The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Bourbon and better software (Friends)

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Adam is joined by Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant — they discuss Bourbon, sniffing arms, better software, leading a successful startup, scaling teams, building vs acquiring, and Adam even gets Robert to commit to watching Silicon Valley!!

Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about bourbon and better software. Thank you to Fly.io, the home of changelog.com. Launch apps near users too easy. You can do so for free at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Yes, let's talk about Sentry's launch week, March 18th through the 22nd, 2024. They are ready for liftoff. They'll be showing off

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slash launch dash week. Again, that link is in the show notes. It's been a bit since we've talked. It's been May of 2022 and is now 2024. It's been that long? It's been that long it's been that long what have you done with your life even not just like your business but your life how's life i mean all all of it's great are you working too much oh yeah i mean it's it's really funny because i wear an apple

watch every day and in the heart app you can see my resting heart rate yeah going like up it's like it's like on a slope right now so i'm like oh i should i should go go on a run or fast-paced walk at this point um yeah yeah no i'm good life's good what do you do when you're not working like what's fun for you i see you on linkedin i think posting about maybe twitter x uh about like your evening drinks when you're celebrating that's that's what i see of you yeah that seems to be like robert fun time it is so i've got it's out of view right here but i've got a pretty nice uh little liquor cabinet that i like to keep stocked with nice stuff and i like making it old-fashioned and we've got some really cool like fire hydrant branded booze material we've got like a nice scotch glass and but yeah no it's i

honestly i would want to acquire one of these scotch glasses is it a snifter it's or is it a scotch glass it's i guess it's not technically a scotch glen karen i guess a glen karen yeah that you would use for scotch it's it's like I guess it's more of a bourbon glass, but it has an incident started line and an incident resolved line on it. Nice. Oh my gosh. But we might have a couple. Let me know. We might have a couple still in stock. I mean, I'm a scotch guy myself. Well, I'm more of a bourbon guy personally. Do you know about the sniff in your arm tactic whenever you're doing flights? Like if you're tasting multiple bourbons and you're sort of comparing and contrasting, do you know about that process? No. What is that? he taught me the true bourbon experience and it goes like this you know you're not meant to get

drunk it's not trying to get twisted it's just enjoying the bourbon for what it is you talk about the mash bill you talk about how it's made you know if it's a port finish if it's a single barrel if it's a selection all these things go into like what makes the bourbon that you're tasting taste different you know it's age obviously is a key component to that. Where in the world it was aged, here in Texas, things age differently. Our bourbon actually ages, a two-year bourbon in Texas is like a five-year bourbon because of the drastic swings in temperature in the cask house. Yeah, it makes sense.

The rick house is open usually, un-air conditioned, so House is open, usually, on air condition, so you get the full spectrum of the air. But anyways, you pour up a flight. It could be three, it could be five, about an ounce each. And then you sniff it for a good minute or two before you even drink it. It's just all about all the components of it. The sniffing, obviously the tasting, but in between

those to clean your nose palate because your nose and your taste buds are so connected you sniff your you sniff i'm sniffing for the audience by the way you sniff your non-watch hand and it cleanses it changes out your nose palate so that when you sniff the next one it's you kind of get a new sniff you You get a new sniff palette. You know, if it wasn't 153 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, I would be tempted to give it a shot. Got a couple of nice things. No, it's interesting. I've never, never once heard that.

The best way to do it though is, is with friends, you know, with one or two friends over hours comparing, like we just, we just lined up all the Elijah Craigs he had. It's like, okay, here's a port finish. Here's the 10-year. Here's the whatever's. And he just lined them all up. Here's my selection. He went to Specs and it was their Specs selection. He's also gone and selected the barrel himself. That means

you taste different samples from each barrel and you say, okay, that's the barrel I want. And you get a full pour into your bottle from that barrel. Oh my gosh. So anyways, the bourbon experience is what it's about. So can you use this smell technique like with your friends if they're there too? Can you just smell their wrist or is that too weird? I mean, if you want to smell their wrist, I mean, it might be a unique nose palate cleansing process. I would sniff only my wrist. If you sniffed my wrist, I wouldn't be upset about it, but I might be a unique nose palate cleansing process. I would sniff only my wrist. If you sniffed my wrist, I wouldn't be upset about it,

but I might be like, well, you know, you got your own. Yeah. That makes the tenure smell different. Anyways, we should change the subject before this gets way too weird. Yes. Well, the good thing, I think, is just that you got some cool stuff for Fire Hydrant. I think that's pretty cool to have swag that isn't just a t-shirt you know i see you're wearing the fire hydrant hat you know it's not just the t-shirt it's not just the thing that seems to be like the in quotes developer swag it's

yeah a bit more unique yeah that's i've been to so many conferences and i've gotten so much swag in my days that one day this was years ago like fire hydrant had just raised like some money and the i was like i want to make a shirt like i feel like cool companies have cool shirts and i was at digital ocean and i had like all these old cool digital ocean shirts and and then i was what i did is i laid out all the shirts all my tech shirts that i wore all the time and i put the ones that i didn't wear but had like on the side and i was i was just kind of like feeling them looking at them and i was on the ground in my apartment and i was like you know what every shirt that i wear is the american apparel tri-blend super comfy doesn't make me feel like

a nascar driver like advertisement and like that's the kind of shirt that i want so we've got a bunch of shirts that don't say fire hydrant on the front at all it says it like on the back of it in really small print but it says like dev oops engineer or simply restart everything and i just like i like having cool tech shirts i think that those are those are fun yeah i agree with that or even your other one which is better incidents which i think is a cool name for what might be your media hub that you're growing i've seen that you've got a podcast out there congratulations articles out there it's a destination on fire hydrants website now i think better instance is a cool name yeah maybe we should make some some shirts for that one

especially if you want to be seen more as a brand you know yeah i think the last time we talked actually the name of the podcast the title is enabling a world where all software is reliable so it really was about better software, right? Yeah, the thing that I like about software is making cool software that helps other software, like developer tools, right? That's the better way to say that. Yeah, and I think

better incidents is like the community of people talking about how can we make better software, right? It's not about, it's about better incidents and managing them better. But is there a world where we just don't have incidents, right? And I think that's just a cool world to chase after, is no incidents. How can we do that?

It's impossible, right? There's always going to be incidents. Right. Software always has bugs, always has issues. There's always crashes. There's always going to be incidents but right software always has bugs yeah always has issues there's always crashes there's always a mess up somewhere yeah yeah and i think that community is is definitely start talking about that more and more as time goes on here the cool thing i think that you've you know you had some pain when you were digital ocean so that made you think okay i should do this for real, and you've created FireHydrant. That's the TLDR for those who didn't know how you did it.

But, you know, there's always going to be issues in software, right? So you've put yourself in a place where you can help people do better over time, but it's not like you'll eventually have a – there's no done state to FireHydrant. There may be a mostly done state at some point, but at some point, all software kind of still has issues, whether it's a retrospective or a post-mortem or an on-call situation. There's always something to help developers really just focus on the vital few versus the trivial many, which is like half the battle right as an sre or someone that's in ops or in charge of an application or a system being up or mostly up or reliable you know that's

you're always going to have something going wrong in that situation yeah it's good for your business right there's no shortage of new customers for fire FireHydrant, that's for sure, yeah. I think that software is kind of this interesting, there's like two sides of it, I think, for reliability. There's the software engineer's point of view, the person that built it, their perspective of its reliability,

and then there's the customer's perspective of its reliability. And I've said this in various forms, but I was at DO for a year and a half, right this in various forms, but, you know, I was at DO for a year and a half, right? Like not super long, but we had some insane incidents while I was there and while I was on call. And then my next gig, I was at Namely HR and our incidents were really different actually, because we were a payroll company and our software could be fine but maybe there was an operations mistake and then the perspective from the customer was holy crap this is the worst

thing ever we actually had an outage or excuse me not an outage we had a day where our payroll software didn't pay an entire company that is yeah that's, that's bad. That's bad. That's a catastrophe. That's a catastrophe. For sure. And the reason wasn't because our software messed up, actually. It's because we had payroll experts on the side.

There was just a human, just a very casual, not a big deal mistake where it didn't hit submit. Simple mistake, right? But to the customer, they were like like your software didn't pay us and we're like uh we didn't push submit to say we need to do the ach transfers on our side and so our ceo actually got a keg of beer it was a local company in new york city and they went to their office with a blank checkbook and said i

will pay people here and now if you need it today. That incident always kind of stuck with me because that wasn't a software outage. That was, but it was an incident and kind of like lends to the fact of like, you know, these perceptions are, there's a lot of challenges to where the outage really is occurring. Is it on the software side? Is it on the customer side? Is it the customer maybe accidentally misconfigured the software and it's doing something that they're not expecting and they're calling it an incident,

but it's you saying, no, it's misconfigured. So I don't know. I think that software reliability just has so many different angles to it. But at the end of the day, the only opinion that matters is the people using it. What's their perception of reliability? I guess that basic question is, But at the end of the day, the only opinion that matters is the people using it. What's their perception of reliability? Right.

I guess that basic question is, at what point does an incident go from the software layer to the business layer? I mean, I don't think they're necessarily synonymous, but in a lot of cases, the business is powered by the software. So if it's a software issue, it's a business issue. But in this case, was an a human error so there wasn't like a a sentry alert right or some sort of error that bubbled up that creates something else that says okay this this was born in software it was born really in the probably the realization of the ceo and his employees or his or her employees that hey hey, what happened? Why don't we get paid? Where did things go wrong? So like the alert was the human error and the

human probably saying, hey, this didn't actually work out. So at what point does an incident or a platform that helps companies really reliably deal with software incidents, transcend that one particularly into the business realm. How do you do that? Do you track that in something like FireHard? Is it equipped for that kind of level of a business incident? I think that if you're calling it an incident, it's almost certainly a business incident. I mean, I think that every incident erodes trust either externally or internally. And you have to, if you're counting it as an incident, it's also an admission that there's business impact, I think is maybe one way of saying it.

And on the notion of human error, there's a lot of debate on, is there such thing as human error? There's references on it and things like that i don't know i'm kind of in the camp of yes there is but it's not like ill-intentioned it's if someone doesn't push the button when they're supposed to like yeah that's that's an error it's by a person i don't know how else to how else you could like argue that. I think that what we should get better at is making software prevent, like be better at preventing those types of mistakes.

I think that's really what matters more. But yeah, I mean, from the way that I also think about incidents nowadays, I used to be in the camp of like, never let a customer report an incident to you. And man, that's just like so false. You can't, it's not possible, right? If you think about it, all these systems like a sentry error, a Datadog monitor, you know, say another tool, Chronosphere, maybe a new one. If that's alerting you to a problem problem do you know why it alerted you because a user triggered

an error that sent a log line or something into the observability tool and then it notified you like it's hard to know about an incident before a customer does because the customer is the one that triggers you to even know that there's an incident. And I was at a conference and it was this great analogy of like, if I'm on a bridge and the bridge collapses, I'm going to know before you. So like this idea of like trying to get the incidents before people is just like not possible. Yeah.

I'm falling here. So that makes sense. What you're talking about with the, the button pushing, for example, in payroll, I would imagine is an idea of grace period, right? Every month, well, every 30 days, I suppose February is the anomaly, but every 30 days-ish, there's a grace period of this thing should run, and that thing is called payroll. And if it didn't run, that should trigger some sort of awareness to somebody saying, hey, payroll didn't run. Why? Yeah. Because then you can fix it, right? Like you have a window of opportunity to address the situation. You can do a wire transfer if you really need to and fix it that way. Yeah. I think that that is the answer for a lot of these problems i think grace periods retries is how software is like gonna have to start having this like next iteration on

it software used to and still mostly is i would say is pretty unforgiving like you tell it to do something it's going to do it and if you don't tell it to do something, it's going to do it. And if you don't tell it to do something, it's not going to do it. And there's this new kind of middle ground where software and what's happening is like software is getting better at reminding you that you haven't done something. You can see it kind of all over the place. Like if you left something in your shopping cart, right, that's more of a marketing reason. But like if you leave something in your shopping cart, sometimes you'll get an email saying you didn't click submit. And that has saved me a couple of times. Honestly, Amazon has sent me emails saying you didn't click submit. I'm like, oh, that's why I don't have any paper towels. Like I, right. And I think that's, that's kind

of like the middle ground of that. We're going to have to start building into our software for our users is gentle nudges, reminders that, hey, our software won't do anything until you tell us to do it, which I think is a fine middle ground between us and the human. We can't predict what humans actually want. Maybe they wanted to abandon their cart. Not yet, man. This AI stuff is quite compelling. And it's only getting better. I actually just pushed submit on the latest Practical AI podcast, which is one of the shows here on the ChangeLog Network. And the title of it, it's a fully connected episode. So Chris and Daniel are the hosts of that show. And it was about computer vision being, in quotes, alive and well.

And they were just seeing how you know everyone's hyped about generative ai but meanwhile you're sort of looking at that lens of artificial intelligence it's this whole other area that researchers are working on and it's actually very practical to look at computer vision and its advancements and so that's a pretty interesting thing like it gets to be predictive based upon what it sees. Yeah. What do you, what do you think is going to happen with all the computer vision stuff and

advancements? Oof. Uh, I would say listen to the episode. I would say something I saw recently and it was kind of like, this is where I like, so I'm wearing actually the t-shirt right now. We were at a conference called That Conference in February.

It was late, you know, it was like early February. And I had a conversation there with two folks around ag tech. So agricultural tech around, you know, farming and plants and growing and food production and the whole food system, et cetera. And the one cool thing that I've learned recently about computer vision is they have this thing that just like, I don't know, a vehicle or something that like goes over the plants and it uses computer vision to determine what is the plant that needs to keep growing and what is the weed.

Yeah. And it zaps it with a laser. It's crazy. I mean, it's industrial scale level but it's at some point that will be available for my backyard yeah and i'll be so excited because i will stop doing pre-emergence yeah i could just zap them in their tracks with my robo laser yeah all-in-one lawnmower you know it'll be like a post in the middle of your yard that like just does it all day all along you know all day all night without you need to do anything yes might be an eyesore but yeah i think i think that's so cool that the computer vision stuff is

is really awesome and i think the next iteration of it too is like the embeddings that you can create like the vectors that you can create from images and do like similarity searches on images now is just mind boggling to me how, how good it is and how fast it is too. It's like math that I didn't pay attention, enough attention for that kind of math. Does that make you wish you had chosen a company direction that was more physical than not safe ephemeral but it's in the we can't see what you know your company prevents it's all in the it's in the mist you know it's behind the scenes it's hidden you know in the digitals the ones and zeros the bytes you know whereas like if you were an agricultural technologist so to speak then you could be creating or working with that kind of thing you know i mean even i guess it's interesting to even think about like

incidents in there like oh my gosh we're zapping the wrong plant that's an incident right like raise the flag right we zapped our stop the laser strawberries instead of the weeds and that would 100 be an incident right for a farm i would be maybe we should figure out this ag tech company and reach out to them but oh there's it's so booming like whatever's happening there because somebody's gonna be alerting that stuff right it's not a cloud stack that you're worried about or a trace to a front end or a replay to worry about it's like legitimately in the physical real world yeah and i and I've seen this video, and it is wild how close these weeds are to the actual vegetable or agriculture they're farming. So it does make you wonder, does it miss?

What's the SLO for a weed laser? Is it supposed to be 90% accurate? Is it supposed to be 10% accurate? What's the SLO on it? And at that point, I think it goes back to the farmer is definitely the one reporting that incident, probably not the machine itself. Although it could have a second camera

that one camera is computer vision to say what to target, and the next camera is after the fact is saying checks and balances, almost a garbage collection in a way you know in the same real user monitoring you know rum monitoring that's right on uh did we zap the right thing or not yes or no yeah i'd imagine my slo if i were targeting would be like anything above letting these weeds go rampant or using substances or chemicals that prevent them, you know, what's the, you know, what's the delta between the other options, essentially? Like, as long as it's, you know, above or below that, like, below that threshold in that case, I'd be, like, totally happy. Yeah.

As a farmer, you know? Yeah. That was a lot of waste, I'm sure, too, unfortunately. But to your question around like what would i like to do something physical i i think that what we are doing has physical impact is it a thing i can hold and you know touch no right um that's why we make cool shirts but instead like i don't know i i can't say the company is the really big ones that use us but every single day i'm using a product that fire hydrant helps them with incidents from streaming services for a few folks to

some you know other big big companies and i kind of look at that as a major win like that's the physical component that we have. It's like, oh, this software that I use every day is working right now. And if it stops working, I know that they have a tool that's going to help them get it going faster again. So that's how I find my joy with our product in the physical world. I'll concede that for sure. While you don't specifically work in the physical, you enable brands,

services, products that do have a real-world physical impact. That's pretty cool. I mean, software that's useful that actually manifests itself into the real world, that's what software's for. It's not just like a dev tool in that case, which I don't mean as a pejorative just a dev tool, but like a dev tool in that case which i don't mean is a pejorative just a dev tool but like a dev tool is kind of in the in the bites and the bits not so much in the physical it's a tool that helps with the tools be better yeah you know i think that's because we sell to businesses right we're b2b and some companies are b2c and i think it's rewarding you have to like search for

that i think as a founder or employee of a company selling B2B software. It's like, what is the secondary effect of our software? And we have to look at our customers and go, people that have a secondary effect from Fire Hydrant. That's what makes me happy. And once I had that realization, I was like, oh yeah, this is cool. We don't need 10,000 customers. We can have a pretty small set and have a massive impact on the world. I suppose speaking of that notion, I mentioned that it's been a couple of years since we spoke. I'd imagine that you've learned some things.

I'd imagine that the company has grown. I'd imagine that you've improved and added things. Take me down a journey. What have you learned? How have you grown? How have you personally grown in your own skill sets as a leader? Have you gotten better? Worse?

How would you grade yourself? Wherever you want to go. Oh, wow. Do you grade yourself? Do you give yourself a score? I do, yeah. I'm very critical of myself. Are you hard on yourself?

I am. I don't know what dial I want to put this at right now. Like 11 or maybe like a 7. I'll put it at a 7. I think that for the last two years, the company has matured in a lot of ways. When Fire Hydrant started, I was 28, 27 maybe. Actually, I think I was 27.

And 27 is pretty young, right? You have a lot of life ahead of you. And there's certain experiences you just haven't had yet. And so when you're starting a company you just haven't had yet. And so when you're starting a company and you haven't had those experiences yet, this is why second time founders always get better terms in their companies. And actually the most successful companies, Harvard Business did a review on this. They said that companies with founders that start in their 40s actually have a way higher success rate. And the reason for that is experience.

So in the last two years, I would say that that experience has been very material. I've learned a lot. I've gotten better at certain things. There's still a list of things I want to get better at. But I would say that the one that I've really settled into is being yourself is important and not sacrificing the things that give you a lot of like joy in the company just because i don't know the the broader environment would suggest that you should like it feels faux pas for the ceo to be in the code writing code still but like oh yeah no there's still features i build and i love. And if you take that away from me,

you're actually just taking away a part of me, something that makes me happy. And about a year and a half ago, two years ago, I said, I'm going to stop writing features. I'm going to stop. I'm going to remove myself from the code base. I actually had IT revoke my access in Okta. It lasted a month.

I was so depressed. I was like, I gotta write code. And that was when I realized like, I just gotta do, I gotta make sure I continue doing the things that make me happy because then the negative impacts impact the whole company.

I had to rein it in and I have to be careful with what I build and what autonomy am I accidentally stripping away from other engineers in the company. So now I try to pick up like smaller things that I see, like maybe a bug or a little mini feature that I think would make a customer happy. Like I'll go do those things. And it's a nice balance that we have to strike. I think that another thing that has helped a lot is being clearer in what you're doing on a more shorter term basis. I think it's common for founders to speak too big, at least for me. I'm really pie in the sky, really magical thinking, but not giving the

steps to get there one by one, by quarter brick by brick like is detrimental means that your company and the people in it won't feel like they have a path to walk down and they're like walking through a swamp hacking down thickets to try to get somewhere and they don't even know if they're going in the right direction so i'd say in the last year and a half especially the company has gotten a lot better at that. With me just saying, we're going to do this revenue number this quarter, we're going to do 100 product improvements, and XYZ. And it's quarter by quarter gets reminded every single company update. And that has been a very material change in the business. And it was a super easy, low lift thing for me to do. I just had to learn to do it.

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It's so cool. Once again, imageproxy.net. Check out the demo while you're there and check out the advanced features for the pro version. Once again, imageproxy.net. How is the company led? Is it led fully by you? Like is not so much that every decision is made by you, but like the direction. Are you the rudder? Like if you say go left, everything goes left. Is there any red tape, board, anything that's like sort of preventing you

from casting vision and helping your team give that path to apply? I think it's a little bit of both. I think that as a CEO, I do have a board. I have three board members, all investors in the company. We've raised a good amount of money. And you want to make sure that everyone is aligned to a big bet before you make that bet, right?

You want to make sure that everyone, and you need to be able to explain why you want to make that decision. And it's a good forcing function. Honestly, it's for me, I about a year ago, I said, we need to build on call, we must, that's where the market's going. I want to be the first there. And I had to do a lot of work to get people onto that page. It's like on call, you've got this big incumbent out there publicly traded as a couple of others. How are you going to do it? And, you know, it was a lot of work. But ultimately, it was me saying, I want to do this. I think it's the right thing. I'll do my best to build the trust into why

I think this is the best thing. But ultimately, it is it is the CEO's job to make the call. And sometimes that call needs to be made faster. And luckily, we did this so fast and soon, or a year ago, that it was easy to get the conviction to go that direction. So I would say a little bit of both. And sometimes I have to restrain myself. Like there's things I want to do that you don't have time or capacity or really a clear enough picture even to make that call.

And I did that early on at the company. I think that four years ago, I was kind of shooting from the hip on more things and built some things that I would take back. Honestly, I would unship them if I could. Can you name any of these unshipped things that you might unship? What would it be? Is it big? Is it small?

No, there's a couple of small ones. Like we have some stuff that is just kind of confusing in our product that I would probably either decide, like, do we want to reinvest in this idea?

Did this idea have merit? Or is it just code that's in our way to building something else right now? I'll say one. We have like service dependencies in Fire Hydrant. You can actually link services to each other.

I would say we went like 50% of the way with that. It's not automated. It doesn't link into a service mesh, so it automatically creates those links for you. There's a UI for it that you kind of have to do it. And it's just missing things. So again, you have to just decide

do we want to invest in this thing that's sitting there is it like a house that's in disarray that no one's lived in for three years and we're trying to buy it and like fix it or do we level it and clear that land for something else on top and that you know you just got to make that call we have a few of those around our app we've been around over five years sure can we talk about, I suppose, then to now? Again, back to talking two years ago, scale. What size was the company then? What size is the company now? What's the challenge

to managing the current scale? How have you learned to manage the current scale? Scale a few years ago, we were in the good amount of revenue and we had i want to say 45 ish employees two years ago we've got 63 today and so we've had some modest growth we had we were impacted by some of the conditions and did have to let go of a few amazing folks in the past but and that is always challenging but i think that the the learning from that is don't don't grow too fast with your head count stay super focused pick a mountain to climb and like don't stop until you climb it or until you don't have a good reason to climb it anymore and i think that comes with the scale of FireHydrant at this point is we service, we have a lot

of people that use our products. We have a lot of massive companies that use our product. And when you're operating in that segment, the scale that you have to operate has to change. Like you have to have people that have been there, done that. You can't have a team that hasn't worked with a multinational publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. Like you have to have people that have worked with that type of client. And I think that we have gotten really good at finding and like knowing that we

should be building that type of team. We've gotten clarity on that. I think in the past, yeah, I don't think you can scale without clarity. And I think three years ago is when I would say we needed to get better at it. And we've gotten, I would say, really good at it lately. Our team has been crushing a lot of features. I mean, we built an on-call product. We launched that on GA recently.

And we did not focus on anything else. We only focused on that for months. And I think a payout is obvious and now we don't want to build anything differently. Like we want to use that same method moving forward. Yeah. Describe clarity. How do you get to clarity? What exactly in quotes is clarity? I mean, I get it, but when you say that, help me understand how things became less opaque and more clear for you. Early on, FireHydrant was a lot. I mean, before it was even a company, FireHydrant was a side project.

And for me, it was a, wouldn't it be cool if? And that was kind of like the product motto. Like, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? And the clarity comes from when you start asking that question paired with what problem are you trying to solve? Are you trying to innovate something? Are you trying to offer a product that's better for a better price? That was our choice. And you need to pick the problem, be really clear on that, or you're not going to clearly solve it. You're going to build something that's really nebulous. I think of it like a noble gas. Noble gas will expand to the space that it's in. And if you have a really giant, let's use a football stadium, like a covered football stadium, the gas will expand to the whole space. So you need to

pick, are you trying to fill a football stadium? Are you trying to fill a little tiny box? Because you don't have that much gas to go in with in the first place as a startup. So if you're going to concentrate on something like you need to pick the space that you want to fill out. And I think that that clarity is extremely necessary. Or you will suffer from things taking too long really trying to do too much has a confusing like an identity problem like if you build a feature that's trying to do too much it has an identity problem so I think

that you just have to get super clear on something what is the problem you're trying to solve and every once in a while it's okay to say wouldn't it be cool if but you should pair it with something else yeah what do you do to keep everyone so focused like uh at your scale 60 some people in the company you cast a vision you laser focus for months you ship it you're happy with that you want to keep rinse and

repeating that process again what are some of the like literal tools behind the scenes like you guys just use a ton of Google Docs? How do you keep people informed? How does communication happen? You know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, our tool chain is probably similar to what others have. We have Jira, Slack, Zoom. We have Google Docs for a lot of stuff.

We have, you know, the normal tool chain, I would say. We don't use email. Fire say we don't use email, Fire Hydrant doesn't use email, really, it's used for some stuff with different teams. My role in keeping the trains on time is honestly more in having just a kick ass, like team around me, there are limitations to what a single person can do. And having the executive team at fire hydrant that we do now has been like life-changing for me like i don't think about sales i don't think about marketing i have a new vp of engineering that like lets me not think about engineering a lot and that means that i can go focus on because next and the next obvious question is well what are you thinking about you know i'm thinking about

yeah so you know it kind of frees me up to think about well what's what's firehugger in two years not two days what's what is our uh financing like what's that look like what do we we need to do xyz or something bad will happen like those are the things that I can focus on now. And the only way you can achieve that is by having an awesome fricking team. So for any founder listening to this, like build a great team. That's the only way you can scale. It's the only way you can manage beyond like 50 people. Yeah.

I mean, that seems like obvious advice to some degree, but at the same time, it's not obvious. And then the next question is how do you pay for it? Right. I mean, you obviously raised money, so that's one way to pay for it. And then I think, I can't recall if when we talked before you said you were cashflow positive, I don't know if you can share if you are or not, but I know you were winning good contracts and multi hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts. I think you said in the conversation, if I recall correctly, I mean, to build a team, you have to be able to afford a team. So it's kind of have to battle sometimes too.

It's like, I know where I want to go, but I got to have money to get there. And I got to sustain. Yeah. Money is commonly a limiting factor for any startup, right? Absolutely. I think it's a good one, though, because, again, that forces clarity. Like, okay, if we can only build one thing, which one are we building? And you've got to be really clear on it.

I don't know, maybe this is what the question is really asking, but I think that compensation policy, for me, it should be worth it. It should be worth paying people great salaries otherwise like why would you why would you try to get a really good person for like a cheapskate compensation like that doesn't make sense to me you're not going to get that person really good people will know that they're really good and will know their value and they will ask for more money but if you have you have to ask yourself like,

okay, if I think that this person is going to do, let's use a salesperson. If I think the salesperson who has a quota of, let's just use a million dollars for sake, their quota is a million dollars a year. And I think that they are going to have a better odds of achieving it, 50% better odds of achieving it if they get paid $20,000 more a year. Why would you not do that? Why would you ever nickel and dime to that degree if you have 50% better odds of achieving a million dollars? And I think that you need to apply that logic across a lot of facets of the business. I think you need to think that way with every department. And we've had great salaries and compensation at FireHadron since the beginning.

We have always aimed at paying people very fairly. We do not have regional salaries. If you are in Oklahoma, you get paid the same for the same title and the same job as someone in New York. And that's just a policy we've had since day one because we pay for the work. I think that's the philosophy that I'm actually pretty proud of that we've maintained that. Yeah, for sure. Well, for somebody who likes to be in the code so much,

you're certainly not in the code as much given that you're focused on two years. I suppose that could be somewhat code related but not actually building features it was robert after dark is the joke was that what's that what's the joke that was robert after dark that's that's that's that's when i you know crack a bourbon open or a scotch and oh my gosh sit on the couch and write something. You have any hobbies? Writing code. No, I do.

I have a photography hobby. I love skiing. I actually have all of my camera lenses on my desk right now. Nice. What's your, are you Sony or Canon? I'm Sony. I have a Sony a7 IV R. It's a great camera.

It's super versatile. You can do so much with it. I think mine is an a7 IV R. It's a great camera. It's super versatile. You can do so much with it. I think mine is an A7 R III, I want to say. It's about four years old, three years old, maybe. Mirrorless is my way. Mirrorless is great. I'm a big fan of Sony. I'm actually looking to a Sony a6400, I believe.

The a6400 is one I want to maybe grab just to have as a webcam, too. It's lightweight. lightweight you got a great camera body on a great great resolution it does and I can use all my lenses with it too I think I'm using this 24 mil it's an APS-C sensor so it's a 30 mil equivalent full frame do you have the grandmaster the 24 millimeter 1.4, this one? No, this is just a Zeiss. It's a tiny one. No, not a Grandmaster.

That's a big one. That's heavy. This is like, it's a Sony, but it's a smaller one. It's not the GM. Zeiss though, that's a nice brand. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I love cameras too. I just ask you that because you know when you um i'm

talking about clarity and sometimes you know you get clarity by sort of stepping away to get unstuck sometimes we're stuck and we're not even we don't even know we're stuck do you ever feel stuck yeah like in this vision casting is it pretty like is it pretty clear for you to be visionary, to be a futurist? No, I'm maybe opening myself up here. But I need to step away. I need to think. For me to think clearly, I need to disconnect. And that's why we have a policy at FireHedron, minimum time off.

You have to take at least three weeks off a year. It's something that we push. And I'm not excused from it, actually. And it's freaky for people. I think that there's this hustle culture, especially in America, of if you're not working 80 hours a week as a startup founder, you're screwing up. And I take a more scientific view here. There's plenty of studies that say if you do that, you're eventually only working the equivalent of 40 hours a week anyways or less so why do that because you're so inefficient you're so inefficient right and so i've stepped away i've done long ski trips before i've i've done like in the duration of fire hydrant i've i did a trip to argentina for two weeks in the early days. I've done trips to Scotland by myself.

I did a really long working on the road trip and had a couple of days here and there. And honestly, at the time it felt odd. I felt weird doing that. But I do not think that we would have been as successful if I hadn't. And it's a hard thing for founders to admit. It's an image thing, I think.

Yeah. Do you hang out with other founders? What do you do to kind of get some osmosis going on from other folks that are walking your walk? I do, yeah. There's actually a weird cohort of people that were at DigitalOcean with me that are all founders. I'm, yeah. There's actually a weird cohort of people that were at DigitalOcean with me that are all founders. I'm not kidding.

It's not just one. It's like six. Six of us that all work together, that all have companies, and all of them are doing oddly well. So DEO back in the day was kind of like a breeding ground for founders, it felt like.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, so we had like, yeah, I still have conversations with folks. I went to meet up for a company called Vantage, cloud cost optimization tool here in New York City. Both the founders are awesome. And yeah, I like to stay in touch with those folks. It's really the only group that kind of understands some of the other hidden stresses of the job, I would say, that can actually kind of like commiserate and be empathetic. Do you get stressed out a lot?

Do you stay pretty, how do you de-hulk the Hulk, so to speak? You know, do you do breathing tests? You know, like, do you control yourself? Like, I know every night with my son, because I got a four-year-old, and my wife and I, we swap out. We have a seven-year-old going on eight. Well, I was just saying he's eight because tomorrow he's eight. But so we have an eight and a four-year-old in our house, both boys.

And one night I'm with one son, one night I'm with the other. And my one son doesn't like to do it necessarily. I think he does, but I don't know. It's a thing I've done with the other son basically is the long story short here, but it's a breathing thing. And since he's four, we take four good breaths. Okay, deep breath in, hold it, hold it.

And we just do four of those because he's four. And for kids, obviously if you take more oxygen into your body, it's easier for you to have a better brain because it literally has more oxygen to feed itself and to survive and to thrive. I'm curious, what do you do to maintain your stress levels? Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a couple of things I've done and I, you know, I've, I've tried to get on the meditation train. I honestly, I struggle with just remembering to do it. But the one thing that I'm very consistent about is I go to a lot of concerts.

And I mean a lot. And I'm a big pop punk fan, so I go to shows with mosh pits and crowd surfing. It gets a little crazy, but it's a good release. You get to go listen to like the music and that's just kind of my choice and last year i saw 24 concerts and it's a lot of concerts it's just a lot of shows a lot of festivals wow so i have this year i have five music festivals lined up all across the u.S. and one in England.

I have multiple shows that I already have tickets for. Like my Ticketmaster has a scroll bar of shows. So that's what I do. You're serious about this, man. I go to a lot of concerts, yeah. You ever come here to Texas, to Austin for ACL or even South by Southwest? I know South by Southwest is mostly film and stuff like that. There's a lot of music around that.

Yeah. I haven't been to that one, but I did go to Dallas last year for a music festival called So What Music Festival. And small little festival in Dallas, but had a bunch of bands that I love. And I said, yeah, why not?

So my girlfriend and I, we flew down to Dallas for a few days and tried not to get injured. There you go. Wow. It was hot too. It was 116. Very cool, man. I love that. It's good to, it seems like trivial in a way, but I think to test a leader is to also test how they take care of themselves and how aware they are of what they need to do to take care of themselves.

And I always find myself, like I know I have a saying that I've learned from other people, but it's, Adam, what are you optimizing for? If I know what I'm optimizing for, if I have clarity on what that goal is, whether it's specifically in one lane or just generally in my life, like I know what I'm trying to do. I know how much time I'm trying to enable myself to have for the things I know I need to have to recharge and recoup and reconnect with people, with myself, et cetera.

I feel like you can really tell a leader, a good leader, based on how aware they are of what they know about themselves to take care of themselves. I think maybe 27-year-old Robert may have been less in tune with that. And I'm not sure how old you are now, but you're probably more in tune with that. 33 as of a few days ago, actually. But yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you do have to think of your body as a machine. What you put into

it is what you'll get out of it. If you put crap in, you're going to get crap out just in the way that data analytics works. Crap in, crap out. Same thing with Salesforce hygiene and marketing data and software. It's always the same. If you put crap in, you're going to get crap out. So you have to make sure that you put the good stuff in. You got to put fulfilling things in. You got to put good food in. You got to exercise. You have to put exercise into your body.

It's not exertion. It's you got to put the exercise in. And that's been something that's definitely clearer to me now than I would say when I was 27. Yeah, that's certainly true. I do want to zoom back out again to FireHydrant. Can we talk more about the state of better software, the state of incident management? Like what opinions do you have? I know you're kind of obviously biased, but how do you feel about the state of tooling available for developers? And how do you feel like if we're

measuring, I suppose, success or just judging ourselves, how do you feel like if we're measuring I suppose success or just you know judging ourselves how do you feel FireHunters is doing in that mission to to help enable better software to be out there you know I think there's there's a a long but rewarding road ahead we're really focused on the end-to-end experience right now with our software. We really want people to have a one-stop shop, no swivel chair experience for incidents on call, retrospective status pages, tracking change events, all that good stuff. And we're well along the path, but there's a long ways to go. Ultimately, my kind of adjusted phrase is the best incidents are ones that don't happen. And whatever we can do to accomplish that, we've got years ahead of us to build those things.

And then I think the state of the developer tools market is seeing something similar right now. I think that you need to have a platform play. I think the era of small niche tools is hard to justify right now, just from a spend perspective for the businesses that are purchasing them. And I think that for the larger tools that want to become big businesses with great returns, us being one of them you you kind of have to focus on solving multiple problems and solving them very very well so on call is our answer to that it's the beginning of multiple other answers that we'll have throughout this year we've got a lot of exciting stuff queued up so more big features like this some big big ones in the bag, yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Okay.

OnCall's a big one for you guys. I mean... OnCall is not easy to build. It's tough. And I'm so proud of my team for building that functionality. And we built it with really good tech, really good testing, really good reliability, really good design. And we built an iPhone app and an Android app. I mean, that's pretty sweet, too.

So that's not a small feature there's a lot to do but some of the next stuff i think is also just super exciting we're on a mission here right like a world where software is reliable by default that's we got to build a lot of things to get there yeah so fans of jelly we had nora on the podcast a while back i was always a fan of her thinking. And I suppose as you talk about the literal tools having to be not small anymore, but come to a platform play, they were acquired by PagerDuty. Were you surprised by that? I'm not suggesting you have ill wishes, of course, but what are your thoughts, I suppose, on that acquisition of PagerDuty and Jelly? Yeah, I mean, I think that Nora was the right person to build Jelly with that team. It had a lot of people that were very passionate about the space and the problem.

We think that that's good for them to be acquired and I congratulate them. I think our play is just a little bit different, if I'm honest. I think that we want to control our own destiny there. I do think that acquisitions are interesting for businesses. They can go really well or they can go really badly. There's companies that are really good at M&A. There are companies that are really bad at M&A. And candidly, PagerDuty just doesn't have enough for us to know yet. The only notable acquisition that I can think of from PagerDuty was Rundeck

and Jelly was kind of the next one. And that was years later. So I think that time will tell. I think that can you integrate Jelly into PagerDuty effectively in an amount of time that works really well for the business and the outcomes and the sales team is probably itching to get it because I can see from my perspective that there's a lot of people paying PagerD and a lot of people paying us at the same time.

So you're going to see a very interesting market because of that acquisition, not only from us, but also our competitors too. So what do you do? Well, you've got to go build something else as well. You've got to play the game. You've got to build a really awesome kick-ass on-call tool. But there's a lot of other things that we'll have to build in the future to remain competitive.

And I think that that's obvious. What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by one of my good friends, one of my best friends, actually, one of our good friends, Tailscale. And if you've heard me on a podcast, you've heard me mention Tailscale several times in unsponsored ways because I just love Tailscale. And I reached out to them and said, hey, we're talking to a lot of developers. I love Tailscale. I'd love to have you guys sponsor us.

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No credit card required. Again, it's free. Up to 100 devices and three users all for free at tailscale.com. No credit card required. Have fun. What are your thoughts on will you always build your own features? Do you think you have this? I suppose that level is not necessarily just build versus buy.

It's build versus acquire, which is sort of buy, of course. But are you more in the camp of let's let us examine our hypotheses about X and then go build X or is it let's examine our hypotheses and go acquire? What are you feeling for your future? You know, we've thought about some small ones in the past. We've written them down as ideas. But the idea behind controlling your own destiny i think is i like building software that

is yours i think that acquisitions again like it can go a bunch of different ways i've seen companies that try to fill a gap in their product by acquiring another one and it does not go well it feels like it still feels like two different products it still behaves and is designed as two different products and ultimately it becomes interesting like do you have a oil and water situation with the people that built that product and your team as well do they build software in the same way and they may not have any animosity towards each other but they're not interchangeable so a good example is is namely you know Namely has changed a lot since then. There was a merger into a larger company about a year ago.

And we actually licensed the software for our payroll. It was not part of our Ruby on Rails app. It was a Ruby on Rails app. And then there was this other payroll software that was written in C Sharp, and it ran on SQL Server. And we bought the code base, and we used it for our payroll. And it was, you know, we bought the code base and we used it for our payroll.

And we suddenly, Namely had payroll. But payroll was on NamelyPayroll.com. And the HRIS system was on Namely.com. And our customers felt it. Our engineers, it was like speaking different languages to each other, literally C Sharp and Ruby. And it took a very, very long time to finally start integrating those tools together. Like it was a multiple year project just to combine the authentication for those two tools

together. So I had that experience. I've seen it a bunch of other times at other companies that I prefer if we can build it and we can build a good version in a year it's likely more worthwhile this is my perspective it's likely more worthwhile to do that than to buy a company that air quotes fills a gap for you for a few years but it's going to rear its head at some point I think a couple of companies have nailed this though Datadog has some awesome awesome acquisitions in the past that are integrated into Datadog has some awesome acquisitions in the past

that are integrated into Datadog that you wouldn't even notice. Like their logging tool. They bought a company years ago that did logging. They didn't have it. Another company does as well as Salesforce. Salesforce has a bunch of acquisitions. They buy multiple companies a year. But they have a muscle and energy to do that.

So again, it really depends on the organization. I think for us, for the time being, we don't have an acquisition team. We don't have the muscle to do it. Probably a bad idea for us to try to mix in something just to cover off a gap when we could probably just go build it in some amount of time. Yeah. Any possible tease of the next big thing for you? I mean, I know since you're always since you have an executive team that lets you have that freedom to think about two years from now, what's two years from now? A version that you can share of it. Yeah, I think the vision the version of it is we help incident responders do

a whole lot of things. We help them declare incidents. We help them get paged now. We help them do retrospectives. And something that we want to do is help the responder do more during the incident. And I'll say we're going to make it a lot easier during the heat of the fire. I like it. I like how secretive you are of it, too.

It's like you almost have this, no one sees your face. I see your face. You have this confidence, but yet you don't want to share too much. You're like, you know what? This is my secret. I'm not sharing all this. It's a competitive market right now, man. I've got competitors. They're going to listen to this. Yeah, they are. Can we talk about that? Do you mind like going one more layer? I mean, you just mentioned OnCall because that's what you all built. Sure. Someone else just built OnCall as well's what you all built. Sure. Someone else just built OnCall as well. A couple others built OnCall. I don't know who all the others are. I only know of one

other than the other incumbent. Yeah. I mean, look, I actually really respect those folks. I'll say it. It's Incident.io. There you go. Steven and Evan and all those guys. Lawrence. I think that's a great team. I think they've got a good product.

I like competing with them. This is a big, big market. This is a multi-billion dollar market. By our math, this is a $20 billion market that we're going after right now. If each of us comes away with 3% of it, we'll come away with 5% and we'll come away with 10% at some point.

I don't think anyone's going to be mad about the outcome. So it's competitive. It's going to keep being competitive for a long time. I think at some point you're going to see like a really clear distinction between the tools. But I mean, honestly, PagerDuty left this castle-sized gate down over their moat and you have us and a couple others sprinting across it to claim the land that's been a little long in the tooth, a little asleep at the wheel. So that's what's going to happen for the next year. It's going to be very, very interesting. Yeah. What do you think happened there to leave this castle-sized gate down over their moat, as you had said, to quote you back.

What do you think happened there? Who's letting that guard down? I mean, that's a guard down situation, right? You know, it's hard to speculate, and I don't have any ill wishes. I mean, that company, it's publicly traded, so you can see all of it. It's hard to slander a company

that's doing $450 million in annual revenue, right, worth billions of dollars. I do think that there is about to be a very tough moment where people are going to start asking that question. I get asked that all the time. And I'll be honest, I don't know. I really don't. I don't have an answer. I've written a blog post about this. People ask me, why didn't PagerDuty build this? And I just cheekily say, why didn't they build anything else? It wasn't just incident management. It was a lot of other things for years.

Like status pages that only recently came out. Like status page IO came out and like obliterated the market. Everyone had status page dot IO. And Atlassian acquired them probably eight years ago, right? Yeah, like five years ago, I think.

And the folks that built that tool, they're not like bandits. They did a great job. And then you see tools like why, like change events aren't being tracked for up until like last year. And FireHedgehog's had all those things for five years. So I don't really know.

There's a lot of phrases I think that Innovator's Dilemma probably is the most apt one to use there. But I think at some point I would love to sit down and ask what happened here? Was it technical debt? You just couldn't move? You're in a tar pit?

Was it limitations of cash? I don't think it's that. I don't know. I really don't have a good answer here. Maybe I should get their CEO on a podcast. And Jen is great. And she's like, honestly, she's great in person. She's great on all the things that she does. So I don't know.

It's interesting. I mean, I think that us and the other folks that are kind of clamoring for this incident management space right now, it'll be interesting to see what happens the the next year yeah she may even have different opinions too she may think that uh she might come on and say roberts you may have a different vision yeah and she's like you're behind yeah right you're like you'll see like i mean again the you got to look at the scoreboard it's a 450 million in revenue that's a lot If one of us goes and gets 20% of that amount, like we're not complaining. So it's, yeah, it's all about perspective.

But I do think in the next, again, I'll say it again and again and again, the next year or two, you're going to see something change pretty quickly, I bet. Yeah. Maybe this is, I suppose, somewhat, I don't know how to describe it, I suppose, but

at what point are you personally done with this mission? What is done for you? The pie is baked. It's all over. Folks are, I don't know, I can't come up with an eating analogy that's any good, but let's just say it's done. The thing is done, right? I don't think it's a goal. I don't think it's a goal. I don't think it's a target. I've been asked in the past, what's the goal here, acquisition or IPO? And my standard answer is,

I can't aim at either of those things. Those are the results of execution. So I just have to keep executing and one of those things will happen. And then beyond that, I don't know. I think it's a feeling. I think that you can see other founders and they'll write their departure blog posts

and commonly you'll see the line, it's time. It's just time. You know when you know. I'm far from that. Got a lot of gas in the tank and just want to keep going. Do you enjoy being CEO? I do, yeah. I mean, I think it's great when you have an awesome team

to run up a hill together with. I think it's a fun space that I understand and experienced myself. It's fun working with the types of companies that we do, these massive companies, huge logos, paying us substantial amounts of money. Like, that's fun. I want to keep doing that.

So yeah, being the CEO of Fire Hydrant is really fun. Do you watch much television by any chance? Like TV episodes? It's not called TV anymore unnecessarily because it's like TV, but it's like episode stuff. Shows, I suppose, not movies. Do you watch much? I just watched, I just got obsessed with a very subpar show honestly but it's it's uh halo on paramount i played a lot of halo as a kid i played xbox looking forward to the movie yeah

the trailer looked pretty good and i'm a non-trailer watcher person i don't like to watch trailers because it ruins it for me but what i did see sound look pretty cool i played so much halo man so i started watching the series and you know it's like i said it's pretty subpar but it's cool to see like this world that i was so immersed in as a teenager like come to life right yeah and i think that's why i was i've spent i was up until 3 a.m two nights ago finishing it um wow yeah that's that's kind of what I watched. Must watch to the end. And also Next Level Chef, Gordon Ramsay. Oh, you beautiful genius.

It's like the best dumb food reality TV show. It's so good. I'll check that out. I asked you that question to see if you'd, just by happenstance, mention Silicon Valley, the TV show. Because as we have this conversation and you look at your incumbents and the market share, et cetera, I just think to myself, one, I suppose,

did you watch that show ever? I never actually watched Silicon Valley. I'm actually scared to. No, you should watch it. What gives you this fear? We hear this often. I always mention Silicon Valley. It's my thing. I'm afraid it would hit too close to home. I don't know if that's true. I've never seen it, but I don't know. Yeah, well, I think it would hit close to home. I'm not sure I would say maybe it would be too close to home.

I guess it depends on what you're guarding yourself from. But I think it's pretty comical in a way. The satire was just so on point. And talking to somebody who hasn't watched it, it's kind of hard to explain it without potentially not ruining it, but revealing a little too much. One, I would say a prescription for me if I'm your doctor. Dr. Adam says go, Robert, and binge. Whatever binges for you. What is it on? Is it on HBO? Where is it? It's on HBO. You can also

purchase the discs, which is what I've done. And I put it on Plex. So I have it on repeat on Plex. The conversation we've had and the direction you're going and how you're competing and how you even have that happy competition between you and Incident as an example and Steve and the direction you're going and how you're competing and how you even have that you know happy competition between you and incident as an example and steven the team there to me seems a lot like the overarching thing that happens throughout the six seasons of

silicon valley and i think it's i mean i don't know i think it's kind of enjoyable it's almost like you know art imitates life i think you'd enjoy it I'm actually curious if you watch at least season one I'll tell you what I'll take my prescription I'll watch an episode tonight I'll do that okay how about this if you end up liking it and go beyond one

episode and you watch seasons or all the seasons let's come back and pod just about Silicon Valley and your perspective on it what you think the show is just so spot on a 15 minute one it's an absolute masterpiece in my opinion of of art and given what we do in our business i mean we've been doing this as a podcast for i've been podcasting almost 20 years yeah 2005 is when I started a podcast. So in like a couple years. Next year is 20 years of podcasting for one. This show has been on the air for 15 years.

We're in our 15th year as a podcast. We've watched the trend in your DO days before it was even fire hydrant for you. So we've watched the trend lines and we've seen this play out. And so that's why I personally enjoy the show so much because it does satire a lot of what we experience day to day but it and nothing else can match that there's there's no other show ever that matched its level of clarity of accuracy and i suppose just like phenomenal humor just there's just so many details in there you have to watch it a thousand times to get every single one. It's so good.

All right. Well, like I said, I'll watch it. I'll watch at least one tonight. What else is on your mind? What else is in your purview that we can share before we call this friends of friends? Look, we have covered so much. You know, I think that I think the last thing that made me kind of chat through here is for any founder on this past, present, future, the hard times of venture capital are getting better.

The hard times of sales cycles, elongating and procurement, taking their time on signing contracts are getting better. And, you know, I think that my kind of unique perspective right now is that we're definitely seeing things kind of come back to life. It's been two years of pretty rough times. And I don't know, maybe just trying to offer hope to people that are out there listening to this as they, you know, watch customers or, you know, sales cycles get harder. It's getting better for sure. I'm glad you said that because I feel that pain as well. I mean, yeah, the last two years have been challenging and I see this year already changing dramatically in a lot of cases back to not so much the best of times, as we've said here in tech, but better times where people just have, have I suppose more hope in the market you know more opportunities coming up

people loosening up and doing more what they had to do they realize you gotta market to developers you gotta talk to people you gotta share your ideas and you can't just

stay in a vacuum and post on LinkedIn that has measure of success but it's not the only way to do things you know and so

I feel you on that I'm glad you said that because it's good to hear you say that because I need to hear that too, you know? That things are getting better and there is hope to be had, so to speak. Look, I mean, we went through a pandemic. We went through some of the worst startup financing environments since 2008, 2001.

So it's definitely coming back to life. So you'll feel it soon. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, Robert, I call you a friend. That's why we had you here on ChangeLoggingFriends. It's cool catching up with you, diving deep into some details, catching up with some, some bourbon tactics, the way you think about different things and whatnot, what you do to recharge and obviously how you're leading, you know, fire engine. I love what you do over there. I think you're doing great. And i love a lot of the even the new design i think is super awesome thank you guys put out there yeah it's spot on i like the colors i like a lot of the

way you think that's why i invited you back i even if you don't call me a friend robert i call you a friend you know i'm saying so i call you a friend call your friend adam no the that new design i cannot that is not that is not me that That is the stunning marketing team and design team that we have. So, you know, that's their work, not mine. Well, that's good. It's good, and I like it. So, very, very well done. Tell them I said very well done if they don't listen on this podcast.

Tell them personally for me. And, man, get a merch store and put those bourbon glasses on the merch store man i'm sure you'll have some i have thought about it fire hydrant fans out there i mean put them on there for like cost if you if you're not wanting to try to make money but like that's so cool i love the idea of that line going down i was thinking like a credit system like resolve 100 incidents on fire hydrant get a shirt resolve a thousand incidents on fire hydrant get a bourbon glass uh you know like make a reward system for our most prolific incident commanders.

Oh my gosh, that would be cool. And I like that idea. Like the unique swag to me is super cool, especially if it, you know, you as a founder CEO, like that's one of your, you know, personal passions to enjoy is bourbon. And so there's a connection there, you know.

We're not just connected to companies through its usefulness. We're connected through relationship. Yeah. You know, I'm far more loyal when I like the people behind the thing, not just the thing itself. Totally. Yeah.

As a buyer, you know what I'm saying? And it comes through, right? Too. It comes through all, every aspect of the business. So awesome.

Yeah. All right, Rob. Well, thank you so much. Bye friends. Thanks for having me well you'll be happy to know that after the show robert did in fact tell me that we are friends

and so that makes me happy because yeah you know making friends is cool uh i'm a fan of robert I'm a fan of his story. I'm a fan of Fire Hydrant. They got a good team over there. I talked to many of them. And I'm really just a big fan of the way he leads, the way he thinks about growing a company. And there's a lot to learn from Robert. So I was happy to have him here on Change Logging Friends, digging into his hobbies, his practices, and his bourbon.

I personally would love to have one of those bourbon glasses, and so I hope that one day he'll be gracious enough to send me one. And if they did, I'd say thank you. And I want to give another shout-out to our sponsors for this episode, Sentry.io and their launch week. So much cool stuff happening at Sentry, Sentry.io in their launch week. So much cool stuff happening at Sentry, Sentry.io. They'll link up the launch week on their homepage, I'm sure. So check that out, Sentry.io.

And use the code CHANGEWILL to get $100 off a team plan for three months. That's cool too. Imageproxy.net is awesome. Real-time processing for your images, for your front-end web. So cool. Launch it as a Docker image. It is open source, and they also have a pro version for more advanced features. Again, ImageProxy.net.

And last but not least, my favorite, Tailscale. I'm proud to say I have a large tail net. Everything, every machine, every Mac, every iPhone, every Linux box, a gaming PC, anything I would ever build or run would run Tailscale if it could. And by the way, they all can. So I do. Check them out at tailscale.com. And of course, our fan favorite fly.io, the home, the home of changelog.com. That's where we live. You can launch that for free at Fly.io. Okay, those BMC beats bang because BMC is a banger.

Yes, the beats bang because how many times can I say beats bang with Breakmaster? It's kind of like a tongue twister, but not really. It's kind of fun. Anyways, Breakmaster, you're awesome. And I hear that Breakmaster is coming back on ChangeLog and Friends to discuss the album Dance Party. Have you listened yet? Are you dancing right now? You should be.

If not, go to changelog.com slash beats. That's it. Friends is done. We'll see you next week.