The Infra Pod - Big Announcement! We are now called ....

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

You probably already notice our name has changed if you get this episode! Listen to Tim and Ian talk about how we started this podcast, why we changed our name and what we're planning for the podcast as well. Follow and share us in all the social channels -> http://www.infrapod.io X: @theinfrapod Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-infra-pod/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheInfraPod

Well, this will be a special podcast episode for us because Ian and I have actually never introduced ourselves. So we want to take this opportunity. If you're already a listener or going to be a listener for us, we want to tell you who we are and what we're doing here. Sounds good? Sounds fantastic. Tim, I think you have to go first though

because you have that beautiful melodic voice that is the beginning of every introduction. So it's your go. Who are you, Tim? We met on a Discord that I started called Yet Another Infra Group. And our Discord has been chit-chatting Infra details all day long. If you've been to our Discord, you can probably see we have a bunch of spicy hot takes, a bunch of discussions. It was really fun when everybody was there. And, you know, it almost feels like an engineer, almost like a water cooler or a conference in a place that everybody has something interesting to say. And we're just like debating, right? About what's the future, what's going to happen and learning new stuff all the time.

And, you know, if you don't go to a conference, if you don't go hang out with some really cool engineer people, you don't get that kind of discussions. And so I really miss it, right? Especially when a Discord starts to die down a bit. So I wanted to do this with a good friend, Ian, make sure that we can actually keep this going. And so, you know, just quickly, my background, like, and Ian and I are probably somewhat similar-ish. We're engineers, you know?

I worked in a lot of distributed systems and backends from Mesos, Kubernetes, and Spark and Kafka. You know, I was a founder as well before my co-founder, he's a professor at Stanford, took a lot and Spark and Kafka. I was a founder as well before my co-founder. He's a professor at Stanford, took a lot of research and production. And now I run a little VC fund backing a lot of really nerdy and geeky people

working on cool stuff all day long. I just love these topics because I've been working, investing, and thinking. And I want to keep this going for that reason. And hey, Ian, tell us who you are, sir. Who am I? Oh, that's, I want to keep this going for that reason. And, uh, Hey, Ian, tell us who you are, sir. Who am I? Oh, that's a good question. Well, I mean, Livingston, as Tim said, I'm an engineer and I think at core, that's who I am. I'm a builder and this is a passion project. You know, I started when I was 12 programming and I got my career started building

co-browsing technology and building proxies and doing all these crazy things and building distributed systems. And then I saw how hard it was to build distributed systems at scale, even for the most expensive CRUD app in the world, which is Salesforce. And then I spent a lot of time building on top of a lot of the core distributed systems. Things like Kubernetes, built multiple companies, did things in the machine learning space, and did a lot of stuff with privacy-preserving technology and encryption. I spent a lot of time also trying to apply technology and changes to large organizations like my time at Snyk.

And so generally speaking, I'm just a nerd that loves to talk about infrastructure and how new infrared changes the way that we work, and more importantly, the things that we can build and how that makes society better, broadly speaking. And this is fun. I love it. And Tim and I have a great time doing it.

So Tim, what's our big announcement? Yeah. So when I started this Discord and I started a podcast, it was really trying to create a podcast that kind of almost like alers to our audience and our discourse. So we call it Yet Another Infra Deep Dive because our group was called

Yet Another Infra Group, Yig. But we're getting a lot of love from people outside our Discord. And one thing I realized, and I think Ian and I both realized, we should focus our pod and make it so much simpler for people to think about and really make it so much easier for folks to remember what we're doing.

Instead of calling ourselves yet another, we're going to call ourselves, are you ready? I'm so ready. Yeah, we're going to call ourselves the InfraPod. We don't have any spiritual animals or any crazy little analogies here. We're going to keep it so simple because that's what we're doing. We're talking about infrastructure, right? All things infrastructure, actually.

And we're going to geek on this for a while. And we're going to do different kinds of stuff. But it's all around infrastructure, which is a topic I love and Ian loves as well. So I don't know. Any thoughts here about this? I mean, I'm excited. We just pulled out like,

I mean, someone's going to come along and say you got to drop the the, you know, for our Facebook moment. But I'm super excited. You know, I think the thing that Tim and I have learned, it's been over a year. I think we've done 20 something episodes, if not more. When we get to have great conversations

with really smart folks working on cool infrastructure problems. We enjoy it. We learn a lot. But the feedback we get from people who listen is always really supportive. And so we just really want to double down on what we found is enjoyable and is worth our time and also is very valuable for everyone else. And we're really excited to continue building a community

and continue to have really smart, unique thinkers on the podcast that challenge the way we think about constructing software and what that allows us to do. And so I think that's at the core of what gets me up to do this when we do it and why we'll always make time for it. And we're very excited to keep doing that. I'm personally actually extra excited about our podcast logo.

It took a while to play around with, obviously, but I was like, wow, this is super cool. Anyway, I'm really stoked about our branding, I suppose. You're going to be able to find us on infrapod.io. We're going to change our name for our podcast. We're going to be able to find us on infrapod.io. We're going to change our name for our podcast. We're going to have the typical social channels. You can find us YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter. We're going to all link to different websites.

You're able to find us. We'd love for you to subscribe and give us feedback, especially your engineer, your founder, your investor, just anybody that's very cares deeply about the infrastructure topics. We're very interested to figure out what are things we can make folks like ourselves and you to make the best content possible.

And I think Ian and I, we are very fortunate and we know a lot of good folks and we probably could get anybody really if we really try. But we want to be able to tailor the right audience and also tailor the right content. So I don't know. I'm actually quite excited. Something like this is bound to happen, right? We need to have more content that's tailored made for this industry.

There are not many, you know? So anyway, that's what I think so far. I'm excited for us to keep playing with the format. I think one of the things that we really learned is, you know, we love our Spicy Future Hot Take segment. And I think it really helps us peer into what people are thinking. And, you know, I think we've learned also that for us, this sort of casual conversational approach we have makes it really easy to listen to and also makes it really easy for our guests to shine. I think the number one thing I would walk away from all of this is this is about learning for everybody and sorting through the why.

What's this really about? This isn't about funding rounds. It's not about no cachet in VC circles. It's not about the number of customers you have. It's really about what are you trying to achieve and how are you going to do it and why is this important? And I think that clarity of thought around those questions and better understand what's going on is ultimately the reason that we're doing it. Yeah, and we'd love for you to recommend guests for us too.

We're not just talking to founders. We've, we talked to researchers, we talked to engineers, we talked to security people where infrastructure is everywhere now. And it's no longer just your cloud or servers or databases, right? We're actually going to see infrastructure in every single piece of our

software stack. And we actually think infrastructure will be fun to talk about in many different facets. So I'm excited to talk to somebody going to be working on some vertical that's actually doing something really, really unique and changes the way we do things. So if you have really amazing people,

and we'll be in the lookout to find people that are doing amazing paradigm shift stuff and want to get them on our pod. And like Ian said, we're not interested in marketing for other people only. We actually are very interested in finding people that are actually going to change something pretty dramatically. We've done some good episodes of people doing pretty interesting stuff so far. So I'm pretty excited already.

We want to find more people that are actually doing really groundbreaking stuff. Like this is the things that start changing how most people do things. I think that actually will be very fun

for people to talk to. Exactly. Especially, you know, Marc-André said software's leading the world. That's 100% correct. And if anything, AI represents more software

and more infrastructure. And we're going to see an acceleration in a lot of these topics and a lot of interest. So I think now is a really exciting time. I think the other thing I'd add is, this isn't just about what cool code I wrote or what cool algorithm we brought about or what way do we have to deal with distributed consensus or what fine-tuning mechanisms enable you to fine-tune certain things. And we will talk about those topics. Those are important. But it's also about how do you make this stuff successful for companies? We've had some people on the podcast talk, well, if you're

doing something innovative, what do you do? How do I get past the CFO, as an example? Or from the other angle, it's like, well, what changes are happening inside organizations that enable this new infrastructure to be adopted? We just did one about security engineering. What is security engineering? These are important topics to understand the broad space of what's actually going on and enables the cool infra and the people that are working on cool stuff

to actually find success in a way that's enduring, where they can build a business and that continues the investment that continues to this virtuous cycle where we continue to actually build cool stuff. Whether that's on the research, development, product, whatever. I think that whole spectrum is interesting. And our promise to you is that we'll continue to try and find the most interesting people to talk to so that when you listen to the episode or you pick up a thing, you're always walking away after your time investment with like, okay, I learned something and that was new and

that was unique and I have a better understanding of what's going on. Sounds amazing. So we're now to be known as the InfraPod. We'd love to have you subscribe, share on your social channels, tell all your geeky nerdy friends like, hey, Ian and Tim are doing something interesting. And of course, we'd love your feedback as usual. And we can't wait to hear all the amazing guests on our show and all the things you enjoyed about us and what we're doing as well.

Awesome. I'm excited. Thanks so much. We look forward to hearing your feedback.