Adam Stacoviak: “No, I want to make money.” It was a joke. It was a joke.

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.

Jerod Santo: You need to have money to make money, I guess.

Jerod Santo: And it was really fun. And I feel like some of that excitement right now – I’m getting flashbacks to that with MCP servers, because there’s a lot of cool demos right now. You can plug it into darn near anything. You’ve got an MCP server… You know, I saw a guy who just plugged it into Postgres. And of course, his LLM can speak SQL, but it’s just better. It seems like it can just do better with not having to write SQL just to hit the MCP server. And you can just talk to your Postgres database.

And then I’m curious about like – well, what happened the last time was the good old days got old, and then the companies grew up and they needed to make money, and they shut things off, and they locked out third party developers… And it just got very hostile eventually. Sometimes out of necessity, sometimes you don’t know, but it happened… And I’m curious your thoughts on that parallel, because it seems like MCP and letting your LLM talk to X, where X is not the social network, but X is all of the things that have MCP servers, is really cool right now, and could produce some really interesting use cases, and let some awesome hacks out. And then I’m wondering, is there a plan for when that spirit of openness changes? What are your thoughts?

Jerod Santo: So I saw this trend coming a couple of years ago and I invested in a company that does non-alcoholic gin and whiskey… And they’re very popular. And they sent me a bottle, because I was like an early investor, or whatever. It’s one of these – I’m not sure if you had to be accredited or not, but you can invest in private companies now, through sales, in different entities. And one of these – it’s like a crowdfund, to a certain extent, but not like a kickstart. Anyways, they sent me a bottle of it… And I told my wife about it, because I’m like “Yeah, I mean, dry January is a thing now.” Like you said, people are starting to want to have the social aspect of drinking, but without the actual alcohol part… And so more and more of these alternatives are just going to make money. And so I think I put like a thousand bucks in; I’m not like – I’m not a big investor. I like to just place little bets and see what happens with them. It’s fun. And they sent me a bottle. And you know what? We cracked that sucker open and tried it… It was disgusting. [laughs]

Salvatore Sanfilippo: Basically, they started the company and approached me immediately after starting the company in Germany. We were in Germany, there was some kind of conference, a NoSQL conference of some kind… And they asked if I wanted to join the effort earlier. But I was in a too good situation, basically taking money for free, and working on my system, so I said “It’s okay for me if you do business with this thing. The license allows it, so…” But eventually, it was the most obvious thing that trying to make money with Redis would also pay me.

Anurag Goel: …and growing revenue, and doing it in a way that allows me to keep Render an independent entity, and for me to have enough control over what we build and how we build it, and to work with the people I want to work with… And all of that essentially means staying independent over the very long term. We’ve also raised all this capital, and we have a responsibility to make money for our investors, for our employees… And so all of that, I think, does naturally mean in today’s environment an IPO. But that’s just like a step in the long-term journey. Because one thing you realize is post-IPO I’ll still have the intensity of problems that I have today. They’re not going to go away. We’ll just have a different set of problems. You just go faster. It never gets easier. This is a famous cycling quote. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t get easier.

We’ve raised all this money. In some ways, my life is harder than it was when I wrote the first line of code for Render. And it’s harder because I have to constantly reinvent my job every six months. And learn very quickly. And learn a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with engineering, on how to run a company. And that’s never going to change. So the IPO is just a step in that journey. We’re nowhere close to an IPO, but the way I think about it is long term this company should outlast me. And we talk about it internally as this being a generational effort. And all of that points to staying independent, because we’ve seen what happens when you get acquired by Salesforce.

Jimmy Miller: Yeah, yeah. This is – okay, this is a blog post that I will write at some point soon, which is I think we have overindexed on the values that are good for our day job, and start applying them to our everyday life when we’re coding, and I think this is a big mistake that we’re doing. In your day job it’s often not good to reinvent the wheel. You should just pull that well-used library that everyone knows. Don’t go make your own frontend framework. Use React, use Svelt, whatever you want to have. It’s fine. I’m not going to be partisan here. But in your day to day life, when you’re coding - yeah, reinvent the wheel. Use your own framework. Do whatever you want. Because all of those values are made for the company. They’re made to make money. And if that’s not your goal, if your goal is to learn and have fun, we need to ignore all those values that we keep shoving on.

Bert Hubert: Yeah. And these things all happen. So I’ve worked with an impossible Python project that just requires two different versions of the same dependency, and they cannot do it. And you also don’t know how to recover from that. But on the other hand, it is of course sometimes great fun that someone just moves ahead so quickly, because they embed all of Chrome in their project. So yeah, boom.

[01:00:02.05] And I’m sort of this ascetic person that needs to be really – yeah, I need to work really hard to display something that looks like a webpage, and someone else has no qualms at all about embedding an entire Electron copy. So it is always a bit of tension that says “Look, I’m telling you about these things that will be bad like five years from now”, and these people are like “Hey, but I’m shipping today.” So I do really feel that stuff. But especially we’ve – lately we had InfluxDB, I think, which all of a sudden… Which is a time series database, and I think that they have now limited you to 500 metrics or so, because they want to make money. And of course, I respect that they want to make money, but if you built your whole project on InfluxDB - yeah, you have an issue right now, because your business model might not support their business model.

Adam Stacoviak: [01:05:54.12] And I installed Windows, and I’m just so sad for Microsoft, that they can’t get that right. They have the largest installable base of a computer user on the planet. And that’s their best effort. It’s just – I’m just sad for them. That’s just – it’s a mess. They installed so many softwares that are just not necessary, and it’s just disgusting. Maybe it’s their fault, maybe it’s not their fault. I feel like they can solve the problem; they’re not solving the problem. But they’re not.

I don’t believe there’s a default, free password manager in Windows. I googled it… PCMag disagrees. They say that there’s other ones. So they haven’t selected like this default installed for Windows, but… You know, somebody’s got to do this, and who’s going to lead that effort? It can’t be 1Password, because they’re of service. They’re a software company trying to make money. I mean, I think giving away 1Password for free is not very smart… Although it could be the Xerox of 1Password, or I guess the Xerox of password managers, is that they could give it away for free to everybody to a certain limit, and attract a lot of people. And they’re already on all the platforms, so maybe that’s a good way for them… But there is no LetsEncrypt for password managers out there where it’s just free to everyone and accessible.

Tom Occhino: [00:15:52.22] There is a business there, yeah. It’s very interesting, the contrast. One of the things I’ve loved about being at Vercel versus Facebook was Facebook had a business that was over there, that was funding everything that we needed to do, and it was enough for us to make our own engineers more efficient, to level up the quality of our applications… But we didn’t really have to concern ourselves with how other companies are adopting our technologies. So that means that, you know, we collaborate, we build an open-source community, we benefit from recruiting, and thought leadership, and all these things… But there was no sort of like “On the balance sheet, here’s the value that we derive.” And I think being able to invest in open-source technologies from the angle of “There’s kind of a business that’s funding the open-source development, but I’m more directly connected to the customers” has been a really enlightening and great experience. We now can talk about business outcomes for our customers, and how the sort of frameworks and the technologies that we built led to those business outcomes.

But one of the things that both companies kind of have in common is Facebook famously said “We don’t build services to make money, we make money so we can keep building better services.” And Vercel is kind of the same way now with open source investment. We don’t build Next.js to make money; we have a business that makes money, so that we can keep funding Next.js development. And I like being more directly connected to the customers, and seeing the ways that our framework improvements enable them to achieve better business outcomes, which is a much more direct link than I had at Facebook.

Tom Occhino: Yeah, I completely agree. One of the things we saw in the early days of React was because React became relevant outside of Facebook, people working at Facebook believed that the technology stack that they were using and the skills that they were learning were relevant, and so they stayed around a long time. They didn’t feel like their skills were being sort of “This only applies to this technology stack, it only applies to this company”, so they didn’t feel locked in. And I think with Next.js, we need people who use Next.js to not feel like they’re locked into Vercel, or they just won’t use Next.js. So it’s somewhat counterintuitive, but the best thing you can do to grow both Next.js adoption and probably Vercel usage is make it very clear how to use them independently.

And so yeah, we’ve seen lots and lots of companies do different things in this space. One of the nice features of my background and Guillermo’s background is that we both are very passionate independently about open source itself. That’s where we started. I started out on MooTools, and we’ve been kind of web zealots ever since.

So yeah, I think telling that story is really important, because if the only thing you ever hear is that these things don’t work independently, “This is about lock-in”, or “You can only use them together, and this is about funneling usage into Vercel”, if that’s the only thing you hear, you’ll eventually just be like “Yeah, that must be true.” But once we’re like “No, no, no. Actually, here’s how it works, and here’s how we innovate, and then here’s how we generalize, and here’s the proof”, people are like “Oh, okay, great. There is a narrative here. There is a story here. There is intentionality here. It’s not just this sort of funnel.” So that’s why I say we don’t build Next.js to make money, we make money to build Next.js, and Svelte, and other technologies as well.

Adam Stacoviak: I have an idea for you. Or at least let me see if I understand this right. And this is where my idea comes from. What if – let’s play a scenario. What if the developer world rejects this because they’re anti-crypto? What if Tea – because you can still determine the dependency graph, with or without onboarding. You can still determine the graph, because it’s in Git. So long as it’s open source and available, you can determine that graph and its importance. What if it becomes a speculation engine so the people who do care about speculating can leverage it as crypto, whether developers or not, and now it’s sort of like maybe this adjacent proxy to value. And - not me saying this, but I’m going to say it… Who cares if the developers are anti or for crypto, and who cares if they truly adopt this or not? It can be a way to speculate the value of the lone developer in Nebraska’s thing, and create value, whether they take it or not. Because you can now have a betting world, basically, against all of open source. And there’s a way to make money, slash create value, or speculate value, and take away that value if you want.

Quincy Larson: Yeah. So we think 50 years out, 60 years out. I think in terms of what is likely to be accomplished. Okay, so if you go all the way back to the the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first mass-produced book in history, it was more than – it was like 600 years ago. It was just with the advent of the printing press. And this book came out and it brought literacy to everyone in the 1450s. 1450s. 600+ years ago. 670 years ago. And still, we have illiteracy. I don’t believe that AI is just going to magically change illiteracy. I think that there are a lot of people who just – it’s still hard to learn to read if nobody teaches you how to read; it’s very difficult. I hear all these things of people who have unschooled their kids, and they haven’t necessarily put effort into teaching the kids… There’s just this idea that the kids will naturally learn how to read. And some kids might, but a lot of kids won’t necessarily learn how to read, and they’ll end up not having reading level nearly what their peers, and it’ll be a huge kind of crushing weight on their shoulders, like “I’m not good at reading.” And they’ll carry that with them. And I feel like it’s the same thing with technology.

People certainly have this with math. “Oh, I just suck at math.” They never learned how to do math, and they always feel bad about themselves, and they’re always intimidated whenever they’re reading a book and there’s some math, or something like that, or whenever they look at some equation… Even the most simple equations, when they’re walking around the science museum and they’re just “Oooh…!” They get this anxiety. And same thing with software. “I don’t really know how a web server works. I don’t really know what garbage collection is doing.” It’s just, in the back of your mind you’re just kind of unsure of yourself.

[01:30:00.20] And so if over the course of 600 years there are still people – when they have had this relatively abundant thing that they could read, mass market… 600 years… It’s going to be a very long time before technology literacy is solved, and before everybody can just feel confident that they understand how recursion works, and things like that. And I do think that these are things that people in Star Trek – like, I always look at Star Trek and I realize that it’s flawed in the sense that it’s just kind of this vision from the ’70s, and then it got interpolated through the ‘90s, with Next Generation, Voyager, and D6-9, which is the best one, according to Andrew Brown, big Trekkie and massive contributor to freeCodeCamp… He’s created 50 certification preparation courses on our YouTube. But I realize that it’s just kind of a sci-fi vision of the future, but it makes practical sense. A lot of the things in that show, I can see that that’s where we’re heading. We’re heading toward computers where you just talk, and you can use declarative speech instead of imperative speech. And the machine, it just gives you a lot more affordance in figuring out what needs to be done. And if you watch The Expanse, there’s lots of AI… But it’s not everywhere, and they’re not talking to AIs, and stuff. It’s just like doing the little things like recalibrating the turrets on the ship, and stuff like that.

And I think that 100 years from now, if we want to talk 100 years - let’s just choose a big, round number - people are still going to exist. We’re probably not going to be all walking around in exosuits. I will be impressed if we’ve terraformed Mars at all by then. I just genuinely don’t think that there’s the political will, and the budget, and all that stuff, and I think that people greatly underestimate how difficult it will be to colonize space, and stuff like that. I think realistically, we’re still going to be here. Hopefully, we’ll have done some stuff to mitigate climate change and mitigate job loss due to automation, and stuff like that… But people are still going to need to learn. People are still probably going to need to work and figure out a way to make money. I don’t believe that UBI is coming to save us, universal basic income, or anything like that. I think fundamentally, people are going to still need to learn and they’re going to still need to go out and do things to provide for their families. That has been how it has been throughout civilization, throughout the history of every civilization, whether that is the hunter-gatherer tribes… People have needed to go out and figure out how to keep the calories coming to keep the body going. And I think institutions come and fall, but we’ve got these human animals, 100,000 years of human tribes interacting with one another, and warring, and things like that… But I still think that they’re going to need to learn. I don’t think there’s going to be a magic matrix thing where you just “Teach me how to fly a helicopter” and there’s a program.

Zac Smith: [00:27:06.01] Yeah, exactly. [laughter] Well, I mean, I think what I learned – I’d always respected Intel as a company. But what I learned working with them pretty closely was how hard of a task they had ahead of them. I mean, first off, we think market leading for 10 or 15 years in something… They’ve been market leading for 40 years. It’s really, really hard when you used to own 90% of the market, to change anything. And I think that that has to be appreciated. Because I didn’t appreciate how complicated cultural changes when it starts to go off track, or when you forgot or couldn’t figure out how to innovate the next thing, because you were so busy making all the money, and winning all the market. Because why would you do anything else than x86 great data center CPUs and desktop CPUs, because it’s working?

And so that’s what I kind of appreciated out of that. I would say that I was surprised… I did find that all the chip companies really struggled… It’s kind of like blindingly obvious, and at the same time not in the realm of possibility that the chip companies all needed some sort of recurring or subscription revenue. They have huge, huge, increasing investment cycles around CapEx, whether that’s designing their technology, or that’s producing it with Intel and their fab… But they have these huge things where they go and then they just sell the chip one time. And increasingly, they’re competing against, I believe, their biggest customers, hyperscale clouds, which are also making their own chips. But they have a nice, juicy, recurring revenue model. So they get to make money on those chips every day, or for years and years and years.

And I believe that [unintelligible 00:29:00.21] and I was very surprised. I was like “Hey, y’all, we should work on that together.” And every chip company, when we would talk to them, was kind of like “Yeah, yeah, we should. But could you guys just buy the chips from us, please?” And we’re like “No. Let’s practice the other thing. Let’s move to the Apple subscription model, versus the buy your phone through Verizon. Let’s figure out how to do that. And let’s also solve things like circularity, and full recycling, and reuse of components, and all the other stuff that goes with that.” It can be better; not just like more stable revenue, it can also just be better.

And it’s kind of what customers wanted too, because customers kept expressing “Hey, I want access to this stuff. I don’t want to be sold more kit all the time.” But it was so hard for the organizations - and I still think it is; I haven’t seen any meaningful approach. And I’m kind of curious right now, especially given the dominance that Nvidia has within its business, if it’s going to try and change the model of transferring its IP, the GPUs, as a service basis, versus on a CapEx basis. And I just – I haven’t seen that yet. And I’m quite surprised by that.

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

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

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

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

Kevin Ball: So I have very mixed feelings about this. I mean, I love Evan You. I think he’s done incredible work for the JavaScript world and community, and he clearly knows how to build really, really good tests. I don’t feel like we have a great track record for building tooling infrastructure, open source tooling infrastructure in VC-backed companies. I feel like that sets up the incentives in a really dangerous and broken way.

We don’t see much out of the last company that tried to do this. What was it, RoamJS? What are they doing? Well, they got detoured on trying to make money, and stopped making really cool tools. Stopped having the impact that they potentially could have had.

And so, I don’t know. Evan has a track record, and has shown he knows how to build great things, so definitely, I will give it the try… But I am worried about what that means for these tools, now that they’re in the VC-funded ecosystem.

And it’s interesting too, because I feel like Evan was one of the examples I had seen for essentially crowd-backed development that actually seemed to work. He was getting enough money from Patreon and these other things to really replace a developer’s salary, or even more. I think he was even able to hire some folks on the amount of money he was bringing in, and go. And so to see him come into the VC rocket ship world - it is a message that maybe that’s not as sustainable as it looked for him.

Jerod Santo: I mean, it’s one place. Greed also drives innovation. Like, “I want to make money. I need to invent something to make more money.”

Jerod Santo: A lot of our advertisers are venture-backed, and that’s why they have some money to spend on getting their name out there, right? And so that’s a straightforward thing. I don’t know if Raycast is a freemium based on a pro version, right? But a lot of these are going teams. When you have a team, there’s our business model. Warp is doing that, Zed is doing that, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that’s a pretty straightforward line. That doesn’t bug me.

Of course, there’s still the question of “Can you actually make enough money with that model, to make money for your investors and thrive, and all that?” But at least it’s there, and it’s obvious, and it’s not like “Well, we’ll just figure it out later.” That’s my biggest concern with venture-backed.

Jerod Santo: It is to make money by any means possible.

Jerod Santo: [25:51] There’s an inherent tension between, let’s just say, leadership inside of organizations that use websites to make money, and engineering inside organizations that use websites to make money. And some of that tension I think is exacerbated by the availability of tools such as – is it Segment? Am I remembering Segment? Which one’s the adapter pattern for your – well, let’s just go with Google Tag Manager, for instance… Where it’s basically like grease for the skids of how many third-party scripts can I load on my webpage without asking anybody for permission, because I’m in leadership… And I just wonder how folks can, at an engineering level, deal with a situation where maybe they don’t have the entire control over everything that goes onto their webpages.

Jerod Santo: That’s why I’m over here thinking, who needs a label? No wonder they need the social media platforms, because who needs them anymore? I’m sure there are things they bring to the table, but nowhere near what it used to be in order to get your music out to people. Now, yes, there’s more noise than there ever has been, but it’s always been the case, at least in American history, that very few people could make their living by making music. I mean, it’s not a mass market job. It’s a very rare person that can get that done. I would argue it’s easier today. There’s probably more people making a living off of their music creations than in the past, because it’s easier to find your 1,000 true fans. And you’re not maybe going to be a multimillionaire, but you can probably make a living that way, because you don’t have to go city to city to actually literally find them.

Now, once you’ve got your fans, it is harder to make money, I think, which is why touring, again, has become the way that artists are making a living now… It used to be their album sales, and the tour was kind of to promote the CD. Now it’s the music promotes the tour, and the tour is how you make money, and you sell merch, and you can make a living that way… It’s a hard job. A lot of people burn out and don’t survive touring. It’s not an easy life to live, although it’s probably a very exciting life. So I just wonder, what are the labels bringing today, in 2024, that is of value compared to what they extract? I don’t know what that equation looks like.

Justin Garrison: At some point, that’s like the business decision of “We need to be profitable, or we need to make money, and so these people are really expensive. Let’s get rid of them” is wild to me, because –