Screaming in the Cloud - One Keyboard Shortcut to Rule Them All with Tom Uebel

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

About TomTom is the co-founder and CEO of Command E, an app that provides blazing fast search across all your docs and records in G Suite, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and 20+ more tools vi...a one easy keyboard shortcut.Links:Command E: https://getcommande.com/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, cloud economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. needed, so they built one. Sounds easy enough. No one's ever tried that before, except they're good at it. Their platform allows teams to create consistency for the entire incident response lifecycle so that your team can focus on fighting fires faster, from alert handoff to retrospectives and everything in between. Things like, you know, tracking, communicating, reporting, all the stuff
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Starting point is 00:02:17 Coming soon from the Duckbill Group. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Tom Hubel, who's the CEO and co-founder of a company called Command E. Tom, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Corey. It's great to be with you. It really is because I'm delightful. Just ask anyone who has been on the show and I basically hold the gunpoint to admit that I'm delightful. So for a long time, I have been whining for something that doesn't really exist. And when I discovered a post that you had made about a month before this recording or so, I realized, oh my God, someone built it. I got to get them on the show and yell at them about it. And what you have built is also the name of the company, Command-E. What is Command-E? Because there's a near certainty you'll do a better job of telling that story than I will. Yeah, so Command E just gives you one keyboard shortcut to get to any of your docs and records in the cloud. You can think about any tool that you use at work. Command E is
Starting point is 00:03:18 blazing fast search across all of that. So you can be going about your day, and no matter what you need to get to next, you just hit Command E, quickly type in the search box that pops up. You know, maybe it's like Corey Quinn LinkedIn and hit enter and we'll get you there as fast as humanly possible. I feel like on some level that you're being completely accurate while also dramatically underselling how magic this thing is. I want to be clear, you are not sponsoring any of my nonsense yet. This is me more or less fanboying over what you have built. Fundamentally, from where I sit, it's I hit Command-E, which is the shortcut, and I type in anything I want. And it does the stuff you'd expect, like files on your computer. But then it goes beyond that. There's a crap ton of services. I don't know if it's metric crap tons or imperial crap tons, but whatever it is, there's a lot of them where you integrate with various third-party APIs. I mean, as I'm pulling it up now, I notice Clubhouse is on the list of all things. You integrate with Dropbox, with Gmail, with GitHub or Github, depending upon pronunciation, Jira, Slack, Spotify, and the list goes on. I'm not going to read this off. I'm
Starting point is 00:04:25 not part of your marketing department, but it's impressive in that it ties in and solves the problem of you and I were talking about something two weeks ago. Where was that conversation? Was it in email? Was it in Twitter DMs? Was it in LinkedIn conversations? Was it in Slack somewhere? Was it in Post-it notes or something? And it doesn't matter. I can search. And as long as there's an integration, it just shows up. And that's part of the magic. Have I nailed the salient points or am I overstating the case so far? Yeah, that's it. It's really, you know, there's been sort of this proliferation of tools as the cost of building great software has come down. You know, it's been sort of this proliferation of tools as the cost of building great software has come down.
Starting point is 00:05:05 You know, it's sort of any category you think of. There's a few great tools in it. And that's awesome. It's great that you can sort of find best in breed tools for anything you want to get done today. But it involves all these switching costs that, you know, maybe didn't exist 10, 20 years ago. And Commandee is sort of that layer of glue that pulls all these things together really nicely and sort of works the way your brain does, where the second you think, I want to go to this, we just get you there. You don't have to think about, was it in Gmail? What was the name of that Google Doc that Corey shared with me last week? Just the second you know what Google Doc
Starting point is 00:05:41 you want to go to, Salesforce record, JIRA ticket, whatever it is. You just hit Command-E and we'll get you there incredibly quickly. And you're not exaggerating when you say incredibly quickly, because I figured, all right, great, typical story here. There's a search. Everything has a search and it usually sucks. This doesn't suck. What is that using under the hood? Yeah, so there's sort of a few pieces that roll up to something that I think is really compelling. So one is it's a desktop app, so you can be anywhere on your computer. It's not sort of just browser-based.
Starting point is 00:06:09 Anywhere on your computer, hit Command-E, Control-E if you're on Windows. And then the other thing is that we are tapping into all those services, and we are doing a pretty good job, I think, of knowing what you're probably going to want to get to so that we kind of have it built up where every search should return in 10 milliseconds or less. A lot of people talk about sort of 100 milliseconds as being the speed at which humans can kind of perceive, hey, I'm waiting on something or not. So we try to keep all our searches to 10 milliseconds or less. So it really does feel like your tools are kind of finally moving as fast as your brain can.
Starting point is 00:06:49 It's an incredibly powerful feeling that I think a lot of us just haven't experienced in a while. No, it's very clearly not reaching out to anything across the network, which sort of gets to my next part. That to be very clear and disclosure here, you and I did have a conversation about this when I first discovered it, because honestly, I was convinced you were doing something horrifying and that I do have some level of authenticity in what I tell people on these shows. And I don't want to be advocating for something that is not working in people's interest. And there's a couple things that scared the hell out of me. The first is you link with a whole bunch of different APIs. I have you linked right now to multiple Gmail accounts. I have you talking to my Evernote stuff that has a bunch of history from back when I used to use Evernote because they used to care about their customers. I have it tied into Spotify, not that I care about that.
Starting point is 00:07:34 A whole bunch of local stuff on my own disk and so on and so forth. There's some sensitive data in there is the first part. So what is the whole privacy policy? And is my next big announcement going to be a data breach? And followed very quickly afterwards by what does it cost? Oh, there is no direct way to give you money. Combine the two of these things and you can sort of see why I jumped to a terrifying conclusion there. Definitely. Yeah. So this is something that we thought long and hard about from day one and made sure we sort of did this right.
Starting point is 00:08:05 Candidly, I sleep a lot better at night with the security model we went with. It's been kind of interesting seeing this debate play out with sort of Signal versus WhatsApp and various other tools more recently. But from day one, our security model has essentially been you control your own data. We don't actually have it on our servers or anywhere else. Your data is synced from these third-party services and stored encrypted on your own device, as well as sort of the connections that you make to services to enable us to do our thing that's stored securely on your own computer. None of that is going to us. So even if we wanted to, we don't have access to your service.
Starting point is 00:08:48 Our terms stipulate that. So there's no surprises here. So my data never leaves my machine. Exactly. Awesome. I know you said that before, but it's important to get that on the record on these things because it's one of those like, well, remember that time we destroyed the company by trusting something?
Starting point is 00:09:01 Right. Which brings me to the next. There's a trope going around that if you're not paying for something, you are the product. On some level, that even applies to this podcast. I mean, there are sponsor ads that are put into this.
Starting point is 00:09:11 And on some level, the audience listening to it is the product. Now, we take a very restricted view of this. We wind up saying, well, we get this many downloads and we think GOIP-wise, this is the generalized distribution globally.
Starting point is 00:09:26 And that's all we say because that's all we know. It's more or less screaming into the void. At the end of that though, it does wind up working because people listen to the ads. If they're compelling and relevant, people will visit them and it becomes a very valuable thing for the sponsors. So it's not necessarily inherently awful thing, but it's also the audience here is paying with their attention, for lack of a better term. And with this, I don't see you're doing sponsored ads next to my content of, wow, you just pulled up your W-2. It looks like you should have a new job. Have you considered working at Google? There could be some horrifying monetization plays here. What is the plan for that?
Starting point is 00:10:05 Definitely. Yeah, so we're in a fortunate position where kind of early days backed by top venture firms in the Valley. And so right now the product is free for any individual to try. We'll eventually have a pro tier and team plans in time. So this very much will be sort of traditional SaaS monthly subscription
Starting point is 00:10:26 payment at the team level. It's definitely not a data play where even if we had your data, we would be trying to do anything there. This will be a subscription SaaS with team plans in time. One of the things that I noticed about Command-E is you could probably view it as something of a weakness. I view it personally as a strength because it reinforces what you've already said, which is when I installed it on a second computer, it had no earthly idea who I was. It had none of my synced accounts, and I had to go through and log back into all of them. Now, on the one hand, it's annoying slightly, but it does validate that if you're stealing my data, you're really bad at it and not using it in any way to benefit the user experience.
Starting point is 00:11:08 I mean, and credit where due, I'm not completely as, shall we say, naive as I might appear. I did some packet captures and kept a close eye on this thing and saw what it was talking to. And if you are stealing my data, you have also built one of the best compression algorithms
Starting point is 00:11:22 in the universe. Yeah, no, it's always fun talking to people that say, hey, that sounds great, but let me do my own homework and see that that's actually the case. Yeah. Again, I have sensitive data with my clients on the consulting side. I don't want to ever turn this into a story of, well, I took it on blind faith and that seemed like the way to go. Believe me, if there had been something nefarious, this would not be the conversation we were having right now. Definitely, definitely. But it's phenomenal. And the problems that I have with it now have extended beyond the, oh, getting up and onboarding and getting the muscle memory trained, which in some ways is
Starting point is 00:11:56 kind of the hardest part. And now it's going more in the direction of integrating with additional services, limitations of the integrations made available by the various providers themselves. For example, I don't see a Twitter option, particularly to look at DMs, because those things are impossible to search natively. I can see that there's a bunch of, in some ways, it looks like duplicate services,
Starting point is 00:12:17 like Gmail and Superhuman, for example. It goes to the same data store. And looking through this, it's interesting, and I'm very curious to know how a lot of these decisions got made. Tell me more. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, it's one of the most exciting parts of running a startup, I think, is when you sort of get your product out there. And what you keep hearing from people that try it is, oh, this is great. Just can you please carve off more of my world and support more
Starting point is 00:12:44 services? So that's definitely something we'll kind of continue to work on. We want this to be sort of the command center that you can run your day off. So continuing to work on supporting more services. So I've been whining about this for years and the fact that this didn't exist. And it turns out that when you have a problem, you can either whine about it or alternately, you can apparently raise some VC money and go fix it. And you took the path less traveled. Why? I mean, complaining is fun.
Starting point is 00:13:14 Yeah. So where Commandi really came from is my co-founder and I worked together for a few years before this at an early stage VC. And while we were there, we sort of saw a few things. One was we were on a team of 12 and we counted them up one day and we were using 26 different cloud systems. So I think it's sort of become this problem that people are really aware of at this point,
Starting point is 00:13:38 but there's just been this sort of proliferation of SaaS tools and great software that I alluded to earlier. And it creates some pain in finding your information. And then the other piece was that some of our closest friends there, some of the smartest people we've worked with, were not in engineering roles. They were living their days between Salesforce, Gmail, multiple Gmail inboxes, LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, and just sort of tearing their hair out at the friction of moving between these systems, quickly getting information in and
Starting point is 00:14:11 out. And meanwhile, my co-founder and I were in our code editors. And you're familiar with, anytime you need to move to the next file in your day, it's just this really nice pattern of you hit a keyboard shortcut, a search box pops up, focused, ready for you to type. You type a fragment of the next file name, you hit enter and you're there and you move on with your day in less than a second without ever really... Someone hasn't configured Vim the same way that I have. But it's just really quick. We didn't experience this problem that they were experiencing because we had great tooling and we realized that some of the underlying tech had shifted in a way that it was possible to
Starting point is 00:14:49 build something in the mold of Command-E that would just make their lives so much easier and let them be as productive as they're capable of being. It was just their tools getting in the way. One thing that I find a little challenging about the onboarding is not the tool itself and it's not setting up the accounts i whine about it but it took me three minutes not the end of the world the problem i have is now that it exists i have to remember that it exists it's the overcoming the learning curve of training yourself to automatically whack command E. And that took me a little bit of doing. Is that a common thing? Am I just basically a slow learner?
Starting point is 00:15:30 What's the deal there? Yeah, it's interesting. I think we have more work to do there, but you'll have some people that will just sort of immediately map it to one use case and then sort of expand it to do more things over time. There's some people that it just kind of works for them. Engineers are really interesting to us just because it's a pattern that they've experienced before and they
Starting point is 00:15:51 don't have to sort of remember this new behavior. It's just mapping it to a few services. But yeah, it's definitely sort of a different way of working that once you're bought in on and you're ramped, it's sort of impossible to go back, but it does take some doing. You are undoing a decade or so of point-and-click muscle memory. It's also easy to look at this because I found it a month or so ago,
Starting point is 00:16:14 and okay, so you're a month or so old. It turns out that as I learn things, I'm figuring out, among others, that software does not spring fully formed from the forehead of some god. It takes an iterative design process. And in fact, I believe you folks were founded when?
Starting point is 00:16:29 In 2018? Yep. So let me ask you the awkward, difficult question then. Looking at it, it's a very simple app as far as the way that it is designed. And honestly, that is a testament to its design. It's not at all difficult from my perspective to work with it in an intelligent way to get, understand what it's doing, but it doesn't feel like there's a lot of there there, if that makes sense. There's not a whole lot of configuration options. There aren't
Starting point is 00:16:58 a whole lot of messing around with other nonsense. Instead, it looks like it's very stripped down. And it feels like if you talked about this on Hacker News, the response is, Instead, it looks like it's very stripped down. And it feels like if you talked about this on Hacker News, the response is, oh, it must have taken you a weekend to build it, right? Yeah. Explain to me how this evolved, because I'm pretty sure that I'm looking at the end road of an awful lot of customer stories and iteration and honestly, attention to detail. Yeah. And we kind of knew early on that this was going to be the kind of thing that just had to work really simply. So what I like to tell people now is you can go to our website, hit the download button and have the download done, all your accounts connected, data synced
Starting point is 00:17:35 and have completed your first search in less than five minutes. So I'm pleased to hear that it only took you three. It takes a lot of work. There's definitely some real engineering under the hood. One of the things that my co-founder Ben really kind of nailed early on was he thought a lot about how Slack sort of took IRC, which I think a lot of us that have been on engineering teams had sort of communicated with other people on the team through IRC, but you never really saw sales, marketing, all these other roles in the company in IRC. But then Slack sort of built this amazing desktop app experience around it and made it really easy to get up and running, delightful to use, and simple. And all of a sudden you had wall-to-wall deployments. Everybody was in it. Everybody liked it. I still maintain,
Starting point is 00:18:26 and this is not necessarily the universal story, but I used to set up IRC servers and E-Jabber-D servers to talk to folks and Slack started eroding all of that and people got very angry. Like, what is the deal here? And the honest answer was, look, I can go and talk to someone in marketing
Starting point is 00:18:44 or in accounting whose primary language is not writing code and give them a, just this webpage. And suddenly they're up and they're in the chat and persistence works. It fixed the user experience and people love to overlook the sheer value of that. A hundred percent. Yeah. That's really what we're trying to do. I think I really like products that are just very simple and elegant on the surface, but have a lot of depth to them. So I think that's really kind of the needle that we're trying to thread here where anybody can get up and running and it just works sort of the way you'd expect it to.
Starting point is 00:19:15 But there's also a lot of power under the hood for people that are kind of power users and want a bunch of advanced features. Hop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35% faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com slash trial. So tell me a little bit more about the evolution of this, because it's easy to go from the initial problem statement of huh i have an awful lot of different things i need to search independently in obnoxious ways to okay now let's start unifying that and what that looks like is that an iterative process is it originally imagined as a web app instead of a desktop app was it originally viewed as targeting a single operating system what was the product evolution
Starting point is 00:20:25 here before it sprang out fully formed into the light of day? Definitely. So my co-founder, Ben, kind of had been talking to me about this while we were working together previously. And then we both kind of left the firm that we were at and I went and traveled for a bit and I came back and he had put together a V1 and we went to dinner and he sort of pulled it up for me. And at that point, it was sort of desktop from day one with the keyboard shortcut that pulls it up. So this isn't a story of sort of a lot of pivots along the way. It's a story of, I think, just like ruthlessly continuing to evolve the initial idea, which I think was really sort of spot on from the beginning. The first version I saw was a desktop app
Starting point is 00:21:09 that pulled up with Command-E, but searched across all of your Chrome history. And we've sort of since then realized that, okay, we don't want Instagram and Facebook in there. We want this to be a work tool that's very focused on helping you be productive in your workday and this to be a work tool that's very focused on helping you be productive in your workday and continuing to add integrations, continuing to add features. So we were very focused on just sort of docs and records early on. And as we move to this sort of command
Starting point is 00:21:36 center that you can run your day off, it means adding stuff like calendar so that if I hit command E five minutes before this call, I shouldn't have to do anything. The first result should just be the event we're about to be on, and I can just hit Enter, and the Zoom link, I'm just taken straight into the Zoom instead of having to dig into my calendar. It went from being purely browser and cloud-focused to now letting you search across your local machine
Starting point is 00:22:02 because a lot of people told us, hey, I love the fact that you've added cloud search. That wasn't really a thing before, but I just want one sort of pattern that I can build and use across all of my searches. And so there's more to do, but it's just kind of that continual evolution of trying to carve off everything
Starting point is 00:22:21 so that you really do just have one place that sort of as quickly as possible gets you to the next thing in your day. One thing you talk about is the vision is cloud search. And I always like dropping this Easter egg in for folks who listen to this and pay attention. It's always been irritating to me that Google, the search engine company, will have Google Docs and you can use the search for Google Docs, and it's rubbish because why would a search engine company build a good search engine for its own work suite? But if you go to cloudsearch.google.com on a paid account, it's awesome. It does more or less what Command-E does, albeit only within the
Starting point is 00:22:57 confines of your Google account. And on some level, that becomes almost a great definitive answer to, well, what's to stop some other company from coming at you by behind? Like, oh, don't worry. If a Google or an Amazon were to come out and do this, they would really screw it up. See slide B. Because they've done things like this and completely failed to tell that story compellingly. Every time I bring up cloudsearch.google.com, people are astounded and they think I'm messing with them. Then they pull it up in the browser so they can yell at me, and then they get angry because why did they not know this existed years ago? Yeah, it's really fascinating seeing the different cuts of that.
Starting point is 00:23:36 I'll bite my tongue on that one, but yeah. Of course, you have to be nice to people. I don't, which is sort of my entire shtick, and it works for me. So what can you tell me, if anything, about future roadmap? I mean, it's easy to look at this from a perspective of integrating with different services. I think I saw you recently started supporting Coda, which I'm using in some weird edge cases, and oh, that becomes super handy. But what's on the roadmap coming up? Is there an idea at some point that I'll be able to invoke local bash scripts, for example, on my system? Yeah. So we're trying to let people do more and more. So I mentioned we just recently added calendar. If you think about kind of the ways that you start units of work in your day, it's often, you know, hey, let me pull up that Google Doc. Let me get
Starting point is 00:24:21 into this meeting. Oh, that's right. This is what people with real jobs do. I wind up starting my day by pulling up Twitter mentions and starting with, oh Christ, what now? Yep. There's sort of just continuing to nail away at search use cases. So one thing that we want to get better at is, hey, what was that doc that Corey shared with me? And we made it really easy to get into your Zoom, but can we make sure that we surface the relevant information there? One of the things we're really excited about right now is supporting more collaborative use cases and letting teams sort of work with Command-E. I think there's definitely some benefits to sort of solving the problems that we've solved at the single player
Starting point is 00:25:01 level for teams as well. So just continuing to expand on that. What about potential dangers? One of the things that I see when looking at this is the ghost of feature creep on some level where, hey, we can use this to also, I don't know, do keyboard macro expansions, or we can use this to automatically start killing processes that are running amok with the right invocation.
Starting point is 00:25:24 And at some point it almost tries to become an electron-based version of the terminal, where at some point, you're more or less building an entire operating system into this application. Is that something that you're concerned about? Is that so far down the road that I'm hilarious for even mentioning or thinking of it now? What are the dangers that you see if this doesn't go right? Yeah, I think there's a few things. You could definitely see tools that have sort of tried to build for all these sort of bespoke use cases and lost the focus. I think simplicity is super important to us. If you think about our sort of guiding principles, it's often focused on performance. So from day one, we've sort of said it's going to be an extremely strong
Starting point is 00:26:04 engineering-led team that solves this problem. And so we focused on just building the best engineering team and then bringing on a great designer to make sure that we're always focused on keeping things really performant and simple. I do think that we've also very much focused on work use cases. So we get a lot of requests for different things. And one of the things I like about building B2B software is often your customers can kind of pull out use cases from you. And it's just a matter of applying some discernment and just really building for them. So we try to stay really focused on things that we think will be used very broadly by sort of the personas that Command-E works really well for, which is
Starting point is 00:26:51 across sales teams, across product teams, engineers. It's just really focused on staying close to the voice of the customer. That's part of the challenge that scares me on some level, is I always feel like my use cases are bizarre and more than a little bit frightening. But I knew that Command-E was something to honestly be super excited about, which I hope my enthusiasm is conveying accurately. I'm not shilling. No one's paying me to talk about this, unfortunately, because it turns out I'm not as good at business as I thought I was. But there's something deeply compelling about when I saw this and it just grabbed me. But I wanted to validate that because, again, I'm I was. But there's something deeply compelling about when I saw this and it just grabbed me. But I wanted to validate that because, again, I'm super weird. So I showed it to other folks. And every person I've shown this to has lit up as soon as they see what I'm talking about.
Starting point is 00:27:37 And I'm not just talking engineering users. I'm talking business folks. And there's really something that you have tapped into here. It seems like it's the sort of thing that has a viral potential tied to it in the positive way, not the InfoSec sense. Yeah, it's been awesome. Like I love conversations with people like you that are just like, oh yes, I've been waiting for this thing. Thank you so much for building it. It's great. But also can you do these three things? This is amazing. Now, let me tell you what your problem is. But yeah, I just think my co-founder, Ben, and the team have really nailed it. This was
Starting point is 00:28:15 sort of this natural evolution, I think, when you think about how things have matured on the web and at work over time. So I remember finding this clip where Marc Andreessen was talking about the Netscape browser and how previously everything was sort of done through what he called cryptic commands, talking about the command line, which just wasn't really accessible to most people. And then all of a sudden you had a browser
Starting point is 00:28:39 and people could kind of point and click their way around, which makes total sense when the corpus you're talking about is sort of the entirety of the internet. But so many of us go to work and there are so many of these things where it's like, I know exactly where I want to go. Just get me there as quickly as possible. I don't need this sort of point and click thing.
Starting point is 00:29:00 Actually, this sort of command line terminal experience where performance is the sort of key bit. Something like commandee just makes total sense. The one thing I've been always trying to understand about Mark Andreessen, and apparently I'm nowhere near alone in this, but he went from following me on Twitter one day to blocking me. And to this day, I have no idea why that is. So if you're listening to this somewhere, Mark, I invite you at any time to come on this show and explain yourself. I would love to hear it. We can talk about whatever you'd like. I somehow don't think he listens, but we always learn new things as we go.
Starting point is 00:29:34 Now, that said, tell me about your team. It's easy to fall into the myth of the single heroic founder working a day job and then not sleeping and writing code all night. And that really is only accurate for terrible code. That's not the way to write anything well. None of us are an island and there is a team. It's not just you sitting there by yourself building this. Who else is involved? Yeah. So we're kind of an early small team. It's seven of us now. It's myself, five senior engineers, and a really great designer who sort of have experience building some of the it at past companies they've been at and just know how to really build great products and have a lot of experience with the problem that we're going after. So that's, you know, I think one of the best things about being a founder is you really
Starting point is 00:30:37 get to sort of build a team that you're excited to get out of bed every morning and work with towards some goal that you're all excited about. So that's been, I think the best part of building commandee is just having a really special early team and knowing the sort of possibilities of what the next wave of folks that we bring on board will look like. I know it's dangerous to ask this given that you're still seed ground territory, but if you were to go back to 2018 and do something differently, what would it be? That's an interesting question. I always struggle with this one because I'm always going to want to move faster. I think a lot of my job is just looking at this whole engine and saying, what can we do to move 10x faster on something but i've also seen that a lot of what we're doing
Starting point is 00:31:26 it's easy to sort of take all the learnings that we've had to date and say oh yeah if we could have just done that six months ago that would have been awesome but i think a lot of this is sort of the compounding benefits of you know spending more time than anyone in the world thinking about this particular problem and the pieces sort of come together in a way that, you know, you'd love to just remove all the work that got you to where you are today, but I'm not sure that that's realistic. So. Yeah. Make all the right decisions up front. Easy to say that, but it's honestly, if we could do that and predict the future, why are we talking about this instead of, well, first I would begin by winning the Powerball six weeks in a row. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:32:05 Everyone talks about, oh, I'd buy this stock or that stock. Oh, no, no. Shoot for the boon. Yeah. If you could have told me like, hey, the team that you have today, you can have them on day one, sign me up for that. If you could sort of fast forward all of it, would love to do that, of course, but. Those 40 VCs I met with that didn't invest. Yeah. Just skip all those meetings. Just go to the one that did. It's way easier as it turns out. Yeah, that's part of it is just kind of getting to a point where you enjoy the day to day and take it as it comes and sort of have faith that you're making progress and just keep chipping away at it. It's, you know, a decade to kind of build this
Starting point is 00:32:40 to what it should be, I think so. And I'm looking forward to seeing how it gets built and following along from the cheap seats, throwing sarcasm and unsolicited product feedback your way. Well, like I said, these are kind of some of the most fun conversations we have is just people that have been looking for this for a while and they find it and share their excitement with us. So yeah, really appreciate you sharing that with us. No, and thank you. I appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:33:05 If people want to learn more about you and what you're up to, and of course, download it themselves, where can they find you? Yep, our website is just getcommande.com, just the word get and then command and the letter E, the way you'd expect it, and go there. And there's more about the product and download button right at the top. And we'll, of course, put a link to that as well into the show notes. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Starting point is 00:33:29 I really appreciate it. Yeah, likewise. Thanks so much, Corey. Tom Ubel, CEO and co-founder of Command-E. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice
Starting point is 00:33:49 and an insulting comment just as soon as you use your crappy search option instead to figure out where those reviews go. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at ScreaminginthecCloud.com or wherever fine snark is sold.

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