This Week in Startups - Head of Instagram comments on teen impact, Jay-Z’s NFT lawsuit + Sourcegraph’s Quinn Slack | E1285

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

First, Jason reacts to comments from Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri on the impact of Instagram on teen girls and comparing the risks of social media to the automobile industry (1:50). Then, Jason breaks down OpenSea's update on their front-running employee (11:55), and Jay-Z's NFT lawsuit (15:40). Finally, Sourcegraph CEO Quinn Slack joins to discuss growing his universal code search engine, selling a high-ticket SaaS product and more (21:48)!

Hey, everybody got a great show for you today. Sourcegraph CEO Quinn Slack, who is building Google for Code Search is on the program. What a great company. They've become a unicorn and raised money from the best investors in Silicon Valley. It's a great story. We talk about SaaS pricing and a bunch of other interesting topics. He's a good guest. But first, I want to follow up on some stories we covered earlier in the week.

Ahead of Instagram, Adam Wasari, made some comments comparing social media to the car industry in terms of harm done and the value of cars and a recent podcast appearance. So I'm going to break down that comparison. I think it's actually not a bad one. And tons more drama in the NFT space. Jay-Z is suing his Rockefeller record's co-founder, Dame Dash, who's trying to sell NFTs? Jay-Z already sold his NFTs, yada, yada. And we talk a little bit about OpenC and the issues they faced.

There's an update on their employee who was front-running the market or doing insider trading, however we want to talk about it. Stick with us. Great episode. This week in Startups is brought to you by Zendez. Qualifying startups can join the Zendesk for Startups program and get six free months of Zendesk products. You'll also get access to an exclusive community of startups for advice and connections. Visit Zendesk.com slash Twist today to get started. Lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget?

Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% sent off for the first four weeks. And market a hire. Need expert marketing help fast, hire vetted marketing specialists this week from the company that's already used by Netflix, all birds and more. Get $500 off your first hire at marketa hire.com slash twist and use code twist. Okay, the head of Instagram Adam Mosari is facing backlash for comments he made on the Recode Media podcast, an excellent podcast with peer Kafka. I've been on it once or twice. He basically compares social media and the dangers of it to the car industry. Let's listen to a 70 second clip and I'll give you my feedback after. As head of Instagram, do you feel

like the product should not be available to certain kinds of people? I mean, if this is something that genuinely could make, and you don't know yet, right, that you're saying we don't, we're not fully confident in the research. But if there's a chance that this is a product that could really harm people in the same way that cigarettes could harm people, that you guys should be restricting it or maybe taking it off the market? Absolutely not. And I really don't agree with the comparison to drugs or cigarettes, which have very limited, if any, upsides. I think that anything that is going to be used at scale is going to have positive and negative outcomes. Cars have positive and negative outcomes. We understand that. We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents,

but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar. I think that we do a ton to help people connect with those that they love. We've helped advance a number of important social causes, particularly Me Too and Black Lives Matter. We help small businesses make a living. We help creators find ways to express themselves as a bunch of, we give voice to those who have been historically marginalized. There's a ton of value that we create. But yes, of course, there are also issues as well.

All right, they have folks. So you know that quote, in case you missed it, we know. know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy it. I think social media is similar. I mean, it's fine. I think using analogies is how we figure out how new things impact us. A couple of things to think about with cars.

Cars go through a lot of regulatory testing and have massive amounts of regulation. In the beginning, they had none because they were new. And then they went through massive, massive regulation. and there was many actions taking against the car industry because they knew that airbags and seapelts and three-point harnesses would have absolutely saved more lives. And they kind of took their time in adding those because they added a lot of cost to the car and a lot being, you know,

hundreds of dollars and it would have saved millions of lives or probably hundreds of thousands of lives over the years since 30,000 people a year, I believe is the number die in car accidents. And there is a minimum age for driving. and people take driving lessons and they get a driver's license. So if Mossari is a fan of this, great, great metaphor, how about kids have to take a course, pass a test, and they get a social media license if they want to use social media

before the age of 18 or 17 or whatever it is. If we know that, you know, and it's proven that this causes, you know, anxiety, depression, etc., in one-third of teen girls, well, then maybe they should take a course before they get on it. That seems completely reasonable to me. It seems like the social media, the downside to social media might be actually more than the downside to driving.

So great analogy. I'm sorry, yeah, let's regulate social media for kids exactly the same way cars are, which is don't let them use it. Kids are not allowed to use social media until they hit the age of 16. And there are situations that are allowed to use it in. There are sometimes not allowed to go on the highway, right? You get a learner's permit. You're allowed to use it.

But during the daylight, you have to have a drive. ever with you. I like that analogy as well. What if to use social media your parent had to be, you know, or your guardian had to be on the side right next to you? In other words, they had access to the account. They saw what you posted. Maybe they approve what you post. They could easily build that into Instagram. How about a tool where with Instagram you add who your parent or guardian is, I'm sorry, and that person then sees all of your interactions, everything you posted and everybody you followed. And they would give you the ability to approve like I do on my iPhone. I will approve the apps my daughters want to add.

They request it, the parental controls I edit. So let's put parental controls on Instagram, where if somebody wants to post and they're an underage person, they're, you know, I guess 13 is the starting age, but let's say anybody who's, you know, a teenager, not 18 yet, their parents have to approve their post before they post it. Easy to do, right? So I think metaphors are helpful. And I actually kind of like this one. Why not highly regulate social media for kids?

It makes total sense. The U.S. News published an article in February about the impact of social media on teen girls, mental health. Here's a quote from that article. We found that girls who started using social media at two to three hours a day or more at age 13 and then increased that use over time had the highest levels of suicide risk in emerging adulthoods, said the study author Sarah Coyne. She is an associate director of the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Provo,

Utah. Suicide rates of 100,000 people in America have risen steadily. since social media took off in the late 2000s. So if you look, we would have 11. If you look at this chart, suicide rates, you know, 10.8, 11, 10.9, up until 2006. And from 2006, we had straight up growth in the number of suicides in the United States.

That correlates exactly when Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, all became super popular. Is that the correlation? Is it opioids? Is it something else? who knows, but it's definitely something that is so obvious to anybody who's a parent or anybody who's used social media, that social media is not something children should use. It's obvious to every parent. Parents give into it. I understand it's really hard if the other kids in the class have phones, they have TikTok, it's hard to police.

You don't have unlimited time. We've all got to work and have other obligations as parents. But this is where Musari needs to take more ownership. The idea is here, they were covering up this information. about these results at the same time that they were proposing Instagram for kids. So this is absolutely crazy. I don't know if I like the cigarette analogy

as much as I like the car analogy. So another quick update on this Facebook fallout after the Wall Street Journal article published on Tuesday. The following happened. Three Democrats from both houses of Congress sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

asking for answers like, quote, please provide copies of all external research Facebook has commissioned or otherwise accessed regarding the mental health of your children and teen users. Here's another quote. Please provide copies of all internal research Facebook has conducted regarding the mental health of your children and teen users. And third and finally a quote, will Facebook agree to abandon its plans to launch any new platforms for children or teens, including versions of Instagram for children? If not, why not?

So you're going to see a lot more legal investigation. and I think Facebook, you know, we should, our expectation is Facebook cares more about growth and revenue than they do our children. You should not trust Facebook with your information and you should not trust them with your children. And certainly you should not trust the Chinese Communist Party and let your kids use TikTok. My best advice to you as a parent, and I'm not saying this in a preachy way, is no social media till 16 or 17. that's going to be our plan and our household. And I understand not everybody has the resources I have or maybe you're a single parent

and you don't have the time to monitor everything. There are apps now that will let you monitor like RPAC, I think is one, where you can put this on your kid's phone or iPad and you can watch their usage, see what URLs they open, see what instant messages and what they do, how much time they spend in each app

and in fact to block them from certain apps. And of course, none of this is perfect and I respect your right to choose as a parent what you think is the best. But, by Lord, do some research on this because, and if you know anybody who lets unbridled access to their kids, I think parents need to sort of team up on this because if you have three or four kids in a group who are allowed to use TikTok and four or five who are not, we all know what's going to happen. They're all going to share the TikTok and probably something they could handle at 16, 17, 18,

years old, something like that, but I think we all know at 10, 11, 12, 13, it's probably not something they should be doing. So it takes a village. And how do you sleep at night, Facebook executives? I hope the money was worth it because you're all going to regret it when you get to the pearly gates. Zendesk is the go-to tool for customer support. We all know that. They also offer a suite of tools designed to remove the difficulties of sales software. So get Zendesk suite of sales tools plus their industry leading support software for free. for six months as part of Zendesk for startups. I'll show you how to do that in just a moment.

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blog post. We covered this on Wednesday show, announcing that an employee who was involved in Insider trading of NFTs has resigned. Here's the quote from the blog. We have a strong obligation to this community to move it forward responsibly and diligently. That's a, you know, a nothing sentence. The behavior of one of our employees violated that obligation. Okay.

They're admitting that this occurred. And yesterday we requested and accepted his resignation. That would be the lowest form of sanction is that you accepted their resignation. I'm kind of disappointed by that. Here's another quote. we do not take this behavior lightly, if you're just accepting his resignation, I think you do. Upon learning of this conduct, we immediately commissioned a third party to conduct a thorough review of the incident and make recommendations on how we can strengthen our existing controls. That review is ongoing, but we are committed quickly implementing its recommendation.

So that quote is a standard PR tactic. We hired an outside investigator. Here's how it actually works, because I've been involved in this before. You hire this outside investigator. Those investigators, who do they report to? who pays their bill? Okay. OpenC pays their bill.

They report to the CEO and the board of OpenC. Those shareholders can take that report and throw it away if they don't agree with it. They don't have to act on it. They can create a second report. They can do whatever they want with these reports. The fact is what this person did was really dirty and it really is going to tarnish the entire space because if one person did this, I'm almost certain 10 other people did. And so the actual response should be, we are going to pursue legal action against this employee.

You probably should if you are a trading platform and somebody is screwing the folks in your marketplace. Literally this person was screwing the buyers and sellers in the marketplace. You should pursue some legal options. I know that's hard to say, but when somebody steals or does something like this, the actual way to take the behavior lightly is to let them resign. you want to take legal action. That's what they should have done here. They should have pursued it with the authorities.

There might not be anything you can pursue. I don't know if this is exactly legal because OpenC and other folks are claiming these are not security. So it's not a security and how is it exactly insider trading? They just bought a, it would be like buying a comic book that you knew was going to be promoted by Marvel Comics and then holding it. The problem is these NFTs are accelerating and costs on the first day. So this is more like that story we have. of the Nike vice president. And she was,

her son was buying all the, you know, shoe drops before they came out. This is more along that. So more along that line. OpenC's response timeline, they found out in quotes about the employee actions on Tuesday, forced their resignation on Wednesday and announced they will potentially

pursue legal action and changing their anti-front running control. So maybe they will pursue it. I give their response here like a six. They didn't mention, investigating all other employees and checking to see if anybody else had done this. I bet you somebody else, I would say dollars to donuts,

60, 70% chance somebody else in the company's done this or somebody else's family members have done this. So while this person got caught, somebody could have just told their family member, their cousin, their friend from college, hey, go buy a bunch of these for me. They're going to be huge and we'll flip them two days later and chop the money up.

So there's probably some other stuff that's going on here. That's my best guess, but I'm saying guess as well. Now, in more NFT news, NFTs have captured people's imagination because people will buy them, and they're basically worthless digital assets. The only value they have is the value that is bestowed upon them by collectors. So there's no intrinsic value in any of these, essentially. Maybe somebody can tell me if there is one that comes with rights to borrow a boat or something or people are selling NFTs for time on private jets or usage of an actual real world.

old private club. I'm not sure if they do. So in more NFT news, Jay-C sued Damon Dash is co-founder at Rockefeller Records over auctioning off copyright to to Jayce's debut album as an NFT. So this is going to get really complicated. So in June, Jayce's Rockefeller

record sued its co-founder, Dame Dash, after hearing about Dash's plans to auction off his stake in the company as an NFT. Now, why would be, if he has a stake in the company, does that stake in the company come with residuals to that album? Is any value to it? Do you have a voting

mechanism? Is this company active and are these rights active? Who knows? In July Dame Dash launched an auction with a starting bit of 10 million for his one third share of Rockefeller, his one third share of reasonable doubt and a commemorative NFT representing the certificate

of ownership. This is the NFT. It looks terrible. And it says it's the rock. It's the diamond. You get the idea. Quote from the website, Damon Dash is auctioning his one third interest in Rockefeller, Inc., which owns Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z's first album. I don't know what it owns.

Does it own all the rights to it? Can you then sell the songs on Reasonable Doubt to a movie and get one-third of the fees? So if somebody wants to use it in a TV show, i.e. licensing or have those rights been sold? The highest bidder will also receive the commemorative NFT. It's the Rock representing certificate of ownership. The Bloomberg article explains the convoluted legal argument as quote, Rockefeller says that while Dash holds a one-third stake in the company, it owns the album itself, and he has new legal right to sell the NFT.

Essentially, Rockefeller is saying, Dash has no right to mint his stake in the record company or the album itself as an NFT and sell it. And I'll just add here, like, I think they're trying to screw the person who's buying it. Like, what are they actually buying? You're buying yourself into a lawsuit? Seems pretty dumb to me. Dash was blocked from selling rights to the album and agreed to wait until the lawsuit was resolved. before continuing the auction,

according to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article quoted Dash's lawyer who stated that, quote, Dash is just trying to assign the rights to future royalties. He's entitled to as one third owner, Rockefeller, as artists have done for a long time. So I guess you are getting the rights to future royalties. You get all of them.

You get them up until the price you paid for, $10 million, and then you split them. I don't know what the contract here is. Lawsuits ongoing, so Dash's NFT auction has been put on hold. So, I mean, he's Talking about selling his stake, which would be securities, as an NFT, and we're having this discussion, are NFTs securities? Well, this one is specifically designed to act like and represent a security.

So this one for sure is a security. Are other ones a security, or are they a trading card that just happens to accumulate a lot of value? To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt, his debut album, Jayzey sold his own NFT via Sotheby's. for 138K. On Southernby's website, it notes the NFT was on sale from June 25th of July, second with a starting bid of 1,000. And it's a slightly better looking

NFT, I guess. Yeah, I mean, this is the Wild West NFTs. Basically, people are looking at them and saying, this is a way for me to get somebody with a bunch of crypto money, to give me that crypto money, and I give them back a JPEG

that really has probably little to no value. value. And if it acts like a security and, you know, I guess it's a security, it's really hard to tell in these cases because these are something new. They're not exactly securities. But if people are buying them because they increase in value and you're selling collections of them and you have marketplaces, I can see people making an argument they are. And they can obviously be used for all kinds of money laundering and a of money that was obtained illegally. So, you know, this is a really interesting, dangerous, weird thing that has occurred. So if you're into this NFT space and you've made a ton of money, suggest doing a little profit taking. Have fun out there.

But if it's 99% of your net worth and you can buy a house with half the money or pay off your college debt, that's never a bad thing to do. I wish you luck. Be careful out there. Have fun. You know, consider it like gambling. When you are trying to grow a startup fast, hiring engineers will slow you down like nothing else. Don't I know it?

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His name is Quinn Slack. His company is Sourcegraph. They've been on fire. What do they do? They're basically Google for code. What does that mean? if you're a developer and you're sitting there and you're coding and you need some ideas of how to get your job done. Well, it would be great if you could search a Google-like repository for solutions.

Well, he built that and over the last seven years, it's turned out to be a huge business. In the past year, 800,000 developers have used the product, so he's going to blow past the million soon. He's raised a bunch of money, and we're going to talk today about the developer class and when he's building over at Sourcegraph. welcome to the program, Quinn Slack. Thank you. It's great to be here. So when you see the app and the SaaS software company Slack emerge and somebody in your team says, hey, Quinn, we should use Slack.

And they install Slack at your company. And everybody's like, hey, Quinn, are you on Slack? Is Quinn Slack on Slack? I mean, what happens? Is that? Yeah. Do you remember that day? Slack.

And having Slack.org, it feels weird. But I think, to be fair, Stuart Butterfield should, change his name to Stewart's Sourcegraph. So I'd like to make that happen. Fair play. I just want to make sure people understand your name is Slack. Your last name is Slack. Prior to Slack existing SSAS product,

did people refer to you as Slack? Like people call me Calicanus? No, I was never that cool. I love coding. And I've always loved coding. And so I was never a get called by the last name person. But that's okay. All right.

So you founded Sourcegraph in 2013. What was the origin story here? Was there not a place to search for code back then? Do people use GitHub to do that? Or did it not exist? Or was it just not well done? No, there wasn't. The amount of code in the world is growing exponentially.

And it sounds crazy, but we had to go build it for every company out there. And now we have some of the world's best engineering teams using Sourcegraph, three out of five of the Fang companies, and our other customers are Uber, which I know you're involved in, and Plaid, Atlassian, GE. And one staff that I really love is there's a billion people in the world that are using products that are built by people using Sourcegraph. So before we came along, there wasn't any kind of way to have universal code search

across all of the code. And we built it. Now, where do you get all this code from? because people for a long time were very proprietary and secretive about their code. They didn't want to let that out. That was considered a competitive advantage. Open source obviously came out. And that led a revolution that is driving a lot of, you know, the massive innovation we see in the economy today.

How do you get code into your Google of code? So picture yourself as a developer that works at a very large company with, say, thousands of developers, with decades, legacy code. There is so much code in that company and you as a developer have a job, which is to build new things, but most of the job is reading and understanding and maintaining code. It's not writing code. That's about 5% of the job. And so all the code in your company, that is the primary thing that you use Sourcegraph to understand and fix and reuse. There's also a ton of code out there in public, all of these open source components that companies are using more and more, and that's a thriving ecosystem.

But first, we set out to solve the problem for a company's own internal code. Got it. So it's internal searching of that code base. And then they use other tools to document it and et cetera. How do you make money from this? It's per seat. So developers use source graph many times a day in the same way that people use Google many times a day for everyday questions.

For developers, you know, maybe 10 times a day. day. And if they are using source graph inside of a company, then we get paid. And so it's nicely aligned. And it's an organic viral product that spreads. Again, much in the same way that Google spread. Google, you heard about it from a, yeah, Slack as well. It's free for up to 10 users. Is that correct? And then when you hit your 10th developer, you start paying, what do you pay per seat? It depends on what features and components you're using. It's a tiny fraction of what companies are paying to hire and retain and keep their developers happy. And when you look at how important it is for every company to be building more software

to be staying ahead of the competition, to be innovating, because we consumers, we demand so much better software each year. That's an imperative. And though you're going to win if you can innovate, you're going to lose if you can't. So every company knows they need to be a software company. And if you can give them something that truly helps their developers, move more quickly, ship more products, grow revenue, that's the holy grail. And that's something that we are able to do. And the company's grown rapidly, but it was a little bit of a slow start. You spent maybe a couple

years building this out and didn't have much traction from what I understand. Yeah, there was a lot of work going into it. So let me give it the backstory. I have been a coder all my life and I've seen what it's like to work on really big code bases. I was working on open source projects. I also was working with my source script co-founder at Palantier before this, and we were working inside of two really large banks, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America. And we felt the pain of being devs in an organization with a ton of code and to find code that we could reuse or to understand how this works or to fix a bug. A lot of times we'd have to go tap someone on the shoulder. We'd have to go on SharePoint. So many times we had to fly to meet another person to have a in-person meeting with

them just to learn how this piece of code works. Now, if we could have read the code or found the code, then that would have taken instead of $10,000 in a week, maybe three to five minutes. And so we felt that pain. It is so hard to make progress as a developer. And then, you know, you zoom out and all these companies that have this imperative to write more software, well, it feels like, wow, we are not able to ship enough new products and look at all these other companies out innovating us. It all comes back to their developers are finding it so hard to work in this exponentially growing amount of code and complexity. So we had felt the pain, but there's another thing that we saw, and my co-founder had been

at Google before. Now, Google also has a ton of code, tens of thousands of developers every single day adding more code, but they have this secret weapon. They have this internal Google for code, and they even had that more than 10 years ago. And so every Google developer is constantly using their internal Google for code to find existing code to reuse. to fix problems, to onboard, to understand code. And if you quit Google, a lot of times the thing you miss most is not the free sushi or the Fuseball. It's this internal code search, this internal Google for code.

So how you felt Google.com, I think, is there like, external version, which is completely different. This is an internal secret weapon that people doesn't want to give other companies because they want to have the edge. So 300 bucks a year for the software, 25 bucks. to see it. I'm just seeing a Google result is ballpark. Is that about right? It depends on what features you're using.

On average? It's something between, basically, it's less than 1% of what you're going to pay a developer a year. Del available's crossed 125, 150K, 1% would be 1,500 would be like 100 bucks a month. So it's not cheap, 150 bucks a month, but you get a lot of value out of it, because if you save but one week a year would be 2%. So if you save just three days of a developer's time, banging their head against the wall of pace right south. Yeah, that's right.

And here's a scenario. It's so easy for- Yeah, because I ask you a question about this. Why are you so secret about the pricing? Why are SaaS companies secret about price? I notice on your website, while we're talking about this, there's no pricing on the website. Is it that people consider it a competitive advantage?

I know this has always been frustrating for people. In fact, invested in a company called capish.com. that was going and asking all the people who own SaaS software how much they pay and then putting it up there so that people could negotiate harder against, you know, SaaS companies who don't put their pricing on it. Why do you choose to not have like transparent pricing on the website? I'm curious. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you why. And we are a very transparent company. So, you know, you can look in our handbook. You can see, you can look in our code. I'm just talking specifically about pricing.

Yeah. Yeah. So developers are our audience. And if you look at the state of tooling available to developers, a lot of people think, wow, they must be using these amazing super high-tech minority report-like interfaces because they're building the future. But no, the state of tools that developers use is very, very poor. And you look at that compared to what a trader in finance would have, Bloomberg, where that's tens of thousands of dollars per year. You don't see that for developers, even though that's what,

developers need to be much happier and much higher velocity. And so from this background, it's really easy to get started with Sourcegraph. What does that have to do with the pricing, though? This doesn't answer my question about pricing. I'm asking you very specifically. Why do companies who are SaaS not just disclose the pricing? Because the price that it takes to get started is often a lot lower than the price. Once it's rolled out to a whole company and the CTO and CIO and so many internal

business processes are dependent on. it. And if you show the price to get started, then those people are going to be anchored. And if you show the price that is once it's delivering tremendous enterprise value, then the devs are going to say, that's way more than, you know, I am comfortable with. And this is a market failure. This is interesting. See, the reason why I ask you the question three times, two or three times is because I knew there was an answer. So there is a sticker shock that occurs in SaaS. I'll take this outside of source graphic because this is an issue I see across a lot of SaaS

And it's very frustrating to consumers. But the reason SaaS companies do it, this makes total sense to me, is that the sticker shock of, oh, I've got a thousand developers, I'm going to pay $1,500, why would I pay $1,500 for this? We could build it internal. That sticker shock that somebody might have, oh, have a thousand developers is $1.5 million a year. You kind of have to have a discussion with them of why that's actually worth it and that they would have to put 50 developers on this project, which would cost them $10 million a year. to build it and they could just have it right now

for 15% of that cost. But that's not a conversation people can have with the web page. Yeah, that's right. It's interesting. It's a very interesting observation or realization. I was always wondering what it is, but that's, if you get them on the phone

and they see it, but some people do, when people say that to you, hey, why should I pay a million bucks a year? You have people who are paying seven figures a year for this, I take it? Yeah. Don't you wish you could hire a ringer. to help scale your startup and get your marketing tight.

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advise you on who to hire based on your needs and goals. That's five hundy. One, two, three, four, five hundy right now. Marketerhire.com slash twist. M-A-R-K-E-T-E-R, hire.com slash twist. For those folks, when they say to you, why don't we just build this ourselves? How do you and your sales team overcome that challenge? Yeah, so first, let me talk about how we get to that level of investment

from a customer and then thought about why they're still using source graph. We get to that level where we started at a fraction of a million dollars and a lot of devs were using it. A lot of times, say a company has 2,000 engineers, the company thinks, well, this is a brand new thing. We've never seen code search before.

or we don't know how many people will use it. Let's start with 200 users, 10% of our dev team. We know we've seen this play over and over again that it's going to spread virally, but we don't want to create any barriers. And so we're upfront about that. And fine, yeah, start with 200. But then it grows, it spreads and starts to get to the point where 2,000 devs are using it. And then they're starting to use it not just to find code, to onboard to understand code,

but also to push out automated fixes. And they're getting so much more value out of it. And just like I said about those Google devs that when they quit Google, they miss this code search tool so much. Devs can't live without code search. They can't live without source graph. So it's this organic growth and we have proven so much of the value. And the person who's making the decision can ask any single developer on the team.

And they're going to say, you can never, ever, ever take this away from me. So that's how we get to that level. And we like proving ourselves because we think we can do it. And so if we were to share that price to someone to whom we haven't proven ourselves, it's going to be a weird conversation. And also, that's not what we charge before, you know, it's been proven out to a whole team. Right.

So it might be $25 a month or you just come up with some flat rate or whatever. The Chrome extension seems to be in the core of all this. People are working in Chrome all day and they're very comfortable with that. But you have other people building Chrome extensions to work with the product. Is that correct? The main part of Sourcegraph is the web-based code search that looks like Google. you pull up Sourcegraph for your company and there's a big search box

and that's where you type in what you're looking for or what you're trying to learn. And that's the core. The Chrome extension is a great way for Sourcegraph to be integrated into some of the other tools that your team uses like GitHub, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and so on. But the core of it is this web application for code search.

Again, just like Google. Right. But then I saw on your site, people were creating like, I don't know if these are people who work with the company, but you have other Chrome extensions that people build or sort of like an open source community? Is that correct? They're not Chrome extensions. They're actually Sourcegraph extensions. So, you know, here's an example of that. If you are a developer, you get a page 3 a.m.

in the middle of the night and your site is down, you want a single pane of glass when you're looking through the code to help you figure out where the issue is so you can get the site backup. And with Sourcegraph extensions, you can show inside of a customer, for example, this code is deployed here, here's who last touched it, here are all the error logs, and it lets you put any kind of context right on the code so that everyone can see it, whether you just joined yesterday or you've been at the company for 10 years. Got it. How do you deal with competitors in a space like this, and open source competitors as well?

I know anytime somebody builds a big company like this and they get Sequoia and these legendary investors and you pass that billion dollar valuation, everybody's eyes are all of a sudden going to be on it. Do you have a lot of Me Too and also ran companies now? And do you have faced competition from open source? And how do you contend with that? I know a lot of people are skeptical about this, but we don't face right now traditional commercial competition.

There are some open source code search tools, but the primary challenge we face is most devs and most companies have never used code search. And we see this growing so quickly, but we are the ones. educating. Sometimes we wish that more people we're talking about code search, that there are more code search tools in the market, and I'm sure that there will be. But the key thing for us is we are universal. So you take, most companies have code in so many different languages, scattered across a lot of

different systems, GitHub, GitLab, Bitlucket, Legacy code. We look across all of those. And a lot of the usual suspects you might imagine to be competitors, for example, GitHub or, you know, Google or Amazon, people wouldn't trust them to be vendor independent. GitHub is going to make, I think in the future, better code search for your code on GitHub. But if you're the company that has code scattered across seven different places and you've acquired other companies with code elsewhere, you need search across all of them because you need to be able to certify,

yes, I fix this problem everywhere, not just in this tiny little fraction. So that's why it's so important that we are universal with respect to competition. Companies are all going obviously 100% virtual. remote work, work from home, because of the pandemic. Some are trying to get people to come back. Seems unlikely. Developers are the easiest group, I think, to manage remotely because you see their commits and they're in high demand so they can work from home if they want to or find a job

pretty easily. I wonder if you're seeing in the data or anecdotally with your partners and as a developer, more developers internationally working for you. U.S. companies because of this work from home movement where companies like Google and Apple and Facebook, which demanded people come to offices, now we're not doing that.

And how is that changing the industry as a whole now that work from home is the standard, not, you know, for, you know, 37 signals and, you know, Matt Mullenweg at WordPress and automatic. Like, now everybody's doing it. It's not just 37 signals and automatic. Yeah.

well, we are an all-remote company ourselves, and we went all-remote about a month and a half before the pandemic started. So we have felt this. And what we saw as- You saw it six weeks before February. You saw it like in early in December that this was going to be a work-from-home type situation? No, we decided totally independently with no four knowledge to go all-remote. Interesting. Wow.

You must look like a visionary for making that decision six weeks before the pandemic. Well, we were prepared. We had gotten all of the home desks and chairs. And we knew what it was going to be like for companies that were thrust into that work from home all remote situation. And it used to be, if you were working with a bunch of other devs in an office, you had a question about code, though taps them on the shoulder. Or you'd been to lunch with them last week and they mentioned something. You had so much context. It was so much easier.

But now all of a sudden, you're working at home. You're completely isolated. How do you get answers to these questions? and source graph is a tremendous way. There's no tap on the shoulder, right? Yeah, you can't go walk to lunch and say, hey, how do I find this out? So that is an incredible wind at yourselves.

What has the pandemic been like? You're like the ultimate example of a company other than, say, Zoom and Slack. That would be massive wind in the sales. How much did you grow in 2020 and 2021 versus pre-pandemic on a percentage basis? What was the velocity change? I think it coincided with us getting, since we started in 2013 to the end of 2019,

that's when we finally built the product that was selling repeatedly that a dev could bring into their company and it just would spread and work. And so those two things did coincide, but we've been growing really quickly. So, you know, more than 4x year-over-year, tremendous customer retention. 4-X year-over-year. Wow. Four times as many customers one year to the next or revenue, something in the, or both. That's extraordinary. What have you learned as a CEO running a company that's growing 4X?

Like, what didn't you anticipate that you've had to, like, add to your skill set as the founder's CEO? Well, it's been pretty crazy. We grew from around 30 people in January of 2020 to now 210 people. So I feel like my job, I think everyone's job here is changing all the time. You added a person every other day, just so you know. I think the mass is basically a new person join your company every 48 hours. Yeah. You know, look, all these companies have so much code.

The background problem that we're dealing with, big code and helping companies grapple with, that's getting worse and worse. And you have this pandemic, which has accelerated a lot of these trends and also made it so developers are isolated and need more help. You have all these trends that are going in our favor. And then what's going to happen for many decades to come is the number of software developers is going to be growing at 9 to 10. percent year every year. So it's this long-term secular trend that is both creating the problem

that we solve and, you know, making such a big opportunity for us. And I just want to get back to that because all these devs writing code, all that code still exists. It's piling up like a landfill. And 10 years ago, when Mark Andreessen said, soccer is eating the world, well, now every company is drowning in it. And there's more code written in the last few years than in the entire history before that. So this problem is just getting worse and worse. And we call that technical debt in the industry. If you're not documenting your code, if it's not clean, if people don't understand it. My lord, that's just like a really bad foundation, you know, on a skyscraper.

Yeah. Perhaps a callous metaphor on my part, given what's happening with the Millennium Tower. I don't know if you saw that in San Francisco, but they tried to fix it and it sunk faster. Yeah. I mean, what is going on in the world that we, those idiots didn't build pylons and they built on sand and unbelievable. I'm not asking you to officially comment on that. I'm just going on a little bit of. I'm a software engineer, not a civil engineer.

And I believe that what software engineers do is way, way worse and create way more tech debt. And I am one and I get it because there's such pressure to move quickly. I mean, that is, yeah, one of the big problems. Here's a really weird thing that's occurring from the world. work from home movement. Developers are talking about this on Reddit and Hacker News. They take two jobs. And I think the New York Times even got to this story later. And then they just do like a bingo kind of thing where they try to jenga their schedules and they deliver code. If you're an elite developer and you deliver your code perfectly to two different companies and they are pleased with

you and you're in the top 10%, is this moral, unethical, elite, awesome? How do you think about that? I think you need to be transparent about what is going on here on both sides. I think companies would love to get to the point where there was a clear contract and it was entirely measurable. I don't think it's ever going to get to that point. But on the dev side, I think this highlights that a really talented developer is adding way more value to their company than that developer can capture. And that is a problem slash opportunity as well. If you're one of your top five developers at Sourcegraph was working two jobs and somebody ratted them out, what would you do? Would you fire them? Or just double their salary?

I have not thought about this. That's why I'm asking you because it makes it super interesting for your answer. If they were contributing, then I would think that's a genius move. And I think it's important to be transparent in there. So I wish that they would have told us. Because that insight about how they are so productive in two different places at once, we could learn so much from. And we're unique in that we are all about increasing de velocity.

And most companies probably wouldn't celebrate that and say, oh, what can we learn about that? But I would find that fascinating personally. Yeah. It's a snap promotion for me. It's like, well, we obviously did not challenge you enough. manage you properly, let's have, I'm taking that person to a Warriors game and sitting courtside with them and figuring out exactly why they're not the co-founder of the company.

I mean, my God, you have to be brilliant. Now, the one I didn't like was somebody was said they were, they claimed, you know, who knows, these are all like anonymous discussions, but one of them that somebody highlighted for me, they claimed they were outsourcing to a team in, you know, wherever. And then they were just cleaning up the code and then publishing it. And I was like, that's also clever, but that feels just insane and nuts. Don't do that. Very strange.

Yeah. Well, a lot of developers have side projects in open source that they do. And it's a great way to learn. So I get it. What do you think you, it's obvious what the gains are from working for home. People are happier. You remove commutes. They get to spend time with their families if they have them or on their.

hobbies or both. I don't know if that's actually possible. I have three kids. I'm not sure if you can have hobbies when you have kids, but what is lost? And then how are you thinking about that? Because based on what you told me, 90% of your company has never met you and or been in an office space with you. What does that do for culture?

Does it matter? Are we overthinking the value of being in a room? Or is something actually lost? And how do you think about the culture at your company? which is a company that, let's face it, 90% of the people working there have never been to the source graph office, if there even is one anymore. Yeah.

Well, All Remote today, during a pandemic, is totally different from all remote outside of a pandemic. Awesome. What was a big reason in us going all remote was I felt a closer connection to some of our team members in Europe, who I traveled to and spent quality time with, went around the city, went to the Berlin Zoo, really got to know them.

I felt closer to them than some people, in the office who I saw next to the water cooler, a Diet Coke fridge. And so that quality time can build strong bombs. The problem is we're in a pandemic now, and it's much harder to travel and build that quality time. So once the pandemic subsides more, hopefully, all remote is this best of both worlds, the quality time plus the focus and the choice on how you live your life and where you want to live. But I also think something a lot of all remote companies are going to need to grapple with

is we're in this honeymoon period where all remote is strictly better than a company that's temporarily remote and uncertain about when they're going back. But soon, we're going to be competing with companies that are back in the office. And there are a lot of great things about being in an office. So we all remote companies are going to have to compete. But hey, I love that. Companies competing to make better places for devs to work. That's great.

I mean, the great news for you is if people in your company are like, we really need to have an office. I want that experience. You'd be like, great, we now have an office in London. or Berlin. Yeah. And the seven of you can go create an office. And if you want to invite people to come work here, you can have them join the office and do whatever the heck you want.

And we have a lot of differentals, right? I mean, I think, you know, Netflix, uh, I heard Reed Hastings say like, yeah, no, we're adults. We're all coming back to work. Forget it. It's not happening. You don't get to stay home. Apple took the same position.

And man, they flipped. They flipped. They know they're not going to retain talent. I mean, that's the bottom line, right? you're seeing that back channel as well, where people are like, yeah, if you force me to come back to an office, my resume's out. I'm done. Yeah. It feels like people want to be trusted to work in the way that they best work. And trust is so important. And if someone feel like they're not trusted, then I can understand why they feel that way. I think you make a very good point, though, about quality time versus like this performative, like being in the same space time. Yeah. Don't go all the way across the world.

and hunch over in a co-working space on your laptop and not talk to your colleague next to you. Go and hang out with them. Clear your calendar. Have fun. Those bonds are so important. The great bond-making trips we had was, you know, when we did our Australia launch festival, I took some of the team members, scuba diving, you know, on the Great Barrier Reef. I took them two years or a year or two later, we went to Hamilton Island and went to the Witt Sundays, the most beautiful beach raided in the world, went wave running. I mean, it was sick. I mean, it was just totally safe. And those are the bonds that last and those are the memories.

I don't know. Do you have kids yet? Two kids. Yeah. So you know, like, there's a real big difference between like being with them on your phone at the beach or being swimming with them in the ocean or playing chess with them versus watching a movie with them. When you're engaged with them, my lord, you know, that is the memory. When you, the ski trip, the, you know, times you're playing chess, whatever. not when you're, I don't know, all on your iPads or whatever.

And I think that's, I think you're absolutely right. I'm so excited to have all these team members I haven't met and just go on vacation and have a retreat with them and do fun stuff. Yeah. And I hope this thing is soon. All right, listen, congratulations. Everybody to go check out Sourcegraph. You're hiring.

We know that. You're hiring a person every other day. What are you looking for? And what is it like to work there? Why should somebody come work at Sourcegraph versus Google? If you want to see what it's like to be on our team, go read the Sourcegraph Handbook. It's how we work and it's completely public because we're a very transparent company. So we are looking for people that love code or love the idea of way more companies in the world,

way more people in the world building technology, whether that's a developer, a designer, and sales, and marketing. We are all about this idea of in the future that everyone's going to be coding and we want to prepare the world for that moment. Dude, this is brilliant. I am totally going to steal this idea. Everybody go right now. It's amazing how the last five minutes of these interviews, something amazing drops.

It happens like every time. If you can only listen to like 10 minutes of an interview on this week and service, just go to the last 10 minutes. About. dot sourcegraph.com slash handbook. About. dot sourcecraft.com slash handbook.

Company, all remote, asynchronous communication, strategy goals, team, org chart, teammates, it's career, CEO, communication, content guidelines, customer first. And then each department. So if you're in the marketing department, product marketing, content tools, editorial, creating and editing blog posts, blog hackathon, demand gen. I mean, literally, you just gave the entire employee experience handbook to the world.

So why would you ever read a job description when you just go to this and see the goals of the company and the strategy? Oh my God, dude, this is probably. Where did you get this idea from? This is a level of transparency I've never seen. We were inspired by GitLab here. GitLab is also an all-reveote, very transparent company. And you need this. Yeah.

Yeah. And sometimes people have sent me a link and they've said, Quinn, oh no, I think you accidentally made all of this public. It's happened like four or five times. But we're really transparent. Look, it's such an important decision when you go join a company. We want people to know what they're getting into. And we feel like it's a great place to be.

And so we're pretty proud of it. this is such a great idea. Is this something that's just sweeping through the developer communities? Not as much as I think it should be. So anyone can go and copy our handbook. You're starting a new company, go fork it. I'm looking at Git Labs and I'm looking at yours. How many other companies have done this?

Have you ever seen anybody else do this? There are a few. This is such a killer idea. Hey, producers, let's do a segment on this and let's bring this to our founders. I've never seen any of my companies do this. What a great idea this is. All right, listen, continued success. Thanks for being, like, super honest and engaging as a guest, Quinn.

Thank you. Come back. You're a good guest. Let's have you come back in a year and get an update from you, okay? Would that be all right? Yeah, absolutely. Everybody go, if you're a developer or marketer and you want to work at a rocket ship, companies taking off.

And if you look at your investors, my lord, it's a bestie parade. You got Kraft, my bestie, David Sachs. You got Sequoia, my besties over there. I mean, what a great group. Oh, Valor, Antonio Gracios. Oh, look at all these. Red Point. A lot of good folks.

Yeah, really impressive. But you worked at Palantir, right? Why are people so scared of, should people be scared of Palantir? Is that what is going on over there? I love the people of Palantir. I was on the commercial side with my co-founder Beyond. We, the reason why is I got the security clearance paperwork. I'm like, oh, that's a lot of government forms to fill out.

And I want to be put in the most intense team. So, you know, with this tiny team that was starting to work on the JP Morgan Bank of America engagement. So I don't know a lot about, you know, Palantir. I know that there's a lot of great people there. And it gave me this opportunity to see what it's like to write code inside of massive banks. So you were there working on something very narrow. So you don't, they actually silo all those projects because they're all. I don't know how much they silo on the government side.

My involvement was on the commercial side with banks and organizations like that. Should people be scared of that company? Like, people seem nervous about what Pallenture is doing. I don't know. You're the pundit. I'm just a lowly CEO just trying to make it so everyone can code. But you're being magnanimous. I tried at least.

Just so the audience knows, I tried. I tried to get some inside information on Pallenture. I've been trying to have the Pallenture founder on for a while, but like they don't like to talk about what they're doing. But I guess maybe that's part of the appeal. All right, listen, continued success. Thanks for coming on the pod. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.