The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Jeff Robbins is an actual rockstar [rebroadcast] (Interview)

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

On this special bonus episode of The Changelog, we're playing the latest episode of Away from Keyboard with Jeff Robbins. While some dream of having a successful career, Jeff Robbins has already had several. Once the lead singer and guitarist for Orbit, Jeff has worked on some of the most famous Drupal websites. He talks to Tim about his early interest in computers, starting Lullabot, and adjusting to life after leaving the company he built and ran.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to linode.com slash changelog. Hello and happy Friday. It's Tim Smith, senior producer at Changelog. I'm doing a feed takeover today to play for you an episode of my new show, Away From Keyboard. Away From Keyboard is a show about the human side of creative work, where I talk to creative professionals about their story, what makes them tick, how they do what they do, and the challenges of life and creative work. The following is my latest episode with Jeff Robbins. Enjoy.

From Changelog Media, this is Away From Keyboard, a show exploring the human side of creative work. I'm Tim Smith. Where do I even begin to introduce Jeff Robbins? You see, Jeff has had a few different successful careers in a time that most of us get around to one. He worked on the web before there was a web, started a company that's built some of the most famous Drupal websites. And as if that weren't enough, he was in a band in the 90s that signed with A&M Records, toured the U.S. and Canada, and played some of the coolest events. So where exactly does Jeff's story begin in a magical place called the 80s? Okay, let's go into the way back machine, Tim. Man, so, I mean, I've been interested in computers,

you know, and that kind of stuff for a long time. And I'm old, so it goes way back, you know, in the 80s, my dad bought a IBM PC Junior, which was like the cheaper one that you could that people could afford for their house. And I started learning basic programming on that. And then I did all kinds of stuff. I had a Hewlett Packard programmable calculator that I'd won in the state math fair. It was the science fair in my town. It was the math fair. Then we went to the state science fair and I won this calculator and I programmed it to play Monopoly.

So I, you know, I'm a nerd going way back to the 80s. And then I bought an Atari ST computer that had MIDI ports on it so I could hook it up to my synthesizers and drum machines and stuff like that. And I remember I worked all summer to save up the $1,200 or whatever it was that the Atari cost. And then I realized, like, if I got a modem, I could connect to these bulletin board systems and talk to people and, I don't know, find out information and stuff. And so I did that, you know, with the various bods of modems over the years. And I eventually realized that I could make some money with my computer skills. And I started doing temp work on Macs and learned desktop publishing and eventually

learned freehand, which was kind of a precursor to what we now call Illustrator, and ended up getting a job at O'Reilly doing technical illustrations for their books. And they were connected to the internet, which was really cool. And so I could FTP out to things. And there was a thing called Gopher, which was a precursor to the web. And I could connect to these free software, like actually free software, not pirated software, but you know, like open source software boards and download software. And it was so much faster than doing it over my modem. And then the web started. And O'Reilly being kind of one of the kind of at the crossroads of that stuff, you know, writing about books about TCP IP and all of you know, they had a book about Gopher and and ftp and all that kind of stuff um the people at cern who were

developing the http protocol and uh and html um came to cambridge came to the office in cambridge where i was working and kind of did this pitch like hey you need i'll need to get into the web the web's going to be the big thing we want this to be a big thing and o'reilly should write books about it and tim o O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty, being the visionaries that they are, said, well, we're going to do more than that. We'll create an online magazine and use our publishing skills to do web stuff. And so they started creating the Global Network Navigator, GNN.com. And I was involved in a lot of the brainstorming of that. And the woman who would eventually become my wife was the designer.

So my wife is the first commercial web designer. And I got so excited that before GNN even launched, I started one of the world's first web development companies in 1993. And it was an uphill battle because no one had heard of the web. No one wanted a website because they didn't know what it was. They would say things like, ah, I got burned. We spent all this money on a CompuServe page. We invested all this money in Prodigy and now Prodigy is shutting down. How is the web going to be better than that? And so I would have to do sales pitches that were like that. And then about a year later, my band got caught up in a record labels were very excited about it. We got caught up in a bidding war and I said goodbye to And I got to see most of the places in the United States and Canada and a few places in Europe and all that kind of stuff.

And a lot of my web friends went on to found what are now very big empire kind of. Right. But I was their, you know, cool guy who they met through web stuff who was in a band and the band was touring around and playing Lollapalooza and stuff. And for me, they were like, oh, I know the guy that started Flickr and Blogger and Twitter and Slack and things like that. So what did you do with your company when you decided to tour with the band? I handed it over to my business partner. Was that a difficult decision for you? I got offered a record deal, Tim, in 1994.

It was like rock and roll. No, it was not a difficult decision. I figured that'd be the answer, but I wanted to ask just in case. You know, I mean, I also I started doing web stuff for the band. We were we created the first record label website for the little independent record label that we were running on the side. My band was one of the first bands to have a website. And then we got signed to A&M Records and I was in there talking to them about like, oh, what are you guys doing with this whole web thing? And they kind of looked at me like, well, if there are any conferences that you want to go to and you could speak on behalf of A&M.

And so I kind of for, you know, a couple of years before they kind of got going with it, I was sort of like the de facto web guy for A&M Records while I was in one of the bands on their label and stuff like that. So I kept my hand in. What brought you back to the web? Well, in about 2001, there were a whole bunch of record label mergers. There were in the 90s, there were nine major record labels. And over the course of about a year and a half, that number went to three. So basically, they just all sort of collapsed in on each other. And, you know, our first album had done well,

but basically A&M came back to us and said, hey, you know, we think you've got momentum here. Rather than squeezing everything we can out of this album, why don't you go and do another album? However, when the accountants came plumbling through to try and decide which bands to keep and which to leave while these labels were emerging, we just hadn't sold enough records. And so we lost our record deal. And we kind of fumbled on for a while. We put out some stuff independently, went back to that record label that we'd started back in like 91, 92. And, you know, it was a few years before the label money dried up.

But I, you know, started, put out my shingle and started doing freelance stuff. I got a job at an ad agency through a series of circumstances and coincidences. My wife and I ran Ringo Starr's website for about three years. And that sort of led to bigger and other projects for sort of celebrity type people and kind of bigger and bigger web projects, which eventually led me to Drupal. And in trying to build a really big and difficult Drupal website, I met Matt Westgate, who was just a guy doing work in the Drupal community. And I met him on a message board because he was just the most friendly person answering my questions, all of my really like kind of beginnery questions. And he was super

friendly. And I said, hey, can I get on the phone with you? Can I just ask you these questions? I would pay you. I'd done the math. And if like I could pay you to answer these Drupal questions for me, then it would save me time and it would be well worth it for me to pay you out of my own pocket. And so I did that. And the whole time I'm saying, this is so great. You really know this stuff. This is like you can't find this information anywhere. And as the project was starting to wrap up, I kept saying to him, like, I we got to do something. I got to I got to pay you back more than just the money I'm paying you. Like, let's do something. Let's start a company where we can just, you can explain to people how to use Drupal. I know how to start a company. I know how to promote things. And that's what

became Lullabot. And Lullabot started in 2006. And it was still really early days, you know, with Drupal, there weren't any books out about it or anything like that. So we, you know, with Drupal, there weren't any books out about it or anything like that. So we, you know, Lullabot people authored some of the first, well, Matt authored one of the first Drupal books and we started the first Drupal related podcast and did the first Drupal trainings and built a lot of the kind of first Drupal websites that people have heard of. We launched on January 1st, 2006, mostly to just make it easy to remember. And by March, I have pictures of us sitting in a pub in London where we were starting work on the MTV UK website, which was kind of the first website where, you know, because previous to that, it was like, oh, the, you know, University of Calgary has built their, you know, this website, you know, like, oh, that's really cool.

Like, OK. But it wasn't like MTV, you know. And and so, you know, from there we we did all kinds of stuff. Think think back to 2006 to you. What what was the scariest thing of starting a company? I don't know. So about a year prior to that, maybe a year, a little over a year prior to that, I had a job at an ad agency and my wife and I were running Ringo Starr's website and the people at the ad agency kind of thought that was cool and a little bit like, why are you here at this little Providence ad agency when you're doing all

these things out there? But my wife was pregnant. We just bought a new house and I walked into my manager's office to ask for more time off. I was out of my vacation days, but there was another web conference I wanted to go to and I thought it was fine. Just don't pay me, you know? And he turned to me and he said, what are you doing here? Like, why are you working here? You could be doing other things, you know that, right? And I said, uh, yeah, I know, I guess so. He said, go do other things. I said, uh, okay. All right. And so I left there and I left that job. And as I was driving home, I was thinking, wait a minute, did I just quit? Or was I, I just bought a house. I've got a mortgage. And I've got, I've got a, you know, my son was born like, you know, three months later. And like,

so jumping off into the abyss is kind of my skill. And so I'm not saying that it's not scary. I'm saying that perhaps my skill is just not being able to estimate how scary it will be. Right. So was Lullabot scary? No, not at all. It seemed like the next thing to do. And we had a whole lot of success early on. I mean, the fact that we got MTV within three months of starting was key.

Like, you know, it felt like, oh, this is good. It's a positive feedback mechanism. But, you know, as we started to hire people, there were definitely fearful points, you know, why, why, why am I doing this? And it always, it's the same, it's the same thing with the band or anything. It's like, well, why am I doing this? The answer is because at one point I thought it would be really cool. Right. Ah, that'd be cool. I want to do that. The metaphor I always use is like,

it would be really cool to swim across this lake. And about halfway swimming across the lake, it's like, what the F? Then why did I do this? This is crazy. I have no idea how I'm going to get across this lake. And then you get to the other side and all these people come up and go like, wow, it is so great that, well, how did

you, I don't know how you did that. That's so great. You know, it was like, cause I was going to drown otherwise. There's some lessons in there somewhere for somebody I'm sure. But, uh, yeah, that's, that champion of remote work, why he thinks it's the future of work, and adjusting to life after leaving a company he built and ran for so many years. What's up, AFK listeners? Adam Stachowiak here, Editor-in-Chief of Changelog. If you've been enjoying Tim's exploration of the human side of creative work,

you'll probably love our show, Founders Talk. Founders Talk features stories from founders, CEOs, and makers about their journey, their lessons learned, and the behind-the-scenes of building and running their company. Here's a preview of Pia Mancini, co-founder and CEO of Open Collective. She's sharing some of the struggles of being a mother and a startup founder. The first few months are absolutely hard. So super challenging, you know. They need your attention.

They can't walk. They can't do anything for themselves. And, you know, you're trying to keep doing, but then also, you know, doing your responsibility as a parent and it's just like you know it's just probably the most challenging challenging parts of a parent's life is is those first you know six months to nine months of the child's life for sure but it also it also gives you an extra energy like an extra i don't know creativity i don't know if it's the hormones or what but it's like you have that you know you go into a yeah you go into a different gear and you just you just keep pushing forward i don't know there's something that kind of makes you um yeah just

shift gears into that extra thing and and you can and you can do it also Also, what I found mostly with motherhood is I don't have time for BS, essentially. I don't have very little time to waste or to spare. So you become, at least I became really good at saying no to things and just, cutting loose things or situations or people that just, yeah, I didn't just didn't have time. It made me much more focused because the time I have away from my daughter is like I'm doing this right. Otherwise, I'm with her. So Founders Talk is all about in-depth, one-on-one conversation with founders and makers. If you dig that, learn more and subscribe at changelog.com slash Founders Talk. From Changelog Media, this is Away From Keyboard. I'm Tim Smith.

When Jeff and Matt Westgate started Lullabot in 2006, they decided that it would be a distributed company from day one. I've always thought it was such a brave decision, but Jeff describes it more as a happy accident. In itself, it was a little bit of a leap of faith, that missing part of my brain. But it worked really well. And even just sort of because it was an experiment, it allowed everything to be more agile and thoughtful that like, I don't know, how should we talk to each other? How should we keep in touch? How should we communicate? How should we, you know, when you have these barriers where

you're not all coming into an office and kind of falling into these legacy systems and processes of like, ah, of course, I know what it means to work at an office and commute for an hour each direction. Like I know how that works. Um, but this, none of us knew how it worked. And so, uh, it was really great to kind of figure it out as we went. But as we figured it out, it was like, this is great. Like I want to share this with other people. And, um, having worked at O'Reilly, uh, media in the early nineties and being a friend with, uh, Tim O'Reilly, Tim has a sayings and being a friend with Tim O'Reilly, Tim has a saying that everyone has a book in them. What's your book? And my wife has written several books about web design and continues to do that. And so I thought, I want to share this, but I don't quite feel like I can speak on behalf of a community of companies that are doing this.

I could just talk about what Lullabot did, but I don't know if that will help anyone because it's kind of built into the company's DNA. And I kind of want to get a good cross section of like what's going on. And I think that for companies to talk to each other would generally be good. And so I had this idea to do a conference, but a sort of a discussion, what I call a roundtable discussion conference. And we decided to call it Yonder, where we invited people that were running distributed companies, remote teams, company leaders and managers to just kind of sit around in a room together and share, ask questions, share ideas and have a discussion. And that's how Yonder got started.

As I started to make my way out of Lullabot, I took the brand along with me and started doing a podcast and eventually hired some people to do content. And we have an active newsletter now. Yonder.io is where people should go to find out more about Yonder and get on the mailing list

and listen to the podcast if you're a podcast person. And if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are a podcast person. And if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are a podcast person. You know, there's a fair amount of resources out there that are sort of aimed at remote workers or sort of digital nomads, you know. But my fear is that that discussion is a little bit of an echo chamber and it doesn't actually expand the job market. It doesn't create more jobs for those people. So my focus has been trying to talk to companies and about companies

and how companies hire and manage and run remote teams. I think remote workers will find it interesting. And, you know, it's sort of this idea of like managing up, you know, for the workers to understand what good management looks like. They can kind of nudge their managers in the right way. Hey, have you heard this podcast? And, you know, ultimately kind of create a better work environment. But that's, you know, my goal is to, my mission with Yonder is to really expand that market. And, you know, it's happening slowly. The people that are doing, the companies that are doing remote work, there's so much excitement and elation around how good it is that it's easy to kind of think that everyone must understand that. But really, like in that

world of like Fortune 500 companies, we're just not there yet. Those companies are not champing at the bit to make remote work work. But I think, you know, we're going to hit the tipping point in the next few years and the podcast is going to become very popular. Yeah, it's already pretty popular. But I like the I like the description that remote work is the future of work. And, you know, I really do think that the companies that have latched onto this idea have only benefited because they have this amazing pool of people that they can hire from. Absolutely. That isn't tied to any particular location. You know, who are kind of devoid of the, as I like to say, ass and seat mentality where as long as I'm here for eight hours, I did what I was supposed to do. Right. Rather than I feel like the remote work kind of whole idea is to be productive in the moments that you're in front of your desk.

Well, yeah. I mean, remote work is autonomy. Like the idea of autonomy is not an add on to work when you're doing remote work. Like you can work at McDonald's and you're not going to have any autonomy. You could work at Starbucks and oh, there's a little bit more culture and they give us a little bit more choice. You know, I have some autonomy. You know, this feels great. If you're doing remote work, people can't look over your shoulder there. You know, there are certainly companies that are developing tools for this sort of big brother shoulder looking over. But you're kind of fighting against nature a little bit there, you know, and you mentioned this, but, you know, to sort of expand on it a little bit, one of the reasons that companies who are hiring remote workers can get such great talent is because there are so many people that want to work remotely. And not only are you choosing from a larger talent pool, kind of by definition, you're offering a better job, right, because it's more flexible and offers probably autonomy and trust and respect along with it, right? Because it's more flexible and offers probably autonomy and trust and respect along with it, right? Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully, hopefully. I don't, you know, companies have all sorts of different cultures and even distributed companies have all sorts of different cultures. But this means like most of the companies I talk to, you know, I was just talking to Addie Berry, who runs Drupalize Me, which was a spinoff company from Lullabot that does Drupal training online. And she was saying they were hiring a customer support person. She said that they got, I think it was like 3,000 applications in four or five days

or something like, it was just like an incredible amount of like, you know, and and so from that, now you're now you're just playing numbers, right? This is just statistics, you know, right? How many how many of those people are good? How many of those people are great? How many of those people are better than you could imagine? Like, you know, just sift through them and find the ones that are better than you can imagine and then hire them. And now you've got people working at your company that are better than you can imagine, you know. So it's been a few years now that you've left Bollobot. What led up to that decision?

Well, you know, I'm a starter. I'm a big thinker. You know, I like solving really difficult problems and I like, you know, making things that are kind of indistinct, more distinct, you know, things that are confusing, more clear, you know. So that comes into like things like branding and kind of building culture and all that kind of stuff. And I also really like working with really great, talented people. And so over the years with Lullabot, there were a lot of big problems to solve. Who are we? How do we talk about ourselves? What do we do? How do we do what we do? What is health insurance? How

do you offer health insurance to employees? Things like that that are these like, ah. And so over time, I'm not saying that I did all of that, but I helped to find really great people to come in and help Lullabot to do that. And we have hired a really great leadership team of really capable people. I don't tend to carry a whole lot of ego when it comes to that kind of stuff. I'm happy to relinquish control and let other people do things when they're, when they're capable. And so I kind of got to a point where I was surrounded by all these really capable leader people who were running the company and we had kind of figured out who we were. There were a couple of years that we're kind of looking for

the missing pieces. What are we not thinking about? What are we not thinking about? What are the pieces that are falling between the cracks? Like I've, you know, found somebody to do sales and I found someone to do HR. You know, what are we not thinking about? But, you know, as even those pieces started to get kind of at least defined, if not fixed, I found myself sort of, I wouldn't say with nothing to do, but just kind of getting antsy. And my business partner, Matt, started to see me kind of in that position. And he said, you know, what do you need? I said, I don't know. Do you want to take some time off? You know, maybe you could take a sabbatical and just sort of, you know, find your mojo. And when you're running a company, it's like having children. You know, you don't you wouldn't ever consider not being there for them, right? This is just, you know, this is my life. It's not even, you don't even think of it as a responsibility because there's not the option to not do that.

You know, you have a responsibility to feed yourself, but it doesn't feel like a burden. It's just what you do, you know? And in that same way, I was just running Lollabop. But as I started thinking about kind of stepping away and kind of catching my breath, it was really more appealing. I really kind of surprised myself. And so I did that for a while. And about six months later, Matt came to me and said, listen, I've been thinking, if you wanted Lullabot to buy you out, we could do that. That would be, you know, a way that we could go. And he'd been doing a whole lot of research about employee-owned companies and just sort of the financial models around all of that. And he said, you know,

we could do this for you. And then if I, Matt, wanted to do that, maybe at some point down the road, you would be paving the way for a model for me to do that if I ever wanted to do that. But it, you know, it's taken me a good period of time to kind of find my identity, you know. For so long, it was, you know, the Lullabot guy. And people would even say like, oh, do you still play music? And I'd say, well, I don't know, how long can you go like not playing music and still call yourself a musician? And, you know, because it was just like, I was so, you know, entrenched in the Lullabot stuff. And it was I mean, it was emotionally rewarding. We were great people. We were working on great projects, you know, all of that stuff.

I'm not saying that it was, but, you know, I was kind of I definitely had sort of set that part aside. What is that adjustment period been for you? Because I would assume that when you build a business and it's so successful as Lullabot has been and you're running it for so many years, what is that adjustment like to walk away and, you know, now try to have to, like you said before, trying to figure out what your identity is? Yeah, it's weird, but it's been nice not to carry that weight. It allows me to even relate to the people

who continue to work at Lullabot in a different ways. You know, I'm not the boss anymore. And I also, I started doing business coaching and talking to other people that lead other companies about what they're doing and kind of help them to think about their companies. And that's been super rewarding. You know, it's, you know,

a lot of the same stuff I was doing as the CEO of Lullabot, but I get to kind of help these other people who have different problems out, you know, and share my experience. That's been really rewarding. And then I started a new band last year and we put out a five song EP earlier this year and it's been getting really good reviews and responses and people, you know, so I'm out. I just had a show on Saturday and it was really great. So it feels really good to kind of be exercising those muscles again, recording and kind of the more like entrenched creative side of things, because, you know, I mean, I think that business is creative and it ought to be creative, but kind of at scale when there's a lot of money involved and I guess a lot of people

involved too, you want to double check, right? You want to make sure the math adds up. So it's just really nice to be kind of back, you know, where I can just like, I'm going to write a song that has one note. The whole song is just one note, you know, and like, I can do that. People are going to say, oh, that's weird. I'm curious to listen to it. Not like, oh my God, you're going to drive our company into the ground. You know, like, that's a crazy idea. Why would you do that?

You know, so it's nice to have that outlet. And yeah, just nice balance. Jeff Robbins. You can find him at dayjeff.com. that outlet and yeah, just nice balance. Timmy Tim on Twitter. You can find the show at AFK underscore show. Thank you to our sponsor, Hired. Head to Hired.com slash AFK. Our bandwidth is provided by Fastly. Learn more about them at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at ChangeLog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to Linode.com slash ChangeLog. We'll be taking a bit of a break so that I can take a much needed vacation and we'll be back on August 29th. One last thing before we go,

Jeff told me what life is like having a record deal. I mean, it wasn't particularly lucrative. You know, it meant that there was money to record, but more than that, it meant that like people cared. You know, there was sort of a support system. You know, we paid ourselves very minimally, just enough to get by because we wanted to, you know, invest the money that was out there and making sure that the band could get out and have the money to tour and promote and be successful and stuff like that. So it was really, you know, it was it was great. It had a lot of like peak life experiences you know there's really nothing quite like standing on a stage playing to 20,000 people like that's pretty cool

you know and it's hard not to walk off stage and go like that was really cool I'm Tim Smith and this is Away From Keyboard