From Chef to System Initiative

what's up friends this is changelog and friends our weekly talk show about all things adam jacob a massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io scalable full stack no cortisol required learn more at fly.io okay this is epic let's do it hey friends i'm here with brian clark vp a product at neon you know we use neon we love neon so brian you're both a fan and a listener of the show so you kind of know what our shows are about who you reach and of those folks that listen to our podcasts what do you think they need to know most about neon

i think the thing i found in talking to developers is that they really don't understand they don't understand database branches sometimes they'll say is this expensive or is it slow or like i don't really understand where it fits in and so we're changing the the face of it a bit to like maybe focus less on branching because that's the tool and more on like maybe calling it database previews so you can better see how it fits into your development environment the more people can understand oh i get it like hey any changes you make they don't affect production like this is a separate copy the cost of those changes is only the difference between production and whatever changes you made so if you deleted a bunch of things or added new data things like that you're only actually paying the difference because we just copy on right so i think it's like these sets of things is what i have the team really focused on getting people to really grasp database preview environments and then like what's the advantage and like can i use it my system and that's where i'm like yeah like you should be taking this system on like this will increase your confidence it doesn't cost a lot it's super fast that idea isn't out there and i think it's because it's not in most products most databases don't have this kind of integration okay so

concern i've heard out there is why not just run postgres local why database branching why preview branches however you want to frame it a serverless managed in the cloud postgres may be more latent or slower than a local copy it may cost more there's more storage debunk this help me understand

the true cost the true speed lay it on me so in a pull request like a preview environment this system is fast so neon databases spin up in 500 milliseconds or less you're not affecting the speed of your cicd system at all the copy on right for our storage means that there's no actual operation it's like a kind of a null operation when we create a branch you instantly have access to the production data but nothing has changed only until you start writing do we actually save the differences there yeah you're not paying for extra extra data it's not like you're creating a fork and then you like allocate a whole other 200 gigabyte storage system and a whole other separate compute we attach compute directly to the original storage yeah those things are super fast and that's in the pull request environment for the most part on your desktop environment your laptop environment you won't notice a slow down there and you can do reset and things like that so you can make a bunch of changes you can use our cli and do branch reset and it'll just reset with whatever the parent branch was but i i completely understand that need for people to want to have a purely local environment and i want to get there so neon is

super fast production managed serverless databases that are basically never idle they wake up in less than 500 milliseconds that's fast it's managed it scales it branches what else do you need learn more at neon.tech that's n-e-o-n.tech neon.tech well adam jacob is back i'm solo because i think every time you've been on this podcast we've talked about things happening or things going on and not so much about what you've done that's true you sprinkled some stuff in there of course right yeah but never founders talk meets the change love meets change talking to friends and that's what this is this is change looking friends so friends listening to this this is a different flavor of friends so buckle up yeah i kind of want to go into your journey i mean you've been on the show i think four times directly a fifth time indirectly because you were too busy to record things happened and that's when elastic versus AWS happened and we had to borrow previously recorded stuff that was pertinent and it worked out well yeah so i was even great when i wasn't

there there you go like a jacket is it like saturday night live uh we're actually getting

some uh pied piper inspired jackets made the rat pack jackets love it not sure if you're familiar with those bunny chants i am but uh i'm looking forward to those very colorful jackets on my back but yeah change like flavor not pied piper yeah obviously silicon valley reference just so you know so adam where did things begin i heard tell me if this is true i heard that you became a system administrator at the age of eight well i mean that's a that's a bit

of a leap i okay i um so that's not true i mean it depends on how we define it so like my mom was a real estate agent and i'm 46 so i don't know i'm tan i'm terrible at arithmetic so i'm not sure what year it is in the 80s the early early-ish 80s you know you're what age again 40 i'm 46 46 so it was probably 86 87 86 right in that general zone when you're younger than you so we're in the same yeah so anyway mom was real estate agent and like pcs were a thing you know that you could buy and so she bought one that had a modem because she wanted to be able to dial into the mls and that's the multiple listing service for people who didn't grow up the children of real estate agents and it was where all the houses are you know like when they list houses it's like the database you could go look at and so you could dial into this bulletin board and the bulletin board was the mls and then you know i thought it was awesome and so you couldn't keep me off the thing from both uh playing video games because obviously but also that modem meant you could just call bulletin boards and so i have an older brother my older brother had a friend who he'd been on bulletin boards and so he immediately showed me that bulletin boards existed and how to call them and i was just like wait wait wait wait wait like you can just like call other people's computers and then do stuff like talk to them you know like you could page the sysop and they would like it would like ding their computer and they would hit space bar and then you could like chat with the person who like ran the bulletin board and like i just thought that was the coolest thing that had ever happened and then i discovered phytonet so phytonet was like an early version of email so there's like pacmail so you could build and what was cool about phytonet was it was basically like a regional network so what happened is every bulletin board would call a central bulletin board or sorry the opposite way so the central bulletin board with a central hub would call all the bulletin boards in a area code and then collect all their mail and then pass and then make one single long distance call and so everybody would sort of pitch in to cover the long distance fees for transferring your mail and you could send mail all over the world and the thing that blew my mind because this was like peak cold war was you could send email to russia so like you could like talk wow with russians over phytonet and so eight-year-old me and no one knew how old you were and so i was like a precocious eight-year-old or whatever and i thought this was super cool you could play role-playing games like play by email role playing games which i was all the way into so yeah i immediately was like loved bulletin boards and then was like i gotta run my own bulletin board so i was like annoying my parents by like because i immediately signed up for phytonet right and was like using my allowance to pay the long distance fees uh and so that's hilarious so then the you know the the bulletin board would call mine at like two in the morning and the phone and i had it so the computer would like pick up only in that small window and so you know every night at two in the morning the phone would ring once and wake my father up and then he'd like go back to sleep or whatever and eventually they were like what the f*** is happening with this phone call happening at two in the morning all the time and uh and confronted me about it and i was like oh yeah well oops you know so like yeah i love bulletin boards i ran bulletin boards forever uh until bulletin boards weren't a thing i ran a bulletin board in high school that i gave all my friends because internet access was still rare you know in the early 90s and so i would that's how i sort of started running linux was i'd run i was running os2 warp because i wanted multiple phone lines because you could multi-thread and then i discovered linux and probably in 89 or 90 i couldn't have been 90 i don't know early slackware pre-red hat anyway so i wound up like i had a bulletin board where you could dial into it and then if you knew the secret code it would reboot the computer and boot into linux and then my friends could dial in to the other line and then log into my system and then dial out to the internet but using my isp and so i just gave all my friends internet access by letting them reboot my bulletin board like wow i love that stuff so fun i still love it it's like the funnest thing

that's interesting a lot of detail in there really i mean sorry no no what i mean by a lot of detail in there is is by no means what you shared is that is that like that's where the curiosity begins and i think that's why it's kind of interesting kind of just dig back into that kind of cliche question which i really hate leading with which is like how'd you get started

you know i mean that's how i got started and i know i mean i was all in you know like i was taking it apart i had a job i worked in a comic book and role-playing game store it sounds idyllic because it kind of was now that i talk about it this way and the times man those are the times they're great so you know i would save some of the money that i wasn't spending on comic books and i would spend it on gear you know and like yeah it was great i still like when i think about my life and i think about my career i still kind of think of it as one unbroken arc from discovering that it was awesome to talk to people on computers and like my whole life has just been somehow facilitating people talking to each other on computers because i just think it's so cool not just like i like doing it but i i like making it happen even more you know like i just love i just really like the details of it and i like the like i like how computers work and i like how you put them together and i think operating systems are cool and you know like that's just

that's been the vibe the whole time at what point did it go from hobby to wow i can actually do this

as a career yeah so one of my old friends still one of my best friends we see him all the time comes to family dinner like every couple weeks got a job at 16 i already had a job because i was working in a complex store but he got a job working for this isp so to sort of set the scene for people who aren't as old as adam and i like the way the internet happened in the united states anyway was very grassroots so it started out like with lots of tiny mom and pop isps and so in this case it was a very mom and pop isp in vancouver washington that was in the back of a dentist's office so you like walked through the dentist's office like people were getting their teeth worked on and stuff past oral surgery and then you would go into the back office and they took one of the back office rooms and turned it into a data center data center they had a couple of half racks you know and we like put modems switches and yeah and then they were running you know there's a free bsd server and a windows nt server and that was like the isp and so he had gotten a job doing tech support for them and they wanted they were looking to hire another person and so he wound up he was like hey my friend adam can totally do this and then i immediately was like i want to be the systems administrator and there was this like very cool kid that was the systems administrator he like he was this older kid that worked at you know was in the community college or whatever and was into like skinny puppy and wore like you know had like safety pins in his face and like i have no idea what skinny puppy is skinny puppies an industrial band okay yeah that's it should set a vibe if you think like that early like 90s cyberpunk that vision of what the future would be he kind of looked like that sure okay like when that was still a thing you could be and you were being actually edgy instead of like hot topic you know like i haven't quite reached hot topic yet i

googled some images i'm seeing what i'm seeing and it's very large hair very mascara skinny puppy

yeah yeah sure because that era was it also overlapped with hair metal you know sure yeah so yeah you could still had to have massive hair yeah yeah he didn't really have massive hair in my memory but i didn't know him for that long he had a hot girlfriend i remember that thought that was all black leather yeah definitely strong cheekbones yeah lots of german cheekbones you know it's just lots of you know sure anyway you know i thought that was incredible but he was also kind of a slacker because like this was the least interesting part of his day and so and it was the most interesting part of mine and so he would just i would just like do work for him you know because he was whatever too busy by which i mean not there you know and and it was great and then yeah so that i was 16 17 17 it's probably 16 17 something in there because the memory gets hazy you know and then i went to arizona ostensibly to go to college i was a terrible student at 166 gpa strong d average i graduated high school because the i would hang out i would cut class obviously because nobody who doesn't cut class gets a d average and i would like a total loser i would hang out in the library and i befriended one of the librarians and so she would like let me cut class and hang out in the library and so i was cutting class and hanging out in the library and we were talking about how i wasn't going to graduate and so the library had like still books of all the washington state law you know like you know either would still publish them in volumes like it was the encyclopedia botanica or whatever and she found this loophole in state law where you could be concurrently enrolled in college and high school at the same time and if you dropped out of high school with six months left then they just froze your grades as they were when you dropped out and graduated you anyway and so i basically concurrently enrolled myself in college and then dropped out and then graduated through the college as an adult which means you don't need all of the extra credits for the vocational stuff you can just graduate with the with like 40 fewer credits or whatever than then you normally could and told all the kids in my high school how to do it so like 20 of us dropped out all at once it was great so you dropped out so we dropped out went to arizona got a job at another isp and yeah it was that or running a children's theater and the isp

paid better so okay so you traded isps essentially you went from yeah one in vancouver to one in arizona via a loophole in the law that let you drop out yeah and i had another teacher who was

like very upset that i wasn't gonna go to college so he was like if i find you a college do you you have to go and i was like sure and so he did he found uh he found devry before devry was really that big of a deal they're only two different eyes and uh yeah so i wound up going to this i wound up going to devry in phoenix and was there for when they had trimester so it's there for like one trimester because i got this job working in this isp and it paid as well as the average degree graduate from devry and so my mom was like hey do you you know i was i called my mom and was like i think i should drop out because i'm getting paid and she was like oh you should probably talk to the guidance counselor and so i went to the guidance counselor at devri and told them what was up and they were like yeah you need to quit like this is like the thing everybody's here for is to get a job that pays what you so just you should not be here and so i called my mom back and was like guidance counselor said i should drop out so yeah and then those isps like you know in that era it was like a big growth time for for getting everybody on the internet so the big thing everybody was doing in technology was just getting people on the internet so that first isp i worked for was in someone's garage all sorts of fun stories that i can't really tell about that isp really no i really can't we'll just we'll just say you not be able to it's complicated it was um the people in this era sometimes the people who ran isps were i'm gonna say sketchy so like you know if you talk to people who worked in that era in isps they almost all have stories where they're somehow connected to like mobsters and drugs and like because you know because it was a growth it was a growth mom and pop industry where you could make a lot of money very quickly and it took some capital investment and so you can see how it sort of comes together in a certain shape and so everybody i know who worked in that era if you ask them they have a story like that and i have one too but i can't really tell it because i you know because the people who were involved in that story like they're good people who i really like and i don't need to like talk about them on a podcast

so it's easy to trace you back to the company and probably easy to find their name yeah exactly

and i don't i don't need any of that but like rest assured they're funny stories i i shouldn't i

shouldn't i shouldn't have even mentioned it but you know you got me curious and upset yeah okay

i know let's just say that there was a moment where like law enforcement showed up you know to work i was at work then there was a knock on the door and then law enforcement arrived and then all was revealed unto me because the folks in law enforcement knew my boss and it was like a normal harassment kind of thing they weren't harassing him they were harassing his father and so they were like you know it was like you were in a movie and they were making those like you know when there's like the one good son and then the the cops come to harass the good son and he's like bobby what are you doing you know and they're like it was like that okay it was crazy i have other friends who you should definitely interview who would probably tell their stories about like you know they were setting up early like satellite internet connections and having to explain the speed of light to like drug cartels it's a whole thing it was weird really yeah anyway so it's so

wild how um there's a lot of at least there was in a popular tv show i mentioned very early in a show called silicon valley where porn was very influential in the innovation of various tech on the web all of it right yeah and then you have this scenario here which i was never aware of i'm aware of mom and pop isps yeah i grew up in the same era i was i'm very aware of this whole push to say everybody needs to get on the internet this is the yeah it wasn't about what was on there necessarily it kind of was a little bit aol definitely there wasn't a lot there yeah there wasn't a lot it was about getting access to this world wide web this uh what they called the information highway the information super

highway right you could still go buy the book that gave you all the best urls i mean like yeah

you could buy a book with urls i mean that's a whole different era of the internet we would never imagine that being the case now like you might buy a book and it's got like one or two urls in there

yeah no but it's just a book of like screenshots you know right of like netscape navigator and

you know that's uh that's wild it was wild just to see that that uh that crossover of nefarious folks let's just say yeah in the space of innovation yeah well it always happens right

if there's if there's a growth industry that happens really fast like it's it's obviously a thing where you can where you can fraud and all kinds of stuff it happened with like now that i'm talking about it like it happens a lot like yeah there's what's a modern version of it i mean you see this in startups all the time where like you know the requirements to be a founder are pretty minimal if we're being honest and so you know founder bad behavior it's not hard to go look at like founder bad like they're making hulu movies or whatever about the about you know people's bad behavior and the fraud that they commit and like it's kind of the same you know where there's access to money compelling ideas it can be tempting to sort of blur the lines you know because you're you know if you're running or you're founding a startup like you're always you're always hyping a little what you're doing you're always you're always a little telling a future story about what could be or why it'll be exciting and then there's the reality and you know there's a fine line between like elegantly talking about what you think is true and what can happen and lying and you know i think in the middle there was like you know there was all the consolidation of isps that happened and that was another interesting era so like i worked for an isp that was run by the arizona public service company which is basically the power company in arizona and we brought phone lines to a bunch of rural parts of the southwest that had no phone lines in the 90s because the power company had a pop in there there so they could deliver power they had power but no phones and so we brought them phones so that they could get on the internet and you know that consolidation the guy i worked for was a nuclear scientist who had been running the nuclear power plant not that long before and so he was fantastic to us but he was like you know he let me be the i was in the first crop of red hat certified engineers it was me and four people from ibm and that was because my boss at the time like sent me off to get trained or whatever but yeah he wound up with this like it was a very interesting arc and then as the consolidation happened so you know everybody sort of pulled together all the isps into super isps right then what you started to do is the focus shifted toward what you were going to do on the internet right because now everybody was here so now you had that sort of first generation of internet companies in that era rife with fraud right like crazy amounts of fraud so like i worked for a company uh infospace this is a story i can tell because that guy so maybe i shouldn't now that i'm saying it i'm like oof but anyway he was a bad dude navine jane who ran that company was some degree of awful kind of all the time and they didn't really have like a business model but there was a moment in time where infospace had a market cap that was bigger than microsoft really yeah because navine was just an incredible salesman like he would hype you up about whatever it was and you were just like okay yeah he seems great and like in reality he was kind of a monster but like that company was huge there were thousands of people working there we were running corporate infrastructure for them and production infrastructure people were it was crazy what was happening and you know yeah i think there's quite a bit of crossover fraud not to turn it into the fraud show or whatever makes it sound like my

entire career was full of crime but like adam you're a bad guy we work with bad guys i was the

guy who like you know then when they tried to fire him for example so they tried to kick him off the board because he was a bad guy and so the people that i actually worked for i wound up working there through acquisition this is actually an interesting story so i wound up working there through acquisition i was working for this company called go to net they got bought by infospace then what happened was the go to net guys basically staged a coup tried to and they i was the like lead systems administrator for all the corporate stuff so i had set up all the automation for all of the like you know your accounts and stuff your email and so they had told me in advance that they were going to have this board meeting and that they were going to fire the ceo and that they were going to call me and in that moment like as soon as i got that call i needed to like turn it off stat because i didn't want him to leave the boardroom and write an email and be mean so i had to turn everything off immediately so they called me and i turned everything off and then time goes by and i get another phone call and they're like you gotta turn everything back on and i'm like we really have like a back on you know like like i had the off automation but there wasn't really like a back on so it's gonna take a minute so yeah it turns out that what had happened was they had like he had like staged this coup and he threatened basically to take all of the revenue all the contracts many of which were in his name across the street to a new company that he was going to start and you know bankrupt them and so the board then decided to fire the guys that i had worked for who had tried to kick him out and then it took years for him to finally be replaced like his investors just relentlessly pushing him out of that company which you know eventually died the death it deserved which was it was a company that was had no real revenue had no real products it was just but thousands of us worked there doing stuff it was crazy yeah that was what it was like in web 1.0 for like a lot of people you know there's

just a lot of web beta or something like that not even like web 1.0 yeah because like what could be

not quite what is yeah because nobody knew you know like everybody was just trying to figure out what would stick and you had no idea and everybody who was on the internet was stoked because they were like i'm on the internet new stuff's happening you know and like it was awesome and but it was insane and often often strange so like then i went to work for another company it doesn't really matter but then i wound up working for that same set of executives the initial set again at another company so and i loved the team and there were a lot of the same people that i'd been working with for a long time at this point at a company called march x and they they had a business model that it was at least clear if weird which is basically they would pick a vertical they'd pick like targeted ads and then they would consolidate the like you know fourth fifth and sixth biggest players in the game so they would buy them and then smoosh them together and it would sort of spike the revenue and our job was to compress the spend so basically we built a machine that could just slurp up people's companies so like you know if you ran a targeted ad company we could buy you and then we would show up and look at how you ran the software and then port it to the automation that put it on our gear and then that would drop the cost to serve which would then spike profit right and you can see how that sort of turns you into a profitable company over time and yeah so i worked for them for a while and we did that a lot tons of interesting stories kind of live in there yeah you've had some adventures yeah i've enjoyed this uh seemingly

tangent we've been on but i i'm really i'm really curious about it doesn't sound like you went to school no to learn what you learned so you kind of learn by doing right yeah yeah learn by passion maybe even then and obviously by doing and you mentioned free bsd and you mentioned linux and

like this is 89 era yeah it wasn't even free bsd it was bsdi okay yeah and yeah it was mostly linux so linux changed my life you know like as soon as as soon as linux showed up and suddenly i could see all the source code that was a revelation in like did you actually look at the linux source

code though yeah yeah yeah because never looked at the link source code personally yeah i mean

you know when you could get it on floppy disks and then you suddenly had this like i loved operating systems and so but you couldn't see the source code to dos or os2 or windows you know like yeah but linux i was like whoa i can read like man pages for everything and i can look at the source code and i can like figure out what to do and i learned what a compiler was and like all of that stuff happened because linux happened and then there was this huge community of people who were so giving with their time and so giving with their with their focus that they really were it was very supportive as a place to learn and so like when i was working for that isp in arizona i patched the red hat installer so there's a bug in kickstart that made it so you know we basically couldn't automate the installation of this isp that we were building and so i patched it and sent them the patch and they like accepted it you know and suddenly that was like they showed up in an errata you know and then when they ipo'd they like sent me a little thing and were like hey thanks for the patch like here's your friends and family thing you know like it was great the early era of that that era was very like was really rich and interesting and like you know it was also where i saw the first people you know i became a free software person so the idea that that was important like that's how that happened for me so why i care so much about open source and why i care so much about licensing and all that stuff is because if it wasn't for that moment like i can't imagine how my life could have possibly evolved in the way that it did because i didn't go to school nobody did teach me like what i had was this incredibly supportive community and this rich access to information and those two things sort of allowed me to catapult myself into a

different place it's interesting how pivotal linux is to so many people's lives and just the idea of open source i mean i have a similar story not the same obviously i haven't been to 17,000 different isps with various nefarious folks involved or not involved yeah like you have and have the journey that you had but yeah it makes it sound like i worked for crime families that's why i didn't i mean you may have adam i mean you it sounds like you may have

honestly i mean maybe just the one but not just like a one not like a lot yeah sure i mean you

you work for a company with staging a coup i mean i mean boardroom you're in succession basically i

mean you you've lived a movie i wasn't in the room i was just the nerdy kid they called the

kid in the back that was told to push the off button and then suddenly push it back on and

there's no on button and then i yeah then i had to push the off button for thousands of people

that was a bummer you know did you watch the the tv show succession i watched a lot of it i didn't watch all of it man i couldn't put it down i was i was into it it was so it was a really

really well acted it was incredible yeah i just it's so dark and so at some point the bleakness

overwhelms me and then i have yeah i can agree with that there's so much backstabbing constantly i couldn't imagine i was thinking like is that how billionaires with way too much money act in family i didn't make you not want to be one right right yeah i mean it's it was really disgusting yeah but i couldn't watch the i couldn't stop watching the train wreck it was just like all the way to the very to the very end i'm curious though about like an isp stack is it boring is it fun like in those early days like what was the stack oh yeah to run an isp i mean i mean what you had were sort of in the from hardware to software what's what's the give me

a rough break yeah yeah so in the in the very beginning you had like you know like in the dentist office it was like racks of like regular pc modems you could buy off the shelf plugged into like pcs that were just loaded up with serial ports right and then eventually there was you know specialized hardware that you would buy that just had like racks and racks of modems and then you know it evolved over time so in those early in that early era there wasn't a whole lot and it was all mostly you were running it on on solaris that was if you had money it was solaris i don't know why they chose bsdi in the first in the early days but they did but you know if you had if you had capital then you were running all that stuff on sun gear and so for a lot of people it was like solaris for all the stuff that matters and then you know racks of modems that got ever denser sort of as time went by i think peak you know for me we were running red hat 4.2 in production at at the isp in arizona so like which that was us like we were the me and my friends were the ones who decided to do that and saved a bunch of money because we weren't buying sun gear and so we were just putting we were putting rack mounted systems together either by hand or eventually buying them and then sticking them in the closet and basically and then yeah that was like that was pretty much of the stack and then you were running you know apache and you were running for us we were running qmail for for email and yeah that was about it you know you got your home directory and you could like put up your little website on it or whatever and yeah other than that you got access oh dns of course for sure so like i was a big djb person so there was a lot of like you know we were running qmail and we were running his dns server and we were running all that stuff and yeah that was that was pretty much the stack and then you know eventually the stack grew so again money shows up consolidation starts to happen so the coolest consolidation story i have was this set of old macaw cellular guys who had made a bunch of money when macaw cellular got sold to at&t made a deal with the tribe in phoenix so there's like a there's a like a reservation sort of in the middle of phoenix kind of now has a casino that casino the bootstrapping money for that casino came from these macaw cellular guys and what they did was made a deal with the tribe that they could build a huge data center on tribal land and they filled it with modems and they put in their own like class i think it was a class 3 switch this is a long time ago so somebody's going to be like it wasn't i couldn't have been class 3 it was class 2 or whatever but they put in a phone switch that could do long distance phone switching and then they got the tribe to put in a tariff so any long distance call that wound up getting terminated at their giant switch they got like 10 cents and then they split it between this like telecom company and the tribe and so then they went around to all the isps and went stop running your own pops just we've got all the modems and we'll just route the traffic directly to you so just buy colo space next to our huge bank of modems and then you don't have to manage all the modems anymore and you can just run your gear right next to it and then we'll take a nut every time and the guy who set that up was humongous he was like i don't know he's like sit in my mind he was like 6'8 he wasn't that tall he couldn't have been but like in my head he was like like an ogre you know he's huge and as soon as you went in there the first thing he would do is take you to his office and show you his bathroom because he had this he had a custom-built urinal that was like made for him you know it was like a huge floor to ceiling urinal basically and he was incredibly proud of it and then he would leave you with cigars he had one of the racks in the data center he had turned into a humidor and so every time you went in he would like hand you like a handful of arturo fuente short stories and like kick you out the door it's great interesting yeah that's like a

a weird version of cloud in the way it's like modem cloud right come colo next to me it's very

similar to the cloud story right it's it well because that's the story it just happens over and over and over we're seeing it now like it's going to repatriate back to the edge again right like we're going to wind up seeing more and more people not running in the cloud both for the cost savings but also because it turns out it's a superpower to understand how the stack works and so one of the things the cloud has done is sort of abstracted people from the details but like in that era there were only details so so like everybody knew all the details and and it was still a superpower to know them but you couldn't do the work if you didn't know all the details now like you can do a lot of work without knowing anything about how any of this stuff actually works right like if you need a load balancer you can just make an api call and get one you have no idea sort of how that's working or what the stack looks like and like i remember when load balancers like when we first built them when there weren't load balancers because nobody had

enough load you know like yeah so this is the era that you learned linux well learned about linux and linux affected your your thought process around open source at what point did you really come to understand the true importance of open source not just yourself but like to your personal story but then everybody else to then eventually found a company that would be

open source and source yeah so i mean there's there's a couple of things so one was um so miguel de acaza and nat friedman nat friedman would go on to be the ceo of github and a bunch of other things they started a company in the early days called zimian i don't think that was the original name but basically they were the gnome company and they raised venture capital and i remember when the news broke that they had raised venture capital and that everything that they were doing was open source and at this point i had i'd already decided that like that the the game here was figuring out how to how to like start a business and make a bunch of money and so like you know working in arizona we were all contractors because you couldn't get a job working for the power company right because it was all unions and they didn't want the isp arm to be unionized in that way and so we were all contractors and uh so we built it we started our own contracting company and hired everyone and gave them all a 20 raise and just like took a smaller net you know so we were already kind of in that zone of like how do we figure out like let's figure out how to make a bunch of money basically like obviously there's a bunch of money to be had we should get some so when they started zimmy in i remember being like oh man like it's all open source they described how they were going to make money and i was like that could that could work like you could have all of the goodness of like the openness and the sharing and like that could then make you into a bigger business and that was the first time that that entered my mind that like what you could figure out how to do was like build open source and then use the success of that open source to sort of catapult you up in business and then there was a series of others that sort of moved in that early era there was like you know like va linux and the people that now run one of the red hat clones rocky linux like those guys had a company called linux care that's sort of infamous for its terrible booth babes when you look back on it now it's like bad you know wow and like so there was a couple of those things happening and then red hat of course happened and i loved red hat and they treated everyone so well in that era really and when red had ipo'd they made a ton of people wealthy and i just was just like yeah that's the way like we should figure that out and it was obvious to me that it was important on a philosophical level so like because it had made such an impact on my life like i had this career i was making more money than than any of my friends were like i was we were doing well and like that was all because of linux and it was all because of open source right that isp that i was running red hat on like they loved me because i had saved them tons of money and i think what evolved over time was that there was like a i love that strain of like human goodness that lives inside of open source i love that like that that ethic of sharing and that like more is more you know like we can we can the pie can get bigger and then everyone can eat and like that it was just so it's such an ingrained thing in me now but yeah it was it was very motivating and very very real and felt achievable but then you have to figure out how to do it and so it was like you know we tried to start a half a dozen businesses you know and failed but eventually basically those same guys that i worked for for a long time at march x march x went public and i had a pile of stock and i hadn't made any money from any of really not even meaningful money from any of those companies i had worked for and so they had ipo'd and my stock basically vested and for the first time it was also above water so i would have made you know not life-changing money but like meaningful money i would have been life-changing at the time because i didn't have a savings account because whatever i was a kid and spending every dollar but in order to to sell my shares i needed to get there a signature from the chief legal officer and there was this like coterie of executives who had been doing this together this whole time and it had all become fabulously wealthy and so i went into their office and i was like hey can you sign this piece of paper for me so i can finally sell these shares for my like decade of dutiful service or whatever and he was like no and i was like well but i don't have any like proprietary information about it i don't know any special secrets or whatever like please can you do this and he was like no because it would inconvenience me and this is what he said it would inconvenience me and and our ceo and like all my friends so no and i was like just no he was like yeah just no and so i like picked up my piece of paper and i left their office and i walked out of the building and i called my best friend who had built that asp with me in arizona and i was like hey man you hate working for ibm these people obviously give about me you know and so we should start a consulting company i'm done and like i'll go find us clients and pay your bills so you don't have to quit your job until i find us people who will pay us but we'll go build automation and we'll build fully automated infrastructure for startups and so i walked and started a consulting company and we built full we started building fully automated infrastructure for startups and that became hjk solutions so me and nathan hating smith and uh our friend sux siri and then we added some more people barry stein glass and a few others and eventually that became chef but it was the same people you know dreaming about how do we figure out how to start a business how do we figure out how to like build a company that ipos how do we figure out how to like do all of this you know like we wanted it and but we didn't know how to get it and so we just we just kept

kept taking shots you know what's up friends i'm here with todd kaufman ceo of test double you may know test double from friend of the show justin serles so todd on the home page for test double you say great software is made by great teams we build both that's a bold statement yes we often

are brought in to help clients by adding capacity to their teams or maybe solving a technical problem that they were you know didn't have the experience to solve but we feel like we want to set up our clients for future success and the computers just do what we tell them so well at least for now we try to work with our client teams to make sure that they're in a great state that they have clarity and expectations healthy development practices lean processes that that allow them to to really deliver value into production really quickly so we started a lot of our engagements by just adding capacity or technical know-how we end a lot of our engagements by really setting up client teams for success yeah i like that so when you say to

someone you should hire test double for this reason what is that promise i'll throw out a

couple of different promises i would say one we will leave your team in a better state than we found them and that may be improving the code base it may be improving some of the test suite more often than not it's sharing our experience and our perspectives with your team members so they're accelerating along their own kind of career growth path maybe they're learning new tech by virtue of working with us maybe they are figuring out ways to build software with a higher level of quality or scale or maybe they're they're even focusing on the more human side of the equation and figuring out how to better communicate with co-workers or stakeholders or whomever so that's guarantee number one the other one i would say is that we're going to deliver without being a weight on your organization so by that i mean we're able to come in really quickly acclimate learn your systems learn your processes learn the right people and deliver features within you know our first days there so our challenge to our team is to always be shipping a pull request in the first week of work so we acclimate very quickly and we're very driven to get things done that means we don't require a lot of supervision or management overhead or technical support the way some companies envision working with a consulting firm so we really challenge ourselves and guarantee to our clients that we're going to be very easy to work with very cool tide i love it

so listeners this is why edward kim co-founder and head of technology at gusto says quote give test double your hardest problems to solve end quote you can trust them they build great software they build great teams and they'll do it for you you can learn more at testdouble.com again testdouble.com is it uh hjk is that right yeah so you created a consulting company did you essentially do it by yourself and then bring in clients and then enable your friends to join you

is that kind of like how it panned out yeah so i found the first contract okay where i would basically what the what we sold was you'd pay us a fixed fee and we would automate everything so application deployment monitoring trending operating system installation identity management backups database management all that stuff so big long list and we would fully automate all of it for a fixed fee so you know you'd pay us 20 grand and we would deliver all this automation and then you paid us a retainer to maintain it and the fastest we ever turned around was 24 hours so we had someone sign the contract and pay us 20 grand and then 24 hours later we'd fully automated everything they did and yeah it was great we were we were murderers like i'm not sure you should say that given the history of shares but like this is how i met jesse robbins who's sort of integral to the chef story so jesse was the master of disaster at amazon so jesse and if you ever meet him he's like a larger than life human like he's an incredibly motivating person he has a deep and foundational belief in both himself and other people he's a lovely person and it was jesse who was like you know we tried to recruit him to our little consulting company and he was like no i'm not leaving my job as the master of disaster at amazon to come join your fucking consulting company but if you build a product call me and so we we had done we we had grown and we had a couple of people working for us mostly our friends we had you know maybe a dozen clients and we were using puppet at the time we built automation on top of puppet and there was this horrific moment where puppet had this terror had two things wrong with it so one was we were automating more than most people were with puppet and so the way puppet was designed wasn't meant that it wasn't very repeatable so you know you'd build this big graph and then you would do a topological sort of the graph and and topological sorts are random basically and so sometimes the graph would sort in a way that worked and sometimes it wouldn't and the answer was just run the automation again and hope it sorts itself out um or you know figure out the bug in your graph and fix the bug either way what it meant was we would sell all this automation to these people and it would work 100 of the time 80 of the time and then 20 of the time it just wouldn't work at all or it would take five times as long and people didn't love that and so that was frustrating and then there was this bug where suddenly files at random would start getting overwritten by checksums so you'd have like you know your resolve comp file or whatever would just go away and it would be replaced with just a checksum no way yeah totally and so this was so bad so this happens to this happens to like our biggest client right and i hop on irc and i'm like yo dogs you know have you seen this horrific thing happen and the channel is like oh yeah we know about that one and like links me to the bug and i'm like what we you know like how what memo did i miss you know this isn't fixed like how did this not well just how did it not pop to the top of the community's stack you know you just you know like i should i like i was paying attention i was pretty involved and like i didn't know so anyway this bug comes in and in the bug report there's you know it's filed by this kid in new zealand and he files the bug and luke responds and he's like i tried to reproduce this and i couldn't make it happen in the lab and i've spent as much time as i'm willing to spend on it so unless you're willing to pay me for a support contract i'm done and i was like for real you know like it just overwrites files with checksums and you're just like i'm out and he was like yeah i gotta eat and i'm like yeah man i have to eat too we should fix this bug and he was like well you should pay me and i'll fix it and i was like what if we just worked together how about i put my labor toward figuring out what the bug is and we solve this problem he's like no if you do that you're taking food out of my children's mouths and you should like you know you should go somewhere don't do that and i was like dude i'm not paying you you know like i'm i'm not gonna pay you money to fix this bug i'm willing to fix it but i'm not willing to pay you to do it i'm willing to put my own time against it because i got a consulting company to run we weren't making that much money it's not like i had the cash laying around and so i went to the person who filed the bug and i was like hey can you get this to happen reliably and he's like yeah absolutely and it wasn't reliable for us and so i was like great can you get me access to the system that does this reliably and he did and so he gave me access to the system in new zealand and i spent a week figuring out this bug and we fixed it and you know he accepted the pr but was very angry at me um because i had like undercut his model and taken food from his children's mouths and so i was like this probably can't stand like we can't continue to be i don't want to be the consulting company that is like the best in the world at this technology but that also can't but the guy who writes the technology hates us that's like not a very tenable business position and they were completely uninterested in talking about the other problems i had with the system which was like hey at scale you got to figure out like how this big graph works it's a mess like and they were just they were like you're an idiot if you didn't if you didn't do it if you weren't such a big dumb dumb this wouldn't be a problem and so i started writing chef on the side so my partners took over all the all of the work and then i essentially took a couple of months and wrote chef intending to use it for our consulting company but then it was so cool that i showed it to jesse robbins and jesse robbins was like we should raise venture capital for that like let's go and so jesse joined us as the ceo and we raised venture capital and i showed it to ezra zygmuntovich at engine yard who rest in peace ezra who would have written chef if i hadn't written it he was already thinking about doing it but i had written chef and he was like this is what i want and so before we even publicly launched it we used it to automate engine yard and then to make it available to engine arts customers so when we had a pretty great launch and ezra supported us and the rest is

history wow i can remember some dms with ezra and i was sad because obviously he passed away and i had met ezra around at the engine yard offices in san francisco yeah i didn't live there so it was a big deal for me to be there and to meet him and even hang out with them they were so generous they were they were so cool he's like come on in we said we went upstairs and sit down on the couch yeah the two-story yeah you know that's that's where we perfected chef there you go that's awesome and i was like dude you're so cool he's so like you run this company i mean you're so cool he was so cool and i think it was i forget what year he passed away it was like several years later but i wanted to get him obviously i'm a podcaster right i wanted to get him on a podcast eventually and i was like going through my brain of like people that i've met over the years that were influential to me and i was thinking gosh man ezra i think we'll get him on the show and just like share like where we're at now this is like post way post engine yard yeah but that was like the foundation for so much so much in like the early ruby hosting days for sure but there's also a lot of the cloud development that's happened and stuff like that

just oh yeah way ahead of his time it was yeah but when you think about you know that early internet and the culture and the people and open source as was a perfect example like ezra had no ego about ezra 100 could have written chef and it would have been a bigger deal than me i didn't i didn't matter you know he didn't have to do that for me like he had all the resources in the world he had the best ruby programmers he had everything he needed but because i showed up and i had the thing that was basically what he wanted and i was willing to hang out and do the work with him to make it work the way he needed it to like not only did he help me he like incredibly raised our profile you know because he was the most high profile person in that space at the time in infrastructure he'd literally written the book on rails deployment and production and he was just so thrilled to help us and to like move that forward and if he hadn't done it like we wouldn't have been as successful as we were and he didn't have to you know he did it because because that's who he was and and because he believes in open source and he believed in all of those things as deeply as we did and yeah i miss ezra he was great rest in peace ezra definitely going back

to luke puppet is open source he wants you to pay him he did yeah which was fine i wasn't upset that

he wanted to get paid it was just right i was upset at the at the there's this severity one awful severity yeah and his answer was basically like you must pay me or i won't fix it and i was like i just i can't even with that like like why wouldn't you see that this is a thing you must fix you know like it's obviously terrible for your product that's the part of them i want to dig

into the whole you must fix because i i'm sure you know open source works adam i'm talking to the person i go to for answers well now i got deep philosophical questions about open source and the way it merges with you know our freedoms in it yeah he's free to not fix it right he's a hundred percent free to not fix it but you're like dude come on it's so bad you should right yes because

you use the word must is what i'm trying to dig into because product wise you must okay if you're trying like what luke wanted most and we had we'd spent time together i knew like luke wanted the ring like luke wanted it all that's that was what he wanted and so like this was a terrible business decision and so the argument i was having with him wasn't demanding his time for free i was like homie do you not see that this is like this is phenomenally bad for you like when you think about just people adopting the software using it trusting it you know puppet was on the rise and like here's this lurking time bomb it was the thing to use it was absolutely the thing to use and like and it was great and like and here's this time bomb you know sitting in the middle of your product and like that's not your most that's not the thing and like i just didn't understand it and for me it's not that i demanded he fix it because i was willing to fix it myself i wasn't upset that he told me to fix it myself okay like that's what i wanted clarity on because i was like man fixing it myself was a fine answer him being like look i'm too busy i got stuff happening i gotta feed my kids i'm like great feed your kids i'll i'm willing to do it but he was mad i fixed it because if that's how it felt to me i'm sure if we get him on the podcast he'll be like no i wasn't you big jerk but like it sure felt that way to me and to a bunch of other people that were there at the time and like you know i think to be fair to luke i'm sure there's a different side of this story that if you told it it would be very different but like for sure because there's perspectives yeah there's perspectives luke's not a bad guy like whatever we're not besties but like i don't hate luke i'm not like carrying around a weird grudge or whatever but yeah it was it was more of those pieces i couldn't understand and then for me building my business and i was out stumping you know i was going to conferences giving puppet talks i was like i was telling people this was the way and teaching them how to do it because it was raising my own profile at the same time and his and i was like i can't do it if what i'm leading all those people into is the trap of you know in this in this way and so the inevitable resolve conf file getting overwritten with a checksum that's right that's bad news it was done it was tough that you couldn't even personally reproduce this happens at random yeah yeah it was bad and like and so yeah it was it wasn't that i demanded that he do the work it must was like it's clearly you must fix it for your survival for your own best interest and for mine because i'm trying to build a business on top of your software and i can't do it and he was kind of annoyed i was doing that too because again if i wasn't doing it they maybe they would have called luke you know and then we raised venture capital i think before luke did which i think annoyed him too and certainly the existence of chef annoyed him because it felt like you know we had stolen from him we didn't but you know that's how it felt

at the time did you begin from first principles did you i know you didn't steal any code obviously but you did you borrow any i mean because open source is like it's art yeah and art imitates other art right there's borrowing that happened there's influences that happen obviously 100

look it was a hundred percent influenced by puppet if puppet like there's a bunch of things that luke invented like the resource the declarative resource abstraction that idea that you like that you would just say this is the file and here's the shape that i wanted in and then here's like a package and i want that in this condition like there'd be no kubernetes without lucanese right because lucanese was the person that created that abstraction that says here's how i want to declare this resource and then that resource maps to something real in the world and then there's a loop a reconciliation loop that solves those things and that you lay them out in the way you did that was all luke and like mark burgess had invented much of the structure that that drove those systems so a lot of the fundamental underpinnings that was mark but luke was the one who put that user experience on top of it that gave you that abstraction and like you got to praise the man for it you know like if he hadn't done that where would it would be on a fundamentally different trajectory you know and like lucanese is a genius right he's brilliant and if it hadn't been for luke like chef wouldn't have looked like that at all because i didn't i wouldn't have come to that conclusion right but i had his prior art right and then i fixed the things that i thought were wrong with it the way the graph worked i wanted it to be a real programming language not a dsl on and on and on so like you know and it was a fundamentally different product because of it but it doesn't mean that i wasn't standing on his shoulders you know if there wasn't for chef there'd be no palumi right there'd be no cdk right those ideas of like you should you should do the automation in a real programming language like chef was the first of those really that wasn't just like writing scripts you know so it all but it all stands on each other right for sure

yeah it's it's interesting how just how that plays out like that that you can be a part of that and i think one thing you said was that you were using puppet in ways i don't think it was not i'm trying to paraphrase to some degree you said like in ways beyond it was planned to be used

you were hitting the edge cases i mean not planned we just we were we were using it more than most people so like most people were using like a little puppet in their in their stable compute lab and we were using puppet to be like no i'm writing reusable content that i deploy really quickly across and it's thousands of resources i'm fully managing every aspect of the system with puppet most people weren't they were like you know they're replacing cf engine 2 which was like setting up a config file and like making sure the the patch ran you know they were there was like a half dozen resources they were managing if you're managing a hundred resources on a single box that was a big deal we were running you know our standard config on a single host was 300 plus you know 400 so like when you think about that in aggregate it was just and the sizes were so much bigger because at the time this was this was the beginning of web 2 so this was like facebook apps you know so people were like couldn't get enough stuff couldn't get enough gear we had a customer i like who was one of the first music sharing things and it was a facebook app and so they had a billion users immediately that was unheard of right that was not a thing you could do on the internet before that moment and it brought social media into the world and so like they literally were calling all of our friends being like do you have any gear like just can we can we just we just want to buy whatever you got we don't care what it is we'll take it we'll put it in racks like we can't they couldn't scale fast enough and so they were using our kit to scale you know like that automation is what allowed them to do it which was awesome but like you you know and their own intelligence i'm not saying we did it like for sure it was all chef it was all chef it wasn't chef that was puppet that was all puppet we're using puppet to do that and like big deal right yeah and like you know it was just it was a pretty

fun interesting era so if my notes are correct this beginning of ops code yeah not chef yeah was in 2008 roughly probably right yesh so let's say maybe 2007 but it happened in kind of 2008

yeah hjk had been going for a couple of years so like right you know you can backdate that to

did you literally i mean this is probably a boring minutia to some degree but like did you literally convert the company hjk yeah to a different company called ops code or did you like just end the consultancy and found a new company we started a new company and then that company acquired our assets our assets yeah and you didn't have to do any due diligence because

it was yeah because we knew it was there what the diligence was yeah i mean this introduced me to a bunch of new interesting ideas so one was that you could like and jesse knew these things like jesse jesse had been studying the business of venture capital in a way that i hadn't i was i had been but i i was uncertain still and jesse was like not uncertain and so i learned that you like shouldn't never pay a startup lawyer that they take their money when you get funded but they'll do all the work for you for free for example i was like that's amazing and then you know he had lots of he had helped start what would become velocity with tim o'reilly and so he was sort of connected to that whole scene which eventually became sort of the epicenter of how web 2o evolved and how that entire generation of of cloud and all that stuff sort of happened those people were connected for the first time sort of through o'reilly and so those connections and the technology and the shape of the market at the time you know there were allowed us to sort of successfully raise capital but we had a hard time raising like we you know i think we pitched jesse would know the exact number but like 15 20 times and got nose and the we were all beaten down and sort of convinced it wasn't going to work and we met bill bryant at a coffee shop in seattle which was like near his house he like held court at this coffee shop and we gave him our like sad dejected pitch because everybody told us to like raise less money basically and so we had started out asking for two and a half and and we had gotten all the way down to like please give us half a million dollars we promise it'll work out and he was like guys this is a sad pitch like is there like a business you believe in hiding in here is there like a is there a way that we all get like a billion dollars because if so i want to hear that pitch and we're like well yeah and so then we like gave him the billion dollar version he was like that's a good pitch that's what you that's what we're gonna do and he's like and you're gonna ask for three ask me for three we were like okay three and he was like great no and yeah exactly he was like no but i'll give you two and a half in worse terms you know but like and then it worked and you just you know you just did it until it worked and yeah so two

and a half mil that was your initial funding is that right probably or three did you have a product yeah at what point were you okay because i'm trying to launch it we hadn't launched it yet

so we announced the fundraising and we launched chef at the same time did you launch chef as open source then yeah in the beginning yep and there's a we published the fundraising announcement a blog post on like what chef was a blog post about why we chose the apache license we had ezra write a blog post on his blog about it on engine yard or personal his personal okay but we used but we referenced engine yard because they were already using chef and so you'd already

done all that automation for engine yard prior to this even this pitch and yeah yeah yeah fundraise okay yeah so you knew you had faith in what the software was able to do in its infancy

yeah and like you know it was like it wasn't a great launch you know it was like a we know our color scheme was like gray and blue and you know like it was like a website built by systems administrators you know lots of squares but like sure but what did happen was there was very quickly a community of people who we knew from puppet and we knew from the rails community who like really attached quickly to chef and then you know we knew that we were building a community and it was all open source and so we just embraced everyone who would listen so like anybody and you know at that time like open source still happened on irc primarily so you know and you can see it now happening again and kind of in discord where i would argue open source now happens mostly in discord if there's an analog and so we just wound up hanging out with everybody who cared about what we did and because we came up as consultants we frequently knew how to automate whatever they were trying to automate better than they did and so we would help people not only like use the software but solve their like root problem in a deeper way so like one of the things i used to do at the end of my conference talks every now and again was i would just like i would ask people how many people use chef and how people use puppet and how many people use cf engine and like i would offer to fix their problems not by converting them to chef but just like i knew cf engine really well and i knew puppet really well and so like you could come to me with your puppet problem and i would like fix your puppet problem you know and so we just really intentionally tried to build a community because at the time you know this was tim o'reilly's like create more value than you capture like all of that was sort of both in our minds and in our culture and was starting to really crystallize around velocity and around the web 2o summit and around like a couple of those conferences and so that idea really captured us and we really was like embedded in that in that business plan and i think we did a good job yeah very interesting those initial days you know you're

obviously deeply in community out there giving talks willing to fix non-chef things as you just doing whatever what was what was the thing that people were buying what was the the paid for

version of chef yeah so initially it was going to be a hosted sas so this was also the moment the rise of sas so salesforce had launched a few years earlier aws had just begun so like s3 was just happening ec2 had just happened and so like sas was just beginning and so our idea was that we were going to run a hosted service and then if you wanted to run it on prem which you'd be a dummy to do you would be open source and we were just way too early for hosted configuration management like way too early you know and so yeah we launched this hosted sas product big multi-tenant sas service that did okay but didn't do great and all of the large customers banks and insurance companies and stuff like would just run the open source because they weren't willing to run a hosted product a decade later they would all come to me and be like can we just buy a managed can i just buy a sas and i was like you guys like like i did this too late i did this for you and now i have let it founder because you didn't care but yeah and that was the so that was the original business model this was sas and then it turned you know over time it turned more and more toward on-prem software feature discrimination all of that stuff sort of crept in because we were trying to figure out how to monetize what was a growing enterprise user base and just trying to figure it out and we really struggled to do it as i've talked about sort of at length i think i've never heard the story yeah i mean we've gone through like we went through every possible open source business model we went through like you know we started out sas plus open source that you could run on prem then it was we had a the open source version and then we took the sas version and we sold that as an enterprise version that was like hey if you want these other features we wrote the back end in erlang which was one of the greatest technological things i've ever seen in my life the team rewrote the chef server in erlang because we had facebook as a customer and we were their goal was to bootstrap a data center and like i don't remember what the time goal was but it was like five minutes ten minutes from scratch what yeah it was nuts right and it was really condensed and the ruby based chef server just couldn't do it and i remember going to facebook with the erlang chef server on a usb key that had a little like whatever it was like a little bear's head on the end of it and i brought it to facebook and we installed it and ran it and we thought that it didn't work at all because the load was flat and there was no utilization and then everything finished and it was fine and so just it like the erlang just literally ate all the load and just didn't care without breathing it was incredible the first time that we'd used it outside the lab it was truly incredible so we were like hey if you want the good one you know pay us for the good one and then that becomes it becomes hard to maintain both so then you're like well maybe we should just open source the good one too but then we'll hold back some features maybe it'll be security features then maybe it'll be well then what we actually should do is like you can't hold back basic security that's makes you kind of a jerk so then you know maybe we'll we'll build like a dashboard like a better web ui we'll monetize that you know maybe it's security and compliance we'll do that we made some acquisitions brought in the inspect folks you know that was that was great they were awesome their code was incredible that helped you know we like we tried every variation of open core possible and then in the end switched to to a model that looked like red hats which was the most efficient by a dramatic

margin would you say those 10 years before acquisition was a struggle to find the business

model then like given this in like hindsight i mean yes and yes and no you know like because

the thing was good it was hard to make money off of it right like is that we should have made more

money than we did right so like if we had made the amount of money for the value we created that company would still exist it'd be it'd be a public company and you'd be talking about it now we didn't and so it wasn't but it wasn't because we didn't have an impact like the impact we had on the enterprise the client list we had you know we were still growing at a reasonable clip but yeah i would say you know a lot of people tell successful startup stories and they they always draw like a smooth line you know sort of up and to the right that was not my experience my experience was that it was a series of stair steps where all the flat spots in the stairs were just terrifying and existential and and you didn't have enough life experience or business experience to tell the difference so like you know there's a lot of things that in hindsight weren't existential that we thought were and freaked out about and then there's a lot of things that really were existential that we freaked out about justifiably and then fixed and then you know the business model worked out so like but it i wouldn't say it was easy you know and a lot of it was wasn't so much it was never the technology it's always people you know like it's hard to find the right people it's hard to work with people it's hard to figure out how to build a culture it's hard to keep that culture and i think the yeah it was it was it was hard at the same time we were quite successful and it was really fun and i you know i had no regrets i would do i would do it roughly i wouldn't do it the same way i'd have changed the business model if i had hindsight but i think what that did for me was professionalize me so you know there was a moment in chef's life where you know docker had happened and docker was so disruptive to us and to everyone in that space and there was a minute where they were just you couldn't have a conversation that wasn't just docker docker docker docker docker docker and you know with our own with our investors our customers they're like are you you guys are dead right like it was just it was awful and what year was that i don't remember because i'm bad at time but early on in docker's life so a year into docker's existence probably 2015 2016 maybe yeah maybe and i had to give a speech to like because the company was real that was really down and so barry christ asked me to like give him a pep talk you know and so i went and watched um al pacino did a football movie whose name escapes me it's any given sunday yes yes any given sunday and the end of any given sunday he gives the greatest inspirational speech ever put to film you know he's basically got this this bunch of football players and he's like life is a game of inches and you gotta crawl for it and you gotta look at the people next to you and you know he gives this like incredible speech about basically how the team needs to pull together and that the struggle is living that like pushing through it is the source of what it means to be alive and so i like studied him delivering this speech because that's how i wanted to deliver it and i wrote my speech and i did my best to deliver it like i was coaching a football team like i was al pacino and it worked like it i think it did actually rally the team you know it rallied the company but as soon as i was done giving this speech i'm so grateful that i was alone um so we had this office in san francisco that wasn't full of very many people and it had a beanbag because whatever startups and i just collapsed and wept for like half an hour like full body just weeping because the stress of trying to hold it all together and not knowing you know i just told all these people what to do but what if they didn't you know what if it what if we lost yeah what would that mean what that say about me what would it say about them like what would happen to their lives what happened to mine my family and all of that pressure and all of that was so intense and i just couldn't hold it anymore and i realized that the problem was that this had become my life and not my job and that it was you know there's a there's a part of it being your life that's helpful when you're when you're trying to do something new when you're you know you hear musicians talk about this all the time where they didn't have like a you know they didn't have a plan b like that's good and can be helpful but like eventually it turns out that it's your job and that i don't control the outcomes i don't control what people do i don't control whether it's going to work what i do control is how i act i control i control what we do next i control how we respond and to do that well i needed to i needed to put down the burden that said that it was that it was my responsibility and instead my responsibility was to just be the best i could possibly be at the work that i had to do and it had to become about the work i was doing not about whether or not it was going to happen for all of these people and that really transformed who i am into a person like now when i am as a professional ceo i'm a professional entrepreneur like i do that it's my job but it's not who i am and that's the moment that it it i stopped it stopped being who i am it's interesting

to be that your identity is wrapped up in that because when you say that's who i was it's what i was that's what you mean right like your identity was deeply ingrained tied to tethered to and your self-worth yeah you know who you are is adam jacob like your worth is like oh is chef successful

no okay well you said then you do suck you know i had people tap me on a shoulder in a coffee shop and be like you're adam jacob you wrote chef and i'm like yeah and he's like oh i hate chef you know and like he just dang random stranger felt entitled enough and i was like i'm sorry i wasn't thinking about you when i wrote it you know like i didn't mean to hurt you but like i had way more people tell me that it changed their lives and how it impacted their careers and their families and like i have a million lovely stories of that and like but yeah it does sort of at some point you have to decide like what fuel you're going to burn because you're on this long journey you know it takes 15 years and you know if the fuel you decide to burn is your own self-worth your own your own belief in yourself like you'll run out eventually there'll be enough things that tell you that it's not real that you'll that'll be it for you and so like i just needed to switch fuel you know that's not because i don't have some of my identity wrapped up in those things i do like it's been i'm 46 i've been doing it we just talked about i've been doing it since i was a kid like that is a huge part of who i am but it's not all of who i am and it's not the and my success or failure doesn't define who i am you know i'm gonna be good at it whether i win or lose i'm great at it because i'm putting in the work to be good at it and that puts me in a position hopefully to succeed but you know just like those football players at the end of any given sunday the other team's feeling the same way you know like everybody else also in that game is trying to do the same thing they're trying to win too and you win or lose and sometimes it's your time and sometimes it's not your time and like you can't control it but if you're burning self-worth you know if you lose and what you burn down is your identity your self-worth your belief in yourself like it's tough to get back up again you know it's hard to it's hard to decide to keep going but if it's professional acumen if it's skill then it's just now i'm a pro now it's a now it's the game i play and i'm doing my best to play it well you know in the military i was

in the army for a bit in my life and when we did things that didn't seem like it made sense or it seemed like rework or didn't have meaning or it had meaning it was just too big the response was never negative it was always good training that was good training yeah right yeah because like you do some things sometimes in life and you're like that sucked what purpose did it did it have right it was good training it was good training it wasn't burn adam down whether i'm talking to you or me yeah because we're both named madam it was simply wow i went through that to

learn something and it was good training yeah it just it was good training and i think don't let it

be self-worth burning no it can't because it can't be yeah or team burning like that sucked for us like we suck as a team because we just went right does that make us a bad team yeah

does that you know and yeah and i'm i'm so grateful for those moments and i'm so grateful for the opportunity to have had them and yeah but i wouldn't still be doing it if i hadn't had that revelation that like that this is just about the work and that the answer is always just more work so it doesn't matter what the problem is i'm a professional my job is to do the work and i'm going to do the work at the highest level i can do it because that's what i have pride in because i can control that i can control my how i put in the work i can control how i like the level that i'm playing at and that doesn't mean i'm always playing at the best i can play sometimes i have bad days everybody does but like that's a thing that i can do and in the sense of good training if even if i fail it's good training i'll be better like i'm going to learn from it all my game will get better i'll i'll be able to figure out how to how to motivate it yeah not to go

too deep into this scenario for you but when you gave this speech and you said you were in quotes trying to hold it together you must have been terrified like in that moment yeah to to give that speech were you trying to i mean without giving away what the details specifically were were you trying to hype and sell no this potential future what were you trying to accomplish i was

trying to remind them who they were like we had built this incredible company we built this incredible community we were having an incredible impact on those enterprises and i would look for as much impact as docker has had and it has had an incredible impact i know what chef did at some of those companies i know what they were like before and i know what they're like after and the impact chef had on those people's careers on their lives on how they structure their company on what they do we did that and this was the people who did it and i was trying to remind them who they were and i was trying to remind them that it didn't matter what the outside world said it didn't matter what new technology people were hyped up about it didn't matter what any of those things were what mattered was what we could do for those customers what we could do for those people that we were the people who could do that and we were better and we would stay better because we were great at it and but if we didn't lose faith in each other and we remembered who we were that we were going to get through it and we did like when we sold chef like you know we had tried to sell it the years before in this moment there was a moment where you know nobody would buy it for a dollar and this is a company with you know tens of millions of dollars in revenue recurring growing 20 year over year like it's great not one freaking dollar because the market had just turned away from you and was convinced you were going to die and it didn't we didn't right we figured out how to land that plane and like i'm so proud of it but that was because those people didn't lose faith in each other you know and that's what i was trying to do i was just trying to remind them of who they were and what they had done and what they could still do you know i guess in a way you're probably

giving the speech to yourself too which is why you went away and did what you did because it landed on your own like sometimes you come up with the idea and then you say it out loud yeah and then it becomes like it was real beforehand and it was still true before yeah yeah and

thinking about it yeah thinking about it now and talking to you about it like i'm i'm like welling up now just thinking about it like i don't think i'm gonna cry but i might if i do great podcast material but like i like yeah i yeah of course i was giving it to myself of course i was and look in in the years since like i've been in therapy and like learned a lot and i'm improving but like it's not easy for me to talk about like most people but like there's some people for whom they can talk about how they're feeling and it's like very difficult for me to talk about how i feel you know if you ask me what's happening i'm gregarious enough i'll tell you like how my day was i'll tell you like a list of facts about my day but i'm not going to lead with how i feel at the end of the day i'm not going to be like i feel anxious i feel stressed i feel sad i feel whatever and so it's not like i was expressing to other people anyone else even including my wife like what the burden i was holding was that was all just inside and i was just white knuckling it sort of through all of those moments and like yeah so there was a lot of there was a lot of internal pressure that had sort of built up there that needed that needed needed release i think part of why the speech was good was because that same energy came out in the speech you know like i used that as fuel and because i had allowed that to happen when i gave the speech like suddenly all these emotions i had not been processing and hadn't been holding on to like i couldn't keep in anymore and even though i couldn't verbalize them i could certainly experience them physically by just weeping sobbing you know yeah well thank you for sharing that i

know that's vulnerable to put that kind of stuff out there and to share that but i think that's it's a beautiful thing because we live in this world where it's a one or a zero right or it's aren't off and especially in the developer world things are very binary in the fact that it's true or not true right it's an error it's not it runs or it doesn't whatever right and then you kind of get into this other zone where it's like well there's there's people involved and there's emotions involved and there's identities involved and there's you know promises made and there's self-worth that's you know established in something erroneously or or or not and there's a lot of detail in there that i think is is very telling of your character well thank you and just

telling of your willingness to to share the journey yeah i mean because of that experience in open source and all the people who have helped me you know if i hadn't met jesse robbins and he hadn't believed in chef and hadn't believed in me and hadn't believed in those things there wouldn't have been an ops code and if there hadn't been an ops code like there wouldn't be a system initiative and there wouldn't have been a chef and they're you know like they're like there's so many things that would have not happened or would have happened differently and i think you have a responsibility at some point when you when you reach a certain level of professionalism to help other people climb that same pyramid you know like like if it wasn't for ezra where would i be you know and that ezra was higher on that pyramid than i was and in that moment he didn't have to help me but he chose to help me and in that moment that he helped me like he lifted me up and put me on his shoulders and helped me become the person that i am and i think we have a responsibility to do that and i think people who don't feel that responsibility or who don't do it or who actively close that door like to be honest i think they play the game less good like like i think in the end it comes back around you know and i think a lot about like i don't think a lot about it well that's not true i have this like tattoo so i do think a lot about it but like what's the tattoo say it's just three lines that reminds me that i have things that i that matter in my life and that they're that they're not all equal you know there's some things i care about more than others and i should focus on the things that i that matter the most so like my family and it's like in the shape of it's kind of rounded off sort of like the like so big three parallel lines that are like ruled paper literally it's college ruled paper with a denny's coffee mug and we drew a circle around it and we filled in the lines and then we tattooed it on my arm but it's there to remind me that like that i have things i value and i have like and that i need to keep those things in my mind while i live my life and i think that there's a you know when you think about your life and you think about the work that you do or you think about all the things that you've done like there's things that i'll do that will matter when i'm gone you know i hope somebody on some podcast someday is like man you know adam jacob really did blah blah blah blah and helped me in this way and they can be like rest in peace adam you know pouring out for our homie and like i hope that day is far away dang man and you know like i don't want that to be now thank you but like but i care more about that than i do about winning you know i care about how i win because i really believe that you can win better by doing it that way like you can win by being good and by being a person who cares and being a person who helps other people and like you know i think like there's a company that i talked to not that long ago just getting started absolutely gonna wind up competitive to system initiative with you know started by a bunch of very credible people who i helped them get funded because i introduced another person who should fund them i was like here's the person that should fund you and that's the person who's going to fund them and he's a great venture capitalist and like you know i hope they have all the success in the world because it's not a zero-sum game you know like if they if we wind up competing and we play against each other i'm gonna beat them because i'm better than they are and i'm gonna fight like hell to do it but you know if they beat me so be it you know like some days you win some days you

lose yeah but let's go you know yeah for sure are you um as i'm hearing your story obviously a lot of tech founders run parallel to some degree to the storyline of silicon valley the tv show did

you watch that yeah i watched that was most of it yeah end to end i don't think i watched it all the way to the end same thing a little too close to home you know it's like yeah like i can't watch the um like i really struggled to watch all the dramatizations of like crazy founders who do fraud like i can't watch like the elizabeth homes documentaries well there's no fraud in this one well there's a little bit of blurred lines but i know fraud but like i have this like i have this deep part of me like i i was playing mass effect last night the first one and i decided i was going to try and be a mean person and i literally couldn't make mean person choices i feel you that's how i am i just couldn't do it and so like i can't make me twice mean person choices either i really can't so so when i watch those things and i think about myself and the part of my job that requires me to go out and like and sell i'm like oh am i a fraud you know did i lie and it like keeps me up at night and i didn't and i'm not and also like it gives me anxiety so i stopped watching silicon valley because i was it was too much you know i was like oh nope that's too much my life and whatever it had a chef cameo there's an episode where they talk about chef like the chef guy comes in you know and i was like i can't with the show it's too much anyway keep going

silicon valley well the reason why i ask is because there's um there was a scene where richard hendrix which was the main character you're familiar with because you watch season one at least you know was juxtaposed against gavin belson pretty much the entire thing right gavin belson was the villain right he was the one that was doing the fraud and he was the one that was blurring the lines and treating people like disposable you know objects whereas richard hendrix was trying to do his best and in a lot of cases be what you just said which was how can we win and be good yeah we we can't always all be hooli right and there was a point in this in the show where they were side by side and rich was telling gavin no and gavin was like

i shall look forward to the fight welcome home and uh congratulations on getting your business

back thank you and i should congratulate you on your remarkable tech breakthrough i hear your

swimming and funding offers a few i think we're gonna go with supreme hall they seem to get us

you haven't seen all the offers yet richard we were partners once i'd like to do it again this is an acquisition offer and it will make you a very wealthy man let's do this together that's very kind of you but richard at least look it over i can help you get exactly where you want to go i'm pretty sure i know where i want to go and how to get there if you reject me now richard i will come after you i'll devour you think very carefully about what you're doing here here's what i think

gavin i think my decentralized internet threatens hooli's box business model i think basically you are just a server company now and we intend to make servers obsolete so i think perhaps in the end i will be the one devouring you i gave you that patent thanks fair enough richard i

shall look forward to the fight and it's almost like what you said there was while it's not the same scenario i like the idea that in business you can lift others up and invite in some ways competition hopefully not at your demise but that you can hold this stance of i shall look forward

to the fight yeah if i if you're winning you're gonna have better competition a sign of winning is competition like puppet was winning therefore chef existed yeah yeah and like one way to look at it was i was taking away from the potential of puppet another way to look at it was i validated puppet you know i validated that market i like like we grew together we did that together and like you know yeah all the competitive juices like i really think that's how you need to look at it if you're a professional about it you know if it's about your identity different thing if you're like ah will i make a bunch of money will i be able to feed my family like if it's those things you're worried about different problem you know it's different when somebody is like when you're worried about whether your kids are going to go to college and the competitor like that it hits harder you know but i'm not in that position and haven't been in that position for a while and so now i'm at a point in my life where like yeah when i think about that competition i'm like yeah come validate this market come be competition not because i don't and i like you like let's let's you know like i'll i'll help you up the ladder and like i'm still gonna beat you you know like i'm still gonna look you in the eye across the metaphorical court and like you know i'm gonna be the best player i can be and like i'm gonna i've been training hard you know yeah so like literally training hard yeah and and like so like let's figure it out let's go you know and i i want that like i want i want there to be competition i want it to be difficult in that way i want to win but not because you know i don't want to win because i i murdered everyone i see you know like that's no fun i mean there's certainly no one left to hang out with at the end and certainly they're the people who are most likely to be able to talk to you about how it is you know like they're the ones you can most talk to about like oh that's awful i'm so sorry that happened to you i know what that feels like they're also your peers like they're the only other people who know what it's like so when you think about like like destroying that pool of people like of course i want to help people up in that way because like i need those people you know i'm gonna someday i'm gonna need them i'm gonna need to call them up and be like i had to do this hard thing and they'll be like oh yeah i understand and like you know they'll like be there for you in a way that that they won't obviously if what you did was punch them

you know don't punch people not if you can help it yeah unless you're in a mosh pit sometimes you

gotta fair game yeah i mean probably not right that you're kind of a jerk then too but yeah i

suppose well at least it's a it's at least uh accepted if you get it i explained to my daughter

that every now and again sometimes you have to punch someone okay and you want it to be rare you know like you want it to not be a thing you do regularly or easily but if you're gonna have to punch someone you'd prefer to be the one who punches first then second what's up friends i'm

here in the breaks with david shu founder and ceo of retool so david retool has definitely cornered the market on internal tool software development but zoom out for me what's the big idea why did you start retool what is the big idea with internal software yeah so retool started

at this point seven years ago and when we started retool the core idea was that internal software

is a giant giant category that no one really thinks about and what's surprising to most people is that internal software represents something like 50 to 60 of all the code written in the world which might sound pretty surprising but if you think about it most of us silicon valley we work at software companies whether it's like a airbnb a google a meta these are all companies that are software companies selling software and so most engineers these companies are working on external facing software but if you think about most software engineers in the world most software engineers in the world actually don't work at these software companies there's not that many of them there's maybe 10 20 of them big ones at least most of the companies in the world are actually non-software companies so if you think about a company like an lvmh for example like a cocola for example like a zara zara is not selling any software but they actually have a lot of software engineers actually and all their software engineers all they do day in and day out is basically build internal software that's i think you know one reason we started the second reason we started retool is if you look at all this internal software that people are building it is remarkably similar so if you take a look at you know like a zara for example versus cocola two very different companies obviously one a clothing company one a beverage company but if you actually look at the software they're building internally to go run their operations it is remarkably similar it's basically forms buttons tables all these sort of pretty common building blocks basically that come together in different ways but then if you think about you know not just the ui but also what's the logic behind a lot of this stuff they're pretty much just hitting api endpoints hitting databases uh you can have authentication you care about authorization these are sort of a lot of common building blocks if you will do internal tools and so for us the insight was wow internal software is a ginormous category and it's all

so similar and developers hate building it and so could we create a sort of higher level framework if you will for building all this software and that would be really cool that would be really

cool okay so listeners retool is built for everyone built for enterprise built for scale built for developers and that's you if you found yourself nodding your head to what dave was saying then check out retool at retool.com change log it's the fastest way to build internal software do yourself a favor get a demo or start for free today again retool.com change log well intel innovation 2024 accelerate the future is right around the corner it takes place september 24th and 25th in san jose california this event is all about you the developer the community and the critical role you play in tackling the toughest challenges across the industry ignite your passion for ai and beyond grow your skills to maximize your impact and network with your peers as they unleash the next wave of advancements in technology understand the emerging innovation and trends in dev tools languages frameworks technologies in ai and beyond join on-site hands-on labs workshops meetups and hackathons to collaborate and solve real problems in real time collab with experts learn and have fun engage in interactive sessions connect grow your network gain a unique idea and perspective and build lasting networks and of course have fun you'll hear from leading experts in the industry technologists startup entrepreneurs and fellow developers along with intel leadership ceo pat gelsinger and cto greg lavender as they take you through the latest advancements in technology don't miss out on the chance to be at the forefront of innovation take advantage of their early bird pricing from now until august 2nd register using the link in the show notes or to learn more go to intel.com slash innovation what is it that matters to you adam like i know what you're doing now let's let's fast forward a little tiny bit and i'll do the job for you eventually you sell chef i don't i love to get into the details of that like i know you kind of stepped away in a way i don't know the full story i love it from the horse's mouth obviously you've obviously taken a i'm not sure if you'd call it a break between chef and system initiative i'm not really sure of those yeah the timeline between there but you're on a on a journey still yet to revolutionize and potentially change the future of devops and so you haven't stopped this journey but no given that fast forward of a lens and win i'm happy to dig into the details in life what really matters to you what matters to you the people that i love and the life that

we can create together i care about my family and i care about how how that my family goes forward in the world and like what their lives are like that's the thing that matters to me i know that's cliche but it's true and then i care about how i spend my time you know like the you have a limited amount of it and so you know i need work that is compelling i need i need to care i need to believe that the art of it is worth doing because the i want to play that game because it's the funnest game i've ever played you know it's the game i've been playing since i was eight so like it's still the game i love the most you know so like like i kind of feel like it's one unbroken line of training from you know running a bulletin board to now and it's just one unbroken experience of like training to do this kind of thing and so yeah i we sold chef i had stepped away very slowly i basically left i knew i was leaving and had told barry christ who's fantastic the ceo chef that i was going to leave and then i basically took a year to do it by just sort of you were cto yeah that was your title was yeah i was cto and i just sort of we like searched for my replacement and then i slowly backed away from all of the work i was doing but i didn't tell anyone i was backing away i just kind of stopped showing up and let other people take care of it and they all just figured i was really busy because i was usually really busy like but in this case i wasn't actually really busy they just all thought i was busy with someone else and so by the time i actually left it had been six months since anybody had needed me to make a single decision because i had just sort of made myself disappear slowly and then we hired my replacement and he was fantastic and we had a great relationship and i helped him move into him really proud of how i left chef i stayed on the board um so i was involved in the transaction i can't go into too many deals about that but um but then yeah i took some time off and then you know with system initiative back to like what motivates me as a person this is how i'm looping you back into that answer like in my work outside of my personal life and the people i love and you know those are my atomic family but also my chosen family i have a lot of people that feel like chosen family to me where like you know i'm in it for life with them and i don't care what they do you know that i don't care what happens like those are my people and they're going to be my people no matter what and you know that doesn't mean i won't tell them if i think they do something wrong but i'm telling them because i love them not because i'm not going to stop loving you right that love is unconditional and i i have a lot of those people in my life and i care deeply about them in my work now that i know that i'm a professional and that i'm quite good at it i want to build the best possible thing i can imagine because i really think that we can not only build technology that is foundationally earth shattering but we can do it in a way that the people who built it are having the best experience they can have you know like i really think about the foundational work of building system initiative like building a sports team i'm finding great talent i'm nurturing that talent i'm challenging them i'm training them i'm putting them together and that is inspiring to me to put it against a problem that's really complicated and hard and so what we decided to do with system initiative was rethink the foundational abstractions of how we think about automation so throw away as much of the prior art as we needed to to see what would happen if we went a different way and like it's been you know roughly five years of engineering and rnd we're going to launch a public sas here let's call it fall and like if you want to try it now you can so slide into my dms and i'll like hook you up but like and it is a transformatively different point of view on how to on how to build that automation and it's a transformatively different user experience and it's it's been incredibly difficult to build but it's so rewarding because then when it works you're like oh that feels like magic like that's that is new in a fundamental way and so i love the newness of it i love i love the art of it and it's starting to turn over like a business and i love that too because like you get there's nothing more validating in some ways than winning through revenue like when somebody's willing to pay for it that's like that's good juice so like that is also motivating to me um yeah okay so let's let's laser into the thing at

play currently we've talked about the past we've cliff noted the exit i don't think there's necessarily anything to dig into there i think it's good to be proud of how you exit something because you know don't burn bridges you know be a great person be the person you want to be

obviously it's a it's a hard thing to decide you know if your exit isn't perfect isn't like magical then you're you're making decisions about how it impacts everyone's lives in a really meaningful way so it's like you know do those early employees they'd get enough money to like send a send a kid to college but the newer employees will make less and so you know maybe there's an option not to sell it where there's an odds that those new employees would make more but they'd kind of do it at the expense of the old ones so you have to think about like how do you balance all of that out you know so it's like a complicated story it's a complicated thing to have to go through but you can do it with honor you know you can look everybody in the eye and talk about the

trade-offs you made did you in fact get to step away and take some version of what they would call a quote break yeah i took you get to rest a little bit yeah i took like six months off basically did you think about anything at all did you just listen to metal all the time and go for

walks i uh i sat in my office quote unquote which was actually just a bathroom that we had never gotten around to renovating in this like in this apartment not apartment house in san francisco and um i played dark souls because i really wanted to learn how to do that and so i played dark souls i wrote a dnd campaign ran it for my friends i walked my daughter to school every day she was going to elementary school in castro so there was this lovely sunny walk from the mission through to the castro and so i'd walk her to school and pick her up that was fantastic i built a laptop and like noodled around with my like environment you know like i played with operating systems because i love playing with operating systems so i like played with my operating system and yeah and thought a little about what i wanted to do next but mostly i put it all down was that hard to put it down no it was actually easy i was tired you know like that was a lot and i had seen i had already seen that what we were doing wasn't going to work long term so i knew that the returns we were getting from the work we had done for those arch enterprises which was transformative that the teams we transformed were incredible but that the drop-off between those teams and the rest of the company was really steep and that that wasn't kind of the way we hoped it would go kind of as an industry and so i had already gotten a little tired of playing myself on tv where i knew what i needed to do which is go to those companies and tell them that they should do it anyway and tell them that it was going to work out even though i knew in my heart it wasn't and and i didn't love that i didn't love as soon as i as soon as that realization hit me i couldn't do it anymore in the same authentic way that i had been doing it and so so i was ready to stop and i was ready to think about what was next because i felt like the story was undone like it's not like i was finished with the things that i cared about or helping the people that i cared about i still loved systems administrators i love devops i loved all those things i wasn't finished but i didn't believe that if i kept pushing the direction we were going in that way that it was going to work and that made sense you know like so it just made sense to put it down and i knew that what i would pick up next would be something that that would try to move the needle on how those experiences happen for those people so you were able to take a break

which is great you had a good reason to take the break you got family you got this beautiful walk with your daughter i'm sure that's a memory that in your mental picture you can recall in this very moment and it's very pure and very enjoyable i think there's something you know what i learned

about myself the other day so when people talk about the mental picture they actually see pictures in their head like you can you can't see pictures i see nothing oh dude i'm sorry about that i'm not i mean you're missing out i believe i probably am i see i i like it's like facts it's like lists of but like like i know but i remember it and i do feel fondly about it it's not like i don't feel like i do feel nostalgic for it but anyway anyway i don't see the picture anyway yes

keep going well i'm sad for you on that front because i can i can see various moments in my life now my son he has got and this is because my wife he's got the literal ability to look at something and see it forever oh he's got that you know whatever it's called yeah a picture memory or whatever like the visual graphic memory photographic memory thank you he uh and my wife both have that it's a blessing and a curse because like sometimes you can't see the bad things because then you can't unsee the bad things but at the same time well if i if i'm looking here's my superpower my my son like give me a side tangent here okay yeah yeah we're at the grocery store and i'm on the app and i see the product i'm trying to find and i've not i've not bought it before i'm trying to make marshmallows i'm looking for i don't know something an ingredient we're making homemade marshmallows this past weekend and so that's why this is uh ringing true and i'm like eli look at this here's the product help me find it on the shelf because like finding products on shelves and grocery stores that you've never bought before you don't know if it's big or small or whatever and thankfully they have apps these days so heb i live in texas it has a fantastic application that lets you see all the stuff and place your order and pick up all that good stuff i'm like here's the thing we're in the right aisle where's it at he's like oh right there amazing so anyways sick but the point is is that uh i can see clearly various moments in my life like more recently yeah me and my son's fishing yeah i have two sons and i have a daughter as well but in this moment was just the two sons and so we were fishing i can i can clearly remember sitting back just thinking like adam don't lose this moment yeah adam adam take a picture of this moment like hold this in your mind forever just pause all the stresses that you might have of them falling in the water or getting hooked by the yeah fish or whatever what all the all the dad concerns like just just put them over there yeah right yeah and just take a breath and just calm down yeah because it should be calm anyways why should i be stressed and it's we're fishing right we're going fishing it's literally what it's for and i take this mental picture and i can see it in my mind right now i can see the sun glistening up the water i can see the stream where it's at and i can see my two sons just like being silly right the most joyful moment ever i can just see it so clearly

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

keep going uh i don't know where i was going with that but i'm sad that you don't have that because

um i mean i have the feeling which i think is you know to me it's enough it is enough it is enough

let me be sad though that you don't have yeah i don't have which i think a lot of people do have

is this mental i think it's normal that people have that yeah there's a lot of people who don't

have it i don't know what the phenomenon is that of people who do and don't have it but they're

definitely i don't know my daughter was taking a random test on the internet and she was like dad can you see pictures in your head and i'm like no that's metaphor she was like what i'm like every time people say that it's just metaphor they're just it's metaphor she's like dad that's not metaphor you know i'm like oh okay okay yeah anyway i would love to go into system initiative

but not so deeply i think the major questions i have and i think we may have asked you loosely in past conversations but the conversation was less focused on that was why be in stealth for five years kind of thing like how did you finance the early parts of the business you know some of

that startup process yeah with system initiative it was uh so we had three founders me mihir lupinachi and alex eti and i think one of the reasons we were in stealth for a long time was just that we actually didn't know what the solution to the problem was like i had some ideas about what it would be and alex had some ideas about it but we didn't know for sure and we were trying to discover sort of what the solution was and we had enough expertise that we you know raised venture capital kind of immediately and had enough space to go do that i think that process of like building something showing it to people learning what it was and we did that a lot so we showed it to people but we showed it to them privately and sort of in more testing kind of frames i think the was it valuable to be stealthy you know like over five years probably in that like if you tell people how great something is and then five years later it shows up they're like you know you kind of missed your shot at like capturing their attention up a lot you know i think you know system initiative we launched it as open source and had like you've been able to download it and try it and do stuff with it for a while and people have been but now it's kind of in the in the shape where like the fullness of the experience is compressing in a way that like you'll be able to use it and it feels good and it's like stable for you and it can like solve your real problems in a way that it hasn't been able to do just because the technology was so so complicated you know in terms of funding the business like the only real struggle there is that five years is a freaking eternity in startup land and so you know and and we felt like we were close for a really long time because we've sort of known what the answer is but because we had to build all this foundational technology you just didn't really know when you were going to get it wrong because no one had ever built it that way before so you're like that won't work uh that won't work and you just don't know until you're right at the end and then you're like uh here's another like soul crushing problem we have to solve and so it's just been like a series of really difficult obstacles luckily system initiative is incredibly compelling and so our ability to keep it funded and to keep our investors sort of happy is pretty great because what we're building is transformative and very cool and so you know like they're in that said it's got to get into the world and people need to use it and we'll see if people love it but i can't imagine building something cooler you know like it's super cool and how it works is super different and so those things together i think is enough to carry it into the market in the way that it needs to and again you know as a professional that's my job like my job is to what i do is i take venture capital money and i try to build the best businesses i can build from it and one of the ways you build the best business and technology is you have to have foundationally great technology if you do you have a better shot at it being transformative and meaningful over a long period of time and so you know you got to deliver on that and so i think we're

delivering on it timing is key right timing is key in in any launch yeah it makes a difference wouldn't you say timing is key i mean you have a history of the timing with chef chef had

particularly good timing i think you know like the market was really ready for it i think the market's really ready for for stuff like system initiative 2 i think you know when you look at market timing and you think about like the question there usually is more about like it's difficult to time the market but it's easy to time the zeitgeist of the customer so if you think about like what is the experience everyone's having and can you say to them what that experience is in their own words so that when you when they hear from you what it is you're doing does it resonate with them in their lived experience that's a thing you can learn how to do and you can learn to discover and you can you can follow that truth you know it can't tell you what to build right it doesn't tell you how to solve that problem or solve that experience but it tells you that it's real you know it tells you that that experience is universal that that problem is real that that moment of displeasure or or dislike is real and that's a place where you can go build a business and exploit it and so some of its external market timing you know for chef that was like the rise of sass and hyperscale which sort of sets the stage for needing ubiquitous automation because without it you can't scale quickly enough but like with system initiative it's it is that failed those failed devops experiences it is that when you ask people who do that work if they enjoy it the answer is i love the technology kind of but it hurts me all the time you know they're like playing dark souls and like it could be better and they are willing to have it be better because that lived experience feels that way and i think that is a market timing that you can create that in retrospect people will look at and be like oh what great timing but in truth it's actually just how close are you to those people right like if the further away you are from the people who are going to use your product the harder it is to build something that

they're going to love i guess what i was potentially trying to get is to roughly your feathers a little bit not so much your feathers particularly but mostly just to consider with chef you battled the rise of docker and a change in the ecosystem and we talked about your five years of stealth and it's a wonderful thing to be able to have the investors and the folks to be there

to do all the we were installed for like three of the five but three of the five sure thank you for

correcting me but nonetheless even now you're an open beta and it is open source and you can see a lot of it it's still in motion to be pretty high barrier to entry though yeah what do you mean by

that you had to like download the source code and compile it and run it on your laptop and yeah yes

like yes that's kind of what i'm getting is like it's still it's not easily accessible by everybody i can't go and and you know free tier it today right but you will be able to soon yeah okay do you see any looming dockers out there to system initiative

i mean no if i could see them they're not a docker like the thing about docker is that nobody saw docker and then docker happened and everybody's like fuck docker you know like that was an avalanche of like a real sea change in the experience of what was possible major change and for the better right would you agree for the better yes okay i would agree docker was for the better okay i mean my spicy hot take because i don't think kubernetes was for the better i think we're actually net worse on most vectors but you know i'm alone pretty much in my feelings on that but that could be because i'm a grog nard you know what i mean like it could just be that i'm whatever old so yeah if i could see if i knew what it was then i'd be reacting to it already but i don't know what it is i think the biggest challenges for system initiative aren't there's some other disruptive technology that sort of eats my market share i'm far enough ahead in terms of what the technology is and does that like you'd be insane to try to do what i'm doing because it would also take you five years even having prior art like you don't really have prior art like the source code is not enough to understand how it works or why like you have to like that's knowledge that like the people who've worked on system initiative have but the market doesn't have that knowledge and and wouldn't even from the source code so copying it doesn't make any sense i think it will later but it doesn't now i think our challenge is more that like it is fundamentally a different approach to solving these problems and that means that the experience of solving them is also fundamentally different and so our big challenge isn't going to be is there some competitive technology that beats us it's just going to be do the people who do this work love it or not like i love it that's the way i want to do this work now like it's the way the people who've used it so far want to do their work now but will everybody else love it i don't know and i can't know until i put it in their hands and make it easy and in a minute you know it'll be three clicks and you'll be in a workspace and you can start automating some infrastructure and it's sick and when that moment comes will i i don't will they love it if they love it everything's cool and if they don't love it well it was still my best game you know for sure it was still the best thing i could build it was still the best thing i could imagine it was still the best way i could have possibly thought about using that capital to try to build something that i think has the potential to be truly transformative and like you know i want to build things that are transformative i want to build things that push it forward i want to i want to move the art and so you know the challenge for system initiative is that it's not as there's some other technology that will conquer me like that'll happen later because i am that technology

and so it'll take a minute for people to catch up how does this work uh i suppose your outlook on the rise of platform engineering you've grown up and have you were there when devops was born as you said in past conversations with us i think it was john ospaul's all right yeah sure and now you have this rise of platform engineering is that does system initiative dovetail play well with this change of c because you still have devops but maybe devops serves platform engineering and not so much developers because platform engineering serves the yeah ecosystem developing teams on their larger team i mean i don't know like how do you how do you i mean i kind of

think you settle this i kind of settle it by thinking about what people are going to do with their time so like what system initiative is good at is like it's so much quicker and safer and faster to use system initiative to model infrastructure and to look at how the system could work or should work and like it's dramatic and it's much easier to extend to do interesting complicated things so that's going to as a foundational technology people can use to build what they need to build to solve their problems it's great you know platform engineering is a marketing response and a technology response to the same fundamental problems the system initiative looks at you know you look at that same problem that says ah devops teams they're not working as well as you hope they were they've been struggling to like deliver the results over a long period of time and as the system got bigger so then they have this reaction to it that says what if in fact we were just wrong about it and what we needed was an api all the way all the all the time we've had this conversation a bunch of times in as an industry where it's like we need portals you know you're going to need a you need a developer portal you know and so you build a developer portal and they could click a button and they get their little development environment and then they don't have to think about all the details and it's going to be awesome and like we do this all the time we've always been doing it and we've been doing it since i started working in the industry but now they're like hey what if that was the answer and so what if the answer to this fundamental experience problem that we're all having is a portal that if we build a portal better and we make the apis better and make the portal more flexible and we make the lines between who builds the stuff that the portal runs and who uses it better that the outcomes will be better that's their bet i think it's a dumb bet because it's being built on top of the same foundational technologies that delivered the terrible user experience you didn't love so how exactly is papering over that going to be better it won't it won't because you've already fixed the experience at the bottom you were like no the shape of the bottom infects the shape of the top and so the actual lived experience the actual outcomes of those platform engineering companies uh it's cool to have a portal and like you can make a lot of money having portals you know like cod foundry made a lot of money selling portals here's the fun part it didn't take over the world and not everybody's using portals weird right not because they weren't building you great portals they really were it was a great toolkit for building great dev experiences um and they made billions of dollars and now nobody talks about cloud foundry so you know we'll see what happens my bet good name though i like the name incredible name great technology great people is an awesome name but bad bet and like i mean not a bad bet they made so much more money than chef did so just so we're clear it's super worked out for them so why are we listening to me but like as a technology i just i think i think the problems with what's happening now in that space in operations in the lived experience of those people is fundamentally tied to the to the way we've stitched all the different technologies together it's not that one technology sucks it's that when you put them all together in order to get to the outcome you're looking for it doesn't hold up as well and like those platform engineering stories are essentially stories about how we surface the stitching right and i just don't i don't believe that that's going to change the outcome at all i think it's like changing from car like you know like when cars moved from having a key that you put in the stem in the ignition you turn the ignition to having a button that said start that didn't like change my life you know like i still started the car the same way which is i push a button and then the car starts and where i turn the key and the

car starts like your wrist is uh probably feeling it though i mean and for the positive versus

negative i guess you know like if you ask me if i want a key i turn or a start button i choose the start button right but i think platform engineering is roughly akin to putting a start button on top of what is essentially the identical car dang okay and you know i believe that because i helped build the fundamentals of the car and so when you dig into how it all holds together you're like well of course it uses source control the same way of course it uses terraform under the hood of course it uses pulumi of course it stitches together this of course it talks to this under you know all that stuff it all has a way that it works it has a way that you manage it and you can't really escape it and it defines the outcomes in a very real way both culturally and technically and so you know i think that's that's my that's my answer okay and it's not i don't think it's hubris i mean it's probably some hubris but it's but it's mostly just like you kind of know it in your heart anyway you know like if you just if you just sit quietly and ask yourself like okay if i had a better portal over the exact same technology but the exact same way that i was working before would it be better and you're like well yeah for people who need that thing it'd be better you know for the person who just wants one it's probably faster to get one and once i have one what's it do oh the same shit before i had a button eh like better to have a button than not a button that's for real but like did it change the game of what happened no outcomes identical button better you know okay so long on devops obviously i mean i'm long on platform engineering because platform engineering is going to turn into whatever it needs to be because all those people are playing the game they're all competitors they're like if what i do changes the face of platform engineering they're going to call it platform engineering i will too like hold this space for next year when i lose my when when it turns out that my marketing message about second wave of devops or whatever is bad and i pivot hard to platform engineering because platform engineering won and i lost i'm not above it i will come back in here and i will completely be like nope it was platform engineering all along can't believe i said what what have been and the problem with everybody else's platform engineering is the way they fundamentally build that technology what a bunch of goobers and like that's because i'm playing to win yeah like i'm not tied to it i'll get behind the platform engineering train if that's the train that pushes me forward into victory and also as of today like it's not the train i want to be on but i will you know i'm in i'm down for whatever i just want to win last

question i'll let you go to your extensive important fun day that you have ahead beyond

this podcast of multiple this is super fun at this point yeah you're gonna have to edit it

lightly we'll lightly edit it yeah honestly i think it's all good stuff and i'm very happy with the conversation um so you've alluded to fall right you're in you're in private beta now you said slide in your dms yeah you can persist some initiative yeah find me on twitter send me

an email i'll hook you up right now i can see and maybe you can see the horizon probably better

than i can yeah because you're in it right what is what is just over the horizon you mentioned over the horizon you mentioned fall yeah what can you mention here for the first time ever or at

least tease yeah the first time ever so one of the things that you do in system initiative is you customize the way this big it's got this big hyper graph of functions that is the thing that actually configures like writes the configuration and sort of runs a simulation of what it is you kind of want to do that whole thing is programmable and so the loop of how you create new assets and add new behavior is getting very tight so like for example there's a you push a button and then you can create you know if you had um let's say you needed to automate your cdn and we don't support that yet or you have your own application has like a deployment mechanism that's custom you could just click the customize button in system initiative you write some javascript that defines the properties of the asset you want and then you write functions just little short functions the longest ones are maybe 100 and 200 lines long and usually that's because there's data in them not because the they're that complicated to write that you know are what actions you would take so you want to deploy action so you would write a little function that describes what it should do on deployment or you have a qualification that you want to run when somebody puts some data in to tell them in real time whether or not the configuration is good or bad or whether it work or not so like for example when you use like iam rules in aws for doing security stuff aws has a way to validate those rules that's a that's a qualification that we wrote for the iam rule so when you're when you're like using an iam policy every time you change the policy it runs the command that validates your policy and tells you if it's good or bad and shows you in real time it's sick all of that is stuff you can do yourself and you don't have to ask me anything and then there's a little button and that little button says contribute and if you click it it tells you you know that you're agreeing to the terms of the apache license that we're going to review your code and then you can push the button and it'll come to us and we'll review your code and then we will ship it and we'll do that loop over time and so i think what's on the horizon is i think this new way of building automation gets connected to the creativity that is latent in that community where like because the tooling has been the tooling now for a while it hasn't been the most creative work to like do devops stuff because mostly what you're doing is like oh i'm writing more terraform how am i writing terraform well five years you know doing what is you get ups doing get ups yeah and suddenly there's this thing that's very different works in a very different way and it's fun and so i think people are going to have a lot of fun like writing stuff in system initiative and making it do things and then sharing it with each other and i think that's what's going to propel it into the into the world it's not because like system initiative alone it's going to build all those abstractions it's because you can build whatever you want with this fun machine i made you and so like we made you this really fun machine for building automation that has this like really interactive loop of programming it that like it's fun to program and like you're gonna come program it and so people are going to look at it at first and they're going to be like oh this is you know whatever it's visual design for architecture stuff and that's what they'll see first and it is that but under the hood it's actually just this really fun programmable machine and i think that what's on the horizon is that that community of people once they catch on to the fact that what we've given them is this like incredible way to program their own machines i think they're going to go

nuts programming the machine would you think that these shareable contributable programmable things that you'd mentioned to written in javascript would be comparable to the way docker compose yaml files have helped people who don't really understand docker stand up a new docker image is that is that a good comparison yeah kind of it's because that's shareable it's like i can go grab a dark compose file yeah as long as i have docker on machine i can run that i can dock pose up dash d and off to the races yeah this is more like um i'm gonna go

again with the wayback machine but like it's more like lisp where there's like old lisp machines like if you wanted to change the way the application worked or like the window functioned you could click a button in the window and it would just pull up the source code and then you could just change it and then the operating system would now be different and you were like and now it did new things it's more like that so like what the unit of sharing because what what system initiative is under the hood is this modeling system for this graph the way you program it is different because what you're doing is writing functions that inform how the graph should behave at different points in time and like it's just a really different way of thinking about it so like they're shareable in the same way that maybe like a compose file is but to the user like when you bring that asset in it's like suddenly there's an asset and it shows up on a canvas and it's got like input and output sockets and it's got properties and it like does cool things so like that's pretty it is similar and that you can share them and it's repeatable it's different in that the way you interact with it is like much more visceral you know you're just like oh i need one of those and then there is one and then if you don't like how it works you can just open the source code and tweak it and then you could contribute that back in a single seamless loop like not by forking a repository literally by just examining the code for the thing you already have and over time we're going to make it so you can hold that patch and when new updates come to that thing it'll just tell you hey you also added this extra property do you want to keep it you know and like yeah you can so like it becomes this really interesting programming system and like i think that i like that more than anything is the thing that's going to really propel it because i think they'll come for the ease of use that is like it's so much easier to model infrastructure and to like and to see what you've done when you're finished like then looking at like a terraform repository if you've ever like looked at terraform and tried to understand what it does it's actually really hard to do from reading the code because there's all these layers of abstraction and variables and stuff that sort of do it system initiative you kind of see an architecture diagram that looks roughly the way you think it should and so that's what's going to bring people to the yard first but they're going to stay because they're going to realize that that machine is programmable and they can make it do whatever they want and that's where it becomes the power tool that actually has enough potential to change how we do the work broadly because if it couldn't do that then then my ambitions are too low you know what i mean like i want to change the game i don't want to just like i don't want to just improve it a little i want it to be fundamentally different i want there to be a day before and a day after you know and i don't know if i'll win back to being a professional but yeah but oh i'm giving it you know like everything you got i'm bringing the heat you know and like bring in the heat we'll see you know sometimes you bring the heat and you lose but i don't think i'm gonna truth i think i'm gonna i think i'm gonna win but we'll see i don't know we're all on i'm on the edge of my seat you know in the words of gavin belson he said

i look forward to the fight yeah i look forward to the fight yeah i like that a lot yeah all right well system init.com is where you're planting your roots now maybe not your identity i don't think so based on what you said but definitely where you're planting your professionalism and all your effort in the space of devops totally and yeah if you want to if you you can send me

an email i'm adam at systeminit.com it's pretty easy to guess so like if you want to try it out on the sas platform like and you got to the end of this incredible podcast like you deserve it

like feel free this is your prize adam's giving away slide all in access to the to the to the dms

yeah and the private beta or adam hjk on twitter x if that's still a thing you use but like you know you can totally just come and i will i will hook you up just tell me about the changelog

very cool all right adam thank you so much man it's been fun yeah thank you adam so fun okay that was epic that was awesome at least it was for me i don't know about you but i love talking to adam jacob he is a dear friend of mine if i was a neighbor i'd be hanging out on the daily and i'd be fine with me but here's what i want to know i want to know how you feel about this founder's talk change looking friends the change all flavored show i've brought to you today because it was an absolute joy to plan this show to sit down with adam and go through all the details all the details to go deep and to go long like this was an epic podcast it's lengthy many chapters lots of good stuff in here and i i enjoyed it all i hope you did too so next week on the changelog into the babaverse we go yes i talked to dennis e taylor if you have not listened to those books yet you should dennis etaylor.org check him out check out his books i love them all they're all amazing one of the best science fiction authors of all time catch up with his books and then listen to that show now if you're a babaverse fan and you're deep in it well this is going to be a treat for you okay big thanks to our friends over at neon test double retool and intel for sponsoring this episode and of course a massive thank you to fly.io that's the home of changelog.com our app is everywhere our users are because fly is awesome with no ops they make it too easy and they'll make it too easy for you too learn more at fly.io and those beats banging bmc brings those beats break master cylinder love you bmc love you and to you our dear listener thank you so much for listening thank you for tuning in there's no bonus on this one the whole show is a bonus so skip the plus plus this time we do love you plus plus subscribers but this show is for everyone and i hope you enjoy it that's it this show's done we'll see you next week