The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Beyond Heroku to Muse (Interview)

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

This week we’re back for part 2 with Adam Wiggins — going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse (listen to part 1). After a six-year adrenaline high on Heroku, Adam needed time to recover and refill the creative well. So, he moved to Berlin, did some gig work with companies…dabbled in investing and advising. But he wasn’t satisfied. Adam likes to build things. Ultimately, he was just waiting for the right time to reconnect with James Lindenbaum and Orion Henry — the same fellas he created Heroku with. Eventually they founded Ink & Switch, an independent research lab which led to innovations that made Muse possible. Muse is a tool for deep work and thinking on iPad and Mac. Today’s show is all about that journey and the details in-between.

this week on the change law we're back as promised for part two with adam wiggins going beyond heroku and the story of muse after a six-year adrenaline high on heroku adam needed time to recover and refill the creative well so he moved to berlin did some gig work with companies dabbled in investing and advising but he wasn't satisfied. Adam likes to build things. Ultimately, he was just waiting for the right time to reconnect with James Lindenbaum and Orion Henry. These are the same fellows he created Heroku with. Eventually, they founded Ink and Switch, an independent research lab, which led to the innovations that made Muse possible. Muse is Adam's full focus. It's a tool for deep work

and thinking on iPad and Mac. And today's show is all about that journey and the details in between. A big thank you to our friends and partners at Fastly and Fly. Our pods are fast to download globally because Fastly, they're fast globally. Learn more at Fastly.com. And Fly lets you put your app in your database, close your users all over the world. No ops required. Check them out at fly.io. This episode is brought to you by Sentry.

Build better software faster. Diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code more than a million developers in 68,000 organizations already use sentry and that includes us here's the easiest way to try sentry head to sentry.io slash demo slash sandbox that is a fully functional version of sentry that you can poke at and best of all our listeners get the team plan for free for three months at Ascentry.io and use the code changelog when you sign up. Again, Ascentry.io and use the code changelog. so we're back part two adam wiggins is here and we're going beyond heroku adam are you are you ready for this you got your seat butt on you buckled in can't wait are you a five point harness or a three point harness kind of person well uh i like the five point because it uh makes me think of the i don't

know like a spaceship or a fighter jet or something like that so we'll we'll go that way all right we got uh well how many is that that's uh three clicks i don't know how many buckles go into that either way click them all in let's get settled so we've got uh many different angles we can go so you exit from roku we told that story in part one so listeners if you if you're coming to this as part two you don't have to go back but it would be wise to go back and listen to part one which is right back one layer in your feed if you're listening to the changelogs feed now if you're on the master feed now it's a couple it's several back either way go find it what's the best way to open up going that next step adam got ink and switch the lab you got muse what you're doing now like but you went to berlin where do we begin this this next journey

beyond heroku for you yeah i think it was pretty natural to start with at the end of such a powerful experience life-changing in so many ways to be a part of this phenomenon uh which which really was as we we talked about in telling the story you know i could certainly happy to take credit for my contributions there and and we had a great team that did a lot of great things but so much of it was serendipity and things going on in the industry and just being part of a particular moment in time for Silicon Valley, for Ruby, for agile development, with Git, with cloud, et cetera. So having been on that journey, which is really just this kind of nonstop adrenaline rush, you know, they talk about the emotional roller coaster of, of entrepreneurship, but that's just turned up to 11 when you do find that moment in time where you can,

where you can really have a big impact and where you're, what you're making is, is having that kind of lift. So having done that for, I guess it was six years and change, which is basically the longest I've ever worked on any single project. And then once I left that behind and kind of period of rest and need to refresh the brain and refill the creative well, and that's all what kind of what led me to go and do some, some gig work with, uh, with companies here in Berlin, including SoundCloud and, and a few others that were kind of up and comers at the time. But I i was mostly waiting for you know i knew that i wasn't done with entrepreneurship i was still relatively young you know kind of prime of the prime of the career and furthermore that i wanted

to to do more with the same two fellows that i that i did heroku with that's that's james lindenbaum and ryan henry and we we had kind of scattered to the winds in our own ways and were maybe kind of recovering from this, yeah, again, this six-plus-year adrenaline rush. That's the only way to put it. But then somewhere around, I think it was 2015, is when we, let's say we reconvened, a little bit refreshed. We'd all been off doing different things.

James went on to start Heavybit, which is an accelerator program for developer companies and has gone on to be a very successful kind of business slash program. And Orion actually was working in philanthropy in the global surgery space. So we were all, you know, here's me off in Berlin doing these gigs.

So we're all off doing kind of weird stuff. But I think that's necessary. You just need that creative refresh. But then when we did come back together, that's when we said, okay, let's think about what comes next. And that turned out to be Ink and Switch. So whose idea was Ink and Switch? What is it?

What did it start as? What did it become, et cetera? So I guess we had the luxury of being able to think in terms of a slightly longer time horizon. And we're less thinking in terms of, okay, what's the startup we can start tomorrow that solves a really immediate pain point? And we can get customers and get into YC and, you know, sort of that very pragmatic aspect of commercial business. And I, we all started to get interested in more academic research. And in particular, we were inspired by, we ended up kind of taking a deep dive on the industrial research labs that have been very influential in our industry. So Xerox

Park is one that I think is, is oft quoted, you know, it basically invented the modern gui and the laser printer and ethernet and so on but then you go more back in time you can you can also look at something like bell labs right where unix was invented and also lasers and also gps and also transistors so now they obviously had a very long run over several generations that's a dramatic dramatic example. And there's others. You can go even further back and look at someone like Thomas Edison, for example, and what he did with his Menlo Park. It was kind of like a private industrial research lab, you might say. So kind of looking at all these historic examples, and we got inspired and said, okay, well, we want to think about what the future of computing looks like, not just in terms of like what's an immediate

pain point we can solve right now that might be a business opportunity, but taking a little bit longer time horizon, a more academic perspective. And we sort of combined that interest in, let's call it R&D, if you like, with a look at the current state of computing. So in 2015, this is kind of the iPhone and the app store have become pretty well entrenched. You know, Facebook is, you know, has become this juggernaut, social media generally. And it's interesting between the time when we started Heroku and where we were here, kind of like thinking about, okay, what's next? The computing industry had gone through a shift where before, you know, you go back to, I don't know, certainly when I cut my teeth in computers in the 80s and 90s, but even in the 2000s, computers were really for making things. They were for word processors, spreadsheets, programming, Photoshop, et cetera.

And you could do email and stuff like that. But in general, they were devices for productivity and creating things. And I think the thing that really happened in the kind of last decade or two is a shift to the mass market where they become more consumption devices, right? Like a phone is more for messaging with your friends, looking at social media, watching videos, shopping, that sort of thing. And that obviously has been an unprecedented boom for the computing industry. And more people are using computers than ever before.

And there's many, many ways that's a good thing. But we kind of had this strange feeling that what we thought was the original use of computers was sort of languishing in a way. I always like to think of the example of like, think of how far we've come in something like the ability to watch movies or TV. What did that look like in, I don't know, circa the 90s, right?

It was like broadcast TV and VHS tapes that you could rent from Blockbuster or whatever and you compare it to today. It's like always on demand, streaming on your iPad, whatever. It's like science fiction technology comparatively. We had TGIF back then, which was, thank goodness it's Friday. And the reason why we had that

is because those shows only came on on Friday evenings. And you had to watch them on Friday at 6 p.m. or whatever it was. Absolutely. We don't have those constraints anymore. Absolutely. And by comparison, maybe you look at something like,

yeah, word processors or spreadsheets, some of those programs I mentioned before. And obviously there's been some advancements, but I don't know, if you look at, say, Google Sheets, and is it that much different from Excel circa 1995? If you look at the screenshot of them side by side together, you've got the collaboration aspect of Google Sheets.

That's obviously a huge leap forward, but that's kind of it. So we sat down to think about, could we combine the idea of the classic industrial research lab, like a Xerox PARC or a Bell Labs, with a thinking about how can computers be better or what might they be like in an ideal future 10 or 15 or 20 years out focused specifically on the productivity side. And one piece of that is the end user programming

which is the same thing that went into Heroku and as I said we kind of only partially fulfilled that vision. We did make it easier to deploy apps and that does open up programming to a lot more people maybe than than what i've been able to do it before but that idea of like everyone being able to program computers still you know that remained elusive so the to me the end user programming is one one piece of it but broadly speaking okay if if computers are beautiful as creative devices and productive devices what can we do to push forward the state of the art there separately from the advances happening in kind

of let's call it consumption computing when you say we for ink and switch obviously you mentioned your co-founders you came back together with but like you know were you all involved in the research and the work or were other people because i'm looking at some of the things you've got involved here there's other names involved. So how does the royal we play out with Ink and Switch? Yeah, well, at this point, because the lab's been going for quite a while and Peter Van Hardenburg, who also was part of Heroku, he's best known for running the Heroku Postgres team

and had a lot to do with that product being as good as it was. He's the lab director now. So really it is a lot of the same folks who built Heroku Postgres team and had a lot to do with that product being as good as it was. He's the lab director now. So really it is a lot of the same folks who built Heroku who are now part of Ink and Switch. But we structured it a little differently. It's not a startup. Again, it's a research lab. It's more of a kind of grant-driven thing. And we do these individual research projects, which might last a month, two, three.

So someone might come onto a project, be part of that project for that period of time, publish an essay at the end with the findings, and then they essentially go off to do other things. So at this point, we've had many dozens of people involved in Incan Switch projects, but there isn't kind of like a stand that the core team is pretty pretty small so by we here yet is it is james ryan and myself peter van hardenberg who got got very involved mark mcgrannigan also from the the roku world came in and then there's a number of other great researchers including martin kleppman who's really big on our kind of local first and crdt track uh jeffrey lit and many other great people.

But again, we can, because we are more of this loose collective rather than a company, you can have someone like, say, Jeffrey Litt. He's also doing a PhD at MIT at the same time. He's doing research projects with us. Or Martin runs a research lab at a university, but he's also involved in Ink and Switch. So we can have this kind of looser, yeah, again, it's the academic model, which is a little different from the,

you know, you join a company, you're going to only work on that company. It's sort of like a top-down, you know, command and control structure. Has there been any GUIs or Xeroxes or mice, mouse, Unixes's come out of this yet? What's any aha's so far? What's any big things yet?

Yeah, so probably some of the papers I would point your listeners to if they're interested. So usually what we do is publish. Sometimes we publish open source and there's prototypes you can go and try out either on the web or you can download and tinker with. But really the output is kind of these academic style papers. And it's really interesting because, you know, in the academic world, publishing a, I don't know what, a 30-page PDF that's like rich with citations and prior art, it goes into great detail about what you learned is a pretty normal thing. But in the, what you might call the practitioner world, you know, you're used to a blog post that says,

here's how I think we should do things differently with React or whatever. And if it's more than 1,500 words, your attention starts to wander. You're probably going to hit the back button, go back to Twitter or whatever. So we're kind of in an in-between place a little bit. Most of the essays we publish are kind of in the 5,000 words range, which is very long for a blog post, but actually pretty, I don't know if quite succinct is the word for it, but pretty commonplace in the academic world. So yeah, if you want to read some very long and philosophical pieces, but that also include videos and screenshots and information about what we learned, A few I can recommend. One of our top ones, I think, is the paper called Local First.

This is the culmination of a bunch of research on essentially a synchronization layer that lets you get the benefits of cloud without the downsides of cloud. Sometimes we call it Google Docs without the Google. It looks into ways that you can use, in particular, CRDTs, which are a type of technology for essentially kind of multi-writer synchronization. But you can potentially bring that together, sometimes with peer-to-peer networking, like IPFS-type stuff, sometimes not.

This is a technology Figma has used a little bit, but also is starting to really have a bit of a groundswell, which also is kind to really have a bit of a groundswell, which also is kind of a funny one because, of course, me and Peter and lots of others involved in IncanSwitch, we helped with the rise of cloud through Heroku. And in a way, local first is not quite a rejection of cloud, but a desire to say, okay, cloud brings a lot of benefits, but we also lost things that we had when we had local file systems and native applications. Can we really get the best of both?

We hope so. We think so. Particularly because data ownership for individuals is... Interestingly, developers have always worked this way, right? I have all my development tools locally or whatever, and I don't want to put stuff in the cloud. I want control. I want it on my machine. So this is kind of an extension of that same idea to every other kind of productivity software out there. Yeah. It's interesting, some of the things you say there, because there was a quote, I believe it was about

the ownership, I suppose, of cloud, and this promise. There was a bumper sticker. I'm trying to find it, because I was looking through that paper as you were talking. It says, there is no cloud. it's just someone else's computer. I kind of like that because it kind of describes it pretty well. Yeah, some others worth checking out maybe is

actually for your audience here, because we do do a lot of stuff that's more design-oriented, so like Infinite Canvas, we can talk about that as it relates to Muse. End-user programming is a big area. A relatively recently published one called Potluck, which is about basically adding little bits of computation to text notes so that you can have these

spreadsheet-like dynamic documents, but it's all in plain text. That's in the end user programming line of things. One I suspect that your audience would probably appreciate really well is called Cambria, which is talking about data lenses. Data lenses is, again, an idea from the academic world. This is an updated and extended version of this, which is really all about the fact that when you think about a database or an API,

you always have versioning, and you have schema, and you have migration. Usually, even that word migration kind of sends a little chill down the spine of anyone who's worked on a big production system. The idea that your data was in one state before, and you need to change it in some fundamental way, and it will be in this other state later. And that's true for API versioning and so forth as well. And the paper lays out a bunch of these kind of related cases of things.

But basically, there's this idea from computer science academia of data lenses, so forth as well. And the paper lays out a bunch of these kind of related cases of things. But basically there's this idea from computer science academia of data lenses, which is an idea that you shouldn't have to ever do the one big migration, but actually should, can, and in fact would be very desirable to be translating your data all the time. So this is rather than maintaining a whole bunch of versions of an API or having several database schema that you have to migrate between, that actually you can translate smoothly between it. So that's the sort of thing that definitely this is much more on the developer and technical side,

but again, I think your audience might appreciate it. So how many of these are you personally involved in? Yeah, so I ran the lab from 2015 to about 2019. And so I was kind of the lead author, or at least I didn't necessarily do all the research, but I did most of the writing for, I don't know, the first probably six or so of these essays that we put out. And then since then, now I'm just part of the board there and kind of help contribute editorially to these essays. But I can't take any credit for ones that have come out recently. Again, great team that's there. And notably, that does lead us a bit to the

Muse story here, which is that it was in the process of doing a category of research that was around interfaces. You mentioned the Xerox PARC and the GUI. And one of the things that PARC did, of course, that was so interesting is they said, look, computer graphics are getting better. This text-based interface that we've always used, can we improve on that? And they sort of invented the idea of overlapping Windows

and many of the things that you take for granted in like a windows mac os or kind of linux desktop environment today and so for us one of the questions we were asking was okay you actually have a generation of people now who are growing up on touch screens and they actually in some cases there's some interesting studies that people uh who are in this younger generation who are now kind of hitting university age or working age actually struggle a bit with a mouse and a keyboard. This is kind of the grandpa way of using a computer.

And the touchscreen is actually the native way that kids are growing up with these days. But I think we've probably all seen the discussion around the fact that in a way it's very sad and limiting that if if an ipad is your main device as it is for a lot of kids when they're younger there's no path to programming that or they're very very limited paths to programming that i should say there's some some glimmers of hope with things like swift ui or hopscotch or or so forth but again very very limited compared compared to, certainly I grew up with the Apple II

where you were basically just at a basic prompt right at the start and then even going forward from there. The ability for a person who is interested in computers or a young person who's interested in computers to go deeper and learn how it works on the inside and build something for themselves has become much more limited, sadly, with the mobile platforms.

Yeah, it's a real bummer. Yeah, it's a shame, but I guess I'm a big believer in, for technology generally, the mindset of, we've lost something, so therefore we should go back, really doesn't work. What you can say is, we've lost something, can we go forward, but in a way that maybe retrieves some of the best elements of what was there in the past and brings it forward into the future? So for myself, for example, who's such a huge lover of Unix, I'm always thinking in terms of like, okay, it's not that I think that sort of Unix should be the basis for, I don't know, a mobile phone. I mean, it is, you know, underneath the hood, but the interface should be that. But are there ideas from Unix that we can bring forward into

modern interfaces? So one track of research we did here was just kind of saying, okay, so a touchscreen right now is a very crude device, right? You have these big buttons, you kind of like, you know, punch them with a single finger compared to the precision of a keyboard and a mouse.'s very limited and so relatedly you know the applications that go with it are also pretty simple and limited but is there a world where you could have a tablet be as fast and powerful as you know a great developer sitting at a desktop workstation another prompt we used for this was, what's the version of Vim for a tablet, where you have this like command gesture interface, it's very fast and powerful,

and it takes a while to learn, there's a learning curve, but that pays off eventually. So that was kind of a track of research we were pursuing. There was a related thing with Infinite Canvas, which is sort of an idea of like a twodimensional document type that you can spread things out on, you know, design tools like Figma and Sketch and Illustrator kind of have a version of this. We were sort of exploring it as a general purpose document type. So several of these tracks of research kind of all came together. We eventually published one of our essays, which was titled Muse, a Studio for Ideas. And that essentially showed this prototype that we had built that put together a few of these different ideas. And that one seemed to be far enough along or based on the

response to it or just our personal experience using this prototype we had that we said, you know, we think there's something that could be commercialized here. So we want to spin it out of the lab in the same way that, you know, many would argue that Xerox PARC failed in some ways to fully commercialize things and instead others kind of just borrowed those ideas. But in theory, a research lab, an industrial research lab at least, part of its purpose should be to develop technologies that can be applied in the real world. And applied typically means a commercial product, right? You have a thing that solves a problem people have and you sell it to them. So we saw the opportunity to potentially make a product

based on this research and have a few of the researchers who worked on it basically spin out, form a for-profit company and start to work on that product. And that was the birth of Muse. Gotcha. So Muse has been born. It is out there on the app stores.

You can run it on your iPad. You can run it on your Mac, which I'm doing currently. Although on my Mac, I can tell it's built for the iPad first and the Mac is usable and good, but I can tell that your heart's desire is on the iPad, which makes sense with the story that you're telling here about Muse. It's dubbed as a tool for deep work, and you got it out there in production, so you shipped it, which is awesome. Tell us the time framing of when you decided to spin it out to shipping and maybe a little bit of that tale of what all goes into, because this is a new world for you, right? Consumer-based iOS software.

It is, yeah. Grappling with the App Store and certainly Swift and sort of these native technologies. We also had this dimension of I really went pretty deep in the research world and the big idea, the ivory tower of academia

you might call it, which has many things going for it, including the ability to be very thoughtful about things, think things through, it's all in an open, you're sharing ideas with others, and you're thinking these grand thoughts and exploring them in a way that's unconstrained from, call it the real world, for lack of a better word.

And then you go to implement the software, put it through, say, even just going through Apple's App Store review, part of the point of the app is it breaks the status quo, that it does things in a new way. Because we think, for example, the iPad has a lot of potential as a creative tool, but it hasn't really found that potential. It tends to, I don't know, creative people buy iPads and they have a vision of themselves being like, you know, Leonardo da Vinci sketching in their notebook, and instead it turns into the thing they use to watch Netflix in their living room sofa. And so we think that—

Bash hopes. Yeah, exactly. And we think a lot of that is the software and the way the software is built and how the interfaces work. But a lot of that is even baked in, to some extent, to the operating system. And so breaking those rules a little bit. And I think this is a theme of my career and my colleagues as well, which is part of what made Heroku able to do what it did was we broke some fundamental assumptions that people had. A big, big one, I don't know if you both remember this, but the read-only file system.

This was just a huge fight for us for many for many many years which is people wanted to be able to just save something from their app onto the file system and expect it would be there later and part of the containerization again what later became to be called containerization where you can throw away these processes and that if you want to persist anything it needs to go into a database or something like that or a similar service that was core to making it possible for this platform to work the way that it did. But it also broke this fundamental assumption. It created all this friction and the number of support tickets

I can't even begin to tell you that we had on that particular point. Well, I can give you as a user and as a person who was along for the whole Heroku ride pretty much, I hated that thing. I hated because, and if I didn't, but I put up with it knowing what it bought me. I realized, I don't know if it was through good communication by you all or what it was or enough Googling where I'm like,

why the heck is it read-only file system? It seems so stupid that I realized this is actually what allows these other things to happen and so it's like put up with this thing which is painful in order to gain all these other things and it was worth it for me and I stuck around I did it but so many times I bumped my head up against that when all you want it's like can I just persist a file on the disk here for a minute you know well you can for you you can't count on it you actually could like there was ephemeral you could do it but you couldn't trust it. Exactly, yeah.

So you could write things there, but it wouldn't necessarily be available in the next web request because that could be a different process. That did break some assumptions. It was just doing things in a way that developers haven't had to do it that way, which required a lot of rewriting of stuff

and picking certain tools versus others. Yeah, and you could certainly have a whole long philosophical discussion about opinionated products, right? Something that tries to encode values or worldview or creative process versus something that tries to give you as much freedom and flexibility as possible. And for whatever reason, I'm drawn to opinionated products. I guess I have opinions, but in particular, exactly as you said,

when it lets you do something you couldn't do otherwise, but you need to break some assumption that is baked into the status quo, that's to me where interesting innovation potentially lies. As a side note, I wonder, we probably can't answer this, but how many customers did you push to S3 over the years? Because it's like, well, you can't, you know, you want to use Heroku. And of course it was on top of AWS anyways, but you got to have somewhere to put your storage. Well, S3 is the

simplest, fastest it's right. And it's fast both in terms of getting and using it, but also it's fast with Heroku because y'all were on their infrastructure anyways. I'm sure tons of people signed up for that because of Heroku. Yeah, well, I'm all right with that. I think S3 is an incredible product in some ways, maybe the best part of the Amazon Web Services. It's so simple, as the name says. It does something simple, but very needed,

solid, reliable. It doesn't offer a lot of complexity, or it doesn't offer a lot of features, you might say, but that's actually part of why it can do what it does, because it is just so simple. It's just kind of a blob store and serving platform. It certainly adheres to the Unix philosophy you said you were inspired by in part one,

where you were saying, like, you can just do this one thing right, whereas maybe your constraint said, well, this is how we have to do it, and there are ways you can persist to file, et cetera. It's just not on here. There are other ways to do it. There's workarounds, essentially, and that's fine.

This Unix tool works this way, and it's fine. That's right, that's right. Yeah, so I'm tying that kind of same theme back to Muse is that we want to show maybe computing can be different in some way that we can embrace touch screens for example but in a way that does isn't necessarily dumbing things down and so that kind of led us to the tools for thought community which actually had a real rise in the last few years rome research was one of the first but basically a lot of these kind of linking, backlinking tools like Obsidian.

Now you've got Obsidian and LogSeek and many others. Notion, obviously, is kind of a team version of that. People got really interested in these knowledge management tools that were largely based around linking and kind of more powerful features. We got to be a little bit a part of that community and world of things. And there's, again, researchers who are working more on the academic side, but people also making commercial products who are trying to push the boundaries of what computers can do, again, for productive uses. And in particular, we're really interested in, and for Muse, the center point is what we usually call thinking, which computers are very good for creating things, but they're less good for thinking.

And so the evidence of this usually is like, if you need to think through a tough programming problem, obviously you're going to sit at your code editor or whatever to grapple with to understand the situation or to look through the logs or whatever else. But at some point, if you really need to think it through, you probably get up and take a walk. Maybe you scribble on your whiteboard, maybe you write in your sketchbook. There is like sort of in front of a keyboard is not necessarily the best place to think. And so this whole tools for thought community, which I really enjoyed being a part of, or haven't really enjoyed being a part of, or have really enjoyed being a part of in the same way I enjoyed being part of the Ruby community 10 or 15 years back is sort of a small but pretty passionate set of people who, yeah, are thinking, how can we, how can computers help us think better, develop ideas, be wiser, be more thoughtful, which in many ways is a very sharp contrast to, I think, what is going on in a lot of the consumption computing, which is driving us more towards, let me just consume as much information as quickly as I can and sort of form hot take opinions and not really be that thoughtful. So that's been a really fun community to be part of as part of this project getting to deep thought and deep work is uh in today's fast pace moving world is an absolute challenge right your your tools have to enable you to do

that or you forget you can or you never learned and some people just have never deep worked or deep learned like they just they just are deep thought they just sort of just i don't know they're just in this fast pace moving world sort of just, I don't know, they're just in this fast-paced moving world so they just never slow down enough to think, well, I can actually deep work this or deep think this. And it's sort of missing. And I think it's a tool that enables you to do it and reminds you you can.

We try to embrace those ideas in a lot of ways. Yeah, I guess briefly it's probably worth sort of defining deep work. Probably different folks have different definitions of it, but I feel like for programmers who are always trying to defend their calendars from the managers who want to cut up all their time or whatever, we understand that you need a good two hours minimum to really get into the headspace of a problem.

You can talk about state of flow, you can talk about loading up the context or whatever, but two, three, four hour session, that's where you can really go deep on a truly difficult problem. And we also know that getting interrupted in some significant way, obviously a meeting, but even something like a phone call or a notification on your phone or something like that can really break that kind of fragile state. And because we live in a world that's driven by interruptions now and that's true even on our work tools as well right like i love slack but it kind of is part of this like interruption driven culture and then we have notifications on all our devices and and all that sort of thing and so the idea of just sitting down to truly go very deep on a problem for hours at a time, extended concentration,

pushing yourself to the limit of what you can do, that's an increasingly kind of like rare, it's a word for it, skill or just tool to deploy. So that's one of the things that we stand for. And our product is built around that idea of let's come into the space where you won't be interrupted it can be sort of a sanctuary for going deep on a particular problem Hey friends, this episode is brought to you by my friends and potentially your friends too at Fire Hydrant. And I'm here with Robert Ross, founder and CEO of Fire Hydrant. And Robert, there are several options out there for incident management, but what is it that makes Fire Hydrant different? The reason that we think that Firehydrant is on to something is because we're meeting companies really where they are. We face the same problems that every company in the industry that

is building and releasing software is also facing. So where you want people to be able to sign up for Firehydrant and immediately be able to kick off an incident using the best practices that we've built and we've experienced and have gathered through the other amazing customers that use our tool. It really is a very quick time to value. And we want people to have a long jump from where they are to where they want to be in incident management. I love it. Thank you, Robert. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all Fire Hydrant features included. There's no credit card required to sign up. They are making it too easy to get started, so check them out at FireHydrant.com.

Again, FireHydrant.com. What makes this be the place that you replant your flag? It seems like Muses where you planted your flag. You're podcasting around this. You're putting all your, seemingly from the outside, we haven't actually, but it seems like you're putting all your attention into this or the large majority of it. So why is this problem worth solving so much for you? Yeah, that's a good question. I think, you know, as an entrepreneur or a creator of any kind, right? Like what draws you to just be completely a man on fire about solving a particular thing?

And it's hard to say, it comes from something deep inside. And, you know, maybe post-talk, you can better explain it. Yeah, for me, it does come back to this reason that we started the lab, which is I love computers and computing. And I think they have the potential to enhance a lot of what makes us human. I think they allow us to do better at things like art and science. And certainly the remote work world is also its whole own thing that I think has been a huge enabler for people being able to live more flexible lives, but also do the creative work that they love. But that tends to be balanced or countered out a little in some ways by this what we just talked about this kind of like always on 24-hour news cycle interruption

hot take culture if that's the right word for it but but it's really enabled by technology and so you see this tension i think in computing which is okay you know my Mac is it a bicycle for the mind like Steve Jobs said or is it a way for me to get breaking news I'm constantly breaking my flow when I'm deep in a programming problem or a design problem and I think in a way the the computing industry really is sort of pulled in these two two directions right now so we started the lab to see what we can do to put more thought and resources and energy into that. Again, productive, thoughtful, how can we become better at, we think, these noble pursuits, and how can computers help us with that? And so Muse is one piece of that. It's not necessarily the whole thing and indeed ink and switch has a grand

revision of which maybe muse would be a you know an app in that ecosystem if that's that's the right way to put it but for whatever reason this kind of fluid environment for thinking and thinking through difficult problems and doing deep work and the specific technologies that go with it the infinite canvas the local first sync and a few other pieces um just i don't know somehow it really uh somehow really caught my caught my passions and so yeah we're three years into it now and and still still just loving it i have a couple of meta questions while we're talking meta muse here not the podcast just about muse and your desires there two phenomena that happened that I want to ask, they're kind of on other sides of the coin. The first one is the sophomore album.

So anytime you have a band, of course, pulling from the music industry that comes out with their huge hit record and it blows minds and it's amazing. And then they have this time off to regenerate their creativity and then they have, and they have money now and they have this time off to regenerate their creativity. And they have money now, and they have fame. And then they have their sophomore album. And so historically, it's been a stumbling block for a lot of bands because what do you do? Do you give people more of what you started with? Do you redefine yourself?

Did you catch a flying star or whatever? Then you can't do it. Can you not recreate the magic, you know, and some bands fail and other bands succeed at having that second album be great. And I'm just curious if you have not, I'm not going to ask you if you're going to succeed or fail or whatever, but like, do you have any of that trepidation of like, gosh, what if I can't do it again? Or do I, do you even want to do it again? Or what are your thoughts on, you know, Adam Wiggins' sophomore album? Yeah, I thought about that really specifically. And I think my partners did as well in our kind of, you know, aftermath of Heroku time, which is before we even, I even thought about what I would do next. I just said, look, this is probably going to be the most successful thing I ever do in my

life. I'm not going to use this as some kind of benchmark for what I want to achieve in the future. My goal for success is having something interesting to say and doing creative work with a great team and doing my very best to bring something meaningful into the world. And I certainly hope that we could, you know, capture that lightning in a bottle again. I feel like you see this also with, I don't know, maybe like film directors. You know, it's always interesting to me when I, you know, I'm a bit of a film fan. And so, yeah, I see a really incredible film and I go, who is this director? It's an incredible work. And you go look up their other stuff and you see that like maybe they've had one or two hits and then a whole bunch of other things that were not that well

received or maybe maybe just in between and you go watch them and you see they all have the same style you can see they in many cases they had the same team right a lot of the same people came to work on it and a lot of the same concept and you can see they put the same like heart into it but sometimes all the pieces come together in a way that produces, what do you call it, box office success or whatever. And other times it doesn't. And I think you really have to be at peace

with that as a creator. And you count yourself lucky if you get even just one of those in your career. Of course, you want everything you ever do to be a success, whatever way you want to define that. But I think it's important to be proud of the work and invested in it and not benchmark yourself based on, I think, something that's almost kind of out of your control, the serendipity element of it that we talked about quite a bit last time.

Yeah, so definitely went into it with that perspective. The other thing that I like to think of, I like the sophomore album metaphor. The other one they mentioned is for book authors, where if you have a New York Times bestseller or something like that, your next book, your publisher is going to want you to follow up with something else pretty quickly because they think, okay, this person's a good author. They can make us some more money. But they usually say you have your whole life to write your first book book and you only have a year or two to write the second book so a lot of the ideas and thinking and whatever that may have gone into that first book was your accumulated experience of your whole life whereas you're on the shorter shorter timeline that's similar with the sophomore album as well a lot of musicians like they spend their whole lives

building that first album and it's like what they have to say to the world. And then it's kind of like eight months later, it's like, where's your next one? It's like, well, I've got eight months to put things together. Indeed, there are incredible artists, whether it's musicians or other kinds of art or authors or whatever kind of creative works you want to think of where someone manages to build on their first one is good and their next one is better and their next one is even better

and they're telling a story and evolving it. Others, like you said, just do the same thing over and over again. For me, I have no interest in that. I guess I could have gone and done another developer tools company, but I don't know. Yeah, well you certainly picked a different domain. You changed your genre, so that's one way of not sticking to the formula. So in light of that, which I think is a very mature and wise way of looking at it, if you're not shooting for another Heroku-sized hit,

like if that's not your metrics for success, then when you look at Muse and you think about what success would look like for Muse, what does that manifest as for you? Definitely, yeah. Well, I always come back to impact to the world. And for me, it's both about business success I take to be as something that's, if you take a capitalist perspective, let's say profit is a measure of value you've created in the

world, right? So there's a lot to be said for that. If people are willing to part with their hard-earned money for a product you've created or an album you've written or whatever else, that's a good sign that there's something good there and you've put something good into the world. But yeah, a lot of it for me is impact and the ideas coming through.

And so to me, it's more important to, for example, have Heroku have been influential in the industry in the sense of inspiring others or helping shape how we think about, for example, developer experience and that we can make that better than it was before. That to me is almost that I'm more proud of than any particular product innovation or certainly something like any of the kind of just you know business metrics for for success so for ink and switch and for muse both which are all those separate entities they're kind of coupled ideas uh or i should say they're very intertwined in the sense of what they're trying to do in uh in terms of impact for me success would be okay helping to with the greater tools for thought community get people thinking about how computers can be better for allowing us to be more thoughtful or how computers can be

better for productive devices like what is that you know that 10 year old right now that's on whatever devices they have what's going to inspire them to create the next great game or the next great company or the next great piece of art what's the what are the software and the computing and the internet components in that that make it possible for our next generation to to go even further than where we have gone so being part of the kid computers help us with thinking and then there's kind of a lot of sub elements ofments of that, I think, as well, which is like this local first sync, which I've mentioned a few times. Muse has implemented a version of this.

This is a huge track of research for Ink and Switch, but would be a seismic shift for the industry. Cloud has become so pervasive, right? And if we say, actually, we can take a step beyond that and get all the benefits of cloud, but actually get a lot of other benefits that are sort of downsides with the cloud, if we can have some effect of that. And we're starting to see that actually more and more products are marketing themselves as local first or using some subset of these technologies. So that to me is really exciting.

And if someone uses Muse, feels what it's like to have all your data be local and fast all the time, and you never have a spinner, and you can go offline and everything still works completely well, even though it's a collaborative environment. And then they go, huh, software can be like this? That's interesting. And then maybe they either want to hold other products they use to a higher standard, or if you're a software creator yourself, maybe you think, huh, maybe I could or should build build my app in this way so that kind of impact is what matters the most to me is muse collaborative at this point where you can have other people multiple people one document or whatever you call the boards i guess or one infinite canvas whatever terminology you use so that is in uh alpha right now so if've built the technology, works pretty well in my opinion, although we're in the process of testing that.

So essentially right now the version you can download from the App Store you can use for individual ideation. As you mentioned, you can link together your devices and you can kind of see how they sync between each other. And this was actually our little trick to de-risk the technology because this is such a bleeding-edge technology. It really just came straight out of the computer science world and no one's really implemented it fully working in production systems yet so we we tested it out by saying okay

we'll just use this in a personal product to sync between your two devices and use that to kind of shake out all the the edge cases and the and the operations challenges and so forth and we've been doing that over the last few months since we launched that product. And then with that being really solid, now we can build a multiplayer. And the multiplayer basically looks similar to a Figma or something like that, where you have the avatar and you can see someone's cursor and it's all completely real time. But it also has the capability that you can just get on a plane at any time or turn off your Wi-Fi or whatever else, and everything still works.

So that's in alpha right now. In fact, if you're a team interested in that, you can check our website, and we've got a little memo about group ideation and a little type form survey you can fill out if you want to join that alpha program. Can we talk about tools for thought at this point? I mean, I feel like as we were talking here, I'm trying to like wreck my brain with how I think and how I capture my thoughts and my ideas because in many ways, my DMs with Jared or my, you can probably attest to this, Jared, like most of my ideas, some of them are just like shotgun,

like this is actually a bad idea, but I'm going to share it anyways because I just don't care if it's a bad idea, even if it's like that's stupid Adam you should just like do this thing this way or whatever but either way like my tools for thought I don't know if I use some people use notebooks like physical

hard copy you know can't collaborate there is no sync because there is no sync situations I just think like how do people think and what kind of software out there is already out there that enables thinkers to capture their ideas in ways that are, that can like give them speed to, you know, capture during your moment or just be able to just capture any of these at all. I feel like notion or notes or text is very like a crude way to capture ideas. I guess it's the most basic.

Maybe you draw, maybe you open Photoshop or some sort of grafting app that you can draw something. But then I feel like it's a bunch of hodgepodge of tools that don't really come together. Maybe that's kind of what you're doing with Mute is because you've got this infinite canvas, you can zoom in, you can do all these different things. But like you said, you're still at the bleeding edge of a lot of this technology. Long story short, my question is, what kind of tools are out there already for tools for thought that are this kind of fidelity? Is there anything?

Has there been anything? Yeah, that's a great question. Let's see how it can unwind things a little bit. For me, the classic tools for thought are sketchbooks, whiteboards, Post-it notes, index cards, and so on. And not everyone uses this exact set of things, and people do different combinations, and some draw beautiful sketch notes in their notebooks, and other people just kind of scribble down a quick idea on a post-it note,

and that's kind of it. But most people use some kind of externalizing of your ideas. And I always like the idea that even here, just thinking in the analog world, there's a great interview with Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, where they're asking about his notes. He has all these sketchbooks where he's working through his physics problems. And they're basically asking to see the notes. It's like, oh, this is a record of your thinking. And I'm going to butcher the quote a little bit, I think. But he says, no, no, no, this is my thinking. It's the process of getting the ideas out onto the page, seeing them, and then kind of like bringing that back into my

mind. That loop is actually how I think, right? Because there's sort of a limit to what you can hold in your mind and your short-term memory. And especially when you get into visual thinking, which obviously a lot of mathematics work tends to be that way. For me, this is very true with programming work as well. At some point, if I'm doing architecture, I need to sketch a diagram. It's not enough for me to either do it in code or just to do it in text. There's a visual and a spatial component as well. That's not true for everyone, but that seems to be true for quite a

lot of people. So yeah, the analog tools are the classic. And then I think all of those, what would you kind of classically call note-taking tools? I think Evernote, you know, is probably, while it fell from grace a little bit, was one that was popular for a while. I used just plain text files and markdown files in a Dropbox folder for many, many years. And then in modern times, exactly, you have this tools for thought kind of revolution that's happening. A lot of that is text-based stuff ranging from kind of the outliner stuff like Emacs org mode and Workflowy and Roam and so on, as well as the more visual-oriented stuff, which would include something like probably like Miro or Fig Jam, obviously Muse is in that category. But I think it's pretty early days. And in many ways,

for me, in terms of digital tools for thought, sometimes we haven't even just beaten a folder on my file system because I can throw in, here's three images and a screenshot and a PDF and a text file. Here's a collection of loose multimedia. That actually is also a really good thing for bringing together my thinking and my source material on a project. That's maybe kind of a quick overview of how I think about that world. There are so many tools. And as purveyors of fine digital goods, is that how a purveyor does? Or users of fine digital goods?

We don't make any of them. You do, Adam. But we just use and talk about. I've seen so many, what do you call them, ideation tools, productivity, collaboration, note-taking. They all have a little bit different view of the world. And so they're all bringing something different, some unique perspective of why this is good.

And it's kind of like the note-taking app space where it's like everybody kind of uses notes a little bit different. And so there's a lot of room, I guess, for different entrants because it's not like there's one grand way of creating or ideating. There's lots of different ways. And so what is Muse's perspective? We've talked about infinite canvas.

Maybe you can describe that in more detail. I've also seen the nesting functionality. What are the big ideas in Muse that makes it a unique entrant into the creativity space? Yeah, Infinite Canvas is something that I think is going to be a much bigger category going forward.

We actually even have a little microsite on that, infinitecanvas.tools, where we try to document all the movement in that space that's happened very recently. Apple's just now launching a product in that space, and several others that are up and coming. But historically, this has been design tools. So

Illustrator, I think of as kind of the first infinite canvas where you had true zoom in and out. You could just kind of put things wherever. Like Photoshop, you have an edge to the document. And obviously, like the classic, say a word processor, a text editor is a very linear thing. There's a top, it goes down, and that's it. You can't kind of just put something to the side. But on a desk or on a pin board or on a whiteboard or something like that, you'd be, I'll stick these off to the side here and I'll put this one over here. And I think this little pile here represents this one set of ideas

and this little pile represents another set of ideas. That concept doesn't really exist in most computing tools. Partially it's because computers are very structured and organized and rational. That's actually what we want from them. We like that we can dump a bunch of junk in and it gives us a nice neat list or a grid or something. But actually we think that ideation is something

that can be a little messy. Free form is probably a better word for it. But yeah, it's just kind of like, I'm not quite sure yet. I think these things kind of go together. I'm going to stick them over here. This happens to me even when I'm writing an article or something where I have a paragraph. I'm not quite sure where it should go, but I think it's pretty good. I'll kind of stick it down at the bottom and kind of like an attic section under a you know a thing so i can bring it back later but again that one-dimensional thing is kind of limiting in a way and i think why these design tools and figma really is one of the best implementations just technically as well as its multiplayer capability and you see people a lot of people using figma for what i

call like off-brand uses like we're having a team retrospective we're having a roadmap planning and so therefore we're going to kind ofive. We're having a roadmap planning. And so therefore we're going to kind of all go into this thing and be able to shove these things that kind of look like post-it notes and whatever around to understand a problem together, to work through an idea, to make a shared plan, et cetera. But of course, Figma is a design tool. So you can very easily get hung up on,

should the border radius on this be four or eight pixels? Do I want this font size or this one? Do I want a medium or a bold? And of course, all that kind of fidelity is really getting in your way when you're in that ideation phase, which I think is part of what makes, for example, whiteboards, or I'm actually a big fan of Sharpies. I would keep, back before I had Muse, I would keep just big sheets of butcher paper in my office and Sharpie markers and just kind of draw stuff on there because you just can't get too precise. You can't be too neat. You have to really stick to the, just the raw idea and the raw, just like the big, broad strokes of it. And so that's part of what, what Muse is trying to do. If you think of those

off-brand uses of Figma where people like the openness of the canvas, the sense of place, bringing everyone together to get rid of all the design specific stuff and hierarchical layers and the auto layout and whatever, and make it more of just this kind of loose, loose space for, for ideating together. That's where I almost wonder if like Muse, you can, and this may be exactly what the idea is, like you can put these higher fidelity files into the board. So rather than having to create it within the thing itself, this is one thing I liked about Dropbox Paper was that, unlike Google Docs, you can change the heading sizes,

you can change the font and styles, and you can really, you know, Jared can have one style and I can have another, but the raw idea kind of got like, well, is this a paragraph? Is this a heading? Is it a list? Like it just got formatting got in the way with Dropbox paper

or with a doc from Google or whatever. But Dropbox paper is like, no, this is the one style. And you can add maybe another return between paragraphs if you wanted to, but that was the most you could really do. But I think they have not done the most amazing job with that product. And we don't use it anymore, just for whatever reasons. But in the case of, say, Figma, where you get a more high fidelity, and Muse, maybe it's more, as you said, free-form thinking.

Maybe it's about embedding certain larger format files in there, where maybe you can add an Illustrator file that gives a fidelity, and you can eject back out to illustrators to say, well, here's the design for this thing. And here's where it points to this or whatever that, you know, maybe that's a 3D space. I don't know. Maybe that's a way where you can be like, here's how you think and here's how we can organize what we're doing as a team or individually, I guess, currently, but here's the, you know, literal embedded high fidelity file that we can examine in its current state,

but also eject out to that application and go deeper and finer with a whole different workflow. But Muse is about putting this idea on a board together and saying this is where we're at currently or where we're moving towards. Yeah, absolutely. Those kinds of integrations, whether it's classic files,

let me drop in an Excel sheet or a video or something like that, or whether it is more of a cloud service, a Figma, whatever. I think Notion probably gets the closest on this. And in many ways, Notion is the big success story for the tools for Thought World to date, where they do manage to bring together multimedia of all different kinds and the text blocks and the linking and all that sort of thing. But again, it is, well, it's not an infinite canvas. It is a classic page base top to bottom.

It's text oriented first and foremost, rather than visual or spatial or sketch. You can't start with a sketch and then kind of start to add text. The place you really start with Notion is text. So we think Notion, I mean, I think Notion's a great product and it's obviously been very successful. But we think that if you can imagine a world where there is a proliferation of tools for thought that are as, you know, kind of in the same vein as Notion but explore totally different directions such as visual and spatial, the direction we're going,

and that teams and individuals have a lot of different choices to choose from just the way that, you know, I'm a big believer also in just diversity of tools. And so I don't think there needs to be one programming language to rule them all, nor do I think there needs to be one tool for thought to rule them all. One, because you might use different ones in different circumstances.

And two, just because you have different ones that just fit with your brain. You know, just because you have different ones that just fit with your brain. You know, someone might say, I like rust because it just fits my brain. I say, I like Ruby because it just fits my brain. And, you know, you can debate over performance or what kinds of applications it's most suitable to write. And those, those are valid discussions, but a lot of it does come down to taste and feel and vibes. And I think that's also a thing that, that could and should happen in the tool for thought world. But right now we kind of have just note-taking apps

and file systems, and then there's a few early movers like the Notions and Roams of the world. And I just hope to see a much more proliferation of that so that we all have more choice. Right. Yeah, I think of Notion as a great tool for a knowledge base. It actually kind of even gets into production to a certain sense. Here's your database tables.

Put your data in here that's important to you and stuff, which is awesome. It's very multi-purpose in that way. I do find it too formal and stringent, I guess, for actually ideating. There's also the world of mind mappers. There's mind mapping software, which is very much tools for thought. I've tried those over the years as well.

I think in outlines a lot, not really coming up with a new idea, but planning something. I just think in outlines, so I use outliner tools. It seems like Muse is in the middle. There's definitely mind mapping things going on especially with the drill downs now the mind mapping tools, lots of them they want to put everything into this tree structure

for me even those I'm too busy thinking about how to use this tool than about my ideas and formatting I guess yeah formatting, that's what I was saying because my idea gel is this tree right and so I guess the primitives inside of Muse, what I've seen so far, is you have the board,

and boards have boards, right? So there's your infinite, like your nesting. You can drill down from a board. A board can have multiple boards, right? And you kind of double-click down into one. Exactly, so it's infinite nesting, just like a file system, basically. And we think that maps to your brain, but also to just how ideas are, right?

Which is you're in the middle of exploring one idea and you kind of realize there's this whole sub thing that goes with it. And you start that board and you drill down deeper or you link to another board, for example, and that there's potentially no bottom to that. You can go as deeply as you want. And indeed, the way we've implemented it was a huge engineering challenge was there's no opening of day. There's no point where you have a list of documents and you double click one to open

it. You start on a home board. You smoothly navigate. You know, if you're on a device like the latest iPad Pro, it's 120 frames per second. You pinch in like you would on a you know google maps or something and you smoothly navigate into that board and it all feels like a kind of seamless continuous video game world that you're sort of traveling through this space of ideas and that that's part of the that's part of the feel maybe that we're offering and you can argue uh one way or the other on the

the pragmatic benefits of that but again the feel and the vibe and the sense of fluidity to me is a big part of the idea we're trying to express. Yeah. So it's almost like a visual spatial outline. Because the same thing with an outline, you drill into an outline. Now I'm thinking about these particular subsections. I can also go back out to the higher level.

And so it's like that, but it's like boards inside a board. Now, what are the primitive objects that you can put into a board? I know there's text. I know there's images. Because that's the other thing is like, even when thinking with Notion, I get confused. Like, is this a page?

Is this a database? Should I put a page in here? Should I link between databases? Like Adam was talking about Google Docs. Is this an H1? Should I make this a subheading? Or, you know, you start to like get stuck in like the formatting or the objects and so how does muse kind of help us not have to maybe think about so much what we're

putting in our boards certainly as much as possible we try to have the tool get out of your way there there can be a learning curve there partially because we do it is a power tool it is supposed to be fast and you know when you really learn, whether it's the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac or the advanced gestures on the iPad, that there is something to learn there. But the core primitives are incredibly simple. They're basically cards. Everything's a card. They can all be resized the same way. You can navigate into them the same way. And a board, it's just a special type of card that contains other cards. Now here, we're calling back yet again to Unix philosophy here, right? Everything's a file. So this is everything's a card. But again, we're trying to embrace, we're putting together the old sort of the Unix file system, hierarchical file system, and everything's a file with the new,

right? So for example, one of the sources of inspiration for us is just the photos app that's on your phone, whether it's iPhone or Android, but particularly the iPhone one, you know, it's just every time you snap a photo, it goes into a bucket. When you load it up, you get this grid of photos. You don't need to choose a file name or figure out what folder to put it in or really think about it. You just have your photos there. And if you want to take it somewhere, you can grab it and drag it someplace or use the share sheet to send someplace else. And the kind of the simplicity of that, we wanted to bring that to every media type. So yeah, that kind of, let's call it the core native types are images, videos, links, obviously

is very, well, links to the web, very important in the modern world, links to other apps, which you can have in the kind of Apple ecosystem. And then there's text. So we have kind of a spatial, what we call like spatial text. You can double click anywhere on a board or double tap anywhere on a board and essentially just start writing. So if you want, and indeed, we sometimes do do this, you can make a new board, double click in the upper left corner and just start typing. And you have a thing that just looks like a plain text document. But unlike a plain text document, you could at some point decide to grab that paragraph and instead of needing to put it at the bottom

like we talked about before, you just shove it off to the side somewhere. And then you can pull out your pencil if you want to scribble a little note. I don't know where this goes. Think about it later. This kind of thing, right? And this gets particularly fun in the collaborative setting.

So when I'm working with my colleagues on, for example, we were doing a little demo video script recently and kind of going back and forth on what should be in the script and storyboarding it and so forth. And we had, you know, it was basically just a vertical top to bottom text document, which was the script. But in the margins on both sides, we have like ideas and notes, little comments. We have, you know, what about this one? Here's a still image. Here's a little sketch of what it could be. Here's an alternate paragraph of, you know, here's an alternate order that we could do things. And you get this thing that looks a little bit more,

yeah, like a notebook or a whiteboard or something like that. Again, it has this kind of, yeah, this freeform nature. It's visual, it's spatial. It's just sort of more fluid and more multimedia than what we usually get with our with our text documents or even something like notion which is again very good multimedia wise you can drop in links and videos and things like that but once you get into the comments for example they're just plain text again you know it's like having a chat over slack or something like that which is fine to a, but sometimes you need more than text to express an idea. I've been sitting here playing with it, and it's pretty interesting

how you can, like, paste tweets in, and if there's images in those tweets, it brings it to the sidebar, which you can either, like, I think, throw away or get rid of. I pulled in, like, PDFs. I've titled things. You can go into those PDFs. I haven't figured out how to like eject out of the muse scenario and like go to the actual pdf in adobe acrobat or preview or whatever

it might be but it's really interesting how you do this and i and i think the one thing i'm on obviously on a macintosh right now computer a desktop and i happen to have a pen in my hand because I I'm a Wacom user so my left hand my far left hand is the magic mouse from Apple in the middle is my keyboard on the far right hand side is a Wacom tablet so I'm the I'm the left hand scroller slash touchpad thing and I'm on the right hand side with a very iPad like pencil and so I'm like man why can I not treat my computer like an iPad in this scenario I guess a real challenge you must have is like is defining features and enabling features based upon platform right like that must be a true struggle for you all because I'm finding when

I'm using what would typically be a mouse touch or movement with the pen I'm actually drawing and you treat that as a drawing application. And I'm like drawing lines on my screen when I don't want to be. And I can't double click with it. I can't treat it like a mouse. I literally have to go over my touchpad. So can you talk about how do you design this tool to do what you want, but also take into consideration what the platform has to offer,

whether you're on an iPad or whether you're on desktop, how do you favor or enable? I imagine you're in early innings of making this work really well because it seems a little kludgy, but speak to the struggle. Yeah, sure. Well, we're a big believer in designing for each device specifically, and obviously there should be things that are shared across them. I think it's really the reality of a creative professional's life

that we really all have a minimum two devices, which is the kind of desktop laptop form factor and the phone, but you do different things with them, right? They, they serve a different purpose, especially when you talk about your productive life, I think, or earlier someone made mention of the, the capturing, you know, the quick capture of a, of that idea in the Eureka moment, which might be while you're out on a walk in a park and you're just not in front of the computer and you want to get that written down. And my muse is not here.

Ah, right? Exactly. But at the same time, you also wouldn't expect to do a detailed long form editing of a huge article on your phone. That's just not the right device for that. You bring in potentially a tablet,

whether that is something like a Wacom, but we also think that the kind of standalone tablet like an iPad has a potential additional use, particularly in this thinking mindset thing. You're getting away from your keyboard, you want to pace around the room, you want to go lean back in a chair and kind of, you know, scratch your chin and this sort of thing. We think iPad potentially has a lot of potential for that. I think that's also the success of something like Kindle plays a role like that as well, which is that it can be this middle ground

that's between the phone and the computer. So we think that each of these three devices has a special place to play in the creative person's life and that will design the app for each one to all work together, but also embrace the unique strengths of each platform. Now, exactly as you said, we have not fully fulfilled that vision.

The tablet or the Wacom tablet aspect of things is something that we just haven't had the chance to put a lot of development effort into. Another thing we're doing sort of unique with this company is trying to stay really small, capital efficient, not going the big venture route, at least not yet. We're right now a six-person team, so we're trying to develop features slowly and thoughtfully rather than breakneck pace. Some of what you see is intentional choices of we leave things out. We don't want a bunch of font size choices because we think that

doesn't go well with ideation. You get stuck on that when you should be thinking about your idea. That's something we're intentionally leaving out. Other things like that the Mac doesn't have enough drawing capabilities relative to iPad just reflects the fact that we only released our Mac app five months ago. We just need to do a lot more work on that. Pretty long way from fully fulfilling the vision.

I realize I'm also an edge case too adam me having a waycom is is uncommon you know it's it's not a common tool for most people although i've met a few that share my exact same setup where right hand is a pen like my mouse is not a mouse it's always been the pen and i never have any wrist issues either because i'm not sitting there holding this mouse in one position clicking clicking clicking it's just far more free form and i've loved that for those reasons. And I don't actually, I do a lot of creative work for us, but it's very uncommon in comparison to the common. I do it. It's just not like maybe it's 10%, 20% maybe, but I'm always using a Wacom tablet as

my right hand and it's my mouse and my left hand is hand is my scroll and maybe i'll tap with that but it's you know it's a it's an uncommon scenario i could totally admit that but they are out there that is very interesting we have a lot of um wacom tablet users who are basically it for most of them their complaint is you actually can't get access to the ink tools um the gesture that you use on the ipad as you swipe in from the edge of the screen to get the ink toolkit to come out, and you actually can't do that on the Mac. So you only basically can have sort of the one black pen effectively. So usually that's the complaint that we have from the tablet, from the Wacom users.

The cool thing about the Wacom, too, is it's got those extra keys. It's got things that you can tap into specifically. you if you wanted to tell and maybe this is still an edge case and we're getting so hypothetical here but I'm sure it's common enough for you

that if you want the iPad experience on a desktop then adopt this way of doing things but the thing with your kind of tool

is to get adoption is to go where the users are not reroute them to new routes so that's why I totally admit I'm an edge case, don't design for me, but that's my, that's how I, and I don't have an iPad

because I find that it's usually Netflix or something like that, or like it's a watch or it's a consuming device. And I have, I always go for the Pro Max or the larger phone because I just like to bridge my gap where I have a strong desktop maybe and my desktop now happens to be a laptop too so I used to have a desktop and a laptop and a phone whereas now I just have a desktop which is a laptop and a phone so I only have

two devices in my case and Jared I think you're the same yeah so for me iPad's never really been a creative device for me but still yet Muse is such a functional thinking thing for me and that and that's why I'm asking so many questions because like thus far I haven't found something that beats notion to think and outlines as Jared said but like at some point the fidelity just isn't there or a mind mapper which just doesn't really fully map I'm not going to bust out sketch or photoshop or illustrator to start putting my ideas out there because then I can't collaborate with Jared or others. And then it's this AI file or a PSD file.

It's just this fractured world where nothing comes together where Muse has a chance to bring it all together. I love that articulation of the vision. I think you really see it there. And we're trying to slowly and steadily work our way towards bringing all those pieces together. The devices, all the different capabilities you expect, the multi-user collaboration as well.

And by the way, end-user programming is part of our grand master vision on this one as well. Oh good, I was wondering when we were going to get back to that. Somehow I can't seem to not work that into anything I ever do. But EconSwitch has some really excellent research going on right now basically about how to program with a pen, as well as different ways to create kind of sketchy exploratory programming environments, even if it's more visual with a mouse or some mix of sort of this, of a mix of a spatial and a formulaic environment. So we very much hope to, once we nail all the devices and the multi-user collaboration, then the final stage here would be

you have this essentially programmable ideation space. What's the end state? Sometimes, I can't help it, Jim, I'm sorry. I've been listening to a lot of plausible science books and i think farther in the future because of these books the way they make you think and we can get caught up in like the early innings like you're in now with muse and some of the limitations we're sort of here saying like will you succeed let's imagine 10 years goes by and you have succeeded what is mute like don't i don't care about the number of years but like some further future where there is success and it's not like well revenue or user more on impact and usefulness

so can you speak to like what is the end state of usefulness for this kind of application where do you where do you want to go that's the most useful yeah well certainly when i envision kind of the usefulness in the creative person's life it would be the same way that someone has an attachment to their sketchbook, for example, where they just, when they're in the position of, I have my next great idea, this is what they pull out. to add into this. It's not just a matter of taking those analog ideation sketchbooks and whiteboards and whatever and putting them on the computer. I think that part is sort of straightforward. Where I think it gets a lot more interesting is now you're on the computer, which is this dynamic medium. And so again, that programmability, that flexibility that we would expect from the dynamic medium and bringing that to your ideation space. And the additional component here, which we haven't talked too much about, but actually is a huge part of our vision is remote

work. So for me, going back to where we sort of started part two, you know, one of the things I wanted to do was not necessarily be stuck in the Bay Area. I wanted the ability to explore the world, to meet teams elsewhere, to live where I wanted to live, have the quality of life I wanted to have. And the degree to which tools, remote work tools, you know, those Zooms and Slacks and things that have been life-changing, I think, for many of us, those really were an enabler of that. But the place that still remains just uncontested for better for like thinking through problems and coming to consensus and making great decisions with a team it's being in front of a whiteboard together right it's being in person together you can work through stuff in a way

in person i think in a way that you can't with with digital tools not yet. So I guess my dream place for impact would be not just that personal tool where I have this kind of personal programmable sketchbook that is a great private place for me to like think through my ideas, but also as a place I can meet with other collaborators, whether it's for a side project, whether it's a team in my workplace

where we can work through difficult problems together and not only have it be as good and high fidelity and high bandwidth as working through a problem in person in front of a whiteboard, but actually even better because we have this dynamic medium that's so powerful and we can do things with on the fly that we would never have been able to do with analog tools and be able to have all remote teams that are every bit as effective as an in-person team, but the individuals can live these more flexible lives, can live where they want to live. It's easier if you're a family

person, et cetera. So that kind of enabling of great teams and great ideation together but more flexible work lives for creative people that's the combination of impact i want to see do you see the metaverse playing a role ever i feel like the potential evolution of muse so maybe muse 1.0 high impact great tool, but then the far future version might be like, well, let's step into our Muse. These boards you created, and you mentioned avatars and collaborations.

Do all roads eventually lead to some sort of metaverse considering remote work and togetherness? Do you think about that ever? Absolutely, yeah. We looked into that. I mean, this is part of what research labs do, right? Is try to think about every possibility, including the stuff that's way out there.

And at least the VR kind of side of things, and that's not even counting the kind of augmented reality side, I felt, or based on the evaluations we did a few years back, was just so early. I think that for a while, it is going to be a place for kind of

entertainment and new kinds of media experiences, certainly communication, but I think the kind of precision that you need out of productivity tools. I mean, we're here talking about like, we're still trying to get the kind of precision and performance out of a touchscreen that you can currently get out of a keyboard. So in a way, anything that turns it into a VR, AR type of a thing is, I think, even further out. So we felt like that wasn't super fruitful right now. I think the technology there needs to advance a lot, and really it mostly has to do with the input.

The head tracking and all that sort of stuff is amazing. And maybe there is a world where, I don't know, you're using some kind of conventional computing input device while you're wearing the headset. I could see something like that. But I think the input devices are so key. And that's the thing that I think we're pretty far away on, on that sort of world of things.

But absolutely, I would love a space that is more physical where I'm not just stuck in a chair all the time. And that's a little bit what I like about using iPad is being able to actually go and pace around the room with it in my hand or sit back in maybe at least a different chair, the one that's not at my desk. But maybe my dream state is something that's more like, maybe something like Tony Stark's lab in the Iron Man movies

where you've got many screens and you've got the holographic displays and you've got the voice and you've got the various different kinds of inputs and you're not in just this one fixed position, but the work is all around you. So whether that's some kind of VRAR, whether it's something like Brett Victor's Seeing Spaces, whether it's something like Tony Stark's Lab, I think there's a world that's like this. One thing that overlaps between some of my research was Adam's Heroku values, which I'm

not sure if that was ever truly Heroku's values, and then Muse's principles. So you seem like you have to start from this state of like, this is whom we are, so this is what we create, and this is how we value it, and this is how we treat each other, and this is how we work together, and this is how it affects the world you have to sort of have these valuable boundaries i suppose in both cases can you speak to how that helps you operate and maybe those around you operate effectively and reach the mission and how do your principles and values on on either side sort of like help you play out in the in the best way possible yeah well as you can tell from both of those examples, I'm absolutely a start from principles kind of guy or start from values. My Heroku values gist is actually something I published, I think basically it was on my last day of work there, if I'm not mistaken. No way. there actually was we had we we knew that her who had the strong point of view and we wanted to articulate some of the values about not just that's in the product but how we work as a team which

which they're sort of related right we're making a product that we ourselves want to use that embodies the way that we like to work that they kind of feedback to each other but it was more about how the team worked together and we had had a number of meetings and discussions about okay we should really write these values down so it's more clear to new people coming onto the team and whatever. And we just never, we got some like good loose ideation, let's say, but we never really boiled it down to like, this is our agreed upon canonical 15, whatever, 15 set of values. And so I always found that a bit annoying, but I also understood why we didn't get there. We were busy building the product. So on my last day, I was like, you know what, I'm just going to write down mine.

And I'm going to call them my Heroku values so that I'm not claiming, if someone else in the company disagrees, that, you know, points three, seven, and nine, or whatever. But that ended up probably being one of the best artifact of those early days in terms of how our team worked together.

And then, yeah, Muse has kind of a principles on our site, which I think is a little more refers to the product. But maybe this is a nature. I don't know if it's just something I tend to do in my businesses, or maybe it's the nature of when you're building creative tools. You know, Heroku is a tool for developers. Muse is a tool for anyone that needs to do thinking. But in doing that, how your team works and how the product helps you work, those two things are pretty closely related. Indeed, they should reflect each other in a lot of ways. We have some principles on the Muse website.

Coming back to this thing where we often make these counterintuitive choices break the status quo it creates a learning curve someone comes in they want to do something in a way that they've yeah every if you come in assuming oh muse is a note-taking app so it's going to work like apple notes for example which apple notes is an amazing application right and there's a good reason that it is a good cornerstone way to just take simple notes on your phone and your other devices. But if you come in assuming it's going to work the exact same way and all these things that you can assume from it and other kind of like standard note-taking apps like that, you're going to come in and you might be surprised, disappointed, overwhelmed, annoyed. So having

those principles to point back to both for us as a team to be able to say, okay, are we building things that are consistent with these principles as we go? And then second, for our users and customers to be able to understand, okay, we didn't just make this one counterintuitive design choice to annoy you. It supports something deeper and something we think is valuable. And if you agree with these values, then you will probably, it's worth your while to get over that little hump of friction and learn how the product works. If you don't agree with the values, then probably don't waste your time, right? Maybe it's not the right product for you to check out. This is the fastest way to now build native mobile apps for your mobile workforce. There is no complex frameworks anymore or tedious deployments. You can build mobile apps with what you already know, like JS and SQL.

This is all in the browser, no code or what they call low code. Join the wait list. Head to retool.com slash products slash mobile. The link will be in the show notes. Again, retool.com slash products slash mobile. Okay, so let's talk about the now. You've got pricing on the Muse website. In terms of, you said impact, but you also said revenue. It is a business.

You mentioned how you're running the team lean in terms of a smaller team. And I wasn't sure of all the details of specifics there, but you've got pricing on there. What's the current state of user base? Do you have a lot of users? Is it a little bit of users? Are you profitable? How do you break down now? Okay, creative product works great.

You're iterating and evolving. What's the state of business? Are you succeeding on that front? Are you being profitable? Give me some details there. Yeah, we're too early to say a lot about the success of the business there. And we're also trying to balance, I guess, a big ambition against my desire to be capital efficient, sustainable. It's tricky and time will tell whether we've, we've chosen a good path here,

but the hard thing is that, you know, we, we could have been sustainable, but then we really saw the way that a lot of the ways we wanted to expand on these other platforms. If we had this additional person or two on the team, you bring in of course you know people tend to be your biggest biggest cost so the long and short of it is i think our ambitious ambition is usually running a little bit ahead of what our revenue is so i think on the spectrum of there's sort of pure classic customer revenue funded and this is usually started by one person or two people they probably do consulting in the beginning. You know, if you think like Basecamp, you know,

began life this way. I had lots of companies began life this way. You're doing consulting for a few years. You keep the team just incredibly small and you try to get to a sustainable revenue point and then you only grow what revenue will allow. The other extreme is the venture world, where it's just like get millions or tens of millions or even more money higher higher higher don't even worry about putting the price on the product and we felt some of that in the heroku days as well you know we didn't even put pricing on it for several years in and it really wasn't a motivation to to to earn revenue, really, because we were funded by venture money. And I guess I'm a believer in understanding the value of your product by charging money for it.

So we did start charging money for Muse very early. And a big part of that was building that discipline that was a little bit closer to the indie hacker, solo entrepreneur kind of world of things. I really like that world of things. On the other hand, we have all these big ambitions. We're doing these cutting-edge technologies like the local first sync.

We need to be on all these platforms. We've got the multiplayer and so on. We have used investment money to basically spend more than we're bringing in so that we can build towards that ambition. But we also very specifically are trying to not just go the direction of, okay, take that seed round or series A, hire to 20 people, and then kind of worry about the money later on. So we're trying to find a middle ground there. It's going to be challenging because you've been to the mountaintop, right?

So you kind of know what it feels like, but then you're like, well, we're back down here at the bottom, in comparison, of course. And you have to scrap and you have to scrape and you have to earn that value. But that's kind of nice because you have said in other articles that, and I'm going to butcher some of the paraphrase here, that you sort of push back against the advising and VC things. Because it just didn't help you think. You like to be in the product. You like to deal with the hard choices and the details. And that's kind of where you're at right now. So this might just be your perfect place, Adam, where you're at now.

Yeah, maybe. Well, to me, it's sort of an ideal thing is to mix having a great team and going after something ambitious, but maybe there is a kind of, um, excess that naturally, and this is not a, I'm not trying to complain about the venture industry. I know that's a popular thing to do, but there really is something to be said for when you raise a bunch of money at a big valuation, that money's burning a hole in your pocket. You got to hire. Now you're focusing on hiring rather than maybe proving out your core idea. I've seen plenty of teams. I think Heroku, in a way, even dealt with this. We'd raised enough money and started to hire a team before we had that real product figured out. We weren't the platform.

We were the web editor. And I think there is a world where things might have gone a little differently. You start to hire people. You get invested in the path you're on. You've got this money to spend. So I think it can keep you from finding that product market fit and finding that right piece. So for us, really getting to this, for Muse at least, getting to this multiplayer step and checking the product market fit on that with a small team and being capital efficient. But yes, you're right.

Having been down the road of, here's the venture money, get a big shiny office, basically pay top of market salaries, all the perks, get the t-shirts, get the top of the line computers or whatever. We're trying to run a middle ground here of bringing great people onto the team, paying them fairly, getting good equipment for

everyone, do the thing, spend the money that you need to accomplish your business goals, but not overspend. And what even counts as overspending? It's all very much a judgment call. But I've been there in that temptation and just the ease of you raise the money at the big valuation, then the money's there. What are you going to, I don't know, you sort of lose some perspective. So I don't know. Time will tell if that was the right path.

Maybe for my next venture, I'll come back and be like, ah, screw it, I just sort of raised $20 million at the start and then just spend lavishly. There's a lot to be said for that. Or the other way around. Maybe I'd want to go full indie hacker and just try to build the whole thing myself or with one other collaborator.

I'm not sure, but I really wanted to see if something was possible with this middle path where you could both be ambitious, have a team, but not necessarily go down this road of getting addicted to venture money before you've even discovered your product market fit. So something that's different this time from last time is you're not slinging the code, right? I think you said that on our last conversation. You're not actually coding. You used to be a prolific open source person. Heroku days, even before Heroku days, but during Heroku, I'm looking at your GitHub right now.

I still see Pony on there. I think it was a Pony user of your, isn't that a Deliverer's email, right? Like it was like a simpler than Action Mailer. And I like that for my Sinatra apps. Back in the day, I always appreciated your taste as an API designer. But man, there's just no contribution graph anymore. Like it's just emptiness out there. So I'm just curious, like, are you completely not writing any code anymore? Or do you scratch your own itches? What's the status there? Yeah, I'll admit that part of things is a loss I feel sometimes.

I do write a little code here and there, usually either for fun or just to be in touch with particular technologies, sort of try something out to kind of understand how it works rather than to deliver any kind of finished piece of software. Certainly understanding Swift as a programming language, which I really like, is excellent. The whole Apple world of kind of developer tool chain stuff,

Xcode and whatever, is its own interesting parallel universe to the web technologies world. I also try to stay abreast of web technologies and dabble in those things. So I think it's very important for someone like me who is in a role of guiding a technology or guiding a team that is using technology to accomplish its goals or do something new in the world. You got to know how it works and you can

only do that if you're really pretty hands-on with it. But yeah, I found myself actually, this was true in the later part of Heroku as well. One funny thing there was my title. My official title was CTO, Chief Technical Officer, but I was not the most technical of the founders. That was my colleague, Orion Henry. He did all the really deep work with, say, the routing layer. He and Blake Miserain, he did all the really deep kind of early Erlang work with the routing layer. And even though I did write a lot of the early code, I'm not sure that software engineering has ever been my best skill.

I think it was always a means to an end for me. You mentioned API design. I think actually that is much closer to what I'm all about. When you're building a developer product, of course you're designing things like command lines and APIs, whereas when you're building something that's a little closer to the end user,

productivity software, the design work has a slightly different shape. There is still a lot of very technical design work, so this whole world of syncing where it doesn't rely on the cloud means how do you display the status to the user? For example, if you've been offline for a while and you've been doing a bunch of changes,

how can you see that those things have not been synced to other collaborators? There's prior art from things like Git and the developer world, as well as, yeah, there's prior art there, but there is a lot of really interesting design work that is also very technical. So certainly I get to do plenty of that. But yeah, in terms of writing code, I think of the last line of code I wrote to contribute to Heroku was probably, I don't know,

three years into that journey. And most of the rest of the time I was leading teams and doing design and other aspects of designing the add-on system, things like that, which obviously very much touch the technology, but ultimately are not sitting down at a code editor for most of my day.

All right, so hypothetical, Adam Wiggins' next venture, Muse, succeeded. You sold it to Salesforce for 20 bills. For billions this time. Yes. We win. You decide you time. Yes. We win. You decide you're going to go indie hacker. You're going to build it all from scratch yourself.

It's going to be a SaaS. Let's just put you in the web world. What tools are you picking up first or at least trying first? What would you grab? Would you go grab your Ruby still or would you try something else? What do you think?

What do I like to write or have skill with? And then there's where do I think is interesting in the technology world so i would be surprised if whatever i want to do in the future doesn't channel the same kind of close interface for the user fast like i really really become very big on that like performance i'm just so tired of spinners and all that we suffer through with modern computers fast as they've gotten somehow we're always still waiting for them and so this is one reason why i was really drawn to swift and the native technology development stack that you do have in the apple world of things i've also been variously interested in i have a early in my career as a video game developer and things like sdl which is an open source video game library and

more kind of just writing c and and sort of like kind of more raw canvas rendering is also very interesting to me. If I was to go web technologies, which for sure is still, that's still kind of where the most interesting stuff is happening ultimately, even though actually the first version of Muse we built with web technologies and I just couldn't, basically couldn't do the things we needed it to. But where I think it gets really interesting is when you decouple it from the browser. And obviously browser is great for a whole bunch of reasons. The main one or the top one being that you can type in a web URL and you're essentially running a program written by,

you're downloading and running instantly a program written by someone else. And it does that completely in a safe and sandbox way, which is, from my point of view, just an absolute miracle of technology that hasn't been accomplished anywhere in any other technology stack. But at the same time, yeah, browsers are ephemeral, and they tend towards slowness, and you just need this connection, this always-on connection. So the decoupling of those technologies,

which obviously Electron has been a poster child for, one that I've gotten interested in recently is Tari, which is the idea of kind of taking, you know, kind of the core concept of Electron, but like doing it in a way that's more high performance and a little closer to the metal, use more system components, that kind of thing. We'll see if they're successful

at putting that together into a good package. But you combine that potentially with system languages like Rust, and then I think we're still figuring out how to do good rendering in the web stack. You know, the DOM isn't really that suitable for web applications, high-performance web applications, but there are, yeah, you've got kind of the Figma route

with WebGL, which maybe kind of touches on that. SDL, kind of more raw canvas rendering. So I don't know, there's some combination of those things that would be interesting. And one thing I actually dabbled with also in my research time at Ink and Switch, and I might come back to, is I actually had basically forked the Chromium OS

to have a Chromebook that could boot directly into a web app, but the web app's running locally native to the hardware. I think there's some unbundling of web technologies that could potentially get a lot of, again, coming back to maybe the same theme that was in the local first stuff, which is can we get the good parts of cloud and leave behind the bad parts?

I wonder if there's a way we can unbundle the web technologies and take some of the bright spots in that world and put them together in a way that lets us get kind of fast, high performance, powerful local applications, but also a lot of the things we love about web technologies including developer experience and the openness of it and the ability to interface to backends and so forth. So sometimes when people like you do what you do you think I've got this many years on this thing here. Are you a muse, ride or die? I'm just thinking far forward. What can we expect from Adam Wiggins? What can we expect from you?

Where can we expect to see you in your creative output will it be muse focus will be the podcast and talking to folks around tools for thoughts like the next several years is it muse muse for life or what's a good next step from here for you it'd be hard to fully predict that i certainly can easily imagine spending basically the rest of my working career, however long that turns out to be, on Muse and the larger Ink and Switch universe of next generation computing, productive computing, end user programming, and so forth. So very, very absorbed in and passionate, even though I've been essentially working on that world of things now for seven, eight years, I don't see any, any end in sight in the sense of sort of my personal passions and drives. That said, I think for me, business ventures and products in a way are a venue to

express ideas. And when I feel like I don't have something to express anymore within that space, that's when I start to think about, you know, a graceful exit. And that's, that's what happened with Heroku. You know, it was the, not only the six years that I spent on that product, but the couple of years leading up to it that I was getting into the world of Ruby and Agile and so forth. So after, I don't know what it ended up being in total, let's say eight years, I felt like I didn't have a lot more to say. And I thought very seriously about staying on longer. And there's a lot I could have done there that would have been less about like expressing of some grand vision and more continuing what we'd started and making sure it could be as successful as possible. A lot of that would have been just being a manager in a larger organization because of the

size of the team there. But yeah, for me, it really is when have I tapped out my passions and my ideas in a space. And it's really hard to predict. I have had businesses that have only had a year's worth of ideas and then I've moved on. That's a little more rare. But yeah, at least at the moment, it very much feels to me like news and the larger world of Ink and Switch is my life's work. But you never know with entrepreneurs, right? We have shiny object syndrome, I think, which is there's a being drawn to novelty.

And so yeah, five years from now, hard to say, but at least in my ideal world, we're continuing this grand vision of a next generation computing platform that's great for thinking, that's great for programming, that lets you do deep work. And that is something that a new generation growing up can be inspired by how to create things with computers and not just how to consume that's something interesting to marinate on because that's one thing i like a lot about what we do here jared at changelog because i feel like every new curiosity i have or any new idea that comes from that curiosity can be applied here and i think that's what you're saying adam which which is like i couldn't apply any of my curiosities and you know what that drew me to or led me to at Heroku anymore so it felt like a natural departure because you weren't exiting you were just your creativity well for

there and how you can apply it seemed to be mostly done unless you push a little harder and it would stay in to management but if with Muse that's why I asked you that question less on like what's next for you but more like how long will you push this because i can see success for this and once you get there and you hit that fit there's just lots more ways you can sort of like iterate and get more fine on the details like i said with the wake on like even with that for example that that's a detail that y'all haven't really touched much on but there's an application there and there's just so many of them out there in the world into ituos is still a very well-known brand. And I love this thing. I've used one for many, many years. So it's my way of doing things. I can imagine there's

so many more out there like that. But to be able to find something that you care about and work with people that you enjoy working with on an idea that really makes sense and can have impact and every new idea that you have or if there are more can be applied there then why change right i mean obviously you have an outlet which is sort of like more question mark and open-ended with ink and switch but a direct application of potentially even a lot of that research you all are doing which has got to be just super interesting to have that kind of uncharted territory on one side, but then application on the other. It must be a way to keep you grounded as a creator

because you can always ask the questions, but then find applications as it makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Curiosity and uncharted territory are both terms that resonate very deeply with me. That's when I know I found the right space for myself to do the work that I do. Obviously, a lot of it does have to also do with the people, the people you're doing it with, and their sense of, you know, that you're charting that uncharted territory together and there you're being curious together and exploring the space and yes i think there's a fractal world of tool for thought space to explore that i i think is very likely to keep me engaged for many many years but of course it also depends on the market right which is you know as we move into for example the the multiplayer version and how do groups think together and are

our ideas things that people want need resonate with people does another team execute these same ideas better etc all of those are always possibilities that's the the discipline of the market so i'll just we'll get in there and express these ideas the best we can and if they resonate with folks then we can expand and go further and go deeper and just see how far it goes. Let's give a little nudge on that front, the fit front. Let's give our listeners an opportunity to go and try Muse and check it out. So it's museapp.com. There is a recent memo, which are, I guess, kind of like blog posts that mention the group collaboration. There's a short survey down at the bottom. So if you feel like your team is in that two to eight person spot,

then they have a survey. So I imagine you're looking for people who want to give you that collaborative feedback and be patient and be kind, potentially even, you know, with the feedback to do so. I think Jared and I fit in there because I, I kind of think that he and I are visual,

but we don't have tools to do it. And if we had a, a group infinite canvas, we might just keep it there. It's just always there and we just go add to it. It's not like, hey, can we work on this document together? It's more, can we go to our Infinite Canvas together and just throw ideas there? And whenever he gets a chance, he goes and looks. And when I get a chance, I go and look.

And it's this place where we can sort of meet digitally that's more fidelity than simply notes or an outline and things like that so the nudge is museapp.com it's free to try really i mean they can there's a pretty generous free tier like to just play and have fun i think you basically charge by boards or by cards sorry so there's a lot of room to to try before you buy that's right yeah i'm taking notes here your your your pitch is pretty good. I might want to work some of this into our marketing language here. And by the way, we'd be very, very happy to onboard you both to the alpha such as it is today,

assuming you have time for a buggy, quirky, early stage product. Well, we're used to using our own website so we're used to buggy quirky alpha software that I write as app developers you probably have as much sympathy as anyone for what the early days were like well Adam I imagine we can come up with more questions and go deeper on more things

but I feel like that's a good place to leave things I really appreciate you giving us the part one breaking your rule going deeper on Heroku. I think a lot of people out there really were curious. You know, the backstory, the story of Heroku, essentially, at least from one perspective,

so we got at least one co-founder to give us that. Maybe we'll talk to others, but I think this is enough for us, but I really appreciate part one, and I've really appreciated part two as well, going deeper into beyond Heroku and the story of Muse and what that might mean for you and you know tools for thought who would have thought right so cool but thank you Adam thank you for letting me walk through it all it was a fun walk

down memory lane for the past and a dwelling of and an under better understanding of where I'm at today. And I'm trying to put it all in the context of, I guess, a career well spent or a life well lived. Yes, sir. Thank you. What a journey. Thank you for tuning in for this two-part saga with Adam Wiggins, going through Heroku, going beyond Heroku into Muse, Ink and Switch, and all the fun things for deep work, deep thinking that Adam is working on and his team. I'm truly grateful for Adam and his

time coming on the show, sharing all the details. If you have any comments, any thoughts to share, please let us know in the comments. The link is in the show notes. And of course, we couldn't give you a two-part series like this without a little bonus so for our plus plus subscribers there is a bonus at the end of this show make sure to stick around for our non-plus plus subscribers hey it's not too late changelog.com slash plus plus check it out 10 bucks a month 100 bucks a year support us directly make the ads disappear and get a little closer to the metal a big thanks once again to fastly and fly and break message into those beats are banging and of course to you our listeners thank you so much for tuning in but that's it this show's done we will see you here on monday Thank you. Outro Music