Jerod Santo: I mean, they’ve been around a long time. They’ve been valuable, they’ve been producing good stuff. But man, did they just find themselves perfectly positioned for both AI, blockchain, gamers… All the things that are still burgeoning, or going up, AI of course being the main one. And this massive new need for GPUs. NVIDIA has just been killing it.

Max Howell: We use Base, which is Coinbase’s blockchain.

Autumn Nash: That’s what I’m – and just like, we were just talking about how hot it’s been, and the fires, and I’m like “Yeah, let’s make heat even worse.” You know what I mean? I love the inventions of new technologies, and I am excited… I definitely use AI to be more efficient, and I think blockchain has its place, but I just think it’s like wild to do this kind of damage to the environment and spend this type of money and not know how we’re going to get the return. Everybody is scrambling and cutting costs… And just even the discussion between cloud and on-prem - like, DHH is always recommending something, and sometimes I’m wondering “Do you do it for like the views and the likes, or do you actually think these things?” Because there’s nothing in technology that you can say “This is what works for everything.” You know what I mean? Like, that’s a red flag in itself. So I don’t know, it just feels like everybody’s like lost right now. Everybody.

Chris Wanstrath: I’m most looking forward to the blockchain integration and the AI-powered features, I think…

Joseph Jacks: Yeah. Some disease. I’m just going to say tweet. I came up with one phrase – because people ask me this question all the time, “What is the thesis?” It’s so strange. And the phrase - I want to say probably late 2019, maybe even early 2020 - is “Open source is eating software faster than software is eating the world.” So that’s been the phrase. And that’s kind of been the slogan, and the whole mantra or whatever. And I think it does really well tightly kind of articulate what the fund is about, which is like, it’s easy to explain things to people when you can kind of build on an existing, well-understood dynamic or concept or whatever… It’s sort of like reasoning from analogy, which I think often is not that helpful, because you’re not really deeply understanding something if you reason by analogy. But Mark Andreessen is very famous for saying software is eating the world, and this is kind of the Andreessen Horowitz thesis, right? And they’re very known for that, so people have a strong understanding… So I was just kind of like trying to build on that to say “Well, actually, we think instead of software eating the world, which is kind of true, we think something more important and more kind of disruptive is actually happening, which is that open source”, which really means something very specific… It’s like a really like kind of specific phenomenon, and important… “Open source is eating software itself at a rate that is faster than software is eating the world.”

[20:23] So I’m beating the drum on this for - probably another year or two years go by… And then as I was raising our second fund, which was sort of like 2022, 2023, I started to visualize this. I started to kind of like write down… I think I was like having breakfast one day or something, and I was just trying to write down two waves. There’s a really big wave, which is like the software eating the world wave, and then there’s a smaller wave, which is the open source eating software wave. They overlap. They’re sort of super-imposed on each other.

So the big wave is like this huge wave. And then if you look at the horizontal axis, it’s time. So a number of years, a number of decades, or whatever… And then the vertical axis, kind of up and down is the size of the market, and how much money, how much industry size kind of has been to sort of like eaten; how much of software has eaten the world.

So it’s like tens of trillions of dollars or whatever on the vertical axis. And then on the horizontal axis, it starts around 1970, maybe 1960 or something… And then sort of the wave kind of goes – Oracle, Microsoft were founded, and then what other software companies and software industry were sort of created… So it’s like this line that develops, and you sort of put logos on it… And then the bottom wave is open source eating software. So how do you visualize that? But again, it’s in the context of companies.

And so obviously, I put Red Hat in there, and I put JBoss, and whatever. A bunch of other companies. And then as time goes on, you’ve got like MongoDB, and Talend, and MuleSoft, and GitLab, and HashiCorp… All these other companies. Databricks… And there’s more and more. Odoo, Grafana… There’s a lot of these companies now.

And my thesis in visualizing this extremely oversimplified image of the slogan, the visualization of this slogan, was that the rate of growth of the small wave, that small curve - the rate of growth is faster and expanding at a faster rate than the rate of growth of the large wave. Because the rate of growth of the large wave has sort of hit this kind of like asymptote or sort of like scale in which you can continue to digitize more industries, and like software is eating more and more things… But it’s almost pervasive at this point. Yes, there’s software for so many parts of the world… And now if you really look at the fundamentals of software and sort of like what it really means, there’s two ways of building and sort of releasing software to the world. You can build something that’s proprietary, where the person who created the technology or the software is solely in control of the ability to make the software better, and improve it, and dictate can you trust it or not… The other way is open source.

And if you look at open source in the context of Linux, there’s so many reasons why Linux succeeded in basically becoming the dominant server-side operating system. By the same token, there’s so many reasons the Android smartphone platform succeeded on smartphones just in terms of the number of smartphones. There’s many reasons why languages and databases are increasingly becoming dominant as open source open platforms.

Now we see things like LLaMA, which is actually not technically open source, but I think there’s some forgiveness that we have to kind of offer there, because neural networks are not source code. They’re a different artifact. And we’ve blogged about this and stuff last year, actually.

[24:04] So the idea, the principles of open source have remained unchanged. There’s a lot of resistance to that in the world of capitalism, and the world of business, particularly by financier types and VCs. I don’t consider myself a VC. I consider myself something a little different, but technically my job is as a VC. But we have a philosophy, we have a view that the world across all technology categories, starting with software - but it’ll eventually sort of like permeate across other things, too - is moving more towards transparency and systems that you can actually trust and verify that you can trust them, and systems that are user-empowered, user-owned, user-controlled, and permissionless. And those things are totally orthogonal to any particular type of technology. You don’t need to be a blockchain, you don’t need to be crypto to have those properties. You do need to adhere to a certain set of principles though.

And so that’s kind of structurally what the fund is about. How we’ve been sort of prosecuting these views has kind of been relegated to software company startups, and open source companies, largely, with a handful of exceptions… But I plan on doing this for the rest of my life, and it’s extremely fulfilling and comforting to see more and more evidence of the thesis actually playing out to be more and more correct. I mean, I can certainly imagine a world where I wake up every day for years on end, and the world is just more and more proprietary, and more locked down, and more centralized, and there’s less hope of any of these ideas having any long-lasting potential. That would be really depressing. [laughter] But so far, I see a lot of evidence on the other side, so it’s kind of cool.

Break: [25:55]

Chris Benson: [00:23:50.05] I think that’s a fantastic insight. I think in a perfect world if we can help people along kind of get through their own trough of disillusionment very quickly, to climb back up onto the slope of enlightenment by following that guidance is essentially what I’m getting at… Before diving into it, I know that over time, as I’ve talked to people, it reminded me of – amplified beyond what I’ve heard before, but of previous technologies that were supposed to solve everything. You know, blockchain was going to solve the world, if you recall. Blockchain was amazing, we were gonna have it everywhere, it was gonna be everything… And having since reached that plateau of productivity at the end of the lifecycle, blockchain has a fantastic place in the technology world, and a vibrant community. But of course, it doesn’t solve all things, and I think people need to realize that the same with these kinds of models is that they can do that.

So I know that one of the things that I’m trying to get people to do is to get through their own trough of illusion quickly, and start recognizing in a really productive sense how to fit it in with larger systems. We’ve always talked about it’s really the software system around these models that makes it all work, that makes the value for the user… And even extending that, if you’re not in the cloud, it’s the hardware. If you’re out on the edge, it’s all about what you have on the hardware, and how does it integrate, and how does it integrate with the systems you already have in place, and what special value are you expecting generative AI to bring to bear that you haven’t already been trying to design and solve for?

And so I think as people really stopped and they kind of got out of their New Year’s Eve party moment, and they said “Okay, I’m an engineer, I need to start being an engineer again”, and thinking about it, and they thought “Well, maybe it doesn’t solve everything, like I thought, but I can identify some pretty cool things that it would help [unintelligible 00:25:42.02] And I’m hoping that people will start focusing on that, and bring engineering, to your point, back to bear on this, and solving it, but solving it in that larger ecosystem, that includes the overall stack that you’re in, the software… And, since we’re moving evermore out onto the edge, into all the devices that we use out there, beyond just our cell phones that are always everpresent, that we can find some good uses.

Matti Ranta: Yeah. And it’s great, because just like how with – this is a terrible example, but I’m gonna use it anyway… With NFTs on the blockchain - you’re not even actually storing an image on the blockchain. You’re storing a reference pointer to somewhere else, to a URL. And that’s what Git LFS does, is you’re just storing that pointer to wherever you’re actually hosting the file. So we can throw those files into S3, or an alternative, and…

Mark Russinovich: I liked it when they got into blockchain, too.

Autumn Nash: See, I felt like I had the interest in the other way. I looked at blockchain and I’m like “It’s an immutable data structure.” You know what I mean? I was just like “I don’t get it.”

Ron Evans: And there’s always the opportunities, if somebody genuinely is like “We want to take it in this way”, there’s not a consensus for doing that; we’re taking it in our own way. They should do that, that’s not a bad thing. Like, we don’t have to all – if we reach a fork in the road, it’s not two brothers. This time, it’s actually a business decision about something or another.

[01:04:08.10] And I mean, TinyGo has grown into a very big thing in WebAssembly. It wasn’t originally created to do that. That was an emergent property of the ecosystem. And one I’m very glad for, and I’m very involved with now myself. But the original vision with TinyGo was very specifically for small embedded devices, and bringing Go to the microcontroller. And then it just so happened “Oh, we could actually compile this to WebAssembly.” There was some very nascent support in GigGo for WebAssembly at the time, and that’s something that the LLVM toolchain that TinyGo was based on - not BigGo, but that TinyGo is based on. So it’s like “Oh, this would be a cool feature to add. We should do that. No real specific, more just like “Oh, it’s like a low-hanging fruit. Some people seem really interested in this. We should do it.” Next thing you know, “Oh, wow… TinyGo is so much better for WebAssembly than BigGo.” And we’re like “Wow, it is? How interesting! Why is it better? What does it do?” Like, we didn’t even know ourselves some of it. We were just genuinely interested. It was an emergent property of the community, of a problem that they wanted to solve, that BigGo was not solving for them… So a bunch of people started devoting time and energy to improving that WebAssembly support in TinyGo. And then the WebAssembly system interface, which is WebAssembly on servers, and serverless… The WebAssembly not in the browser. You know, part of the fact that we were interested in it ourselves, that also we move a lot faster than BigGo. We can. We can innovate a lot more quickly. We haven’t given a 1.0 guarantee yet, so we can change things… We’re not – even though largely, I would say the Road to 1.0 for TinyGo is more about the hardware interfaces than it is about compatibility with Go itself. Because we’ve had pretty good compatibility for a while. But it was very much an emergent property of the community.

And as more and more of us said “Oh, wow, WebAssembly… That’s really a very interesting thing. We have some problems we wanna solve with that”, and Go being a really good language, for whatever, that this has been an aspect of TinyGo which was not something that was part of any master plan. It’s something that the community wanted, that the community is, and does, and is not at all – there’s no need for it to be a zero-sum game. Oh, it can either be for embedded or it can be for WebAssembly, or it could be for Linux, or for Windows, or for macOS - that’s a false dichotomy. It could be for whatever we collectively want it to be for. But again, with that sort of curation in mind - like, you can share the park, but you can’t just like go in and start digging it up to build your own little thing, when that’s disturbing the flora and fauna of the ecosystem. And so that’s in a compassionate, kind way… But also looking at like the why. Why is this person asking for this thing? Usually, it’s because they either have some need, or they can’t figure out how to get the thing you have right now to do the thing that they want. Either way, that’s kind of on you. If it’s a need they could solve some other way, you could recommend that. If it’s a thing that your software doesn’t do yet, but that it could, you could mention that, and say “Oh, maybe you can help.” Sometimes they’re like “Oh, I don’t know enough programming.” Yeah, but they already took the project in a better direction just by saying “Hmm, here’s this thing that somebody might need.”

[01:08:19.28] WebAssembly again - a really great example. There’s a lot of people who are very involved in blockchain applications. I’m not really one of them. I don’t judge people for what they choose to do with their computational power. My currency is render graphics, play games, churn through large language models… This is on you, not on me. I’m just trying to create technologies that are useful.

So there’s a bunch of people who are using TinyGo specifically because they wanted to use WebAssembly as part of their engine for doing their processing… And so they were looking for basically what we call WebAssembly unknown, Wasm unknown, which is sort of a naked WebAssembly. It’s WebAssembly with no expectations of what the running environment would be.

So for the listener, if you haven’t checked out WebAssembly, first of all, do. There’s lots of interesting things happening. You can run it in your browser, you can run it on serverless applications like fermion spin, you could use it to build plugins for your current software, like Extism, or you could use it to actually run on microcontrollers and embedded devices with TinyGo and Meccanoid. So there’s all sorts of different, interesting areas to do this in.

So this group of blockchain enthusiasts said “We really want to run TinyGo with Wasm, with no external dependencies.” And the people who are doing Wasi are like “Oh, that doesn’t sound very useful”, just because it doesn’t have any ability to call any specific thing. And these folks were like “Oh, that’s okay. We don’t care. We have our own APIs.” So it took a while before it actually turned into something which landed in TinyGo, just because it had to build a little bit of a critical mass. Just one person wants it, just one or two, they’re not willing to do any programming work on it, but they’d like to have this feature… Okay, that’s a signal of intent. There’s maybe other people. Is it useful for other things as well? Well, yes, as it turns out. That same pattern of Wasm unknown is exactly the pattern that’s being used for Meccanoid, for running WebAssembly on embedded devices, like microcontrollers.

So if it was not for the blockchain community sort of priming the pump of starting to think about this, then those of us who are actually interested in using that same pattern for something completely different would not have maybe worked on it and adding it to TinyGo. So again, the community is defining what the thing is, because the purpose of TinyGo is to serve the community’s needs. It’s a means to their ends, whatever those happen to be.

Paul Vixie: I would like to say so. [unintelligible 00:35:26.26] ever taken on something that was going to be clearly possible… [unintelligible 00:35:31.23] And at the time, I left nonprofit service and went back into the commercial world in 2013. I was trying to do exactly what say. I was trying to figure out “Well, if there were a replacement to the DNS protocol that you could opportunistically adopt…” So you as an information publisher, you as let’s say a smartphone maker, just creating a lot of DNS requests, you’re going to fetch a lot of information, and just try to enumerate all the different entity types in the entire DNS economy, and say “Well, how could they speak both for some transition period”, which by this time is 30 years, “but anybody who was an adopter would immediately get some improvement [unintelligible 00:36:21.16] performance, less resource use”, whatever it is that would be the incentive to adopt. And in a way, that’s how HTTP/2 and now QUICK (HTTP/3) are doing it. And so I was really tinkering hard with this, at the time that I just kind of said that “That’s it. I’ve done 18 years of nonprofit service. I need to go think about my retirement” and I went back into the commercial world.

But I’ll tell you, the biggest impediment to this is that everybody wants to be the creator of that. So you’ve heard of crypto, and Bitcoin, and digital currencies… All of them followed each other along this model of “We don’t like the fiat currencies. We want to be able to have money via a matter of private contracts, without governments being able to either inject money into the economy, or control interest rates”, or whatever. And the problem is nobody [unintelligible 00:37:21.09] came in later and said “It’s a really good idea. I’m going to adopt [unintelligible 00:37:26.02] most popular.” What they did is they came in and they said “Whoever owns this is going to be a trillionaire”, and they created [unintelligible 00:37:32.20] Why would you use an existing one instead of submitting your own?

So some of those very same people have come along and said “Yeah, we could use the blockchain to encode domain names, so that takedown was impossible. So that no matter whose trademark you were infringing, or whose intellectual property you were infringing, there’d be nowhere to target a lawsuit, as you [unintelligible 00:38:00.03] There’d simply be nowhere to go to request takedown. And wouldn’t that be better than having government? I’m not sure it would be, but I’m pretty sure that that type of anarchy might do more harm than good. [unintelligible 00:38:18.25] opportunity.

Johnny Boursiquot: I mean, the last time I saw this much hype about anything was around crypto, and blockchain, and Bitcoin, and all that stuff… Which I think I’m hearing a little –

Samuel Goff: But the interesting thing about that is the intersection of the blockchain, because from my perspective, blockchain has a lot of potential to establish trust, and to basically provide historically-accurate, verifiable information in a way that cannot be forged after the fact. So then you can start to establish trust, and make use of historical information in a way that benefits everybody.

Kris Brandow: Yeah, I’m curious as to like – because you know, it’s easy to be hyper-fixated on what the hype cycle is currently occupied by… I’m interested of “Well, what happens when the hype cycle inevitably moves on?” Which I think everybody right now - because we’re in the hype cycle - is just like “The hype cycle is not going to move on.” But I don’t know, I’ve said this before; it’s been an unpopular opinion before. It’s just like, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was also the huge hype cycle that everybody was talking about, and it’s now been replaced with AI. And before that – there’s always a hype cycle, and there’s always something.

[01:17:56.10] I think there’s a lot of interesting things that come out of the – like, once the hype cycle has moved on, you’re left with these technologies, of like “Well, what can you actually do with these technologies? What are interesting applications of them?” I think that’s happening now with blockchain and how people are thinking about blockchain in kind of new and novel ways. Or even the components or the concepts of a blockchain, irrespective of the implementation of it. And I think that AI as a space has the same sort of potential, where it’s like once we can actually really kind of get into the nuance of it… So I feel like that’s kind of what follows those big hype cycles, is the hype cycle is the lack of nuance, and that lack of nuance allows us to imagine literally anything. And people doomerize it, people are super-excited about it, but everybody is just like – there’s a whole lack of nuance around most of it. And then you start getting a lot of that nuance, and the hype comes down, and you start being like “Oh, these are the interesting places where this technology can actually go.”

And I think that Go as a language, it’s positioned in a special place, and I think it is – I mean, as the language of the cloud, I feel like it’s gonna play a role in all of this, but a different role, a complementary role. So I don’t think it’s gonna be the language you use to necessarily write large language models, or do the things that other languages are currently good for. But I think it’s going to be somewhere in there, probably playing a very foundational part. Kind of like with the cloud. Go is certainly not – you don’t have to write all of your services in Go. In fact, you might not even write Go in general, but most definitely, it’s all over the place in the cloud world, and in that whole thing. So I think there’s space.

But yeah, it’d be super-interesting to explore that on the podcast, and have people in… I think it was – I don’t remember who brought it up, but someone brought up the idea of not necessarily debate, but different viewpoint episodes, where you bring in people that have not necessarily opposing views, but differing views, and you have a conversation. I think that would also be interesting in this space, but also just in general for us as a Go podcast, because there’s a lot of things in Go where it’s like “I don’t know, the answer is it depends.” There’s two episodes basically of this on Changelog & Friends. There’s the “It dependencies”, and then there’s an “It depends” with me. So listeners, if you like that kind of “I don’t know, the answer is It Depends”, go over to Changelog & Friends and listen to that.

Lars Wikman: Something-something blockchain…?

Natalie Pistunovich: Blockchain all the way.