Richard Moot: It’s kind of funky, because I think most people think of it as separate companies. And I think they were kind of operated functionally that way… But as far as I’ve understood this, it’s all Block. And each one of these other things are brands that are part of Block. But I joined before we became block, so it’s I still have this thing burned in my brain that I work for Square … Recently that’s changed a little bit, so I work on all Block products, doing developer relations now.

So yeah the relationship is each one of these divisions kind of focused on a different audience in the economy. Square is focused on businesses, and trying to run small businesses, midsize businesses… We even have some enterprises. And then cash is all about consumers; trying to give financial tools to people who are “Hey, I want to go invest in Bitcoin”, or “I want to go buy stocks”, or “I want to send money to my barber.” It really helps essentially act as a consumer banking product. And so that’s kind of where there’s a little bit of – getting both sides of the counter is kind of what we talk about.

And then we have our other brands, Tidal with streaming… And that’s kind of focused on artists, and we’re trying to figure out what ways can we enhance artists… Because they kind of operate their own business. And then we’ve got some of the more out there things, like Spiral doing Bitcoin grants, and open source Bitcoin, trying to really transform Bitcoin into the digital currency of the internet. And so yeah.

Song: [04:47]

One day I asked my teacher, What use is math to me?

She answered: When you’re older, someday my boy you’ll see…

There’s a world of computer systems out there

Full of valuable data and not secured with care

And you can make a fortune in ransomware…

With a little bit of math!

It’s called encryption,

Just a little bit of math,

Cause a conniption;

Lock the data, hide the key;

They’ll pay up eventually,

It’s all just math.

Ransomware is big now

Because it’s organized.

You can buy it as a service

And sell it for a prize.

There’s a whole world of tempting targets to hack -

Governments, hospitals, schools to attack

And they pay up in Bitcoin, hard to trace back…

It’s all just math!

We call it crypto - just a little bit of math.

No need to tiptoe,

Hackers whisper, don’t be nervous,

We take pride in customer service…

Well then I told my teacher, I’m feeling terrified;

How can we protect ourselves from all this cybercrime?

She said, “Don’t click weird links, or use “password123”.

Make offline backups, invest in security.”

And that’s when I realized how screwed we might be…

Just do the math!

So many systems.

If they all took a bath,

Wouldn’t we miss them?

Next time there’s no meat or water or gas,

And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath

You can blame IT, or some Russian sociopath,

But personally, I blame math.

Jerod Santo: Right. Well, this isn’t an investment show, it’s definitely a show about software, so I’ll stop down that route. But let me just say that we’ve been watching this, and watched loosely some of the alternative coins or the things that are changes to Bitcoin or inspired by Bitcoin, and like I said before the break, there’s lots of things that come and go… I was even mining some CoreCoin for a few months just for fun; that’s at 0.00 at this point, and perhaps is completely just a footnote in history.

One thing that we look for as we invest our time and our skills and perhaps even our money into communities and software projects, because this is a very large software and open source software projects - there’s over 80 projects that the Ethereum Organization has on GitHub… We look for sustainability and long-lasting things, and one of the constant themes in our shows and in our community of developers is the JavaScript fatigue and the constant churn of new frameworks and new ways of doing things - some people see it as a Renaissance, other people see it as ridiculous… I personally don’t buy into new JavaScript frameworks very often because I’m just waiting for the next one, and it seems like with the cryptocurrencies there’s very much that possibility. Aside from Bitcoin, many other ones have come and gone, and of course, Bitcoin itself hasn’t been around for all that long in the grand history… So that’s one of the questions I have about Ethereum, especially as we look at it as app platform - and we’ll get back to that. Looking forward, you’ve survived what would be considered a PR disaster and really a crisis in your community over the summer… Looking forward, what is it about Ethereum that you believe makes it have lasting power, and that we can have trust, not just in the currency, but in the platform as something that we can invest in?

Jerod Santo: Yeah. When you talk about finance as a zero-sum game, I feel like there’s actually been moves now to actually open up about finance as well; I’m not sure if either of you have tracked the celebrity rise of Cathie Wood and Ark Invest, and a lot of the moves that she’s doing in public. They’re an investment fund, and they will actually publish their moves at the end of every day. Like, “We sold these stocks. We bought these stocks.” And people laughed at that for a while, but because she’s been successful with early on Bitcoin, early with Tesla, she’s very much into growth stocks - because of that, people started to follow her very closely and just emulate. And when she makes moves now, it makes news on a lot of the C-SPANs and the… Is C-SPAN the Congress one? What’s the one that’s the finance one…?

Kevin Owocki: [01:03:16.12] I largely agree with you. I think that another parallel is the internet bubble, and I think the key is to invest in the Yahoo! or the Amazon, and not the Pets.com. The internet bubble was a bubble, but it was also a fundamental shift in the way the world organizes its information. I think that what we’re seeing here is the fundamental shift, and possibly a fundamental shift in the way the world organizes its finances. I think that what TCP/IP did for information, there’s the potential that the blockchain will do for the financial system. There’s obviously huge upside there, but under the guise of upside, there’s gonna be the Bitconnects of the world, or projects that are just looking to hang on to the trend.

This is actually one of the reasons I started Gitcoin - to allow people to have the skills to thrive in this new blockchain ecosystem. I think that educating people and helping them learn to use the tools and build meaningful relationships is how we mature the ecosystem. It’s one of Gitcoin’s missions.

Peter Ma: As a hacker, I basically build prototypes a lot, and the entrepreneurs generally follow what the trend is. And the latest trend is blockchain and AI. Blockchain is still really difficult to program, but people get into it because there’s one or two really good applications. They see Bitcoin as one of the things that’s gonna change the world, and all the programmers are starting to study blockchain. And they see self-driving cars, they start seeing this as being deployed in the real world, and they’re like “Okay…” This is a time where you have emerging technology that’s being applied in the real world now, and this is a time for me to invest my time to understand and to execute and to find opportunities within this space.

[16:18] As it happened back with mobile. When mobile started getting into people’s hands, all of a sudden, all of the programmers started jumping on mobile. I jumped in before that, and I remember just being one of the independent Android developers; I was invited to give a talk at TED global. That was really rare, because people didn’t get into it. But as soon as that tipping point has been passed through - we have current applications being deployed in the real world - that’s when the programmers all wanna jump in, and this is where opportunity is.

Drew Wilson: Yeah. And so that was my big swing. Since then, I’ve come to realize that, you know, having a big win is such a – financially, it’s so different than having a large cashflow. Having a big win means you can go out and buy a big house and do a bunch of cool stuff and get all this kind of crazy stuff going on, and invest in these properties, and do that. It’s like, it’s what you would think of as wealth. That doesn’t happen when you have a huge amount of cashflow. If you make $2 million a year, you literally can’t do what I just said, because you don’t make enough money, even though you’re making $2 million a year. It’s just so different. But if you don’t have cashflow, you can’t do anything. You can’t control your own destiny. You can’t work for yourself.

So having like a cash cow, like an app that’s like just killing it, on a small scale, that lets you not have to work somewhere, that lets you get to experiment and do whatever you want… That is the successful life idea. That’s not the successful finance idea, that’s a successful life idea. And the ultimate goal for a lot of people who are very ambitious is to have both of those. You have this windfall, so you can do a bunch of cool stuff, but then you also have this cashflow.

I gave away my cashflow when I sold my company. I was too inexperienced to know all this at the time. But I did get the windfall, which was great. But now I need the cashflow. And so learning all these things that I’ve learned - there’s always so much more to learn. So I’ve got to get myself another cash cow, and then hopefully I’ll consider myself set. But until then, I can’t stop the doing of the things. Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with that, but… There. I said words.

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]

Jerod Santo: It’s kind of the cleansing of – I mean, we’re talking about a correction. There’s a reason why that’s the word that’s used. Because something was wrong, you know what I’m saying? And it was wrong for a long time, and it just bubbles, and it percolates… And then eventually it corrects, and things get back to, as Sean calls it, the real world. And that’s his silver lining as well, is like actually now the companies who are focused and deliver on quality, and can actually ship a thing that’s reliable, that people want, and will pay for - they make money and they grow. And the ones who are just really good at convincing people with lots of money that they have the next big idea, and all they need is another thousand employees and that idea will somehow just start printing money… Like, that’s not always real. In fact, 99 times out of a hundred, or maybe more, it’s not real, which is why VCs are playing essentially an odds game. VCs play a numbers game. They invest in enough times that eventually they’ll hit the Uber, and that will make up for all their failures. And it seems like their money is still floating around though, it’s just floating around specifically AI startups.

Beyang Liu: Yup, basically. So the way we think about it is basically like this… What we are doing, and what I’d recommend other organizations do is you want to position what you’re building inside your organization to ride the wave of model improvements. So what that means is you have to just assume that the reasoning capabilities and the latency will continue to improve at approximately the same clip as they have been. So what do you do? To a certain extent, you have to hack around the existing limitations, but you don’t want to invest too much in those, because another six months rolls around and those are kind of obviated.

I think where you do want to invest in right now is very high quality tools and capabilities that can be composed with the rapidly-advancing reasoning capabilities of frontier models. And so it’s essentially – for us it’s kind of nice, because we’ve essentially been building these tools the entire time at Sourcegraph. It’s like, we’re building tools to help human brains explore the codebase, effectively, and build up a working understanding of it, and write effective code pattern matching against the existing patterns, and validate that that’s correct and consistent within the style of your organization and the rules in your organization.

Now increasingly we’re seeing the LLM brain being swappable in for the human brain in a growing number of tasks. Every kind of advancement in reasoning capability or context awareness or pattern matching capability advances the frontier of where an LLM serving as the coordinator of these tools, the orchestrator of these tools can now automate something that previously a human brain would have had to attend to.

And so the way we view it is we are really investing in the tooling ecosystem and infrastructure that we build around the model, with the assumption that all the frontier labs are going to be pouring, it seems like all the money in the world - billions, if not trillions of dollars - into pushing the advancement of this reasoning technology as far and fast as they can.

So that’s the big wave right now, and the way we’re designing our platform is to just provide the best tools for accelerating and automating the software development lifecycle, under the assumption that there’s going to be kind of like a – maybe Moore’s Law is not the right analogy here, but I think you can assume some pace of advancement in reasoning capabilities for at least the next couple of years.

Jerod Santo: And I’m like “Oh, you’re so much better than all of us, Gary.” Which is probably true… But I’m still using Zed today, so I didn’t learn my lesson. I feel like SQL is kind of like that. Like, you can invest in a language and a library and then you can switch libraries, and they all kind of map on top of what are ultimately outputting SQL expressions… And some are better and worse, and they allow you to break out of the box, and write your own fragments… And I think Ecto is a pretty good one… But after years and years and years of like ending up with SQL, and then learning it because I’m looking at it now, even though I didn’t write it - I wrote some Ruby code, for instance - I just think SQL is really powerful. It’s been here since day one, practically, of most of our careers… It’s not going anywhere. And it’s one technology, the language I’m speaking specifically, that is worth every software developer learning, because it’s transferable across jobs, projects, languages etc. And I didn’t really invest in it directly, in my career… I kind of learned it slowly through osmosis. And I probably would have been better off just setting aside all the ORMs all the years, and just being like “Learn SQL really, really, really good” and I’d probably be a better developer. And so I’ve changed my mind about that… It’s probably too late for me. But for you youngsters, maybe, invest in SQL.

However, my addendum to that sentence is “But not really anymore.” That’s because you know what is really good at writing SQL? It’s language models. They’re just really good at it. And so do you have to learn it anymore? I don’t know. I guess you have to be able to try to use it after your LLM’s written it for you, and make sure that it works the way it’s supposed to… But I haven’t written a SQL query in a couple of years now by myself… And so there’s my addendum, is like maybe we don’t have to learn SQL, because it’s so low level… So low-level - that’s a weird thing to say. It’s low enough of a level that your everyday developer starting today and going forward won’t have to just write it directly anymore. They’ll have tooling that writes it for them. So that’s my change of mind, but also not so sure, because of what they’re doing to our workflows.

Adam Stacoviak: But I feel like that’s kind of cool that you can do that. I feel like Ollama is – and maybe thanks to DeepSeek… We’ve been talking about Ollama for a while, but I’ve just never actually been curious enough to play with it. For whatever reason I just haven’t, let’s just say. But now I’m in this kick, like I mentioned, of – I’ve got two things resonating with me.

I really want to build some sort of AI home lab, and thus far I’m just using what I have… Because I think that’s where you should begin, right? If you want to know where to begin, what do you have? Play with that. Even if it can’t run anything super-powerful, begin where you are, basically. But now I’m curious enough to be like “Well, would it make sense for me to take my hard-earned dollars and invest in hardware?” One, for just curiosity. Two, maybe we can get a sponsor to pay for it. Three, maybe we can make some content from it. But four, just have this AI as a service with models I’m going to swap out as this becomes more and more popular, on my own network. You know, tie in a Home Assistant, like you’ve done, maybe even side-train a model where I can take this sort of like really small model and say “This is the way we propose things. And these are all of our contracts over the last two years”, and let it have that source of truth. And now it’s just super-smart with the way we do business.

I don’t want to give that kind of – sure, I could probably do that with ChatGPT… But man, wow, what an exposure point. Here’s all of our contracts over the last two or three years… Could you imagine that? No. I would feel much more comfortable doing it… And I think that’s the angst, is like everyone has to give up some version of privacy to play with artificial intelligence; or you have some version of plagiarism. Well, I’m sorry to tell everybody, like, AI is here to stay. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. And you can be against it if you want to be, and you can ignore it if you want to, but you will be behind. You will. Because young folks - and I don’t want to say just young folks, but people that are born into the world today, with the way technology is, they don’t know any different. You and I, Tim, we grew up probably in the dial-up days. You probably remember how AOL sounds, right?

Bert Hubert: Well, having 25 is not an optimum, I can tell you that. But even if you have 25, there is no need to set up a complicated data structure to hold 25 political affiliation names. But one day you might sit there and say “Hey, wouldn’t it be useful, wouldn’t it be fun if we had a complicated red-black tree so that we could make really rapid searches of our 25 political parties?” And then you sit there maybe in 2032 trying to debug why it doesn’t work, and that’s because you tried to be clever. And so many people came to me and they said “If I have one regret, it’s that we built things too complicated, and then seven years later no one understands the code anymore.”

[00:32:06.25] And the other thing that people came up with is that people change jobs a lot, for a number of reasons. But if you want to do long-term software development, the easiest way to do that is with long-term employees. Because they build up knowledge, they know how the stuff works… But if you have people that are changing in and out all the time, then you become very reliant on good documentation. And it’s, of course, always good to have good documentation. I mean, by all means, do it. But it’s very hard to compensate for all that knowledge walking out of the door after two years.

So people also said, “Look, you really need to–” I mean, it’s old fashioned and it’s almost crazy talk these days, but that you really need to just invest in keeping your developers happy, and wanting them to stay for like maybe seven years, or eight years, or something like that… But again, this is also not how many places work these days anymore, because they have contractors, and they zoom in and they zoom out…

So as a result – so I wrote the article based on my presentation to the Dutch electoral board, and it hit Hacker News, and other people… And amazingly, almost everyone agreed with it. It’s very rare that that happens. But like 30,000 or 50,000 people read it. And based on that, I got a lot more feedback from people that said “Look, we are doing nothing like this here. We are following sort of the Facebook model of software development, where we deploy all the time, and most days of the week it actually works. And sometimes we go through a bad patch.” But then there are all these kinds of people that have to make software that opens and closes bridges, and doors, and MRI scanners that could physically tear themselves apart, or pacemakers, or robots that actually do surgery. These people are like “No one understands us anymore. Because if we do the regular software development thing, they start with stuff that is so fragile that we would never entrust that to open or close a bridge, or launch a rocket, or whatever.”

So it’s actually becoming quite a rare skill to build the kind of software that has like safety of life consequences to a bunch of people that will start with downloading the latest JavaScript framework… Even though that might be very nice for your website.

Kris Brandow: [00:32:16.06] I actually kind of feel the opposite. I think Go is potentially going to be the first language that undefines backwards incompatibility. That makes it so that backwards incompatibility is not a thing at all. I think there is a very good opportunity for Go to do this with the way it’s set itself up so far, if the Go team decides to invest in a few more tools. Go has pretty much already jettisoned the entire idea. I mean, it was never really an idea that Go version 2 would ever be a thing… It was just a name to give to kind of next gen features. And with the way that modules work now, where the version in the module dictates what feature set you’re going to use, it is possible to change the language in the future in ways that would be backwards incompatible in another language, but continue being compatible because the compiler can switch out its tool chain at will.

So yeah, you can still compile that old code using your current Go command. It’s just going to go grab a different tool chain and compile the code with that. And I guess technically you could say that’s backward-incompatible or backward breaking change… But for the consumer, it doesn’t really feel that way at all. And there’s a small effort to take some of the ideas from Go’s distant past with Go fix, and with this tool called Eg or Example, to actually be able to rewrite code for you, so if you do make a backward breaking change, the code will just be rewritten automatically to the new thing… Which I think also really reduces the amount of like “What is a backward breaking change?” If you just build that into the compiler as well, and the compiler can just do this for you automatically, then it can just look at the context of “What is this module code written in? Oh, it’s this version, and we have this other version. I know how to map these two versions together, so I can just automatically translate it.” And you just reduce or remove almost all of the backwards incompatibility things that you might come up with.

And I think if you add that with the ability to do the v2 modules, you really just remove the need to ever create something like Go 2. Like, I don’t know what would be in Go 2 that would be something we can’t use the current tools or some of the upcoming tools to remediate.

Jerod Santo: I need to invest in a smart rock company, because we’re gonna be selling a lot of smart rocks.

Phillip Carter: Yeah. So it was kind of funny, because after we – basically, one of our major success metrics was “Well, how many users are using the new net?” We reached about 5 million, and that was sort of like a major benchmark, and we hit it. And I just had a conversation with my PM director, and I asked him “So what’s the next big thing? I mean, this was really ambitious, and we knocked it out of the park. What’s the next big one?” And he’s like “I don’t know.” And that was because he was switching jobs over into another department, offered a VP position at Microsoft. I’m like “Oh, that’s why you don’t know. Okay. Well, I guess maybe I’ll look around too”, because I really liked the team that I was on, but you know, you complete an ambitious arc and you’re like “Okay, well, let’s kind of look around what’s out there. Maybe there’s something new.”

There’s clearly a lot of interesting stuff going on in developer tools outside of programming languages… So like looking up stack, what are the things that are there? So I ended up talking with some folks at Honeycomb, just because I didn’t know anything about observability at all. But I was aware of Liz and Charity, and I was aware of like a general consensus among some of the .NET developers that I knew that Honeycomb was doing things the right way, or the better way, or whatever. I’m like “Okay, cool. Let’s explore. What’s the worst that can happen?” Like, it’s not for me? Alright, cool.

So I chatted with them, kind of did the whole interview loop… I really liked the people, and was kind of sold on some of the initial vision. Because Honeycomb - it came out before Open Telemetry, but it was still very, very early stages when Open Telemetry was formed. And Honeycomb as an observability tool is fundamentally different from the rest of the market. It has this ambitious goal of “We really want to help developers reshape fundamentally the way that they introspect their systems”, and this gets from super-high level, like how you do an analysis workflow… Instead of saying “Oh, I’m going to look at my logs, and then I’m going to go look at traces that correspond to that, and see if I can find a match…” And like “Oh, I have this metric that says it’s up. Alright, cool. Are there any logs that relate to this time range, or something?” Kind of a broken debugging flow compared to what we do. And that kind of attracted me.

[00:28:08.25] But then at the same time, they’re like “Well, there’s also this whole other thing with Open Telemetry”, where regardless of our product shape or what we think people should be doing best, there’s this open standard that’s evolving, that is ambitious enough that people – it captures the majority of what people care about. And we have some pretty big customers, who are like - them continuing with Honeycomb is pretty contingent on us being quite deeply involved in the project.

So one of our larger customers, quite literally, in clear contract terms, was like “You need to be significantly involved here, because we’re taking a bet on standardizing on OTel, and we’re taking a bet on using Honeycomb across all of our teams. And I do not want one of those pillars to falter in some way. So I trust that you care about your business, but do you really care about OTel? Figure it out.” That’s what the role was scoped to, was “Okay, we’re going to take a bet on OTel. Great. We did it. Mission accomplished! But what is that bet? What are we doing, though? Where should we point our time, and our limited number of engineers we have? Should we hire for this? For how many? What are the most important things to invest in? What are the major problems that people have?” All the big stuff.

And I was just given the mandate to go and shape that into “Where do we point our force vector?” if you will, and “How do we keep doing that?” And then how do we start, a) trying to start skating where the puck is going, of like the project is evolving in this way… Can we make sure, at least at a very minimum, does the Honeycomb product not get destroyed by this thing in some way? We don’t want to be caught by surprise, in some capacity. But then also, b) okay, well, we do have a perspective here. How much of our perspective on observability aligns with the overall perspective of Open Telemetry? How do we make these things come together in a way that fits very well, and works for everyone involved? And how do we ultimately demonstrate that we are leaders in the project, instead of just consumers of this open standard? That was the main thing. And that’s what I did for about 3 years or so.

And being a startup, I kind of had my hands in all kinds of different places, but I was always very fundamentally rooted in being an Open Telemetry maintainer, which I’ve been since - -gosh, I think like the end of 2021… And trying to fix all kinds of problems that like “Oh, someone’s trying to use Open Telemetry plus Honeycomb, plus this language, plus this environment that they want to run in. It falls over in this way. Okay, great. Is that a legitimate bug? Is that a documentation problem? Is that like they wanted to use an API in this way and they couldn’t figure it out, and we need to add a more convenient API to something to just make it more obvious for someone how they accomplish something?” Just multitudes of that kind of work over the course of the years, and just being much more involved in the project and trying to shape what are the things that we try to make good in this big open standard that none of us have the time to really work 100% on all the time. And yeah, I don’t know… Kind of [unintelligible 00:31:10.17] stuff, but did that. Still doing that, frankly.