This week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients.

Why should Titan exist? In Joe’s words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn’t sit well with us. So, we built Titan.” On today’s show Joe shares the journey, the why’s, the how’s, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed.

Today is another day in the sun for open source! HashiCorp has announced an enormous $100 Million round on a unicorn valuation of $1.9 Billion.

HashiCorp launched in 2012, which we covered around the same time with founder and creator Mitchell Hashimoto, and again a year later shortly after officially forming HashiCorp with Armon Dadgar.

Ron Miller of TechCrunch included this pull-quote to give context to HashiCorp’s roots.

After graduating and getting jobs, Hashimoto and Dadgar reunited in 2012 and launched HashiCorp. They decided to break their big problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces and eventually built the five open source tools currently on offer. In fact, they found as they developed each one, the community let them know about adjacent problems and they layered on each new tool to address a different need.

Over the years, HashiCorp has been in our newsfeed and on our podcasts regularly — so dig into the archives while we make plans to sync up with Mitchell on the future plans of HashiCorp.

I’m currently working at a top tier investment bank as a software engineer. I’m an insignificant cog in a machine that skims the cream from the milk. I’m earning the most money I’ve ever made and yet I’m the least fulfilled I’ve ever been.

Right now in the UK and across the world, things are uncertain. Companies are laying workers off, there’s a cost of living and energy crisis. I’m excruciatingly lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to develop the skillset I’ve got. In times like these every signal is telling me to stay on the path I’m on, enjoying the comfort and safety of a high paying job.

I’m not going to listen. I’m quitting and I’m leaving this place. I’ll see you in the mountains.

After this post blew up, Seán wrote a follow-up on what quitting the rat race means to him.

Alex Ewerlöf and his team implemented “Tech Debt Friday”

Engineers looked forward to the Tech Debt Friday. The team would happily remind management that this day cannot (under any circumstances) be planned for regular feature/bugfix work. Although we fixed some bugs along the way, this was primarily an investment to make future feature development cheaper while improving the maintainability and reliability.

Initially it was hard to defend spending 10% of the team bandwidth on tech debt, but over time the payback was huge

He goes on to list eight things that happened as result of this policy. Good stuff.

This post by Chris de la Iglesia starts off very down on blockchains, but ends up not so down after all:

We are entering a new world with a new focus on giving users control over their data, their identity, and their systems. We are building distributed filesystems, distributed identity, and yes, blockchains. I think oftentimes we end up seeing only the blockchain technology due to the headlines and the financial investment, but distributed systems as a whole are taking off in a big, big way.

Zach Leatherman has been considering sustainability models for Eleventy, so he surveyed the field to see what everyone else in the web framework ecosystem are doing. Check out his post for the raw data and his analysis. Here’s where he stands as of today:

I don’t have the answers. I definitely wouldn’t agree that Eleventy has figured out our sustainable monetization strategy but I do really admire the success that Vue has had solving this exact problem. I do know that I have no interest in Trend 2 (raise investment money) but I’ll continue to keep a keen eye on what other indie-framework folks are doing.

Grafana Labs announced a $220 million Series C investment round yesterday at a $3 billion valuation. I had Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana Labs, on Founders Talk late last year — should I get him back on?

Congrats on the “B” Raj and team.

As with our previous rounds in 2019 and 2020, this funding will enable us to focus on accelerating the development of our open source observability platform and supporting the success of our community and our customers.

Here’s one example of how we’re pushing toward those goals: Earlier this year, we launched an “actually useful,” forever-free tier of Grafana Cloud that provides the industry’s most generous no-cost, fully managed observability stack, with 50GB of Loki logs, 10,000 series of Prometheus metrics, and 3 Grafana dashboard users included. Now, we’re adding 50GB of traces to the free plan, leveraging our Grafana Tempo OSS project, which recently became generally available for production use.

I hadn’t heard of Prosus prior to this announcement, so if you’re at all like me, this is for you:

Prosus invests globally across a range of online platforms focused on areas such as food delivery, classifieds and fintech. It also maintains a more than $200 billion holding in Tencent. Prosus’ parent company, Naspers Ltd., acquired the Tencent stake in 2001 for $34 million.

Turning $34 million into $200 billion is quite the feat. They’re a savvy bunch, if nothing else. Joel Spolsky also wrote about the acquisition on his blog, ensuring us that everything is going to be okay:

Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices.

I hope he’s right, but color me skeptical. Stack Overflow surely isn’t perfect as is, but it’d be a huge set back to the software world if it were to decline from here.

From the AWS open source blog:

Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality. This project includes OpenSearch (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (derived from Kibana 7.10.2). Additionally, the OpenSearch project is the new home for our previous distribution of Elasticsearch (Open Distro for Elasticsearch), which includes features such as enterprise security, alerting, machine learning, SQL, index state management, and more. All of the software in the OpenSearch project is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2).

Did you listen to our epic Elastic vs AWS episode on The Changelog? I’d really love to hear from the community on this subject…is this a good thing or a bad thing for open source at large? Why didn’t AWS just work with Elasticsearch (the company)?

We plan to rename our existing Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Ryan Dahl and Bert Belder announcing the Deno Company:

Deno is not a monolithic system, but rather a set of technologies that we believe can be repurposed to a variety of needs. Not every use-case of server-side JavaScript needs to access the file system; our infrastructure makes it possible to compile out unnecessary bindings. This allows us to create custom runtimes for different applications: Electron-style GUIs, Cloudflare Worker-style Serverless Functions, embedded scripting for databases, etc.

In order to vigorously pursue these ideas, we have raised 4.9 million dollars of seed capital… This investment means we will have a staff of full-time expert engineers working to improving Deno. We will ensure that issues are addressed, bugs are fixed, timely releases are made; we will ensure Deno is a platform others can build on with trust.

Deno will remain MIT licensed: no open core. It appears they will commercialize through infrastructure and other offerings. Maybe deploy is the first of these?

Maintaining a GitHub project with other people creates “many email notifications about various things.” But they don’t all hold the same importance. Maxime Vaillancourt shows us how to use Gmail filters and labels to better manage all the emails coming from GitHub issues, etc.

I receive many email notifications about various things that happen on there: direct requests to review a particular piece of code, feedback on pull requests I’ve opened, pull requests merged by their authors, people directly mentioning our username in a comment, issues closed by their authors, etc. I receive hundreds of emails every single week.

…using Gmail filters, we can automatically add labels to GitHub notification emails based on their content. This solution takes less than 10 minutes to implement, and the long-term return on investment is quite appreciable.

Rina Jensen shares more details on the future of MDN Web Docs in this post on Mozilla Hacks.

First we want to be clear, MDN is not going away. The core engineering team will continue to run the MDN site and Mozilla will continue to develop the platform.

However, because of Mozilla’s restructuring, we have had to scale back our overall investment in developer outreach, including MDN. Our Co-Founder and CEO Mitchell Baker outlines the reasons why here. As a result, we will be pausing support for DevRel sponsorship, Hacks blog and Tech Speakers. The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writing.

No matter how much investment software companies may put into tooling and training their developers, “C++, at its core, is not a safe language,” said Ryan Levick, Microsoft cloud developer advocate, during the AllThingsOpen virtual conference last month, explaining, in a virtual talk, why Microsoft is gradually switching to Rust to build its infrastructure software, away from C/C++. And it is encouraging other software industry giants to consider the same.

This sounds SO familiar, as heard from Josh Aas recently on The Changelog (listen here).

We certainly should not be writing any new code in C and C++. The opportunity for vulnerabilities – I mean, it absolutely will have vulnerabilities, and we need to get that type of code away from our networks to start with, and then probably away from most other things, too… So I would hope that in 10-20 years we think it’s crazy to be deploying major (or maybe even minor) pieces of software that are written in languages that are not memory-safe.

So we’re trying to remove code written in C and C++ from our infrastructure at Let’s Encrypt. I think that’s just a basic part of diligence applied to secure infrastructure. If your stack is some giant pile of C++ or C at the network edge, followed by OpenSSL written in C, followed by a Linux kernel written in C, glibc - your whole pathway has got all this code that you just know is full of security holes. It absolutely is. You just can’t claim that those are even close to secure systems. They’re absolutely not. We’re gonna look back on this and say “That was crazy. We have better options today.”

YC touches so many companies that it is in effect an index on the entire early stage venture capital industry, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average for public stocks.

Lots to ponder in this post. Developer tools, AI, education, and health care are all trending right now in YC investment while hardware and fintech sectors are slowing.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the value traded in large scale investments like these. What do both sides get? With this particular investment, however, it’s pretty obvious what Microsoft is getting (Azure++) and what OpenAI is getting (an expanded R&D budget). It’s also worth noting that this is specifically focused on Artificial General Intelligence, not merely advancing the current state of the art in Machine Learning.

Companies like GitLab and Zapier are 💯 remote. Stripe’s next engineering push, colocated in what they call “hubs,” will be a new style of hub — remote.

Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote. We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet.

Stripe will hire over a hundred remote engineers this year. They will be deployed across every major engineering workstream at Stripe.

This means if you’ve ever wanted to join the ranks of Stripe, but moving was a blocker for you, the window of opportunity is now open to you and there’s no limit to what you can work on.

We have seen such promising results from our remote engineers that we are greatly increasing our investment in remote engineering.

OpenAI, one of the largest and most influential AI research entities, was originally a non-profit. However, they just announced that they are creating a “capped-profit” entity, OpenAI LP. This capped-profit entity will supposedly help them accomplish their mission of building artificial general intelligence (AGI):

We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance. Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit—which we are calling a “capped-profit” company.

The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount—and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP—are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity.

To some this makes total sense. Others have criticized the move, because they say that it misrepresents money as the only barrier to AGI or implies that OpenAI will develop it in a vacuum. What do you think?

Learn more about OpenAI’s mission from one of it’s founders in this episode of Practical AI.

The Linux Foundation is essentially a foundation for foundations, and the newest member to join the ranks is the GraphQL Foundation. We’ve been tracking news and talking about GraphQL for some time now.

Back in 2012 Nick Schrock, Dan Schafer, and Lee Byron got together at Facebook to build the next generation of Facebook’s iOS app powered by a new API for News Feed — what they arrived at was the first version of GraphQL. Lee Byron has this to say about today’s announcement:

Today, GraphQL has been a community project longer than it was a Facebook internal project — which calls for its next evolution.

As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption since its open sourcing. Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, I hope to see GraphQL become industry standard by encouraging contributions from a broader group and creating a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support.

So who’s involved? Well, GraphQL Foundation is being created in partnership with the Linux Foundation, Facebook, and nearly a dozen other companies. Those “other companies” are likely large scale companies who’ve contributed to or are using GraphQL in production and have a vested interest in its future.

Justin Jackson shared some personal insights and lessons learned in this post — and quoted Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom saying:

A founder is spending 60 months of their best years in their startup (instead of their career). That is a substantial upfront investment; it’s like a seed round, but instead of money, it’s your life.

And the bootstrappers dilemma…

Can I get this to scale, while paying my bills, without burning out? This is why many founders end up raising venture capital.

On Friday, Business Insider reported that Microsoft has held talks to buy GitHub.

Matt Weinberger writes for Business Insider:

GitHub is a $2 billion startup that claims 24 million software developers as users. On the most surface level, the logic of Microsoft buying GitHub is pretty clear. Developers love GitHub, and Microsoft needs the love of developers.

Here’s the current speculation…

If Microsoft were to acquire GitHub, it would mark a significant change of course from where the startup stood just six months ago. As recently as late 2017, insiders said GitHub was fully committed to staying independent and eventually going public. It’s also possible that instead of striking a deal to buy GitHub outright, Microsoft may make an investment — possibly with an option to buy — and allow one of its top engineers to be poached as CEO.

h/t Dan McClain for sharing this in Slack.

This is great news for those struggling to convince budget-makers that performance is worth their investment. Hopefully, it’ll also incentivize news sites to trim down and put their content front, center, and fast. 🙏

Google suggests Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights as resources to test how your pages are performing.

Andrew Ng shared his plans for his newly created AI Fund — with investments including NEA, Sequoia, Greylock Partners, SoftBank Group, and others.

Andrew Ng:

I am excited to announce the formation of the AI Fund. We have raised $175 million, and will be sequentially initiating new businesses that use AI to improve human life.

In the early days of electricity, much of the innovation centered around slightly different improvements in lighting. While this was an important foundation, the really transformative applications, in which electric power spurred massive redesigns in multiple industries, took longer to be grasped. AI is the new electricity, and is at a similar inflection point.

Given Andrew Ng’s prominence and success in bringing AI to industry, and his partnership with some of the world’s premier technology investment firms, this announcement may well signal the next wave of capitalization for AI-oriented startups.

Robert O’Callahan:

By truly independent, I mean a browser with its own implementation of HTML, CSS, JS, etc; this kind of independence is critically important to the open Web, and the world, and hence Mozilla’s mission.

…if you’re willing to give up on engine independence you can save a lot of those expenses by adopting another vendor’s engine, probably Chromium, and drafting off Google’s investment. It’s no surprise that for-profit companies would take that path, and that only Apple and Microsoft, companies with deep pockets and deep fear of Google, have declined to do so.

This is a great tldr-style breakdown of the components required to run an organization like Mozilla, which is “needed just to build Firefox”.

There’s also a response from Jason Laster (the same Jason Laster we talked to on episode #247) to Robert’s tweet about this post saying:

It would be great to promote partnerships as an effective OSS strategy.

It’s not often here at The Changelog that we cross the chasm and talk about venture capital or startup funding. However, a recent contribution to the open source community requires it.

The Series Seed documents, donated to the startup community by Ted Wang at Fenwick & West, LLP, recently rev’d to 3.0 and were open sourced under the CC0 1.0 (Public Domain Dedication) license.

These documents are a stripped-down set of preferred stock startup financing documents aimed at creating a simple set of documents for early stage investment.

From the announcement post:

The focus for Version 3.0 is on making the Series Seed documents easier to use both online and offline. A larger percentage of closings happen almost entirely online and we modified the documents to make them work more easily with various software platforms. As one example, we've collaborated with the folks at AngelList to ensure that this version of the documents works with their online closing process.

Not only are they being modified to work more easily in online transactions, but they are now open sourced on GitHub – and taking a note from the software development and open source community on how we show off our work and collaborate to make better software.

Version 3.0 will also begin using GitHub as the platform for managing the discussion and update process for the Series Seed documents. Engineers in our community use GitHub to showcase their work, solicit feedback, and make their project better through teamwork. We are taking a page from their playbook.

Check out the Series Seed documents on GitHub. If you plan to use them, make sure you read the disclaimer!

Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — joins the show to dive into the origins, design, and evolution of NATS, a high-performance, open-source messaging system built for modern cloud-native systems and part of the CNCF. Derek shares the story behind NATS, what makes it unique, and unpacks the recent tensions between Synadia and the CNCF over the future of the project.

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Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.

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Drew Wilson is back! It’s been more than a decade since Adam and Drew have spoken and wow, Drew has been busy. He built Plasso and got acquired by GoDaddy. He built a bank called Letter which didn’t work out…and now he’s Head of Design at Clerk and back to chasing that next big thing.

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Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

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Jerod turns Adam into Lego, a Walrus, and a Walrus in the style of Studio Ghibli…and so much more. This is a good one to watch on YouTube.

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Justin Searls from Breaking Change joins the show to discuss Apple’s Intelligence blunder, the end of the good times in the tech industry, and POSSE Party, his in-progress product that lets “any dummy with a website enjoy a life of algorithm-free luxury.”

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇