The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The business model of open source (Interview)

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

This week we're joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef's acquisition in 2020 for $220 million...in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much _stealth mode_ details as he could about System Initiative.

What's up? Welcome back. This is the ChangeLog. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog. Every week we talk to the hackers, leaders, and innovators in open source and the software world at large. Today we're talking with Adam Jacobs, CEO of System Initiative and co-founder of Chef, about open source business models and which business model he thinks is the right model to choose. His graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef's acquisition in 2020 for $220 million in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much Stealth Mode details as he could about what they're doing at System

Initiative. Of course, huge thanks to our partners, Leno, Fastly, and LaunchDarkly. We love Leno. They keep it fast and simple. Get $100 in credit at leno.com slash changelog. Our bandwidth is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com. And get your feature flags,

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Adam Jacob, it's been, I guess, a few years since you've been on the show. And I've honestly been looking forward to ever since the last time you had a new show. So I'm glad to have you back. Me too. It's so fun. That's a lot to live up to. We had three years of anticipation of talking to you again. That's true. Yeah, I got to bring it. And don't let us down here.

I will try my best. You know, so I'll frame it then. I'll frame it for the reason why. So my mind has been changed and I look at it differently ever since you talked about AWS as the marketing funnel. And, you know, I had a different vision for that. Like I had a different view of it. My perspective was changed with a lot of things we talked about on that show. We'll link it up in the show notes for everybody listening. So there's a lot of my mind that I changed because of that conversation with you.

And then earlier this year, we did that show on Elastic and AWS and that whole kerfuffle. And while we didn't get you back for that, we did reuse some of the audio from the initial show in 2019, which was still on point, you know? Yeah. So I've pretty much been looking forward to a revisit to a lot of that change perspective, a lot of the new things happening in open source and just generally, you know, catching up with some of your history, which we didn't get to dig into. So that's why I've been looking forward to talking to you since

then. Well, that's awesome. Cause I love talking about all those things. Like the narcissist in me loves talking about myself and I love talking about open source. So yeah, I'm in. That's awesome. Doesn't mean perfect then. Yeah, exactly. Let's frame it a little bit for those catching up. So you're an original founder of Chef,

changed the game quite a bit. It was originally called OpsCode. Massively successful open source project and would you call it a commercial open source company? How would you frame that? commercial open source company how would you frame that is that a newer term since the beginning of chef let's frame some of your history so to speak yeah i don't love the commercial open source thing because i i sort of believe open source and business are like open source is a strategy for businesses yeah so like the idea of a commercial

open source company it feels weird to me and I don't like it. Whatever, I don't like calling them open source business models either, but everybody does. You have to choose a lexicon that everybody gets, right? Yeah, and I'm a systems administrator and I hate that DevOps became a job title because I feel like it meant that my people gave up their identity.

But nobody cares. So whatever, I call them DevOps engineers like everybody else. I still call Adam out because he uses the word literally, non-literally. And it's just like, Jared, give it up, man. You know, you've lost that battle. Yeah, it's over. Yeah, that happened.

Literal does not mean literal anymore. You just have to live with it. Yeah, that literally happened a while ago and it's done now. Oh, man. Yeah. My daughter does that too. She said literally. She says it in this like really specific way.

It's hilarious. So Chef was definitely a commercial open source company by that terminology's phrasing and we went through sort of every variation of that so you know we we started out where the the plan was originally like pure sass like we were going to open source everything and then we were going to run it for you as a sass platform and everybody was going to do hosted configuration management in the cloud because why would you ever want to run any of that stuff not in SaaS? We were just wicked early, like crazy too early to have people make that leap. So it took a couple of years for us to finally get the message

that the market was telling us that you couldn't really do that. And so then we shifted to more open core. So we had a variant of the open core so we took the we had like a variant of the open source server that was what we ran for our sass and we turned that into a commercial piece of software that we sold for money that had different features so it had multi-tenancy and some other stuff then that eventually also was open sourced and there was another platform that was more focused on like analytics and some other stuff. And then we bought another product called inspect that was also open source. And then we rolled some compliance stuff on top of that. And then we did some continuous delivery

stuff. And then we did some application deployment stuff. And you know, all that stuff was some mix or another of open source and free. And then in the end end what we learned was that we could just never get the mix right and you kind of couldn't win for losing you know like you'd you'd open source something and everybody was thankful but then the people who were paying you only because of that one feature wanted to stop paying you or i would put something in the commercial bag and people would be like you guys are like not true open source scotsman you know like if you were real open source scotsman that'd be free you bastards right and it's just like no matter where i turned there was somebody who was mad at me it was i or or was giving me the finger because they weren't going to pay me

for my product and so in the end we wound up doing a lot of research and a lot of like soul searching which is kind of tied to my leaving chef to, sort of just in timing. But Chef changed its business model to being like Red Hat. So it was completely open source. And what they do is they take every piece of software they build as open source. And the product, Chef itself, if you want it, you have to pay Chef money for it. And if you want it from somebody else, you can go get it.

There's a lovely open source project that's called Sync. And those guys repackage the software and they call it Sync. And you can have it as open source for zero dollars. Or you can buy it from Chef. That's the short version of Chef in open source history. Short version, yeah. And to give some further back dates. It was good. It was succinct enough. 2008 was the beginning. It was 15 years. Yeah. I mean, that's a long time.

Yeah. I mean, that was the beginning of OpsCode. Before then, we were running a consulting company called HJK that did fully automated infrastructure for startups. So sort of even before that, that crew of people had been together for a couple of years before OpsCode started, before Chef was written. Was that initials or them wannabe? It was initials.

Yeah, it was my partner and co-founder Nathan Haney-Smith and then a gentleman who was with us in that era but didn't translate into the Ops Code era, Sakshiri Kritikara, and then I was the J. I figured you were the J. Yeah, and then Barry Steinglass. We put two and two together on that one. Well, you know, but I don't know what your listeners are thinking.

And then our sort of fourth partner was Barry Steinglass, but he joined right after we named it. And so he was the S in solutions. That's a nice hack. You mentioned the tension there with never being right. How did you deal with that? Considering I know you to some degree, at least I think I do, being a very fan of open source, even so much to say it's not an open source business model, it's a strategy, you seem very purist when it comes to open source and very in touch with what open source is. How did you deal with the tension that you always had to battle given what you were doing with Chef?

I mean, I think okay, but badly. You know, like I, it turns out that with open source, what I care about is I care about people more than I care about companies. And that's not because I didn't care about my company. I care deeply about my company. It was very important to me. The one I run now is very important to me. I take that. It's very seriously.

It's my career. It's important to me. When I think about open source, though, I don't think about companies i think about people and i think about the optionality that those people have in their lives that they otherwise wouldn't have had because that's what open source did for me you know when i was 16 15 whatever i was and got that first like you know slackware on floppy disks or i think it was the yggdrasil actually, not even Slackware, like that opened up the whole world for me in terms of what I could build and my whole career, like my whole life has sort of been sort of, you could draw a straight line from, you know, floppy disks in the back of

a book to where to this podcast. And so, you know, that's because those opportunities were available to me because those people created open source software and put it into the world. And not only could I use it, but I could break it. I could tinker with it. I could open it up. I could see how it worked on the inside. And that allowed me to create the opportunities for myself that eventually led to Chef, which eventually leads to like where I am now, which like I'm in this lovely house and there's like deer outside and like, it's my life's great, you know? And it's because these people did this for me they created this commons and they created this space that to me is what's important and what i care about and what i came to realize is that when i tried to take a different

lens on why that mattered to me it was false i didn't care about it because of the money i like the money but that's a different thing that I care about they're not the same does that make sense? you're optimizing for the accessibility even as you said that I thought about my straight line to this point in time and Jared I'd love for you to do this as well

my straight line was GeoCities which was not open source but an initial, it was the on-ramp to putting something on the internet and I was like wow this is this is possible, you know? Yeah. And the very next thing was figuring out how I could run my own site. And at the time it was WordPress way back in those days.

There you go. And then my next thrush was Ruby on Rails and putting it on a Linux server, honestly. And that's like my earliest impression into say open source and accessibility. So it's this ability to be able to play as well. Right? To be able to see the Lego, not just the thing that gets built with the Lego. Yeah. What about you, Jared?

Yeah. What's your straight line? Yeah. I mean, mostly came out of in college just learning about Linux and seeing my colleagues. What do you call them in college? Friends? Co-students? I don't know.

That's a stretch. People using Linux and all of these and being like, where do you buy that? And I'm like, no, it's all free. It's all free? I mean, that's where I really started with these, like free as in cost. Free as in beer.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, when you were in college. Yeah, you knew where you were. Yeah, totally. Free beer would be great. Free software, awesome too. Yeah. And it really did go through wordpress i think so like it was like pearl and linux command line stuff and then wordpress brought me to the web yeah and then i also went through beyond rails route so i was in ruby and etc but it was definitely just

as simple as like i can just use all this software for free. And that was awesome. It is awesome. And then there's this moment where it goes from that to being a source of opportunity, where if you want to build something, or you want to make something, or you want to try something, or you want to like, have a career, like, it's all available to you, it's all open to you. And like, you know, we don't all start out in life in the same position. Like, we don't come from the same families, we don't come from the same economic backgrounds and countries, like, there's a million things in our lives that influence like where we can end up or where we can go or what we can do. And open source is this lovely thing where it turns out, you can always take this software and do what you need to do with it to

make your life better. And there might be other reasons why you can't take advantage of that resource existing, but that resource does exist and no one can take it away from you and no one can tell you not to do it and no one can tell you not to start. And then there's even more beautiful than that. As soon as you start, you're going to find this community of people who embrace you for doing it, who love you for doing it, who then also benefited from that moment. And then all of a sudden there's this huge web of people whose lives are infinitely better than they would have been before. That for me, like, that's it. That's what i cared about and when i think about all the other things in open source that i'm nerdy about and i'm nerdy about all of it that for me that's what mattered

and it took a lot of soul searching to figure that out like that i didn't know that's how i felt until i spent like a really significant amount of time reading philosophy and like giving myself therapy and being like what is it that i want like why do i and being like, what is it that I want? Like, why do I care? What is it? What is this thing that matters to me? And why does it matter?

It was hard. Congratulations on not being tainted by the opportunities. Cause I think you can, you can have this access, right. And then even take that access and turn it into an opportunity or see the opportunity and then be tainted by the money or the possibility of millions or billions. I mean, there's openainted by the money or the possibility of millions or billions.

I mean, there's open source companies that are raising multiple hundreds of millions of dollars worth billions at a valuation. And it's very tantalizing. It's very... I mean, they should take it. Sure. But I mean, I'm seeing if on the wrong side of the fence, you can... It's like Loki when he touches him with the spear or whatever.

They immediately turn into like a Loki or whatever. That's a very flattering thing to say, but I'm not sure how true it is. Like, you know, like here I am. And like, like chef was a very successful company. I'm saying congratulations.

Congratulations for not. I think I am. Okay. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Like, I don't know that I'm untainted by it. Do you know, like I knew what I wanted,

like in the same way, like what I wanted was to like, I don't know if you guys remember Zimian. Do you remember Zimian? Like red carpet. It's, i think it predates both of you based on the story of your straight line but it was like the first open source company i remember nat friedman and miguel de casa so nat friedman the ceo of github now miguel de casa open source superhero.net right mono right yes those guys also created gnome that's right and way back in the day they started a company with venture capital money to make like software for linux and they made like an update

system and they made like an exchange competitor and i remember being with my buddies and we were running this isp nathan haney smith who co-founded chef with me Like we saw that happen and we were like, man, we got to get in on that. Like you can start a company building open source software with other people's money and like get rich. Like, you know, we were sitting on a porch, like drinking beer and being like, we should figure out how to get rich. Like this startup game is legit.

And like, it worked, right? Like right like yeah it did work like we got rich yeah i don't want it to seem like i'm whatever some kind of saint i wanted to get rich and it worked and i'm rich now yeah and it's better to be rich than not to be rich i don't feel a lot of shame about it and also the thing about it that mattered, if I hadn't gotten rich, it would have been fine because the amount of opportunity and the relationships that happened in the community that happened from those things and the relationships I have with those people would have been worth it either way. If that whole thing had gone the other way and it totally could have, there were a million moments where it could have gone the other way, like it would have been fine. It would have been great. I was already fine. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. So like, I don't think I was untouched by the Loki spear is what I'm trying to say. I see. Like I knew what I wanted and it was open source that like helped me get what I wanted. But what I wanted wasn't like, it wasn't pure. I'm not like a monk.

So Chef sold for 220 million in cash, according to our notes. Is that accurate? Yeah, it's accurate enough, sure. And so there you were holding part of that, the goodies there. And then did you have a hard time deciding, I've accomplished rich, I like open source stuff. I mean, you can always get more rich.

That's a secret. That's a secret of getting rich. You just want more money. What drove you next? Right? Yeah. I mean, I love, I'm a systems administrator, like at heart, you know, and I like, I love building things and I love infrastructure and I love people who build infrastructure. I love those communities. Like that's my, those are my people. And that's my jam in the same way that like heavy metal is my jam. Like those are my people. And so, you know, I took a lot of time off and I left chef, I think in a good way. I, I had left chef before the acquisition. I was on the board, but I, I wasn't active day to day. I'd had quite a

bit of time off and I, you know, I played video games and I spent time with my daughter. I walked her to school every day and I was just in my life in a way that I hadn't been able to be for whatever 15 years but there was never a question about whether I was going to build something again because I like building things in the same way that I like playing video games or I like being with my family or I like heavy metal or I like any of those things Like I like computers and I like software and I like infrastructure and I like writing programs and I like building companies. Like one of the best things to me about venture capital is that I can come up with a wild plan that like has this, like the building of a business as a thing you do with your

hands as a thing that happens from work. I love that work. It's so fun. And it's so fun to like think about building those things and to watch people thrive and to watch your customers thrive and to figure out like what the right product is to build. Like what a joy to get to do that all at all.

And then to be able to do it with people who for their professional living take money that other people have made that they're willing to risk on high risk ventures, and then find people like me and say, Oh, yeah, I want you to go do that for sure. You should definitely go on that crazy journey to build that product and try to make a company out of it. And if you don't, it's cool. If it doesn't work out, no harm, no foul. Yeah, so you're investing now?

No, no, I'm CEOing a company called The System Initiative. And I do a little investing through Amplify, which is a venture capital fund that also invested in System Initiative. But no, what I do is build things. And I want to build things again, so I'm building things again. And it's very cool.

Do you find that there's a difference in drive or ambition? Maybe you were hungrier then. Maybe you didn't have as much money. You don't have to do this anymore. maybe you're hungrier than maybe you were i didn't have as much money you know you don't have to do this anymore so you're doing it for the love of the game but does that love of the game produce like the old production did that's a great question i mean i do still have to work because your life tends to inflate to the size of what's available ah do you know what i mean i do this is why many nba players end up bankrupt end up poor yeah

so i don't think i'm on like nba player like cocaine binge trajectory or whatever i think everything's i think everything's cool a little more sustainable than that can i say that on the podcast is that okay that's your point of view thanks man but like yeah i don't think so i think what's changed is that early on with hjk and then with Chef and OpsCode, like all of us who I think started that company would share this point of view, which is we had something to prove to ourselves about who we were. Forget about proving it to the outside world. You know, that question of like, who am I and what can I do? There's a great hardcore lyric I really like, which is you shouldn't seek what you already are. I don't need to strive to be who I am. I'm already who I am. Then I don't think we

knew who we were and who we wanted to believe we were, were people who could start companies, who could make products, who could sell product, who could like run venture capital businesses. Like we wanted to be those people, but we didn't know if we were those people. And everything was fraught with peril. You know, it was like a motorcycle gang. We all like joined together, we were bonded by blood. And we were going to like we were going for it. And that was beautiful and lovely, and also really hard, and very emotional. And not everybody always made their best decisions, because it's really hard to make those good decisions when you're also trying to understand who you are. You know, you're growing up. Now I know who I am and who I am as a person who can build companies. I can write software. I can bring products into the world. I can do all of those things. I don't have to be nervous about

whether that's who I am. That is who I am. And it doesn't matter if I succeed or fail. No one can take that away from me because it's me. It's in me. And that's very different than it was, you know, 15 years ago. And so in a lot of ways, it's more fun because I can just do the work. And that's the secret about all of this stuff. Everybody wants to make it out like it's whatever there's some like it's chess. And it's really not, it's checkers. Like you just got to show up every day and work, like make the next right decision and like put in the time and that's what it is. And so I don't feel like I've lost drive. I feel like what I've lost is the anxiety that comes from being unsure if I'm going

to be okay, if it doesn't work out out because now I know for sure I'm fine not just because I've had an outcome but because as a person like what are you going to do tell me I'm bad at it like I know I'm good at it does that make sense yeah I had said once before where I was like you just show up and do the work and he's done that's it and someone said that wasn't right it takes a lot more than that's kind of what it is though you just show up every day consistently and do the work and he's done yeah and that's that's it a And someone said, that wasn't right. It takes a lot more than that. I said, no, that's kind of what it is, though. You just show up every day consistently and do the work, and he's done. Yeah. And that's a basic framework to getting to where you want to go.

And that could be your success versus my success. They're probably a little different, or they're probably a lot of the same. But no matter what, whatever I think success is, if I keep doing that, I'm probably going to arrive where I want to be if I keep showing up and doing what he's done. Yeah, there's no guarantees in life. So sometimes it doesn't work out. But like, another thing I think that's different for like, I think you need that for sure. So that's the most important thing, especially if you look over a long time horizon. You know, if I look back over chef and that 15 year period in my life, there were tons of moments that felt like they were the most critical time. And if we didn't figure it out, we were going to die because we were going to die because there wouldn't have been a chef

anymore. And also when you look back at those times, they didn't matter. And whatever choices we made were relatively binary and probably it would have worked out fine in whatever direction we chose, as long as we kept putting the work in behind that choice. And we really wanted to believe that one choice or the other was the distinction. And I'm not sure that in that in hindsight, it really was, it was just that ability to like, okay, yep, like, this is what we've decided, we're going to push as hard as we can. And then we're going to make the next best decision. And we're going to push as hard as we can. And you do that over a long enough time period. And, and it's pretty much going to work out. I think the other thing that you need is you have to sort of be convinced that,

that you can win and not in like an egotistical way where it's like, you know, I'm going to win because I'm the man, but simply because like, you have to believe that winning is possible because if in your heart you believe that winning is impossible, then even showing up and doing the work, you'll kind of sabotage yourself a little. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Because it's hard. You need hope. Yeah.

Knowing the winning is a possibility is a sign of hope, really. Yes. Yes. Yes. If you think it's not possible, then why? Then why play? Why show up and swing? This episode is brought to you by our friends at Square. Square is the platform that sellers trust.

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And so there's this massive market of sellers who need help from developers. They either need a bespoke solution built for themselves on their own node stack, where they are working with Square Dashboard, working with Square Hardware, or with the e-com, you know, what you see is what you get builder. And they need one more thing. They need an additional build.

And then finally, we have the app marketplace where you can make a node app and then distribute it so it can get in front of millions of sellers and be an option for them to adopt. Very cool. All right, if you want to learn more, head to developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs, and to create your Square Developer account. Start developing on the platform sellers trust. Again, that's developer.squareup.com. so do you think you've learned through chef that the red hot hat style that you guys eventually adopted like is that the way to go if you're trying to do what y'all did yeah i know there's

different models or they're not business models. There's different ways you can approach business as an open source. You should a hundred percent call them business models. Cause that's what everyone does. So I should, I'm trying to be gracious for you. I know you don't like the term, but I respect you so much. Yeah. There are other ways to do it, but it seems like that's kind of the one that you've decided is the best one. Yeah. I mean, with the giant caveat that like everybody's situation is different, yada, yada, yada. I think if you really break down the options available, there's some just immutable facts about business that are just real. So the

way business works, no matter what you want to do, you have something, and I would like it. And in order to get it, I must hand you dollar bills. That's business in a nutshell. Anytime that we're not doing that, what we're doing might be interesting, but it's probably not business, right? But that's really what business is like, you've got stuff, I want it, I pay you, I get it. What we do with open source businesses is open source tends to mean that I can have it for free, that for zero dollars I can acquire the resource. And that means, of course, that some people won't pay you for it because they don't have to pay you for it. And so then you have to find out, well, what's the thing that I pay you for? The way I talk about that is that you're creating artificial scarcity, right?

The software itself is infinite. Anybody can use it and you can get it from anyone and it's all good. But in order to get you to pay for it, I have to create some kind of scarcity so that you're willing to part with your hard earned cash in order to acquire the goods. So one way we create that scarcity, the traditional way is by just keeping it to yourself and then only giving it away for money. That's proprietary software, right? And that model we know works. If you build something of value and you want to sell it for money, people will pay for it because they want it. And like, it's pretty straightforward. When

we do open source, we're making it more complicated every time. And so in the most traditional one, we would do like open core where we say, well, yeah, the main part of what we do, which is usually the most valuable thing you do, because if it's not valuable, then the open source users don't need it, right, is completely free. It's $0. And it's open source, you can take the source and build derivatives and do whatever you want with it. And then there's some other thing we build on top of it, that's even more valuable than the first thing was to a certain target market. So, you know, analytics for the enterprise

would be a good answer or SAML support. If you want SAML support, it costs extra, right? The problem with the open core model is that you always get it wrong and you gave away the most valuable asset, which is probably whatever it was you did in open source. So in the case of Chef, the most valuable thing you got from Chef was Chef. Like you had configuration management. It ran Facebook for free. That's amazing.

That's super valuable. I gave it to you for free, $0. Now, when I would try to build open core software on top of it, it was never as valuable as Chef. It's hard to build something that's that valuable. So like trying to find something that's that valuable on top of something that's that valuable. It's just it's a really difficult proposition. So then the next way to think about doing that, there's a lot of others, but let's just talk about open the free software product model. So the Red Hat model. So what Red Hat did that was

genius was they said, all right, software is not a product, right? So if you think about software, just like the bits and a product, a product is something that I buy from someone and it comes with all the things it has. It has packaging and marketing and sales guys and support and documentation. It has all this stuff. Software, that's the stuff that I get from GitHub, you know, or that I could just like, maybe I could run it or maybe I can't. That's software, right? And what Red Hat said was what people buy are products. They don't buy software, they buy products, especially companies, enterprises don't buy software, they buy products. And so what we're going to do is we're going to

make enterprise products out of open source software, right? So they said, we'll take open source software that gets this big reach and gets us like this huge array of different verticals we can go into. And for each one of those things, we're going to package it together into a product that the enterprise can consume. And then we're going to say that that supply chain and all the pieces and components that make up that thing, that's my product. That's what you pay me for. And by doing that, they essentially reinvent the proprietary business model. Because if you want Red Hat Enterprise Linux,

there's only one way to get it. And that's pay Red Hat money. Now, you could run CentOS all day. You could run whatever else you would want to do, feel free. But what it's not is Red Hat. And so then you have to ask yourself questions like, well, do I trust the supply chain? How do I know? Who do I call if there's a problem? What if there's a security vulnerability? And the guy who does the security vulnerability patches in CentOS is on vacation, and they forgot to give somebody else the keys to release the software?

What happens then? What if I have a kernel bug in my high frequency trading systems? How do I feel about that now? And in all those cases, that tends to swing you right back to the proprietary one, right? And that's why people pay for it. And you hear engineers all the time be like, I would never pay for that stuff. What a garbage thing. Software is free, just download it off the internet, do what you want. And like, that's because they're engineers, and they're talking about software, they're not talking about products. And so, yes, I believe the Red Hat model is better because what you get is all the upside of open source. You get all of that community building. You get all of that good juice.

You get all of that like human goodness that comes from doing it that way. And then you also get basically the exact same upsides of a proprietary business, which is if I create value, I charge you for it. And that's the deal. And it simplifies everything. Every other variation is this convoluted model that really only its mother could love. If you like mapped out open core business models on paper, it's insane that that's what you would do.

It's nuts. You would never do it to yourself on purpose. Right. And so now we're seeing a lot of all the like commercial open source stuff like cockroach or elastic or those things that they're not even open source anymore. They're just proprietary software again. What they're doing is reinventing the proprietary business model. But then they're also saying, well, but you can look at the source code like maybe you could fix a bug on my behalf that to me is just like who cares you took all the human goodness part away from it you showed me the source code but why do i give it yeah what's in it for me nothing which doesn't mean your product is bad because i pay money for software all the time i like paying

money for software i got no problem paying you money for good software. But it's not a community. It's users. It's a community the way that Excel has a community. Not a community the way that Linux or WordPress is a community. Right. A group is not a community. Communities, they commiserate. They connect.

For the same reasons we all drew our lines from open source to today for ourselves. Yeah. There's some sort of union in that, either here in this three-person group or the actual communities that represent things that brought us to the street line here. Yes. It's not to say that those communities of users can't bring value to you. They can, but it's not the same

as open source. Open source taught me to program. Open source taught me to, like, there's a whole world that it opened up for me. That doesn't happen because you were a World of warcraft fan who built a cool ui mod do you know what i mean it's not the same so what if you're not targeting enterprises does it then change your answer i mean does it seems like if you're going like b2c or maybe in more smaller companies small businesses it seems like small businesses and also individuals,

I'm thinking of this because of the engineers, like we'll just take the free one, you know? Yeah. Does that change the calculus quite a bit? Because small businesses and indies do not like the things that you can productize into what an enterprise appreciates like that 24-7. I mean, that sounds like a bad business to me. Yeah.

If your target market actively resists paying money for the thing that you produce that you believe is a value that sounds like a business and you should get out truth so is there a subset of open source software that is even viable as a business yeah of course because there's a subset of businesses that are viable as businesses. How large is that minority? Are we talking like 5% of projects, 25%? Half of them? Oh, I don't even know. I think in general, I don't think we've I'm trying to think now sort of on the fly of a good example of a B2C open source company. I can't think of one. Well, something like Tailwind is doing pretty well right now.

They have... Are they? I think they're doing fine. I love Tailwind. I'm using Tailwind. So good. But like, I even pay Tailwind money for their product because I want to pay the Tailwind guys.

Okay. So why aren't they doing so well? I don't know if they're not doing well. I have no idea how much revenue Tailwind's making. I'd be shocked if it was more than a million dollars. I think it's probably around there. Annual? Yeah.

If they're making more than a million dollars in ARR, I'd be surprised. I think it's around there. But is that not a successful business though? Sure. It can be a super successful business. So we'll have to define success before we can answer this question. Yeah. Venture capital success business.

Like success for venture capital backed businesses. Okay. I would say Tailwind is like, there's business success, which is, am I running a business? Am I paying my employees? Am I happy? Is my life good? That's amazing. And people draw a distinction between the two. So let's draw them to right. So then there's like venture capital success. It's a different game you're playing. In the venture capital game, what you're playing is, I believe that I could take this risky product idea and bring it to market and turn it into a giant company and succeed or fail. That's my bet.

Whereas if I'm starting a company to feed myself, the conditions are incredibly different. Now the conditions are, if that thing fails, I don't eat. And so the bar of success is how comfortable am I at eating? You know, like, is my life supported? Is those things and we talk about we sometimes venture capital people sometimes talk about those as like lifestyle businesses, right? And it becomes this like, whatever, like a sneer. I don't think it's a sneer at all. I just think it's a good example of like, I can't think of a big business to consumer open source company in the venture capital sense, whereas in the business-to-business... Maybe WordPress is a good example then.

Yeah, maybe WordPress is a good example, but I think if we broke down WordPress's revenue, I bet even WordPress's revenue is mostly business-to-business, right? Yeah, but not business-to-large enterprise, I guess is the distinction I'm drawing. Maybe it is, I don't know. Maybe it is, yeah.

I bet their highest paying customers are all banks running wordpress instances for something they're probably news organizations with my guess yeah it could be which are kind of big business but like i don't know yeah i don't either you want to talk about infrastructure companies i can like i can dish on right so i mean i think if we are talking about infra but if i'm talking about wordpress i'm a little out of my depth. Probably. I'm probably talking out my ass. Yeah.

The reason why I ask this kind of question is because I think a lot of people go are trying to go from zero to one. Like they have their chef, but it's like their open source project. That's just like their, it's their side hustle. Yeah. And they're like wondering, am I going to be able to do this thing or not? Yeah. You know, what, where are the field goal posts?

Is it full time or is it a $200 million exit? Like those are different ball games that you're playing there. Super different games. But people are usually wondering, can I go from zero to one or is this just always going to be a hobby of mine? You know?

It's always easier to go from a business to something else than it is to go from something else to a business. So like in open source, the thing about starting with something that's open source is your optionality is only to figure out how to close something off, you have to create that scarcity somehow. So you know, if you have an open source project, and you want to create a business out of it, if you wanted to follow the free software product model, which I think you should do, then the number one thing you have to do is stop releasing builds with your branding on them. And you have to make it so no one else could ever

release a version of that software that is called, you know, I'm wearing a McLaren hat, McLaren, like you're the only one who can do that. And then people who want it have to agree to your commercial terms, which means at some point they have to pay you. And doing that would like you could do that and it would, somebody would pay you if it was valuable, like they do it. Yeah. Now you still have to do all the work of designing the business itself, which is who's my target customer?

How do I reach those people? How do I convince them that it's worth buying? How do I get them to try it the first time? And like all that stuff, that's just stuff you have to do, whether what you're doing is open source or what you're doing is closed source. That's just business. And so like, I think the real question for people trying to go from zero to one is what kind of business do you want and you know, how big can it be? And you start by making spreadsheets by just making it up because you can't actually answer any of those questions. And all you're really trying to do

is get to a place where you can believe that success is possible. And if you can't create a spreadsheet that tells you success is possible, it's not possible. So that's like step one. And I've thrown away so many, like what I thought were really great business ideas, because I couldn't build a spreadsheet where when I looked at the spreadsheet, I was like, that's going to work. Like I looked at the spreadsheet and I was like, I'm doomed. I'm done. There's no way, you know? And so you do that. And I think that's the same if it's your open source project or if it's like whatever it's going to be, the difference is your success criteria for that little spreadsheet. You know, if it's, can I feed myself and my family and buy a house? That's one thing. If it's, can it become,

you know, to be viable for venture capital, then the upside of that spreadsheet has to be, it's going to ring the bell and go public. So it has to be, it's going to be trading on the New York stock exchange and it's worth billions of dollars. And like, they're just, it's the same spreadsheet. It's just the bar to say, this is a good idea or a bad idea is dramatically different right yeah you mentioned cockroach and elastic and you said they're not open source they are not and you said they're not they're not obviously not following the the red hat way or this product slash software this dichotomy there you described give us us a spin on CockroachDB, Cockroach Labs as a company,

if they'd have done it the way you say. How could they have done it the open source way? Yeah. So the reason why I use them as a lens is people out there will want to emulate their success. Of course, because they're successful. Raise lots of venture capital, worth billions of dollars,

have a great idea, changing the world with technology and software. It's the dream, baby. That's why I the world, technology and software. So it's the dream, baby. You know, that's why I'm using them as an example. It's a good, it's a good example. Look, I think I just want to be clear. I don't know those guys. I don't, I got no beef. Like everything's, everything's fine. I don't, I'm not upset or whatever. And God bless them. Like it's hard to build a business and be successful and raise venture capital. All that stuff is incredibly difficult. So like me armchair quarterbacking, that's what I'm doing right now. And I just want

everybody to realize like I'm armchair quarterbacking and I know I'm up my own ass. So like me armchair quarterbacking, that's what I'm doing right now. And I just want everybody to realize like I'm armchair quarterbacking and I know I'm up my own ass. So like, let's just, with that being said, I'll answer your question. So like- Okay, appreciate the preface. Yeah.

What's the view like from up there? You know. Let's skip that part. It's healthy. You know what I'm saying? Like everything's pretty good as far as it goes. What Cockroach has done is they built a transformative piece of technology. It's very cool. what i'm saying like everything's everything's pretty good as far as it goes what cockroach has done is they built a transformative piece of technology it's very cool and people who use it

love it and what they've proven is that if you build something that's amazing and you sell it for money people pay you for it which is awesome but that is literally proving that you could build something amazing and if you don't give it to someone, unless they pay you, you'll make money. Like, and so that's great. What they wanted was the upside of open source. And so there's two upsides of open source that people I think think they want in business. So one is this idea of community.

And so that's the sense that says the people who use the software can have an impact on its direction or they can have an impact on, on what it is. But, but mostly it's about like, nothing's better than having a, if you're choosing between having a consumer who just buys your product and has no relationship with you, or like I'm wearing an at the gates t-shirt every day I wake up, I put on a metal t-shirt because those are, that's my people. And like, I pay them money for this shirt because I'm repping for the brand. It's a part of

who I am. Like, and when I go to those shows, I'm not just enjoying the music. I'm commuting with my people and that's community, right? We're creating this sense where like, there's a cockroach. Do you want to have a cockroach DB community where people are cockroach people? There were people at chef who were chef people. You know what I mean? And like, we came together every year. We talked to each other.

We helped each other out in our lives. Like it was church to a degree right so you want that and that's usually attached to the source code right our open source communities tend to grow up partly because of the availability of that source code and that attachment and so they want to have the best of both worlds they want to have that easy monetization where it's clear what they're doing and they can control their own destiny and they also want the upside of having these thriving communities. And you can build a community. I'm sure there's CockroachDB people who are going to CockroachCon or whatever. I don't know if that's a thing who like identify as CockroachDB people in

the same way that there were Oracle people who identified as Oracle people. But it's not the same as what you see as like Linux people or WordPress people. Like it's not the same as what you see as like Linux people or WordPress people, like it's not, they're not even close. So they're giving that up a little bit for more control. The other thing they're doing is creating a different lens on competition. So in open source, part of what they're protecting against is like they're afraid of AWS, or they're afraid of Microsoft or GitHub, like taking their software and launching it as a service. And the thing of it is, if what you're building as a product is successful enough, then you're going to get big enough that there will be competition.

There's no successful product that doesn't have competition that doesn't exist because it's so obvious that what you should do is compete with someone. It's not a difficult mental leap. That spreadsheet's really easy to build when you have an example already that tells you it works. You just get, you riff on the theme just a snudge, and you're like- You are the spreadsheet. Yeah, and suddenly you're GitLab.

I don't mean to talk ill of the GitLab guys, but like that was not a hard business plan to put together. It's like GitHub, only open source. And you're like, okay, yeah, spreadsheet works. Here's the money. I'm in. I'm in. Good pitch. You know, like it's not, source. And you're like, okay, yeah, spreadsheet works. Here's the money. I'm in. I'm in. Good pitch.

You know, like it's not, whatever. It wasn't hard. Whereas like the initial creation of GitHub was quite hard, right? So the activation energy for competition is much lower than leading the pack. So if you're CockroachDB, what they believe they're doing is protecting themselves from that low activation energy for the big Amazons and those guys. That's a complete falsehood. Like the reality is those guys have giant hosted global databases already.

And if CockroachDB builds a giant globally hosted database that's so much better than theirs, and they can't launch a CockroachDB service, what that's going to do is not keep them out of your market. It just guarantees they're going to enter the market with not CockroachDB. You're just guaranteed that you're going to have to compete with that other database on a feature-for-feature basis. Whereas if they could take CockroachDB and launch AWS,

they couldn't call it CockroachDB. They'd have to call it like AWS McLaren DB, you know? And then they'd have to describe all the ways that it's compatible with Cockroach and you have to talk about the upstream and everybody would know. They'd be like, what's McLaren DB? And you'd be like, oh, it's about the upstream and everybody would know they'd be like what's McLaren DB and you'd be like oh it's cockroach only on AWS you'd be like oh yeah and as soon as those words left your mouth what you're saying is cockroach

DB is the thing I wanted and and I used the AWS thing because it was easy and if I'm cockroach DB that's a much better competitive position than saying I have to choose cockroach DB Aurora right so that's sort of how Cockroach has set it up. And I think you could do better by trusting that that community that you want would actually lift you up, that the value of that thing would be stronger, and that you're better at the product you created than anybody in the world will ever be. And so CockroachDB, I've never used it. I love Postgres. I'm building all the system initiative on Postgres. I looked at Cockroach for 10 seconds

because as soon as I looked at it, I was like, why am I going to pay CockroachDB money when I could just run Aurora? And that was it. That was the extent of my competitive analysis because I would need a feature that Cockroach gives me that Aurora doesn't that kicks me over the line and they didn't have one.

Now, if it was open source and it gave me extra optionality, all of a sudden I might feel differently about it. I probably would have chosen CockroachDB. I probably would have used their hosted service and not Aurora, but I didn't because they opted me out. They'll never know that because what do they care? There's a big enough community of people who love CockroachDB. They're paying them money. They say, why are we successful at getting this money? The answer is, because I sell a product that's valuable for money. And so they're going to listen to this podcast and what they're going to say is, that guy's nuts. That's not how it worked.

And they're right, because they made their choices and it worked. Their choices were based on some competition you mentioned. So the naive approach that and maybe it's naive, maybe it's not. Maybe it's just lack of thinking front of the line of the business line saying eventually somebody's going to compete with me because they did a license change. They were, and cool, it's open source.

They had an OSI approved license. They transitioned to what they called a highly permissive BSL license. And then there's been some other transitions, I'm sure. But the point is to a non-open source. Which is secret code for not open source. Right. Not open source, but source available. Like this terminology is source available. Yeah. But don't hate me so much, you know? Don't completely hate me for doing it. Right. I think ultimately the reality is, it says, what it says is, I don't trust that my community is a true community. I trust that

they're users. And the thing about true communities is when it's hard, they hold you up. Chef went through many, many disruptive cycles. Docker disrupted us. Kubernetes disrupted us. Like over and over and over again, extinction level threats to our business happened.

And the thing that made that business succeed in the end was that community of people who loved Chef because they wanted it to win. Because Chef winning meant they won. That wouldn't have been true without that thing. What did you do special to make that happen? You treated them like the peers that they are. And how did you do that, though? Like, get specific. Like, how did you treat them like that? I mean, for me, it was that

I approached those people as people, as humans, and that they were there wanting to be a part of this thing that I loved and had built and wanted to see thrive, that they made it thrive. That was everything to me. Like, that's it. What a beautiful thing that somebody would come and like, want to be in that place with you. And then also want to share those same values that was it's just it was beautiful and like i don't think there was any magic to it other than genuinely believing that was true and behaving that way like we threw amazing conferences where we like hired like derek mazzoni who's a the woe pop dj at kexp and he would like scout the location find local artists we would find local bands that would come and play it was amazing like i got a mud honey poster back here

because our bat like our corporate band opened for mud honey in seattle like that was fun you had fun and that fun was like the community like enjoyed itself in that way and enjoyed being with each other because we had this shared sense of ownership over this thing that we had all built. And one of the real difficulties in shifting Chef to the open source, to the free software business model was that the Chef brand, which was always mine, always Chef's, it always belonged to the company. Like people really felt strongly that that brand belonged to them. And they were mad that we were no longer producing completely open source builds that were called Chef. They felt duped. And I felt really bad about that. I didn't feel so bad about it. I didn't do it.

And the salve that I gave them was that all the software was open source now, that there was nothing that they couldn't have, and that we were going to collaborate together to build those communities, to build like sync and those things, and it wouldn't be hostile. I think that's what it is. And you can rely on that community to get you through those hard things. And when those communities don't exist, well, then you're just a business that's failing. You know, you're just a business that got disrupted. I know what it's like to be disrupted. It sucks. Like it hurts to get in a spot where you're like, oh man, we had like, we were growing, you know, at 20% quarter over quarter, 150% quarter over quarter. And now we're going 10% or negative.

That is not fun in business land. But when you have this huge community of people behind you who want you to succeed, not just from a revenue perspective, but from a community perspective, right? Like, like a loyalty thing. They're not going to leave your side that they've got your back. They, when someone's calling you names, they're going to say, that's not true. When somebody puts your shirt on backwards or inside out, cause they don't want to represent you anymore. It's like, come on now. That's not cool. Exactly. They're calling them out. They're saying that's not cool. How Adam's been here. And it's because they've been there

and you've been there. And that thing has has been genuine i don't think you can fake it i don't think that's a thing you can manufacture i think it happens because you show up it happens because because you legitimately care about each other that is the thing i'm most proud of about chef like early on in its life we had people come into like the irc channel it was pound chef on free node when free node was a thing and they asked us like what they should cook they had their first date in their whole life so they finally got a date and they were they wanted to cook for their first date and they were like what should i make on my for my this person on my first date to make a good impression and like this irc channel full of hundreds of people, like I've never seen it more engaged than it was in like debating what thing

this person should cook. Absolutely. They were not in the right place, man. Like, but they just assumed that's what it was about. That's hilarious. But there was no hesitation.

There was, nobody was mean. You know, nobody was like, you shouldn't be talking about cooking in this channel. Like everybody was just like, Oh man, we got to help you out. Like, what's it going to be and like then we were

debating like which ones are easiest to cook and if you what he like wasn't a very good chef so like you know it's got to be simple but then it's got to be like you know so i think we wound up with like carbonara or something you know that's like a little fancy but easy enough to cook how did the date go never came back oh. Oh, that's not good. Couldn't tell you. In my head, it went great. Based on the advice, right? I think when it goes great, they come back and tell you.

They thank everybody for their great advice. But that's the Chef community, right? Like, that's what it was. And I think it's what it still is. That's cool. I think being open source is not enough to create that community on its own. But that community can only exist around products that are open source, because otherwise you're a fan. And I'm a fan of so many things, but they're not my church.

They're not my place. They're not my people. They're not. You know what I mean? Does that make sense? Yeah. You know, I was wondering as part of this, your journey, essentially, whether you were more cynical or more hopeful. And it seems like you're not cynical. It seems like you're hopeful. I'm so hopeful. Yeah. No, look, how can you not be hopeful?

Look at people. Look at this thing that we do all the time. It's insane that it exists at all. And it exists because we've all decided it should, like literally, all of us decided that this was the coolest thing we'd seen. And we wanted to keep doing it. And we do it every day. And it's such a blessing. And that like mass group decision that this is how it's going to go. And that's and that we can all have lives because of it. And we can, we can spend our time on earth doing this work,

that is such a beautiful thing. And I fundamentally believe that that is who people really are. There's so many things that divide us and make us awful and those are awful things and I see them and I don't want them. Do you know what I mean? And also at the core of what we all hope for, I think that's really what we all hope for. And we've got this little pocket of the universe where there's this precious thing. And we happen to have done it in software.

I think that happened in software because the resources are infinite. If you have power and a computer, you can do what you want. So it's effectively infinite within its own sphere. It's not because power and access to computers and all that stuff. But if you put that stuff aside, like it is this infinite resource where it costs nothing to let other people have it. That is a beautiful thing. It's a lovely vision.

And it's, yeah, it makes me infinitely hopeful for what it can do and be. all cloud computing resources they have access to are in the same room with them. SSO allows discovery and instant access to all layers of your tech stack, behind NAT, across clouds, data centers, or on the edge. I have Ev Contavoy here with me, co-founder and CEO of Teleport. Ev, help me understand industry best practices and how Teleport Access plan gives engineers unified access in the most secure way possible. So the industry best practice for remote access means that the access needs to be identity-based, which means that you're logging in as yourself,

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you're on the show and if you go to the home page now it's like hey request an invite so a lot of work being done but kind of like stealth mode tell us what you're up to and the progress and all that yeah i mean it's definitely stealth mode. It's real good progress. I am like system initiative. When I think about the things that I care about and have cared about for a long time, I really care about what it feels like day to day to build software and ship it and then to run it in production over time. Like that's the thing that I'm most nerdy about. And I like it both from the point of view of just like for myself and my own teams, but I love it when it's in the like complicated world of the enterprise. Like I find huge companies and how they figure out how to do that just fascinating because there's so many amazing people that work in those

companies that often feel a little more like their hands are tied than, you know, people that work in those companies that often feel a little more like their hands are tied than, you know, folks who work in startups, they tend to feel like they can just sort of do what they want. But if you, you know, if you work at Morgan Stanley or whatever, not to pick on Morgan Stanley, I don't know anything about Morgan Stanley, but like, like they probably don't feel like they can just do whatever they want. You know, there's probably like a process they need to weave through. So that's what I love and have always loved doing. And I think leaving, coming out a chef and looking at my experience of sort of how DevOps and those like digital transformation and all of those things that sort of happened.

And, you know, I think we had a lot of real success for a long time at making people feel like they had a superpower in their ability to deliver that software. And they were, they were really orders of magnitude better than they were. at making people feel like they had a superpower in their ability to deliver that software. And they were really orders of magnitude better than they were. I think what I still see is that the ambition that people have to be good at delivering software and at managing those systems and the complexity with which they would like to build systems. And by complexity, I mean just like, if I want to build something really great, it might have a lot of moving parts. And so that their willingness to build something amazing that has a lot of moving parts, I think has increased, as like our use of

the internet has increased. And you know what I mean, all those things are now much even more obvious than they were a while ago. So system initiative is really about figuring out how do we look at that whole process, that whole system, the human side of it, the interaction side of it, the technical side of it. And, you know, what could we have if we really sort of rethought it from scratch? What if we looked at that as the problem that it is today? And what would we build as opposed to looking at it through the lens of, well, what are

the decisions we've made for the last 20 years? And how have those things, like, how can we add another layer on top of it? Or how could I just like have a little small tweak? I don't want to build something that's a little bit better than something else. It's a rewrite. I want to analyze the system. And I want to then look at that thing and say, how can we make this an order of magnitude or more better for people to use like how can we make the experience of doing it amazing again so without revealing too much can you give us a for instance of where one thing where you rethought from scratch and it actually was like way better or is going to be way better with system initiative. Yeah. I'll just give you a thought experiment. Okay.

If the way that we express what we want in terms of how our applications go into the world and their requirements is source code, but how they behave in the real world is that they're dynamic systems that change over time. How can we reflect that change over time to the source code in an elegant way? What is that? How's that work? And right now you can't, right? If you provision a bunch of stuff and then go tweak it by hand somewhere, that by hand tweak is bad. It's drift. It's hostile. It'll get undone when the automation comes back around again. Those models, we do that because they help us understand, like try to manage this big estate. But it has a very big user experience problem, which is I can no longer relate to the resource directly, I have to go through the abstraction to get there. Right? So is there

a way out of that trap? And without revealing too much, like, maybe, yes, there is. Oh, maybe, maybe someday, you may see that there could be an answer to that question. But that's the sort of question that I'm talking about. Or like, you know, the way we interact with the system has been really unimagined. Like we interact with it the way we interact with source code.

But if you look at like other things, like can we do better? I don't know. It's kind of like a get rebase almost because you have the system as code. It gets deployed as automated software infrastructure. It goes out the way code is infrastructure or whatever you call it happens. And then the Git rebase essentially is your tweak. I mean, that's a great question. That's a good analogy. If you think about trying to do that

for real, though, it's pretty complex. Like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff sort of in the way. So system initiative, you know, the reason I'm not I'm not being coy because I don't want people to see it. It's because it's not ready. Yeah. And it's the kind of thing where it's either going to be ready. And when people see it, they're going to be like, whoa. Also, some people are going to see it and be like, I don't want this at all.

So like, like, it's going to be a strong binary reaction i suspect but you know it's not the sort of thing that benefits from early reveals because it needs to like it has to come together that's right and you know if you're this far into this podcast i think you can probably intuit that i'm not a person who tends to like hide my light under a bushel or whatever like i'm not coy about what i think so like, I will a hundred percent be not coy about what it is and how it works when the time is right, when the time is right. But, you know, I think as an industry, I would say the challenge for us in the cloud era now is that I do not think we are well served by continuing to get incremental improvements on the existing way that we work. I think the

existing way we work has roughly hit its ceiling. And we might be getting small bits better, but it's on the margins. And it's not enough. If we really want to get to the next like plateau of productivity, we have to do we have to do an order of magnitude better. How do you mean how we work today? Can you give an example of where it's wrong? Yeah, think about all of the work that's required to set up the way an application goes into the world. Like, what are all the things you have to do? Like, just like, if you just like grab a piece of paper, and you wrote it all down, like, you got a source code repositories, you got maybe infrastructure stuff, you got monitoring, you got this, you got that, you got this whole big thing. And every single one of those is sort of constructed differently but different in a way that's necessary for your

problem so the difference between us is not arbitrary it's actually the difference that makes it work at all and the only real ways we have to interact with those systems is through a ton of human effort and it's that way because whatever, that's the best way we've figured out how to do it. But I don't think it's fun. Like when you ask people like what the fun part of their stack is, is that do they ever say like, oh, the fun part is the infrastructure

or the application automation or my continuous delivery pipeline? Like I don't ever hear people say it's fun to configure their continuous delivery pipelines. Do you know what I mean? Just people like you, the sysadmins who nerd out about it. Yeah, but even we don't think it's fun. We think the tinkering is fun. But we don't think the operative, it's not like, you know what I mean? What are you doing today? A bunch of configuring. It's going to be fun.

So when you talk about incremental improvements, are you saying containers was an incremental improvement and orchestration was an incremental improvement i would say containers was the last order of magnitude improvement and it was to application packaging and delivery that was the last major organ like order of magnitude improvement i would also say that the full expression of the power of that improvement was hampered by the lack of innovation everywhere else. If you compare the experience of typing Docker build or Docker run and how that feels and how beautiful that moment was, and you compare it to everything else that's required to make that thing work in the world, it pales in comparison to that initial user experience of Docker run.

And that's what I'm talking about about like that was an order of magnitude improvement in how we bundle our applications together and ship them that was amazing everything else way worse and it's actually so much worse that it makes that experience worse by reference do you know what i mean it drags it down and so yeah it's system initiative it's the kind of thing since we were talking about business that can only exist because venture capital exists. Because it's just too big of an idea. It's too much. Yeah, but it's not too much. So I mean, we're talking in two years of development, maybe three at this point,

still not out there. Not yet. That's a big investment. But it's pretty cool. How do you iterate that? That is pretty cool. How do you think you're building the right thing? It's a great question. I mean, we're pretty solid domain experts so i'm not building software that's not in my own domain so like you know if i was building software for you guys i'm not a podcaster i don't do what you do so if i was building software for you i would need to iterate with you very much to know if i'm on the right track

because what do i know about podcasting right in this case like we're pretty solid domain experts all everyone who's at system initiative has been around this industry and done this work for a really long time. So some of it is just having a point of view and all good products have a point of view. And so that's a big piece. And then we have shown it to people. It's not like no one's seen it. It's just that I ask all those people to keep it like a type one secret.

I think there's two kinds of secrets in the world. There's secret secrets where when someone tells you you have to keep it or bad things happen. There's type two secrets where what you actually want is people to tell other people what you said, but to say that it's a secret. So everybody knows it's a secret. System initiative is a type one secret for the people who've seen it. Bad things will happen. Don't tell anyone for real, for real. I'll be upset with you if you tell people what's happening. Yeah. I thought you might make them an offer they can't refuse or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So that's interesting. Yeah. But I think as an industry, what we're due for, we were the people, infrastructure automation and automation in general, was the thing that

empowered all these people to do so much better. And now it's kind of become the bottleneck like if you look at what's holding them back they're like i can't i can't get the automation it's so much work to make the automation work the way i would need to in order to do this ambitious thing so i'll just be less ambitious yeah so we have an entire new podcast you may not know this is called ship it and it's all about the boring parts that we want to automate away but we can't yet so if system initiative is, we might have to just retire that show altogether. I hope you fail, Adam. Just kidding. I'll tell you what, I'll make you a deal.

Okay. As soon as it's not a type one secret. Okay. We'll do a podcast. I will show you the thing and we'll like dive as nerdy as you want to about how it works and why it's built the way it's built. And like, we can go wherever you want to go

as soon as it exists. That's a deal. I will come and do that with you instantaneously instantaneously so fun what's the horizon then when when do you think this might be something that's a type 2 secret i bet it's a type 2 secret next year okay and yeah but like if you ask me like when's it going to ship my answer is like the blizzard guy's answer it's like when it's ready and not before. So here's the million dollar, maybe the billion dollar question. Are you going to go the chef route?

I mean, you've already accomplished open source business success, system initiative currently in stealth mode, but is it going to stay closed even once you open it up? Or is it going to be an open source thing? My point of view on that stuff is that the business needs to be designed first

and then open source is second. And that's not because I don't love open source. I hope that's clear in this podcast, like I so much do. But it's because the two things are separate, like the decision to be in business and the decision to be an open source, they're different things. And so system initiative right now, as far as I can see, as a business, it would be tough to think about why that should be open source, at least in the early days. That's not to say that it would never be open source or that some of it wouldn't be open source. That all said, when I look at the competitive strategy and the landscape for First System Initiative and with my partners, if what we see is that we think that that model is

better for competition, for building community, for all the reasons that having open source matters, then of course I would open source it. And of course what I would do is run the Red Hat model. I'd run the Chef model. I would run the free software product model, but that'll be a business decision we make because of how we want to bring that product into the world. Not because I'm an open source true believer. And I think all software should be open source or, or it's created by people who have no soul. Does that make sense? I'm both an open source true believer and a business true believer. And I get to be both at the same time. And in this context, my business context comes first, because this is a business venture that I have gone into. If that business tells me that's the right move,

then that's exactly what I'm going to do. And I wouldn't hesitate to do it. Was Chef then accidentally a business? No, Chef was born into a market where it had very direct competitors, CFEngine, Puppet, and then it had closed source competitors, BladeLogic and Opsware. And that being a proprietary entrant into that market at that time, I don't think was a viable path. Different time too then. 2008 was a different time. It was a different time, but I really believe that because of the shape of the landscape, there was no version of Chef where it not being open source would have worked.

I think there's definitely a world where system initiative absolutely works and is not open source. And maybe it's better because it's not open source from a business perspective. I don't think business is always better because it's open source. The largest businesses in the world are not open source businesses. That's not to say that that that cap is like a built-in handicap or whatever do you know what i mean yeah but to say anything else would be foolishness yeah well systeminit.com was pretty cool looking even as sparse as it is to quote it says reinventing how we interact with computing environments got three

cool shapes. Is there any sort of, I don't know what to describe those as. That's where all that VC money went, the shapes. Yeah, they went to the shapes. Look, my partner and co-founder, Alex Etier, is an incredible person who does not like to be a public figure, but is one of the greatest product people I've ever known. And working with him is just a pleasure every single day and he makes all that stuff look good and easy because he is meticulous and thoughtful and just such a delight and so like i think yeah that's a that's all alex in the best possible way the blinking

cursor is cool i like your shade of green it's very similar to what we call hacker green around here brother that that blinking, like talk about Alex. It's tight. Like. Very tight. Talk about culture. Yeah. That blinking cursor tells you who it's for.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It does more work telling you who it's for than a million marketing people could ever do. That blinking cursor is like, this is for you. If what you are is a, if this is your jam, if you're a power user, this thing's for you. That blinking cursor is how you know. Well, Adam, it's been fun catching up with you. I really do enjoy our conversations.

I think they're very much therapy in lots of ways for me because we get to commiserate. We get to dream a little bit. We get to show our hope in the idea of business, the possibility of venture capital, and the purest nature of open source, which we right here truly believe in. And we love hanging out with people like you who believe also in both sides, business,

because we are a business. Yeah. And we are also open source. You know, we're not an open source business, though. We're just a business that happens to have their kind of main thing is open source. And nobody uses it besides us. So we're not like even looking for adoption, really. It's just simply there to contribute.

Now you're a business about the culture of open source. Yeah. And all the things around it. That's definitely of open source, right? This is the same way that radio DJs are of hip hop. That's right. Precisely. You're definitely of that culture, 100%.

You get us. I totally get you. I'm in. You totally get us. I completely get you. I i totally get you i'm in you totally get us i completely get you i love talking to you i'll be here anytime you want to i'll just i'd bore everybody to death they'd be like you need a new guest and i'd be like no i'm the permanent guest i'm it it's my show we'll definitely get you on ship it once uh system initiative launches we'll probably bring on the changelog too that'd be fun that'd be so fun that would be fun yeah

deep dive yeah we'll dive as deep as you want i'd love nothing more than to spend and like however long you want to talk to me being nerdy about so i can't like no believe me no one wants to tell like the story of what that thing is and why it's amazing more than i do so hey you've been toiling away for a while now for sure so it's gotta be getting to where you're you're ready to get it out there in the world no doubt oh i'm so ready up to my eyeballs ready but you know what it's got to be it's gonna get there do you have t-shirts yet i don't even have a t-shirt isn't that awful the moment you have a t-shirt i want to buy one or actually to send you one because i want to rip it you know what's funny so we we have a design for a t-shirt and when it ships i'm going to build that t-shirt it's a

really cool design it's gonna be a good day for you it's and when it ships, I'm going to build that T-shirt. It's a really cool design. It's going to be a good day for you. It's a shipping gift to myself and to ourselves, you know, to the team. We're going to do that together. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do one very personal thing on the way out. I'm curious of your favorite metal band and why.

Oh, OK. So you mentioned favorite lyric or at least a lyric during the show. So I'm sure you got a favorite lyric and maybe a favorite band. Okay. So it's a tough question because like different people feel differently about like where the borders of metal and like hard rock are. My favorite album of all time and probably band of all time too, because they kind of always go together is appetite for destruction.

So it's guns and roses. And I just remember like, I loved all that. So I had a sister who's 10 years older than I am. And I just remember like I loved all that. So I had a sister who's 10 years older than I am and my brother is two years older than me. And they like it was like peak MTV. And so I was like, yeah, I was very little and not watching cartoons. Instead, I was watching MTV with my sister. So like all that stuff was just in my brain.

And I loved like all of that hair metal band. Steph Leppard was the first band I ever like collected all of the albums of, you know. And so I loved all of that hair metal bands, Def Leppard was the first band I ever like collected all of the albums of, you know? And so I loved all of that stuff. And I just, I remember seeing the video for welcome to the jungle and just being like, Oh, what is that? I was just like that.

It's like dangerous and dirty. And like hair metal at that point was like, not dangerous. Like it was full clown. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It was like every rose has its thorn every day for like 12 hours a day and then guns and roses happened and i was like oh that's incredible and then do you remember skid row like skid row happened too and

like skid row also kind of dangerous and sebastian bach was pretty or whatever but like then slave to the grind happened and they got really heavy and then i saw skid row on the slave to the grind tour and the opening act was pantera now that's my band so if you ask me the same question i asked you pantera is my band it's pantera so i saw pantera open for skid row i was in the sixth grade i think how old are you then adam i'm 43 okay so we're like same basically same age i'm 42 so this is like same era. Guns and Roses for me, Appetite for Destruction. Yeah. I remember being in fifth grade

or fourth grade on the playground and me and my buddy are like, my Michelle and all that good stuff. I grew up on Pantera, had the, had the shirt. Yeah. I went to one of their concerts,

unfortunately, because I was just, I didn't have a lot of money or a car to get there and I was young. So anyways. Yeah. I was,

I was blessed with early access to all that stuff and then grunge happened like in seattle and i lived in basically in portland so like i gotta see all those bands when they were small and still touring but like nirvana nirvana but like pantera man like i remember it was walk and there was this dude in front of me wearing this incredible like boston jacket like it was a leather jacket with like a big boston logo on the back of it and then like there's phil and he's they're doing walk yeah and i was just like i was in do you know what i mean that was it i was done forever i was like this these are my thing yeah and then i got to high school you know like everybody's middle school sucks

and like whatever the kids who picked on me all through middle school, I got a girlfriend during the like summer between middle school and high school. And my girlfriend was friends with all of these like senior guys who were stoners, like just like long hair, leather jackets, like full on the whole deal. And they she introduced me to these dudes, like the first day of high school. And then, like the second day of high school and then like the second day of high school they saw the people who'd been picking on me like my whole life pick on me and they just walked over and they were like yo not this kid like do that again you're dead and I was like this is my tribe I'm in you're my people you know yeah metal for life

anyway there you go it's a long answer to your question I like that we could go deeper but I just want to get a good little personal out on there because I know what a metal fan you are. I've got similar roots. I wouldn't call myself, you know, Agony of Life. That's a good band too. Agony of Life, Sepultura, Pantera.

Yeah, of course. Guns Roses, of course. All that stuff. You know, but yeah, that's where I hang out at. When I hung out in those eras, I'm still listening to Guns N' Roses, still listening to Pantera. Yeah, of course. Just less often. At least once a week for me.

At least once a week, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for all you shared here, Adam. We appreciate you. Got mad respect. Thanks for sharing your time. Oh, it's my pleasure. That's it for this episode.

Thanks for tuning in. What are your thoughts on open source business models? What do you agree with? What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? Let us know in the comments. And up next week is Evan Weaver, CTO of FaunaDB and former director of infrastructure at Twitter. He was employee number 15 there. We had an awesome conversation covering FaunaDB.

And on deck after that, we're talking about learning-focused engineering with Brittany D'Anigi. Make sure you catch that one as well. Big shout out to our partners, Linode, Fastly and Launch Darkly. Also thanks to Breakmaster Cylinder for producing all of our awesome beats. And of course, thank you to you.

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