Jerod Santo: A lightweight proof-of-work captcha

Cap looks like a solid alternative to the typical CAPTCHA solutions: reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile, etc. Instead of making humans solve complex puzzles, it requires SHA-256 proof-of-work computations. Why PoW?

Every CAPTCHA can eventually be solved, whether by AIs, algorithms or humans paid via CAPTCHA farms — this results in an endless cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders. The crucial difference lies in the cost imposed on attackers…

Imagine sending 10,000 spam messages costs $1, potentially earning $10 – a profitable venture. If Cap increases the computational cost so that sending those messages now costs $100, the spammer loses $90. This eliminates the financial incentive.

Cap is an open source JS implementation. It’s customizable and offers a standalone Docker image with a REST API so it can be used from any backend language.

Jerod Santo: [50:46] Yeah. Well, you developed good habits, so that will be a real virtue for you, to maintain those habits. I would add options trading to the list of things you should not get into when you get out, because your Robinhood account can also be an entertainment that turns into disaster… And I’m sure you’d like to avoid future disasters. I think your open source work is far more profitable and way less risky than options trading options. But tell us about the open source. How long did it take you to get into? How did you get into it? What do you work on in the open? etc.

Adam Stacoviak: …shouldn’t make any money. You shouldn’t even attempt to be profitable. Like, that’s–

Drew Wilson: [00:58:37.08] Pure loss. Pure loss. No, no, no, we made money in that there were people paying us money, and money went to our bank account, but we were not profitable. So I lost a lot of money. More than –

Anthony Eden: No, it’s fair. Look, it’s a fair point. I’ve had a lot of people over the years tell me – even inside the team, we’ve talked “Why don’t we put the registration part up front, and flip the equation back, so that we look like a registrar?” And the counter argument has always been “Well, then we become just like everybody else. What sets us different from them?” But maybe it’s the inevitable evolution of where we will go. Often I’ve let this business be driven in the direction that our customers want to go, more than what I necessarily want personally. And that’s okay. That’s one of the reasons why we’re still in business. And we’ve always been profitable, we’ve always been a stable, steady growth business because the customers are the key. They’re the ones who set the direction we’re going to go, and we’ve tried to listen to them and make that work.

Justin Searls: But you know, we’ve got the next round of investors that we’ve got to impress. So that’s why we’re ordering all these foosball tables, and these massage therapists, and just like stocking it… And you may as well have had casting of just stock video people in the office, or something… The amount of money that was getting pumped into VCs, that was just silly money, that had no care at all what the ROI is. In fact, there was a long time there I would talk to founders and they’d be like “No, we’ve been not only not to chase profitability, but it’s seen as a red flag if you become profitable, because it means you’re insufficiently investing in growth.”

[01:11:54.21] Like, that was the environment that I sold in for the entire run that I was doing that role at Test Double. But the thing that I wanted to sell, which I had learned in the – I graduated college in 2007; I was fortunate to get a job, and then held onto that job for dear life during the 2008 financial collapse…

Hard knocks, right? And I had to learn a lot of these skills because everyone in 2008, 2009, 2010 only cared about “Show me the ROI show, prove your worth, prove your value.” And I got all those skills, and then around 2011, 2012, they stopped mattering… But that’s why I’m excited. That’s why I view this optimistically; the people who actually give a s**t, who really, really sweat the small stuff, who care about quality, and who care about just the credibility of stuff, like we’re talking about with Apple. They want to do a good job and they want to make great stuff. That is aligned with making money. That is super-aligned with demonstrating an ROI for shareholders. And now it’s just finally the time where it’s valuable again. And it’s been so frustrating to watch all of these winners and losers seemingly be so arbitrary, and just a popularity contest with the investment class. Now we’re closer to the ground and we can get real traction if we choose to.

Jeff Smith: Well, as you said, we can dive deeper into the mechanics… But more of a use case [unintelligible 00:14:47.20] technique that taps into your current music streaming. So it’s not during the work that – it could be if you’re listening to it, but it’s also in your commute, and when you’re at home. So we wanted to design something that didn’t change your behavior, but just kind of tapped into it. And then take that data and then analyze it and everything from there. So it’s an opt-in technique based on their current music listening habits.

So it’s interesting you bring that up… I mean, working with architectural design firms, landscapers, I didn’t realize they listen to music under the big headphones. So for them - great, all day long. Or manufacturing. But we can sense and analyze the data just on your relationship to music. And I can get into how that differs, and so on.

But it’s a lot of learning for us right now too, which has been exciting. People’s approach to music, what it not only says about them, means about them, but just over time.

Now, you bring up about retail… And there are some of those areas that we have intentionally said let’s hold up on. Let’s first just master the science, let’s make sure that it’s high-integrity, it is human-centric, and we take care of people, and it is for their wellbeing and flourishing.

We have had a few folks saying “Yeah, but if we can help sell another sweater by changing up the music, maybe.” But at the end of the day, that would be data that is completely stripped of any personal information, and all that. I think over time there are all sorts of use cases, and we just have that true North as far as how is this truly improving lives. And improving lives is improving businesses, and they are more profitable and sustainable and everything else… And so there may be a place for that. But yeah, I don’t know if that helps.

Break: [16:40]

Kurt Mackey: So I have a weird take on startups. We can basically keep operating Fly as long as we want to… At some scale, if that makes sense. We have a pretty good, established business; we have a lot of ways we could tweak it to make it like profitable right now, for example. But I think the future is still huge. And so we’re burning money to try and get big still, because I think there’s a huge opportunity for our particular company to be – the thing I tell people is I want it to be enduring and have an impact. Like, I built a company, we sold to IBM - basically gone now. I have a nice car, that was cool… But there’s just no – nothing I can just keep thinking about for the rest of my life. And I’m kind of – I really want to keep working on this forever, and I think it would have to be… It has to keep growing or I kind of get antsy, I think. And maybe that’s not true as a new, self-healed single person, but it’s probably true.

[01:29:07.15] And so we’re pretty healthy, but I think it’s a kind of a toss-up if we’re gonna get where I want to go or not, if that makes sense. There’s a lot of threats to a company like ours. We’re basically competing with monopolies, and in particular we’re competing with monopolies in a time in the US where people like monopolies. There’s not a lot of work going into limiting kind of the power of giant companies like there was 40 years ago, or whatever. And so there’s huge risks to what we’re doing.

The thing I mentioned about earning the reputation that lets you have outages, and people are just like “Oh, I guess we’ve just got to deal with this like everyone else is.” It’s like, that’s sort of an existential threat. Like, there’s a world where we can’t be perceived as being good enough for companies to want to spend money on us. But I do think – I keep talking about the LLM on machines thing. I think we have an incredibly good business of people coming and wanting to run their apps on us, and I think it goes very deep, because there’s a lot of really valuable, good workloads.

I think the trick for a company like ours is people need to be able to theoretically spend a million dollars a month on the exact same product we’re selling, and you can get big. And so I think a lot about Heroku, who you couldn’t necessarily spend a million dollars a month on Heroku - it just, it doesn’t go that deep - and I think we’re in a really good spot there, because we’ve got kind of the depth of the platform there, and we’ve got a really good business we can build down to that, if that makes sense.

We’re not raising money anytime soon. And part of that is because we don’t need to. It doesn’t make sense. We can’t necessarily spend money faster right now to grow faster. I don’t think we’re to that stage. And also, why would you raise money right now? Oh my God, it’s terrible out there. So we’re just batting down the hatches and not for another two years, and hope the world changes. Is that a helpful answer?

Marc Boorshtein: Not even, no. That would have been awesome. That would have been amazing. No, this is – so we first got involved with this in 2011, when we first got involved. It was actually kind of funny, because I had just left my full-time job to work on Tremolo, and I was at a pitch contest, a mass challenge. So I was up in Massachusetts with my partner, and I was working for a consulting company at the time, that dropped this thing in my lap. And I was like “You’ve given this away. There’s no way I can implement this and be profitable.” And I got back and started talking to my customer, and I was like “Tremolo could do this.” And they’re like “Okay, let’s pitch it to them.” And the sun, the moon and the stars aligned, and they’re like “Okay, let’s do it.” It worked beautifully. But it was Active Directory. And with Active Directory, local government typically is very, very Microsoft-focused. So everything from their on-prem, all the way up to the cloud is almost entirely Microsoft, at least in this region. Different regions are going to be different. But at least my experience has been most localities are very, very heavily Microsoft-focused.

And so they had Active Directory, and if you’ve ever worked with Active Directory, the only way to get two Active Directories to talk to each other is to just take all the firewalls and throw them out the window. So they didn’t want them hooked up directly into this thing, they didn’t want them talking to each other… Active Directory – I mean, that’s the keys to your entire kingdom. So you don’t want to just like “Yeah, we’re just going to merge these things and make them all work together.” That’s a little dangerous.

So we came in and said, “Alright, we can link these things together in a secure way.” At the time, we were doing everything via LDAP virtual directory. So if you’ve ever worked with an LDAP directory, you take a proxy that knows LDAP on the front… Think of like an HTTP proxy, but for LDAP. So it talks LDAP on the front, and then it talks whatever you need on the back, and creates this big, virtual tree. So we created this environment where it was this big virtual tree of all these different infrastructures… And then we were working with - at the time, I think it was SharePoint 2011… And so we had to integrate that in, which was a whole kind of fun.

[00:08:04.29] And we got it all working beautifully, and so they’re like “Yes, this is great. We want to move forward.” And then I learned about government procurement. So it took us almost two years to get the procurement group, and we finally got it up and running…

Jerod Santo: Democratising publishing

Ghost founder, John O’Nolan, shares some thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media. (Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, I’m sure)

Ghost is a distributed non-profit foundation which gives away all of its intellectual property under a permissive MIT license. The company has no investors and, in fact, no owners of any kind. I don’t own any part of Ghost, and neither does my co-founder Hannah.

We currently generate around $7.5M in annual revenue, and have been profitable and sustainable for the past 12 years.

“Wait, what?”

I’m glad you asked.

Those are some pretty astounding facts, when they’re all presented together like that. John lays out all the details of how Ghost is structured in this post:

The structure we’ve chosen for Ghost — a single-entity non-profit organisation — has helped us to create a lot of trust and clarity around the Ghost project and the Ghost brand. Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.

That structure has served them well, but he doesn’t think it’s sufficient for where Ghost is going. Ghost’s board is just two people, himself and co-founder Hannah Wolfe. In the future, it will change. John says ‘No BDFL’, which is interesting in light of our conversation with DHH last week. I sure hope it works. Democratizing publishing is a big deal and Ghost is making a real run at it.

Jerod Santo: [00:55:47.13] So we’ve already said different strokes for different folks… Previously you also said people are building different things… But yet we have these big, grand sweeping debates about the right way, don’t we? Are these ultimately profitable? Is it a waste of our time? I mean, I feel like if I was pro Web Component platform person, and I read Ryan’s post, I’d be like “Here’s some good feedback that we should now go and integrate into what we’re building.”

Abi Noda: So DORA is the DevOps Research and Assessment. But since I want to say 2013, maybe they’ve been publishing an annual report on the state of DevOps. And right now we’re talking about tech debt and developer experience, but eight years ago people were talking about DevOps, and “Hey, what is the ROI of investing in DevOps?” So it was the same problem; history repeats itself.

And what they did was they said “Here’s some ways we can measure DevOps.” So it was metrics like MTTR and lead time, deployment frequency… So they said “Here’s DevOps.” And what they did is correlate it to companies’ profitability, stock returns and increases, EMPS scores… And by doing that, they were able to “prove” and show the dollar ROI, “Hey, companies, when they invest in DevOps and get X percentage better, their stock prices tend to be X percentage higher.” They tend to be X percentage more profitable. So it wasn’t perfect –

Nick Nisi: Yeah. And I’ll say something potentially controversial… I don’t think that it’s all that valuable for them to be delving into this, because they absolutely need the VC money to be able to sustain the AI pieces, especially because it’s not – as far as I know, it’s not paid right now. Like, it’s a free feature for everyone. That stuff’s not free, and it’s not profitable. It’s not even profitable to the companies that are doing the AI. Like Copilot. Copilot is like a massive loss, last time I heard,for Microsoft or GitHub. It costs them like $30 a user and they pay – I pay like $10 a month for that. It’s just not that profitable, because it’s so intense to train these models.

Daniel Whitenack: “Hey, this would have maybe been nice back in the day.” And so the UI experience for those that have not tried it yet, and you’re just listening, it kind of paused, sat thinking for about 10 seconds, and then it gave the executive summary or the summary that I asked for, but there’s a little kind of drop down that I can click… And it thought for 10 seconds, and the steps that it says that it kind of talked through are formulating a research problem, breaking down DFT applications, considering quantum embeddings, changing gears, and pioneering new DFT modeling. And it gives a little summary of those, and seems to be more text-generated there, and that sort of thing.

So the problem statement is relevant. The text is relevant to some of the things that I would know about in that case, but also pretty much what I’m aware of from what people have already been exploring in the past. It’s not like all of a sudden this model shocked me with a “Wow, that would be a really interesting and profitable area of research” in this topic that I’m aware of. But it was generally in an area that’s interesting. So I guess, kind of good-ish, but not mind-blowing.

And so yeah, that kind of brings up the part of what I’m wondering here around “Where is the proper place for this in my day-to-day workflow?” Maybe we just haven’t figured that out yet, because I can definitely see a lot of places where I’d be like “Well, I don’t want to pay up for this”, because it is going to be way more expensive than the 4.0 or 4.0 Mini, right? I could see a lot of places I could apply 4, 4.0 Mini, or any number of LLMs that would operate in a similar way. Where am I going to apply this in the software that I’m building? I don’t know. I haven’t really pinpointed that yet.

Ryan Worl: And the reason why it doesn’t bother me so much, basically, is the portion of the Kafka market - because we have commercial competitors, obviously; the portion of the Kafka market that has been commercialized – let’s say somebody is paying a licensing fee or some of their fee to use the product, not just hiring somebody to run out for them… The portion of that market that’s been commercialized is very small. So there’s so much green field market out there for us to commercialize, along with this constant, ever-increasing trend of things becoming more real time. And these other tailwinds of more observability and security data being generated in the world… This market is just going to be so big in the future that I think it’s unlikely to have a winner-takes-all dynamic, similar to the way that there are multiple large public cloud hyperscalers that exist, and are very profitable… There’s just so much of this market out there that we’re not super-concerned about any particular competitor. Even if one were open source, there’s a lot of other dimensions that we would hopefully be better at competing on, that you don’t get out of just the fact that the product is open source, combined with the fact that the market is so huge that we’re pretty happy with our position as it is today.

Break: [01:16:49.00]

Autumn Nash: But it’s just wild to me that they were so willing to make this investment into AI, which – it’s not saying that there isn’t going to be something good that comes from AI, but it was such an investment at the loss of humans that have been doing the work, and making it profitable for you, you know? And like, okay, you’re building software, but so much work goes into maintaining it, into being able to fix the outages… And okay, you’ve released it. Now how are customers going to use it? And how are we going to break it on accident? You know what I mean? So…

Andreas Kling: Yeah, so that’s been a big change. And part of why it was so easy to lift Ladybird from Serenity OS to other operating systems was that Ladybird was like this big, dense package that just had the whole code stack in one pile. So once you figured out how to get pixels to show up on the screen, everything just worked. And it was like you took a window out of Serenity OS and just lifted it over to Linux or macOS.

But building everything ourselves was great in Serenity OS. It was great for personal therapy, and building a kindergarten for computer programmers. Those kind of purposes - great. But for shipping a product in two years, insisting on writing every line of code ourselves was getting in the way a little bit… And we decided that we’re going to relax and say “Maybe we don’t have to do everything ourselves. Maybe we don’t have to say that we are experts at all of these things.” Like, we don’t have to be the expert at image formats, or encryption, or 2D-accelerated graphics on the GPU, or whatever. There are all these things that are not really core competencies of a browser, that we don’t really need to do ourselves… And we decided to just let go of Serenity OS’es rule or mindset that everything has to be built by us. We said, “Everything that isn’t really a web technology, we can just lean on the open source ecosystem, and take advantage of mature, high-performance libraries that exist.” And this has been hugely profitable for performance, for productivity, and for correctness. We’ve been able to like just take ready-made components that do a lot of stuff that we needed to do, and they work better and faster than what we have. And we’ve been able to delete, I think, 150,000 lines of code, or something like that, just by lifting in libraries that everybody had on their computers anyway. So it’s fantastic, really.

And there’s been some social challenges to this, because a lot of people were really attracted to the project because of this mentality that we do everything ourselves, we don’t care how long it takes, we don’t care if it sucks, it’s ours. It’s attractive. A lot of people love that environment. I love that environment. I wanted people to have that. And that was also one of the reasons that the fork made a lot of sense, because then the fork could retain that way of working, where in Serenity OS still they have those 150,000 lines of code that we wrote ourselves. And they will continue to live on in that world, unbothered by the greater OSS ecosystem. But in Ladybird, we leverage existing stuff to make it possible to ship in this lifetime, basically.

Adam Jacob: Yeah, because nobody knew… Everybody was just trying to figure out what stick. And you had no idea. And everybody who was on the internet was stoked, because they were like “I’m on the internet. New stuff’s happening!” And it was awesome, but it was insane, and often strange.

So then I went to work for another company, it doesn’t really matter… But then I wound up working for that same set of executives, the initial set again, at another company. And I loved the team, and there were a lot of the same people that I’d been working with for a long time at this point, at a company called Marchex. And they had a business model that it was at least clear, if weird, which was basically they would pick a vertical, they’d pick like targeted ads, and then they would consolidate the fourth, fifth and sixth biggest players in the game. So they would buy them and then smoosh them together and it would sort of spike the revenue. And our job was to compress the spend. So basically, we built a machine that could just slurp up people’s companies. So if you ran a targeted ad company, we could buy you, and then we would show up and look at how you ran the software, and then port it to the automation that put it on our gear. And then that would drop the cost to serve, which would then spike profit. And you can see how that sort of turns you into a profitable company over time. And yeah, so I worked for them for a while, and we did that a lot. Tons of interesting stories kind of live in there. Yeah.

Autumn Nash: it’s not even good capitalism. But wait, let’s just take the warm and fuzzies out. It’s not even – how does this become profitable? And it’s a crappy product. And you’re spending more money. What…? I’m so confused.

Joseph Jacks: To concretize my view of what I think sustainability is - which, again, human language is so horrible and brute force. Everyone has different definitions of different words and stuff. My view of sustainability is that you have a system, it’s like a system, and you have continuously more input going into the system relative to the outputs going out of the system. So the outputs will produce and generate more inputs into the system. Okay? That is sustainability to me. I mean, it’s kind of the same as saying you have a profitable business. More revenue than spending. This is really basic stuff. Many other examples that we can use.

Adam Stacoviak: I’m torn. I don’t know. I think it’s – we have to weigh it against the whole “Shall we buy it or should we build it?” That’s the question, really, here. We’re saying we should build it, because we can customize it to our specific needs, but then we have to maintain it. And then we have to find a way to pay for it, which may or may not be something that we can get given to us, so to speak, as part of a partnership, which is how we’ve done it before… So there’s definitely some – in dreamland, I think, as a pipe dream officially, it does make sense to pursue, because it’s the itch; it’s the scratching our own itch. Back to the really simple CDN idea we came up with four Kaizens ago… I don’t know, that’s kind of what this is, is can there be a version of this that doesn’t have to be - not so much that the Cloudflare, CloudFronts, or Fastlies, or Bunnies, or anybody else out there is a bad or a good thing… But like if you can build it yourself – I think that’s the question; like, if you can build it yourself and maintain it yourself, and fine-tune it, and it’s worth it to you, is there a way you can go your own route? And I think that’s where a really simple CDN comes into play, where that’s really what we want. We don’t want all those bells and whistles. I think the purging thing is probably the most pertinent thing, because we do purge frequently enough when we have misses or issues or whatever. That’s a frequent feature. Otherwise, it’s what nodes and regions matter to us. Can we monitor speed and fastness, and can we fine-tune the system we’ve built enough to eke out every millisecond possible? And I think the answer is yes, but the question for me is how do we pay for it? If we can figure out how we pay for it, and make it not so much profitable, but make it something that bakes into our core story, like we have done in the past, to me I think that’s a win/win. And I prefer triple wins. Win/win/win.

[01:30:04.19]

We win/win/win. We all win.

Jerod Santo: He’s bootstrapped and profitable right now… Who needs VC?

Annie Sexton: Yeah. But I won’t go down that rabbit hole, talking about that client. But what I was actually doing was working on a note-taking app called Typist. And it was just the note-taking app that I always wanted. Both of the applications that I had attempted to turn into profitable businesses were just things that I wanted and didn’t exist yet. The first one that I built was a translation app for building vocabulary. I originally built it for learning Japanese, because that’s what I was doing at the time… And then, once again, got burned out on that, because I had let it become my whole identity. Any kind of spare time that I had, I was like “Time to work on that side hustle”, and that became very toxic.

Same thing happened when I was working on Typist, which I built and I actually used every single day. It’s basically Apple Notes with a Markdown WYSIWYG. Really easy, clean to use. It wasn’t perfect. I had a couple of – I had a few dozen users, but it was definitely buggy enough that it wasn’t ready yet. And I really loved it, and I really saw a future for it… But I just happened to burn out. I’ve actually recently picked it back up again, but I’ve set some ground rules for myself, which is if “I’m going to re approach this, I’d like to redo it in –” First of all, I’m rebuilding it because I’m a software engineer and that’s what we do… And ironically - or maybe not ironically at all - I’m rewriting it in the most common… “Oh, I want to rewrite this in Rust.” I feel like it’s almost become a meme now, of people who learn about Rust and are just like “Oh, I’m gonna rewrite everything in Rust.” And I say this – I’ve barely learned Rust. The only reason I’m considering this is because of - I think it’s called Tauri. It’s like an Electron alternative. Rust is very intimidating to me, but I’d like to learn it because one of the big complaints about Typist was that it’s massive, because it’s an Electron app. And I had many people who were like “Please, not again. I already have too many things that are Electron on my computer”, so I was like “Alright, okay, let’s try it.”

Paul Orlando: Okay, so the 12 that I list are technological related ones… So you might be thinking here of like even Moore’s Law kind of examples, or I gave like [unintelligible 00:53:09.19], other types of network-related, bandwidth-related examples… Social and behavioral changes… There’s some social and behavioral things that stay the same across centuries. People love music - I don’t think that’s going away in the future, no matter how long you wait. And there’s other just maybe more cultural effects that do change generation to generation.

There’s regulatory and legal drivers, and some of these function like an on/off switch; it is completely prohibited to do a certain thing, or it’s mandated you must do it. Others are more like a dimmer switch; like, there’s some gray area. And I give, different examples there, like patent protection, where it’s strongly enforced, versus - you know, it could be state by state; say like legalization of different products.

Installed base is another one. So when you rely upon the existence of another product that’s out there, so like the smartphone, or smartphones with the App Store installed… Like, Uber did not need to also develop the smartphone, and then hand that out to all of its customers, so you can rely on an installed base another company invested in.

The crisis one we mentioned… The economic driver is, I think, pretty straightforward. So there are growth times in the economy, times of decline; that might drive different behaviors. Networks we kind of mentioned, but as opposed to the installed base examples. It’s about the connections in a network.

So again, going back to the Uber example - you had people navigating with these old Tomtom devices in their cars, but those were not networked. So if I want to create a rideshare business, I need whatever that device is, whether it’s a smartphone or some other standalone device, I need them to be networked for the communication between the driver and picking up the passenger.

Distribution is another one. So different ways that you can reach customers, resources… Capital access is a big one, especially I’ll say for the last few years, because we went from an era where the money was kind of flowing… Both low interest rates, so you had to look for high-yield, places to invest, but then also COVID era, the first part, when a lot of money was pumped into the economy, and [unintelligible 00:55:38.00] valuations were going through the roof… And then a year, year and a half later that dried up. Huge valuation cuts, startups that were expecting that they were going to be investing heavily in growth, but maybe it was not profitable growth, and then they can’t raise the next round, and they have to shut down.

[00:56:00.13] Organizational drivers… So this is where the organizations themselves can learn internally, and then be more efficient.

Available talent. So what is your access to people that can actually build the thing? Is it that there’s just not enough people with – I guess the joke is I want 20 years of generative AI experience on my team. People don’t exist. Versus “Oh, we are producing these new experts at a good rate.”

And then lastly, demographic drivers. So you might just look at how populations age, or health needs, things like that. It’s a long list, and I’ve figured that any startup is probably really dipping into one, two, maybe three of those… And then to make that process maybe a little easier, to give people some ideas, at the end of the book I include what I call timing patterns. So we see combinations of these in different ways, and what ends up happening in some of those combinations… So that might give you an idea, if you have a tech driver with a capital access driver and a demographic driver - what are some examples of companies benefiting from that or not?

But yeah, I’d say the approach that I would take - because you mentioned Lean Startup, that book changed the way people ended up building companies after that came out… Yeah, what I hope people end up doing as a result of reading this “Why Now” book is they’ve probably already been thinking about the impact timing has, either on themselves, or they’ve seen other startups, other products kind of benefit or suffer because of timing… So they’ve started thinking about this, but this book will give them a bit of a process to follow, that I think is helpful. And then a lot of examples of other companies that either did this really well, or poorly. So I tried to write it in a way that was pretty straightforward… Basically, I want people to be different, and to act in a different way because they’ve read this. And yeah, I think a combination of the methodology, and then all the examples does that.

Adam Stacoviak: I thought it was like in Silicon Valley, Jerod, there’s a two and a half second song that Guilfoyle plays every time Bitcoin is not profitable enough to continue to mine.

[01:00:55.06]

“That’s the song “You Suffer” by Napalm Death.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s a whole song. It’s like a second.”

“It’s an alert, whenever the price of Bitcoin dips below a certain value; it’s no longer efficient to mine. When it comes back up, it is. So I need to know when it breaks that threshold, so that I can remotely toggle my rig at home.”

“Okay… Any idea how often that might happen?”

“Bitcoin is very volatile, so…”

“This is so loud…”

“A lot?”

“Good. Alright. Well, maybe turn it down, or something.”

Adam Stacoviak: [01:03:56.12] What does it take to make profitable products that you can sell? Like, it sounds like such detail-oriented, high-skill, high-investment… Like you just mentioned, “We include a solvent. We’ve thought about this. We’ve tried to fix it ourselves.” What does it take for you to run a successful company?

Nathan Sobo: I don’t know. I don’t know that I fully even understand what it’s gonna take to get to Linux… But I think we can get there within low-single-digit months of a fraction of the team, and then we’re going to see what the ongoing maintenance cost of it is relative to its value.

In terms of the business model, what we’re focused on right now is adoption. So adding a second platform opens up a very large number of potential users who might be interested in it. So it serves that goal. And community development is another business goal we have right now.

In my mind, again, the nature of a company is – obviously, we do need to become profitable and have a plan for becoming profitable… But every venture capitalist knows how large the market is of developers, and how valuable that market is… And so right now I think we just need to stay focused on getting adoption. I’m happy to take people’s money, and one thing we’re thinking about is just like at least giving people a good out-of-the-box code gen experience to use LLMs. And that’s something we could offer like a trial for, for example, just so that people can see it. And then it’s like, you get to the end of the trial, or you get to the end of the fast usage, and your rate limit is constricted, and now you can like decide to go to Open AI and sign up, and get an API key, or bring your own local model… Or if you want to just give us your credit card, we’ll take your money there.

But it’s not really our key focus right now, is like generating a ton of revenue. I think the key focus is like “Let’s build the community and get a ton of users using this thing”, so that we can like respectfully offer those users things that integrate with their workflow, and make them more productive down the line. And I hope I don’t turn people off with that, that we are planning on eventually offering facilities in our flagship build… But hopefully it being open source gives people the reassurance that if we’re too annoying about that, you can always build it from source, or get it from somebody else. But I think we’re gonna be able, with the collabs stuff – like, we’ve been hanging out with members of the community. It’s been small, but we’re just in these channels, coding… Like, it’s happening right now. There’s a couple of people working on Vim, Conrad and a member of the community… And it’s like - yeah, it’s been so cool just to… Even watching members of the community that we’ve granted write access just pairing with each other and not even involving us.

So I think on that front, the AI front or some unknown front, there’ll be something that we can sell to developers. I was glad you mentioned that, because I was referencing our transcript, Jerod, where you mentioned… If you want to search this, it says “The collaboration part”, the social coding part. And Nathan, you responded by talking about how you’re not trying to compete with GitHub. I think the conversation was around how these channels and this collaboration might circumvent the need for a pull request, because there’s this real-time collaboration happening… And I think that’s really interesting, because that’s what we really gravitated towards the end of the conversation, was how interesting it could be to have these real-time collaborative coding sessions inside the editor. Can you talk more about - like, when you referenced this channel, what exactly is a channel? How do you get granted write access to things? What are some of these terminologies? If a listener is listening to this and they go pick up Zed, how do they interact with channels? What is that to an everyday user? What is that to you all and how you’ve been using channels?

Adam Stacoviak: It’s interesting also to see it live side by side with the project. I mean, we hear the term and have heard the term commercial open source software, COSS being an acronym, and being quite popular… There’s a lot of companies that obviously have done versions of this, but I think yours is uniquely different that you’ve been a maintainer for so long… And I suppose internally you thought “Well, if I’m going to keep being a maintainer, I’d better find a way to be able to, one, leave GitHub to do this thing full-time, but then also sustain myself and potentially build a profitable, useful business for…” Like, why would you burn your career capital, essentially, is what I’m trying to say? Why would you go and transition to something else? Why wouldn’t you just try and find a way to create a value artifact, which is Workbrew, alongside the thing you’ve been pouring so much effort into for – as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been Homebrew. I don’t know you as anything else. You know what I mean? And we’ve known each other for many years now.

Autumn Nash: So my link is “How satellite images and AI could help fight spinal apartheid in South Africa.” It is by the people at DAIR, I think it’s called. Distributed AI Research Institute, and it’s by Timnit Gebru. She is the AI PhD who left Google because they didn’t agree with her ethics paper, and they kind of tried to push her out… So she is using data to help people to get more democratized resources, like school healthcare, parks and hospitals, and able to get more resources after apartheid had really separated a lot of those resources, and the resources have stayed separated and out of the reach of a lot of people that really need it… And they’re going to use data and imaging and AI to basically redistribute those and to make a case backed up by data to help make things better for those people that don’t have access to those things… But it’s really interesting the way that she did it. It’s in the MIT Tech review, which is one of my favorite sources for articles, and it’s just really awesome. People talk about bad things AI will do, and then how AI will be profitable, but this is really cool to see AI being used to help people and to - I guess you could say like kind of right wrongs that were done in history… And it’s going to be used to make things better for people, and at no cost to people, so it’s really cool.