The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - From Chef to System Initiative (Friends)

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Adam Jacob goes solo with Adam for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up. This is a different flavor of "Friends" for you. Enjoy.

What's up, friends? This is Changelog and Friends, our weekly talk show about all things Adam Jacob. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. Scalable full stack, no cortisol required. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, this is epic.

Let's do it. Hey friends, I'm here with Brian Clark, VP of product at Neon. You know we use Neon. We love Neon. So Brian, you use Neon. We love Neon. So Brian, you're both a fan and a listener of the show. So you kind of know what our shows are about, who we reach.

And of those folks that listen to our podcasts, what do you think they need to know most about Neon? I think the thing I found in talking to developers is that they really don't understand. They don't understand database branching. Sometimes they'll say, is this expensive? Or is it slow? Or like, I don't really understand where it fits in. And so we're changing the face of it a bit to like, maybe focus less on branching, because that's the tool and more on like, maybe calling it database previews. So you can better see how it fits into your development environment the more people can understand oh i get it like hey any changes you make they don't affect production

like this is a separate copy the cost of those changes is only the difference between production and whatever changes you made so if you deleted a bunch of things or added new data things like that you're only actually paying the difference because we use copy on write. So I think it's like these sets of things is what I have the team really focused on. Getting people to really grasp database preview environments. And then like, what's the advantage? And like, can I use it in my system? And that's where I'm like, yeah, you should be taking this system on. This will increase your confidence. It doesn't cost a lot. It's super fast. That idea isn't out there.

And I think it's because it's not in most products. Most databases don't have this kind of integration. Okay, so a concern I've heard out there is why not just run Postgres local? Why database branching? Why preview branches? However you want to frame it. A serverless managed in the cloud Postgres may be more latent or slower than a local copy. It may cost more. There's more storage. Debunk this. Help me understand the true cost, the true speed. Lay it on me. So in a pull request, like a preview environment, this system is fast.

So neon databases spin up in 500 milliseconds or less. You're not affecting the speed of your CICD system at all. The copy on write for our storage means that there's no actual operation. It's like a kind of a null operation. When we create a branch, you instantly have access to the production data, but nothing has changed. Only until you start writing do we actually save the differences there. Yeah, you're not paying for extra data. It's not like you're creating a fork and then you like allocate a whole other 200 gigabyte storage system

and a whole other separate compute. We attach compute directly to the original storage. Yeah, those things are super fast and that's in the pull request environment. For the most part on your desktop environment, your laptop environment, you won't notice a slowdown there and you can do reset and things like that. So you can make a bunch of changes. You can use our CLI and do branch reset and it'll just reset with

whatever the parent branch was. But I completely understand the need for people to want to have a purely local environment. And I want to get there. So Neon is super fast. Production managed serverless databases that are basically never idle. They wake up in less than 500 milliseconds. That's fast. It's managed, it scales, it branches. What else do you need?

Learn more at neon.tech. That's N-E-O-N dot tech. Neon dot tech that's n-e-o-n dot tech neon dot tech well adam jacob is back i'm solo because i think every time you've been on this podcast we've talked about things happening or things going on and not so much about what you've done. That's true. You've sprinkled some stuff in there, of course, right? Yeah.

But never Founders Talk meets, the Change Law meets, Change Logging to Friends. And that's what this is. This is Change Logging to Friends. So friends listening to this, this is a different flavor of friends. So buckle up. Yeah. I kind of want to go into your journey a bit. I mean, you've been on the show,

I think, four times directly, a fifth time indirectly because you were too busy to record. Things happened. And that's when Elastic vs. AWS happened. And we had to borrow

previously recorded stuff that was pertinent. And it worked out well. I was even great when I wasn't there. There you go. Do we get like a jacket? Is it like Saturday Night Live?

We're actually getting some Pied Piper inspired jackets made, the Rat Pack jackets. Love it. Not sure if you're familiar with those by any chance. I am. But I'm looking forward to those very colorful jackets on my back. Yeah. Change a little flavor, not Pied Piper.

Yeah, obviously. Silicon Valley reference reference just so you know so adam where did things begin i heard tell me if this is true i heard that you became a system administrator at the age of eight well i mean that's a that's a bit of a leap i okay i um so that's not true i mean it depends on how we define it so like my mom was a real estate agent and i'm 46 so i don't know i'm 10 i'm terrible at arithmetic so i'm not sure what year it is in the 80s the early early ish 80s you know you're what age again 40 i'm 46 46 so it was probably. 86, 87.

86, right? In that general zone. One year younger than you. So we're in the same park. So anyway, my mom was a real estate agent and like PCs were a thing, you know, that you could buy. And so she bought one that had a modem because she wanted to be able to dial into the MLS. And that's the multiple listing service for people who didn't grow up the children of real estate agents. And it was where all the houses are, you know, like when they list houses, it's like the database you could go look at. And so you could dial into this bulletin board and the bulletin board was the MLS. And then, you know, I thought it was awesome.

And so you couldn't keep me off the thing from both playing video games, because obviously, but also that modem meant you could just call bulletin boards. And so I have an older brother. My older brother had a friend who he'd been on bulletin boards. And so he immediately showed me that bulletin boards existed and how to call them. And I was just like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Like, you can just like call other people's computers and then do stuff like talk to them you know like you could page the sysop and they would like it would like ding their computer

and they would hit spacebar and then you could like chat with the person who like ran the bulletin board and like i just thought that was the coolest thing that had ever happened and then i discovered phytonet so phytonet was like an early version of email. So there's like pack mail. So you could build. And what was cool about Fidonet was it was basically like a regional network. So what happened is every bulletin board would call a central bulletin board. Sorry, the opposite way. So the central bulletin board with a central hub would call all the bulletin boards in an area code and then collect all their mail and then pass and then make one single long

distance call. And so everybody would sort of pitch in to cover the long distance fees for transferring your mail and you could send mail all over the world. And the thing that blew my mind, because this was like peak cold war was you could send email to Russia. So like you could like talk with Russians over Fido net. And so eight year old me and no one knew how old you were. And so I was like a precocious eight year old or whatever. And I thought that was super cool. You could play role playing games, like play by email role playing games, which I was all the way into.

So yeah, I immediately was like loved bulletin boards and then was like, I got to run my own bulletin board. So I was like annoying my parents by like, cause I immediately signed up for Fido net. Right. And was like annoying my parents by like because i immediately signed up for vitonet right and was like using my allowance to pay the long distance fees uh and so that's hilarious so then the you know the the bulletin board would call mine at like two in the morning and the phone and i had it so the computer would like pick up only in that small window and so you know every night at two in the morning, the phone would ring

once and wake my father up and then he'd like go back to sleep or whatever. And eventually they were like, what the fuck's happening with this phone call happening at two in the morning all the time. And, uh, and confronted me about it. And I was like, Oh yeah, well, oops. You know? So like, yeah, I love bulletinin boards i ran bulletin boards forever uh until bulletin boards weren't a thing i ran a bulletin board in high school that i gave all my friends because internet access was still rare yeah you know in the early 90s and so i would that's how i sort of started running linux was i'd run i was running os2 warp because i wanted multiple phone lines because you could multi-thread and then I discovered Linux. And probably in 89 or 90. I couldn't have been 90. I don't know early slackware pre red hat.

Anyway, so I wound up like had a bulletin board where you could dial into it. And then if you knew the secret code, it would reboot the computer and boot into Linux. And then my friends could dial in to the other line and then log into my system and then dial out to the internet using my ISP. And so I just gave all my friends internet access by letting them reboot my bulletin board. Like, wow, I love that stuff. So fun. I still love it. It's like the funnest thing. That's interesting. A lot of detail in there, really. I mean, sorry. No, no. What I mean by a lot of detail in there is, mean sorry no no what i mean by a lot of detail in there is is by no means what you shared is that is that like that's where the curiosity begins and i think that's why

it's kind of interesting kind of just dig back into that kind of cliche question which i really hate leading with which is like how'd you get started you know i mean that's how i got started and i was i mean i was all in know, like I was taking it apart. I had a job where I worked in a comic book and role playing game store. It sounds idyllic because it kind of was now that I talk about it this way. And the times, man, those are the times. They're great. So, you know, I would save some of the money that I wasn't spending on comic books and

I would spend it on gear, you know, and like, yeah, it was great. I still like when I think about my life and I think about my career, I still kind of think of it as one unbroken arc from discovering that it was awesome to talk to people on computers. And, like, my whole life has just been somehow facilitating people talking to each other on computers because I just think it's so cool. Not just, like, I like doing it, but I, I like making it happen even more, you know, like I just love, I just really like the details of it. And I like the, like,

I like how computers work and I like how you put them together. And I think operating systems are cool. And, you know, like, that's just, that's been the vibe the whole time. At what point did it go from hobby to, wow, I can actually do this as a career? Yeah. So one of my old friends, still one of my best friends, we see him all the time, comes to family dinner like every couple of weeks, got a job at 16. I already had a job because I was working in the comic book store, but he got a job working for this ISP. So to sort of set the scene for people who aren't as old as Adam and I, like the way the internet happened in the United States anyway, was very grassrootsy. So it started out like with lots of tiny mom and pop ISPs. And so in this case, it was a very mom

and pop ISP in Vancouver, Washington, that was in the back of a dentist's office. So you like walked through the dentist's office, like people were getting their teeth worked on and stuff past oral surgery. And then you would go into the back office and they took one of the back office rooms and turned it into a data center data center. They had a couple of half racks, you know, and we like put modems in them. Switches and. Yeah. And then they were running, you know, there was a free BSD server and a windows NT server.

And that was like the ISP. And so he had gotten a job doing tech support for them and they wanted, they were looking to hire another person. And so he wound up, he was like, Hey, my friend, Adam can totally do this. And then I immediately was like, I want to be the systems administrator. And there was this like very cool kid that was the systems administrator. He like, he was this older kid that worked at, you know, was in the community college or whatever and was into like skinny puppy and more like you know had like safety pins in his face and like i have no idea what skinny

puppy is skinny puppy's an industrial band okay yeah that's it should set a vibe if you think like that early like 90s cyberpunk that vision of what the future would be he kind of looked like that sure okay like when that was still a thing you could be and you were being actually edgy instead of like Hot Topic, you know, like I hadn't quite reached Hot Topic yet. I Googled some images and I'm seeing what I'm seeing and it's very large hair, very mascara. Skinny puppy? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Because that era was, it also overlapped with hair metal, you know? Sure. Yeah. So yeah, you could still. You had to have massive hair. Yeah, yeah. He didn't really have massive hair yeah yeah he didn't really have massive hair in my memory but i didn't know him for that long he had a hot girlfriend i remember

that i thought that was all black leather yeah definitely strong cheekbones yeah lots of german cheekbones you know it's just lots of you know sure anyway you know i thought that was incredible but he was also kind of a slacker because like this was the least interesting part of his day and so and it was the most interesting part of mine and so he would just i would just like do work for him you know because he was whatever too busy by which i mean not there you know and and it was great and uh yeah so that i was 16 17 17 that's probably 16 17 something there because the memory gets hazy, you know? And then I went to Arizona, ostensibly to go to college.

I was a terrible student. I had a 166 GPA, strong D average. I graduated high school because the, I would hang out, I would cut class, obviously, because nobody who doesn't cut class gets a D average. And I would, like a total loser, I would hang out in the library. And I had befriended one of the librarians. And so she would like a total loser, I would hang out in the library. And I befriended one of

the librarians. And so she would like let me cut class and hang out in the library. And so I was cutting class and hanging out in the library. And we were talking about how I wasn't going to graduate. And so the library had like still books of all the Washington state law, you know, like, you know, they would still publish them in volumes, like it was the Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever. And she found this loophole in state law, where you could be concurrently enrolled in college and high school at the same time. And if you dropped out of high school with six months left, then they just froze your grades as they were when you dropped out and graduated you anyway. And so I basically concurrently enrolled myself in college, and then dropped out and then graduated through the college as an adult, which means you don't need all of the extra credits for the vocational stuff.

You can just graduate with the with like 40 fewer credits or whatever than than you normally could. I told all the kids in my high school how to do it. So like 20 of us dropped out all at once was great. So you dropped out. So we dropped out, went to Arizona, got a job at another ISP. And yeah, it was that or running a children's theater and the ISP paid better. Okay. So you traded ISPs essentially. You went from one in Vancouver to one in Arizona via a loophole in the law that let you drop out.

Yeah. And I had another teacher who was like very upset that I wasn't going to go to college. So he was like, if I find you a college, do you, you have to go? And I was like, sure.

And so he did, he found, uh, he found DeVry before DeVry was really that big of a deal. There are only two DeVrys. And, uh, yeah.

So I wound up going to this, I wound up going to DeVry in Phoenix to devry in phoenix and was there for one what i think i had trimester so it's there for like one trimester because i got this job working in this isp and it paid as well as the average degree graduate from devry and so my mom was like hey do you you know i was i called my mom and was like i think i should drop out because i'm getting paid and she was like oh you should probably talk to the guidance counselor. And so I went to the guidance counselor at DeVry and told them what was up. And they were like, yeah, you need to quit. Like the thing everybody's here for is to get a job that pays what you, so just, you should not be here. And so I called my

mom back and was like, guidance counselor said I should drop out. So yeah. And then those ISPs, like, you know, in that era, it was like a big growth time for, for getting everybody on the internet. So the big thing everybody was doing in technology was just getting people on the internet. So that first ISP I worked for was in someone's garage, all sorts of fun stories that I can't really tell about that ISP. Really? No, I really can't. We'll just, we'll just say. What makes you not be able to? It's complicated.

It was the people in this era, sometimes the people who ran ISPs were, I'm going to say sketchy. So like, you know, if you talk to people who worked in that era in ISPs, they almost all have stories where they're somehow connected to like mobsters and drugs and like, because, you know, cause it was a growth,

it was a growth mom and pop industry where you could make a lot of money very quickly and it took some capital investment. And so you can see how it sort of comes together in a certain shape. And so everybody I know who worked in that era, if you ask them, they have a story like that. And I have one too, but I can't really tell it. Cause I, you know, cause the people who were involved in that story, like they're good people who I really like and I don't need to like talk about them on a podcast so it's easy to trace you back to the company and probably easy to find their name yeah exactly and I don't I don't need any of that but like rest assured they're funny stories I I shouldn't I shouldn't I shouldn't have even mentioned it but you know

you got me curious and upset yeah okay I know. I know. Let's just say that there was a moment where like law enforcement showed up, you know, to work. I was at work. Then there was a knock on the door and then law enforcement arrived. And then all was revealed unto me because the folks in law enforcement knew my boss and it was like a normal harassment kind of thing. They weren't harassing him. They were harassing his father. And so they were like, you know, it was like you were in a movie and they were making those like, you know, when there's like the one good son and then the cops come to harass the good son and he's like, Bobby, what are you doing? You know? And they're like, it was like that. Okay. It was crazy. I have other friends who you should

definitely interview who would probably tell their stories about like, you know, they were setting up early like satellite internet connections and having to explain the speed of light to like drug cartels. It's a whole thing. It was weird. Yeah. Anyway, so. A lot of, at least there was in a popular TV show I mentioned very early in the show called Silicon Valley, where porn was very influential in the innovation of various tech on the web. All of it. Right? Yeah.

And then you have this scenario here, which I was never aware of. I'm aware of mom and pop ISPs. I grew up in the same era. I'm very aware of this whole push to say, everybody needs to get on the internet. This is the, it wasn't about what was on there necessarily. It kind of was a little bit. AOL definitely meant about. There wasn't a lot there.

Yeah, there wasn't a lot. But it was about getting access to this worldwide web, this, what are they called? The information highway. The information super highway, right? You could still go buy the book that gave you all the best URLs. I mean, yeah you could buy a book with urls i mean that's a whole different era of the internet we would never imagine that being the case now like you might buy a book and it's

got like one or two urls in there yeah no but it's just a book of like screenshots you know right of like netscape navigator and you know that. That's wild. It was wild. Just to see that crossover of nefarious folks, let's just say. Yeah. In the space of innovation. Yeah, well, it always happens, right? If there's a growth industry that happens really fast, like it's obviously a thing where you can fraud and all kinds of stuff. It happened with, like, now that I'm talking about it,

like it happens a lot. What's a modern version of it? I mean, like, it happens a lot. Like, there's... What's a modern version of it? I mean, you see this in startups all the time where, like, you know, the requirements to be a founder are pretty minimal, if we're being honest. And so, you know, founder bad behavior, it's not hard to go look at, like, founder bad...

Like, they're making Hulu movies or whatever about, you know know people's bad behavior and the fraud that they commit and like it's kind of the same you know where there's access to money compelling ideas it can be tempting to sort of blur the lines you know because you're you know if you're running or you're founding a startup like you're always you're always hyping a little what you're doing you're always you're always a little telling a future story about what could be or why it'll be exciting. And then there's the reality and, you know, there's a fine line between like elegantly talking about what you think is true and what can happen and lying. And, you know,

I think in the middle there was like, you know, there was all the consolidation of ISPs that happened. And that was another interesting era. So like, I worked for an ISP that was run by the Arizona Public Service Company, which is basically the power company in Arizona. And we brought phone lines to a bunch of rural parts of the Southwest that had no phone lines in the 90s, because the power company had a pop in there so they could deliver power. They had power, but no phones. And so we brought them phones so that they could get on the internet.

And that consolidation, the guy I worked for was a nuclear scientist who had been running the nuclear power plant not that long before. And so he was fantastic to us, but he was like, you know, he let me be the, I was in the first crop of red hat certified engineers. It was me and four people from IBM. And that was because my boss at the time, like sent me off to get trained or whatever. But yeah, you wound up with this, like, it was a very interesting arc. And then as the consolidation happens, so, you know, everybody sort of pulled together

all the ISPs into super ISPs, right? Then what you started to do was the focus shifted toward what you were going to do on the internet, right? So now everybody was here. So now you had that sort of first generation of internet companies in that era, rife with fraud, right? Like crazy amounts of fraud. So like, I worked for a company, Infospace. This is a story I can tell because that guy. So maybe I shouldn't now that I'm saying it, I'm like, Ooh, but anyway, he was a bad dude. Naveen Jain, who ran that company was some degree of awful kind of all the time. And they didn't really have like a business model, but there was a moment in time where

Infospace had a market cap that was bigger than Microsoft. Yeah, because Naveen was just an incredible salesman. Like he would hype you up about whatever it was, and you were just like, okay, yeah, he seems great. And like, in reality, he was kind of a monster. But like, that company was huge. There were thousands of people working there.

We were running corporate infrastructure for them and production infrastructure. People were, it was crazy what was happening. And you know, yeah, I think there's quite a bit of crossover fraud, not to turn it into the fraud show or whatever. It makes it sound like my entire career was full of crime, but like, Adam, you're a bad guy. I'm not bad guys. I was the guy who like, you know, then when they tried to fire him, for example, so they tried to kick him off the board because he was a bad guy. you work with bad guys. I was the guy who like, you know, when they tried to fire him, for example, so they tried to kick him off the board because he was a bad guy. And so the people that I had actually worked for, I wound up working there through acquisition.

This is actually an interesting story. So I wound up working there through acquisition. I was working for this company called GoToNet. They got bought by Infospace. Then what happened was the GoToNet guys basically staged a coup, tried to. And I was the lead systems administrator for all the corporate stuff.

So I had set up all the automation for all of your accounts and stuff, your email. And so they had told me in advance that they were gonna have this board meeting and that they were gonna fire the CEO and that they were gonna call me. And in that moment, as soon as I got that call, I needed to turn it off stat

because I didn't want them to leave the boardroom and write an email and be mean. So I had to turn everything off immediately. So they called me and I turned everything off and then time goes by and I get another phone call and they're like, you got to turn everything back on. And I'm like, we didn't really have like a back on, you know, like, like I had the off automation, but there wasn't really like a back on. So it's gonna take a minute. So yeah, it turns out that what had happened was they had like, he had like staged this coup. And he threatened basically to take all of the revenue, all the contracts, many of which were in his name, across the street to a new company that he was going to start and, you know, bankrupt them.

And so the board then decided to fire the guys that I had worked for who had tried to kick him out. And then it took years for him to finally be replaced. Like his investors just relentlessly pushing him out of that company, which, you know, eventually died the death it deserved, which was, it was a company that was, had no real revenue, had no real products. It was just, but thousands of us worked there doing stuff. It was crazy. Yeah. That was what it was like in web one Oh, for like a lot of people, you know, there was just a lot of web beta or something like that. Not the only web one Oh yeah. Because like what could be not quite what it is. Cause nobody knew, you know, like everybody was just trying to figure out what would stick and you had no idea.

And everybody who was on the internet was stoked because they were like, I'm on the internet. New stuff's happening, you know? And like, it was awesome. And but it was insane and often, often strange. So like, then I went to work for another company. It doesn't really matter. But then I wound up working for that same set of executives, the initial set again at

another company. So and I loved the team and there were a lot of the same people that I've been working with for a long time at this point, at a company called March X. And they, they had a business model that it was at least clear if weird, which is basically they would pick a vertical, they'd pick like targeted ads. And then they would consolidate the like, you know, fourth, fifth and sixth biggest players in the game. So they would buy them and then smoosh them together and it would sort of spike the revenue. And our job was to compress the spend. So basically we built a machine that could just slurp up people's companies.

So like, you know, if you ran a targeted ad company, we could buy you. And then we would show up and look at how you ran the software and then port it to the automation that put it on our gear. And then that would drop the cost to serve, which would then spike profit. Right. And you can see how that sort of turns you into a profitable company over time. And yeah, so I worked for them for a while and we did that a lot. Tons of interesting stories kind of live in there. Yeah. You've had some adventures. Yeah. I've enjoyed this seemingly tangent we've been on, but I'm really curious about,

it doesn't sound like you went to school to learn what you learned. So you kind of learn by doing, right? Yeah, yeah. Learn by passion maybe even, and obviously by doing. And you mentioned FreeBSD and you mentioned Linux and like this is 89 era. it wasn't even freebsd it was bsdi okay yeah and yeah it was mostly linux so linux changed my life you know like as soon as as soon as linux showed up and suddenly i could see all the source code that was a revelation in like did you actually look at the source code though yeah yeah yeah because never looked at the Linux source code, though? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I never looked at the Linux source code personally.

Yeah. Never. I mean, you know, when you could get it on floppy disks, and then you suddenly had this, like, I loved operating systems. And so, but you couldn't see the source code to DOS or OS2 or Windows, you know? Yeah. But Linux, I was like, whoa, I can read, like, man pages for everything, and I can look at the source code, and I can, like like figure out what to do. And I learned what a compiler was and like all of that stuff happened

because Linux happened. And then there was this huge community of people who were so giving with their time and so giving with their, with their focus that they really were, it was very supportive as a place to learn. And so like, when I was working for that ISP in Arizona, I patched the Red Hat installer. So there's a bug in kickstart that made it so, you know, we basically couldn't automate the installation of this ISP that we were building. And so I patched it and sent them the patch and they like accepted it, you know, and suddenly that was like, they showed up in an errata, you know? And then when they IPO, they like sent me a little thing and we're like, Hey, thanks for the patch. Like, here's your friends and family thing. You know, like it was great. The early era of that, that

era was very, like, was really rich and interesting. And like, you know, it was also where I saw the first people, you know, I became a free software person. So the idea that that was important, that's how that happened for me. So why I care so much about open source and why I care so much about licensing and all that stuff is because if it wasn't for that moment, I can't imagine how my life could have possibly evolved in the way that it did because I didn't go to school. Nobody did teach me. Like what I had was this incredibly supportive community and this rich access to information. And those two things sort of allowed me to catapult myself into a different place. It's interesting how pivotal Linux is to so many people's lives. And just the idea of open source, I mean, I have a similar story, not the same, obviously. I haven't been to 17,000 different ISPs with various nefarious folks involved or not involved. Yeah. Like you have and have the journey that you had. Yeah, it makes it sound like I worked for crime families.

That's why I didn't. I mean, you may have, Adam. I mean, it sounds like you may have, honestly. Maybe just the one, but not like a lot. Yeah, sure. I mean, you worked for a company that was staging a coup i mean i mean boardroom you're in succession basically i mean you you've lived movie i wasn't in the room i was just the nerdy kid they called the kid in the back that was told to push the off button and then suddenly push it back on and there's no on button

and then i yeah then i had to push the off button for thousands of people that was a bummer you know did you watch the TV show Succession? I watched a lot of it. I didn't watch all of it. Man, I couldn't put it down. I was, I was into it. It was so, it was a really, really well acted show. It was incredible.

Yeah. It just, it's so dark. It is dark. And so at some point the bleakness overwhelms me. And then I have to like. Yeah. I can agree with that. There's so much backstabbing constantly.

Yeah. I couldn't imagine. I was thinking like, is, I can agree with that. There's so much backstabbing constantly. I couldn't imagine. I was thinking like, is that how billionaires with way too much money act in family? It makes you not want to be one, right? Well, yeah. I mean, it was really disgusting. Yeah.

But I couldn't stop watching the train wreck. I get it. All the way to the very end. I'm curious though, about like an ISP stack. Is it boring? Is it fun fun like in those early days like what was the stack oh yeah to run an isp i mean i mean what you had were sort of in the from hardware to software what's what's the give me a rough breakdown yeah yeah so in the in the very

beginning you had like you know like in the dentist office it was like racks of like regular pc modems you could buy off the shelf plugged into like pcs that were just loaded up with serial ports right and then eventually there was you know specialized hardware that you would buy that just had like racks and racks of modems and then you know it evolved over time so in those early in that early era there wasn't a whole lot and it was all mostly you were running it on, on Solaris. That was if you had money, it was Solaris. I don't know why they chose BSD in the first in the early days, but they did. But you know, if you had if you had capital, then you were running all that stuff on

Sungear. And so for a lot of people, it was like Solaris for all the stuff that matters. And then, you know, racks of modems that got ever denser, of as time went by i think peak you know for me we were running red hat 4.2 in production at at the isp in arizona so like which that was us like we were the me and my friends were the ones who decided to do that and saved a bunch of money because we weren't buying sun gear and so we were just putting we were putting rack mounted systems together either by hand or eventually buying them and then sticking them in the closet and basically and then yeah that was like that was pretty much of the stack and then you were running you know apache and you were running for us we were running qmail for for, for email. And yeah, that was about

it. You know, you got your home directory and you could like put up your little website on it or whatever. And yeah, other than that, you got access. Oh, DNS, of course. So I was a big DJB person. So there was a lot of like, you know, we were running Q mail and we were running his DNS server and we were running all that stuff. And yeah, that was pretty much the stack. And then eventually the stack grew. So again, money shows up, consolidation starts to happen. So the coolest consolidation story I have was this set of old Macaw Cellular guys who had made a bunch of money when Macaw Cellular got sold to AT&Tt made a deal with the tribe in phoenix so there's like a there's a like a reservation sort of in the middle of phoenix kind of now has a casino that casino

the bootstrapping money for that casino came from these macaw cellular guys and what they did was made a deal with the tribe that they could build a huge data center on tribal land and they filled it with modems and they put in their own like class i think it was a class three switch this is a long time ago so somebody's going to be like it wasn't i couldn't bring class three it was class two or whatever but they put in a phone switch that could do long distance phone switching and then they got the tribe to put in a tariff so any long distance call that wound up getting terminated at their giant switch, they got like 10 cents and then they split it between this like telecom company in the tribe. And so then they went around to all the ISPs and went, stop running your own pops.

Just we've got all the modems and we'll just route the traffic directly to you. So just buy Colospace next to our huge bank of modems. And then you don't have to manage all the modems anymore. And you can just run your gear right next to it. And then we'll take a nut every time. And the guy who set that up was humongous. He was like, I don't know. He's like, in my mind, he was like 6'8". He wasn't that tall.

He couldn't have been. But like in my head, he was like an ogre. You know, he's huge. And as soon as you went in there, the first thing he would do is take you to his office and show you his bathroom because he had this he had a custom-built urinal that was like made for him you know it was like a huge floor-to-ceiling urinal basically and he was incredibly proud of it and then he would uh leave you with cigars He had one of the racks in the data center. He had turned into a humidor. And so every time you went in, he would like hand you like a handful of Arturo Fuente short stories and like kick you out the door. It's great.

Interesting. Yeah. That's like a weird version of cloud in a way. It's like modem cloud, right? Come colo next to me. It's very similar to modem cloud, right? Come colo next to me. It's very similar to the cloud story, right? It's, well, because that's the story. It just happens over and over and over. We're seeing it now. Like it's going to repatriate back to the edge again, right?

Like we're going to wind up seeing more and more people not running in the cloud, both for the cost savings, but also because it turns out it's a superpower to understand how the stack works. And so one of the things the cloud has done is sort of abstracted people from the details. But like in that era, there were only details. So like everybody knew all the details and it was still a superpower to know them. But you couldn't do the work if you didn't know all the details.

Now, like you can do a lot of work without knowing anything about how any of this stuff actually works, right? Like if you need a load balancer, you can just make an API call and get one. You have no idea sort of how that's working or what the stack looks like. And like, I remember when load balancers, like when we first built them, when there weren't load balancers, cause nobody had enough load, you know? Like, yeah. So this is the era that you learned Linux.

Well, learned about Linux and and Linux affected your thought process around open source, at what point did you really come to understand the true importance of open source? Not just yourself, but like to your personal story, but then everybody else, to then eventually found a company that would be open source.

Yeah, so, I mean, there's a couple of things. So one was, so Miguel de Acasa and Nat Friedman. Nat Friedman would go on to be the CEO of GitHub and a bunch of other things. They started a company in the early days called Zimian. I don't think that was the original name. But basically, they were the gnome company. And they raised venture capital. And I remember when the news broke that they had raised venture capital and that everything that they were doing

was open source. And at this point I had, I'd already decided that like, that the, the game here was figuring out how to, how to like start a business and make a bunch of money. And so like, you know, working in Arizona, we were all contractors because you couldn't get a job working for the power company because it was all unions. And they didn't want the ISP arm to be unionized in that way. And so we were all contractors. And so we started our own contracting company

and hired everyone and gave them all a 20% raise and just took a smaller nut. So we were already kind of in that zone of like how do we figure out like let's figure out how to make a bunch of money basically like obviously there's a bunch of money to be had we should get some so when they started zimian i remember being like oh man like it's all open source they described how they were going to make money and i was like that could that could work like you could have all of the goodness of like the openness and the sharing and like that could then make you into a bigger business.

And that was the first time that that entered my mind that like what you could figure out how to do was like build open source and then use the success of that open source to sort of catapult you up in business. And then there was a series of others that sort of moved in that early era. There was like, you know, like VA Linux and the people that now run one of the Red Hat clones, Rocky Linux. Like those guys had a company called Linux Care that's sort of infamous for its terrible booth babes. When you look back on it now, it's like bad, you know? And like, so there was a couple of those things happening.

And then Red Hat, of course, happened. And I loved Red Hat. And they treated everyone so well in that era, really. And when Red Hat IPO'd, they made a ton of people wealthy. And I was just like, yeah, that's the way. Like, we should figure that out. And it was obvious to me that it was important on a philosophical level. So like, because it had made such an impact on my life. I had this career, I was making more money than any of my friends were like I was,

we were doing well. And like, that was all because of Linux. And it was all because of open source, right? That ISP that I was running Red Hat on, like they loved me because I had saved them tons of money. And I think what evolved over time was that there was like a, I love that strain of like human goodness that lives inside of open source. I love that, like that, that ethic of sharing and that like more is more, you know, like we can, we can, the pie can get bigger and then everyone can eat. And like that, it was just so, it's such an ingrained thing in me now, but yeah, it was, it was very motivating and very, very real and felt achievable, but then you have to figure out how to do it. And so it was like, you know, we tried to start a half a dozen businesses, you know, and failed, but eventually basically those same guys that I worked for for a long time at March X, March X went public and I had a pile of. And I hadn't made any money from any of really not any meaningful money from any of those companies I had worked for. And so they had IPO

and my stock basically vested. And for the first time, it was also above water. So I would have made, you know, not life changing money, but like, above water so i would have made you know not life-changing money but like meaningful money it would have been life-changing at the time because i didn't have a savings account because whatever i was a kid and spending every dollar but in order to to sell my shares i needed to get their a signature from the chief legal officer and there was this like coterie of executives who had been doing this together this whole time and it had all become fabulously wealthy. And so I went into their office and I was like, Hey, can you sign this piece of paper for me so I can finally sell these shares for my like decade of dutiful service or whatever? And he was like, no. And I was like, well, but I don't have any like

proprietary information about it. i don't know any special secrets or whatever like please can you do this and he was like no because it would inconvenience me and this is what he said it would inconvenience me and and our ceo and like all my friends so no and i was like just no he was like yeah just no and so i like picked up my piece of paper and i left their office and i walked out piece of paper and i left their office and i walked out of the building and i called my best friend who had built that asp with me in arizona and i was like hey man you hate working for ibm these people obviously give about me you know and so we should start a consulting company i'm done and like i'll go

find us clients and pay your bills so So you don't have to quit your job until I find us people who will pay us, but we'll go build automation and we'll build fully automated infrastructure for startups. And so I walked and started a consulting company and we built full, we started building fully automated infrastructure for startups. And that became HJK Solutions. So me and Nathan Hating-Smith and our friend Sock Siri. And then we added some more people, Barry Steinglass and a few others. And eventually that became Chef. But it was the same people, you know, dreaming about how do we figure out how to start a business? How do we figure out how to like build a company that IPOs? How do we figure out how to like do all of this? You know, like we

wanted it and, but we didn't know how to get it. And so we just, we just kept, kept taking shots. You know, what's up friends. I'm here with Todd Kaufman, CEO of Test Double. You may know Test Double from friend of the show, Justin Searles. So, Todd, on technical problem that they were, you know, didn't have the experience to solve. But we feel like we want to set up our clients for future success and the computers just do what we tell them. So, well, at least for now, we try to work with our client teams to make sure that they're in a great state, that they have clarity and expectations, healthy development practices, lean processes that allow them to really deliver value into production really quickly. So we started a lot of our engagements

by just adding capacity or technical know-how. We end a lot of our engagements by really setting up client teams for success. I like that. So when you say to someone, you should hire Test Double for this reason, what is that promise? I'll throw out a couple of different promises. I would say, one, we will leave your team in a better state than we found them. And that may be improving the code base. It may be improving some of the test suite. More often than not, it's sharing our experience and our perspectives with your team members so that they're accelerating along their own kind of career growth path. Maybe they're learning new tech by virtue of working with us.

Maybe they are figuring out ways to build software with a higher level of quality or scale, or maybe they're even focusing on the more human side of the equation and figuring out how to better communicate with coworkers or stakeholders or whomever. So that's guarantee number one. The other one I would say is that we're going to deliver without being a weight on your organization. So by that, I mean, we're able to come in really quickly, acclimate, learn your systems, learn your processes, learn the right people and deliver features within our first days there. So our challenge to our team is to always be shipping a pull request in the first week of work.

So we acclimate very quickly, and we're very driven to get things done. That means we don't require a lot of supervision or management overhead or technical support the way some companies envision working with a consulting firm. So we really challenge ourselves and guarantee to our clients that we're going to be very easy to work with. Very cool, Todd. I love it. So listeners, this is why Edward Kim, co-founder and head of technology at Gusto says, quote, give Test Double your hardest problems to solve, end quote. You can trust them. They build great software. They build great teams and they'll do it for you. You can learn more at testdouble.com. Again, testdouble.com.

Is it HJK? Is that right? Yeah. So you created a consulting company. Did you essentially do it by yourself and then bring in clients and then enable your friends to join you? Is that kind of like how it panned out? Yeah. So I found the first contract. Okay.

Where basically what we sold was you'd pay us a fixed fee and we would automate everything. So application deployment, monitoring, trending, operating system installation, identity management, backups, database management, all that stuff. So big long list. And we would fully automate all of it for a fixed fee. So, you know, you'd pay us 20 grand and we would deliver all this automation. And then you paid us a retainer to maintain it. And the fastest we ever turned around was 24 hours. So we had someone sign the contract and pay us 20 grand.

And then 24 hours later, we'd fully automated everything they did. And yeah, it was great. We were murderers. I'm not sure you should say that given the history you've shared. But like, this is how I met Jesse Robbins, who's sort of integral to the chef story. So, Jesse was the master of disaster at Amazon. So, Jesse, and if you ever meet him, he's like a larger than life human, like he's an incredibly motivating person. He has a deep and foundational belief in both himself and other people. He's a lovely person. And it was Jesse who was like, you know, we tried to recruit him to our little consulting company. And he was like, no, I'm not

leaving my job as the master of disaster at Amazon to come join your fucking consulting company. But if you build a product, call me. And so we had done, we had grown. We had a couple of people working for us, mostly our friends. We had, you know, maybe a dozen clients. And we were using Puppet at the time. We built all that automation on top of Puppet. And there was this horrific moment

where Puppet had this terror, had two things wrong with it. So one was we were automating more than most people were with Puppet. And so the way Puppet was designed meant that it wasn't very repeatable. So, you know, you'd build this big graph, and then you would do a topological sort of the graph and, and topological sorts are random, basically. And so sometimes the graph would sort in a way that worked, and sometimes it wouldn't. And the answer was just run the automation again, and

hope it sorts itself out. Or, you know, figure out the bug in your graph and fix the bug. Either way, what it meant was we would sell all this automation to these people. And it would work 100% of the time, 80% of the time. And then 20% of the time, it just wouldn't work at all. Or it would take five times as long. And people didn't love that. And so that was frustrating. And then there was this bug where suddenly files at random would start getting overwritten by checksums. So you'd have like, you know, your resolve comp file or whatever would just go away. And it would be replaced with just a checksum. No way. Yeah, totally. That's the worst ever. to this happens to like our biggest client right and i hop on irc and i'm like yo dogs you know

have you seen this horrific thing happen and the channel is like oh yeah we know about that one and like links me to the bug and i'm like what we you know like how what memo did i miss you know this isn't fixed like how did this not what just how did it not pop to the top of the community stack? You know, you just, you know, like I should, I like, I was paying attention. I was pretty involved and like, I didn't know. So anyway, this bug comes in and in the bug report, there's, you know, it's filed by this kid in New Zealand and he files the bug and Luke responds. And he's like, I tried to reproduce this and I couldn't make it happen in the lab. And I've spent as much time as I'm willing to spend on it. So unless you're willing to pay me for a support contract, I'm done. And I was like, for real?

You know, like it just overwrites files with checksums and you're just like, I'm out. And he was like, yeah, I got to eat. And I'm like, yeah, man, I have to eat too. We should fix this bug. And he was like, well, you should pay me and I got to eat. And I'm like, yeah, man, I have to eat too. We should fix this bug. And he was like, well, you should pay me and I'll fix it. And I was like, what if we just worked together? How about I put my labor toward figuring out what the bug is and we solve this problem? He's like, no, if you do that, you're taking food out of my children's mouths and you should like, you know, you should go somewhere. Don't do that. And I was like,

dude, I'm not paying you, you know, like, I'm not going to pay you money to fix this bug. I'm willing to fix it, but I'm not willing to pay you to do it. I'm willing to put my own time against it because I got a consulting company to run. We weren't making that much money. It's not like I had the cash laying around. And so I went to the person who filed the bug and I was like, hey, can you get this to happen reliably? And he's like, yeah, absolutely. And it wasn't reliable for us. And so I was like, great, can you get me access to the system that does this reliably? And he did. And so he gave me access to the system in New Zealand. And I spent a week figuring out this bug, and we fixed it. And, you know, he accepted

the PR, but was very angry at me because I had like undercut his model and taken food from his children's mouths. And so I was like, this probably can't stand. Like we can't continue to be, I don't want to be the consulting company that is like the best in the world at this technology, but that also can't, but the guy who writes the technology hates us. That's like not a very tenable business position. And they were completely uninterested in talking about the other problems I had with the system, which was like, Hey, at scale, you got to figure out like how this big graph works. It's a mess. Like, and they were just, they were like, you're an idiot.

If you didn't, if you didn't do it, if you weren't such a big dum-dum, this wouldn't be a problem. And so I started writing chef on the side. So my partners took over all the, all of the work. And then I essentially took a couple of months and wrote chef intending to use it for our consulting company. But then it was so cool that I showed it to Jesse Robbins and Jesse Robbins was like, we should raise venture capital for that. Like, let's go. And so Jesse joined us as the CEO and we raised venture capital. And I showed it to Ezra Zygmuntowicz at Engine Yard, who rest in peace, Ezra, who would have written Chef if I hadn't written it. He was already thinking about doing it, but I had written Chef and he was like, this is what I want.

And so before we even publicly launched it, we used it to automate Engine Yard and then to make it available to Engine Yard's customers. So we had a pretty great launch and Ezra supported us and the rest is history. Wow. I can remember some DMs with Ezra. And I was sad because obviously he passed away. And I had met Ezra around at the engine yard offices in San Francisco. Yeah. I didn't live there, so it was a big deal for me to be there

and to meet him and even hang out with him. They were so generous. They were. They were so cool. He's like, come on in. We went upstairs and sat down on the couch. Yeah. The two-story, you know, office they had.

That's where we perfected Chef. There you go. That's awesome. And I was like, dude, you're so cool. He was so cool. Like, you run this company i mean you're just so cool he was so cool and i think it was i forget what year he passed away it was like several years later but i wanted to get him obviously i'm a podcaster right i wanted

to get him on a podcast eventually and i was like going through my brain of like people that i've met over the years that were influential to me and i was thinking gosh man ezra be cool to get him on the show and just like share like where we're at now. This is like most Waypost Engine Yard. Yeah. But that was like the foundation for so much. So much. And like the early Ruby hosting days for sure.

But then also a lot of the cloud development that's happened and stuff like that. It's just, it's just. Oh yeah. Way ahead of his time. It was, yeah. Way ahead of his time. It was. Yeah. But when you think about, you know, that early internet and the culture and the people and open source, Ezra's a perfect example. Like Ezra had no ego about, Ezra a hundred percent could have written Chef and it would have been a

bigger deal than me. I didn't, I didn't matter. You know, he didn't have to do that for me. Like he had all the resources in the world. He had the best Ruby programmers. He had everything he needed, but because I showed up and I had the thing that was basically what he wanted and I was willing to hang out and do the work with him to make it work the way he needed it to, like not only did he help me,

he like incredibly raised our profile, you know, because he was the most high profile person in that space at the time in infrastructure. He'd literally written the book on Rails deployment and production. And he was just so thrilled to help us and to like move that forward. And if he hadn't done it,

like we wouldn't have been as successful as we were. And he didn't have to, you know, he did it because that's who he was. And because he believes in open source and he believed in all of those things as deeply as we did. And yeah, I miss Ezra. He was great.

Rest in peace, Ezra. Definitely. Going back to Luke, Puppet is open source. He wants you to pay him. He did. Yeah. Which was fine. I wasn't upset that he wanted to get paid. It was just, Right. I was upset at the, at the, there's this severity one awful thing. The severity, yeah. And his answer was basically like, you must pay me or I won't fix it. And I was like,

I just, I can't even with that. Like, like, why wouldn't you see that this is a thing you must fix? You know, like it's obviously terrible for your product. That's the part of him. I want to dig into the whole, you must fix. Cause I I'm sure, you know, open source works, Adam. I'm talking to the person I go to for answers. Well, now I got deep philosophical questions about open source and the way it merges with, you know, our freedoms in it. Yeah. He's free to not fix it, right?

He's 100% free to not fix it. But you're like, dude, come on. It's so bad you should, right? Yes, because- But you used the word must is what I'm trying to dig into. Because product-wise, you must. Okay.

If you're trying, like what Luke wanted most, and we had spent time together, I knew. Like Luke wanted the ring. Like Luke wanted it all. we had, we'd spent time together. I knew like Luke wanted the ring, like Luke wanted it all. That's, that was what he wanted. And so like, this was a terrible business decision. And so the argument I was having with him wasn't demanding his time for free. I was like, homie, do you not see that? This is like, this is phenomenally bad for you. Like when you think about just people adopting the software, using it, trusting it, you know, Puppet was on the rise.

And like, here's this lurking time bomb. It was the thing to use. It was absolutely the thing to use. And like, and it was great. And like, and here's this time bomb, you know, sitting in the middle of your product. And like, that's not your most, that's not the thing. And like, I just didn't understand it.

And for me, it's not that I demanded he fix it because I was willing to fix it myself. I wasn't upset that he told me to fix it myself. Okay. Like. That's what I want a clarity on. Cause I was like, man. Fixing it myself was a fine answer.

Him being like, look, I'm too busy. I got stuff happening. I got to feed my kids. I'm like, great. Feed your kids. I'll, I'm willing to do it. But he was mad. I fixed it because if that's how it felt to me, I'm sure if

we get him on the podcast, he'll be like, no, I wasn't you big jerk. But like, it sure felt that way to me and to a bunch of other people that were there at the time. And like, you know, I think to be fair to Luke, I'm sure there's a different side of this story that if he told it, it would be very different, but like for sure. Cause there's perspectives. Yeah. There's perspectives. Luke's not a bad guy. Like whatever. We're not besties, but like, I don't hate Luke. I'm not like carrying around a weird grudge or whatever, but yeah, it was, it was more of those pieces I couldn't understand. And then for me building my business and I was out stumping, you know, I was going to conferences, giving puppet talks. I was like, I was telling people this was the way and teaching them how to do it. Cause it was raising my own profile at the

same time and his, and I was like, I can't't do it if what i'm leading all those people into is the trap of you know in this in this way and so the inevitable resolve conf file getting overwritten with a checksum that's just right that's bad news it was tough it was tough that you couldn't even personally reproduce this happens at random yeah yeah it was bad and like yeah, it was, it wasn't that I demanded that he do the work. It must was like, it's clearly you must fix it for your survival for your own best interest. And for mine, because I'm trying to build a business on top of your software, and I can't do it. And he was kind of annoyed I was doing that too. Because again, if I wasn't doing it, they maybe they would have called Luke, you know, and then we raised venture capital, I think before

Luke did, which I think annoyed him too. And certainly the existence of Chef annoyed him because it felt like, you know, we had stolen from him. We didn't. But, you know, that's how it felt at the time. Did you begin from first principles? Did you, I know you didn't steal any code, obviously, but did you borrow any? I mean, because open source is like, it's art. Yeah. And art imitates other art, right? There's borrowing that happened. There's influences that happen, obviously, but did you borrow any? I mean, because open source is like, it's art. Yeah.

And art imitates other art, right? There's borrowing that happened. There's influences that happen, obviously. A hundred percent. Look, it was a hundred percent influenced by Puppet. If Puppet, like there's a bunch of things that Luke invented, like the resource, the declarative resource abstraction, that idea that you like, that you would just say, this is the file and here's the shape that I want it in. And then here's like a package and I want that in this condition. Like there'd be no Kubernetes without Luke Kniez, right? Because Luke Kniez was the person that created that abstraction that says, here's how I want to declare this resource. And then that resource maps to something real in the

world. And then there's a loop, a reconciliation loop that solves those things and that you lay them out in the way you did. That was all Luke. And like Mark Burgess had invented much of the structure that, that drove those systems. So a lot of the fundamental underpinnings that was Mark, but Luke was the one who put that user experience on top of it that gave you that abstraction. And like, you got to praise the man for it. You know, like if he hadn't done that, where would it, we would be on a fundamentally different trajectory, you know and like luke canese is a genius right he's brilliant and if it hadn't been for luke like chef wouldn't have looked like that at all because i didn't i wouldn't have come to that conclusion right but i had his

prior art right and then i fixed the things that i thought were wrong with it the way the graph worked i wanted it to be a real programming language not a dsl on and on and on so like you know and it was a fundamentally different product because of it but it doesn't mean that i wasn't standing on his shoulders you know if there wasn't for chef there'd be no palumi right there'd be no cdk right those ideas of like you should you should do the automation in a real programming language like chef was the first of those really that wasn't just like writing scripts you know so it all but it all stands on each other, right? For sure.

Yeah, it's interesting how, just how that plays out, like that you can be a part of that. And I think one thing you said was that you were using Puppet in ways, I don't think it was not, I'm trying to paraphrase this in a way. You said like in ways beyond it was planned to be used. You were hitting the edge cases. I mean, not planned.

We were just, we were, we were using it more than most people. So like most people were using like a little Puppet in their, in their stable compute lab. And we were using Puppet to be like, no, I'm writing reusable content that I deploy really quickly across. And it's thousands of resources. I'm fully managing every aspect of the system with Puppet. Most people weren't, they were like, you know, they were replacing CF Engine 2,

which was like setting up a config file and like making sure the patch ran. You know, there was like a half dozen resources they were managing. If you're managing 100 resources on a single box, that was a big deal. We were running, you know, our standard config on a single host was 300 plus, you know, 400.

So like when you think about that in aggregate, it was just, and the sizes were so much bigger because at the time this was, this was the beginning of web two. So this was like Facebook apps, you know, so people were like, couldn't get enough stuff, couldn't get enough gear. We had a customer I like who was one of the first music sharing things and it was a Facebook app. And so they had a billion users immediately. That was unheard of, right? That was not a thing you could do on the internet before that moment. And it brought social media into the world. And so like, they literally were calling all of our friends being like, do you have any gear? Like, just can we can we just we just want to buy whatever you got. We

don't care what it is. We'll take it. We'll put it in racks. Like we can't they couldn't scale fast enough. And so they were using our kit to scale you know like that automation is what allowed them to do it which was awesome but like you you know and their own intelligence i'm not saying we did it like for sure travis cole it was all chef big ups it was all chef it wasn't chef that was puppet that was all puppet we were using puppet to do that and like big deal right yeah and like you know was just, it was a pretty fun, interesting era. So if my notes are correct, this beginning of OpsCode, NotChef, was in 2008, roughly. Yeah, that's probably right.

Ish. So let's say maybe 2007, but it happened in kind of 2008. Yeah, HJK had been going for a couple of years. So like, you know, you can backdate that to. Did you literally, I mean, this is probably a boring minutiae to some degree, but like, did you literally convert the company HJK to a different company called OpsCode? Or did you like just end the consultancy and found a new company? We started a new company and then that company acquired our assets. Our assets, yeah. And you didn't have to do any due diligence because it was your company. Yeah, because we knew what was there what the diligence was yeah i mean this introduced me to a bunch of new

interesting ideas so one was that you could like and jesse knew these things like jesse jesse had been studying the business of venture capital in a way that i hadn't i was i had been but i i was uncertain still and jesse was like not uncertain And so I learned that you like, shouldn't never pay a startup lawyer, that they take their money when you get funded, but they'll do all the work for you for free, for example. I was like, that's amazing. And then, you know, he had a lots of, he had helped start what would become Velocity with Tim O'Reilly. And so he was sort of connected to that whole scene, which eventually became sort of the epicenter of how Web 2.0 evolved and how that entire generation of cloud and all that stuff sort of happened. Those people were connected for the first time sort of through O'Reilly.

And so those connections and the technology and the shape of the market at the time, you know, there were allowed us to sort of successfully raise capital. But we had a hard time raising like we, you know, I uh allowed us to sort of successfully raise capital but we had a hard time raising like we you know i think we pitched jesse would know the exact number but like 15 20 times and got nose and the we were all beaten down and sort of convinced it wasn't going to work and we met bill bryant at a coffee shop in seattle which was like near his house. He like held court at this coffee shop. And we gave him our like sad, dejected pitch because everybody told us to like raise less money basically. And so we had started out asking for two and a half and, and we had gotten all the way down to like, please give us half a million dollars. We promise it'll work out.

And he was like, guys, this is a sad pitch. Like, is there like a business you believe in hiding in here? Is there like a, is there like a business you believe in hiding in here? Is there like a, is there a way that we all get like a billion dollars? Cause if so, I want to hear that pitch. And we were like, well, yeah. And so then we like gave him the billion dollar version. He was like, that's a good pitch. That's what you, that's what we're going to do.

And he's like, and you're going to ask for three, ask me for three. And we were like, okay, three. And he was like, great. No. Yeah, exactly. He was like, three. And we were like, okay, three. And he was like, great. No. Yeah, exactly. He was like, no, but I'll give you two and a half in worse terms, you know? But like, and then it worked. And you just, you know, you just did it until it worked.

And yeah. So two and a half mil, that was your initial funding. Is that right? So probably or three. Did you have a product? Yeah. At what point were you? Okay.

Cause I'm trying to. We hadn't launched it. We hadn't launched it yet. So we announced the fundraising and we launched Chef at the same time. Did you launch Chef as open source then from the beginning? Yep. And there's a, we published the fundraising announcement, a blog post on like what Chef was, a blog post about why we chose the Apache license.

We had Ezra write a blog post on his blog about it. On Engine Yard or personal? His personal. Okay. But we referenced Engine Yard because they were already using Chef. And so you'd already done all that automation for Engine Yard prior to this,

even this pitch and- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fundraise? Okay. Yeah. So you knew, you had faith in what the software was able to do in its infancy. Yeah.

And it wasn't a great launch. in what the software was able to do in its infancy. Yeah. And like, you know, it was like, it wasn't a great launch, you know? It was like a, you know, our color scheme was like gray and blue. And, you know, like it was like a website built by systems administrators, you know, lots of squares, but like- But what did happen was

there was very quickly a community of people who we knew from Puppet and we knew from the Rails community who like really attached quickly to chef and then you know we knew that we were building a community and it was all open source and so we just embraced everyone who would listen so like anybody and you know at that time like open source still happened on irc primarily so you know and you can see it now happening again and kind of in discord where I would argue open source now happens mostly in Discord, if there's an analog.

And so we just wound up hanging out with everybody who cared about what we did. And because we came up as consultants, we frequently knew how to automate whatever they were trying to automate better than they did. And so we would help people not only like use the software, but solve their like root problem in a deeper way so like one of the things i used to do at the end of my conference talks every now and again was i would just like i would ask people how many people use chef and how people use puppet and how many people use cf engine and like i would offer to fix their problems not by converting them to chef but just like i knew cf engine really well and i knew puppet really well and so like

you could come to me with your puppet problemet problem, and I would like, fix your Puppet problem, you know? And so we just really intentionally tried to build a community. Because at the time, you know, this was Tim O'Reilly's like, create more value than you capture. Like all of that was sort of both in our minds and in our culture, and was starting to really crystallize around Velocity and around the Web 2.0 Summit and around like a couple of those conferences. And so that idea really captured us and we really was like embedded in that business plan.

And I think we did a good job. Yeah, very interesting. Those initial days, you know, you're obviously deeply in community, out there giving talks, willing to fix non-chef things as you just said. Yeah, just doing whatever. What was the thing that people were buying?

What was the paid for version of Chef? Yeah, so initially it was going to be a hosted SaaS. So this was also the moment, the rise of SaaS. So Salesforce had launched a few years earlier. AWS had just begun. So like S3 was just happening earlier. AWS had just begun. So like S3 was just happening. EC2 had just happened. And so like SaaS was just beginning. And so our idea was that we were going to run a hosted service. And then if you want to run it on-prem, which you'd

be a dummy to do, you would be open source. And we were just way too early for hosted configuration management, like way too early, you know? And so, yeah, we early for hosted configuration management, like way too early, you know? And so, yeah, we launched this hosted SaaS product, big multi-tenant SaaS service that did okay, but didn't do great. And all of the large customers, banks and insurance companies and stuff like would just run the open source because they weren't willing to run a hosted product. A decade later, they would all come to me and be like,

can we just buy a managed, can I just buy a SaaS? And I was like, fuck you guys. Like, I did this for you. And now I have let it founder because you didn't care. But yeah, so that was the original business model was SaaS. And then it turned, you know, over time, it turned more and more toward on-prem software, feature discrimination, all of that stuff sort of crept in because we were trying to figure out how to monetize what was a growing enterprise user base and just trying to figure it out.

And we really struggled to do it, as I've talked about sort of at length, I think. I've never heard the story. Yeah, I mean, we've gone through, like, we went through every possible open source business model. We went through, like, you know, we started out SAS plus open source that you could run on prem. Then it was, we had the open source version and then we took the SAS version and we sold that as an enterprise version that was like, hey, if you want these other features, we wrote the backend in Erlang, which was one of the greatest technological things I've ever seen in my life. The team rewrote the Chef server in Erlang because we had Facebook as a customer and we were, their goal was to bootstrap a data center and like i remember what the time goal was but it was like five minutes ten minutes from scratch yeah it was nuts right and it was

really condensed and the ruby based chef server just couldn't do it and i remember going to facebook with the erlang chef server on a USB key that had a little, like, whatever, it was like a little bear's head on the end of it. And I brought it to Facebook, and we installed it and ran it. And we thought that it didn't work at all, because the load was flat, and there was no utilization. And then everything finished, and it was fine. And so just like the Erlang just literally ate all the load and just didn't care without breathing. It was incredible. The first time that we'd used it outside the lab, it was truly incredible. So we were like, Hey, if you want the good one, you know, pay us for the good one. And then that becomes, it becomes hard to maintain both. So then

you're like, well, maybe we should just open source the good one too, but then we'll hold back some features. Maybe it'll be security features. Then maybe it'll be, well, maybe we should just open source the good one too, but then we'll hold back some features. Maybe it'll be security features. Then maybe it'll be, well, then what we actually should do is, like, you can't hold back basic security. That makes you kind of a jerk. So then, you know, maybe we'll build like a dashboard, like a better web UI. We'll monetize that. You know, maybe it's security and compliance. We'll do that.

We made some acquisitions, brought in the InSpec folks. You know, that was great. They were awesome. Their code was incredible. They helped. You know, we tried every variation of OpenCore possible. And then in the end, switched to a model that looked like Red Hats, which was the most efficient by a dramatic margin.

Would you say those 10 years before acquisition was a struggle to find the business model then? Like, given this and hindsight? I mean, yes and no. Because the thing was good good it was hard to make money off of it right like is that we should have made more money than we did right so like if we had made the amount of money for the value we created that company would still exist it'd be it'd be a public company and you'd be talking about it now we didn't and so wasn't. But it wasn't because we didn't have an impact. The impact we had on the enterprise,

the client list we had, we were still growing at a reasonable clip. But yeah, I would say a lot of people tell successful startup stories and they always draw like a smooth line, sort of up and to the right. That was not my experience. My experience was that it was a series of stair steps

where all the flat spots in the stairs were just terrifying and existential. And you didn't have enough life experience or business experience to tell the difference. So like, you know, there's a lot of things that in hindsight weren't existential that we thought were and freaked out about. And then there's a lot of things

that really were existential that we freaked out about justifiably and then fixed. And then, you know, the business model worked out. So like, but I wouldn't say it was easy, you know, and a lot of it was wasn't so much. It was never the technology. It's always people, you know, like it's hard to find the right people. It's hard to work with people.

It's hard to figure out how to build a culture. It's hard to keep that culture. And I think the yeah, it was it was it was hard. hard at the same time we were quite successful and it was really fun. And I, you know, I had no regrets. I would do, I would do it roughly. I wouldn't do it the same way. I'd have changed the business model if I had hindsight, but I think what that did for me was professionalize me. So, you know, there was a moment in chef's life where, you know, Docker had happened and Docker was so disruptive to us and to everyone in that space. And there was a minute where you couldn't have a conversation that wasn't just Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker.

And with our investors, our customers, they were like, you guys are dead, right? It was awful. What year was that? I don't remember because I'm bad at time. But early on in docker's life so a year into docker's existence probably 2015 2016 maybe yeah maybe and i had to give a speech to like because the company was real that was really down and so barry chris asked me to like give him a pep talk you know and so i went and watched um al pacino did a football movie

whose name escapes me. It's Any Given Sunday. Yes, Any Given Sunday. And the end of Any Given Sunday, he gives the greatest inspirational speech ever put to film. You know, he's basically got this bunch of football players and he's like, life is a game of inches and you got to crawl for it. And you got to look at the people next to you. And, you know, he gives this like incredible speech about basically how the team needs to pull together and that the struggle is living,

that like pushing through it is the source of what it means to be alive. And so I like studied him delivering this speech because that's how I wanted to deliver it. And I wrote my speech and I did my best to deliver it like I was coaching a football team, like I was Al Pacino. it worked like it. I think it did actually rally the team, you know, it rallied the company. But as soon as I was done giving this speech, I'm so grateful that I was alone. Um, so we had this office in San Francisco that wasn't full of very many people and it had a beanbag cause whatever startups. And I just collapsed and wept for like half an hour, like full body, just weeping because the stress of trying to hold it all together and not knowing, you know, I just told

all these people what to do, but what if they didn't, you know, what if it, what if we lost, what would that mean? What'd that say about me? What would it say about them? Like, what would happen to their lives? What happened to mine, my family? And all of that pressure and all of that was so intense. And I just couldn't hold it anymore. And I realized that the problem was that this had become my life and not my job. And that it was, you know, there's a, there's a

part of it being your life. That's helpful when you're, when you're trying to do something new, when you're, you know, you hear musicians talk about this all the time where they didn't have like a, you know, they didn't have a plan B like that's good and can be helpful. But like, eventually it turns out that it's your job. And that I don't control the outcomes. I don't control what people do. I don't control whether it's going to work. What I do control is how I act. I control I control what we do next. I control how we respond. And to do that well, I needed to I needed to put down the burden that said that it was that it was my responsibility. And instead, my responsibility was to just be the best I could possibly be at the work that I had to do.

Then it had to become about the work I was doing, not about whether or not it was going to happen for all of these people. And that really transformed who I am into a person like now, when I am as a professional CEO, I'm a professional entrepreneur. Like I do that. It's my job, but it's not who I am. And that's the's my job, but it's not who I am. And that's the moment that it, it, I stopped. It stopped being who I am. It's interesting to be that your identity is wrapped up in that. Cause when you say that's who I was, it's what I was. That's what you mean, right? Like your identity was deeply ingrained, tied to, tethered to.

And your self-worth. Yeah. You know? Like who you are as Adam Jacob. Like your worth is like, oh, is chef successful? No? Okay. Well, you suck.

Then you do suck. You know? I had people tap me on a shoulder in a coffee shop and be like, you're Adam Jacob. You're a chef. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, oh, I fucking hate chef. You know? And like, he just, random stranger felt entitled enough.

And I was like, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking about you when I wrote it. You know, like I didn't mean to hurt you, but like I had way more people tell me that it changed their lives and how it impacted their careers and their families. And like, I have a million lovely stories of that. And like, but yeah, it does sort of, at some point you have to decide like what fuel you're going to burn because you're on this long journey, you know, it takes 15 years. And, you know, if the fuel you decide to burn is your own self-worth, your own, your own belief in yourself, like you'll run out.

Eventually there'll be enough things that tell you that it's not real, that you'll, that'll be it for you. And so like, I just needed to switch fuel, you know, that's not because I don't have some of my identity wrapped up in those things. I do like, it's been, I'm 46. I've been doing it. We just talked about it. I've been doing it since I was a kid. Like that is a huge part of who I am, but it's not all of who I am. And it's not the, and my success or failure doesn't define who I am. You know, I'm going to be good at it, whether I win or lose, I'm great at it because I'm, I'm going to be good at it whether I win or lose. I'm great at it because I'm putting in the work

to be good at it. And that puts me in a position, hopefully, to succeed. But, you know, just like those football players at the end of any given Sunday, the other team's feeling the same way. You know, like everybody else

also in that game is trying to do the same thing. They're trying to win too. And you win or lose and sometimes it's your time and sometimes it's not your time. And like, you can't control it. But if you're burning self-worth, you know, if you lose and what you burn down is your identity, your self-worth, your belief in yourself,

like it's tough to get back up again. You know, it's hard to, it's hard to decide to keep going. But if it's professional acumen, if it's skill, then it's just, now I'm a pro. Now it's a, now it's the game I play. Um um and i'm doing my best to play it well you know in the military i was in the army for a bit in my life and when we did things that didn't seem like it made sense or it seemed like rework or it didn't have meaning or it had meaning it was just too big the response was never negative it was always too big. The response was never negative. It was always good training. That was good training. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. Because like you do some things sometimes in life and you're like, that sucked. What purpose did it have? Right.

It was good training. It was good training. It wasn't burn Adam down, whether I'm talking to you or me. Yeah. Because we're both named Adam. It was simply, wow,

I went through that to learn something and it was good training yeah it just it was good training and i think don't let it be self worth burning no it can't because it can't be yeah or team burning like that sucked for us like we suck as a team because we just went through this thing does that make us a bad team yeah does that you know and yeah and i'm i'm so grateful for those moments and i'm so grateful for the opportunity to have had them and yeah but i wouldn't still be doing it if i hadn't had that revelation that like that this is just about the work and that the answer is always just more work

so it doesn't matter what the problem is i'm a professional my job is to do the work and i'm going to do the work at the highest level i can do it because that's what i have pride in because i can control that i can control my how i put in the because I can control that. I can control my, how I put in the work. I can control how I like the level that I'm playing at. And that doesn't mean I'm always playing at the best I can play. Sometimes I have bad days. Everybody does, but like, that's a thing that I can do. And in the sense of good training, if even if I fail, it's good training, I'll be better. Like I'm going to learn from it. I'll, my game will get better. I'll, I'll, I'll be able to figure out how to, how to, how to motivate it. Yeah. Not to go too deep into this scenario for you, but when you gave this speech and you said you

were in quotes, trying to hold it together, you must've been terrified like in that moment to give that speech, were you trying to, I mean, without giving away what the details specifically were, were you trying to hype and sell this potential future? What were you trying to accomplish? I was trying to remind them who they were. Like we had built this incredible company. We'd built this incredible community. We were having an incredible impact on those enterprises.

And I would look for as much impact as Docker has had, and it has had an incredible impact on those enterprises. And I would look for as much impact as Docker has had, and it has had an incredible impact. I know what Chef did at some of those companies. I know what they were like before, and I know what they're like after. And the impact Chef had on those people's careers, on their lives, on how they structure their company, on what they do, we did that. And this was the people who did it. And I was trying to remind them who they were. And I was trying to remind them that it didn't matter what the outside world said. It didn't matter what new technology people were hyped up about. It didn't matter what any of those things were. What mattered was what we could do for those customers, what we could do for those people,

that we were the people who could do that and we were better and we would stay better because we were great at it. But if we didn't lose faith in each other and we remembered who we were, that we were gonna get through it. And we did. Like when we sold Chef, like we had tried to sell it years before in this moment.

There was a moment where nobody would buy it for a dollar. And this was a moment where, you know, nobody would buy it for a dollar. And this is a company with, you know, tens of millions of dollars in revenue, recurring, growing 20% year over year. Like it was great. Not one fucking dollar because the market had just turned away from you and was convinced you were going to die. And it didn't, we didn't, right. We figured out how to land that plane. And like, I'm so proud of it, but that was because those people didn't lose faith in each other, you know? And that's what I was trying to do. I was just trying to remind them of who they were and what they had done and what they could still do, you know? I guess in a way you're probably giving the speech to yourself too, which is why you went

away and did what you did because it landed on your own. Like sometimes you come up with the idea and then you say it out loud and then it becomes like, it was real beforehand and it was still true before. Yeah. Yeah. And thinking about it now and talking to you about it, like I'm been like welling up now just thinking about it. Like, I don't think I'm going to cry, but I might if I do great podcast material, but like, I like, yeah, I, yeah, of course I was giving it to myself. Of course I was. And look, in the years since, like, I've been in therapy and like learned a lot and improving. But like, it's not easy for me to talk about like most people.

But like, there's some people for whom they can talk about how they're feeling. And it's like very difficult for me to talk about like most people, but like there's some people for whom they can talk about how they're feeling. And it's like very difficult for me to talk about how I feel. You know, if you ask me what's happening, I'm gregarious enough, I'll tell you like how my day was. I'll tell you like a list of facts about my day, but I'm not gonna lead with how I feel

at the end of the day. I'm not gonna be like, oh, I feel anxious. I feel stressed. I feel sad. I feel whatever. And so it's not like I was expressing to other people, anyone else, even including my wife, like what sounded like I was expressing to other people, anyone else, even including my wife, like what the burden I was holding was. That was all just inside and I

was just white knuckling it sort of through all of those moments. And like, yeah, so there was a lot of internal pressure that had sort of built up there that needed, that needed, needed release. I think part of why the speech was good was because that same energy came out in the speech, you know, like I used that as fuel and because I had allowed that to happen when I gave the speech, like suddenly all these emotions I had not been processing and hadn't been holding onto, like I couldn't keep in anymore. And even though I couldn't verbalize them, I could certainly experience them physically by just weeping, sobbing, you know?

Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. I know that's vulnerable to put that kind of stuff out there and to share that. But I think that's, it's a beautiful thing because we live in this world

where it's a one or a zero, right? Or it's on or it's off. And especially in the developer world, things are very binary in the fact that it's true or not true, right? It's an error or it's not. It runs or it doesn't. Whatever, right? And then you kind of get into this other zone where it's like, well, there's people involved. And there's emotions involved.

And there's people involved and there's emotions involved and there's identities involved and there's, you know, promises made and there's self-worth that's, you know, established in something erroneously or not. And there's a lot of detail in there that I think is very telling of your character. Well, thank you. And just telling of your willingness to share the journey. Yeah. I mean, because of that experience in open source and all the people who have helped me, you know, if I hadn't met Jesse Robbins and he hadn't believed in chef and hadn't believed in me and hadn't believed in those things, there wouldn't have been an ops code. And if there hadn't been an ops code, like there wouldn't be a system initiative and there wouldn't have been a chef and there, you know, like there, like there's so many things that would have not happened or

would have happened differently. And I think you have a responsibility at some point when you, when you reach a certain level of professionalism to help other people climb that same pyramid, you know, like, like if it wasn't for Ezra, where would I be? You know? And that Ezra was higher on that pyramid than I was. And in that moment, he didn't have to help me, but he chose to help me. And in that moment that he helped me, like he lifted me up and put me on his shoulders and helped me become the person that i am and i think we have a responsibility to do that and i think people who don't feel that responsibility or who don't do it or who actively close that door like to be honest i think they play the game less good like like i think in the end it comes back around you

know and i think a lot about like i don't think a lot about it well that's not true i have this like tattoo so i do think a lot about it but like what's the tattoo saying it's just three lines that reminds me that i have things that i that matter in my life and that they're that they're not all equal you know there's some things i care about more than others and i should focus on the things that i that matter the most so like my family and it's like in the shape of, it's kind of rounded off sort of like the, like, so big three parallel lines that are like ruled paper, literally it's college ruled paper with a Denny's coffee mug. And we drew a circle around it and we filled in the lines and then we tattooed it on my arm. But it's there to remind me that

like, that I have things I value and I have like, and that I need to keep those things in my mind while I live my life. And I think that there's a, you know, when you think about your life and you think about the work that you do, or you think about all the things that you've done, like there's things that I'll do that will matter when I'm gone. You know, I hope somebody on some podcast someday is like, man, you know, Adam Jacob really did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and helped me in this way. And they can be like, rest in peace, Adam, you know, pouring out for our homie. And like, I hope that day is far away. And you know, like, I don't want that to be now. Thank you. But like, but I care more about that than I do about winning. You know, I care about how I win

because I really believe that you can win better by doing it that way. Like you can win by being good and by being a person who cares and being a person who helps other people. And like, you know, I think like there's a company that I talked to not that long ago, just getting started, absolutely going to wind up competitive to system initiative with, you know, started by a bunch of very credible people who I helped them get funded because I introduced another person who should fund them. I was like, here's the person that should fund you. And that's the person who's going to fund them. And he's a great venture capitalist. And like, you know, I hope they have all the success in the world because it's not a

zero sum game, you know, like if they, if we wind up competing and we play against each other, I'm going to beat them because I'm better than they are. I'm going to fight like hell to do it. But, you know, if they beat me, so be it, you know? Like some days you win, some days you lose. Yeah. But let's go, you know?

Yeah, for sure. Are you, as I'm hearing your story, obviously a lot of tech founders run parallel to some degree to the storyline of Silicon Valley, the TV show. Did you watch that? Yeah, I watched that. I watched most of it. Yeah. End to end. I don't think I watched it all the way to the end. Same thing. A little too close to home. You know, it's like, I can't watch the, like, I really struggled to watch all the dramatizations of

like crazy founders who do fraud. Like I can't watch like the Elizabeth Holmes documentaries. Well, there's no fraud in this one. Well, there's a little bit of blurred lines, but no fraud. Like I can't watch like the Elizabeth Holmes documentaries. Well, there's no fraud in this one. Well, there's a little bit of blurred lines, but no fraud. But like, I have this deep part of me. Like I was playing Mass Effect last night, the first one. And I decided I was going to try and be a mean person. And I literally couldn't make mean person choices.

I feel you. That's how I am. I just couldn't do it. And so like- I can't make mean person choices either. I really can't. So when I watch those things and I think about myself and the part of my job

that requires me to go out and like, and sell, I'm like, ooh, am I a fraud? You know, did I lie? And it like keeps me up at night. And I didn't, and I'm not. And also like, it gives me anxiety. So I stopped watching Silicon Valley because it was too much.

You know, I was like, oh, nope, that's too much my life. And whatever, it had a chef cameo. There's an episode where they talk about chef, like the chef guy comes in, you know? And I was like, I can't with the show. It's too much. Anyway, keep going. Silicon Valley.

Well, the reason why I ask is because there's, there was a scene where Richard Hendricks, which was the main character you're familiar with, because you watched season one at least, was juxtaposed against Gavin Bellson pretty much the entire thing, right? Gavin Bellson was the villain. He was the one that was doing the fraud

and he was the one that was blurring the lines and treating people like disposable objects, whereas Richard Hendricks was trying to do his best and in a lot of cases be what you just said which was how can we win and be good yeah we can't always all be Hooli right and there was a point in this in the show where they were side by side and Richard was telling Gavin no and Gavin was like I shall look forward to the fight. Welcome home, and congratulations on getting your business back.

Thank you, and I should congratulate you on your remarkable tech breakthrough. I hear you're swimming in funding offers. A few. I think we're going to go with Bream Hall. They seem to get us. You haven't seen all the offers yet. Richard, we were partners once. I'd like to do it again.

This is an acquisition offer, and it will make you a very wealthy man. Let's do this together. That's very kind of you. But... Richard, at least look it over. I can help you get exactly where you want to go. I'm pretty you get exactly where you want to go. I'm pretty sure I know where I want to go and how to get there.

If you reject me now, Richard, I will come after you. I'll devour you. Think very carefully about what you're doing here. Here's what I think, Gavin. I think my decentralized internet threatens Hooli's box business model. I think basically you are just a server company now and we intend to make servers obsolete.

So I think, perhaps in the end, I will be the one devouring you. I gave you that patent. Thanks. Fair enough, Richard. thanks fair enough Richard I shall look forward to the fight and it's almost like what you said there was while it's not the same scenario I like

the idea that in business you can lift others up and invite in some ways competition hopefully not at your demise but that you can hold this stance of, I shall look forward to the fight. Yeah. If I, if you're winning, you're going to have better competition. A sign of winning is competition. Like Puppet was winning,

therefore Chef existed. Yeah. And like one way to look at it was I was taking away from the potential of Puppet. Another way to look at it was I validated puppet. You know, I validated that market. I like, like we grew together. We did that together. And like, you know, yeah, all the competitive juices, like, I really think that's how you need to look at it. If you're a professional about it, you know, if it's about your identity, different thing. If you're like, ah, will I make a bunch of money? Will I be able to feed my family? Like if it's those things you're worried about about different problem, you know, it's different when somebody is like, when you're worried about whether your kids are going to go to college and the competitor, like that hit, it hits harder, you know, but I'm not in that position and haven't been in that position for a while.

And so now I'm at a point in my life where like, yeah, when I think about that competition, I'm like, yeah, come validate this market, come be competition. Not because I don't, and I'll like you like, let's, let's, you know, like I'll, I'll help you up the ladder and like, I'm still going to beat you. You know, like I'm still going to look you in the eye across the metaphorical court and like, you know, I'm going to be the best player I can be. And like, I'm going to, I've been training hard, you know? Yeah. So like literally training hard. Yeah.

And, and like, so like, let's figure it out. Let's go, you know? And I, I want that.

Like I want, I want there to be competition. I want it to be difficult in that way. I want to win, but not because, you know, I don't want to win because I, I murdered everyone I see,

you know, like that's no fun. I mean, there's certainly no one left to hang out with at the end. And certainly they're the people who are most likely to be able to talk to you about how it is, you know, like they're the ones you can most talk to about like, oh, that's awful. I'm so sorry that happened to you. I know what that feels like. They're also your peers.

Like they're the only other people who know what it's like. So when you think about like, like destroying that pool of people, like, of course I want to help people up in that way because like, I need those people, you know, I'm going to someday I'm going to need them. I'm going to need to call them up and be like, oh, I had to do this hard thing. And they'll be like, oh yeah, I understand. And like, you know, they'll like be there for you in a way that, that they won't obviously if what you did was punch them, you know.

Don't punch people. Not if you can help it. Yeah. Unless you're in a mosh pit won't, obviously, if what you did was punch them. Don't punch people. Not if you can help it. Yeah. Unless you're in a mosh pit. Sometimes you got to. Fair game. Yeah. I mean, probably not.

All right. You're kind of a jerk then too, but. Yeah, I suppose. Well, at least it's a, it's at least accepted if you get it. I explained to my daughter that every now and again, sometimes you have to punch someone. Okay. And you want it to be rare, you know, like you want it to not be a thing you do regularly or easily. But if you're going to have to punch someone,

you'd prefer to be the one who punches first than second. What's up, friends? I'm here in the breaks with David Hsu, founder and CEO of Retool. So, David, Retool has definitely cornered the market on internal tool software development. But zoom out for me. What's the big idea? Why did you start Retool? What is the big idea with internal software? Yeah, so Retool started at this point seven years ago. And when we started Retool, the core idea was that internal software

is a giant, giant category that no one really thinks about. And what's surprising to most people is that internal software represents something like 50 to 60% of all the code written in the world, which might sound pretty surprising. But if you think about it,

most of us at Silicon Valley, we work at software companies, whether it's like an Airbnb, a Google, a Meta. These are all companies that are software companies selling software. And so most engineers at these companies are working on external facing software. But if you think about most software engineers in the world, most software engineers in the world actually don't work at these software companies. There's not that many of them.

There's maybe 10, 20 of them, big ones at least. Most of the companies in the world are actually non-soft software companies. There's not that many of them. There's maybe 10, 20 of them, big ones at least. Most of the companies in the world are actually non-software companies. So if you think about a company like an LVMH, for example, like a Coca-Cola, for example, like a Zara. Zara's not selling any software, but they actually have a lot of software engineers, actually. And all their software engineers,

all they do day in and day out is basically build internal software. So that's, I think, one reason we started to retool. The second reason we started to retool is if you look at all this internal software that people are building, it is remarkably similar. So if you take a look at, you know, like a Zara, for example, or a Coca-Cola, two very different companies, obviously. One a clothing company, one a beverage company. But if you actually look at the software they're building internally to go run their operations, it is remarkably similar. It's basically forms, buttons, tables, all these sort of pretty common building

blocks, basically, that come together in different ways. But then if you think about, you know, not just the UI, but also what's the logic behind a lot of this stuff, they're pretty much just hitting API endpoints, hitting databases. You care about authentication, you care about authorization. There are sort of a lot of common building blocks, if you will, to internal tools. And so for us, the insight was, wow, internal software is a ginormous category and it's all so similar

and developers hate building it. Could we create a sort of higher level framework, if you will, for building all this software? And that would be really cool. That would be really cool. That would be really cool. Okay. So listeners, Retool is built for everyone, built for enterprise, built for scale, built for developers.

And that's you. And if you found yourself nodding your head to what David was saying, then check out Retool at retool.com slash changelog. It's the fastest way to build internal software. Do yourself a favor, get a demo or start for free today. Again, retool.com slash changelog. Well, Intel Innovation 2024 Accelerate the Future is right around the corner. It takes place September 24th and 25th in San Jose, California. This event is all about you, the developer, the community, and the critical role you play in tackling the toughest challenges across the industry.

Ignite your passion for AI and beyond. Grow your skills to maximize your impact. And network with your peers as they unleash the next wave of advancements in technology. Understand the emerging innovation and trends in dev tools, languages, frameworks, and technologies in AI and beyond. Join on-site hands-on labs, workshops, meetups, and hackathons to collaborate and solve real problems in real time. Collab with experts, learn and have fun, engage in interactive sessions, connect, grow your network, gain a unique idea and perspective, and build lasting networks, and of course, have fun. You'll hear from leading experts in the industry, technologists, startup entrepreneurs, and fellow developers, along with Intel leadership CEO Pat Gelsinger

and CTO Greg Lavender as they take you through the latest advancements in technology. Don't miss out on the chance to be at the forefront of innovation. Take advantage of their early bird pricing from now until August 2nd. Register using the link in the show notes or to learn more, go to intel.com slash innovation. What is it that matters to you, Adam? Like, I know what you're doing now. Let's fast forward a little tiny bit, and I'll do the job for you.

Eventually, you sell Chef. I don't, I'd love to get into the details of that. Like, I know you kind of stepped away in a way. I don't know the full story. I love it from the horse's mouth, obviously. You've obviously taken a, I'm not sure if you'd call it a break between Chef and System Initiative.

I'm not really sure of those, the timeline between there, but you're on a journey still yet to revolutionize and potentially change the future of DevOps. And so you haven't stopped this journey, but given that fast forward of a lens in a way, and I'm happy to dig into the details, in life, what really matters to you? What matters to you? The people that I love and the life that we can create together. I care about my family and I care about how that my family goes forward in the world and like what their lives are like. That's the thing that matters to me. I know that's cliche, but it's true. And then I care about how I spend my time, you know, like the, you have a

limited amount of it. And so, you know, I need work that is compelling. I need, I need to care. I need to believe that the art of it is worth doing because the, I want to play that game because it's the funnest game I've ever played. You know, it's the game I've been playing since I was eight. So like, it's still the game I love the most, you know? So like, like I kind of feel like it's one unbroken line of training from, you know, running a bulletin board to now. And it's just one unbroken experience of like training to do this kind of thing. And so, yeah, I, we sold chef. I had stepped away very slowly. I basically left when I knew I was leaving and had told Barry Crist, who's fantastic, the CEO of chef that I was going to leave. And then I, I basically took a year to do it

by just sort of, you were CTO. Yeah. Yeah. I was CTO. And I just sort of, we like searched for my replacement and then I slowly backed away from all of the work I was doing, but I didn't tell anyone I was backing away. I just kind of stopped showing up and let other people take care of it. And they all just figured I was really busy because I was usually really busy. Like, but in this case, I wasn't actually really busy. They just all thought I was busy with someone else. And so by the time I actually left, it had been six months since anybody had needed me to make a single decision because I

had just sort of made myself disappear slowly. And then we hired my replacement and he was fantastic and we had a great relationship and I helped him move into them. Really proud of how I left chef. I stayed on the board. Um, so I was involved in the transaction i can't go into too many deals about that but um but then yeah i took some time off and then you know with system initiative back to like what motivates me as a person this is how i'm looping you back into that answer like in my work outside of my personal life and the people i love and you know those are my atomic family but also my chosen family i have a lot of people that feel like chosen family to me where, like, you know, I'm in it for life with them. And I don't care what they do, you know, that I don't care what happens.

Like, those are my people and they're going to be my people no matter what. And, you know, that doesn't mean I won't tell them if I think they do something wrong. But I'm telling them because I love them, not because I'm not going to stop loving you. Right. That love is unconditional. And I have a lot of those people in my life and I care deeply about them. In my work, now that I know that I'm a professional and that I'm quite good at it,

I want to build the best possible thing I can imagine because I really think that we can not only build technology that is foundationally earth shattering, but we can do it in a way that the people who built it are having the best experience they can have. You know, like I really think about the foundational work of building system initiative, like building a sports team. I'm finding great talent. I'm nurturing that talent. I'm challenging them. I'm training them. I'm putting them together. And that is inspiring to me to put it against a problem that's really complicated and hard. And so what we decided to do with system initiative was rethink the foundational abstractions of how we think

about automation. So throw away as much of the prior art as we needed to, to see what would happen if we went a different way. And like, it's been, you know, roughly five years of engineering and r&d we're gonna launch a public sass here let's call it fall and like if you want to try it now you can so slide into my dms and i'll like hook you up but like and it is a transformatively different point of view on how to on how to build that automation and it's a transformatively different user experience. And it's been incredibly difficult to build, but it's so rewarding because then when it works, you're like, oh, that feels like magic.

Like that is new in a fundamental way. And so I love the newness of it. I love the art of it. And it's starting to turn over like a business. And I love that too, because like you get, there's nothing more validating in some ways than winning through revenue. Like when somebody is willing to pay you for it, that's like, that's good juice.

So like that is also motivating to me. Yeah. Okay. So let's laser into the thing at play currently. We've talked about the past. We've cliff noted the exit. I don't think there's necessarily anything to dig into there. I think it's good to be proud of how you exit something

because, you know, don't burn bridges, you know, be a great person, be the person you want to be. Obviously. It's a, it's a hard thing to decide. You know, if your exit isn't perfect, isn't like magical, then you're, you're making decisions about how it impacts everyone's lives in a really meaningful way. So it's like, you know, do those early employees, they'd get enough money to like send a, send a kid to college, but the newer employees will make less. And so, you know, maybe there's an option not to sell it where there's an odds that those new employees would make more, but they'd kind of do it at the expense of the old ones. So you have to think about like, how do you balance all of that out? You know? So it's like a complicated story.

It's a complicated thing to have to go through, but you can do it with honor. You know, you can look everybody in the eye and talk about the trade-offs you made. Did you in fact get to step away and take some version of what they would call a quote break? Yeah. I took,

you get to rest a little bit. Yeah. I took like six months off basically. Did you think about anything at all? Did you just listen to metal all the time and go for a walk? I, uh, I sat in my office, quote unquote, which was actually just a bathroom that we had never gotten around to renovating in this, like in this apartment, not apartment house in San Francisco. And, um, I played dark souls cause I really wanted to learn how to do that. And so I played Dark Souls.

I wrote a D&D campaign, ran it for my friends. I walked my daughter to school every day. She was going to elementary school in the Castro. So there was this lovely sunny walk from the mission through to the Castro. And so I'd walk her to school and pick her up. That was fantastic. I built a laptop and like noodled around with my like environment, you know, like I played with operating systems because I love playing with operating systems.

So I like played with my operating system and yeah, and thought a little about what I wanted to do next, but mostly I put it all down. Was that hard to put it down? No. It was actually easy. I was tired, you know, like that was a lot.

And I had seen, I had already seen that what we were doing wasn't going to work long term. So I knew that the returns we were getting from the work we had done for those large enterprises, which was transformative, that the teams we transformed were incredible, but that the drop off between those teams and the rest of the company was really steep. And that that wasn't kind of the way we hoped it would go kind of as an industry. And so I had already gotten a little tired of playing myself on TV where I knew what I needed to do, which is go to those companies and tell them that they should do it anyway and tell them that it was going to work out, even though

I knew in my heart it wasn't. And, uh, and I didn't love that. I didn't love as soon as I, as soon as that realization hit me, I couldn't do it anymore in the same authentic way that I had been doing it. And so I was ready to stop. And I was ready to think about what was next because I felt like the story was undone. It's not like I was finished with the things that I cared about or helping the people that I cared about. I still loved systems administrators. I loved DevOps. I loved all those things.

I wasn't finished. But I didn't believe that if I kept pushing the direction we were going in that way, that it was going to work. And that made sense, you know, like, so it just made sense to put it down. And I knew that what I would pick up next would be something that, that would try to move the needle on how those experiences happen for those people. So you were able to take a break, which is great. You had a good reason to take the break. You got family. You got this beautiful walk with your daughter.

I'm sure that's a memory that in your mental picture, you can recall in this very moment, and it's very pure and very enjoyable. I think there's something- You know what I learned about myself the other day? So when people talk about the mental picture, they actually see pictures in their head. You can't see pictures?

I see nothing. Oh, dude, I'm sorry about that. I'm not. I i'm not i mean you're missing out i believe i probably am i see i i like it's like facts it's like lists of but like like i know but i remember it and i do feel fondly about it it's not like i don't feel like i do feel nostalgic for it but anyway anyway i don't see the picture anyway yes keep going well i'm sad for you on that front because i can i can see various moments in my life now my son he has got and this is because my wife he's got the literal ability to look at something and see it forever oh he's got that you know whatever it's called yeah it takes your memory or whatever like the photographic memory photographic memory thank you he uh and my wife both have that it's a blessing and a curse because

like sometimes you can't see the bad things and you can't unsee the bad things right at the same time well if i if i'm looking here's my superpower my son like give me a side tangent here okay yeah yeah we're at the grocery store and i'm on the app and i see the product i'm trying to find i've not i've not bought it before i'm trying to make marshmallows. I'm looking for, I don't know, something, an ingredient. We were making homemade marshmallows this past weekend, and so that's why this is ringing true. And I'm like, Eli, look at this.

Here's the product. Help me find it on the shelf. Because finding products on shelves in grocery stores that you've never bought before, you don't know if it's big or if it's small or whatever. And thankfully, they have apps these days. So H-E-B, I live in Texas. It has a fantastic application that lets you see all the stuff and place your order and pick up all that good stuff. I'm like, here's the thing. We're in the right aisle. Where's it at? He's like, oh, right there.

Amazing. So anyways. Sick. But the point is, is that I can see clearly various moments in my life. Like more recently, me and my son's fishing. Yeah. I have two sons. And I have a daughter as well, but in this moment, it was just the two sons. And so we were fishing. I can clearly remember sitting back just thinking like, Adam, don't lose this moment. Yeah.

Adam, take a picture of this moment. Like hold this in your mind forever. Just pause all the stresses that you might have of them falling in the water or getting hooked by the yeah fish or whatever what all the all the dad concerns like just just put them over there yeah right yeah and just take a breath and just calm down yeah because it should be calm anyways why should i be stressed and it's we're fishing right we're gone fishing it's literally what it's for and i take this mental picture and i can see it in my mind right now i can see the sun glistening off the water i can see the stream where it sat and i can see my two sons just like being silly right the most joyful moment ever i

can just see it so clearly yeah i can't see any of that but what i can do but i know exactly how i felt so like when i hear that what i translate that to is how it felt in that moment and like i know exactly how it felt to hold my daughter's hand while i walked her to work every day i know exactly how or to school every day i know exactly how it felt when like she was born and like i held her for the first like you know like i don't i can't see the picture i can i have the facts of the picture but i can't see i can't see it in my head but I can feel it like it was happening right now. So, yeah. Anyway, keep going.

I don't know where I was going with that, but I'm sad that you don't have that. I mean, I have the feeling, which I think is, to me, it's enough. It is enough. It is enough. Let me be sad, though, that you don't have what I have, which I think a lot of people do have as this mental picture. I think it's normal that people have that, yeah. There's a lot of people who don't have it. I don't know what the phenomenon is that of people

who do and don't have it, but there definitely is. I don't know. My daughter was taking a random test on the internet and she was like, dad, can you see pictures in your head? And I'm like, no, that's metaphor. She was like, what? And I'm like, every time people say that, it's just metaphor. They're just, it's metaphor. She's like, dad, that's not metaphor. You know, I'm like, oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Anyway. I would love to go into system initiative, but not so deeply. I think the major questions I have, and I think we may have asked you loosely in past conversations, but the conversation was less focused on that, was why be in stealth for five years kind of thing like how did you finance the early parts of the business you know some of that startup process yeah with system initiative it was

uh so we had three founders me mihir lupinachi and alex etier and i think one of the reasons we were in stealth for a long time was just that we actually didn't know what the solution to the problem was. Like, I had some ideas about what it would be and Alex had some ideas about it. But we didn't know for sure. And we were trying to discover sort of what the solution was. And we had enough expertise that we, you know, raised venture capital kind of immediately and had enough space to go do that. I think that process of like building something, showing it to people, learning what it was. And we did that a lot. So we showed it to people, but we showed it to them privately and sort of in more testing

kind of frames. I think the, was it valuable to be stealthy, you know, like over five years, probably in that, like like if you tell people how great something is and then five years later it shows up they're like you know you kind of missed your shot at like yeah capturing their attention up a lot you know i think you know system initiative we launched it as open source and had like you've been able to download it and try it and do stuff with it for a while and people have been but now it's kind of in the in the shape where like the fullness of the experience is compressing in a way that like you'll be able to use it and it feels good and it's like stable for you and it can like solve your real problems in a way that it hasn't been able to do just because the

technology was so so complicated you know in terms of funding the business, like the only real struggle there is that five years is a fricking eternity in startup land. And so, you know, and, and we felt like we were close for a really long time because we've sort of known what the answer is, but because we had to build all this foundational technology, you just didn't really know when you were going to get it wrong because no one had ever built it that way before. So you're like, ah, that won't work. Ah, that won't work. And you just't really know when you were going to get it wrong because no one had ever built it that way before. So you're like, that won't work. That won't work. And you just don't know until you're right at the end. And then you're like, here's another like soul crushing problem we have to solve. And so it's just been like a series of really difficult obstacles.

Luckily, system initiative is incredibly compelling. And so our ability to keep it funded and to keep our investors sort of happy is pretty great because what we're building is transformative and very cool. And so, you know, like they're in that said, it's got to get into the world and people need to use it and we'll see if people love it. But I can't imagine building something cooler, you know, like it's super cool and how it works is super different. And so those things together, I think is enough to carry it into the market in the way that it needs to. And again, you know, as a professional, that's my job. Like my job is to, what I do is I take venture capital

money and I try to build the best businesses I can build from it. And one of the ways you build the best business and technology is you have to have foundationally great technology. If you do, you have a better shot at it being transformative and meaningful over a long period of time. And so, you know, you got to deliver on that. And so I think we're delivering on it. Timing is key, right? Timing is key in any launch. Yeah, it makes a difference. Wouldn't you say?

Timing is key. I mean, you have a history of the timing with Chef. Chef had particularly good timing, I think. You you know like the market was really ready for it i think the market's really ready for for stuff like system initiative too i think you know when you look at market timing and you think about like the question there usually is more about like it's difficult to time the market but it's easy to time the zeitgeist of the customer. So if you think about like, what is the experience everyone's having? And can you say to them what that experience is in their own words?

So that when you, when they hear from you, what it is you're doing, does it resonate with them in their lived experience? That's a thing you can learn how to do and you can learn to discover and you can you can follow that truth you know it can't tell you what to build right it doesn't tell you how to solve that problem or solve that experience but it tells you that it's real you know it tells you that that experience is universal that that problem is real that that moment of displeasure or or dislike is real and that's a place where you can go build a business and exploit it. And so some of it's external market timing. For Chef, that was like the rise of SaaS and hyperscale, which sort of sets the stage for needing ubiquitous automation because without it, you can't scale quickly enough. But with System Initiative, it is those failed DevOps experiences.

It is that when you ask people who do that work, if they enjoy it, the answer is, I love the technology, kind of, but it hurts me all the time. They're like playing Dark Souls. And it could be better. And they are willing to have it be better because that lived experience feels that way. And I think that is a market timing that you can create that in retrospect, people will look at and be like, Oh, what great timing. But in truth, it's actually just how close are you to those people, right? Like, if the further away you are from the people who are going to use your product, the harder it is to build something that they're going to love.

I guess what I was potentially trying to get is to ruffle your feathers a little bit, not so much your feathers, particularly, but mostly just to consider with chef you battled the rise of docker and a change in the ecosystem and we talked about your five years of stealth and it's a wonderful thing to be able to have the investors and the folks to be there to do all the install for like three of the five but three of the five sure thank you for five, sure. Thank you for correcting me. But nonetheless, even now you're in open beta and it is open source and you can see a lot of it. It's still in motion to be kind of- Pretty high barrier to entry though.

Yeah. What do you, how do you mean by that? You had to like download the source code and compile it and run it on your laptop and yeah. Yes, yes. That's kind of what I'm getting at. It's like, it's still, it's not easily accessible by everybody.

I can't go and, you go and free tier it today. Nope, but you will be able to soon. Okay. Do you see any looming dockers out there to system initiatives? I mean, no. If I could see them, they're not a docker. The thing about docker is that nobody saw docker and then docker happened and everybody was like,

fuck docker. That was an avalanche of a real sea change in the experience of what was possible. Nobody saw Docker. And then Docker happened and everybody was like, fuck Docker, you know? Like that was an avalanche of like a real sea change in the experience of what was possible. Major change. For the better, right? Would you agree it's for the better? Yes.

Okay. I would agree Docker was for the better. Okay. I mean, my spicy hot take is I don't think Kubernetes was for the better. I think we're actually net worse on most vectors. But, you know, I'm alone pretty much in my feelings on that. But that could be because I'm a grognard. You know what I mean? Like, it could just be that I'm

whatever old. So yeah, if I could see if I knew what it was, then I'd be reacting to it already. But I don't know what it is. I think the biggest challenges for system initiative aren't there's some other disruptive technology that sort of eats my market share. I'm far enough ahead in terms of what the technology is and does that like you'd be insane to try to do what I'm doing because it would also take you five years. Even having prior art, like you don't really have prior art. Like the source code is not enough to understand how it works or why. Like you have to, like that's knowledge that that the people who've worked on system initiative have,

but the market doesn't have that knowledge and wouldn't even from the source code. So copying it doesn't make any sense. I think it will later, but it doesn't now. I think our challenge is more that it is fundamentally a different approach to solving these problems. And that means that the experience of solving them

is also fundamentally different. And so our big challenge isn't going to be, is there some competitive technology that beats us? It's just going to be, do the people who do this work love it or not? Like I love it. That's the way I want to do this work now. Like it's the way the people who've used it so far want to do their work now, but will everybody else love it? I don't know. And I can't know until I put it in their hands and make it easy. And in a minute, you know, it'll be three clicks and you'll be in a workspace and you can start automating some infrastructure and it's sick. And when that moment comes, will I don't, will they love it? If they love it, everything's cool. And if they don't love it, well, it was still my best game.

You know, it was still the best thing I could build. It was still the best thing I could imagine. It was still the best way I could have possibly thought about using that capital to try to build something that I think has the potential to be truly transformative. And like, you know, I want to build things that are transformative. I want to build things that push it forward. I want to, I want to move the art. And so, you know, the challenge for system initiative is that it's not, is there some other technology that will conquer me? Like that'll happen later because I am that technology.

And so it'll take a minute for people to catch up. How does this work? Uh, I suppose your outlook on the rise of platform engineering, you've grown up and have, you were there when DevOps was born, as you said, in past conversations with us I think it was John Oswald is that right yeah sure and now you have this rise of platform engineering is that does system initiative dovetail and play well with this change of sea because you still have DevOps but maybe DevOps serves platform engineering and not so much developers because platform engineering serves the ecosystem of developing teams on their larger team.

I mean, I don't know. Like, how do you settle this? I kind of settle it by thinking about what people are going to do with their time. So like what system initiative is good at is like it's so much quicker and safer and faster to use system initiative to model infrastructure and to look at how the system could work or should

work. And like, it's dramatic, and it's much easier to extend to do interesting, complicated things. So that's going to as a foundational technology people can use to build what they need to build to solve their problems. It's great. You know, platform engineering is a marketing response and a technology response to the same fundamental problems the system initiative looks at. You know, you look at that same problem that says, ah, DevOps teams, they're not working as well as you hoped they were. They've been struggling to like deliver the results

over a long period of time. And as the system got bigger, so then they have this reaction to it that says, what if in fact we were just wrong about it and what we needed was an API all the time. We've had this conversation a bunch of times as an industry where it's like, we need portals, you know, you're going to need a, you need a developer portal, you know? And so you build a developer portal and they could click a button and they get their little development environment.

And then they don't have to think about all the details and it's going to be awesome. And like, we do this all the time. We've always been doing it. And we've been doing it since I started working in the industry. But now they're like, hey, what if that was the answer? And so what if the answer to this fundamental experience problem that we're all having is a portal that if we build a portal better, and we make the API is better and make the portal more flexible, and we make the lines between who builds the stuff that the portal runs and who uses it better, that the outcomes will be better. That's their bet. I think it's a dumb bet because it's being built on top of the same foundational technologies that

delivered the terrible user experience you didn't love. So how exactly is papering over that going to be better? It won't, it won't because you've already fixed the experience at the bottom. You were like, no, the shape of the bottom infects the shape of the top and so the actual lived experience the actual outcomes of those platform engineering companies uh it's cool to have a portal and like you can make a lot of money having portals you know like cod foundry made a lot of money selling portals here's the fun part it didn't take over the world and not everybody's using portals weird right not because they weren't building you great portals they really were it was a great toolkit for building great dev experiences um and they made billions of dollars and now

nobody talks about cloud foundry so you know we'll see what happens my bet good name though i like the name incredible name great technology great people is an awesome name but bad bet and like i mean not a bad bet they made so much more money than shifted so just so we're clear it's super worked out for them so why are we listening to me but like as a technology i just i think i think the problems with what's happening now in that space in operations in the lived experience of those people is fundamentally tied to the to the way we've stitched all the different technologies together it's not that one technology sucks it's that when you put them all together in order to get to the outcome you're

looking for it doesn't hold up as well and like those platform engineering stories are essentially stories about how we surface the stitching right and i just don't i don't believe that that's going to change the outcome at all i think it's like changing from car like you know like when cars moved from having a key that you put in the stem and the ignition you turn the ignition to having a button that said start that didn't like change my life you know like i still started the car the same way which is i push a button and then the car starts or i turn the key and the car starts like your wrist is uh feeling it though. I mean, and for the positive versus negative, I guess, you know, like if you ask me if I want a key, I turn or a start button,

I choose the start button. Right. But I think platform engineering is roughly akin to putting a start button on top of what is essentially the identical car. Dang. Okay. And you know, I believe that because I helped build the fundamentals of the car. And so when you dig into how it all holds together, you're like, well, of course it uses source control the same way. Of course it uses terraform under the hood. Of course it uses Pulumi. Of course it stitches together this, of course it talks to this under, you know, all that stuff. It all has a way that it works. It has a way that you manage it and you can't really escape it. And it defines the outcomes in a very real way, both culturally and technically.

And so, you know, I think that's my answer. And it's not, I don't think it's hubris. I mean, it's probably some hubris, but it's mostly just like, you kind of know it in your heart anyway. You know, like if you just sit quietly and ask yourself like, okay, if I had a better portal over the exact same technology with the exact same way that I was working before, would it be better? And you're like, well, yeah, for people who need that thing, it'd be better.

You know, for the person who just wants one, it's probably faster to get one. And once I have one, what's it do? Oh, the same shit before i had a button like better to have a button than not a button that's for real but like did it change the game of what happened no outcomes identical button better you know okay so long on devops obviously i mean i'm long on platform engineering because platform engineering is going to turn into whatever it needs to be because all those people are playing the game they're all competitors they're like if what i do changes the face of platform engineering they're going to call it

platform engineering i will too like hold this space for next year when i lose my when when it turns out that my marketing message about second wave of DevOps or whatever is bad, and I pivot hard to platform engineering because platform engineering one and I lost, I'm not above it. I will come back in here and I will completely be like, Nope, it was platform engineering all along. Can't believe I said what, what, and the problem with everybody else's platform engineering is the way they fundamentally build that technology. What a bunch of goobers. And like, that's cause I'm playing to win. Yeah. Like I'm not tied to it. I'll get behind the platform engineering train. If that's the train that pushes me forward into victory. And also as of today, like it's not the train I want to be on, but I will, you know, I'm in, I'm down for whatever. I just want to win.

The last question that I'll let you go to your extensive, important, fun day that you have ahead beyond this podcast of multiple hours at this point.

Yeah, you're going to have to edit it. Lightly. We'll lightly edit it. Yeah. Honestly, I think it's all good stuff and I'm very happy

with the conversation. So you've alluded to fall, right? You're in private beta now. You said slide in your DMs. Yeah. For System Initiative. Find me on Twitter, send me an email.

I'll hook you up right now. I can see, and maybe you can see the horizon probably better than I can. Yeah. Because you're in it, right? What is just over the horizon? You mentioned fall. Yeah.

What can you mention here for the first time ever? Or at least tease for the first time ever, or at least tease for the first time ever right here? So one of the things that you do in system initiative is you customize the way this big, it's got this big hypergraph of functions that is the thing that actually configures, like writes the configuration and sort of runs a simulation of what it is you kind of want to do. That whole thing is programmable.

And so the loop of how you create new assets and add new behavior is getting very tight. So like, for example, there's a, you push a button and then you can create, you know, if you had, let's say you needed to automate your CDN and we don't support that yet, or you have your own application has like a deployment mechanism that's custom.

You could just click the customize button in system initiative. You write some JavaScript that defines the properties of the asset you want. And then you write functions, just little short functions. The longest ones are maybe 100 and 200 lines long. And usually that's because there's data in them, not because they're that complicated to write. That, you know, are what actions you would take. So you want to deploy action. So you would write a little function

that describes what it should do on deployment or you have a qualification that you want to run when somebody puts some data in to tell them in real time whether or not the configuration is good or bad or whether it'd work or not. So like, for example, when you use like IAM rules in AWS for doing security stuff,

AWS has a way to validate those rules. That's a, that's a qualification that we wrote for the I am rule. So when you're, when you're like using an I am policy, every time you change the policy, it runs the command that validates your policy and tells you if it's good or bad and shows you in real time. It's sick. All of that is stuff you can do yourself and you don't have to ask me anything. And then there's a little button and that little button says contribute. And if you click it, it tells you, you know, that you're agreeing to the terms of the Apache license that we're going to review your code.

And then you can push the button and it'll come to us and we'll review your code and then we will ship it and we'll do that review your code. And then you can push the button, and it'll come to us and we'll review your code. And then we will ship it. And we'll do that loop over time. And so I think what's on the horizon, is I think this new way of building automation gets connected to the creativity that is latent in that community, where, like, because the tooling has been the tooling now for a while, it hasn't been the most creative work to like do devops stuff because mostly what you're doing is like oh i'm writing more terraform how long we're writing terraform five years you know doing what i do get ups yep doing get ups yeah and suddenly there's this thing that's very different works in a very different way and it's

fun and so i think people are going to have a lot of fun, like writing stuff in system initiative and making it do things and then sharing it with each other. And I think that's what's going to propel it into the, into the world. It's not because the system initiative alone, it's going to build all those abstractions. It's because you can build whatever you want with this fun machine I made you. And so like, we made you this really fun machine for building automation that has this like really interactive loop of programming it that like, it's fun to program. And like, you're going to come program it. And so people are going to look at it at first, and they're going to be like, oh, this is, you know, whatever, it's visual design for

architecture stuff. And that's what they'll see first. And it is that. But under the hood, it's actually just this really fun programmable machine. And I think that what's on the horizon is that that community of people, once they catch on to the fact that what we've given them is this incredible way to program their own machines, I think they're going to go nuts programming the machine.

Would you think that these shareable, contributable, programmable things that you'd mentioned to written in JavaScript would be comparable to the way Docker Compose YAML files have helped people who don't really understand Docker stand up a new Docker image. Is that a good comparison? Yeah, kind of. Because that's shareable. It's like, I can go grab a Docker Compose file.

Yeah. As long as I have Docker on my machine, I can run that. I can Docker Compose up dash D and off to the races. Yeah. As long as I have Docker on my machine, I can run that. I can Docker compose up dash D and off to the races. Yeah, this is more like, I'm going to go again with the Wayback Machine, but like, it's more like Lisp where there's like old Lisp machines. Like if you wanted to change the way the application worked or like the window functioned, you could click a button in the window and it would just pull up the source code and then you could just change it.

And then the operating system would now be different. And you were like, and now it did new things. It's more like that. So like what the unit of sharing, because what, what system initiative is under the hood is this modeling system for this graph. The way you program it is different because what you're doing is writing functions that inform how the graph should behave at different points in time. And like, it's just a really different way of thinking about it. So like, they're shareable in the same way that maybe like a compose file is, but to the user, like when you bring that asset in, it's like, suddenly there's an asset and it shows up on a canvas and it's got like input and output sockets and it's

got properties and it like, does cool things. So like, that's pretty, it is similar in that you can share them and it's repeatable. It's different in that the way you interact with it is like much more visceral, you know, you're just like, Oh, I need one of those. And then there is one. And then if you don't like how it works, you can just open the source code and tweak it. And then you could contribute that back in a single seamless loop, like not by forking a repository, literally by just examining the code for the thing you already have and over time we're going to make it so you can hold that patch and when new updates come to that thing it'll just tell you hey you also added this extra property

do you want to keep it you know and like yeah you can so like it becomes this really interesting programming system and like i think that i like that more than anything is the thing that's going to really propel it because i think they'll come for the ease of use that is like that's so much easier to model infrastructure and to like and to see what you've done when you're finished like then looking at like a terraform repository if you've ever like looked at terraform and tried to understand what it does it's actually really hard to do from reading the code because there's all these layers of abstraction and variables and stuff that sort of do it. System initiative, you kind of see an architecture diagram that looks roughly the way you think it should.

And so that's what's going to bring people to the yard first, but they're going to stay because they're going to realize that that machine is programmable and they can make it do whatever they want. And that's where it becomes the power tool that actually has enough potential to change how we do the work broadly. Because if it couldn't do that, then, then my ambitions are too low. You know what I mean? Like I want to change the game. I don't want to just like, I don't want to just improve it a little. I want it to be fundamentally different. I want there to be a day before and a day after, you know, and I don't know if I'll win back to being a professional, but behold, I'm giving it, you know, like everything you got, I'm bringing the heat,

you know, and like, we'll see, you know, sometimes you bring the heat and you lose, but I don't think I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna win, but we'll see. I don't know. We're all on, I'm on the edge of my seat, you know. In the words of Gavin Wilson, he said, I look forward to the fight. Yeah. I look forward to the fight. Yeah. I like that a lot. Yeah. All right.

Well, systeminit.com is where you're planting your roots now. Maybe not your identity. I don't think so, based on what you said. But definitely where you're planting your professionalism and all your effort in the space of DevOps. And yeah, if you want to, if you can send me an email, I'm adam at systeminit.com. It's pretty easy to guess. So like, if you want to try it out on the SaaS platform, like, and you got to the end of this incredible podcast, like you deserve it.

Like, feel free. This is your prize. Adam's giving away access to the, to the, to the DMs and the private beta. Or AdamHJK on Twitter or X, if that's still a thing you use, but like, you know, you can totally just come and I will and I will hook you up. Just tell me about the changelog. Very cool. All right, Adam.

Thank you so much, man. It's been fun. Thank you, Adam. So fun. Okay, that was epic. That was awesome. At least it was for me. I don't know about you, but I love talking to Adam Jacob.

He is a dear friend of mine. If I was a neighbor, I'd be hanging out on the daily and that'd be fine with me. But here's what I want to know. I want to know how you feel about this Founders Talk, Change, Like, and Friends, the Change, Love, Flavored show I've brought to you today because it was an absolute joy to plan this show, to sit down with Adam and go through all the details. All the details. To go deep and to go long. This was an epic podcast.

It's lengthy. Many chapters. Lots of good stuff in here. And I enjoyed it all. I hope you did too. So next week on the changelog into the Babaverse. We go. Yes. I talked to Dennis E. Taylor.

If you have not listened to those books yet, you should. DennisETaylor.org. Check him out. Check out his books. I love them all. They're all amazing. One of the best science fiction authors of all time. Catch up with his books and then listen to that show.

Now, if you're a Bobiverse fan and you're deep in it, well, this is going to be a treat for you. Okay. Big thanks to our friends over at Neon, Test Double, Retool, and Intel for sponsoring this episode. And, of course, a massive thank you to Fly.io. That's the home of changelog.com. Our app is everywhere. Our users are because fly is awesome with no ops. They make it too easy and they'll make it too easy for you to learn more at fly.io. And those beats banging. BMC brings those beats. Break, master, cylinder. Love you, BMC. Love you.

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