Paul Frazee: But I think they had a different concept of it. I tried it out, and whenever you went to a torrent, it actually sort of acted like a typical torrent client, as opposed to behaving like a website. I don’t know if they were quite tried to use it as a drop-in replacement to HTTP, which is what we started doing with Dat and that was one of the differences…

But back to Feross’ original question, the good news is that there’s a lot of projects out there right now that are attacking this problem. So for anybody that’s really into decentralizing the web, you should be happy to hear that. A lot of it has to do with blockchains. Beaker and Dat - we don’t use any blockchains; we’re really actually just seeing how far we can get with Dat… And there’s some technical similarities, because Dat has this append-only log behind every Dat archive, which retains all the history and it uses signatures on that log… But unlike almost every other blockchain, there’s no decentralized consensus, which is the major feature of a lot of the cryptocurrencies.

[16:23] But the Ethereum project has been really explicit about how they wanted to build a next iteration of the web with their tech; they even started, I believe, the Web 3 Foundation.

You know, I guess almost all of the blockchain-based solutions have payments at the core of what they’re trying to add to the web, which is cool… Payments are important; it’s important that people can make money off of their work, and it’s all sustainable… But the main difference, I feel like, between what we’re doing and what the cryptocurrency-based projects are doing is that by not using the blockchain, by not having decentralized consensus, we actually reduced costs even more. You can do this all with hardware that already exists, you don’t have to pay any money to transact on this network, and you end up getting a lot of the same kind of benefits, where you’re detached from any proprietary cloud, which is really what’s at the heart of all this.

So that would be probably the most significant difference between a lot of these projects - is there a cryptocurrency involved or not?

Andrew Stanton: I do. I don’t think we’re necessarily all the way there yet, but I think there’s a bunch of indicators that are really positive for it. First, big companies are starting to depend on it. Dropbox, for example, uses Rust in their storage layer, because they need reliability. Facebook came out earlier this year with their cryptocurrency which is written in Rust, because they need the security. Microsoft a few days ago published the result of a project where they were trying to replace core pieces of their Windows 10 code with Rust, because they got tired of security flaws. So we’re kind of seeing a lot of big companies starting to adopt it, at least in prototyping cases, and more seriously in the case of companies like Facebook.

I think that it is going to be really valuable, because the one thing that I’ve noticed for us is that there’s really kind of three payments that you have to make when it comes to building machine learning. There’s the cost of development, there’s the cost of running, and then there’s the cost of maintenance. And Python does a great job at the cost of development. We have this rich ecosystem, filled with libraries out there, you can just PIP install them, they just kind of work… You can prototype an idea very quickly. But it’s not an efficient language, so that cost to run starts adding up, especially when you have to clone it over hundreds of machines to train these very large models.

[40:08] The final piece - and this is the more insidious one - is the cost of maintenance. What is the cost of failure in your systems. And when we think about things like production, whenever our learning to rank models go down, we start losing money really quickly. We have 18 million results for jewelry, right? It turns out that there are better answers in there than others. So we need to be very cognizant of what that long-term effect actually is when it comes to building out “production”.

Kevin Owocki: Yeah, sure. So Gitcoin is a portmanteau of GitHub and Bitcoin. What that means is we take any GitHub issue you already work on GitHub, and we allow you to incentivize that issue by attaching a cryptocurrency bounty to it. So if there’s some bug on a repo in open source that I’m relying on, and I can see that that issue board is overwhelming or it’s got a lot of issues on it, I can place a cryptocurrency bounty on that issue in order to incentivize the repo maintainer to turn around the scope that I would like turned around preferentially. So it adds incentivization mechanics to open source software.

The community is about 1,700 people at this point. I’d say that people join Gitcoin a) to make a little bit of money in open source, but also just to learn about blockchain with a set of peers that are also excited about Ethereum and Bitcoin and the evolving Web 3.0 ecosystem.

Adam Wiggins: [01:21:49.13] Because your kids are all grown up and out in the world doesn’t mean you don’t still love them and have emotional reactions to things transpiring in their lives, right? Yeah, for sure, that that one was tough for me to see, because it was part of our original vision, or somewhere in that early vision, that it’s quick to get started. And it’s not about it being free exactly. It’s that you don’t need to make too many decisions to start a new project, and get it on the internet. And that’s something that – actually, I think open source was the thing that really kind of opened my mind to that originally, which is… I remember years ago when you wanted to - or at least my early experience with SQL databases was things like Informix, where you needed to go get a license before you could even use the software. So if you have an idea for a project late at night, you’re not just going to like spin it up out of nowhere. There’s this whole ritual that is involved. Now there’s the money, of course, and then that leads you into “Okay, is this project really important enough to spend the money?” and like needing to frontload that decision. So for sure, being able to like just get something up and running quickly and frictionlessly, and the free is part of that… So yeah, I was quite sad to see that.

I have a lot of sympathy for the business decision, because having been on the inside of that machine, even all those years ago - I’m sure it’s changed a lot since then, but it is a huge amount of… “Work” doesn’t even capture it. “Responsibility”, “stress”, I’m not quite sure. But being responsible, or a steward in some way for all these applications is just this huge job, and there’s really a lot of clutter with the free apps. And I probably, looking back, would have done it a little differently. Actually, we did make some big changes… This was kind of right around the time I left… Actually, I’ll give a shout-out to my colleague, Peter van Hardenberg, who’s now running the Ink & Switch research lab… But he was one of the ones that helped lead the project of setting up these hobby dynos, and something where there was like a little bit more restrictions on the free stuff… So if you’re like “Okay, yes, you get started with a quick side project, but if you really are going to make it be a longer-term thing, and you’re getting value from it, you should pay some amount. It doesn’t have to be a lot; just a little bit.” And that’s a way – it’s less about the money in the sense of like paying for the runtime or whatever, and it’s more about just sorting out what’s really important to people and what’s not. And that sorting is important, because you end up with all these junk apps that were like one-off experiments, or someone just kicking the tires, or whatever, but you can’t tell those apart from the ones that are important to people. And so it makes just the running and the maintenance of the platform a lot harder.

And then, you throw in the whole like spam and abuse side of things, which we always knew in the beginning would be a challenge… But of course, this is long before there was such a thing as cryptocurrency mining. So in today’s internet - I mean, I don’t know what the trust and safety team or whoever it is there that needs to deal with this, but I can only just can’t even begin to fathom how much work it is to kind of filter and manage just this totally free, open-ended runtime.

So I wish there had been a different solution; I’m sure they’ve thought about it and came up with what made the most sense, because I can see something there being a big problem for the business, and that problem impacting other users and customers, right? Badly-behaved apps in some ways sucking up all the time and attention of the team that’s running the thing, and then they have less time to support the people who are really getting value from the platform. So I see why the free apps would be a problem. But at the same time, it was a core part of the vision, which is that it’s completely frictionless to get started, and this takes that away.

Joseph Jacks: Right. I think that’s an interesting way of looking at it. All of those things – not to be pedantic, but I think all those things probably matter a lot in any conversation with either going and doing something in the cryptocurrency blockchain world, or as a venture capital-oriented thing, or just as a general startup raising money, whether it’s open source or not… I think for us, we fundamentally take a very technical approach, and definitely look at the code and authentic open source nature of a given company and team and project, and then sort of reason up from there. So I’d definitely say the distinction, at least for whitepaper to ICO reasoning - it’s different, for sure. But yeah, that’s definitely an interesting way of looking at it.

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

Tom Occhino: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of top of funnel… But the other thing that I really like here is - and I want to get this point right. Vercel’s reached a point now where we don’t build Next.js to make money. We make money with this managed infrastructure business in order to keep building Next.js. So it’s nuanced, but it’s actually really important. A lot of people think “Oh, monetizing open source can never work at scale long-term, and so you have to find a more durable, more sustainable way to fund open source development.” And the most durable, sustainable way we’ve found to fund open source development is to be really passionate about open source. And the sort of - I don’t know, rising tide lifts all boats, associated with the innovation that you can kind of give back.

So the thing that I really like about Next.js is that obviously the way that Facebook uses React, they have to fill in a lot of other gaps and answer a lot of questions. How do you do data fetching? How do you do routing? How do you do server rendering? And all those things end up being very tied to Facebook’s infrastructure, and kind of bespoke. But if you want to use the full power of React outside of Facebook, you kind of do need a framework. And I think even at the most recent React Conf, the core team has kind of admitted this. It’s like “Look, the best way to use React is with a React framework.” And it fills in a lot of those gaps for you.

The thing that I really love about Next.js is we can actually build the framework and the infrastructure in tandem. It turns out we have opinions about software architecture. And at the end of the day, we’re trying to enable this sort of pretty great developer experience that leads to an exceptional user experience. And performance is paramount as part of that.

And when we build these two things in tandem, it turns out you get the same benefits that Facebook gets from building their own frameworks, and building their own infrastructure. Or that Apple gets from building their own software and their own hardware.

So we kind of innovate in tandem, and we create something that is extremely cohesive. If you author your code this way, we can automatically deploy optimized infrastructure that way, and then we’re not done. Once we get it working and we’ve proven that we have this highly cohesive end-to-end stack, now we can actually generalize. Now we can codify the seams between the frontend and the backend and say, “Okay, we’ve created something that’s highly cohesive, but we’ve given it loose coupling.” So you can take Next.js and you can run it on your own. You can self-host it, you can run it on other providers… Or you can take Vercel’s managed infrastructure and you can target the same build output API with your framework, and you can run it on Vercel’s managed infrastructure.

So this kind of framework-defined infrastructure thing I think is something that used to only be big tech. Google had their version of this, Facebook has their version of this, Amazon has their version of this… But now we have that for the rest of the world. So yeah, the thing I love most about this JavaScript framework, Next.js, is that it influences the infrastructure that gets provisioned on behalf of your application.

Joseph Jacks: …physics-intense type of company. When you’re talking about the world of bits, raising tons of venture capital, in my opinion, is a scam. I’ve actually said that publicly. And I think that if you were to just siphon the size of venture capital and focus it on the bits companies - not the ones that are doing hard atoms type stuff, but just bits - it should be 95 percent smaller of an asset class, a cottage industry, a service industry, very much focused on the absolute best possible founders. And you do not need a lot of capital to make a huge, huge, huge, huge impact. That’s my learning. Can you make money with open source companies? Absolutely. Will there be more of them in all these different categories? Yes. Will there be 10 or 20 false positives in each possible category? Probably. Perhaps because maybe we overhyped the category. Because I’ve been doing a conference, and blogging, and tweeting about it, and there’s more funding going into these companies now, and all the VCs love it now too, and all this. That’s overfunding. That’s inefficient. That’s bad. It’s actually bad. In fact, open source companies, if they’re, again, focused on a pure bits business and not shipping a hardware product or something, they can be the most capital-efficient companies you can imagine.

Because if you have a huge open source community that is like – this is kind of a bad way of saying it, it’s kind of distasteful or whatever, but it’s true… Like, effectively subsidizing massive engineering costs that don’t have to show up on the balance sheet of the company, and also subsidizing go to market, marketing, lead gen, customer acquisition… Because the moment you flip the switch on a product that solves a customer problem, you have a huge amount of that user base that experiences the pain of that problem saying “Look, sign me up. I love your product, and I’ve been using your open source thing for the last five or six years. It solves a fundamental problem in our business, and we’ve been looking for the thing that you are selling for the last five years. We’ve just discovered it. Please sell it to us. Take our money.” That is an extremely efficient sales process, that rivals any other type of sales process you see with proprietary technology companies, that have to spend a ton of money on advertising, on sales, go to market, and all this kind of stuff.

And there’s a lot of other aspects to it too, that I didn’t even talk about. But it is very hard, and it’s very nuanced as well. One thing I think that is still very unsolved, frustratingly, and painful, is that I continue to see people who are not philosophically aligned, or remotely as interested in sort of the essence of this stuff as I am, who are very successful VCs, take the exact same playbook that we have, and then when the companies get to a point of 50, 100 million in revenue, a few hundred million in revenue, they really start to heavily encourage the founders to change the license of the core technology. I find that to be unnecessary, duplicitous, harmful, two-faced, and despicable, to say the least. I could probably talk a lot longer.

Jerod Santo: I doubt that that’s true. Can they continue to make money with that being true?

Jerod Santo: So there’s lots of different ways that people can bring in money around or with their open source work. And we’ve covered many of them over the years. I think even in one of your blog posts you were talking about Caleb Porzio’s Sponsorware, I remember talking with Caleb when he first kind of invented the thing and realized that it might work for certain things… And that was very exciting, because it was like “Okay, here’s a new avenue.” But there’s no great one where it’s like “Everyone should just do this.” And it seems like your strategy with Polar is “We’re going to provide tooling for all of them, and you just pick and choose which one you want to do.” Because you’ve got newsletters, you’ve got private stuff, you’ve got what looks like sponsorware perhaps… There’s just a lot of different ways that you can execute currently inside Polar. Maybe talk about the current ways people can make money with Polar, and then we can talk about the strategy that you’re employing there to build it out.

Jerod Santo: We’ve talked with hundreds of people about their software creations, maybe thousands, and so many perspectives around why they do what they do, and then what usually informs how they’re doing what they’re doing… And one of the things that we care about is the sustainability of the software ecosystem, and of the software community, the people building the ecosystem. And so we often asked them about things, and one of the things we asked them about was “Well, how are you going to make money with this? Because you’re going to do it for a long time, and it’s gonna drain you, and so part of sustainability is offsetting that time, offsetting that cost.” And some people have plans, and they’re trying to do the thing, and “This is a side hustle”, or they start it off as a passion project, “Now I’m monetizing…” And other people have just been like “No. It has to be for the joy. It has to be for the love.” And they’ll say like “I already have a job, and now I have a hobby I love and I care about. And if I turn it into a hustle, now I have two jobs. And the thing I love is now something that I work for.”

[40:21] And sometimes that’s just the answer for certain personalities. It’s like “Nah…” So I like that you’re saying “Guardrails now. No monetization for now.” You’re not saying this is a law, forever and all time, because then you go breaking your own law and feel bad about it… But you’re already making a living, the best living you’ve ever made. And so why take something that you love, and that you’re passionate about, and that you enjoy, and then start toiling at it in a way that it has to be changed into some sort of money-making endeavor? It seems like that could just very easily for you destroy all that joy.

Alex Gallego: I think later in life I probably should have more backup plans… But largely, for the majority of my life, I had this one thing that I kind of became obsessed with, and I don’t really have an alternative; in my mind, where I sit today, Redpanda, the product, will be successful, and if the product is successful, we’ll make money with the company, and it will happen. To me, I don’t see any alternative for that not to work out.

At this point in my life, even if it’s not the financial success, the obsession is like to me I see an opportunity for changing how actually developers build applications. And for better or worse, I don’t know, I don’t have any backup. There’s nothing else. And maybe for the bigger parts of my life that’s how I operate. And so I’m not sure so much as an undercurrent, so much as more of like a mental framework. I was like “We will figure this out somehow.” Maybe not with the same impact, or reach, or speed, or whatever. Something will change because that’s how life works out, but I think it’s fundamentally how I approach a lot of things, and it’s worked out well for me. I know it’s probably bad advice for a lot of people, but so far it’s worked out for me.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, that’s super-cool. And I think hosting is an obvious business model. Obviously, it’s working well so far, better than the open core, which was giving you probably indigestion… At least that’s how I think of it; like, to decide where to put stuff, and then as you confessed to earlier, the open source stuff was more solid than the proprietary stuff because of the fact that more people were using it. Have you considered on-prem as another way of going about it? Because a lot of orgs, I would assume, want search, but they don’t want hosted search, because their data is precious, and they may have regulations, or they may have security concerns… And you think you could make money with an on-premise version, even though I could just, you know, yum-install and run it myself… But I don’t know, maybe the tooling around it that y’all are building for the hosted version could be value-add for larger orgs.

Bruce Schneier: Nobody writes books to make money, with the exception of the top New York Times bestseller thriller writers. Nobody writes books to make money.

Solomon Hykes: Yeah, that’s something that was really fun in the early days of Docker… It was very welcoming, and open source a lot of times is not welcoming; it’s intimidating. You feel like “Oh, it’s a scene. I’m not part of that scene.” Even if you’re an experienced engineer sometimes, but it’s even worse for beginners. It’s scary. I like that we’re making an effort to be welcoming to everyone, even if it’s your very first open source contribution ever.

I think a lot of people made their first open source contribution in the early days of Docker, and that was deliberate; it took a lot of work to make it that way, and we have the benefit of that experience. Then it became different - it was larger, more serious, also more contentious, because standardization started taking place… And you had businesses arguing over who was gonna make money with it, instead of individuals just having fun together. That still happened, but it was kind of overshadowed. So this time we get to do the same thing, but try to keep the focus on that.

I think a lot of people are gonna make their first contributions on Dagger. That would be really nice. That would make me happy.

Jerod Santo: It makes sense, because if you’re going to be working on something privately, it’s probably proprietary software that you’re making money off of… So you can pay some money to make some money. But if you’re willing to open source it and let it be in the world, or if it’s for other people, as well as yourself, then it’s open source already, and it’s free in that sense. So I think it scales alongside usually the way people make money with software… So I think it’s a good model.

Adam Stacoviak: I almost said earlier, don’t burn out in the name of sustainability… Because Hugo being new to finding ways to make money with this, you’re willing to experiment and sometimes you get yourself into a direction that isn’t exactly sustainable, because it takes too much time… And you’ve promised sponsors or whatever, you created this business model… And I’m all for finding ways to sustain, but don’t do something that gets you into the position that you’ve gotta burn out to sustain.

So I think of it more like thrivability, Jerod, not sustainability… And I wanna promote that.

Jerod Santo: We didn’t really have any other stars; we had a lot of ideas, for things like helping parents control springtime, and other things that it would probably be really hard to make money with… But I think the farthest we got on any of that stuff was mainly writing out the idea, trying to determine if it’d be useful.

[11:54] One of the reasons we did Fly is I decided it’d be a good idea to go talk to our previous investors just to keep the relationships warm, just in case we ever wanted to raise money, and a lot of them actually – I was just talking through ideas, and we actually had several people offer to invest purely on the basis of Fly, basically, the one infrastructure idea we had… I was like, “That’s interesting…” That’s a big shortcut to save a lot of money fundraising and just be able to do something.

I feel like that was fortunate, and we probably won’t ever get that experience again, but we basically got an easy round of money out of it, which is never something that happens as far as I can tell.

Zed Shaw: Yeah, yeah. So it’s pretty straightforward to just say, like – let’s take just Google. Google’s entire company, up until maybe eight years ago, when they started making Go and their own stuff, their whole company was based on open source. They used Linux, they used tools, they used everything… I don’t really think they built too much of their own stuff. In fact, they got sued for that; they were using Java and they weren’t paying for it, so they got sued for it, right?

So if you take a company like Google - and they are worth 600 billion dollars, something like that; something really insane right now, 500-600 billion dollars. So they’re benefitting from open source, and then the average open source developer that works on the tools they need makes almost nothing. In fact, what we see is an open source developer is gonna die from cancer and he goes on GoFundMe and begs people for money for his funeral. And then there’s this company that’s making 500 billion dollars.

So that’s the thing - it’s really obvious, but for some weird reason programmers sort of all think that’s okay. They can’t really think about it. And in fact, they go so far as if you try to make money with your open source - like, you license it GPL; I remember I licensed something GPL, and all these people from Django started yelling at me that I licensed in GPL. Like, how dare I try to make money on it?

So we go with this thing, this sort of like self-loathing, “If you wanna get paid, you’re greedy”, but the company who’s making tons of money on your stuff is not greedy. They’re allowed to make that money, they’re a corporation. But you, the developer, you should be helping the universe with your free stuff, and you’re just a greedy jerk for doing that, for trying to make money?

Jerod Santo: Very cool. So you were talking about how to make money with open source… MySQL was open source, you sold the company around it to Sun, which went to Oracle, now MariaDB is open source, but yet MariaDB Corporation… So tell us about how you’re going about running a 100-person company on an open source thing like this.

Max Howell: That’s all I’m gonna say. [laughs] And I’m working on something for Homebrew. I don’t think I’m gonna go back to the core, but I always have a notebook full of ideas, tools I need, and that’s why that tweet is still pinned, even though I’m not working at developer tools with Apple anymore - “The foundation of the modern world is developer tools”, because I believe it, it is. And I love being a developer because we can make our own tools. It’s like the only industry apart from maybe blacksmithing - and I’m not sure if they even do make their own tools - that we can make our own tools to improve our workflows, to make ourselves more efficient and productive. So I always have a notebook full of ideas for stuff, and this is one that I’ve been toying around with for a couple of years and I’m really trying to make it now. And yes, it has growlers in it, and I don’t wanna say anything more about it because I don’t like to jinx myself. I feel like if I say things about some new ideas I have that I then don’t finish them. I really wanna finish this one though, also because I’m thinking about how to make money with it, and that’s what I want: I wanna be able to work on open source full-time.

Adam Stacoviak: Is there anything, considering the saturation – we talked about this in the past shows we’ve had you on… Is there anything about – because we’ve talked about how to-do apps are, it’s a pretty saturated market; you’ve got a number of known competitors, a number of known competitors that actually offer this stuff for free, some that really provide good value and have paid versions of them… Is there anything that in hindsight when you’re looking back at what you had done with Cheddar and what could be possible, is there anything you would have done differently with it? Because you obviously could have made money with it and you did make money with it, it just wasn’t – from what I understand it wasn’t a ton… Not enough, obviously, to keep you afloat, because you wouldn’t have made the changes you’ve made, but is there anything you would have done differently with Cheddar looking back on things, knowing what you know now?

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

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

Louis Pilfold: Well, it’s because that’s the – I mean, games because it’s cool. I like when people make art. And games are a prominent form of electronic art. That’s awesome. So I like art. More art is good. But the business stuff is because that’s what I make my money with. I spend five days a week, eight hours a day making some - I don’t know, web thing, or payment processor, or something… And I was always like “I wish there was some other – the language that I want for this just isn’t quite there. I can’t find it.” And while if I was trying to mess about with some art, or some music, or something, it’s like “Oh, GDScript is really good for this.” Or like “Rust is really good for this.” And maybe that’s because I didn’t have enough experience in those worlds to say “Oh, actually, Rust isn’t very good for it. I think I can make a better video game Rust”, or something. I just didn’t feel the same need to try and like solve those problems… While Gleam is like “This is what I think people need to make their lives easier, to remove some of the stress of the work we’ve got to do every day.”

Jerod Santo: Yeah, you have to decide what you want in life. And if you find yourself in a privileged position to be able to make those kinds of choices, then you decide what matters most. And if more money, and more power, and more fame, or whatever comes out of building the business bigger is what you want, then that’s what you go after. But I’ve always desired freedom and liberty more than money… And so I could make more money with this, but I would be giving up freedom and liberty and time to do other things. And Adam feels the same way, so we’re both on the same page there.

Of course, we have shiny object syndrome, and we have moments where we’re like “Here’s a huge opportunity. Should we seize it?” And we have to talk to each other and make those decisions. But ultimately, we’ve always come back to -we’re really happy to do this work, and it’s satisfying work, and we just haven’t decided to go ahead and scale it to the hilt, and chase the dollars. I think that’s paid off.

There’s been times where, of course, opportunities come by, and you think “Maybe if we took some investment, we could hire more people, we could do more…” There’s so much we could be doing that we aren’t. And that’s really the problem, is like, we could have a whole news wishing. We could have way more written content. We’ve always wanted to have more of those posts, like the one I wrote about the Changelog not going viral. Our whole written side of our business - it’s pretty weak. And I know we could just make that better with money and people. But ultimately, we’ve chosen kind of freedom and lifestyle so far, and I think it’s been a pretty good decision for where we are.

Jon Calhoun: I mean, the hard part about any business is finding that balance. What is the right balance of the price point that we can support the way we want to support it, and it’s not so astronomically high that we can’t make sales, or anything? And every business tries with different things, but I think it’s about finding that right level. And I think Google is one of the ones that historically has been like “Oh, we give everything away for free, and make our money with other stuff”, so I think people got used to that. But then now we see all these products they make that just get shut down, and it’s like “Well, clearly, there is a downside to this approach.”

Jeff Robbins: [laughs] Okay, let’s go into the way-back machine, Tim. Man, I mean, I’ve been interested in computers and that kind of stuff for a long time, and I’m old, so it goes way back… In the ‘80s my dad bought a IBM PC Junior, which was like the cheaper one that people could afford for their house, and I started learning basic programming on that, and then I – yeah, I did all kinds of stuff… I had a Hewlett Packard programmable calculator that I’d won in the State Math Fair – or the Science Fair… In my town it was the Math Fair, and then we went to the State Science Fair… And I won this calculator and I programmed it to play Monopoly… So you know, I’m a nerd going waay back to the ’80s.

Then I bought an Atari ST computer that had MIDI ports on it, so I could hook it up to my synthesizers and drum machines, and stuff like that… And I remember I worked all summer to save up the $1,200 or whatever it was that the Atari cost… And then I realized if I got a modem, I could connect to these bulletin board systems, and talk to people, and find out information, and stuff. So I did that with the various bauds of modems over the years, and I eventually realized that I could make some money with my computer skills. [laughter]

I started doing temp work on Macs, and learned desktop publishing, and eventually learned FreeHand, which was kind of a precursor to what we now call Illustrator, and ended up getting a job at O’Reilly, doing technical illustrations for their books… And they were connected to the internet, which was really cool! I could FTP out to things, and there was a thing called Gopher, which was a precursor to the web, and I could connect to these free software - actually free software, not pirated software - open source software boards and download software, and it was so much faster than doing it over my modem…

[04:17] Then the web started, and O’Reilly being kind of at a crossroads of that stuff, writing books about TCP/IP – they had a book about Gopher, and FTP, and all that kind of stuff… The people at CERN, who were developing the HTTP protocol, and HTML - they came to Cambridge, came to the office in Cambridge where I was working, and kind of did this pitch, like “Hey, you all need to get into the web. The web is gonna be the big thing. We want this to be the big thing, and O’Reilly should write books about it.”

Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty being the visionaries that they are, said “Well, we’re gonna do more than that… We’ll create an online magazine and use our publishing skills to do web stuff.” So they started creating the Global Network Navigator, GNN.com, and I was involved in a lot of the brainstorming of that, and the woman who would eventually become my wife was the designer… So my wife is the first commercial web designer, and I got so excited that before GNN even launched I started one of the world’s first web development companies in 1993. It was an uphill battle, because no one had heard of the web. [laughter] No one wanted a website, because they didn’t know what it was.

They would say things like “Oh, I got burned! We’ve spent all this money on a CompuServe page. We invested all this money in Prodigy, and now Prodigy is shutting down! How is the web gonna be better than that?”, so I would have to do sales pitches that were like that.

Then about a year later my band got caught up in a – all record labels were very excited about it, we got caught up in a bidding war, and I said goodbye to web stuff and spent the rest of the ’90s in a van, driving around the country. [laughs]

Justin Searls: …for a services company, it was really hard for me, that whole decade, as a sales guy, as the guy pitching. Because we founded the company, Todd and I, on this theory of the case that ROI, return on investment and business value, from which everything else flowed… Like, we had found Agile and extreme programming, and we’d iterated and innovated in teams in the past, and really helped companies figure out “How am I going to make or save money with software project, and how am I going to avoid failing with this investment that I’m going to make in software?” We were really good at it. And we hired a bunch of people who were really good at it. And then my job as a salesperson was to get on the phone and make the case of why us, why this approach, why we be different, why it’s worth it. And you know what I did instead? I’d get on the phone with people and I’d start up like “Well, here we’ve got TDD”, or “Here we’ve got this cross-functional team”, or “Here we work with the product owner and stakeholder and we educate”, and all. And I couldn’t get the fifth word out before somebody would respond “Alright, how many warm bodies do you have, and what’s your rate?” Because the only problem that they were solving for was headcount. I’ve got to get a thousand people into this Uber building so that it looks like they’re a real legit deal, because we’ve got a serious C – what are they, in series G at this point? No, they’re IPOed.