Chris Beams: [01:24:04.19] Yeah, for sure. And some percentage are actually out and out scams, right? I think a lot of people are too quick to say “Oh, it’s just all scams”, or something like that. Mostly, the things that you run into, I think it’s still safe to say, are actually well-intentioned people saying “Hey, I’ve got a bright idea. I’ve got some sort of notion of a kind of economics that I can add into this application, that I can sort of tokenize it, and that I can build a legitimate way to fund the development of this project. People will hold this token and pay for using the application with the token” or whatever different kind of model.

So there’s hours and hours that we could talk about on all of those models, right? But what Bisq is doing is something if not unique, very unusual, by comparison, to this kind of norm that we’ve been seeing in this space. Basically, one thing that makes it unusual is that Bisq is working, running software. We’ve actually built the system, it’s out there, it works, people use it, and people are happy to pay to use it.

When people initiate a trade, both on the maker side and the taker side (both counterparties), they pay a fee into Bisq, in Bitcoin; that fee goes to the arbitrators today. I’m one of those arbitrators, the founder of Bisq is one of the arbitrators. So people are willing to pay to use this application in this network, because it’s valuable to them to be able to trade. Same reason people pay a fee on a centralized exchange.

So that works to a degree, in terms of economically incentivizing the development of the application. That can help pay the bills and so on, if you will, but it doesn’t scale very well with regard to getting that JavaFX UI person to come and contribute that chart implementation, or fix that bug, or whatever it is. That’s where this idea of a DAO comes in.

What we’re up to here and what we’re rolling out is a token; we added a token into the sort of larger Bisq system, and that token is actually something based on Bitcoin. This is something that is not a new idea, but not a lot of people do - it’s called a colored coin. What that means is that each BSQ token (we actually call the token Bisq as well, but its ticker symbol would be BSQ) is actually backed by a small fraction of a Bitcoin, a thousand Satoshis, where a Satoshi is one one-hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin. So 1,000 of those, which is a very, very small amount of Bitcoin, actually backs this coin.
What this means is that – and before I get too much into the details of what BSQ is, what can you do with it? Well, we haven’t launched it yet, and I can get into the details of the roadmap later, but when it’s fully functional, what people will be able to do is buy BSQ, trade for BSQ on the Bisq exchange - so they might trade Bitcoin for it - and with that BSQ they’ll be able to pay their trading fees at a lower rate than they would pay for it in Bitcoin. So it’ll be a cost-savings to them, they’ll be able to do more trades more cheaply when they pay for them in BSQ.

[01:28:04.27] Okay, so what? What good does that do? Well, on the other side, and getting back to the original question you asked, we wanna bring people in, have more people contribute, we wanna fully decentralized the operation and maintenance and development of the whole network and the application and so on. So this is the second role of the BSQ token.

The first role is that you can pay to use the application with it, so it’s a kind of access token in that way. The second utility that it has is that you can be paid in it for the work that you do for Bisq or on Bisq. Somebody comes along and implements the chart that we were just talking about - they would at the end of that month period issue what we call a compensation request, and fundamentally that’s gonna be a document saying “Hey, I did this work.” It might be a link to a pull request, or one or more pull requests or commits, something like that that says “Hey, I contributed a chart and it’s merged. That took me this much time, and this is my market rates, what I usually get paid.” Again, just sort of thinking in the units of currency that we denominate our lives in, “Hey, this was $1,000 worth of work for me”, and then they would look at what the market price of BSQ is, and they would issue a compensation request for that amount of BSQ.

What happens is then DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) votes on his compensation request and anybody else’s requests that were issued during that period, and they’re voting in the affirmative or negative - “Yes, we’re going to pay for that work”, “No, we’re not.” And people don’t have any guarantee.

Brendan Eich: [35:47] Yeah, so that’s the really radical idea, and it’s not fully implemented. Brave, with the right opt-in - we wouldn’t wanna surprise users with this, but Brave should be your personal Google; it should be your personal data set and machine learning, which adds value to the data.

You know how people say “Facebook sells your data”? They don’t, because if they did, it would all get quickly arbitraged to a low price, and it’s seasonal enough, there’s enough repeated behavior among users that it wouldn’t be necessary for them to keep selling it. It would be extracted and in bulk. Facebook doesn’t sell all your data. What they do is they say “Come onto our platform and do ads”, or “Come onto our platform and transact in a very limited way with the data.” That’s what Google does with the web. Google is a really brilliant, once-in-a-generation business. They started with search ads - very clean, because when you’re searching, you have strong intent, you’re looking for something, you’re willing to see a promotion, especially if it’s algorithmically well-placed. It could be better than the organic results that Altavista would have found in ‘98. That’s why Google started rising fast then, and they did search ads even then; they were making enough money they got the famous angel investment from Andreas Bechtolsheim. He asked them, “How do you make money?” and Sergey said “Placed results, search ads.” Andreas said, “I’m using Altavista, but they get tricked by pages that put a little dictionary in the HTML comment, and suddenly that page is authoritative for every word in that dictionary, and they get undue search rank in Altavista. What do you do about that?” Larry Page said, “Oh, we take care of that because we count incoming links to do reputation, pagerank.” Then Andreas said, “How much are you making?” This was like ’98, when Sergey and Larry were still I think on Stanford campus. They said, “A hundred thousand a month and growing”, and Andreas said, “Let me go to my car and get my checkbook”, and he wrote a famous angel investment check which paid off very well.

That search ad business is still strong for Google, but search is kind of flattening out. The smartphone is less of a searchy device, it’s more of a social and bespoke search, or custom app experience. Voice is rising, AI is changing things… Search is flattening. It’s gonna be a challenge for Google to keep satisfying Wall-Street’s needs as a public company.

Google also did something clever - in 2008 they bought DoubleClick, because they saw if you didn’t convert all those search ads on the search engine result page, those quality texty result up top that were clearly identified at ads, but sometimes could be better than the organic results – if you didn’t click on those, you went off into the organic results, and you visited publisher sites and ecommerce sites… You kind of got distracted and surfed a bit for fun, celebrity-stalked somebody a bit… Then you came back to your major purchase, but maybe you did it through an ecommerce site and Google had no piece of that action. So they bought DoubleClick, because DoubleClick had a display ad business. They were all over publisher sites, they were on a lot of ecommerce sites. And they had cookies, they could be audience profiles by tracking people across sites.

[38:59] That gave Google a more complete model of the user, from search, through browsing to various sites that DoubleClick had cookies on or other footprint on, and Google’s been integrating things ever since - YouTube’s gotten big… In some way they’re the web, eating their own ecosystem, but they’re also getting a more complete user model.

I think you may have seen, even Chrome will now be mixing your history into the advertising model if you don’t opt out, I believe. Powerful business, but it’s got some downsides. Increasingly, Google and Facebook own 90 cents of every marginal ad dollar spent. Every extra ad dollar being spent this year above last year, 90 cents out of it goes to Google and Facebook. And that’s not a stable setting, even if you don’t mind those two being the new duopoly on search and ads, or social and ads, because Facebook’s coming after Google, and Google’s search business is flat. So there’s a problem there.

Also, there’s a huge privacy problem. People just don’t like being tracked that way. They get retargeted by bad ads, they get creepy ads, ads that make your eyes bleed, parasite pictures, belly fat reducers, wrinkle reducers… And they get malware now. Malware is actually being placed, and has been for a few years. This is kind of an under-reported story, because a lot of it works by being ransomware - it holds your PC hostage, encrypts the disk and says, “Here’s how buy Bitcoin and send Bitcoin”, and it charges not too much. So grandma paid $600 or $1,200 to get her pictures back of her grandchildren, and she’s too embarrassed to admit it.

There was a hospital in Southern California where all the systems in the hospital were thrown by ransomware. That gets you more on the FBI and Interpol radar, but these are criminal gangs hiding in nation-states that don’t necessarily prosecute them. They’re using very sophisticated exploit kits; that’s the payload that downloads and tries a bunch of vulnerabilities.

The ones we know about from the last year and a half, Angler in particular, used Flash and Silverlight and Java plugin vulnerabilities. Brave turns off plugins by default. The plugins should die, Steve Jobs was right. Thoughts on music - he was right about DRM; thoughts on Flash - he was right about Flash. God bless Steve Jobs. [laughter]

I’m not gonna endorse everything he ever did, but he did two solid things there for the web and for security. These exploit kits now are trying browser vulnerabilities. I’m pretty sure Neutrino is the one that superseded Angler and it’s trying browser vulnerabilities, because every sophisticated endpoint software is endlessly vulnerable, and you have to keep patching it. That’s what Chrome does, that’s what Firefox does, that’s what Microsoft does now… It was one of the lessons of the last 15 years in browsers, that you have to release all the time to keep ahead of the exploits. You have to fuzz-test your codebase with travesty JavaScript-generated JavaScript that finds all the safety bugs.

[42:01] These exploit kits are out there, and they’re coming in through ad exchanges. How do they do it? They actually create fake ad agencies. These are fake businesses, with fake CEOs and CMOs, fake people pictures, bios, and they go and buy ads… They put custom creative ads into ad exchanges. They pay the fees to get into the exchange, and then in real-time bidding processes automated ad exchanges place these ads on publisher pages, sometimes even gateway to other exchanges. They get onto a Chrome ad exchange at a low price, but they can claim to guarantee some conversion or some performance to the publisher who wants to sell the ad space for the ad. And the publishers fall for this every time, because they wanna fill out every space they can with ads, even at the bottom of the page, where the parasite pictures are. And they generally don’t directly sell that to brands or agencies; it’s not good space, so they say “Oh sure, programmatic ad partner. Come on in and own my space and put whatever you want in there.” Programmatic means automated, if it means anything. So he goes and says “Okay, let’s use this ad exchange…” It’s AOL, or OpenEx or Yahoo!…

Pretty soon, you don’t know where those ads are coming from. They’re coming from Russia, but they look like legitimate ads. And here’s the crazy thing - sometimes if you scan their JavaScript, they all come with JavaScript, for tracking pixels to confirm that the ad was viewed, things like that. You don’t see anything overtly bad; you might see some funny little image, a processing loop that maybe is commented innocuously look like it’s doing something to do gamma correction on the image. What it’s actually is taking a graphic decoding of an exploit kit loader from image pixel perturbations. In other words, it’s taken out of the hiding, some kind of signal, a covert message in an image or a picture is being done to hide the guilty code that’s gonna load the Angler exploit kit.

This leads to the New York Times, BBC, AOL and other top sites in late March having ransomware malvertising on their properties. If you think about it, this is actually an outrage, right? Why should world-class online publishers tolerate this? Why should they not control the quality of the ads. Why shouldn’t they have only direct, trusted relationships? Well, as I say, the bottom of the fold, and even the middle of the fold (middle of the page) ad spaces just aren’t as valuable as the top, and even big publishers that have direct sales forces and their own tech teams and do beautiful, custom sponsorship ads…

[44:48] My favorite example, Louis Vuitton handbags on Elle.com. That takes up the bottom half of the frontpage, it looks nice, it’s a trustworthy ad as far as I know - there’s very little third party about it; there’s some tracking… It’s a custom video ad from Questra or somebody, but it’s pretty legit. That’s not the problem. It’s the stuff below that that all the publishers want to fill their space and make a little bit of money. Otherwise, if they leave the space dead, they’re just leaving money on the table. And that leads to malware coming on the pages.

To get back to Brave, we saw this coming. We said ad blocking - even in 2015 when we started - was rising. We started May 2015. We didn’t know that iOS, thanks to Tim Cook, would start making ad blocking easy to use with Safari. They make it an app install model, instead of a browser extension model. They make it content blocking, and it rose quickly to the top of the app store last fall and it became very popular until it saturated short-term demand, and it changed the whole conversation. It made people across the ecosystem - from the marketers who spend on advertising, to the publishers who rely on whatever of that spend is left after all the middle players and the parasites have taken their skim - it made everybody say “Oh no, ad blocking is not going away. It’s not just AdBlock Plus or uBlock Origin. Now it’s iOS. It’s Apple. And Apple had walked away from advertising as a business I think twice. But it wasn’t just because ads are annoying or unaesthetic; that’s a very shallow way to characterize it. Ads are actually dangerous, because they’re over delegated through these ad exchanges, and there’s no contractual relationship.

Doug Crockford knew this. If you remember Doug’s work at Yahoo! with AdSafe, which was a static verifier for JavaScript and was kind of like before Google Caja, which became Secure EcmaScript, AdSafe was Doug’s very picky way of trying to get Yahoo! ads not to contain malware. This has been a longstanding problem, and as I said, it’s under-reported because ransomware - the price the criminals extract is low enough people are embarrassed and they can pay it, get their system back… It’s very hard to track these criminals down. But even ignoring the ransomware threat, just the privacy problem that your data profile is constantly being sucked out of your machine and you’re not benefitting from it, you’re actually suffering from increasingly worse ads, even ignoring the malware; just annoying ads. Retargeting, which is when you get hammered by an ad you’ve already seen… Because it sometimes nags you into buying something you wouldn’t, or in the best case reminds you of something you forgot you do wanna buy. It has a little bit of lift, like a fraction of a percent, and that means that it’s gonna get done; it’s not gonna be left on the table. That money is not gonna be left on the table.

So advertising has become this toxic parasite system, in my opinion. It’s over delegated, there’s too much principal versus agent conflict of interest, there are layers of that, and along with that, there are layers of confirmation bias in the data that’s extracted in the model.

[47:54] They say they have great data, all these ad tech companies; they wanna go public or they wanna get bought by Oracle, and they say they have magnificent data which will increase yield. But if you look year to year, the actual performance of advertising, the so-called yield, doesn’t really go up. Money just goes from one pocket to a different pocket. Publishers are still suffering, and there are long-term negative externalities, like secular trends that are bad for everybody, like the rise of ad blocking and the rise of malvertising.

Brave is trying to address this, but not just - I’m being very negative here - we’re not just gonna cure something that’s bad; we wanna make things actively better. We wanna make this anti-Google, personal Google. We want you to be in charge of your data, and that means not only should you not have bad ads or annoying ads or dangerous ads, you should have a piece of the action. You should get revenue, you should be able to control the terms of the economics. And if you don’t want ads, you can donate, and then you can block guilt-free.

Frank Karlitschek: I have to give you a little bit of the back-story here. ownCloud, the project before, was something I founded ten years ago. Last month was actually the ten-year anniversary, when I started ownCloud. It was a free software, open source project. At the beginning it was actually part of the KDR project, of the KDE community, and I did it in my spare time, in parallel to some other activities. It was a pure hobby, volunteer project.

I picked the AGPL as a license, and the community was coming together, and we released the first version, second version, third version, and so on… And then one-and-a-half years later it became clear that there’s an opportunity to actually found a real company around this.

[04:05] I founded a company together with two other co-founders. I looked for two other people to found the company together, and that’s what we did… Based in Boston, in the U.S, actually. That’s also where I lived in the U.S. for two years. And yeah, this was the ownCloud company.

It was quite successful at the beginning, but over time it became clear that some things didn’t really work out that well. There were some issues, to be honest, with my co-founders; I picked the wrong people, to be honest. There was also a little bit of misunderstanding how a real open source business should work.

We decided to do an open core business model, which means there was a community version which was open source, but didn’t have all the features; to get all the features, you had to get the enterprise version, and the enterprise version was proprietary.

We also did dual licensing, so we asked all the community contributors to sign a CLA, and then the company did dual licensing. So the software was available under the AGPL, and then also the proprietary license, and many other (I would say) creative things that sounded good at the time, but at the end actually had the effect that the company as not working.

This was actually sad, because the software was quite good, the team was good, companies tried to buy it, and there was a lot of successful parts in it. This is what basically triggered the fork. 12 people, including me - the core 12 people - actually decided to start over. Four years ago we founded Nextcloud as a fork of my own project and fork of my own company, and we actually tried to do some things, a lot of things, differently and better this time.

For example, we are pure open source, we don’t have proprietary extensions, we work better together with the community… We actually don’t have external investors anymore, so it’s completely self-funded and sustainable. We tried to do this nicer together with our contributor community… Because we have a really good and big community of over 2,000 volunteer coders, and it’s very important to do it in a fair way for everybody… And yeah, that’s what we’re doing this next year now.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, it was the first M, but it was the maxed CPU… First of all, it’s still very good. And so that makes it hard to buy something brand new. It is the 2021, but it’s 64 gigs of RAM, it’s got a massive multi-terabyte hard drive… It was basically like go to the configurator and hit the max on everything, besides the size. It is a 14-inch, not the 16-inch. So aside from the screen size, it’s just maxed out. And so I hate to go buy one new, that has less specs than this one… But when I go max out the new one again, I’m like “Can I justify this? Because my one’s working pretty well…”

Or I could go downstream and like “Do I really need all that storage? Do I really need all the RAM?” And so that’s where I just like close tab and move on for a little while. So no, I do not have a new Mac… But gosh, I want one.

Luis Villa: And I think this is where one of the things that I’m super-interested in - openness; original open source, it was, in some sense just an IP law thing, right? It was just a copyright license, but it redistributed power in the industry. It made it possible for a small startup like Google - because their original plans were like “Well, in order to do this, we’re gonna need tens of thousands of machines.” Of course, now it’s tens of millions, or whatever.

[46:05] But at the time, the idea that you could license 10,000 machines and like operating systems - again, to this question of copyright licensing… From - at the time your options were Sun or Microsoft, right? That would have been implausible. It just would have been too costly to create Google, and open source allowed new competitors to come in. And we’ve seen this in a variety of different spaces. It tends to – I won’t say it ends control, because obviously, we’ve ended up in a world where there’s a small number, again, of control– they’re just using different tools to control the industry. So where are we going to be at that? Because Natalie mentioned Codex, there’s a project called Big Code, which is open(ish) - you can join the Slack, you can download the models, you can discuss their ethical restrictions… And that is all being done in the open, right? It’s not inside any one company. There are some corporate sponsors to buy GPU time, but it is going to be a research-oriented alternative to Codex. But if that’s out there in the open, or what I’ve been calling open(ish) in my newsletter, because it’s open with some restrictions… Are they huge restrictions, small restrictions - we don’t really know yet.

Open AI is going to be doing this very good, I think very interesting work on things like fingerprinting… Like you say, if you want to deploy in production, Open AI is gonna like challenge you on the safety of your usage. Okay, well, but once it’s out there, if somebody else is doing an open competitor, open(ish) competitor, what’s the infrastructure for – and this gets, again, to these other layers…

I think, if your listeners take away any one thing from this talk, it’s that for a long time, we used intellectual property licenses to govern the ethics of our software. That was weird, and probably not very good, and we should stop doing that as like the first line of defense, right? Because there’s just too many other tools of government regulation… Natalie’s example of a platform regulating what’s being used, codes of conduct… This like 25-year period where intellectual property was the hook that we did all of our ethical regulation through was a very weird period. It was very lucrative for me as an intellectual property lawyer, but probably not the right thing for the industry.

So again, for your listeners, if there’s any one thing to take away from this, it’s that if somebody says, “Hey, we should use an IP license to make human beings behave better”, your instinctive reaction should not be, “Oh, hey, that’s what the free software people did.” Your instinctive reaction should be “Uhm, ehm, uhh… If we must… If that’s the only tool we’ve got, then yeah, maybe.” But it’s almost never the only tool we’ve got. There’s so many other layers of regulation now that we can use to try to govern how we work together, that are probably better suited for it. Because IP is just – and like I said, to get back to this… Like, we don’t even know, right? And we haven’t even gotten into some of the weird side corners. I don’t know how much time we’ve got left, but… Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It’s not only absurd, it’s actually revolting. I think we’re spoiling one of the greatest achievements of humankind, the internet. And we’re willfully regressing on all of the key components that made it so unique, and we’re handing it over to a bunch of monopolists to run as they see fit. That’s just dystopian. And I feel that because I’ve literally been working with the internet since the very first browsers came out. And I owe my entire career to the internet. I owe much of my life to the internet. So to see us spoil it in this slow-boil way is just heartbreaking.

Now, I understand why. It’s not like there aren’t reasons why people enjoy, or perhaps even prefer the cloud… But a) I think those reasons are overstated. I used to assign to those reasons. This whole moniker of like, “Well, you wouldn’t create your own power either. What, are you going to run a power plant in your backyard?” That was very compelling, I think, in the early days of cloud, and now it’s very uncompelling, as people have realized that it takes just as much f****n’ effort to run in the cloud as it does to run on-prem. In many ways, it actually takes more effort. And in many ways, the complexity of racking a server and connecting some Ethernet cables and so on is dwarfed by trying to understand the 150 services AWS puts out, or how you do permissions, or how you do cross-routing; all the other complexity of the cloud is there, it’s at least as much.

[38:24] Now, that is not to say it does not have distinct advantages, and we enjoyed some of those advantages very much when we launched Hey. When we launched Hey, we had scoped and set up the infrastructure to accommodate I think 30,000 people trying out and using the system over the course of several months. Well, we had over 300,000 people show up in three weeks. On the cloud, we could push a few buttons - it wasn’t quite that simple, but at least the mental image of it is simple, where we go like “Boom! Now we have like 10 times the capacity.” Now we can deal with 300,000 people showing up in a few weeks, instead of 30,000 people showing up in a few months. That is a difficult proposition if you had been on-prem. So that’s what the cloud does really well, it does spikes very well. So if you have this incredibly unpredictable business, the cloud does that better than anyone else. Now, is that generally our business? No. I can predict the amount of storage, for example, we need for Basecamp a year-and-a-half in advance, because it’s such a stable, predictable business. The vast, vast majority of SaaS software, and certainly all of b2b SaaS software is incredibly predictable, which is why in part it’s such a good business. But it also means that the key advantage of the cloud is not that pertinent. And in fact, it is almost sort of – it’s the downside, right? Like, you rent your computers.

Now, what do you think is cheaper - to rent your computers or to buy your computers? Now, it is cheaper upfront to rent the computer. So if you have no money at all - great. Okay, fine; you don’t have to buy the machines. But if you have to rent the same computer for five years in a row, you’re going to pay for that computer five times over, at least; in some cases 10 times over. Right? The expenses involved with the cloud are evident in the profits that AWS posts every quarter to its parent company. AWS is responsible for something like three quarters of all profit of Amazon. Now, imagine that - Amazon sells billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of merchandise every day on their website, and it’s barely profitable. They rent out a bunch of infrastructure to tech companies, and that is wildly, obscenely profitable. What do you think that money comes from? It comes from your f****n’ pockets, right? Now, there are some economies of scale, so they can obviously buy some things… But those economies of scales are not like 10 to 1. It’s not like Amazon could buy the same CPU for a 10th of the cost that you can buy that CPU. I don’t know, do they get 20% discount, 30% discount? Whatever it is, the math doesn’t work on the long term if you have a stable workload.

And that’s partly where we have been with our business since the beginning. Now, Hey, was different, but now it’s not so different. Now it’s a far more predictable thing. And when I see the amount of money we send to AWS every month from Hey, I cry a little, because it just looks like, “Geez, if we take that money and we invest it in our own software, a) we get out from under the big tech monopoly of this software, b) we’re not contributing to the death of the internet, where we reduce all the computers that run it to these three data centers, and c) we’ll actually make a bunch of money. We’ll own a bunch of software.

And what I’ve also found, particularly right now, we’re in this fascinating phase of hardware infrastructure where advances are actually happening again. Now, for the longest time, 2010 through ’18, or something, how much extra power they would get out of those Intel CPUs? Bubkes, Nada, Niche. You could barely tell the difference.

[42:07] Suddenly, TSMC and Apple have turned up the heat on the manufacturing processes, and we have AMD putting out five nanometer chips, and you’re suddenly seeing like 20%, 25% performance jumps generation to generation. And Apple has been doing this for multiple years running straight. It’s why those M1 and M2 chips are so ludicrously more powerful, in particular on the laptops, than any of the competition, because there’s finally stuff happening in the hardware realm again. And you get to be involved with that if you buy your own *bleep* computers. That’s fun. Fun in the same way as that example you refer to where we laid out all the RAM we bought for the machines back in 2012.

And the second thing is, computers are getting ludicrously powerful, particularly in terms of storage. And that is one of the things that just fascinate me. What changes, at which point do we have tipping points where - for example, Redis is a tool we’ve used for the longest time, and we used it for a bunch of storage, and that obviously runs all in RAM, but now you have NVMe cards that can do 10 gigabytes a second with a PCIe 5 and you’re going like “Whoa, maybe we don’t need to use RAM for caching anymore. Maybe we don’t need to–” It just opens a whole new domain; it feels like we’re a little bit back at the frontier, in much the same way as I recall like the Pentium days; we went from a 486 to a Pentium and you’re like “Holy s**t, we can do new things in new ways.” There’s some of that going on right now, that I don’t even think the industry at large have internalized, and part of the reason they haven’t is because so much goes straight into this amorphous cloud. If you now knew how large of a site or an app that you could run on a single damn computer…

I’ll give you an example. We just bought some new NVMe cards for Basecamp. 12 terabytes worth of storage - $3,000. You’re like “That’s so wild.” In 2012, when we were spec’ing out the hardware for Basecamp 3, we were buying these exotic, not available to mainstream Fusion IO NVMe cards that were like - I think it was $30,000 for like two terabytes, or something… Like, orders of magnitude less. They were orders of magnitude slower. I don’t think most people realize just how much computing power, how much storage performance you can get in a single box. I would say that probably 95% of – I mean, I’m just f****n’ shooting in dark here, but for comedic effect, 95% of all b2b SaaS software could run on a single box under the sysadmin’s table at the company. And there’s so many companies spending 20k, 30k, 100k, a million dollars a month renting a bunch of s**t from Amazon or Google or Microsoft, when they could just buy some of this new, amazing tech and stick it under the desk.

So I think we’re due to a pendulum swinging back here, where people realize, “Hey, you know what? The cloud was not actually that great.” And the reason it wasn’t that great was it was no less work; it has just the same amount of complexity.” Now, that’s not true in all regards. If you use something like Heroku, or Render, or some of these other fully – there, you can get away with an actual reducement in complexity. But if you are trying to set up Kubernetes, or run that yourself, or run that through Amazon, or whatever, the complexity and the expertise needed is just as high as it was on-prem, and the costs are increasingly out of sync, in my opinion, with what you can do yourself.

Adam Stacoviak: It’s not the worst price ever. US dollars. It’s basically brand new, it’s super-clean. I tested it the moment I got it. I did like all these parameter tests… Initially, I spun up an Ubuntu installation, ran into issues with Docker and GPU… So I went to the dark side. I installed Windows 11 Pro. And so my AI home lab right now is being powered by Windows 11 Pro. I know Jerod is [unintelligible 00:33:39.16] over there on me, which I’m cool with… But man, you’ve got to explore. I love the idea – I’ve never played with Windows in like… And I told my son this. I’m like “It’s been 20 years since I’ve played with Windows. That long.” And I feel like there’s a lot of cool stuff there, but man, they’ve got some really terrible warts over there. Like, just so bad. It’s developer-hostile now, not just user-hostile. There’s ways to clean it up… Chris Titus has a script that you can run via terminal, the administrator-level terminal, and remove a bunch of stuff, and sort of like make some things nicer… Which I think is super-cool. It makes it a little easier as a non-Windows user to like easily get to a certain state…

But yeah, I played with it at first, I did some benchmark testing against it… I really pushed it as hard as I could to just confirm it was a good buy. And it was a good buy.

John Nunemaker: Yeah, that was pretty cool. That was actually kind of like a – I won’t say accident, too… Because I was kind of maintaining it, because everybody else had kind of moved on, and so I just kept it running, and occasionally would add things to it, and stuff; honestly, in my free time. And I remember we started getting a couple support requests here and there, people wanting to buy it… They were like, “Hey, is it for sale?” And I remember asking, and everybody’s like “I don’t know if it’s for sale. We’d have to vet the buyer.” And that kept coming back. So finally, I was like, “Alright, this isn’t gonna happen. It’s just dying right now. So if we don’t do something with it, it is gonna permanently die”, and I was like – I just like it, again, because looking back, it’s the theme or the thread that ties a bunch of that story together. So I was like, “You know what - I’ll vet the buyer. Are you guys okay if I vet the buyer?” And everyone was like “Yeah, that sounds fine.” “Everyone” being my manager, and other people, levels up. So I was like, “Alright, I’ll vet buyers.”

And then as I was thinking about that over the weekend, I remember I was like, “Why don’t I just buy it? I’m already maintaining it basically in my free time. I wouldn’t be any different, except now I would have ROI if something good happens to it. I’d have ROI.” That, again, comes back to impact. So I think on that front, that’s kind of where – so I was like, “You know what - let’s try it.” Again, I don’t think I’ve thought about it until like we’re talking about it now, but… Common thread - you never know it until you ask. So worst-case scenario, when you negotiate, they say no.

[51:57] I remember I think I offered – I don’t even remember. At that point it was losing like $1,000/month or more, just from hosting, and AWS bills, and stuff, and I was like, “Alright, I’ll give you $5,000.” So basically, this shows that I’m real, I’m genuinely offering for it, and I will take on the burden of $1,000/month, vetting the buyer, all the problems that could possibly arise from selling it, and any possible negative impact of closing it down, or any of that kind of stuff.

I sent that up the tree, and at some point they were like, “Yes.” They dropped the price to like – I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about any of that kind of stuff, but it was like an order of magnitude lower. They were just like –

Jerod Santo: So while we’re getting meta, before we get into the results, one last aspect that we find interesting, and I think you’ll find it interesting as well, listeners, is that there’s actually a new thing this year which is brand new - the T-shirt. We’ve gotta talk about the T-shirt before we get into the results. A CSS T-shirt - “Support the survey and look good in the process.” It is a very cool CSS-logoed shirt. Sacha, I assume that’s you on the website there wearing it. Tell us about this idea, what you’re doing with it and what you hope people do, which I assume is buy it… But I’ll let you speak to that.

Kyle Wiens: I bet some people would love to buy that, and then have a product that would last longer. Yeah, nobody would. So what we need is a repair score next to the price. So when you go to buy a product, it should say “Hey, this is an eight out of 10. This is a three out of 10.” And then you know “Well, I don’t care if this is fixable.” Or maybe I really do care; I’m spending a lot, I’m investing in it, and I want it to last a long time. And so this is not a novel idea. France implemented this law about three years ago, and France rolled out a rule for cell phones and laptops and a bunch of other product categories. It says you have to have what they call the indice of repairability. It is a score card that factors in, there’s service manuals available, can you get parts quickly, how easy is it to take apart… And so if you go to apple.fr, and you’ll look at an iPhone, look at the price, the repair index is right next to the price on apple.fr. And if you go into the French equivalent of Best Buy, at retail, next to the price, it’s got the repair index next to it.

So we worked with the French government and helped them technically build and develop the scoring system. This is going to be integrated Europe-wide in coming years. It’s going to be built into the European eco index. So there’s gonna be a variety of information available when you go to buy an electronic products in Europe, and that will include repairability. So then the question is how do we do that in the good ol’ US of A? Because all of us are not shopping for electronics in France. And answer there is the Federal Trade Commission. So you know how you go and you buy a water heater, and there’s a yellow sticker on it that says how much energy it’s going to consume over its life?

Adam Stacoviak: But I’ve been having Seagate drives and servers for as long as I’ve been running data stores, which has been a long time, probably eight plus years, maybe ten years or more; longer than that. 13 years. So over time, I’ve always only ever used Seagate drives. I don’t know why I chose Seagate. Cool name. I liked IronWolf; cool brand name. All that good stuff. They’ve got some good stuff there. But the things I read about them was pretty strong, the warranty was good… And I’ve had good services with Western Digital as well, in terms of warranty; I’ve had some drives from them fail, and have to be RMAed, and the RMA process is pretty simple. That’s what you want to buy it for - you want to buy a brand that’s reliable, you want to buy for parity, you want to buy for replacements of that parity, and to be able to swap it out easily… And then also, do you have a worthwhile warranty and can you RMA pretty easily? RMA is just simply sending the drive back that’s got a failure, and they will replace that drive with the drive that you got, or something that is equivalent. There’s always circumstances that make that different, but… I’ve only had good responses from Seagate, as well as Western Digital. So those are the brands I stick with. But that can be a wife’s tale, right? That’s Adam’s wife’s tale of how I buy hard drives, you know?

Daniel Whitenack: I’m glad to know what it is now, and I feel more comfortable saying the term data fabric now, whereas before I probably would’ve cringed just a little bit to say it. So I appreciate that part of the conversation. It’s always great to have these conversations and learn about a topic together in this format. Speaking of learning, we do always like to share some learning resources in these episodes where it’s just Chris and I. And the one that I wanted to share - I don’t think we have a ton this episode, but I think one I wanted to share, which I kind of forgot was open and online, is Jake VanderPlas’s Python Data Science Handbook.

If you just search for Python Data Science Handbook, there’s a GitHub static page and you can see… So just to kind of give some of the table contents, there’s – you know, starting with IPython, moving into NumPy, and Data Manipulation with Pandas, but then going to data visualization and machine learning… And each of these has a way to run the examples straight from the page and open it in a Colab notebook, which is always good to see an easy way to run things and run a bunch of tutorials. So I would definitely take a look at this. And if you want to buy the book, you can, but also, there’s more than enough to dig into on this online site, and you can open it in the notebooks and such, too.

Johnny Boursiquot: There’s a sort of default stance you can take with build vs. buy. Again, speaking from the point of view of someone who has to – depending on what stage you’re at, and really what environment you’re in, and what company you’re working for… Is it a startup, is it a large enterprise? There are some constraints that you’re gonna have to factor in, be they regulatory, or compliance, or [unintelligible 00:09:48.15] or any of those laundry list of things, depending on the industry you’re in. You might have the ability to do certain things, you might be able to use something off the shelf, whether it be something you paid for, or something that’s open source and maintained by a large community.

The default stance is to always buy. You need to kind of be contextual, but I think if you are building a product, you can sort of - depending on what your circumstances are, you can take a default stance and say “You know what - we are in the business of making web applications for, say, shoemakers.” So perhaps you’re not in a position to go build a database specifically tailored for shoemaking apps. So trying to go build a custom, tailored database to solve that particular problem - you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot, because you’re really wasting your engineering resources and talent and money. You’re kind of wasting your effort and time. Specifically for a startup, time is against you. Maybe you’re running out of money, or whatever it is; you need to get product-market fit quickly and start generating revenue, or whatever the case may be… Then really, your focus is on “Okay, what is the focus that we need to have? What is the discipline that we need to have to get to profitability?”

If you’re a larger organization, then it’s not the money that’s driving that decision, it’s more of – all these other things I’ve mentioned previously; what are the constraints? What are the requirements we have on this organization that perhaps limit our choices on the build vs. buy thing.

You find that in a lot of large corporations, and if you’ve worked for one, you will know that a lot of times you end up having sort of this “not invented here” syndrome. You might know what I’m talking about… Whereby “Yes, we can go pick up this product from this startup, which is solely focused on delivering this particular kind of product. That’s what we need internally. But because of reason X, Y and Z, be it architecture, be it compliance, be it whatever, we can’t simply buy this and integrate it. We would be better off building something close to it, which is never really gonna be as good as the off-the-shelf solution”, but those constraints kind of force you into a “Let’s glue some things together so we can arrive at a solution.” So it’s never cut and dry, but it’s more contextual.

Adam Stacoviak: Sure. Well said. That’s a good way to put it, for sure. I like that approach and I like that sentiment, too. That gives me faith in the direction you may go.

So we’ve asked you lots of questions, we’ve talked deeply about your workflow, your tooling, some of your business model, to some degree… You mentioned your large round of funding, you’re sort of punting on some of the business direction you might go now, because you wanna make sure that you get critical mass, and are actually valuable and useful. You’ve got a Slack community that people are involved in, you’ve got a lot of garnered respect, a lot of demand happening out there… You’re still currently on waitlist. You mentioned 3,500 earlier… What is your waitlist size now? If someone’s listening to this show today and they’re like “Okay, I’ve gotta have this tool. I wanna buy–” They can’t buy it now, they have to join the waitlist. What is the process, what’s the next step for would-be, should-be, could-be users from this point?

Drew Marshall: Exactly. You buy a really nice 4k or 8k UltraHD TV, and you plug your aerial into it, and you wonder why it is that it doesn’t look very good. Well, you have to make sure that your network is aligned with the hardware you’re running it on. That’s just how it is.

So in terms of a home internet connection - and these days, home working, and home internet, and all the rest of it are now in one big melting pot. So my first question would be “So how important is the internet to you?” If the answer is “Well, actually, I run my business on it. I run my life on it. Actually, I want this to be as near as is reasonably possible 100% up”, then I would say you’ve gotta be really looking at two connections, like you have, ideally from two different providers, because that covers off “What happens if the network goes bad? What happens if something bad happens?” And actually, we’ve covered you off – so not only are you with Vodafone and Trunk Networks, but actually… Vodafone is with CityFibre, so that is a different physical cable in the streets, that’s to a different physical aggregation point, that’s plugged into a different physical bit of network, in Vodafone. And then we’ve given you an Openreach circuit, which is why it’s asymmetric, not symmetrical like CityFibre would be… But that’s then on a separate piece of fiber, taking a separate route, in separate ducts, different bits of road, that will go back to the BT exchange, and then over a different backhaul, onto us as a different network… So if any one of us, and if any one of those components goes bad on you - give or take, 30 seconds, you’ll fail over - your life will continue, and depending on what you’re doing, you may not even notice. That’s kind of where I believe people should be. We can fail over transit providers. We can have a major BNG failure he says touching which hoping that doesn’t happen, but… We can suffer those things; we’ve got more than one of them. Customers simply end up disconnecting and reconnecting somewhere else. And although that may not be completely seamless, hopefully within 30 seconds to a minute your router has done its thing, our network’s done its thing, you’re back connected, we’re all online, everybody’s happy again.

Marcin Jakubowski: There are some open source variants of machines that can shred and make plastic, but none that can do it very well… So there’s a technology gap there; none of it that is reliable or cheap enough to do it.

There’s really good grinders, but as far as open source filament maker that can make anything… You’d think there would be, and you read tons about it, “Oh yeah, this one and that one”, but actually a lot of them, the ones you can buy - they work with pellets, very highly controlled pellets that you buy off the shelf, which are still not recycled plastic, really. To recycle plastic you have to have much more tolerance; it takes more science, because you’re mixing all kinds of stuff in there, and rat hairs, and dust, and everything else. You’ve gotta have a process that’s designed to take everything… So it has to be a very robust, good system. That system does not exist yet. The filament maker that you can get - it will run typically from commercial pellets, not waste plastic, typically.

Raj Dutt: Well, was it worth it - I mean, we didn’t really have a choice. So was it worth it to do it rather than not have a conference at all? Definitely. Was it worth it in the sense that it was better than an in-person conference? I don’t think so.

The only net-positive, I think, of the virtual conference – well, it was really twofold. One is we definitely got more registrations than we would have at a physical conference, and then the other point of feedback that we got from a lot of people, kind of tied to the registrations point, is a lot of people said “You know, I really wanted to come to GrafanaCon Amsterdam, but there was no way I would have been able to. I just didn’t have the budget, didn’t have the visa, didn’t have the time off, couldn’t make it to Amsterdam and buy a ticket.”

The other thing is we’ve made it free, which made it much more accessible. So the combination of it being free, and it being virtual kind of really widened the audience a lot. That was a positive. But honestly, if I had a choice - definitely physical. So yeah, was it worth it? It was worth it to try to pull off, which there was a valiant effort on our part of doing so, particularly because it was last-minute and we hadn’t really done anything like it before. So I think the team did a really good job in making it come together in sort of a shoestring and a prayer, so speak… So I’m really happy about that. But I’m bummed out that we’re in this situation and that we couldn’t have it in-person in Amsterdam.

Kelsey Hightower: I think the goal of people who build programming languages and runtimes and platforms like Kubernetes and Prometheus and Sysdig… What we’re trying to do is make it easy to do the right thing. If cost is a problem, maybe what we can do is say “Well, how about this? We’ll keep five minutes of back-data, and whenever your monitor goes off, we’ll go and snapshot the five minutes previous of the entire world - the network, the kernel…”, and maybe you have five minutes back to at least give yourself a fighting chance.

So what we’re trying to do is say “You don’t have to make that trade-off.” I think – hey, I don’t wanna pick on Boeing here, but remember… I think they made one of the safety options an optional feature. It was optional. You had to buy it. Like “Ah, I don’t know what quite is, but I’m great.” But then a pilot needs it to make sure the plane actually takes off.

So what we’re trying to do is say “Look, let’s not make this thing a small or big organization decision.” What we wanna do is have the platform be at the ready. So maybe we start with five minutes of resolution, and it’s there by default. But yeah, if I’ve gotta write a root cause analysis… Like, if you’re a bank - maybe you’re a small bank - your customers might wanna know why their balance is off. I need to know exactly why the balance is off.

[32:10] Regulating industries tend to have to be able to give concrete answers to things… And if you’re in that situation – and I think you’ve made a good point, Stevenson, about monitoring… Maybe monitoring is where we go from having observable systems, and then picking and choosing what slice of that observability we wanna take action on, so then that becomes the monitor on top of that observability, or narrowing the scope.

But my goal - I think what we should be is like “How do we make everything we produce observable, and then make it easy for customers to create a monitor on that thing that is now observable?” I think that’s where we are. Ooh, I would be nervous in some industries if they did that.

Adam Stacoviak: It was harder than I thought. It was a lot more involved; it was like a second job. It’s a significant investment; it’s where you’re gonna spend potentially the rest of your life, if it’s your long-term home, or 20-30 year home, whatever it might be… But it’s a very important thing, and you wanna pay attention to all the details. And if you’re building it, you wanna manage the process of building it and ensure that it’s met all of the things that you agreed to, and is what you wanna buy, and all that good stuff.

Quincy Larson: Yeah, well I managed for-profit companies before I started freeCodeCamp, as a school director, essentially; it was a private, intensive English program, and I had to make sure that we had a good [unintelligible 01:13:01.22] and all those metrics that matter. And I have kind of a traditional business background in addition to my education background, so I can understand the physics of business, so to speak. And that’s really helpful, because that gives me some perspective. It’s kind of like if you’re a jazz musician - if you don’t know how to play, you can just do [unintelligible 01:13:22.07] it doesn’t sound good. But if you do know how to play, you know exactly how to break the rules and how to bend the rules to make it sound really cool.

To some extent, the fact that I’m older - I’m gonna turn 40 next year - that gives me a huge edge, because I’ve got the life experience, I’ve run a lot of organizations before freeCodeCamp, so I knew the people part of it, and the budgeting part of it… So I guess, in some respects, one of the reasons I’m more patient is I’m more confident in the state of the world and how things work and fit together. And also, I have my wife, who has the patience of Job… And she had a job with benefits, and we had health insurance for our kid and for ourselves… So I didn’t need to run out and buy that Ferrari, or whatever it is that startup people do when they exit.

FreeCodeCamp will hopefully go on forever, and hopefully, at least for the rest of my life, which I’m hoping to live to be 90, 100 - hopefully, I can continue to be involved, and leading or helping somebody else lead the organization for the rest of my life. So everything is long-term. This is not a problem that’s going to magically solve itself. If you look at how long it’s taken to get people to even get literacy to the rate it is, after 400 years… This is going to be an ongoing challenge, to teach people about technology.

Marc Boorshtein: Yeah. And it was just going through and figuring out who are we going to buy it through… Because if you’ve ever sold something to like a large company, you’ve had to go through like a reseller… CDW is a big software shop that you might have to go through. Insight’s another big one. Synnex, broken off of Insight… But if anybody who’s listening knows who any of these names are, I’m sorry. Good people [unintelligible 00:08:48.08]

Adam Stacoviak: That’s right. And as long as you’re running, I’m not complaining. But if I look across the room, and there’s a person over there handing out the hamster wheels, but that’s it… Like, “Hey, man, why are you not on the hamster wheel?” He’s like “I am the banker. I am the stockbroker. I trade off of your middleman activity.” So you’re making money off of the fact that I’m working? He’s like “Yeah. And it’s totally fair, because I am working.” And so when I think about it, what happens – I asked the question one time to someone, “What happens if everyone was debt-free?” And that person told me society would collapse. I was like “Why would it collapse?” Like, wouldn’t it be good if people were debt-free and had more disposable income to buy the things that they need? He’s like “Kelsey…” And that’s when I started having this opinion that things are not priced at what people can afford. Things are priced at what people can borrow. I’d rather sell you a car for $100,000, than sell you a car that you can pay cash for 50k. I’d rather just make another 50,000 and you’ve just got to go get a loan to buy it, so we just keep the prices high. And if you have trouble getting a loan, then you can buy here, pay here. And I’ll just charge you 17%.

So if you do this long enough, you have the perfect recipe to make sure that everyone works for ever. Like, why would you stop? You can’t stop working. And if you stop working - “Man, something about inflation, man… We don’t know what happened, but all the houses are now up 40% than last year. So yeah, you’re about to retire, bro, but you can’t afford it anymore. So back to work you go.”

So to me, I keep thinking about “Why would you want a system like that?” But I don’t think we’ve figured out a better way of having people do a bunch of work, and a subset of people not doing any work. People still like that model, and I think what we’ve done is said “Hey, what have you had a chance to not work, and everyone else had to work?” And that’s what we call retirement. This is why I’m very respectful of – the only reason why I get to not work is because everyone else has to work, and so my dollars still have meaning. So I am conflicted. In many ways I’m a hypocrite, that I’m benefiting from the exact same system that I’m trying to wonder why it exists in its current form?

Adam Stacoviak: But honestly, my tactic with sales is not at all about convincing. Zero. I want to lead and sell a good product, that I believe in, but I don’t want you to buy it because I think you should have it. I want you to buy it because you need it. And I want to find out “Can I actually help you?” And if I can, I’m going to convince you that I can help you, not that you need what I’m selling… Which is different. It’s like perspective taking. It’s not the same.

Cory Doctorow: So yeah, that audiobook just closed as well. That audiobook Kickstarter just closed as well. So after I finished the Internet Con, the director I recorded it with is this woman Gabrielle de Cuir. She’s this award-winning amazing directors who’s directed thousands of audiobooks. She is the co-owner of a studio called Sky Vote Media, with her husband Stefan Rudnicki, who’s also won every award under the sun… Like Hugos, and Audies, and Grammys, and just all of it.

So I finished reading Internet Con, which - I knew I could do a good job reading, because it’s sort of anchored around these applause lines from speeches I’ve given hundreds of times. I know that material really well. And Gabrielle came into the studio afterwards and said “Look, I have never said this to an author before, but I think you should read your novel.” We had been auditioning little demo loops from other narrators all week, while I’d been recording the Internet Con, because we were going back in the studio in a couple of months to record Lost Cause… And she was like “You just nailed it. And I don’t direct anyone anymore, except for LeVar Burton and Wil Wheaton. But I will come and direct you if you want to try this.”

So we went back in the studio for a week and we recorded this. It came out fantastic. It is now loaded up in everyone’s CMS. It goes live on the 14th of November, including on my own site, at CrapHound.com, and you’ll be able to buy it everywhere audiobooks are sold, except for Audible and Apple. And it’s good.

Adam Stacoviak: Ask questions, listen way more than I pitch… I think that you can’t really present an idea to somebody unless you understand what Kevin’s talking about, their position, their challenges, what they truly care about… Even what they believe is true. Because you might have the knowledge and the depth and understanding as someone that has value to offer, but unless it can be received, then it’s dead on the vine. So I find that there’s a maturity level to people we help through particular things that we sell. So in a lot of cases, I’m just asking questions. Where are you guys at? What are you doing? What’s working? What’s resonating? Do you work with podcasts before? Have you sponsored content? How comfortable are you in creating content? How valuable is it to your organization? Do you really care to reach the world’s developers, or do you care to reach a UX-centric audience? What are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to speak to? What titles, even? I might even be like “Hey, if you’re trying to reach iOS folks, don’t advertise with us, because it’s not that we don’t reach them… We don’t reach them in large swaths that get you value. So why even sell them something we can’t really give them value in?

I like to ask a lot more questions than I do with the menu, so to speak… Because what we have to sell is pretty finite. It’s not challenging to present the menu, and we can get super-creative, but unless they will see value in the meal, so to speak, they will get comfort in the appetizing nature of what we offer, then it doesn’t make any sense to give them the pitch and it just doesn’t make any sense.

[01:00:00.00] And I’m super-relational, too. We will often talk to folks 20 minutes, maybe more, just about what’s going on. Or even the growth of our organization; just relating, so to speak. So I like to ask a lot more questions than I offer a pitch. And I don’t like to present the menu. I never start a call with “Here’s what we sell. Do you want to buy it?” It’s never like that. It’s more like “Where are you guys at? What are you doing? How are things working for you? How high-priority is this?” Budget’s always a factor, obviously. How much are you investing into this? What’s a good place to begin for you? What are you comfortable with? And I think that translates to many things, not just a “I have something to sell/you buy it” scenario. It’s more like “I have an idea.” For example, what you said, Kevin, you said “I have ideas of how to change things for our organization for the better. But before I present them to you, what are the challenges you’re facing? What do you care about most? What are you dealing with right now?” Because if I can solve something, and it matters to you, but something else is much higher priority, I’m not going to bother you with this presentation of my idea, because it’s premature, or you’re not ready to hear right now. I need to know more about what you care about before I can say “I can actually solve your problems.” You have to know the person to some degree, or know what they’re dealing with, to truly present some value.

Abi Noda: Well, this kind of gets into our startup journey, because a big part of a starting a company like this, you’ve got to figure out who cares, because they’re the ones who are gonna buy your product. And of course, your think, just like you said, “Well, I think everybody cares.” I mean, what manager is gonna say they don’t care about productivity? What CTO or VP is gonna say they don’t care about productivity? Everyone should care about productivity. It’s kind of what we do in capitalism. That’s kind of what we’re all about.

But what we’ve seen is that – well, to your point, absolutely, many organizations put together dedicated full-time roles, full-time teams, specifically focus on these problems. And this isn’t a new concept. There have been DevOps teams and guilds for a long time, and now we see kind of a rebranding of them. We see like platform teams, we see enablement teams, developer productivity infrastructure, developer experience teams… But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that although a CTO – this isn’t true of all CTOs, by the way. I’m making a generalization here. CTOs care a lot about developer productivity. But how much of their day to day time is actually spent being able to think about that, or do anything about it? Very, very little. I mean, you’re busy reporting to the board, the CEO, putting out the next fire, headcount budgets… I mean, you don’t have time to dig into developer productivity actually, right?

So the people that care a lot about developer productivity are people whose full-time job it is to improve developer productivity. And who are those people in an organization? It’s actually not, like you were saying, usually like the managers, and the directors, or even the CTO. They all care about developer productivity, but that’s not their full-time job. Their full-time job is like hitting deadlines and putting out fires.

The people whose full-time job it is to focus on developer productivity are actually, for example, platform teams, and the infra teams, and the developer productivity teams. And their literal mission of these teams is improve developer productivity, and understand – some companies also have dedicated teams just for the measurement piece, right? I mean, of course, Google has an entire organization focused on literally developer intelligence, developer insights. That’s true at even smaller companies. I know a lot of companies that have – I mean, at GitHub we had a team in charge of just pulling together the DORA metrics, which took two quarters to kind of just get that data in one place and put together local dashboards for them.

[01:06:16.17] So yeah, to answer your question, there’s a lot of people out there, more and more, which is good for us and good for the world, that are in full-time roles where their job is to build products, or build programs, or produce insights to improve developer productivity. And if that’s your full-time job, then you’re going to need a solution like ours. I’m not saying buy our solution, but you’re going to realize you’re going to need some good data, otherwise you don’t know where to focus, and you don’t know what the organization should be focusing on. You sure as heck don’t know if you’re getting any better, if anything you’re doing is actually working… So you really can’t do your job without having good information like this.

Johnny Boursiquot: My opinion is that there’s always going to be somebody who is of a different opinion… But I think opinions, and perhaps - well, this is not an unpopular opinion, but I think opinions should be allowed to change over time. Right? Once upon a time, I was a die-hard statically-typed language person, then I discovered dynamic typing, I’m like “Oh man, Ruby’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Python is awesome” etc. And then I swinged back around and now I’m a Go die-hard because I know what my types are, and I know what to expect in places.

So I think it’s okay to swing back and forth, but I think the better approach, which I think is harder than most people give it credit, is to have a measured approach to how you make decisions about things, to how you judge things to be nor good or bad. There’s no such thing as absolutely good, or absolutely bad. You kind of have to say, “Okay, well, what problem am I solving?”

So today I might use dynamic typing because I’m able to move a little faster, because maybe I’m building a prototype, maybe I’m building something that doesn’t need to be statically-typed for reason X, Y, and Z, and you know what the decision is… Which is why I love decision records, right? Including why you pick a framework, or why you pick a language, or what velocity you think you’re going to gain from having made these decisions, right? Because if you look back, three months, six months, six years from now, and look at, “Okay, this is why this decision or these decisions were made. This is why we picked Rust. This is why we picked Lua. This is why – whatever”, and you can explain, you can provide the context within which you were making that decision, the information you had at the time, then I think it’s perfectly fine to argue for and make the case for using anything you want to use, right? As long as you have the rationale for it, and your teammates at the time understand what your reasoning is, and they’re behind it.

[48:06] The disservice we do ourselves is by basically being fanatics of one thing. And I know sometimes I myself sound like a Go fanatic… Because I love Go. I do it every day. It’s my favorite language. Hopefully, I’ll be writing Go into my retirement. But I know that Go is not always the right tool for the job, so I have to check myself whenever I see somebody coming in with a Ruby, or Java, or whatever it is, to not say, “Oh, we don’t want to use those languages, because they’re not Go.” That kind of ego I think should be left out of technology decision-making… Because technology is all about trade-offs, and you’re gonna experience trade-offs, whether it be a language, or framework, software, you buy off the shelf, or software you build yourself, how you run your software, how you’re building infrastructure… Everything is a trade-off. So I think we have to be more gracious with our teammates who may like something different than us, and we have to be level-headed, and understand that there’s context for every decision made.

Joe Percoco: Yeah, and it’s so philosophically different. It’s like, the way we approach a normal person and say, “What should we do with your money? We’re going to buy the entire supermarket; every product in the supermarket, good or bad.” That’s effectively what a diversified ETF is. “We’re going to buy every company in the US economy. We’re just going to buy it, and bet that the US grows.” If you are an accredited investor and institution, what they say is like they walk up to you, as you walk into a supermarket, “We’re going to actually try to pick out for you what are the best products that you should own and create that basket instead, and we’re going to do one in the United States. We’re going to create a China basket for you. We’re going to do a Latin America private equity basket.” This just sort of investing acumen for the reasons I mentioned earlier, just was never accessible by everyone. And now, mobile technology is enabling access to many, many different things that historically have been locked off. Our view is that wealth management is one of the last guarded bastions that we can unlock for a lot of people in a way that was historically locked.

Zac Smith: I think the most fascinating thing that I can learn out of all this time being in the cloud space, which has been super-fun, an incredible ride… And I’ve been thinking about it a lot here at Equinix, which we’ll get to at some point… But one of the most fascinating things for me is that in cloud it was the first real B2B business that had platform-like growth… Where you signed up, you used it, if you liked it, you used more, you get stuck, you adopt… And then you get sold to; later, you buy it. Like, you negotiate, or whatever. And SaaS companies like Datadog, also, similar.

But then I think B2B open source is that kind of next phase, where the cost of – for example, ranked order and priority, the cost of getting to your market and then legacy (I’m gonna call it) legacy enterprise software business where you have to hire a bunch of salespeople, you built the product, and you had to knock on all the doors, and you had to sell the software, they had to want to buy it, and that was a really, really expensive thing, to go and get your software into the market.

And then came the cloud, where it was like, “No, just sign up and try it.” SaaS. “Okay, try it. Cool.” So you lowered the cost of finding your market, because you’re like – you don’t have to go out there and sell it and install it and whatnot; just come try it. It’s all good. Free trial.

I think open source just took that to another level, because way early on, even before you had a product, you find product-market fit. And as soon as it hits, which took years – like in the Grafana, it took years to get product-market fit, but man, it finds itself through the littlest tiniest - because the distribution cost is nothing. And then once it does, there’s this really cool thing called infrastructure everywhere, and “Oh, hey, you don’t wanna run that software? I’ll run that for you.” That’s a business model now.

So open SaaS I think is a really cool way to think of monetizing. So from a business model perspective I think there’s just some structural advantages that open source businesses have. SaaS had structural advantages over enterprise software, and I just think open source has that next wave of structural advantages.