have a good setup at home to spend time and work with teams remotely. I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on fractional CTO opportunities that I’ve been taking on recently, which basically means I get to work part-time for different companies in a CTO capacity. Those companies are typically not ones that are heavily invested in technology, or if they are, they don’t have the capacity to have a full-time CTO leadership in place, so I kind of help them out in hiring the right team, looking at their technology investments so far, and helping them and their strategy going forward on how things should look like, where to invest more, how to prioritize their work, and kind of grow the opportunity space for other engineering teams to come in and start carrying the torch and leading with it.

So that’s what I’ve been spending my time on, and it kind of works out for me working remotely in this scenario, because it’s different companies in different locations, and I don’t have to travel back and forth between places, I can just do it all from home… So I’ve been lucky in that sense, with the lockdown and everything else. It kind of worked out. So that’s what I’m doing right now, and that’s what I’m planning to do for the next short time, or short period of time, while I design some future things and opportunities that I wanna build and create.

[04:10] And in doing so, kind of like leading back to the topic of the blog post, a lot of the patterns that I started noticing or know about from previous histories in previous roles in companies, I’m starting to see them again and again and again, especially as I’m doing this fractional thing, where I spend some time with a lot of companies… And it’s odd to me that the patterns are the same, regardless of the company size, regardless of the company’s market, regardless of the technology, regardless of anything. The patterns keep looking the same, or in the same direction of thinking or investments, and how companies treat technology and how technology teams treat technology.

That kind of led to that blog post, and there’s actually a series of blog posts that I wrote following up that, basically talking about how we’re in this world where we have an abundance of access to technologies, solutions, libraries, systems, services, yet for some reason every company that I’ve worked with at least, whether directly or indirectly, we keep solving the same problems over and over again. Some of those problems are some basic things that you would think by now we would already have a pattern or a solution or answers that we can just copy-paste or implement, or buy, or adopt, that we don’t have to spend time on them anymore as developers.

So that’s kind of like the highlight, and we can get into it, but I wanna come back to you and see if you have any kind of direction to where you wanna take the conversation.

Łukasz Langa: Great question. So let’s maybe take a step back and explain the kind of strategy that we took with this particular project, which is a huge undertaking, but at the same time, we have a release cadence that releases Pythons every year. Predictably in October, you’re going to get a new version of Python. So there’s no way you can shove a big transition like this within 12 months. So what we’re doing instead - essentially, what you’re getting is a state of the project as we are in right now. So there are things that we still need to do, that are still not done.

Most importantly, this split for the main interpreter still having the global interpreter lock and so on, and an experimental one that you have to build yourself, and then you can run without a global interpreter lock - that is deliberate, because with all those costs that we described, we really need to reach out to the community, saying “Look, this is now not an idea. You can actually grab this Python and check whether this helps you. Is it better? Is it worthwhile, the scalability for this extra complexity within the implementation, and maybe this cognitive complexity that is going to be sort of passed on to the user, is that worth it?”

[00:32:05.15] So the community will have to now step in and try out this new Python, and see “Okay, this is slower than the non-threaded version”, but that’s hopefully temporary. But the question to answer is “Does the scalability that this enables help?” So we really need them to give us two thumbs up, like “Okay, keep actually working on this”, since this specialization that Pablo described, and the JIT compilation that follows from that, and so on and so on, are obviously features that we really want to have, including in the free-threaded version. And there are ways to go around it, but they are very complex. It is in fact like on the bleeding edge of computer science as we know it. There are plenty of known strategies for improving performance of interpreted languages that are single-threaded. For free-threaded interpreted languages, this is really where the science sort of is still unclear… Because JavaScript - there has been so much investment in that, like making that fast, with V8, like in Chrome, and so on and so on. Well, that is single-threaded, for the intents and purposes of our understanding of the interpreter. With a free-threaded Python, how to make that fast is more of a challenge. Literally, members of our team are going to be the people writing papers about this later… So this is going to take time. Longer than one release. Longer than two releases. But at the same time, we want to release what we already have, so that it’s no longer just a pipe dream. It’s no longer just a plan or idea. Users can actually experiment with this and tell us “Okay, this is actually awesome. This enables a use case we couldn’t even try before.” Because that’s our chicken and egg problem. Before we actually enable this, we don’t see use cases that are now impossible, so we cannot tell whether there’s an untapped area of Python usage that would be now enabled with free-threading.

So this is what we’re doing with 3.13. This is essentially this current state of the project. Now you can experiment with it. You can see whether your web framework is going to be faster now. Whether now you’re going to be able to process data in parallel, and so on and so on. This is essentially one step of a longer project.

Victor Zhou: The other one I made was called GeoArena.online. So not actually the .io TLD, but later – it’s now GeoArena.io, but anyways, that’s unrelated. Originally, when I launched it, it was called GeoArena.online. Basically, that was a game that – I think I started it freshman year; that was a game that I had been thinking about for a while in high school, and I thought would be cool to try to implement as a web game, because that was the time when I was getting into it a little bit. I was kind of trying to learn more about web development, and I have always liked making games.

[31:59] That game is actually sort of similar to diep.io. That’s the tank game that I mentioned earlier. Some people like to refer to GeoArena as like diep.io, but 1v1. Diep.io - you get into this big arena, you’re playing with 50 other players, you’re kind of just one ship in a sea of many ships… But in GeoArena is much more personal. You customize a ship, and then you enter into a queue, and the game will match-make you with another player based on your skill level, basically.

You have this in-game rating system called – I believe it’s called GeoCrystals. But anyways, it’s just like an [unintelligible 00:32:44.25] rating system. So the game matches you with another player, and then it’s just the two of you in this arena, Diep.io style, battling it up. It’s last one standing wins. You move around, you can fight the other player, you can find the non-player characters if you wanna level up, things like that. You can upgrade. There are a bunch of different strategies that you can use. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s kind of just this 1v1 skills test.

I made that game, and it launched; it got a little bit of traction… It never really blew up so much as Generals did that one day, but it kind of grew in player base over the course of the first couple months, and then after that it was a little bit steady, kind of flatlined for a while. I pretty much put it on the back-burner. I basically put it on the back-burner to build Generals. And while Generals was happening, I didn’t really work on GeoArena as much, because its player base just couldn’t justify the kind of investment that I should have been using on Generals instead. But after I sold Generals, I kind of went back to GeoArena for a bit, with a lot of the lessons that I learned from building and selling and scaling Generals, and I applied those to GeoArena.

It’s fun to go back and look at code you wrote three years ago and be like “Wow! This is terrible!” [laughs] I’m sure you guys know what I’m talking about.

Chris Benson: So this is a particularly interesting episode, I would argue, for me, and probably for quite a few of our listeners that listen regularly… Because we’re talking about something - and Erik, we have the privilege of you as the person who’s created this, but we also have Daniel, whom I’ve been working closely with, and our listeners have been listening to… And hearing Daniel’s passion and him building his own business on your platform… And we talked to lots of different companies… And so it definitely has intrigued me in a way that not every different company owner, if you would, has. I’m kind of curious - I’m thinking about it from a slightly different perspective from Daniel, but you’ve really got me wondering how to make this happen. I work at a big company, as you know, we have big investments in kind of the big cloud providers, as all large companies do… What are good strategies for companies to say, “Okay, we have so much in these other big names and stuff that are out there…” How do we start using Modal effectively? What are the kinds of things you’ve seen your larger customers do in terms of migration over, or things that you might recommend, that enable something of a migration to be more seamless, less painful…

[32:18] Because normally, when you think of large company migrations, they are almost always fraught with pain, and misery, and challenges for the IT crews. So how do people get to this thing that we’re hearing about today, and mitigate all of those problems?

Gregory Richardson: I don’t know if I’ll go deeper. I might [unintelligible 00:14:34.29] off of one of the branches. The side of BlackBerry that I’m maniacally focused on is really just, I want to say, purely the cybersecurity part. So obviously, BlackBerry does a lot of other things. We have our automotive and IoT section/segment that’s very, very, very large, probably a billion-dollar business in and of itself, with operating systems that run in any car that has anything digital in it etc. The part that I’m focused on, though, is pretty much purely my area of expertise, which is cybersecurity.

So what we’ve been doing from my side of the house is helping customers build their defenses in a way that allows them to do something that I call preemptive security. If you remember in my earlier preamble, I referred to - you know, we need to be able to predict what the attackers are going to do, so that we can defend against it. I help my customers strategize around building those platforms, those tools, those combination of different tools to do exactly that.

The nuance of it with cybersecurity is, just because of organically how the industry has grown, and VC investment, and a million other reasons, we’ve sprawled very much into - you know, there’s thousands of tools to get the job done, and there’s probably thousands, if not tens of thousands of different little aspects that need to be protected in the average organization. You might have endpoints, the computers. You might have servers. You might have a network. You might have stuff up in the cloud. You might have operational technology, or IoT technology. All different aspects, that all need to be protected, that all require completely different tool sets.

[00:16:26.20] That sprawl has made it difficult for customers to have a homogenous approach to “How do we defend against it all?” Ismael can probably talk more about one of the things that attackers do, I want to say very, very, very well, is attack the gaps between our tools. So if they detect that you have a great tool that is the foremost tool on protecting computers, your endpoints, but your network stack is a little bit weak, they’re going to attack right in the middle of that network stack, and gain access to the endpoints. Vice versa, if they see your network and your endpoint is rock-solid, but you have a weakness over in the cloud, you’re going to start seeing cloud attacks.

What the industry has not been very good at that, BlackBerry is trying to help resolve, is how do we help customers pull all of that telemetry in to be able to get, as I said, a homogenous view of everything that’s attacking them, and everything they’re doing about defenses across all those little silos. That’s what I help my customers strategize on.

And my customers vary from governments - I’ve met with the government of Morocco a couple of weeks ago - to large corporations, the biggest banks in the world, the biggest airlines in the world, etc. It just spans the range, but all of them have that problem. The most mature organizations have well-developed tools that are unintegrated, and the least – the SMBs, which are also our targets, our customers, have oftentimes less developed security stacks, but the problem is the same. Even if they say “Well, we can make an investment in this one little tool”, then they have their gaps and they’re not being able to ingest all of that intelligence that they have.

It says something about the industry - and I’m going to shoot at my own job now… It says something about the industry that a strategist at that level, focused on those types of problems, is even needed. You don’t have that in the medical industry, as far as I know. You definitely don’t have that in, for example, the automotive industry. There aren’t integrators that need to help you with how to integrate your car to work properly. You go to Ford, you say “I want an SUV”, they give you the whole SUV. They don’t say “Buy the motor here, and then go down the street and get four tires, and go across the way and get a transmission. You glue it together, you make it work.” They give you the whole thing. Cybersecurity doesn’t do that. We don’t give you the whole thing, so that necessitates a cross-section of strategists like myself and the team that supports me to go out and actually help customers parse through this web of tools that they’ve built.

You probably don’t go to cybersecurity industry events. I do. Ismael does as well. Ismael speaks at many of them. The amount of vendors on the expo floor… I remember going to RSA 13 years ago or so - a handful of vendors. It was a small convention. Now? It’s literally thousands. Three, four, five thousand vendors.

Alya Abbott: Well, I think it’s not just about open source. I think there are now starting to be VC firms that are focused on open source, and really buy into that model… But it’s also just the structure of how you do that investment. Do you try to hire up really quickly, spend tons of money in marketing, even if the return is not there, but just to get that growth curve? What are you trying to do, and what is your strategy to get there? I’m not going to tell you 100% never in the next 100 years we’ll take VC money. We’re a small company. We do, to some extent, make decisions about things when we need to make them, not planning things for 50 years ahead… But that has been our strategy so far, and we’ve not been approached by a venture investor who we think would be completely different from all the other venture investors such that we would start thinking about it.

Jerod Santo: John D. Cook describes a tool acquisition strategy he picked up from Kevin Kelly: “If you need a tool, buy the cheapest one you can find. If it’s inadequate, or breaks, or you use it a lot, then buy the best one you can afford.”

John then applies it to the context of software tools: “There’s something to be said for having crude tools that are convenient for small tasks, and sophisticated tools that are appropriate for big tasks, but not investing much in the middle.”

I find myself doing this often. I use crude, simple, not-good-enough tools for as long as possible. Finally, when it’s painfully obvious that the job I’m using said tools to accomplish is worth investing in long-term… I make the big investment. The challenge with this is determining when to make that call.

Daniel Vassallo: But anyway that I could, without necessarily being very picky, very choosy. I don’t care about how sustainable it

is, or how high the return on investment is; whatever I can, to at least have some baseline income. And literally, the next day, after I went through this week of anxiety, I picked up my phone, I went to my personal contacts, and I found a friend who needed some programming help, and I started doing some freelancing with this friend. But the connections wasn’t a lot; I was doing like 20 hours a month, barely enough to cover my mortgage… But it was a huge, huge improvement in my peace of mind. Now I have some income. And I knew that if I wanted to, I could maybe find another client, or maybe add some more hours… It was incredibly liberating. Now, I wasn’t relying on this project succeeding anymore; it almost became like a bonus. Now, if it succeeded, it’s great. If it doesn’t, I’m not going to be desperate, as there’s already something there.

And immediately, things started to – one thing started to come after another. I was seeing these creators, the creator economy was flourishing, self-publishing, educational products, programming books, and whatever, and some of them making decent payoffs, some of them less so… And I said, “I have some technical content in my head. I worked at AWS for almost 10 years, I know certain products inside out… What if I do a brain dump of some of the things I know, and try to sell it online?” And this became another – now I call them another small bet. I spent like a month on this project, not a long time; brain dump of everything in a Word doc, minor editing, put it out on the internet… And within a few weeks, it made low five figures, and it was, again, eye-opening to me. Like, why am I bothering with this huge, ambitious project, highly speculative, that might never – yes, the upside might be huge. If all the stars align, I might make a big exit, or have a high income from it… But there are these small, much more achievable projects that are much more attainable.

And over time, I kept experimenting with different ideas, some things worked, some things didn’t, and I started to believe that this is a sound philosophy, and then, as I kept searching it more, I realized “This is nothing new.” The operators in this world, like book publishers, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, movie studios in Hollywood, operate on this strategy, and some of them have been doing it for centuries, like book publishers, even VCs… I mean, not the modern kind, but investors in general, since probably the Middle Ages have had some portfolio of activities; they only invest small amounts of their funds, they never go all-in on one thing… They treat ideas – I like to call it treating ideas like cattle, not like pets, so you don’t fall in love with your projects… Yes, you want them to succeed, you’ll be disappointed if they don’t… But if they don’t, it’s just business; you move your attention to something else.

[17:57] And I started to see these parallels with how these industries operate, and I think many of their principles apply even to us as individuals. Yes, we’re not investing capital, unlike a book publisher, or a venture capitalist who’s investing their capital; we’re investing our time. But it’s equally scarce and precious, probably more so… And I think we can sort of, again, reason the same way as a VC does with their funds, but in our case with how we invest our time.

So what’s our time? We only get a few hours a day, that is disposable to our projects… How should we invest it? Should we go all-in for many years on one project? Is that a wise strategy? That would be like a venture capitalist going all-in with all their funds on one idea. It’s almost never going to happen, right?

Luca Maraschi: Correct. And that’s exactly our strategy. Our strategy is exactly to tap into that exact problem and give us a solution, this out-of-the-box experience. And the issue with enterprise that we notice and we experienced is, like you were saying, nothing is new there. How can we actually value more the investment that the enterprise does to create value for their customers more than actually trying to actually spend a huge amount of OpEx capital into operating something that on-demand –

Ben Ford: Yeah. Up until now, we’ve been talking about developing products, I guess - developing products and services that you use to deliver to your customers. And that is an ever-growing feast of potential technology platforms and affordances that you can use to build products. The whole point of being in business is to find a problem for a section of the market and to solve it in a way that you deliver value much greater than what you charge, and it costs you to deliver that value much less than you charge for it.

So all of the product management and all of the technology talk is about that bit. That’s all external to the organization that delivers that, but the organization is the foundation. So I got very jaded… And this is probably how I ended up on this OODA loop and research and whatnot, trainers… As a on-the-tools developer, DevOps engineer, leader, with doing a good job on all the stuff that we’ve just been talking about - putting a good team together, building a good platform, and it’s just not quite landing either, because of poorly-aligned priorities, or a misunderstanding of the market, or increasingly, just utter friction internal to the company. So as I’ve been doing all this research on command and control and OODA and whatnot, I realized that we can take a bunch of this great technology that is becoming increasingly more available, and we can use it to build internal systems as well. Because if you put all of your investment into the externally facing parts of your technology and you’ve got a bunch of other interns running around doing Excel to try and figure out what the hell’s actually going on, which is increasingly what happens… Because the way I see it is that you’ve got different company departments – so a company gets to a certain size and it fractures into different functions. You get your head of X, head of Y, marketing, product, whatever. And they go off and they start building their part of the pie. And that’s the right thing to do, because you need a marketing department, you need sales, you need ops, you need customer support… The problem is, you get to a certain point where now all of those individual departments are choosing the right tools to support their journey. So they’ll pick - I don’t know, a HubSpot, or a Amplitude or whatever. There’s millions of these different services you can use to build a better department.

And what I’ve observed in many companies is that’s going really well for that department, but when it comes to taking a step back from operations and figuring out strategy, direction, priorities, and sense-making, and situational awareness, there’s a void in the middle. Because that void is filled by these same expensive people you’ve hired to build out your function, in some cases, trying to aggregate data in Excel very often. Or you’ve got a team of admin folks in the middle of this company who are usually not that well paid, and sometimes not very experienced, and they’re also trying to take all this data and aggregate it together in order to provide some kind of insight, or run payroll, or do any other number of biologically important things that keeps the company ticking.

And I realized a couple of years ago - why would you use Excel when you can connect up… All of these good frontline services have APIs; why would you have a human go into the user interface, download a CSV, manually do all that stuff the same time, at the same way, in the same error-prone fashion every month, or every week, whatever your reporting cycle is, when there’s all these affordances like N8n, like Hasura?”

So I spent the last couple of years basically building a stack of these open source tools that you can run yourself, that you can basically put into the center of your company and turn that into what I’m calling a mission control, which is an idea for the military… Right in the middle of any military unit, there’s always a usually a tent or a room somewhere. It’s got a big map of the area of operations on the wall, and that’s where all the information feeds in. It’s basically the same concept, but for a modern tech-enabled business.

Tom Preston-Werner: [00:55:57.06] Yeah. So we have - let’s say, there’s about 30 startups that we know of that are building with Redwood right now. And we try to track as many as we can to get a sense of, is this angle of optimizing for startups - is that working? Are they out there? Are people choosing Redwood and building with it? We want to know. This is helpful for us to build the future of Redwood. So we know of 30– I think, it’s 31 at the moment; 31 startups that are building actual real startups with Redwood. Many of those are funded. The last time we got the numbers, it was about 19 million of funding that Redwood-based startups had raised. This was right before the 1.0, so that was a month ago. So that’s probably increased from there.

But it’s working, people are building with Redwood, and they come in and the feedback is generally very positive. They’re very happy with Redwood and their choice in doing that. And a lot of it is because of the technology, especially the multi-client, the GraphQL stuff is really important to a lot of people and how easy we make that side of it. But then the community as well, and how open we are to people being involved. And when people make a choice of a framework like this for their company, they want to know that they are going to be heard, that they can come in and they can fix things that are broken if there’s something that’s affecting them, that the core team is going to be responsive to say, “Oh, you have a need for your company, for your business. We’re willing to accept your pull requests. We’re willing to engage you and help you in getting those things fixed.” That ends up being really important to people when they’re making a choice for the long-term of business choice; something that’s going to affect the success of their business. So that’s been really important.

And so we’re continuously growing the Redwood startup club. We also have a community member, Keith, who works on the Maker hHour, so which is kind of a– that’s a bit more of an open forum for anyone who’s tinkering with Redwood or building anything with Redwood, not necessarily they’ve committed to doing a startup and they’re growing a team or whatever. That’s the startup club. The Maker’s Hour is more just like, yeah, you’re doing whatever you’re doing with Redwood and you want to talk to other people about it, or share what you’re doing to be motivated, and so there’s a group of people that often come to the Maker’s Hour to come share that.

There’s also a Spanish language version of that, that we have a community member leading now, which is pretty awesome to see… And then we also do office hours. So some of the core team members will get together every week and do office hours on Discord, so that anyone can come in with any other questions and just have someone available from the core team to be able to answer those. So we have a Discord where we have an active chat community where people come in, and we’ll do some events and things in there. That’s a great place to just meet other Redwood developers, ask simple questions, and get help, or get pointed to the discourse forum software, where we really have this ever-growing knowledge base that is the better place for asking questions and getting answers that may be a bit more complicated than you might ask in the chat and on Discord.

That we chose because we wanted it to be indexed across time. And so this is where a lot of people land when they’re searching for things about Redwood, like “I have this question, how do I implement this thing?”, or “What service should I choose for this other thing?” or like “How do I–” whatever; then you’ll often end up in the forum, and that’s on purpose. We wanted that to be this long-term growing resource that’s indexed, it’s searchable. So all of these things are part of the community that we’ve assembled, and that’s all going to plan.

[00:59:48.29] It’s hard to grow a community. It’s in open source. It’s especially hard from a diversity perspective, and we work really hard to try to increase the diversity of who we see in our community, but it is still overwhelmingly white and male, which we’re always trying to counterbalance with outreach to other communities. And this maybe segues me into the Redwood startup fund, which I can talk about, which is a purposeful effort to increase the diversity of who we see, especially as startup founders.

So the Redwood startup fund I announced when we launched the 1.0. This is a $1 million investment fund that I’ll run alongside the angel investing that I do, where I intend to write $25,000 to $50,000 cheques to startups that are using Redwood in their stack, to encourage people to build with Redwood, obviously, but to also fill out the latter part of the startup journey that we can offer directly. Up until then, we could offer you technology to build with. We could offer you a community and help to think about and strategize about and connect you with people in the startup and investment community, but we couldn’t give you actual money, directly. That was not part of what we could really offer.

Now with the startup fund, for those startups that we really believe in that we think can go the farthest, we have money available directly to fund. So 25K to 50K cheques, really early. I’m hoping this can be super early-stage funding, maybe before you’ve even incorporated your thing, or even written much code around it. And I’d like to prioritize a more diverse set of people that are building. So more women founders, more black founders, other minoritized groups in the software development community that want to come in and do that, but may otherwise not have the option to do that, because of whatever constraints that they have, or just to have someone who believes in you, that has some money to where you can get started and try out an idea. This money is intended to increase the diversity of the community directly through how we prioritize who gets that money.

And the other side of that is, I’d like to prioritize startups that are working on climate-related things with the software that they’re building. This investment is run through Preston-Werner Ventures, which is the entity that I use for angel investing. We also do a lot of work around climate. We have a team of 10 people at Preston-Werner Ventures where we do grants around climate, as well as political work to try to move the needle on climate change. This is a primary focus of what we do with the Preston-Werner Ventures effort that my wife and I run.

And so I’m trying to dovetail all of these things together, sort of combine the open source work that I love to do with the angel investing that I love to do, with the climate work that I think we have to do, and try to pull them all together into a tighter bundle of things. And so that’s the startup fund. So that’s another part of community-building and trying to purposefully evolve the community into what I think is a healthy direction.

Joe Percoco: So you’ve seen them, and it’s a really good push. I’d say it’s the most unpoetic description of my job, capital, capital, capital. You’ll hear other people say, “Find a mission, organize people like a tribe to work towards said mission, and then go execute really hard and work hard.” I just describe it like super unpoetically.

In reality, I definitely don’t shy away from the fact I need to be a steward of other people betting on the fact that I can go create impact, and those other people are people with money who back our company, and people who are saying, “I want to go spend my career at Titan.” I do not take that responsibility lightly. And so as we think about strategic planning, where should we go deploy our time, effort and money, i.e our capital, monetary capital, human capital, strategic capital, largely, and the simple answer is doubling down on everything that got us to this point.

To get to this point in time, we’ve done maybe the third inning worth of a job, across the board - onboarding, investment products we offer, that tripod of experience between client, content and their money, how well our factory is built, our ability to go host other people and open up the gates to the factory… All of those things, we’ve sort of gone a few inches deep, and seen significant traction.

So now with this round, the goal is to really go give the five star experience on each of those, and turn this into an enterprise, not just a fledgling early-stage company. So it comes with a different set of challenges, but in a same flavor as the ones prior.

Derek Collison: Yeah, and it’s interesting… Building a software company - you can get a lot of mileage out of thinking of it as a psychology problem, than a technical, or go-to market strategy. I try to frame everything now as “What is the psychology of the consumer?”

If you’re building a kernel - except if you’re Microsoft, which even there they don’t have to let go of it shortly, is “Oh, those are always free.” Even though there’s probably multiple hundreds of millions of dollars of expertise and investment into these, the consumer bias is it should be free. So always ask yourself, “What does my consumer look like, and what is their bias around what I’m trying to offer them?” If you resentingly say “Oh crap, they’re gonna think it has to be free”, you might wanna rethink what you’re trying to do.

Craig Wiley: [24:08] It’s a really good question, and it’s one that we spend a lot of time thinking about and working with companies on how they’re thinking about this problem. The companies who I’ve been most impressed when I hear their strategy around these things - it really comes down to where they choose to buy, versus build. And from that perspective, one of the things that I think deeply about, and that I think others do as well, is this idea that if you can buy a solution, whether it’s a Contact Center AI - our intelligent virtual assistant or contact agent in your call center - or our document understanding, these technologies that are powered by AI, these make a ton of sense for companies to buy, because for most folks your contact center isn’t the primary point of differentiation for you.

Now, as you move further down the stack, I think the question becomes “Where are you comfortable using AI to accelerate your business and gain efficiencies in your business? And where are those efficiencies tied to your competitive advantage as a company?”

Fundamentally, the idea of buying your AI makes a ton of sense if it’s something that you’re very comfortable with your competitor buying as well. But when it comes to what you should build, it really comes down to “Where are the unique areas that you think you could express some differentiation in that industry?”

So if I take retail as an example, we’ll see retailers who are happy to buy a recommendations system, but they wanna optimize the back-end and their supply chain deeply, because that’s how they believe they can stand out. Or maybe they wanna highly optimize their promotional capabilities, or their forecasting capabilities… Whereas others may say “Listen, forecasting and supply chain - I’m happy to work with a partner and get the best-in-class, that is easily available to me… But I really wanna stand out on our usability or our recommendations, and things of that nature. That’s how I plan on setting us apart from others.”

I think that’s a conversation that companies have been having for a long time with regards to the software they’re building. If I think over the last decade of the number of industries where the leader in that industry has almost become a hybrid software company - whether it’s a retailer who’s become more or less a software company, or a healthcare provider who has a giant software investment… You know, the same decisions that have powered that kind of investment over the last decade, I think now we’re seeing that same set of decisions behind applied to how they’ll invest in intelligent computing, and where they’ll choose to build versus buy.

I’m not seeing kind of a wholesale, like hey, people are giving up Notebooks and are only gonna go buy from now on, or vice-versa. It’s really around how companies will choose where they are willing to build, versus where they’re willing to buy, and how that aligns to their strategy.

Greg Allen: Sure. I would start by saying that two countries are specifically named by the National Defense Strategy, which came out in 2018. Two countries are specifically named as strategic competitors. And that is Russia and China. These are countries who have interests that are identified as being contrary and in contradiction to (in many cases) the interests of the United States, and also who have oriented their national security establishments in competition with the United States. And that’s not a very surprising statement, I would say, to most.

When the National Defense Strategy came out, it was sort of putting on paper the sorts of things that a lot of United States leaders had been saying, and frankly that a lot of leaders in the two countries I just mentioned were also saying. So that’s sort of the basic backdrop of strategic competition.

Into artificial intelligence - of course, this is the national security world we’re talking about, and the military we’re talking about, so we remain quite interested in what is going on around the world, and we would be silly not to be paying attention to that.

I think, speaking about China and Russia each in turn - China’s AI strategy, which came out in 2017, specifically identifies that they see AI as a transformative technology in many different areas, including in national security. It also identifies AI as a leapfrog technology. The term leapfrog is interesting in this use case, because it is describe elsewhere by Chinese military thinkers and strategists as really sort of describing their belief about what AI technology will enable their military, compared to the United States’ military.

If you can think about the example of cellular telecommunications infrastructure in developing countries, notably many developing countries in Africa - this is the canonical example of a leapfrog technology. There were many developing countries in Africa who did not have well built out landline telephone infrastructure, and yet this was no disadvantage whatsoever in adopting cellular telephone infrastructure. They just skipped the development step of landline telephones and went straight to cell phones. That skipping is referred to as leapfrogging.

In our competition with China in military technology, there are many things that we are quite good at, that they have a very hard time with in the technological sense; things like jet engines, things like aircraft carriers - these are really tough, really complicated technologies, that we as a country tend to be quite good at, and that China as a country has historically had a lot of difficulty with.

So when they write about AI technology, they’re saying “Well, if we could really develop an interesting advantage in AI, perhaps we could leapfrog the United States”, which is to say “Perhaps we would not have to catch up to them in aircraft carriers, or catch up to them in jet engines, because we will shift the basis of competition.” And Chinese military thinkers often write quite optimistically about China’s opportunity to compete with the United States technologically in these terms. So we would be remiss if we were not paying attention to that.

[23:52] The second thing I’ll say is that, as pointed out by the Secretary of Defense at the National Security Commission on AI, in his speech at that commission - there are many Chinese weapons manufacturers who are currently selling on international markets weapons systems advertised as being autonomous, meaning they can make their own decisions and act independently, and also having that full combat autonomy, meaning they can actually be responsible for the use of lethal force.

So that’s what China is sort of up to today, at least in terms of what they’re advertising on the international market.

Russia is similarly very interested in AI technology. One quote that everybody really paid attention to was in September of 2017 when Vladimir Putin said that whoever leads in AI technology will be the ruler of the world. And I think Russia does not have a very clear path to leading in AI technology, whereas the United States and China regularly top the lists of who is publishing the most AI research papers annually, and who is publishing the best AI research papers annually, and similarly lead in measurements about who is attracting the most venture capital for AI companies.

Russia is pretty low on all of the rankings that I just mentioned, so I don’t think that Russia has a clear path to leading in AI technology. Unfortunately, they do have a reasonably clear path to leading in the weaponization of AI technology. I think this is a pretty similar story to the internet. Russia was not a leader in any of the foundational technologies for computer networking or the internet, and yet nevertheless Russia developed a very advanced and broad and deep military cyber capability. So similarly, I think Russia is looking to be a leader in the weaponization of AI, just as they were a leader in the weaponization of the internet.

In terms of what they’re doing, it’s a lot of what you would expect. The social media disinformation campaigns, and influence operations that Russia has been in the news a lot for lately - they are also interested in bringing in more advanced machine learning and AI capabilities to these operations.

And then secondarily, combat robotics is an area that Russia has devoted a lot of investment, and has shown a lot interest, and they’re experimenting with a lot of their military robotic systems operationally, literally using some of these systems in Syria. So both Russia and China are moving out aggressively to incorporate AI capabilities into their military.

I would say in terms of the United States’ response, our intent is to lead the world in the military use of AI for the benefit of United States’ national security. I don’t think we’re so much obsessing over each individual capability that comes out of China or Russia, so much as we are looking at the broader landscape. I think AI is a general-purpose technology, the way electricity is a general-purpose technology. It’s useful for things like radio, but it’s also useful for light bulbs. Similarly, computers are useful for just about everything, and we similarly think that AI ultimately has a lot of application-specific opportunities for us. So we’re interested in leading in AI, in the broad sense.

Mikeal Rogers: Yeah. It’s also a really unique challenge. When we had these big projects, you could sustain them because you could line up investment, either from companies or from individuals…But now that your product is built on this dependency chain of hundreds of libraries, understanding the particular needs around each one of those libraries is quite difficult. And finding a scalable sustainability strategy for them is also really difficult.

I think that’s why I’ve put a lot more time into cultural changes lately… Because if you can change the culture around not just open source, but around the way that companies think about open source, and think about contributing to it, you can have a much broader effect than you would have on any individual.

Not every project is Node.js. You’re not gonna get a foundation with a bunch of corporate sponsors lined up. That’s a lot of infrastructure to run; I know because I ran it… And it’s certainly necessary for Node, but you’re not gonna be able to line that up for even a project the size of Babel. An entire foundation around it would be overkill.

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?”

Daniel Zaltsman: Yeah, and on the flipside of that, maintainers will benefit from actually labeling their different issues “hacktoberfest”, and doing so strategically. At first, when we introduced the recommendation to label your issues “hacktoberfest”, that was a really good move, because it sort of allowed contributors to find issues with ease. Now what we’re seeing is there’s actually a lot of – you know, last year 240,000 pull requests to 60,000 repos. That’s the activity that happened in Hacktoberfest 2017.

So think about 240,000 pull requests… The smart thing to do for maintainers is to add specificity to the labeling strategy for the different issues. Is it a “first timers welcome”? Do you wanna talk about the time investment that it’s gonna take, or the difficulty level? Things like that allow the community of contributors to jump in and self-identify and connect with these issues in a way that’s actually gonna get things done.

The other thing I would say to maintainers is don’t necessarily label everything at the beginning of October. It’s October 1st, it’s important to already have some issues labeled now, however don’t worry about getting everything in there right now. You can spread that out throughout the month too, because different things will pop up at different times. We found that that has worked for maintainers.

Mike Bugembe: Yeah, I think – I’m now reaching in my head – I actually had an approach that helped to – okay, so I think what we were thinking about was there’s lots of decisions that take place within an organization; you have some operational, you have some strategic. A good AI use case is a decision that is repeatable. So it happens more than once, and whenever it happens, it’s relatively the same questions asked. I keep referring to that email example, it’s the one that’s on top of my head.

Let’s take Amazon, for example. Whenever somebody has put something in their shopping basket, there is always the decision of “What else could we serve them in order to increase the basket size?” So you get that recommendation at the bottom. That decision is a repeatable decision, and it’s a repeatable decision at a specific point in time. That point in time is very clear - every time someone puts something in their basket, you know you have the opportunity to up-sell them so that you can increase their basket size. That decision happens all the time.

So the questions you would ask is “Can the organization identify when that decision will be made?” Yes. “Can they decide or have an indication of what information is considered every time that decision takes place, and it’s the same information, and are the possible actions that they could take consistent, so it’s relatively the same ones?” Then next you say “Can the outcome be measures?” One of the most valuable things about working in AI and machines is how measurable the outcomes of the algorithm are… Because ultimately, it’s an investment; data scientists are not cheap, cloud computing costs, although most say they should be cheaper, I always feel to some extent they can be more expensive than on prem… But then also your costs can go through the roof with the amount of compute and the amount of data that’s available.

So looking at some repeatable decisions that are relatively complex, but they are measurable. That’s the sort of lens that we would look for a good AI use case.

Joe Doliner: Urbit is this very cool idea where they’re building this cryptographically-secure, peer-to-peer server network where you can just get a server that you can run anything on, but it’s really opaque how to use it; it’s very hard to use. People do use it, and they know this is a problem, they’re working a lot on this… But for us, we wanted to make sure that we solved this problem very well up front.

We saw that people were switching to containers, people were switching to container orchestrators like Kubernetes, and in fact, Kubernetes really seemed like the cream of the crop in terms of container orchestrators… So we made the decision very early on to make our product just completely deploy on Kubernetes. What that means is that when we’re trying to get someone to use our product, if they’re already using Kubernetes, then we can get it up and running for them in like 30 seconds. It’s just a straight Kubernetes manifest that deploys on them. Getting people to that first magic moment with your product, where they’re actually doing something with it - the shorter you can make that feedback loop the better, and the more successful you’re gonna be.

The other very interesting aspect of this is how do you build a company around it, because one of the things that we’ve needed to do, we’ve gotten some developers of the open source community that have come in, but most of the people who do the heavy lifting of Pachyderm development are developers that we employ, and they’re getting paid to do their job, which is a great way to align incentives with money.
For that, you need to have some way that you can eventually make money off of your product. I think for a lot of different kinds of open source projects, I just don’t see any way that this can ever happen. If you’re making an open source BitTorrent client for example, I don’t see how anybody’s ever gonna pay for that. Maybe I’m wrong, I’d love to be proven wrong, but I think there is a lot of people who won’t.

[27:51] For us, fortunately… Companies, when they invest in data infrastructure, it’s a big investment. If they’re running Pachyderm, they’re probably gonna have 10, 20 engineers who are just using it every single day as a major part of their workflow. In those cases, companies are often very willing to pay for support contracts, because it will just make their developers more effective, it saves money… That’s how we make money right now, we just sell companies support contracts. That means they get to call us on the phone and we’ll fix whatever problems that they have.

The other thing that can work in terms of a business model for open source is if you can turn it into some sort of a hosted model. The analogy isn’t totally perfect, but GitHub is sort of a monetization strategy for Git, right? GitHub itself isn’t open source, but you can see how that works.

We’re planning to eventually build an equivalent for Pachyderm, which is tentatively called PachHub. You can imagine this will be a site much like GitHub, except instead of code repositories there will be data repositories, and there’ll be pipelines that are processing those, and you can see what the entire community is doing with all of this open source data and you can modify what they’re doing with it, and you can contribute back to this open data science community that we wanna build.

Karl Fogel: And then the other side is this new thing where companies start using open source releases and projects as a strategic move in markets, where they open source things because they see for example that a competitor is moving in on something, and the first company realizes that if they get first mover advantage by releasing a decent library that’s open source - okay, their competitor will use it, but the first company has all the employees with the expertise, they have momentum, they will be able to run the project and maintain influence, and the second company won’t really have a choice, except to get on board. So at least now you’ve put them in a kind of parasitic position relative to yourself. You gave them free code, but you also hobbled them a little bit, you coupled them to you in a way that is advantageous for you. And that’s just one motivation, it’s not the only reason companies release open source.

The other end of the dumbbell is these large scale, always salary-to-developers funded multi-company projects that as an individual contributor you’re not very likely to waltz in. I’m sure there are some people who are talented enough and have the time or the ability to go in and make some fundamental, important contribution to TensorFlow, but I have a feeling that most of the changes going to TensorFlow are from Google employees or from employees at other companies who are using TensorFlow and where they have to make the changes part of their job.

So that stuff, that requires a higher upfront investment and expertise, and it’s only sustainable because there are corporate dollars behind it.

And then the middle part of the dumbbell is thinning out a little bit, which is what I used to think of most of the open source world, which is this kind of profusion of apps written in all different languages, for all different kinds of platforms, with different GUI widget toolkits and things… It’s not that they don’t exist, but as a percentage of open source activity, I think that’s going down.

Abi Noda: Yeah. Or a mature one. Either way, a huge part of what we do is the expertise we have on the program side. Like, “Oh, you want to run a survey? Well, how do you get buy-in to do that?” People might say, “No way. We’re not distracting our developers with this.” How do you even get buy-in? How do you actually communicate the survey in a way where people aren’t gonna get scared, like we were talking about earlier? How do you do that? How do you get managers looped into this process so you’re bringing them along, instead of this feeling like a thing that’s just taking a chunk out of their day and Slack queue? How do you do that? How do you talk about the results in a way that resonates with leadership? How can you present the information in a way that leadership cares? How can you use this to advocate for additional resources to fund the investments that you believe need to be made? How can you use this to create a positive feedback loop for teams?

All that stuff I just described has nothing to do with really our tool. It at all has to do with things that need to happen outside of our tool. And what we do at DX - they have kind of a long title, so I’ll skip their job title… But we have effectively people in dedicated roles at DX who work directly with our customers, and their job is to handhold them through this process. I think that it’s just such a rewarding part of what we do, and what we can offer, because it’s almost like executive coaching. That’s how I think of it. We’re helping these budding DevEx leaders, we’re giving them kind of the playbook that we’ve seen work at much more mature organizations; we’re helping them get promoted. We’re helping them get funding for the role and initiatives that they care about.

I always kind of joke internally at the company, I’m like “Our North Star metric should be how many of our customers – like the specific, not the company, but the people we work with… How many of them get mega-bonuses or promotions at the end of the year?” That is how we should be measuring how well we’re doing. Because there’s a people side to this. There’s all this measuring, that strategy, but ultimately, we’re working with people, and we’re trying to help them evangelize and build, improve developer experience in their organization. And if they’re not successful individually… Like, if they’re not getting promoted, they’re getting defunded. And if they’re getting defunded, productivity is not getting better at the company, and we’re not going to be around either.

Spencer Kimball: Well, there’s a number of different aspects to the successful strategy, and as you say, ours will continue to evolve… One is you out-innovate. I think Google is probably the only of the cloud vendors that has a truly comparable technology. Amazon’s better at repackaging existing open source… And part of that out-innovating is – you may have read, we’ve made some license changes to the core of Cockroach. We adopted something called the BSL. That’s part of how you continue to out-innovate. It gives you a little bit of protection.

[52:10] Then there’s the idea of being multi-cloud, or cloud-agnostic, and that includes private clouds. So the deployment flexibility is extremely important to the world’s big companies that have been around for a couple of decades and have lots of existing investments in data centers and high-value use cases that aren’t gonna be easily moved to the public cloud. I think that is incredibly important.

Part of something that’s worth touching on further is just how much innovation can be done in the database as a service model. And that’s something that we’re pushing really hard or right now. Ultimately, we’d like to deliver databases with a lot less friction than they currently are delivered as a service.

Right now when you get a database as a service, there’s quite a bit of cost to it. Like, a sort of production-ready, encrypted instance of RDS, that’s sort of the minimal footprint - it still costs you about $100 a month, which is a lot. And you’re choosing the size of nodes, where those nodes are located… There’s a number of decisions that increase the friction of the process.

[56:00] We’d like to drive to a world where databases are truly serverless, in the sense that when you get a relational database, it’s something that you can pay for exactly what you use, not worried about what kind of machines, how many, and even where they’re located. You just get a database, and that database is truly capable of global operation. Hey, if you only use it on the East Coast of the United States, great. You wanna add the EU? That’s extremely simple. It’s as simple, essentially, as setting a different value for a column in a table specifying what region the data should be stored in, or whether it should be global, as an example.

And further, we actually think that price is a major impediment to using something like a relational database as a service. We’d like to make these things perpetually free for developers, for a pretty generous tier. So think about what Gmail did in 2003, where they were effectively making a gigabyte of email free; at the time, you had Yahoo! –