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2020-Founders-Talk-Transcripts

+**Adam Stacoviak:** Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world's most popular open source technology, used to compose observability dashboards. We use Grafana here at Changelog.
+Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source, and they have this big tent open source ecosystem philosophy that's driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But to understand the wisdom that Raj is leading with today, we had to go back to where things got started. To do that, we had to go back like Prince, to 1999.
+Raj, what happened in 1999 to make it a pivotal year in your life?
+**Raj Dutt:** Well, for me, Adam, that was this little company... And at the time, in '99, it wasn't even a company, because we weren't even sure that it would become one... It was more of a project. It was called Voxel. I was a freshman in college, and was super-interested in Linux, and just really wanted to do something with Linux.
+\[04:01\] So at the time, there weren't a lot of people running production systems using this kind of toy open source project that hardly anyone had heard of... And myself and a bunch of friends from RPI basically started this ISP hosting company, kind of cloud infrastructure company using Linux, putting it into production... And we really kind of stumbled onto this by accident.
+We ended up running Voxel for about 13 years, built it completely organically. Myself and the whole team really had no idea how to run a company; we had no business doing this. There wasn't a lot of experience, there wasn't a lot of -- you know, we were a bunch of 18-year-olds, what did we know? But there was a lot of passion, for sure, so we ended up doing that for about 13 years. We didn't really understand the whole VC world, didn't even understand accounting; we certainly didn't understand sales...
+We build kind of a little business, got it up to about 50 people, built it slowly, bit by bit... As you know, hosting is kind of a pretty capital-intensive business, so we were always struggling to find money to buy more servers. This was pre-cloud, obviously; Amazon didn't really come along until 2006-2007, somewhere around there...
+It was a ton of fun. Very stressful, also... And then I'd say we transitioned into actually becoming a business after a few years, by the time people were either graduating or dropping out. None of us wanted to get real jobs, so we kind of made this our thing... And ended up getting some really good clients. A lot of dotcom companies that eventually dot-bombed, and that was fun...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dot-bombed, yeah... \[laughs\]
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, it was a ton of fun, and really a good learning experience. A lot of the people from Voxel kind of ended up going on to do really interesting things. My partner, Zach Smith, ended up starting another hosting company called Packet, that he just sold to Equinix a few months ago. One of our most talented engineers, Kris Beever, started a company called NS1 that's doing really well; Justin \[unintelligible 00:06:22.09\] another cloud infrastructure company that's doing really well... So that was actually one of the things that, personally speaking, I'm most proud of, if that's the right word - a bunch of the Voxel crew, myself certainly included, ended up learning a lot from that experience, and rolled forward into new companies and new projects.
+In fact, there was a TechCrunch article that came out a few months ago that called it "the Voxel mafia." That was a really kind of fun term, and that's the way I look at it... So for me, this current company is in many ways kind of like a do-over; we get to take a lot of those lessons and try to not make the same mistakes, but also double down on the things that worked.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I mean, double down on what works, for sure. Anytime you find out what does work, 10x it, right? Do it until it stops working. That's the age-old marketing shtick - if you've found something that works -- or sales, or pretty much anything. I suppose it could work anywhere, but... If this works, do it until it stops working. And if it works, do it again, until it stops.
+What's interesting is the -- I'm not sure I totally understand the mafia part of it, if it's a bad thing or a good thing, but that you've enabled others to move on and do awesome stuff. I'm familiar with Jacob Smith. Not Zach, but Jacob from Packet. I talked with Jacob a while back. I never ended up working with him, but great team, a super-interesting look at bare metal and what that does... There's all these different aspects of infrastructure, from back in these days that you're talking about, 1999... Literally, buying a server for a company to use, and they're the only ones on it, to cloud now, virtualization, Kubernetes, clustering - all this stuff that's moved on. Serverless... And right back to bare metal with Packet, which is pretty interesting.
+**Raj Dutt:** \[08:25\] Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And to do something that actually was successful for many years - not just like five years or so... it's more than a decade. Kudos to you for doing anything from college that lasted more than a decade. I mean, most businesses fail, and fail early. Yours didn't.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, that's fair, but we also kind of grew it super-slowly, which is no longer the MO, it seems, with startups these days. Nowadays it's all about raise a ton of money, fail fast, go big, go home, that kind of thing... Not necessarily by choice, but just because it was the only option available to us. We really built Voxel organically, and kind of step by step. Every time we could -- we never had a choice to be anything but profitable from day one.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** True.
+**Raj Dutt:** We had no concept of a burn, or even being able to have a burn. If we had a burn, it meant we'd go out of business. So yeah, it was just a different environment, different world... Starting in 1999 meant that we were a year away from the dotcom crash. And once that happened, the idea of a company like that getting funding was kind of completely off the table. Investors had no appetite. It was a combination of investors having no appetite and us having no awareness or knowledge of how to even raise money. So that made for an interesting combination, which just meant that we didn't really have a choice but to build it organically, step by step.
+But the mafia thing is interesting. Mafia is obviously a bad word, or a negative word. I think people use it because we were from New York, so it was kind of like an East Coast thing to contrast with the typical Silicon Valley (or Silly Valley) kind of a...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So then let's fast-forward some -- we'll go back again; we'll tell a lot of your story, so let's not camp out here for too long, or get stuck here, I suppose... When you talk about Grafana Labs today, and the kind of company you're building today, and you mentioned a do-over; learn from then, do now better kind of aspect. When it comes to the kind of company you're trying to build, in terms of like -- you'd mentioned no appetite for funding Voxel after the dotcom bust, and more so the kind of company you're trying to build; I guess less about the company, but more about the speed at which you're trying to build it, and exit this whole idea of "How do you build a company these days?" It's either the short and easy road, or the long and hard road; which route are you taking, given (I guess) what you've learned and maybe where actually Raj wants to go. Not so much like -- do you sacrifice your own desires and build the company that the company needs to be, or do you sort of like inherit your own desires and think a long-term long tail?
+**Raj Dutt:** I think it's a good question. I don't think it's a black and white, or binary answer rather... We've been at this for Grafana Labs for about six years now already. But the big mistake we did at Voxel, in retrospect, was not capitalizing the company sufficiently. Cash was always a thing that was constraining our growth back in the Voxel days. So even though we had a decent product and a decent opportunity, we really couldn't execute at the speed and realize that opportunity that we had, or move on the window of opportunity that was in front of us. So that's certainly a mistake that we don't wanna repeat at Grafana Labs, which is part of the reason why we've raised our Series A, and we have enough money in the bank where we're not making all our decisions based on "Can we afford this right now?" There's more room to invest in the future. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you spend money willy-nilly, but it means that you can do things that make sense, that you're confident in.
+\[12:23\] With regard to exits and timeframes, I'm a firm believer in -- I think we have this imprinted in the DNA of Grafana Labs, we like to say we're long-term greedy. We're not trying to optimize for a particular exit or a time horizon for an exit. I really think that if you try to do that, you're gonna end up making decisions that are really sub-optimal. So we act like we're gonna run the company forever. I'm a firm believer that that's the right way to do it.
+If you end up getting acquired or you end up going public, whatever your metric for success is, I think the way that you do that no matter what your business is is by just trying to build a good business for the long-term. If you get taken out in an awesome exit, so be it; but if you're trying to optimize for that, I really think that you end up making sub-optimal decisions.
+It's kind of a cliché... Some people say that companies are bought, not sold. I think there's a certain degree of truth in that. If you're trying to optimize to sell -- "I wanna sell to Google in five years, or something like that", if that's your plan, you're just gonna make a bunch of bad decisions that take away from building a great business. I think that if you just try to build a really good, long-term business, good things will happen.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I guess the question might be then "How do you make different choices?" Given that, aside from simply just saying "We're optimizing not to be sold", but this idea of long-term greedy, or -- is that what you said, long-term greedy?
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, long-term greedy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Make sure I had it correct... Which I like, by the way; that's super-cool. I'm not sure if you coined that or not, but I like it, so I'm gonna keep using that; I like that a lot.
+**Raj Dutt:** We definitely didn't coin it. In fact, I think Goldman Sachs coined it, so...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, is that right?
+**Raj Dutt:** ...not necessarily a company I admire, but I think it's a good phrase.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think it's got some opportunity, I suppose, to think -- I guess greed can be a negative connotation to it, but... You know, I'd rather be long-term than short-term greedy, if I wanna be greedy at all. Let's focus on the long-term, because there's different attributes and attitudes that come from a long-term mindset. When you're thinking about even a proverb from the Bible, you can't plow a straight row if you're looking back.
+**Raj Dutt:** Sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which is sort of this idea - if you're constantly looking back, you're thinking like "How could I have done differently? Who could have I been sold to? What choices could have I made to be acquired?", instead of thinking about the future, growing a company that's worthwhile for the employees of that company, the customers of that company, the investors (if you have them) of that company, the founders, the stakeholders... You can go on through the layers of interests in a company, but...
+**Raj Dutt:** Sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...if you're looking back and you're thinking short-term gains, or exit strategies, you're gonna miss out on the opportunity. And you'd mentioned this idea of this window of opportunity, and this is something I think that I personally am retrospective about... Like "Am I growing, or are we growing the company - this business, Changelog Media - in the right way to capture our window of opportunity?" And then I asked you about your personal desire for the company and how that may rub, or be in parallel with the necessariness or the needs of Grafana Labs in terms of its trajectory, where it needs to go.
+\[15:53\] Because for me, for example - I'll camp on this for just a second - I may desire not to build a New York-headquartered media company. Now, we may be in every way a media company, but we'll probably never have a New York office. There are certain choices we're making that are different than other "media companies" might make.
+So parallel that to what you're doing - maybe you've got particular personal desires, maybe your business has certain specifics that it needs to do to be the business to capture this window of opportunity... What is that for you?
+**Raj Dutt:** I guess it's a combination of those two things. On the personal level, I really love to travel; I really love doing business internationally. Pre-Covid I was on the road probably 300 days a year... And one of the things at Voxel that was interesting is, you know, even though we were a company of 50 people, we were kind of spread out pretty much across the world. We had a large hub in New York, but... You know, talent is everywhere.
+One of the things with Grafana Labs is we're remote-first. We have just over 150 employees, but we're in like 20 different countries. And that's really fun, that's really exciting, but it's also a way to just get the best talent, no matter where that talent is. So that's kind of the, I guess, merger of personal and business strategy.
+The open source angle is also part of that. At Voxel we really saw how infrastructure was changing, like you said, from bare metal to containers, to serverless now... We also saw how software was changing and how -- you know, Marc Andreessen likes to say "Software is eating the world". Open source is kind of eating the software world. So we really wanted to do something with open source; that's what we're all about, we're definitely an open source company... Not just with Grafana, but with things like Loki and Prometheus. And that also ties in with long-term greedy. You have to really balance this adoption and this grounds-up community movement with your monetization cycle. That takes time to nurture, and you have to constantly get that balance right.
+So that's something that we've been really trying to focus on in the last six years - creating a vibrant, healthy and diverse community, and serving its needs, which is all about value creation in open source land, with the demands of our commercial strategy, which is all about value capture. That tension I think exists in any open source company, and that tension is healthy. We deal with that and we try to balance that every day... And it's hard. But that's also part of being long-term greedy - we're trying to, in some ways, have our cake and eat it, I guess would be the cynical way to put it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Raj Dutt:** It's definitely a combination of a belief that we're doing things that will allow us to create really good software, that our community and our customers love... And we do it in a way that we think is really effective, which is remote-first, and having people all over the world... Which by the way, is how the best open source projects have always been built, since the Linux days.
+For myself and my co-founders in the core team, we really believe in those two things... And that kind of reflects in a lot of our strategy, a lot of our day-to-day decisions... We're also what we call "big tent", which means that we really value interoperability of the wider ecosystem.
+A lot of companies and a lot of vendors in our space try to own the entire stack, and sort of tell a customer that "It's my way or the high way", or "Replace all of what you have and buy my new shiny solution."
+\[19:54\] As an open source company, we take open in a whole new level, because we prioritize interoperability above anything else. So if a customer of ours has existing vendors that they're working with, companies that we really admire and respect, like New Relic or Datadog... You know, their data is in a SQL database, or they've used something like Amazon CloudWatch, or whatever vendor, or wherever their data is stored, we'll integrate natively with those vendors. We don't require our customers and users to replace them.
+So yeah, that's a pretty long-term strategy also... But at the end of the day I think it's also about trust, which is what's really important in open source, and in any business. We're trying to be perceived as not just another vendor. We're trying to be perceived as a trusted advisor. That's certainly aspirational, and it sounds like a good line that you'll find on a marketing website, but we try to make it real, and that's certainly harder as we scale the company.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think the big tent philosophy certainly leans in towards the trusted advisor.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Especially that's part of your recent raise announcement, too... It's all over that. One of the big pillars of that was talking about this big tent philosophy, and I think that you can capture that trust necessary from the community, even from those in your company, that obviously work there for a reason... They believe in something; they don't just want a job, right? Somebody wants to believe in what they're doing...
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And the reason they do that is because you're not trying to knock down buildings, you're trying to make sure the stop signs are in the right place, and the stop lights and whatnot work. You're not knocking down buildings to build your own city. You're helping other people make sure their buildings and their foundations are strong, and the community is strong... And then interoperability is huge and crucial in open source, especially as you look at what cloud is. If you're a player in the cloud, you kind of have to -- well, you should; you don't have to, but you should optimize for interoperability and openness and things like that, because you've got a lot of players in that space... More than just simply Grafana Labs and Grafana Loki. There's more to the stack than those two or three things. It's a bigger piece, a bigger puzzle.
+**Raj Dutt:** Absolutely. And the most interesting customers and the largest customers have a very complicated infrastructure. They're using all sorts of tools, and they have many vendors that a variety of teams are using in different ways. I agree with you that vendors should prioritize interoperability; I don't think many of them actually do. A lot of new employees who come into Grafana Labs kind of get surprised by this, whether it's on the engineering side or on the sales side.
+Our strict MO is that we don't really disparage the "competition", because we do prioritize interoperability. On the engineering side we will absolutely focus on creating good experiences with not just other open source projects, like let's say -- Elasticsearch is a great one. They have a fantastic database. Elasticsearch is just awesome, and we really prioritize working well with that database.
+We also have our own logging platform, Loki. And in some ways, it competes with Elasticsearch for some use cases. Our bigger story and our macro, more important MO is big tent, and prioritizing interoperability, so we will literally go to customers and say "Look, you have Elasticsearch. It's great. We're not gonna tell you to rip it out. Use Grafana with it, and we'll connect to it natively... And here's what it's really good for." And we'll tell that story.
+\[23:54\] So when someone comes in to, let's say, our sales team, the normal playbook with sales is like "Alright, give me the battle card. Give me the kill sheet on how to talk trash about all these other vendors, and why we're better and why they suck."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The kill sheet. I like it.
+**Raj Dutt:** \[laughs\] And our core team is always like "Wait... No. That's really not what we do." We're happy to talk about the differences between different vendors, and that's part of being a trusted advisor, but there will be no kill sheets. We don't have this kind of "rip and replace" mentality. Like you said, we're not trying to tear down the buildings; we're trying to put in the stop signs and help with the plumbing. And if you want a new building, we're happy to build one for you, but we're not gonna erase the city.
+Scott Fingerhut, who just joined us as our VP of Marketing, he likes to say that customers should own their own observability strategy; not a single vendor. And I think that's really right. Vendors are really just trying to come in and say "Alright, we're gonna take over your whole platform, we're gonna take over your whole observability strategy. Throw everything away. Move to this new, shiny thing." And the reality is I think this is kind of like the oldest lie that has existed in IT for a while... Which is this consolidation play, which is sort of like "Okay, we're the new, shiny database. We want you to move all your data into our new fangle database." But guess what - by the time you're halfway done with that, particularly if you're a large, complicated organization, a large enterprise, by the time you're halfway done moving to the new fangle database is gonna be the new legacy database, and there's gonna be another vendor that's just sold you yet another even newer fangle database... So it's gonna be this chasing your own tail kind of thing.
+So I think that interoperability is really key, and I do think it's tied to being a trusted advisor. And that's what makes Grafana fairly unique, is we kind of just natively connect to over 50 different open source projects, commercial projects, different databases, and we don't require that people move their data. Keep your data where it is.
+And there's a lot of really good vendors out there, and a lot of really good open source projects, commercial offerings... And it's about respecting people's choices, at the end of the day.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. You'd mentioned this tension between open source, the way your business and your open source obviously works and is being adopted out there, and the necessary business you've gotta build around it... Because hey, you took funding, you're building a business, you've got employees, you've got stakeholders, you've got things you've gotta accomplish... And you've mentioned this tension, and then you sort of dovetailed into the trusted advisor, which we've talked about a bit there... How do you, I suppose, balance that tension, and how does the balance of that tension translate to trust, on both sides of that community fence?
+**Raj Dutt:** Wow, that's a really hard question, but a really good question. So how do we balance that tension... I guess contentiously, with great difficulty, with a lot of internal consternation. It's a really hard balance to get right, is the honest answer... And it's something that we definitely deal with every day. On one hand, if you pick someone from our engineering team and ask them "Hey, should we make this feature open source, or should we make this feature a commercial feature?" they're probably gonna say we should make it open source... Because it's fun to build open source software, and get that feedback, and give back to the community. And if you asked our average engineer, I think they'd probably veer on the side of building all open source software.
+Now, if you pick someone from our sales team, they're gonna say "Well, every feature that we build should be commercial, because we'll be able to sell it." So it's a tough balance, and what we don't wanna do is we don't wanna build open source software that's crippleware, or that isn't useful, or that teases functionality rather than solving real problems.
+\[28:08\] We wouldn't have a community if Grafana wasn't really useful and solved real problems and provided real value for our community. We wouldn't have a business. Our community and the 500,000+ companies that are using open source Grafana - that's a super-power for the business and for the commercial side of the house. So we wouldn't be able to sell hardly anything if that community wasn't really strong.
+So mission number one for us is actually growing the community, increasing adoption, and then monetization is number two. And that can be tough, particularly for our sales teams, because again, it's long-term greedy; it doesn't necessarily help when you have a quota to hit this quarter. That long-term greedy strategy can be cold comfort to that team. But I guess the way we try to balance it is we constantly ask ourselves "Hey, is this feature useful for the average user, a startup, a small company? Even if they're running it in production, even if they're running it at scale. If it is, let's make it open source. Let's be pretty liberal with what we make open source. And if it's something that is really interesting only to the largest enterprises, like a bank, or a Fortune 500 company, then we'll consider making that feature part of our commercial offerings.
+And that's kind of like a pretty broad, subjective way to think about it, and it's certainly more of an art than a science, but that's kind of one of the so-called sniff tests that we apply when trying to strike that balance.
+I'd say that probably 95% of our engineering efforts go into open source. Even for the next several years, the large majority of our engineering effort will go into open source. Our whole business model and the way most open source companies work is it's all about monetizing a very small percentage of your users. I don't think any open source company - or at least not a rational one, or in my opinion, one that will be successful - will kind of think "Well, we're gonna convert most of our users to paid. Or even half of our users to paid." That's just insane. It's about creating a really large community, and then figuring out who the very small percentage of that community that can become customers are. And if you can create a large enough community, then that small percentage can be a real business... So that's why it's so important to focus on community and adoption.
+We're really lucky to be the center of mass, or the stewards, if you will, of this really vibrant community. I say it's our superpower, but it really is; we're just incredibly grateful for the tailwind that they give our business, both in terms of helping us build better software, through pull requests, contributions big and small, kind of keeping us honest with what we're doing. A lot of them are very interested in how the business is doing... And if we get that balance right, I think the community supports us, and will continue to support us, because at the end of the day, they want Grafana to be a sustainable project, and for the velocity of Grafana to increase even further on the open source side.
+When we started, it was just my co-founder, Torkel, who created Grafana in 2014, and he was kind of doing the majority of the development. We managed to hire a couple of people to work with him in Stockholm, and now we have almost 40 people working on Grafana. Like I said, 95% of our effort is on open source. So it's like this really nice, virtuous cycle, where we can invest more in open source as we're successful in building the commercial business. So as long as that virtuous cycle isn't broken and that balance is right, it's a really beautiful thing, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:21\] The way that I like to think about it, especially in this case, is that the adoption of \[unintelligible 00:32:25.07\] open source is the foundation from which you can even possibly build Grafana Labs... Anything, in terms of commercial viable or anything. So if the open source isn't adoptable, communityable, whatever -able you wanna attach to the adjectives you can do for a project like Grafana - if that's not a solid foundation, then you can't really build cloud enterprise, commercial offerings for banks etc. on top of that, if it's not a vibrant, useful project that actually gives back.
+So I love the idea that 95% of what you do is open source, and that's that five-ish percent or more, if I'm just using the words you use to define that... Right? I mean, if the open source part of it isn't a solid foundation, then what company can you build on top of it? Not much.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, you're totally right. We'd just be like a normal software company that has to -- it'd be like pushing a string up a hill. It would be really, really hard. The community gives us a really large base of users who already use and trust our software. They know Grafana, they're already solving problems with it... Even for our commercial product, like Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud, our sales model is largely inbound. People are coming to us and saying like "Hey, we're using Grafana. Tell us about Grafana Enterprise; tell us about Grafana Cloud. We already trust you guys. You don't have to convince us that you have good stuff."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that's awesome...
+**Raj Dutt:** So yeah, that really helps with our sales efficiency. That gives us a significant structural advantage. So yeah, I think community is absolutely the foundation. And the way they explain it to someone who's not familiar with open source, who came from, say, an enterprise software background, is imagine if you had 500,000 trials underway. 500,000 POCs underway. Now, first of all, what would it cost you from a marketing standpoint to be able to get 500,000 businesses trialing your software?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah.
+**Raj Dutt:** That would be an unbelievable -- you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marketing in order to do that. And that creates this structural advantage from a sales standpoint for the business.
+Now, of course, the downside is those 500,000 companies aren't actually running trials, because most of them will say "Thanks. This is great, and I can use it forever, and I don't have to pay you a single cent." That's just the way that open source works. Open source has never been about value capture. Open source has been about value creation. So the model is we will do a tremendous amount of value creation, and a very small amount of value capture. And I 100% agree that that's the foundation of our business. It's all about trying to have this really, really large pie, and capture a very small slice of it. And if the pie is large enough, then that small slice is material, and we have a real business there.
+But if you try to go too far, and capture too big of a slice, or get that balance wrong, you're gonna hurt the community. And that is ultimately, I think, a mistake that other open source companies have made, and that's ultimately a really -- you know, you might have a good quarter or a good year when you do that, but you're kind of compromising the foundation of your business... Which is why community and adoption is number one for us.
+\[36:09\] Having a healthy community and providing really valuable open source software that's free to use, that solves real problems, isn't crippleware, isn't shareware, or freemium... We don't like those words. That's not what open source is about. That's why that's so important to us.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, freemium is an interesting aspect. I just had a conversation actually with the founder of Snyk on that exact subject... And it was interesting, because there's parts of the freemium model I can appreciate, and Snyk is open source; they have a freemium -- probably similar in business models, but obviously not the same exact philosophy, because they do have a freemium model... But I can see where that -- you know, the free version essentially is the open source; this optimize for adoption, optimize for, as you said, not value capture, but value creation.
+**Raj Dutt:** Right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's sort of what it is... I mean, is that not what open source is at large? It's this large freemium model, this large 500,000 proof of concepts out there?
+**Raj Dutt:** I guess it's similar, for sure. Freemium and open source are -- I guess there's a pretty wide overlap in terms of the go-to-market motion. They're similar in terms of distribution models. But where they're very different is the freedom that open source provides its users. So open source used to be called free software back in the Richard Stallman days and Linux days.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. FOS.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Free and open source software, yeah. That term became uncool at some point.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. You're aging yourself, Adam, because people don't remember that anymore.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+**Raj Dutt:** It kind of got rebranded as open source, but... Back when it was called FOS--
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's shorter, right?
+**Raj Dutt:** And I think it's more business-friendly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Raj Dutt:** Free was a really interesting word for FOS. But the F in FOS, the word free - it was never about free cost; it was about freedoms, and the freedom when you get the source code under a liberal license to kind of do what you want and never have to worry about what happens if that vendor goes away, if that vendor stops supporting you, if you wanna make changes yourself, if you wanna modify it to do things that it doesn't currently do... You know, to never have to be beholden to someone for a bug fix or an improvement, or -- you know, it's like the ultimate insurance policy, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** True.
+**Raj Dutt:** So open source is different in that way, where if we start doing a bad job, or if we start getting that balance wrong between value creation and value capture, then people in our community can be like "You know what, Grafana Labs? We're gonna go our own way, and we're gonna fork Grafana." And if someone can do a better job with that, then we're not gonna be the company behind the software anymore.
+We own the trademark. We don't have the right to prevent forks from happening. We don't have the right to stop someone or a group saying "You know what - we can do this better than Grafana Labs, and we're gonna create a better Grafana by using all the work that Grafana Labs has done." And that's what makes open source really powerful. And the ability to customize it, the ability to modify it and not be beholden to a vendor.
+So I think that's the big difference between freemium and open source. And I also think that's why opens source has really captured the mindshare that it enjoys with developers, that freemium has never really been able to capture. Because that freedom, both to redistribute, to use, to modify, to base derivative works off of - that's really powerful, and those ideas go back decades now, with things like Linux; you wouldn't have projects like Android, as an example, if those freedoms didn't exist.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:17\] Absolutely. You'd mentioned this tension - I'm not going back there, but kind of dove-tailing off of that; this tension and the obvious inherited value of FOS... I don't think it's a terrible term; I think the "free" still needs to be talked about in open source. I think the freedoms of open source needs to be talked about. But then you'd mentioned when you talk to your developers, you talk to your sales team, you get two different answers when it comes to "Hey, there's a new feature we're gonna put in Grafana. Who should get it?"
+And there's obvious reasons why an engineer may be more for open source and why a salesperson may be less... And it's not because they're greedy, it's just -- that's how they get paid. It makes sense.
+**Raj Dutt:** Sure, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But that says you've gotta have some pretty keen eyes on company culture... Because to be able to lead that business is one thing; to be able to hire the right people and have them be motivated and believe that 95% of what you produce in terms of value creation should go to open source - how in the world do you do that? Getting that culture right - how do you do that?
+**Raj Dutt:** That's a great question, and that goes back to kind of a do-over comment that we started with - the realization of how important culture is in a company, particularly when the company is growing really fast. Personally speaking, I feel out of my element on most days, because at Voxel we grew the company to 50 people over the course of 12 years, and at Grafana Labs we're at 150+, and if things go on plan, we'll probably be at 400 people by the end of next year.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+**Raj Dutt:** So I haven't done this before... And the thing that I really realized \[unintelligible 00:41:57.07\] is how important culture is. So that's been something that's been really top of mind for me and my co-founders. And I think we've put into place a pretty strong team in terms of the senior leadership of the company, that kind of understands this dynamic. Our leadership on the engineering side really respects what the sales team is trying to do. The leadership on the sales side really understands this golden goose phenomena in terms of the balance.
+I think it really comes down to that - we're all in this together. You're right, people aren't being greedy. A salesperson isn't being greedy per se when they fall one way. An engineer isn't being naive either when they fall the other way.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Raj Dutt:** So I think that having the leadership team that really gets the big picture, holistically, is the only way that you're gonna have a fighting chance of getting that balance right. And my co-founders, Torkel and Anthony, I think really fundamentally understand the balance. Our engineering leadership, such as Tom Wilkie, our VP of product - he really gets it. And perhaps most importantly, our sales leadership, like Doug Hanna, our chief operating officer, Dave Kranowitz, our VP of sales - they're (shall we say) pretty unique in a good way in terms of sales leaders, where they really understand this dynamic. And it's not something that they're gonna get automatically that they're gonna be born with. To some degree, they've gotta be indoctrinated into the culture. You can't just serve them Kool-Aid and tell them to drink it either. You really have to explain and show them why it is the case. So it's something that isn't passive, it's very active.
+\[43:50\] Just as an example, we hold sessions, from the key leadership down, explaining this dynamic. It's something we talk about internally a lot. And I think it comes down to also people having not just understanding, but respect for all parts of the company. It's about a shared mission, it's about realizing the importance of this foundation. And it's about respecting what your colleagues are doing in all facets of the company. And it's not something that just happens, or you get for free. So it takes works. I feel like that's one of the major things that we have to keep reinvesting in as we scale the company.
+I'm pretty pleased with the dynamic that exists today between the engineering teams and the sales teams. It's very collaborative, and I think that's gonna be challenging as the company keeps hitting new inflection points and keeps getting bigger and bigger, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So you mentioned you're at 150 people now, 400 by the end of next year. So by the end of 2021 you projected 400 people, which is a lot. Obviously, getting the right people in place makes sense. You'd mentioned the foundation of open source, this golden goose phenomena that both sides of the fence need to have respect for. What stage, when it comes to scaling the company in terms of revenue - where are you at in terms of -- not so much how much revenue, but where are you at with organizational sales, things like that? How new is that for Grafana? Have you been doing it for a while? Less than a year, more than a year? Where are you at with sales efforts and revenue generation?
+**Raj Dutt:** So we've been kind of generating revenue for about four years... But we have only really had a sales team for about a year and a half. And that was a huge--
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting ratio...
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. Because we were lucky enough ot get a bunch of inbound interest from the community - sort of the core founders and founding team (if you will) of the company was just kind of handling sales in a very ad-hoc way. And we were learning a lot about what the patterns were, who our customers were... And we managed to get up to several million dollars a year worth of revenue before we really invested in a sales team.
+And one of the big mistakes that I made at Voxel was not ascribing enough importance to having a really great sales team. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of technical founders or product-oriented founders make. As an 18-year-old starting Voxel, I had a very naive view of the world that I think is not uncommon, which is build a better mousetrap and the world will be beat a path to your door. \[unintelligible 00:46:44.10\] That's not the way the world works. Welcome to Rail life. So one of the do-overs at Grafana Labs was making sure that we had a really good go-to-market motion, and that we invested in that.
+We hired our first sales director, Graham Moreno, from MongoDB about a year and a half ago. He really helped take what we were doing, which was very organic, ad-hoc, kind of founder and founding team-led sales, and he actually came in and brought that initial layer of process, and discipline, and repeatability into things. And then about a year ago we hired a chief operating officer, Doug Hanna, from ZenDesk... And he came in, along with Dave Kranowitz, our VP of sales, who we hired around the same time, and kind of leveled up Graham did, one level more.
+So at this point, we now have about 15 salespeople at Grafana Labs. We have three teams, a West team and East team, and an international team. Our sales team and go-to-market efforts are really rocking and rolling. But we've kind of built it slowly, we built it at opportune moments, and I think Doug and Dave and Graham have done a really good job in the last year and a half. At this point, we've got a pretty mature sales team.
+\[48:17\] But we did it sort of after we were generating revenue, and that was deliberate... Because I think if you do that too fast, you kind of -- you wanna do that once you've figured out some basics in terms of how you're selling, who you're selling to, what they're buying. So it was really about accelerating what we had, formalizing it, adding a level of rigor, repeatability... And we're taking sales very seriously now.
+We've got some pretty ambitious targets, that's definitely part of that... But I think we're selling in the right way, and in a so-called long-term greedy scenario.
+When Doug Hanna, our chief operating officer came on board, him and I spent a lot of time talking about open source, and the whole value creation/value capture dynamic, and he actually came up with the golden goose analogy, and started preaching it to the entire sales team. So it's back to making sure we have the right people in place.
+And on the engineering side, our whole engineering team is super-supportive of what the sales team is doing. I said it's collaborative, and I don't say that lightly, because I think a lot of times the relationship between engineering and sales can get kind of contentious, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely.
+**Raj Dutt:** And engineers were like "Oh my god, what did the sales team just tell the customer? What did they sell?" And sales people are like, "Oh my god, why can't the engineering team give me product that I can sell? They're screwing everything up." And there's a lot of natural tendency, I think, to finger-point... And to some degree, that's inevitable, if you scale a company, I think... But I feel like part of my role is making sure that doesn't happen, or at least staving that off as long as possible.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's interesting in your story that I've heard so far is the between the lines, which is sometimes -- I won't "often", I'll just say "sometimes". Sometimes when you begin a sales team, you make mistakes, and those people aren't around long. It seems like the people you've brought on - maybe there's parts of your story you're not sharing, for whatever reason \[unintelligible 00:50:20.19\] and maybe it's your experience with Voxel, that you kind of have this wisdom to lean upon... But you'll see a sales team get developed too early, as you'd mentioned, not really understanding what you're selling, how you should sell it, how you should package it, how you should approach your customers, understanding this golden goose phenomenon...
+I think that's a really interesting thing that a lot of open source companies should understand very well, to have a good balance between their engineers and their sales teams, like we're talking about here... But often what you'll see happen is a sales team will get brought on, and the upside won't be there, or they've gotta do too much work, and there's not a clear understanding of what to sell, how to sell it... And you've been able to not have that problem, it seems, where you bring somebody on, they spin out and they flounder, and you sort of limp along sales-wise for four years...
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...when you could have been much stronger earlier.
+**Raj Dutt:** There's probably a few reasons for that. Let's never underestimate luck in a lot of this, for one...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, sure. Good job on that luck.
+**Raj Dutt:** Right. \[laughs\] No, I'm kind of half-joking with that... But in all seriousness, I think the two reasons I can think of is 1) just hiring the right people, at the right time. That's part of it. When Graham came in -- Graham is a pretty young guy. He makes me feel old, I should say. He came in from MongoDB... And he really kind of, like I said, up-leveled our process one degree. And then when Doug and Dave came in, they kind of amped up the volume and the rigor in the process. But if we tried to do level 2 at the time that we did level 1, I think we would have gotten into some of the stuff that normally happens.
+\[52:12\] Hiring the right people is so important... And that's another lesson learned at Voxel. One of the things that we did at Grafana Labs that was very different is we hired a VP of People Ops, Alex Farrell, back when we were about 25 people. People Ops is the new fangled, cool word for HR... And let me tell you, I did not have, based on previous experiences in the company that ended up buying Voxel, I had not a lot of respect for the concept of HR. I had a few run-ins, you could say, with that department in my professional career. And we made a very deliberate decision to hire a VP of People Ops way early. This is before we did our series A. And I was kind of on the fence, to be honest, of whether we needed to do this. Like, "We're only 25 people. Do we really need a full-time HR/People Ops person?"
+This role isn't just to find new people. Alice is absolutely what I like to call a culture carrier within the company. It's to not only recruit people, find the right people, but to make sure that people are aligned, that the culture is maintained... And I think that she's been instrumental. I mean, she's definitely been instrumental in helping us scale from 20-odd people to 150 people plus. Not to dwell on culture too much, but I also think that that's been really important as we've built our team in general, and our sales team.
+We've been lucky enough at Grafana Labs to have incredibly low people attrition. It's insane. Over the last six years I think I could count the number of people who've left the company on one hand. Maybe one and a half hands. I certainly don't have to start counting toes. So I think a lot of it comes down to culture, it comes down to hiring the right people at the right time, and a certain degree of luck.
+Graham and Doug and Dave have all helped us in very different and unique and timely ways for us over the last couple of years.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think you'll hear people say "culture", and it seems cliché... But I disagree. I think it's cliché if you can't back it up. When you just say "Oh, it's just about culture", and you can't really back it up. But what you're saying is that you've found the right people to make certain organizational properties in your business super-clear. And in terms of People Ops, HR, however you wanna frame that person, their duties and what they do, in many ways figuring out early that they are necessary glue. Not just, as you'd mentioned, recruiting the right kind of people, but making sure the people that are there stay.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That isn't exactly culture; I would say that's wise development of a company, but the way that people interact and the respect that engineers and sales have for the necessary sides of the business - that is culture. Understanding the golden goose phenomenon, understanding those things and making sure that you're not stomping on the toes or blaming each other. That is company culture. And it's interesting, we're in this world now with Covid, and you mentioned how much you love to travel - I can only imagine how must you feel not being to travel as much as you were able to before... And then everybody else, too. Was the company always remote, or is this a new thing to be remote? You'd mentioned being remote-first early. Has it always been remote-first?
+**Raj Dutt:** \[56:07\] Yeah, it's actually an interesting story, because when we started the company, Torkel, our co-founder, the guy that actually wrote Grafana, he's always been based on Stockholm, Sweden. I was living in New York at the time, and our third co-founder, our CTO, Anthony, he's based in Perth Australia. So from day one we were kind of on three different continents.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Distributed. Yeah, wow...
+**Raj Dutt:** And the worst possible timezone alignment... And we kind of had this idea that we wanted to be a distributed company, but we opened up offices in New York and Stockholm. And what happened over the course of our first few years is I'd say we evolved, or regressed even, into being a remote-friendly company, because we had these hubs in New York and Stockholm. And remote-friendly, in my opinion - it's crystal-clear now, although it wasn't at the time - is the worst of both worlds. Because what it means is "Yeah, we have some remote people. It's fine if you're remote", but the decision-making, the watercooler conversations, all the important interactions are gonna happen in our hubs. And if you're remote, you're probably like a second-class citizen within the company, because you're disconnected from the gravity, the core decisions, the core decision-makers.
+So we kind of regressed to being a remote-friendly company... And then I actually have to give a lot of credit to Tom Wilkie, our VP of product - we made a very deliberate decision a few years ago, and we said "Well, we're regressing to being remote-friendly. And what we really wanna do is be remote-first." So then we started trying to dehub and basically stop hiring people in New York and Stockholm, and trying to shift the balance much more to be remote-first.
+We felt we could solve the problem both by hiring people away from our hubs, but also making some operational and cultural changes. If we were gonna have a meeting in the office, we'd still have it over Zoom... Which was crazy, because "Why do that?" We'd start doing things in asynchronous communication methods, instead of watercooler conversations. We'd start writing more stuff down in shared Google Docs. So we kind of created this -- we shifted the center of mass for employees away from the hubs, but we also changed the way that we worked, to be more remote-first.
+At this point, I really don't think the average Grafanista really cares one way or another where they are... So we kind of became truly remote-first. And that's now reflected in our hiring policies, it's reflected in -- aside from the suckiness of the Covid situation, it's kind of business as usual for us. At Grafana Labs no one has to ever come into the office, ever, if they don't particularly feel like it. And that was the way we were operating before Covid.
+Some people like coming into an office, and that's fine. Some people wanna be in that environment, some people don't. We have a few people, for example, in France, and we ended up opening a small WeWork there, because some of our employees were telling us that they wanna have somewhere to go to; that's fine. But you also don't have to go there.
+So yeah, we've definitely doubled down on remote-first, and I'm a big believer that that is the future of work, particularly for software companies... And maybe especially so for open source software companies, where we're kind of working hand-in-hand with the community, which is also global. We're working asynchronously, we're better aligned with the communities around which our core software is built. We can find the best people, our employees have better work-life balance... Although that's not implicit in being remote-first. You have to take extra care for that to happen. Yeah, I don't think we do it any other way, so I'm really happy that we're truly remote-first.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:00:20.11\] You mentioned regressing, and then being mindful of that; that requires some checks and balances and leadership, to say "Where are we going? How are we doing?" Health-wise, in terms of an organization, when you realize you're regressing and then you made that change two years ago, did you see a dramatic shift back to -- you didn't say productivity was an issue, but I'm assuming maybe there was something in there in terms of alignment with people, personalities, tension, whatever it might be, some read-between-the-lines... But did you notice dramatic change when you regressed, and you noticed it, and you made the change back towards remote-first? Did you see upshifts in certain areas? What changed dramatically?
+**Raj Dutt:** I'd say it was a dramatic change, but it wasn't like a sudden change. It definitely took some time to effect that change. And I think the main thing we were trying to optimize for was there was a feeling, a very real feeling that if you were a senior person in Grafana Labs, or someone who was really trying to optimize their advancement opportunities within Grafana Labs, that you were at a disadvantage if you weren't at one of the core hubs. Like if you weren't in New York, or in Stockholm. And you were kind of almost relegated to feeling almost like an outsource or a disconnected part of the company, if that makes sense. And I think that feeling has now completely gone away.
+So we always wanted to hire people wherever they were, and we wanted to be very global in our talent search. I think there was a feeling both held by people at the edges, as well as senior leadership, that we were hamstringing ourselves in our ability to do that because of this divide. And I think now that that divide is basically gone. So yeah, I think that we did successfully make the transition back to remote-first, and at this point it really doesn't matter where people are.
+People even move. In Covid times we've had quite a few people decide to move around, and that's fine. We were definitely used to working in this environment, but because we were remote-first, we also got the team together a lot. We used to have in-person get-togethers, either company-wide, or team by team, project by project...
+The last time we got the whole company together was late last year - or this last summer, I should say - the whole company went to Los Angeles for our annual conference, and we took the whole company to Vegas for a few days after that, and that was tons of fun. But now we've lost all of that, the last 4-5 months, and I think we're really affected. So I don't wanna give the impression that because we're remote-first, we're not impacted by Covid from a cultural standpoint. I'd say in some ways it's the opposite. Because we're remote-first, we're not impacted from a day-to-day standpoint, or an operational standpoint. But those in-person meetings became even more important to happen occasionally.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Raj Dutt:** \[01:03:46.24\] We used to have onboarding every quarter, where if you joined Grafana Labs, you would be offered to go to either -- to somewhere, whether that was Stockholm, or New York, or London, or somewhere like that, and meet as many people as you could. And we'd fly in other people, other leaders, and we'd have pretty immersive onboarding... And it wasn't for onboarding; it's not to be like "Here's your email, here's how you use Slack." Not at all. It was mainly for social bonding... Like, "Let's hang out."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Connection, the relationships.
+**Raj Dutt:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The underestimated things do really matter in teams.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup, exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Do I actually like you?", you know what I mean? "What makes me like you more?"
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. It's a lot harder to be d\*\*\* to someone (pardon my French) online if you've met with them in-person and had a beer with them, you know what I mean?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, absolutely. We have a show here on Changelog called Brain Science, and we talk a lot about the necessity of relationship... And that's what it really is all about. We're humans, right? Sure, we're making software, we're building companies, we're doing different things, we're engineering, we're selling, we're CEO-ing, whatever it might be... But at the end of the day, it's about humans. It's about human connection, it's about solving people's problems.
+**Raj Dutt:** Absolutely.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, what Grafana does for is a tool, but it's not really just about that. It's about being a useful thing for people. That's really what it comes down to. You've got to double-down on the human touch.
+**Raj Dutt:** 100% agree.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And it seems even cliché to say that, so I hate even saying it like that, but that's the truth. You have to prioritize the people. That's why we've gotta say it every day, because people undervalue it. They just skip it.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup, 100% agree. And I think it's easy to -- you know, that human interaction is so important, and doubly so when you're remote-first. You need to mix that in, and that's what we really missed the last 4-5 months. We've hired a lot of people since Covid, and not being able to get the teams together and meet the new people has definitely had an impact on culture, ultimately... Because there's this whole group of people that no one's ever met, and it's just different doing it over Zoom.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's way different. It's awkwardly different, sometimes. Even conferencing... In our neck of the woods, in the tech world, conferences are every day prior to Covid. The hallway track was what it was all about. And no knock against any organization out there doing a conference, by no means, but remote conferences are not the same as in-person conferences, period. Bar none. Because you're missing that touch.
+As a speaker going to a conference you're not getting to build your network as much, because you're really just to some degree phoning it in. Maybe you're giving a prerecorded talk - which is great; you're still getting your name out there. There's nothing against that, and we have to do what we can do in our given circumstances. But it's really going back to less about \[unintelligible 01:07:00.29\] that and more about prioritizing the human touch, because we had that a lot. We took it for granted.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There was OSCON each year, you know what I mean? And going to OSCON - what a big deal that was. Or even KubeCon, and the growth rate of that conference. These are two pinnacle open source cloud infrastructure conferences that were killing it. All Things Open. These are great conferences that are now virtual, and people are not hanging out, hugging, \[unintelligible 01:07:28.08\] beers, slapping hands, getting T-shirts, pat on the backs, whatever. It's just not happening, and it's hard, period.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, I think you're 100% correct. We attended KubeCon, spoke at KubeCon every year for the last several years, and we have our own conference, GrafanaCon, every year, that we kind of alternated between cities. We had one in New York, we had one in Amsterdam, we had one in Los Angeles... And this year we cleverly renamed it to GrafanaCONline...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:07:59.22\] Great name.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, I have to hat-tip Scott Fingerhut on that one... But we had the venue booked in Amsterdam, we had our speaker schedule all set, we had our \[unintelligible 01:08:12.07\] all set, and last-minute we totally changed it to an online conference.
+The good news is instead of having 500 people show up in Amsterdam, we had 20,000 register for a virtual conference, so that's a plus... But that's really the only plus. It just wasn't the same. And the team did a really good job trying to transition it to be a virtual conference... But man, it just -- yeah, I totally agree with what you've just said; there's really no substitute for getting people together, and those hallway tracks, and hanging out after, and building those relationships. It's just almost impossible in a virtual environment, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can we dig into that then? That's a good contrast to consider, is the amount of people that will come in-person versus the amount of people that will at least share their information whether they'll show up or not in a virtual setting. So it was like 2,000 in-person, contrast against 20,000 virtually? As a business, what's the upside?
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, 500 in-person was what we were planning for Amsterdam. It was supposed to be in May. So just a couple months ago I was like "It's gonna be in Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities in the world..."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were looking forward to that travel...
+**Raj Dutt:** Totally. For all the right reasons, of course, Adam. But yeah, so it was gonna be 500 people, and we managed to get about 20,000 registrations; not even close to that showed for any of the live streams. A lot of people watched it on-demand, which was expected. We had some good Q&A on Slack, but that's not at all the same.
+We spread out our conference over two weeks. So instead of doing three days, which was jam-packed, like 8-10 hours a day, we've spread it out over two weeks, and did basically a couple of hours a day. It was a learning experience for us, for sure. We'd never really done a virtual conference like that. We actually switched streaming platforms at the 11th hour and ended up streaming it over YouTube, because we were like "Okay, that'll work. That'll scale. This other thing is just not working out so well."
+And yeah, we're gonna do it again in October. I was hoping that we'd have a physical conference in October, but that's not gonna happen. So - definitely a learning experience for the team.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I know when I saw All Things Open send an email -- they sent an email saying "We're now virtual, and it's an October conference." Back in May, April even, I was like "I wanna hope that it'll be in-person", but I even called it then. All Things Open - I called it in April - will be virtual. And they had no mention of it.
+**Raj Dutt:** I think KubeCon just decided a few weeks ago, or something like that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think even if from a government standpoint and a CDC standpoint or a whomever standpoint it's calling these shots that's advising local governments on what to do and how to handle it - even then, it's just a big risk, I suppose. A lot of work goes into an in-person conference. Not that non-in-person conferences don't have a similar amount of work; they're different types of work, and still very hard, regardless.
+A lot easier, a lot more conferences are happening because the hurdles of a conference being in-person are down. It's a lot easier to throw a virtual conference than it is a real, face-to-face conference. So many more moving parts; talk about capital-intensive - a lot of capital required. Or at least a lot of commitment, if not a lot of capital involved in an in-person conference.
+**Raj Dutt:** \[01:11:55.04\] Sure. I mean, the flipside though - I think it's a lot harder to get sponsors for a virtual conference, you know?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's the truth. That's the thing I'm trying to camp out at. I'm trying to get your wisdom on like "Was it worth it?" essentially. And maybe you can or can't say that, I don't know, but...
+**Raj Dutt:** Well, was it worth it - I mean, we didn't really have a choice. So was it worth it to do it rather than not have a conference at all? Definitely. Was it worth it in the sense that it was better than an in-person conference? I don't think so.
+The only net-positive, I think, of the virtual conference -- well, it was really twofold. One is we definitely got more registrations than we would have at a physical conference, and then the other point of feedback that we got from a lot of people, kind of tied to the registrations point, is a lot of people said "You know, I really wanted to come to GrafanaCon Amsterdam, but there was no way I would have been able to. I just didn't have the budget, didn't have the visa, didn't have the time off, couldn't make it to Amsterdam and buy a ticket."
+The other thing is we've made it free, which made it much more accessible. So the combination of it being free, and it being virtual kind of really widened the audience a lot. That was a positive. But honestly, if I had a choice - definitely physical. So yeah, was it worth it? It was worth it to try to pull off, which there was a valiant effort on our part of doing so, particularly because it was last-minute and we hadn't really done anything like it before. So I think the team did a really good job in making it come together in sort of a shoestring and a prayer, so speak... So I'm really happy about that. But I'm bummed out that we're in this situation and that we couldn't have it in-person in Amsterdam.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So about ten months ago, series A.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And we talked about your hires... I don't know - how many did you hire in the last ten months? What did that series A enable you in the last ten months? Where are you going? What is that allowing you to do?
+**Raj Dutt:** It's allowing us to really just go faster. Both in terms of the products that we're developing, the investment in open source, our general hiring plans... I think in the last ten months we've gone from about, I wanna say 80 people, maybe 70 people, to about 160(ish) today. So pretty much doubled the company in the last 9 or 10 months from a headcount standpoint.
+We're working on a lot of cool projects. We've kind of transitioned from being more than just about Grafana. We're very involved in the Prometheus project, which obviously isn't our project - it's a CNCF project - so I think we're kind of like the... We're definitely a top contributor to Prometheus, which not a lot of people know, but it's part of the whole big tent philosophy... We really wanna make the combination of Prometheus and Grafana really good.
+We've launched Loki, we're working on some cool stuff around tracing, which we'll have some announcements about pretty soon... We're trying to make Grafana Cloud a lot better, we're hiring more people on the go-to-market standpoint, we've got some really long-range bets that we're placing, that won't see anything as far as light of day till well into next year... So it's really allowing us to kind of truly be long-term greedy and just invest across the board.
+But we think we've got a really good -- you know, back to the window of opportunity. This space is a really interesting space right now. Everyone is building internet infrastructure, and that internet infrastructure is kind of in transition, and observability is a really interesting problem to solve right now, because people are moving their systems, their distributed systems, microservices, whatever you wanna call it, and they're just becoming so complicated and high stakes...
+\[01:15:59.13\] And open source is also a really interesting time from a window of opportunity, because we've gone from being like the cheap and cheerful alternative to the rail tools, to now this is where all the truly cutting-edge stuff is actually happening. You look at projects like Prometheus or Grafana - customers are choosing these things not because it's cheaper, it's free, or it's open source, but because it's the best. They're making these decisions not for cost, but because of capability. So we think that that's a really interesting time, and we're fortunate enough that it's never been a better time to be doing what we're doing, so we're trying to make hay while the sun's shining, so to speak.
+So yeah, we're just investing across the board, and we're lucky enough to have some good investors who also believe in what we're doing, and support us, and also get out of the way... Or I should say, in some cases support us by getting out of the way, if that makes sense.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah.
+**Raj Dutt:** And since the series A, we have a board; we have one board member who's not a founder. So our board is the three founders, plus our new board member, Gaurav Gupta from Lightspeed. He's a product guy, he came from Elasticsearch, so he's got a really good perspective... And we'll actually have an announcement maybe by the time the podcast airs, around some other new fundraising-related news.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. Okay... I like that tease there.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I won't hold you to that.
+**Raj Dutt:** I'm not sure where this is airing, so I don't know how much I should say.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We have a small backlog, so at least a couple weeks. So if you could say it in the next couple of weeks... It might be three weeks till this is out.
+**Raj Dutt:** Alright... Well, then I'll say it now, and if you air it too early, you're gonna scoop our news; but please don't, at least not for a couple of weeks, or two weeks from now, shall we say.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We can schedule it, there's no problem.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. Basically, we've just raised our series B, so that's a 50-million-dollars series B... So we're really just trying to accelerate that trajectory even more.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about that then. So 24 million ten months ago, 50 million - let's just say today, for a lack of better terms. I'm sure it's fuzzy numbers there, but... Recent. Super-recent.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Why does it make sense to raise more money now?
+**Raj Dutt:** I think two main reasons. One is we're really kind of -- I'd say they're both equal in importance. It's not like ordered. But one reason is we're kind of sitting here, looking at the global macroeconomic situation, and there's a lot of uncertainty and potential clouds on the horizon. So for us, this is a way where we can kind of take advantage of the current climate, which is very favorable in terms of companies in our space that are doing relatively well... And really just strengthen our balance sheet, so that we continue to have optionality in the business. We have a really strong position.
+Going back to not wanting to make the same mistakes - at Voxel, we were always running out of money, struggling to buy more servers, struggling to make payroll... So the reality is we haven't even--
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That sucks.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, that totally sucks. That's totally stressful.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a drain on culture. All the things you've talked about on this show - it sucks for everybody. It's not fun at all.
+**Raj Dutt:** Absolutely. We don't wanna be in that situation again. And the reality is we haven't really had to spend hardly any of our series A. So this just really kind of strengthens our overall position. So that's one reason.
+And the other reason is we really wanna invest even more in our community and our products. We've started to build a really good sales team - you know, what I told you about the last year-and-a-half - and we'll continue to build that out organically.
+\[01:20:05.25\] The second reason and the other main reason behind this new series B is we really wanna make some big bets and start some initiatives around both open source projects, as well as enterprise and cloud products... And a lot of this won't even be announced for another 6-9 months. Basically, we feel that with what we're doing with Grafana and this sort of composable observability platform -- back to this window of opportunity; there's really a whole bunch of other things that we could be doing within our ecosystem, that we really wanna launch, that will kind of accelerate and hopefully solidify the Grafana adoption story, as well as bring us further into being a multi-product company... Which we've already started to do with things like Loki, Prometheus, worldPing, and other things like that... But we really want to have this complete and composable observability platform, and continue to have Grafana at the center of it, but also be able to do that while putting most of our efforts into open source...
+Because back to the foundational element of that - it would be easy for us to basically say like "Okay, now we wanna focus on just building commercial software. We do wanna do that, but we also wanna put most of our efforts into open source, because that's the foundation; adoption and the health of the community is the most important thing to us at Grafana Labs. So in order to do both, we're going to basically need more firepower and need to hire even faster. So those are the two main reasons behind our recent series B.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you give me some specifics in terms of how that plays out with one or many of these open source projects? You know, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki... What specifically will the funding enable you to do? Would it put more firepower behind it, more community involvement, more community initiatives, more developer support, more engineering time? How will that actually play out?
+**Raj Dutt:** All of the above, really.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** All those things.
+**Raj Dutt:** All those things, absolutely. The Loki teams, the Cortex teams, the Prometheus teams - they're relatively small teams within Grafana Labs. We've traditionally put most of our engineering resources behind Grafana. But those other things, like Prometheus, like Loki, Cortex - we'll have some interesting announcements around tracing soon. You know, Grafana Cloud... We really wanna invest more on the wider ecosystem, if you will.
+So it's really not one thing in particular. It's more on Grafana, scale up on the big tent, wider ecosystem, scale up on empowering the community, investing in the community, investing in open source, also building commercial differentiation, launching new products in our cloud platform that are very different to what we're doing today... It's really about completing the picture from a developer's standpoint. When you want to be able to troubleshoot some of these very complex systems.
+Everything from getting an alert at 3 o'clock in the morning - you're blurry-eyed, it's a high-stakes game; something's down, your boss is calling you every ten minutes... From the time you get an alert to the time that you have to look at your metrics, you have to look at your logs, you have to look at your traces, you have to switch between all these disparate systems across different vendors, till the time that you find the resolution, find the problem, update your status page, create an RFO... How did you violate your internal SLOs, what does it mean for your external SLAs... There's all these systems, all this data, all this process that you have to go through, and there's so many different avenues along the way to optimize for that experience and to make that experience really slick.
+\[01:24:20.05\] So that's really what we're focusing on. It goes so much beyond Grafana itself. And if you can kind of optimize for that experience across different vendors, do it in a way that's really composable, prioritize interoperability, but also just create a flow, if you will, for that poor developer or SRE. She's woken up at 3 o'clock in the morning; why does she have to have 12 different tabs, and 10 different systems to deal with 8 different vendors? There's so much sub-optimal workflow in that, and we just wanna take the pain out of that, and do it in a way that is interoperable and composable. So we're just kind of focused on that problem, and there's so many areas in that problem that we can innovate on.
+So that's the majority of the answer to where we're gonna focus. But then the other part of the answer is -- Grafana itself has been pushed in all these interesting directions by the community, in ways that we couldn't even imagine. And that's the magic of open source. Most people are using Grafana for IT operations, whether it's cloud-native, or legacy IT... But they're using it to run their infrastructure. But we're seeing Grafana used in all sorts of crazy different ways, that are beyond really our imagination.
+There's an emergency room system in Tokyo that's using it to track wait times across all the ERs in Tokyo. The German rails system is using it to help with metrics there. There's a community of people who run beehives that are using it to monitor the activity and the weather around all their beehives. SpaceX is using it to help with launch control. So there's all these use cases that are outside of the normal problem domain that we're solving, whether you wanna say that that's industrial internet of things, or it's business intelligence, or whatever...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Raj Dutt:** So we wanna find those use cases within the community and figure out what the next step for Grafana is, that goes beyond the world that we're in today. And that's the really long-term stuff, that's really exciting. I know Torkel, my co-founder, is really excited about that angle, which is where does Grafana go next? Because there's nothing in Grafana itself that is specific to IT, or containers, or Kubernetes. It is a world-class visualization engine. The IT use case is just the sweet spot that we've found right now. But over a long enough time horizon, we wanna go beyond that.
+So those are the things that we're thinking about in raising the series B... And luckily, our existing investors Lightspeed and Lead Edge participated in the series B, the same investors that participated in our series A... So it was relatively easy for us to get done. It was definitely kind of an opportunistic move for us. We're really pleased to have just gotten that done in the last few days.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm glad we can ship this show in time to delay, to allow that news to be on this show, for one... And then two, I'm glad that that news came in, so that you can double down on your focus on the foundation of open source and all that you've just talked about there... Because that's awesome.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, we're pretty psyched about it, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:27:49.29\] I'm sure. This is breaking news, and that's super-cool; I'm glad for you on that front. It's even more reassuring, I suppose - back to reading between the lines - that these same investors felt comfortable to come back in, in a relatively short amount of time, with a more sizeable investment, too. And they feel confident in your future, and Grafana Labs' future. That's reassuring from the outside point of view, of like "Okay, something's going right in there." We can appreciate and adopt all that you're doing, and believe in what you're doing all the more.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, absolutely. And we're really lucky to have Lightspeed and Lead Edge believe in what we're doing, and share the same long-term greedy philosophy. So we're pretty psyched about that, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any closing advice you wanna share with us audience? I know we covered a whole lot, but is there any major themes over this last couple years, or any major things just like "Man, I've learned this lesson, I've got to share this."
+**Raj Dutt:** Major theme or advice... I suppose for me it just comes to people. You kind of doubled down on yourself, Adam, and thinking this through... The Grafana Labs journey for me - this is by far the largest, fastest-growing organization that I've ever been a part of. Oftentimes I feel like kind of impostor syndrome, going from 160 people to 400 people, especially given my last company capped out at 50 people. But I think the way you overcome that, regardless of where your gaps of knowledge or capabilities as a founder are is just by making sure that you surround yourself by the right team, especially your leadership team. I feel like that's really the job of any founder or CEO - you really wanna make sure that your core team is the right team, with the right people, in the right spots, to not only give you the advice and the counsel that you need, but to get your company to the next level that you need it to get to.
+I think a lot of first-time founders - and I was certainly this way at Voxel - think that they have to know everything, or do everything, or get involved in every detail. That was a mistake that I made at Voxel. What I'm trying to evolve my own MO to be is realize that my role is really to create alignment and to make sure that the right people are in the right spots, and to really be able to -- once you've got that, then that's your main job as CEO, is to create that team, motivate that team, and then basically get out of the way. If you can do that, then I think you're on the right track.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a hard thing to do.
+**Raj Dutt:** It is a super-hard thing to do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:30:53.06\] You have to be quite humble -- I mean, that's a humble perspective, and not everybody has that perspective. So I don't know where you learn that at, if it's just school of hard knocks, or bloodied knuckles, or what... But that's why I asked you that question; I don't know what you're gonna say, but that's a good lesson to learn and a good lesson to share, because that humble approach is difficult to 1) understand, and 2) execute on, because it takes a lot of humility to just get out of the way.
+**Raj Dutt:** I'll be the first to admit that I violate what I just said on a continual basis, but I think that's the --
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's your North Star.
+**Raj Dutt:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what I say for myself. One of my personal North Stars is "Work 8, play 8, and sleep 8." And just like you, I violate that often. I don't always get it right, but that's my North Star. That's what I'm trying to get right. So as a CEO, if that's what you're trying to get right, then at least you know what you're trying to do.
+**Raj Dutt:** I think North Star is a good way to put it, and I think it's okay if you don't always get it right... And I think particularly in a startup it's not a rule that you should endeavor to always follow; and you're just not gonna be able to follow it, either because you're not gonna be able to resist violating it, or because you need to violate it, or because the company is best served by you violating it. But I think having it as a North Star is definitely good, and that's the right way to think about it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I will say then, to encap that, when I do violate it, I do it with intention, and purpose, and usually with the season. There's a time attachment to it. I'll do it or I'll allow it for this season or for these particular reasons, and I'm always in check on that.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because I will let myself violate it, and it's necessary, as you said. Sometimes. But I've gotta do it for the right reasons, and I've gotta maintain that balance of like "If I'm gonna do this, here's the repercussions of it."
+**Raj Dutt:** Yup, yup. I think you need to be self-aware about doing it. And I also think you need to do it more the earlier stage the organization is. That North Star should become increasingly bright as you scale the company.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well-said, Raj. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for your heart in what you're doing, your focus on this golden goose. I love that metaphor, it's awesome. And thank you so much, more so for sharing your wisdom here today. We appreciate it.
+**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, thanks for having me, Adam. I appreciate it. This was fun.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is one of those shows that starts out in a very unique way. Mike McDerment, the founder of FreshBooks, became a founder by accident. Like many of us, Mike had an itch that he just had to scratch, and one thing led to another, and soon enough FreshBooks became a key tool in the belt of many freelancers and agencies who were looking for an easy way to send invoices and get paid quickly online.
+Getting started by accident was interesting to me, so that's exactly where we started. You're an accidental founder... How does that happen? How did you become an accidental founder, Mike? I still don't get that one...
+**Mike McDerment:** First of all, I'd say when we started out -- I guess I had founded a design firm. But starting this company in an accidental way -- I think the inspiration for FreshBooks, for those who don't know it, was I basically was using Word and Excel to bill my clients; I saved over an invoice, and I just... That was the end of my rope, because that had a whole bunch of problems with it. And you know, I just built something; I wasn't really thinking. It was like a creative exercise. I think that's how it got started. It's like a little snowball rolling down the top of a big hill, and one thing led to another...
+I will also say - maybe just a little window into me and what makes me tick is I like to follow my nose. Maybe it's a good scent for opportunity, and value, and the desire to solve problems for others, but that's really what it's been. I think I got into it through accident, and then just continued to follow the trail.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. It seems kind of a common path, to just scratch your own itch, right? To figure out a problem -- in this case, you're an entrepreneur, so your problem turned into a company. You saved over an invoice, you created a better way to do online invoicing, in an age when it wasn't really happening much, right? Take us back to, say, the era. Name the year, give us a frame of reference for the length of time FreshBooks has been a business.
+**Mike McDerment:** The moment when I got frustrated and saved over that invoice was actually in January 2013. If you go all the back there -- and I was running a small design firm, I had this business, I was working from home, I kind of had a constellation of contractors... So if you go back to that time, it was a very different time, with the technologies involved, with the availability of information for how to build a company.
+Frankly, I think this notion of being a founder was less an obvious path. I think the movie The Social Network, and Facebook, and all this stuff -- there's been quite a significant transition, I would say, in just awareness of entrepreneurship as a path, and its desirability. The markets have been exciting for the last while so people are certainly considering it more. But back in 2003, it's like, the DotCom bubble just happened. Everybody's running for the hills; not too far from 9/11... It was a dark time. The technologies people use today to build the kinds of products and services we run just didn't even exist. So that's a bit of the context for where we got started.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And just to clarify, you said 2013, but I think you meant 2003...
+**Mike McDerment:** \[04:14\] Oh... \[laughs\] My bad. Hopefully, people can switch context there. Absolutely, I meant 2003. Yeah, that was the moment we got started, and it wasn't really a company for a little while, yet.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So let's talk about maybe that path then, the early days. I don't want you to go through your entire history, I'd like to focus on some things that you're doing now as a CEO... Because I think Mike today versus Mike in 2003, or even 2010, when we last spoke on a different podcast that I ran, called The Web 2.0 Show - that interview is still out there; we'll link it up in the show notes, and you can go back and listen to how terrible I sounded, and maybe how amazing you sounded, I don't know... We'll find out.
+**Mike McDerment:** \[laughs\] We're probably both in the terrible bucket, who knows... Yeah, I'm afraid now. \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But back in these you'd mentioned that -- you're right, entrepreneurship wasn't something that was... It has become a thing that people are more aware of. And I think too, as you'd mentioned technology being available - today we have so much very modern software available at the touch of any button basically, to any software developer, or anybody who would have this itch that you once had... In those days you had to make everything. You were starting literally from scratch. Open source wasn't even as prolific as it is today, so... Help us understand the technological landscape of then, and the hurdles you had to go through to build a stable application like FreshBooks would have to be to face a Goliath like QuickBooks, or something else.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, very different times. There's two major things worth mentioning. First of all, a technology like Ruby on Rails, a framework for developing web applications really didn't exist, and we were building our own and rolling our own. There were some at the margins, but nothing like what's available now... And frankly, in the next 24 months after that, the landscape of Rails getting momentum and what have you was a big change. We were a LAMP shop, so PHP, Linux, Apache and MySQL.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mike McDerment:** So I think just all those technologies that people take for granted now, like jQuery - not around; these fundamental building blocks... And then I think the other major one I'd call people's attention to, that we've seen over our tenure, is actually mobile. Smartphones were not a thing. I didn't even have a cell phone when I started the business. I was like "Yeah, forget it, I'll just stick to landlines."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\]
+**Mike McDerment:** Eventually, I got a clamshell... I may have had actually a pager for a while, and whatever... But it was just different. There was a whole other platform we needed to start building these products for, and frankly, that mobile piece started to just bring much more clarity to the art of ease of use and the user experience. It just forced -- it really brought new expectations with what is possible to people. I expected on my phone and my desktop - I expected those to be easy to use; like, really easy to use. I expected maybe to work with location services... Whole other considerations that no one was thinking about when we started that.
+I think those were two of the big, fundamental changes from a technology standpoint. I guess the other one would be just cloud, being able to host your products in the cloud, versus bare metal, whether you're running it, or like we did, having it managed at Rackspace. But you know, those are three huge changes in terms of the technology landscape for these kinds of products.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's compare and contrast then, for the listeners' sake... I wanna get into this rewrite/competitor you built in a bit, so kind of dovetail into that if you'd like, but compare and contrast the technologies that you built the classic FreshBooks on, and the things you're using today... Like, are you using open source? Are you in the cloud? You don't have to go too deep into that, but just the tech... Give me kind of a bird's eye view of today versus then.
+**Mike McDerment:** \[08:17\] Yeah. So we've always been open source, just LAMP stack being a thing... It's just that they were seriously under-developed at that point in time. Today we're a single-page app, with Ember hosted Google cloud... I think those are some of the big pieces. And then you have all these tools available to you, whether it's things like Datadog or whatever to monitor application performance, or all the tooling...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Observability, monitoring, stuff like that.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. GitHub to support your development practices... There have been a lot of changes in and around the actual technology choices that you use to build your actual product. A lot of the improvements have come in, like how we facilitate the production of software as well.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's dovetail then into how you almost killed FreshBooks. I assume that at some point -- I don't know really, I can only speculate, but it seems like maybe the technical direction of FreshBooks wasn't going the right direction, you needed to scale and do things, as you'd mentioned, mobile came into play... Maybe even responsive design had a big issue on that, or maybe just the fact that we had multiple-device styles, whether it was a desktop, or an iPad, or an iPhone, or something like that... Bring us into this idea of creating a competitor. This seems very -- I've never heard of this before, ever.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah... To be honest, I think it's a proud moment. We like to think we find creative solutions to problems here at FreshBooks. That's part of the art, and this was definitely one.
+Effectively, where we got to was -- you can talk about the age of some of the technology, and we had moved on and started upgrading parts of our stack, and using... We use a lot of Python today. We'd already started that for a lot of our back-end services... So we're using an ever-evolving and improving collection of technologies, that are more and more modern. So we weren't stuck back there.
+But one of the places we were stuck is the architecture of our application when we started out was just not clean, so we had a lot of back-end, or almost middleware (if you want) logic baked in with our front-end. So if I think about the root cause for what we decided to do, which was to fully replatform, it was really because "Hey, we believe consumer expectations have changed so much - because of mobile, because of other advances - that if we want to win long-term, we're not gonna be able to refactor our way to greatness."
+\[10:46\] So we started out and said "Okay, if user experience matters, ease of use and simplicity, we have won on that today, but it will be harder and harder for us to win and win again, and win long-term, if we don't do something radical design-wise. Let's design those designs at where it would be... And then, you know, can we get from here to there?" And the short answer was "Not really." So we decided to replatform... And in so doing, it opened up a whole series of other problems for us.
+Questions when you replatform - if you read Joel Spolsky, or what have you - the number one strategic mistake you can make as a software company is "You just don't do it. You're bound to fail."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's severely frowned upon, yes.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yes, it's severely frowned-upon, and I think there's good reasons for that. First of all, it's gonna take longer and cost more than you think. You may never finish. That is a very likely scenario. And actually, we tried twice before, and failed... So it was the third time that we kind of got it done.
+My favorite ones are maybe less obvious and more business-oriented, but you could build another version of your offering, and it could fundamentally perform worse from a business standpoint, and you wouldn't even know. What happens is inside the building -- you're building a new platform, and your team is falling in love with doing the new thing... But that doesn't mean it's better, or more business-performant. And that should be the reason you're doing this stuff. Technology, as much as we all love it, is a means to an end, and if you're making the necessary investments to make the platform, the thing better perform better. So you wouldn't know that for sure...
+\[12:14\] Then there's the good old "Hey, your competitors are still moving, while you're standing still, replatforming." That's not good. They're catching up if you've got a lead. Okay, that's bad, because it's probably gonna be a multi-year thing if you're relatively established... We're number two in America for small business accounting software, so it's hard to do that...
+And then finally, my favorite one - I like to call it a sophomore jinx, but I like to describe it this way... If you've ever had a band you love their first album, and you go buy the second one and you're ashamed to be a fan, because it's so bad...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Mike McDerment:** Right? That is a bad scenario.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One-hit wonder, or one-album wonder...
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, exactly. It's like, "Man, I don't wanna be one of those..." I think that presents itself when you go and redesign a new thing. There's no guarantee your customers are gonna love it. People are inherently afraid of change, so things are kind of stacked against you...
+So then we had a whole bunch of problems. Basically, like "Oh, how do we measure it and know it's better? How do we get some stealth while we're working on this, so our competitors can't find us?" I was chewing on all these problems and came up with this crazy idea one weekend when I was chewing on these problems... I was like "Well, what happened if we created a company that had nothing to do with us? No one could track the two companies together. And we use that as like a Petri dish to build the new FreshBooks." What we would get out of that is we could build something out of our competitors' eyes, or even our customers' eyes, frankly, which is helpful in a lot of ways. We could scale it up to know if it was actually business-performant and better...
+Because it wasn't our brand -- and I think once you have a brand and people trust you, you really cannot take as much risk... A really new, fragile, embryonic technology - there's big risk in that, whether it's user experience risk, or production availability, or data loss risk... All these risks are there. So if you're flying under the banner of your existing brand, it gets very hard to take the kinds of risks that lead to something really innovative. I think that's why actually a lot of big companies suck at this stuff. It's one of the reasons; there are others... But it's less talked about, and super-important.
+I really wanted to have an environment and a set of conditions where people can take risks. So by creating this new company, which we incorporated on its own, had its own website, its own brand name, did everything over here... We ran it actually live for like 9-12 months before determining it was ready to switch it over and start moving some people over. That was the approach we took, and that was kind of why; that was the context. But yeah, it was definitely a different way to solve a problem.
+And then I'll go further and say then we had this other problem of "Okay, we have two platforms. People don't like to switch..." We believe in the four E's, which is Executing Extraordinary Experiences Everyday. Very customer service and customer-focused orientation as a business. We recognized that people wanna not be -- you know, a lot of migrations go badly because you're building a platform and you force everybody to migrate, that platform's not ready... And as much as you think it is, and your team is in love with their new thing, I can tell you - the new FreshBooks was not perfectly for everyone day one, at all. So it would have been tragic if we'd forced everybody over. We didn't do that.
+We actually ran both platforms and let our customers choose when to move over, and if they wanted to move over. We thought that was the right thing to do, because we are a serious business software, we are playing a core role in people's lives... And having that choice we just thought was empowering to then, and would help build trust. We actually helped people roll back if it didn't work out the way they wanted it to.
+So all this -- we tried to take this challenging thing that is usually a major trust-mitigating event and find a way to design the experiences so ideally it's trust-building or neutral. We had lots of people who were super-excited about the new FreshBooks. The vast majority. But we definitely had some people who were like "This is not what I had hoped." And that might have been two years ago. And now they'd be like "Oh, it's better than I imagined." This is the thing about software.
+\[16:12\] So I think not only was creating a new company novel and different, our approach to migrating customers from one platform to another - I've never heard of anyone else doing that before; also novel. I think the team, and for executing the complexity in those things, and conceiving of them, deserve a lot of credit.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Certainly it would take a lot of trust of a team in a leader like you to believe in that path and to put their neck on the line every single day, and come to work, and kill it, and do what you've done... So I guess the question hanging in my mind is "Is the new FreshBooks the same technology that you built with this competitor? Was it a one-to-one?" Did you essentially acquire that company? So you wanted to build it in secret, but in the public side at some point they do connect the dots, and you're here talking today, so it's not a secret... So how do you do that and then fold all this in in a way that remains trustworthy?
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, we could probably write several books on this...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Take your time with that one...
+**Mike McDerment:** No, I'll try and articulate it, because what's really fascinating about this when you're inside the problem is literally -- like, you are lost in a maze of possibilities, and it is completely overwhelming, you don't know which way to go, and it's like you're kind of at square one on this journey of building software. That is exhilarating, but also kind of terrifying.
+So here's the thing - that seemed so complex to us, but after a time I came to realize \[unintelligible 00:17:37.17\] it's like "You know what - if you're not us, if you're a net new person to FreshBooks, and you sign up for a new offering, you don't know anything else. You don't care." \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. All you want is a good product.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. So it's like, we're managing all this complexity and have all this history, but somebody who signs up today - all they know is what they signed up for. So basically, what we did is we went back to the users of the new platform (it was called BillSpring), and we told them it had been acquired by FreshBooks. Full stop.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I was curious how that would work out.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. And it was like "Hey, we've acquired it." End of story. There was not much brew ha ha. That's fine. And they could keep using it, so whatever.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And in all honesty, that's exactly what it was, right? I mean...
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true. It's not that it was not factual. That's the truth.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. The part that was less obvious was that we'd built it. \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Mike McDerment:** I hate to think anyone would think we were disingenuous about that, like they were actively trying to get away from us, but... No, so we designed, built, conceived that whole thing, built it... Then we sort of acquired it, and that was the public way for people to easily understand it, and we started flying our logo there. Then we just started signing people up, who signed up at FreshBooks, on that new thing. It was kind of that simple.
+It took us a while to realize it could be that simple. That was a thing... And again, I think we deserve a lot of credit for -- I think we could have executed it in a much more convoluted and confusing way. It was convoluted and confusing for our experience, but we got to a place of simplicity, and that is a beautiful thing.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... You couldn't do that with, say, GitHub, for example. You mentioned GitHub earlier. Let's say five years from now -- Microsoft recently acquired GitHub, and they're like "Wow, we have to replatform this thing." I don't think GitHub would be easy to replatform in the same way you had done. So it seems like this solution -- so listeners who are tuning into this might be thinking "Dang, Mike, you just hit the Holy Grail. I've gotta replatform" or "I'm in a scenario like this. Let me do what you've done." I mean, one, would you do it again?
+**Mike McDerment:** I think that is the question, and I honestly don't know. The benefits and the trade-offs were so interesting and fascinating... I think for the team and the company and realizing what we're capable of, I wanna do it every day. But in terms of the cost and the time and what have you, it's like, "Man, could we find a way to refactor it?" \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:08\] How many years has it been into this transition? Because I'm a customer... So let's do full disclosure here - I'm actually a user of FreshBooks for a long time, using the classic version of it, and I know that you've had a non-classic version for at least a couple of years.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, that's right. And we would have started building that 18 months before that, so call it a solid 3,5 years.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I mean, some businesses don't even last that long, you know what I mean? And you've been transitioning and migrating for that long. That's pretty wild.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, running in parallel. I think we realized we could do that without too much burden, which was good. And maybe someone else's platform - that would not be the case.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Divided efforts, forked interests, attention spans etc. So they are two distinct platforms, and even today you still have FreshBooks new and FreshBooks classic. You still have two distinct platforms.
+**Mike McDerment:** We have customers on two platforms, yeah. We're only available as new FreshBooks.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So when somebody buys today, somebody subscribes today, word of mouth, whatever, it's new FreshBooks only.
+**Mike McDerment:** That's correct.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the skew then percentage-wise, old platform/new platform?
+**Mike McDerment:** Most people are on new FreshBooks. Lion's share.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I'm the anomaly here then.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. You're certainly in the minority. \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, pre-call I did say that it was my fault, not your fault, because it's just fear of change. That's the problem here. It's not that you haven't sold me on it, it's just plain, old, simple fear of change... And that's what happens.
+**Mike McDerment:** This is the thing about replatforms, and that's why I think the mechanism in letting people go - we're trying to boil a frog, Adam, so to speak... Until you're just like "Yeah, it's just time for me to go over. I've geared myself up, and it's gonna be great." That will happen in time, and we'll have everybody over on new FreshBooks in time... But for now, it's great. We want happy customers, and it's been working well for us.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's laser in a bit more to you. I know we've been talking to you mostly about FreshBooks' journey, not so much Mike's journey... But what are your biggest challenges today as a CEO? What are you personally facing?
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, my patented answer to this question - but I'll get into some other more interesting things - is "Ask me in 20 minutes and I'll have a different answer." I'm just always chewing through a series of problems.
+I think if I make it really personal -- you know, we're over 300 people, we're hiring 50 right now... I think how your role changes, and how you need to change, and these kinds of things... I think I went through -- I was very much like a hands-on, directive startup founder at the start, that sort of "crazy founder guy", who was pushing things through, and what have you... Then I went on a journey of learning how to get out of the way...
+The biggest unlocking thing for me was realizing I just needed to hire a whole other level of seasoned maturity around me, and that's what I like working with... I've always been great with people who have been there, done that, got the T-shirt. It was kind of the in-between phase that was harder.
+So I built a team of those folks, and then started learning how to lead a little more, and I think this whole BillSpring thing was like "Hey, that's the job. You're leading." So that was part of the journey. And everyone still has their tendencies and biases, so I'm constantly trying to grow out of any sort of reactionary behaviors, and always be very disciplined about how I'm manifesting, and the effect I have on others, and for the business, and thinking sort of long-term...
+I mean, I think one of the hardest things for me has always been letting people make their mistakes. I'm sitting there, it's so obvious to me they're making a mistake, I just wanna give them the answer, but you've gotta let them go and do it. That has been one of the hardest lessons for me. And that's not to say I think I'm always hard, or anything like that. That's not the point. But when I know someone's heading down the wrong path... Back in the day I would never let them do it. I'd just be like, "No, we're doing this", whatever.
+\[23:59\] Ultimately, people don't build up and get to the same level of capability if you're sort of stealing that away from them. So that was poor leadership and management on a bunch of levels from me. That I think has been one of the hardest things.
+And then, interestingly, I'm coming into a phase again now where it's like "Okay, things are operating at a scale...", I brought in a better half, who's like a president, to drive the next growth period of the business... And I actually need to go back to almost those earlier days, and tinkering and bringing some of that kind of thinking into the business... So I'm working on longer-term, squishier things now, around brand, and things of that nature, which I'm very well-suited to do, but are decidedly less operational; they still require a measure of leadership, but the focus is very different. Far more intangible, nothing urgent, but all highly important, as opposed to a lot of years where everything is urgent and important. So that's kind of a little window into my life these days.
+**Break:** \[25:09\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The next question for you, I guess, dove-tailing off of that, is how do you keep up as a leader? Where do you get your skills? Do you read books, do you have a coach? How do you keep yourself sharp? Is it just bloodied knuckles? Are you a lone ranger? Give us your personality type.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, so I think it's a confluence of things, and I'll try and talk some of those and tell you where I am right now. I didn't ever work anywhere else, didn't really have a manager or boss or any of these things... So leading and things of this nature have always been a bit of a mystery to me. No role models is another way to put it... Which is hard.
+So I think I had some combination of some formative experiences, where the only profession I had before doing this stuff, so to speak, was frankly a "camp counselor." The way that manifested for me is in my last two years doing that I took people on a 36-day and a 42-day canoe trip. So it's me, in the woods, with one other co-counselor, and a bunch of people who were like 16 years old, or whatever.
+And what happens is -- we would travel long distances in a given day, like 30 miles kind of thing; it would not be a ridiculous day on water and land...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a long trip on a canoe.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, that's one day. We did longer ones, we did shorter ones, but on some of these trips, that was kind of an average day. We were moving. And what you get out of that is a sense of perseverance, and team work, and all these things. So I think that was a formative experience for me, where I got a lot of situational awareness for how things can go.
+Then, when I started on this road of building this company, I realized how gapped I was on business, and all these other things, and so my orientation was to collect advisors. I would reach out and network with people who knew more, and I think I had -- for whatever reason, people were always... I guess I had a knack for building rapport and having people want to help me. It wasn't a push. Pretty soon they'd be pulling, and they'd make time for me, and they were helpful... So I would collect these advisors for the many, many problems I had to solve. That became an input, and they became instructive for me.
+Then I think another thing that happened was I hired these more -- I would then read the internet, and I read a lot of books... I'm kind of like an input learner, so I read it, I consume it, I digest it, I refer to it and build on it later. That's part of how I learn. So every night I'm probably reading for half an hour, and it's almost always a business book.
+I do like other forms of books, and I like reading in general, but mostly I'm reading about how to be a better business operator and grower.
+Then the final thing is just surrounding myself with -- and I think where most of the stuff I've gotten in the last few years has been frankly the management team members I hire, who are all more expert... I cannot do their job. But that's not my job. My job is to build the team, and to point the company in the right direction, understanding the market, and the customer, make sure the bank accounts is full... I can do those things. But they operate their functional areas, and they're great with people leadership, people management, so there's some learning there.
+\[32:12\] And then the final thing I layer on top of that is I now do these things -- we have a weekly thing called Shorthands; we offer everybody lunch and we give them recent updates of the company.
+And not every time, but most of the time I'll do a thing called "Mike's Musing", which is I literally talk about something I've learned about leadership. That act of having to explain it to somebody else helps to reinforce how much -- it turns out I've actually learned a bunch... But the act of consciously saying, "hey I saw something", they're always inspired by some manager or leader I'd been talking with in the last 72 hours, and then I just take this lesson, and I don't refer to that individual or anything like that, but I just say "Hey, here's how I'd handle this. Let's build our collective leadership capacity." I think those are the things on that journey that I've been down.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think gets you excited these days then? Just to rewind a little bit, some of the things you said - you said "I haven't worked anywhere else really", you've been a founder/CEO for quite some time now, so you've done (for a lack of better terms) this job; whether it's changed over the years or not, you've been in this position... At some point you get bored, right? Maybe, maybe not - I don't know. What keeps you excited? What is it for you?
+**Mike McDerment:** I think this transition to less operational was quite uncomfortable at the start, but now I'm starting to realize "Oh yeah, I'm getting back to more creating." I'm a builder, I like to create and build. If there's like three phases - create, build, scale - my super-strengths are probably in the create and buildout phases. And then my super-strength is probably -- am I a world-class scaler of things? No. But can I see 3-5 years down the road, to help those people who do scale and point them in the right direction? Yes.
+So it's like "Hey, know your strengths", and then it's like, okay, if I'm spending all my time, in an 18-month plus to 3-year area, and that's my area of influence, then it's like "Okay, what do I need to think about that's building, and how do I make that happen?" That's a fun problem set. Highly valuable and impactful, and it's a luxury to even be here. But in some ways, it's a lot like going back to the beginning. I just learn more along the way.
+So that's the place, and then I work with -- I've actually helped found some other companies, and one in particular that I've spent some time with, which is a good... It is at the earlier stages, and it's very interesting. And helping that team is a source of motivation outside the office.
+But the point is, I actually have some big, meaty, interesting challenges inside the office... Because this is what happens; some of the problems you've gotta solve multiple times, and that can be a little frustrating... But we've got a long way to go, and a big, big platform, and opportunity ahead of us. I think we're in the early days of really taking advantage of -- whether it's machine learning... Early days for our category in doing that stuff, and that to me is a lot of fun, exciting.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, you mentioned bringing in -- I believe you said a president. Is that right? ...to sort of take over more of the next phase of growth for you.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. I think the way I would look at it -- and that's not the actual title, but I think the easiest way to think about a role is... Interesting construct - we're two in a box; we run the company together, we do one-to-one-to-ones with our senior management team, so the three of us are in there, and what have you.
+The individual in question has been fantastically successful, and they like to lean in the 0 to 18-month timeframe, and I lean 18-month plus... So we're together, on the same page with each other's files, but we don't need to go to the same meetings. In the same meeting, we bring a different area of focus. He might be called a COO in other businesses. I think this individual brings a lot more to bear than most COOs would... So it's a great partnership, from my point of view.
+\[36:01\] It actually is quite liberating, because it's like "Okay, you run the results in the operations, and I'm gonna run the future. We'll do both together", but that's where the emphasis lies, and kind of more the accountabilities, and that's fine.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess the reason why I brought that back up in that capacity was to say that you began as the original founder, the visionary, and you've had to graduate yourself out of this role of everyday doing, and more leading and building the team, as you'd mentioned - you mentioned you couldn't do their job etc. - to now being in a position where you can free yourself up again to get back into the details. So I asked you about your motivation etc, and I guess that leads me to this question of like -- you know, if that's the case, if you're now able to get back into some of these bigger challenges you mentioned, that are still in the office, what's the next big thing for you? What's the next big thing for FreshBooks?
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, so as a rule, we wouldn't disclose... Right? \[laughter\] But I will say Fridays are my favorite days. That's where I go to the sprint reviews for our product development teams. So it's back to details. I'm not the core person driving those meetings, but I'm there, I'm seeing the things get groomed up, and I have the opportunity to ask questions, and play the role of like... We were talking about a feature the other day, and this team is building it, and they've looked at the competitors, and they're like "Hold up, we're gonna build it like this", and I'm like "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the presses. You're building something that was intended to replicate a paper world. We have this great opportunity to run in the cloud now. We can do so much that could not be conceived of before. Why would we recreate that model?" And ask questions like that, and help them connect, like "You know, instead of creating that thing, you can manifest it in three other ways that are not recreating that thing. You can add messaging and notifications around its creation, and sequencing events off that... A piece of paper could never do these things. Let's think about this differently."
+So the teams are cranking away... That's a fun role to play, and I think impactful long-term. That's some of my favorite stuff I get to do. And then i have some pet projects that are more secret in nature. We have categories of products that we would like to offer you, and some of those are known... But there's categories that I think should exist for you and don't, so "Hey, who's gonna go and create those? Probably this guy." So there's a lot of work to do, and that is exciting to me.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So FreshBooks has been around for a while, and you expect it to be around for a lot longer. It's not going anywhere. You're only gonna get bigger and better.
+**Mike McDerment:** That is the plan of record.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the goal.
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah. \[laughter\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Mike, thank you so much for your time today. It was excellent catching back up with you. It's literally been nine years since we last spoke. The last time we talked was on that podcast... We're not great friends; we should be great friends, but hey, that's how it works out, right?
+**Mike McDerment:** Yeah, it feels like it. Nice to pick up where we left off, Adam. And thank you for choosing FreshBooks all these years.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, I love FreshBooks. And that's not a paid thing. Hey, I really love FreshBooks, I think it's an amazing product. I've always had great respect for you and your team, and FreshBooks for me, honestly -- I just love it. It's amazing. Trustworthy, reliable... It's never failed me. That's the best part. It's never failed me, ever. I love that.
+**Mike McDerment:** That makes me very happy to hear.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Mike, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
+**Mike McDerment:** Okay, thanks for having me, Adam.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** The role a father plays in a child's life is pivotal. Ian Bernstein formerly founded Sphero, and is now the founder and head of product at Misty Robotics, and they're building the first programmable robot for the home and business. They call it Misty II. But this journey of building Misty II really began when Ian was just five years old, living in a remote area of New Mexico, when his dad bought him an Apple IIe.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Looking back on my side, the Apple computer was probably the biggest purchase our family made... And it was interesting - later on, it was years after I'd started Sphero, and actually more when I was thinking about these more advanced robots at Misty, I called him up to ask him why he had bought this Apple computer... And he told me, "Well, I thought computers would be the future, and I thought you should know about them." That was the reason he bought it.
+I grew up in the middle of nowhere, in rural New Mexico, I started home-schooling when I was in fourth grade, but I kind of ended up teaching myself a lot of stuff from the internet. My dad was always a facilitator. He was always looking for things that I might be interested in, and sort of finding people that knew about those topics.
+When I was 11 -- I'd always liked taking stuff apart. I had this cardboard box of parts, just taking apart broken cameras, and cassette players, and trying to understand how they worked and tried to fix them, but I was too young to really put them back together... But I was always curious how things worked.
+So when I was 11, he found this guy who taught electronics at a tech school, so he ended up trading guitar lessons; my dad's a classical musician.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice...
+**Ian Bernstein:** Guitar lessons for electronics lessons for me. I learned CAD from this guy that my dad met at State Park. He was living out of his trailer. He was a machinist, and he taught me AutoCAD. So I learned from a lot of people that my dad and my mom would connect me with.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting to hear it, too - to hear home-schooling as part of your past. Do you think in retrospect that was a big thing for you? Would you have been too preoccupied in traditional school? ...I guess that's the angle there.
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[03:57\] Maybe... Where I grew up, our public school is 20 miles away. It was 120 kids, K through 12. The year that I dropped out, I basically just told my parents I didn't wanna go to school anymore. That year they combined fourth, fifth, and sixth grades into one classroom. That's how small it was.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** So it wasn't like a big school, in a big city, where there's other opportunities, and after-school programs, and AP stuff... So I think for me home-schooling, and because of my parents being facilitators, I think it worked out really well for me and I got to experience a lot of things that I don't think I would have found if I had continued in school.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. And obviously, you've gone on to do some pretty cool stuff. Sphero is I guess kind of a big deal, right?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, I mean...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's a big deal. I'm just kidding around; it's tongue-in-cheek there. I think it's a real big deal.
+**Ian Bernstein:** I think it's really cool. Obviously, BB-8 was awesome... For me, it's a lot of the educational side of what we did at Sphero, a lot of kids now - I mean, since we started Sphero ten years ago, there's kids that got into Sphero and coding when they were kids, and they're now in college, and sometimes they get notes from people... They're like "Hey, I'm in this field/got interested in stuff because of you and the work you guys did at Sphero with your products." So that's really cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know if this name will ring a bell for you, but Ron Evans - by any chance, does Ron Evans ring a bell to you?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Oh yeah, for sure.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ron is a friend of the show. We've talked to Ron tons of times; I love Ron, he's amazing. And I actually learned about Sphero and some of the things he was doing with it at GopherCon several years ago. On the third day of GopherCon was always this community day. Originally, it was called "The Hack Day", but they ended up calling it "The Community Day", I think just to sort of like bring everybody there. And while the conference was only two days, and it ended, technically, it still had this extra third day... And Ron was die-hard about Sphero, programming robots, and stuff like that. He's since gone to do TinyGo, and embeddable Go and all these fun things... But he was really betting big on Sphero, and he was excited about BB-8 even... Obviously. It's pretty cool.
+**Ian Bernstein:** That guy used so many Spheros... I remember Adam Wilson (my co-founder at Sphero) and I met up with him in L.A. one time, and I think he literally burned out a whole cardboard box of Spheros. There was probably 30 Spheros in there, just completely worn out. I mean, we test these things for over 100 hours easily, and these things were all scratched up, and we were swapping them out with new ones, because he was just going through them so fast. He's in our Misty Robotics launch video too, talking about our new robot.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, let's move on to that then. I mean, let's not obviously gloss over all of Sphero, but let's move into where you're at today... And rewind as necessary. Misty Robotics is new; I think we're talking like 2017 you had founded this, is that right? Can you open up the story there?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, so I've always thought about these more advanced robots, like robots in our lives, since I was a kid. I grew up with The Jetsons, and shows like that... Rosy the Robot...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+**Ian Bernstein:** ...and I've always had that in the back of my mind, like "How do we bring these robots for real into our lives?" ...not just movies and Star Wars and stuff. We had prototyped some stuff in the early days of Sphero, some more advanced robots, but it didn't quite make sense; the technology wasn't there, and for us as a company - we were making more on the toy side, educational robots... And in -- well, it was 2014 when we started working on BB-8. Adam and I spent four months out in L.A, working with Disney; I learned about BB-8 from Bob Iger a year-and-a-half before episode 7 came out...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, so you could have been a leaker...
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[08:05\] Yeah, it was crazy. Just like a little side tangent - when Bob Iger first showed us the picture, you could barely see the picture. It had his name watermarked over it, so the whole screen...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Ian Bernstein:** But when we started working on it for real -- we had to work on it at night, when nobody else was there. When we started working on it as a company, emails and stuff would go out anytime people would come by our office, and everybody had to put them in their cabinets, in their drawers, and as soon as the person left, a Slack notice would go out and everybody would pull them out again. We had locked rooms... It was pretty crazy working on that.
+We even did -- at CES we had kind of a back-room, we created this bookshelf where you literally pulled-open a book and the whole bookshelf swung open... And retail partners that were sort of privileged to view that product for their buyers would go in this secret backroom to see BB-8. Yeah, it was crazy... There was no leaks on that. There was leaks to the iPhone, but there was no leaks of BB-8.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's interesting too, because that was the first episode to bring Star Wars back from (I guess) the negative side of Star Wars - which we might be back to the negative side again, with going from episode 3, 4, 5, back to 1, 2, 3, and 1, 2, 3 is in many people's eyes not part of the canon, even though it is... There's a lot of negativity there, I suppose, around that... But then this new Star Wars episode 7 brought it back. This was Ray and all these new, interesting characters, and BB-8, obviously, and it was an interesting time for Star Wars. So it must have been cool to -- I'm imagining as a kid you were a super-fan of Star Wars, considering how excited you were about working on it.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Oh, yeah. It was amazing. And when we first heard about BB-8, too - Bob Iger was like "Hey, this is the new droid in the film", and honestly it really wasn't until the movie came out, and we were literally in the theater, that we really knew how big the BB-8 character was gonna be. We got a little bit of a hint in the trailer, but... You know, I was like "Okay, well there's hundreds of droids really in Star Wars... Is this just like a two-second scene with BB-8, or is this an actual name character?"
+It was pretty nerve-wracking, because we put everything into BB-8, and it ended up working out very well, because BB-8 did become one of the main characters in the film.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How did you make that choice, to put everything in? What was the indicator? I suppose it was a gut feeling... Was it like "This is just super-cool. I can't help but do it"? Was it an economic thing?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Kind of all of the above. Part of it was just like we would just want it to be a part of Star Wars, and doing something cool, which was maybe a little bit of blind faith... I mean, people at Lucas and Disney were telling us it was gonna be a big character, but we didn't really know... They were super-secretive, too. It took months and months and months to get even just reel graphics of what BB-8 looked like. Literally, months we were going off of a sketch on my iPad that we had made after that meeting with Bob Iger... And it was kind of rough colors, and stuff; we'd really only seen it for like five seconds.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Was there anything like -- any physics schematics that you had too, where you were like "Okay, this is how we operate it. This is the physics of BB-8"? Or did you have a hand in that even?
+**Ian Bernstein:** No, not really. But it was months of us asking before we finally got some video... Basically, some iPhone footage from the set, and a puppeteer pushing BB-8 around, so we could see what the movements actually looked like.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:01\] Yeah. Describe BB-8, for those who don't really have a perfect visual. I'm sure there's many out there who do, but for the few who don't, give us a visual indication of BB-8.
+**Ian Bernstein:** BB-8 is a 20-inch sphere - the actual BB-8 - with this half-spherical head on top. BB-8 is part of the Star Wars universe; its character is R2-D2. It doesn't have a voice, like C-3PO; it's more like beeps. The BB-8 has a lot of personality and character, and follows the Star Wars characters around and helps them in their journey.
+We made a toy version of BB-8. Our BB-8 is maybe four inches tall, it connects to your phone over Bluetooth, and there's a lot of interaction and gameplay. You can program BB-8 in schools, and all kinds of different stuff.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's really interesting, looking back on Sphero - I guess you have said a couple times, the toy side of things, and Misty Robotics, and what you're doing with Misty 2 is toyish, I would say; not really toy, but more of a platform. We'll get into that, of course...
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's just interesting to use these things as gateways for not only young people, but even older people who are like -- I don't know, I'm just thinking like my uncle, who's now retired, and I think he's 65... I don't know, I can't recall his age. Maybe 70. I could be wrong, completely. It doesn't matter; I'm probably way off on his age and I feel about that, so I'm trying to stutter a little bit... But the point is that people who were out of touch with technology even, that are just curious, can pick up these things and learn.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, absolutely. Going back to your original question, it was when we really started thinking about BB-8, out in L.A. - we were at Golden Road Brewery, which is right near Disney's creative campus... And we were thinking like "What's something potentially bigger we could do at Sphero?" And we started thinking about BB-8 that we'd just heard about a few weeks earlier... And I thought "Well, how do we make a real BB-8?" Not the toy version, or a real R2-D2. Again, not a toy version, but like a real robot...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Legit, yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** ...in our homes, our offices, that's really doing useful stuff for us? And of course, behind me right now I have a Roomba in the corner of my room. It is awesome, it vacuums my floor, it's gonna vacuum it at 3 o'clock today... But how do we get robots in our homes beyond just vacuums? And we started to realize that consumers are starting to get more educated, more ready for this type of technology, especially with like voice interaction, and things like the Amazon Echo, and Siri, and Google Assistant... And also the technologies there, from the voice interaction side, that we can use, from mapping a navigation...
+It was pretty early, but starting to get into place that we can navigate a home at a reasonable cost; things like computer vision, so we can give some context awareness to the robot... So that people who are curious, people who have seen these robots in movies - Star Wars, and The Jetsons, and Chappie, and Big Hero 6, and all kinds of stuff can actually start to bring some of this technology into their environments to do useful things.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about iRobot? I say that one just because it's funny, because that one was a robot revolution.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. I mean, definitely iRobot?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right? \[laughs\]
+**Ian Bernstein:** You know, some of that stuff is a ways off, like crazy, humanoid robots, and companies like Boston Dynamics are incredible in working on some of those... But you know, for something at a price point that somebody's gonna have, that's affordable, it's still a long ways off. And you know, something that was really challenging for us on that side was "Well, what does it do?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:04\] Yeah, I guess -- let's just isolate it to just Star Wars. If you're just using R2-D2, or C-3PO or any of these -- maybe not C-3PO, because that one's more human-size... If you're thinking just robot, then you've gotta think that's personality, to some degree resourceful, I suppose... These robots play a pivotal role in even the success of winning or losing in these movies... So they have some very dynamic roles.
+Most robots I think of, like your Roomba, for example... I don't have one, because I'm scared of them, but... Literally, I don't want the vacuum at my feet. I'm just kidding around, but... You know, you've got these robots in our lives today that aren't very smart. And you're trying to create something that's a platform, that if you bring in developers to this platform - which we're gonna talk about more of - you start to get these programmable things that can do very interesting things.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Right. And like you said, a lot of this stuff is really hard. Even getting a robot to follow you around your house is not a trivial task, from the engineering side. Just good voice recognition while the robot is moving, and making noises, and it's motors, and it's things like that. Fans...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Heat dissipation... Yeah, all these different things that really -- I mean, that much sophistication in that small of a package, with closed parts, small parts even... That's a lot of engineering.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yup. So we went through a lot of really challenging times, trying to think of what this use case would be... Like, could it be a security bot? Yeah, probably it could patrol your house... But with all the technology, you need to have a good security bot; would people actually buy that?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** We're trying to go more towards home and office. We didn't wanna be a specialized security bot. We really wanted to have something that could be more multi-purpose, So we didn't go in the direction of some of the other security robotics companies Knightscope, Cobalt, some of those. Even also like Roomba - we didn't wanna be a single-purposed robot like the Roomba.
+So every week it was something different. We could be like the companion robot, the security robot, we could be the kids' teaching robot, we could be just a programmable robot... But it always sort of broke down. Either the technology wouldn't be good enough, the price point would be too high, the tech would be too expensive... It was like six months. It was terrible.
+Then we came across this idea of being more of a platform, thinking back to how computers started, how really smartphones took off. It wasn't Apple or Microsoft creating all the applications, it was people who were specialists in different spaces. So you could think about your phone - most of the apps on your phone aren't written by Apple or Google; they're written by third-parties who are experts in different productivity, or gaming, or messaging... So we decided to take that approach with our robot, provide a really kick-ass platform to developers who know different businesses, maybe like elder care, or teaching, and all these things... All our business isn't in the educational robot for kids, because we probably wouldn't have a big enough market to justify the cost of building that robot. We spent literally like 16 million dollars to build Misty. It takes a lot of money, because you need so many different engineers and disciplines.
+So that could just be a part of the business... But we also have another customer that's buying them in elder care, we have another customer that's buying some units in security... And we could just support them with a common platform, so their costs are lower.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense, honestly... Because if you can't as a company specialize, in the same way that Apple supports computers that are high-end computers, like an iMac Pro, for example, that someone might do extreme video editing on, or large-scale CAD operations, or 3D renderings, and things like that. Then you've got the MacBook Air, which is just focused on someone who needs a lightweight, decent computer to move around, and there are different disciplines of people.
+\[20:24\] In the same way, you can think - well, rather than specializing in security, or certain areas, you can do all the smart things, which is what you do well, to build the necessary components to deal with all the problems like heat dissipation, or the different aspects of vision, or eyes, or natural language processing. You could do all those hard things and give them the building blocks, give that to the dreamers, and enable the dreamers.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, exactly. With Coronavirus now (Covid-19), I wish we had launched Misty six months earlier, because robots have a lot of use cases with what we're going through now... From companionship, to telemedicine, telehealth, working with kids with special needs, autism, where you can't have that face-to-face interaction. Robots, especially like Misty -- so Misty is our robot platform; I'll describe it. It's about 14 inches tall; it's a robot that's on treads, but you don't see the treads. We've put a lot of energy and a lot of learnings that we had from Disney into creating a character that's very friendly.
+She has a face, a head that can look around, a couple arms... They're not articulated, there's no hands with fingers, or anything... Simplified arms, so she can point at things. And then a suite of sensors, for voice interaction, for mapping mobility, so she can drive around, cameras so she can see things, recognize objects, a speaker system, she can dock wirelessly on a charger...
+And we're starting to see our hypothesis working, where we would have customers buying Misty, starting to work on skills in different spaces. The two big areas that we're seeing were elder care, things like safety, companionship, and then customers in the education/therapy side. One of our pilot customers is out on the East Coast, called Fam. They have basically a group of therapists that go to different homes, different organizations, schools, and they basically do therapies with kids, elderly, using robots, as well as a few other things.
+So we're just sort of seeing this machine working, and with Coronavirus now a lot of these organizations need things immediately, like personal protective equipment, stuff like that... And I wish our customers had that little bit more time to get their solutions ready... But it's really exciting to see that people are actually building stuff for Misty, real solutions for people.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting time, honestly... I've been watching Misty since -- mid-2018 y'all got in touch with us, and I think you were not quite at a point where it would make sense to have this kind of conversation, because you needed some... We might have been helpful to you to (I guess) get to market, or share a lot of what you're doing with developers, but we saw it as an opportunity to wait and see what happens with you all. And it's interesting now - we're barely into 2020, and I think a lot of people just wanna scrap 2020 altogether...
+Some people are even putting up Christmas lights to reenact the end of 2019 to go into a new year kind of thing, just to sort of forget, because that's what we wanna do... It's terrible. It really is terrible. And maybe you could speak to launching something so crucial, that you've worked so hard on, at a time where it's very difficult to get any traction in the media, period, that isn't related to solving the world's problem right now.
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[24:13\] Yeah, it's a little frustrating... Like I said, I wish we had shipped earlier, so that people would have had more time with Misty to develop solutions before the last month... But I think we're trying to look at it as what sort of opportunities can we take from this. Right now, a lot of our customers are basically shut down, they're working on different things, or just moving slower, so we're trying to think about how we can utilize this time to pull our team and to get ahead on some stuff. So just work on backend technology features that people have needed, so that when we come out of this phase, whenever that is, whatever things look like when we come out of it, that Misty is in a much better spot, so people can start to think about "Holy crap, what did we just go through? How can robots be useful if this ever happened again?" or thinking about how things changed going forward... That if they're looking for a robot, Misty is much more attractive at that point. Because we do have those features that people want.
+**Break:** \[25:29\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's key into those specific things, because I think this idea of robots as a development platform is pretty interesting. As you'd mentioned, you were in the toyish space with Sphero, and you wanted to create "real robots" (in your own words) that were highly functional. That takes a marriage of several things. We barely scratched the surface on your background. I'm gonna read something that you've put in your LinkedIn, because I think it's pretty cool, just to boast about you, and let you boast afterwards if you like... In your LinkedIn you said "I wouldn't say that I'm the best at any one thing. My strength is that I'm dangerous in many things, whether it's designing machines in CAD, designing a circuit laying out the PCB (I have no idea what a PCB is), programming the embedded firmware, backend, web development, frontend graphic design, UI, UX... I do it all. The more challenging the problem, the better."
+I mean, hey, Ian, we're at a really challenging state right now; the challenging problem is obviously getting past many things that's happening in our world right now, but... I think robots as a development platform is super-interesting. We see it happening when it comes to voice, and you mentioned Alexa and Siri and others... The next platform is a robot that moves, that has all these capabilities, too. You've got a moving camera, you've got moving sensors... A lot of interesting things here. What's the next step?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, the next step is -- I mean, a lot of it is just sort of exposing a lot of these pieces, more pieces to developers. Right now we're sort of at the early stages in mapping and navigation. For a robot to do that is really hard. And of course, you've seen news about autonomous vehicles, and cars, and stuff that can map and navigate, but the sensors that they use on these cars and the compute power is tens and tens of thousands of dollars' worth of technology. That doesn't work for a device that an average person is gonna buy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the price point we're talking about here? Those ranges - you've got like a couple different levels to it?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, so we have three different versions. We have a basic version that doesn't have the mapping and navigation; that starts at $2,000. Then we go up to $3,299 for the high-end version. They can map basically up to about a 2,000 sqft. space. It's still pretty crude... So we're working on basically making the mapping and navigation better, so it doesn't get stuck, or it can map and navigate in a more complex environment, or it can map for a longer period of time. So if you map a space and the robot goes to the other end of your space, and then you move a bunch of stuff around, like maybe your kids brought a bunch of toys out, or a bunch of chairs moved around, and when it goes back, your environment is now changed, the map is changed - how does it know where it is in that space, now that things have moved? So we're working on different pieces like that to make it more robust.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting, to think how it has to investigate, "Oh, it's still the same room. New devices, new things, new objects in the room." Give me a peek - does it go over to the things and investigate how it can get around it to remap the room? Does it try to do that constantly, or is there maybe some flexibility? Almost like a - it's a terrible robot, honestly, but interesting in its simplicity - Interstellar, when they would say "TARS, what's your humor setting?" "90%." "Let's take it down to 75%". Maybe you could take the sensitivity of the environment remapping down to 70%, because you've got active children or active people in your room, or whatever.
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[31:56\] Right. It has to be enough of a match that it can sort of figure out where it is. And there's things like loop closure, which is also important... Looking to my right - I'm in my living room kitchen - there's a big island, where the sink is, a big counter, and the couch up against it. If the robot drives around that, it needs to then sort of match up where it was originally, or if it went around the perimeter of a room where it can't see the middle of it - how does it know that it's back to where it started? If you're drawing a map of a space, as you're walking around, your lines probably aren't gonna match up correctly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** So it has to sort of rejigger the whole map in a way that works. It's just really complicated.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's hard to program. It seems as a human so easy...
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...to me, as a human, because that's my perspective - I can know what I know because of what I know... Whereas with a robot, or something like this that's doing it autonomously, there's no human behind the scenes constantly giving it feedback, saying "You're correct, you're correct." It's literally itself saying it's correct.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. Even as a human though, if you're in a bigger environment, it can get complicated.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, that's true.
+**Ian Bernstein:** If you're mapping a map where like -- I was just thinking back to when I was a kid and I played Mist... I don't know if you ever played that game.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't play Mist, no.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Or like Riven... Basically, there was all these areas, there were these sections -- I think it was like a submarine, and you were going through some underground tunnels, and it was like -- it's a puzzle game. So we ended up -- my friend and I drew these massive maps, and you're trying to figure out where you are, and if you're back at the same spot... And it's kind of like that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I even think about a big building that you might go in. How often do you go into somebody's home and be like "Oh, there's more over there." You just see a hallway, it doesn't seem very deep or investigatable; it just seems like "Oh, it's just a door." Well, that's literally a door to a whole new wing of the home, and you don't have the physical mapping mentality to know that, because you haven't walked the space. There's more behind a door, behind a wall, that you didn't even really consider. You're like "Whoa!" Mentally mapping something.
+I can see how on one side I could say it's easier, but then on the other side it's definitely - you can get lost in a big building. How often do you go into a gigantic museum for a tour, or something like that, and you're like "I have no idea where I'm at"? You have no idea where you're at.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Right. Totally.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You don't have a topology map to look at it. Nothing that says "I've been here before." You rely upon those big maps to say "You are here." Hopefully it's correct.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Oh yeah, I've totally done that. Other features that we're putting in -- we didn't have streaming video and audio, bidirectional, so you could Telepresence with Misty... So we're getting people that are interested in that, especially now, when again, therapists aren't able to go into a family's home and work with their kids...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Colors, facial -- I saw the face on Misty II. I could see how in telehealth, or especially teletherapy, where -- I don't know... I mean, would you choose a robot in this case, with vision, or would you choose a computer with Zoom?
+**Ian Bernstein:** I think a lot of cases a computer with Zoom or a tablet or whatever is plenty... But for certain things, especially elderly, especially kids with special needs, the personality of Misty actually adds a lot. Being able to convey personality through Misty's eyes and expressions and being this real, tangible thing in your space does add a lot. We had a lot of that with Sphero in the early days, as well. They're like "Why can't I just play a game on my tablet? Why do I need this physical ball rolling around?" But when you have something in your actual environment and you have -- even though it seems irrelevant, whatever the smell is of this space, to other ambient sounds and other things that are going around in your environment, to the tactile of you moving the joystick, to seeing this physical thing run into things in your environment... It creates a much more rich learning experience.
+\[36:29\] There's a local school in Denver that has a -- they call them the Kinder Coders. Like, literally, kindergarteners coding Sphero visually. But part of their lessons where they're not doing coding, but they have this big mat on the floor with the days of the week... And a lesson would be "Using the joystick on the device, drive Sphero on the day that it is tomorrow", for instance. And the kid just doing that with a physical device, rather than just like tapping on a button on a screen reinforces their learning a lot... And I don't know how to quantify "a lot", but it does.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, now I can see that, because with just one button push, when there's an experience that happens when you travel to space... It may not be a one-to-one, but I think about directional. If I'm driving and I go from here to there, and I've never gone from here to there, wherever that is, point A to point B before - well, I've got the mental map and experience because my attention, my awareness was focused on getting there... Whereas if I'm the passenger, taking the same trip, less likely, because my awareness wasn't there.
+So in this case where you have them actually mapping a physical object from one place to another, it's akin to that same experience, where your awareness is attached to it. Something is deeper in the learning, not just simply pushing a button. It's something very -- all I can say is your awareness and your attention is sort of focused on this true experience.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Whether it was you or not. It's an extension of you. It's a proxy even, of you, if you're controlling the robot with a joystick, for example.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yup. There's a lot of research talking about socially-assisted robots (they call them) in this space of special needs kids, for diagnosing and doing interventions with kids with autism. There's also a lot of research starting now on robots in the healthcare space, again, with elderly... And having that personality helps a lot, working with (say) elderly people with early onset of dementia.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Using robots to supplement healthcare workers, because we're starting to see shortages of workers in that space; it's only gonna get worse with aging populations in certain countries. Robots can take care of things just like a concierge, answering certain questions for people. Or if it is a person maybe with mild dementia, asking the same questions over and over; that can be hard for a healthcare worker to answer the same question 50 time. But a robot doesn't care.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. There's no emotion. I mean, there's programmed emotion; that could be debatable, I suppose. But there's technically no emotion attached to the repetition. As a human, we get impatient. As a robot, maybe you can program patients into it, or program inpatients into it, potentially... So it's all about outcomes. But I can imagine that there's obviously less emotion involved in the repetition, whereas a human gets frustrated; a robot is like "Oh, no problem. Here's the answer. No problem, here's the answer. No problem, here's the answer." They no issues with repeating themselves a thousand times, whereas you and me are like "I'm done with answering that, okay? I'm moving on."
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[40:00\] Yup. It was kind of interesting, you read that quote off my LinkedIn profile. That's something I've been thinking about a lot recently... I definitely wouldn't say I'm a specialist in any one thing, but I'm dangerous in a lot of things. I'm pretty good at a huge range, like -- I don't know, a monthly goal I'm laying out a PCB, a printed Circuit Board, for a project, and then right now I'm helping rebuild some of our website. So just all over the place - Photoshop, graphic design... I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5... But as you scale a startup, people become more and more specialized. And where do those people fit that are good at a lot of things, but not really specialists at any one thing? I've had people like that on my teams, and those people are your rockstars; those people make your company when you're a small startup. But a lot of those people struggle when your company gets beyond a certain size.
+Either they start to step on people's toes, because they like to do too many things, and they're stepping on the toes of the specialists that are the pros in whatever it is they're doing...And a lot of times the people who are good at a lot of things are actually better at those things too, but people don't perceive them like that. Or there's just not -- you don't have as big a need for somebody that can do a lot of different stuff, unless maybe you're in R&D, or some spaces... So I've been thinking about that a lot on my side, "How do I scale with a company? Is it even possible?" Or am I like the first two years of a startup guy? Like, I'm doing that, and then do another startup. It's interesting.
+Right now I'm trying to help a lot of our team with different tasks that do need somebody to jump in... We didn't have a web person on our team, and we needed to launch our three skews and do some updates to our website... I'm like "Alright, I can do that. \[unintelligible 00:42:16.26\] a design company for four years." Or as we're starting to think about prototyping some different things with misty - like, "Yeah, I can do that." Kind of jumping around. But it's kind of challenging.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** A lot of roles -- it's like, you're the marketing person, or you're the salesperson... It's pretty clear what you need to do and what your goals are.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what is it that you do day to day then? Are you a roamer? Let's break down your role at a higher-level. You're a co-founder, right?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is in many ways -- you're an idea person. You were there from the inception. So in many cases you're there to get things moving, and may not necessarily need to be involved as they get moving. You're a mover and a shaker, not so much a doer on the long-term. You seem to jump around, based on what you've just said there.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what do you do day-to-day? What are some of the things -- maybe that's not even worth going into, I don't know. I'm curious why this is a challenge for you, I suppose. Are you struggling with this? Is this an identity crisis, to some degree?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Maybe...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not so much a crisis, that's overly dramatic... But you get what I'm trying to say... Where you question yourself. I've done this myself, "How can I be most useful right now?"
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm at.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** My day-to-day - some of it is working with our leadership team, trying to decide what our direction is, what are we gonna focus on... I would say that's pretty consistent. But other than that -- you know, there's chunks of time. Like I said, right now I'm working on a website, but maybe before that I was working on our Arduino Backpack that we have for Misty, laying out circuit boards, and helping write some documentation and stuff for that.
+\[44:13\] I deal a lot of manufacturing. I spent about three years in my life in China, working with our factory there, where I can be pretty effective, because I can make decisions on the product, I can do enough of all aspects of the engineering side, on the electrical side, on the mechanical side, QA testing, test fixtures, whatever... It is kind of interesting. It's not easy. You're not the salesperson, and like "What do you need to do? You need to make more sales."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It's not an easy, like "This is what you do. This is what you do", yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. And there's a really good article, I'm sure you've read it... I forget the exact title is, but it's basically like "Giving away your Legos." It's part of the first round blog.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. I haven't read this one. I'm gonna look it up though.
+**Ian Bernstein:** It's really good, and it kind of talks about how as you're scaling, a lot of times you sort of get attached to something, and every certain period of time you need to give away your Legos. Basically, give away your tower that you've been building to somebody else, and start building a new, bigger tower. And it can be challenging to give away your baby, whatever your Lego tower is that you've built, and start something new. I feel like I have to do that pretty often, and that's challenging.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, the cool thing is if you build the right kind of company, you can do that again and again and again, inside the same company. It's not a good thing when you have to start a new thing, literally a new thing. It's different when you can do it within the company.
+I'll say two things. One, if I was on your team and I was somebody who can give you direction, so let's say like a peer - not so much somebody over you, obviously - I would find ways to use your dangerousness in wise ways for the direction of the company... Because I think someone like you is multi-faceted; you need to keep being pointed at different gigantic, hard problems, and solving them, again and again and again. So it makes sense to point you in different directions, that's what I would do.
+Let me ask you a second question to that, which is - have you heard of read the book Linchpin, from Seth Godin?
+**Ian Bernstein:** No.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I'll summarize it by saying that Seth in that book essentially says -- the point of the book is to make you feel like and understand what it should be to be a linchpin. Do you know what a linchpin is? Physically, not the metaphor linchpin. The literal linchpin. A linchpin is the thing that holds the wheel on the hub. So if the wheel is not on the hub, it's not a wheel anymore, it's just -- it's off. The linchpin holds the hub together. So if a linchpin wasn't there, the linchpin -- it's gotta be that. It's the most important thing.
+It sounds to me like you enjoy being a cog. And it's this new thing of -- I wouldn't say "new", it's just sort of an evolving idea, I suppose, to have this cog mindset. And what I call cog mindset is -- this is a quote from me... I'm very sharp, I'm a very highly-specific, very purposeful -- purseposefully purposeful cog that's part of a much bigger, much more grand machine. I play a very specific, highly needed part, so that others can do the same. I serve the unit, the team, and its mission, not myself. That to me sounds like you...
+**Ian Bernstein:** I like that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...where you don't need to be the person that is the most important factor. You build a Lego, hand it off; build a Lego, hand it off.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. I think that's spot on. And luckily, I have a really awesome team at Misty. In our last leadership \[unintelligible 00:48:05.24\] we talked about this as well, and everybody is super-supportive... Being open to letting me engage at different levels, and work with them to make things happen... Which is cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[48:20\] Yeah. You've got a big mission. A part of your mission is 1) be a platform, which is interesting; that was discovered -- I don't know how long ago you said. I think it was about a year ago or six months ago, you discovered \[the need\] to be a platform. You can correct me on the time range there... But then to have this mission of making real robots, and putting them in every business, every home, every school... I mean, that's a grand mission, that -- it's not like a two-year mission.
+**Ian Bernstein:** No.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like a decade, at least, right?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Would you agree with that?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Oh, yeah. I mean, it's gonna take a long time.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you do that? How do you mentally prepare for that kind of mission?
+**Ian Bernstein:** I guess personally you just can't think too big. You've just gotta think one step at a time. And it's easy to think even too big, as in like things that don't even seem that big. But it's literally like "We need one customer building something. Let's get one. And then let's get two. And then three."
+So I think if you think about it in just super, super-simplistic steps, it kind of becomes manageable... But you've gotta always have that North Star in the back of your mind, like "Where are we going with these steps?", making sure those step one, step two, step three are going in some sort of direction that you think is big.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Have you seen Frozen 2, by any chance?
+**Ian Bernstein:** It's been a while, but yes.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's on-topic, but off-topic. Frozen 2?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Frozen 2 is new.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, then I haven't seen it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, unless you saw it in a theater. The reason why I bring it up is -- it's kind of funny, because we have kids, so we obviously have to see Frozen 2... Otherwise I probably wouldn't be like "Oh, I've gotta see Frozen 2." And you'd mentioned the next thing, and there's a song in there that's really cool for kids to hear. The song is titled "The next right thing." The character is going through this -- I don't wanna repeat the story of the movie, but the point is "The next right thing" is the next right thing to do, and it kind of reminds me of what you're talking about here. It's like, you may have a trajectory of an overarching idea of where you're trying to go, some sort of North Star, but the next right thing is what you've gotta do.
+**Ian Bernstein:** A couple, like, Disney things I was thinking about... Bob Iger, when we got to spend a little bit of time with him in 2014 when we were at Disney - he gave us this antidote that was like "Don't create trombone oil." You could be the best trombone oil manufacturer in the world, providing everybody with trombones, and you'd produce like two quarts a year. You wanna think big. And then -- it's kind of a fun story on Frozen. For some reason, when you said Frozen 2, I was thinking Ice Age... \[laughs\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Pretty close.
+**Ian Bernstein:** So we hadn't even released BB-8 yet. This was back in 2015. But I think we'd announced something... I'm trying to remember. But somehow, some guy at Disney reached out to me, just cold-email, and he's like "I heard you were working on BB-8. Can we talk?" So I talked to this guy, and it turns out he was on the Disney Parks side, working on something... And he was like "Okay, can you make a full-size BB-8? If you can do that, can you make me a rock?" I was like, "Why do you need a rock?" We'd actually been working on our own full-size BB-8, so I was like "Well, if your rock is 20 inches in diameter, I can make it." He's like "Alright."
+\[52:11\] So it turns out he was working on the Frozen theater show at Disneyland in L.A (or Anaheim). I basically took all the stuff that I had created this BB-8 with and created this rock... And it turned out to be the trolls.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** So I got invited out, and he showed me backstage, and I got to see the actual show, and they were using it halfway through... It's like, the curtain closes, this rock rolls out on stage and does this dance to some music, and then rolls off, and then the curtains open and all the trolls come out.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+**Ian Bernstein:** So he just used some of our BB-8 technology in a Frozen show at Disneyland.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+**Ian Bernstein:** It was kind of cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That is pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Those trolls - the rock trolls are pretty interesting. And it's interesting how you've had so many opportunities to work with - at least two, I suppose, that I know of - to work with Disney. It's interesting.
+I was even watching something recently with Walt Disney, the early days of the animatronics there, and stuff like that... And it's just some really cool stuff they've done, way back when they first invented theme parks... And specifically Disney theme parks. Characters that moved, and seemed real, and so much cool stuff behind the scenes there.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. And their teams are amazing in imagineering. The robotics that they do there is pretty incredible now.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's interesting though is -- I guess to bring it back to Misty... As I can see it, it's an interesting thing to try to empower developers with a real robot, to make it compartmentible, to make it componentable, to give it access to APIs and access to all these different things... And to have this kind of trajectory, this long decade-worth (or maybe more) of need... You're like maybe three years into your ten-year stretch, maybe? Is that right?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 2017 was the founding of Misty robotics...?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, although we just started shipping in September of 2019.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Because you had a Kickstarter, or something like that. Didn't you have a Kickstarter?
+**Ian Bernstein:** We did our own crowdfund, but yeah -- we did a crowdfunding in the middle of 2018. So it took a little bit to get the robot out the door as far as manufacturing... But I would say that our ten-year plan that we wrote about a few years ago -- I don't know, I'd say we're still... I would say really shipping was more at the beginning of that, so we're still ten years out from just what we've hypothesized the next ten years to look like. And it is actually, in my mind, happening a little bit different than I had envisioned. I thought the first 2-3 years would be more like hobbyists, playing with Misty... And just experimenting, trying different things...
+You know, some things going to be potential real applications, but more on the experimentation side, and what we were finding is almost immediately we were starting to get contacted by real companies - big companies, small companies, entrepreneurs wanting to really dive in and create a meaningful solution immediately. Like, immediately sit down and come up with a timeline of how they work with us to develop their skill, and pilot it with people, and then deploy it.
+\[56:10\] I didn't think that would happen for maybe at least like a year, or something... More experimentation period, versus diving right into a real solution, which is -- you know, on our side, we had envisioned Misty as being this sort of experimentation/development platform where when you're experimenting, some of the features don't need to be as robust.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Good enough.
+**Ian Bernstein:** If somebody is already building a solution that's deploying out to kids with autism, or elderly people, it has to work... And even though our direct customer is the developer, their customers are a real consumer, and especially groups that might be even more challenging, and the technology needs to work better. So we had to shift our strategy pretty quick... Which is a good thing. I mean, it's awesome that people are already doing it. That's a really good thing. It was just surprising.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It just makes me think how difficult it must be to have this mindset of iteration, with that kind of long-term vision, and let's say to some degree accurate hypotheses today, that tomorrow may be somewhat accurate, and need to iterate. I don't know how you iterate -- I mean, I know how you iterate; I don't know what the methodology is of iterating, but in specific to this, how do you command such a platform and then also iterate as the company itself? Because you're the provider of the platform. You're the tooling that makes the tools.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. It is super-challenging.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you focus your time? How do you focus understanding what is important today? I ask that generally, but then seriously, how do you do that? What do you listen to? What are the metrics, what are the indicators to say "This is what's important." Especially considering Coronavirus and the slowdown of the world, how do you figure out what's important?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, that was a crazy curveball to -- it was already challenging trying to figure that out, and then Coronavirus came along... You know, I would say we're still trying to figure it out. We have a very finite team, and finite resources, so we literally put our energy where -- we're trying to focus on (let's say) providing enough tools that the majority of our customers can help themselves... So like connecting customers with other customers through our forums, really good documentation so you don't have to contact us, you can just find what you need online... And then on the other side, trying to decide what may be a vertical that we think could be big, and providing extra energy and support into that field.
+So the two we're looking at again - and a lot of this is coming from our customers - is that children's therapy space and elder care. But even those are pretty broad... Like "Well, what in elder care?" Is it the companion robot that just has a lot of personality and it's there, and can help with loneliness, and connecting maybe through telepresence, connecting family members to an elderly person, again, around companionship... To safety, like using the cameras and computer vision to detect if somebody fell down; or if they hear somebody screaming, the robot can go over and ask if they're okay, or take a picture and send it to a healthcare person, and family members or whatever, to more of the concierge, just sort of answering questions, like what activities are happening at our facility this week.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:00:06.02\] Yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** And all those different use cases - there's some overlap in the technology, but there's also a lot of different technologies that we would need for each one of those different use cases, so where do we focus our energy? And yeah, we're still trying to figure that out, especially now.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, hearing that though makes me think if I were in your position -- I try to generally empathize, because I'm similar to you; I'm not quite as dangerous, but I do have a lot of facets... And I think the one area where I would explore, or at least consider, is becoming my own customer.
+So while you are a platform, you're also very future-focused. Why not spin off another company that's focused on one of these larger verticals and specialize, as well as be the platform? So where it's not Misty Robotics being a customer directly, maybe it's a separate company, but the idea is if there's an area where you see -- because what you need is somebody highly invested, that can prove usage; not just platform, but usage of a platform. Because a computer is just parts, until you put it together and it does something magical, right? Until you put the hardware with the software, with the person, with the skills and the ambition - only then, when you have the recipe, does something become magical. Until then, it's just a platform, right?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If you can become understanding of a vertical that makes a lot of sense, and can become that best customer, well then you're your own champion and you can use yourself as an example to other customers (would-be customers) to use your platform. That's just an idea I would consider.
+**Ian Bernstein:** That's spot on, for sure. It's something similar to what I do... One of my tools is I'll -- I basically just have to think about something else, like not work.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Mm-hm. Take a shower, go for a run. Well, you live in Boulder; do you mountain-bike? Do you do anything fun outside? Get outside, take a hike.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, exactly. I snowboard...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go.
+**Ian Bernstein:** You know, get out and just completely forget that I work at Misty... And blank all that out. I create another persona for myself in my head, and then I do whatever it is, like play with Sphero, interact with Misty, or whatever I'm trying to test... And just sort of really think about how I feel, and notice those feelings to see if it's a good solution or not. That's maybe kind of like what you're suggesting. Obviously, if the product/solution doesn't work for me, it's not gonna work for somebody else... Or at least that's the way I look at it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, especially because you're such a dynamic enabler. What rings true to me as a good sword to have in a repertoire, which is this dangerousness of you. You say "My strength is that I'm dangerous in many things", and I see that as a -- you know, that's a negative word, but it's a very positive effect, because "dangerous", you mean that in the way that you can do a lot of interesting things that are innovative, and in many ways breakthrough. When someone else generally can be hit with brick walls and not get over them, you seem to be somebody who has many skills, and somebody who perseveres.
+Resilience is a big thing, especially in this time... Resilience is probably gonna be one of the hidden skillsets of any individual, as well as any company. How do you get through this kind of -- I mean, no one expected this kind of thing... Speaking to Coronavirus, or just the way the world is right now, and the bounce-back. I'm sure we'll eventually bounce back, but we'll definitely be changed. It's like a scar; we'll have a scar as a species, as humankind... And how do you persevere and be resilient through this kind of time? That's the test right there.
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[01:03:57.29\] Yeah. I mean, it's so easy to get wrapped up... And it kind of reminds me of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was going crazy; you'd just check the price of Bitcoin every five minutes... It's kind of like that now. It's hard to not let yourself every five minutes go on and see what the latest predictions is. "When is it gonna end? How many cases are there in Colorado, and in the U.S. versus other countries?" It's so easy to get sucked into that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a trap though too, right?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Oh, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because while that may be true, we all still have our responsibility. What you're doing is amazing, and Coronavirus aside, it doesn't change that.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It slows it down, is all it does. It may delay certain things, but the usefulness of what you've personally built, and your team and company has built is still just as useful. And what I'm speaking isn't to say you're right or wrong, it's just -- it's this lie we all begin to believe, that just chisels away and says "You're not useful. This thing matters more, and checking where it's at matters more." That's true, it does matter, but the lie is that we're not useful anymore... And we are.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Right. So it's like, how do we not let whatever things are going on consume us? I'm just trying to focus on our work.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The next right thing.
+**Ian Bernstein:** How do we build a bunch of cool features for Misty, so that when we come out of this Misty is in a really good spot for developers who wanna come in, or companies that wanna come in? I think that's what we have to do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's maybe key in on that then, because we've got a highly active audience, who primarily -- a large portion are developers; the primary audience for our podcast network at large, our Changelog brand is developers. So if you were speaking to a large set of developers, what would you say to get them excited about Misty Robotics and what you're doing there?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Well, Misty is a great platform. We've talked about a lot of the capabilities. I'd love for people to start thinking about how robots can be used, both today, and the time's right, literally today... And coming out of Coronavirus, how is the world gonna change? In what ways are they gonna change, and can robots be useful? If you're a developer and you wanna actually create a skill - awesome. Super-awesome. We'd love to support you in any way. If you just have ideas, if you're not a developer, or you have a developer but you're busy working on other stuff, please reach out.
+You're probably an expert in something that I'm not. You may know way more about some other use case for Misty that I've never even thought about. So sharing those ideas with us would be super-useful. We have forums; reach out. It's ian \[at\] mistyrobotics.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think it's super-exciting times; not because of the Coronavirus, but just technology and robotics.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... That's what I mean. It's still exciting times. This \[unintelligible 01:07:08.00\] doesn't change the excitement that we have in our state of innovation. We're doing some really interesting things as a human race when it comes to our internet... And I believe it's now turned 20 years old, so it's an interesting time for us as a connected human race... And it's just interesting.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, I mean, a kid anywhere can start working with a Sphero, or Misty... Start creating a skill and create a solution for a really important problem. There's people right now for personal protective equipment, like using their 3D printers at home to build facemasks...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Crazy.
+**Ian Bernstein:** ...using transparency films... It's pretty cool how people can come together and innovate and share ideas and come up with solutions quickly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:08:05.22\] I'm curious what your stock is on Misty Robots. Do you have a ton that can be deployed? Do you have any interesting programs where you're finding useful ways or interesting ways to economically get them into people's hands, that weren't there before? I say "before" meaning three weeks ago. Any fun things happening on that front to sort of enable people, I suppose, with a real thing?
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah... I mean, luckily, we'd built up a stock before Chinese New Year, which then extended into Covid-19... Yeah, so we do have a stock; we have a pool of loaner units we can get out to people, we have different channels to exchange ideas through our forums, we have these Uplinks that we do, like interactive webinars to interact with people, share ideas. We have our developers on there, so they can answer engineering questions as well... But yeah, a lot of people in certain areas are just totally locked down, just trying to think about "How do I get to tomorrow, at the moment...?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I think of it like the fact that if you've got -- I didn't know you had a loaner pool available, or just some sort of creative way to get these into people's hands, maybe without the large-scale investment, or maybe something; "Let me give you my driver's license", whatever it is. Sign-and-drive kind of thing when it comes to Volkswagen, or whatever... I'm thinking like people have time on their hands, and potentially even a little bit of boredom. How do you leverage that? Because what you need is ideas, and what you need is more people to buy into this platform as an idea, right? So the best way to do that is to get them into people's hands, and capitalize on the time and potentially boredom.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, definitely people listening - go to our website and check it out. We have a bunch of videos... We can't talk about all the stuff that people are working on, because some of it is -- they're trying to make money off it at some point... But just kind of check out some of the things that people are working on, look at the capabilities of Misty.
+Obviously, the more people that are actually creating for Misty, the better. We'd love to have a developer buy one, start playing around with it... Or if you're not in a position to buy one, we do have some units that can go out as loaner units, so you can start experimenting with your idea, testing it out...
+It's definitely a time when you have a lot of time doing different things maybe than you were doing before. I know I am. It's kind of weird - before the show, like I was saying, I've talked to people over text, and my team over Slack, and stuff, but... I haven't talked to somebody in like three days... \[laughs\] It's weird.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm glad to be here for you, Ian. I'm glad to be here for you, you know? It's what I'm here for.
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I appreciate it... I appreciate it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I really enjoy doing this show, because I think it's a unique time to have this kind of conversation. If we had had this conversation a couple months ago, we would have obviously not mentioned Coronavirus or things happening now... But I think it's just interesting having these conversations with founders and big innovators like you, because you dream; you dream big, and you go big. You start a company with a ten-year plan, not a "Will we even survive?" plan. And maybe that's the case, who knows... But the point is that we need people like you out there that are willing to invest in the future, be dangerous in many ways, be resilient in many ways, but then also have this compassion for the world to create something useful.
+Coming from Sphero not that it wasn't important - toys, very educational, but moving to a useful space where you can provide utility for people that would not otherwise have utility when a human can't be there for them, for whatever reason; whenever a robot makes more sense. And I commend you for that. That's a big deal, to be in that position... So I wanna give you an opportunity to be resilient in these next several months, the next year, or whatever... I know things will be great for you.
+**Ian Bernstein:** \[01:12:22.13\] I appreciate it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And thank you so much for sharing your story here on Founders Talk, it's been great talking to you. Is there anything maybe on the horizon that not many people know about? Something coming out soon, that you can mention here on the end of the show?
+**Ian Bernstein:** A lot of exciting stuff coming up. A lot of what we're working on right now is "How do we connect people better together?" How do we get the people who have ideas?
+I'm gonna use an example without a name - a person on the East Coast that came to us early on, who was disabled, and she was like "Oh my God, Misty could help me in these exact ways. Here's how Misty could help me." And I related; I tore my ACL a little over a year ago, and for a few weeks I was disabled. Getting a glass of water and getting it to the couch was so hard, because I had to crutches; like, how do you carry a glass of water? So it was like this crazy procedure that I worked out to get a glass of water to the couch.
+If I could just put it in Misty's hands and have Misty follow me with a glass of water to the couch, that would have been amazing. And that was only like a couple-week period where I was on crutches. People live like that. That would be huge for them, something so simple. So how do we connect the people with ideas to the developers? There's a huge group of developers who are like "I could do anything with Misty, but what do I build?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "What do I do?", yeah.
+**Ian Bernstein:** I don't know. What's my first project? I don't have a goal, really. I have to come up with a goal; that's like the hardest part. Once you know what you're gonna build, you're like an engineer. That's the easy part; we figure that stuff out. So how do we connect the people with ideas and real problems with developers that don't have the ideas, that are looking for an idea, that can actually build them? Because there's the software engineers, or whatever.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And what's the first step for those people? How do they help you on the idea side, and then help you and be there, available to sort of tackle some of these problems that unique people out there are able to surface for a robot like Misty?
+**Ian Bernstein:** That's what we're working through right now - how do we connect these two groups of people directly? We don't need to be the middle person. So everything from a Cragistlist posting ideas, with like "I'm a developer. Give me an idea" to maybe something more formal... So I would say that's the next piece on the horizon coming from us - a good way of connecting these two groups of people.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, when you get there, let us know, because we'd love to share that with our community, to give them that opportunity... Because there's a lot of people out there who are in a unique spot where they do have some boredom, potentially even lots of time... I know me as a parent - it's impossible to have time. I envy those, in some ways, that don't have kids in this kind of scenario, because man, I would be catching up on some sleep, I would be organizing... It's impossible as a parent. So there's some people out there who have just tons of time, and they need to have captured boredom... You know, "Take my boredom and use it for the good of this world, somehow, someway..." And then there's definitely some places where a robot as a platform makes a ton of sense in our future.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. Let's create this future together.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's do it. Ian, thank you so much for sharing your story and sharing your time with us. We really appreciate it, thank you.
+**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, it was fun.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** What turned me on to reach out to you was your recent raise... And often, businesses use raises as a mechanism for marketing, but also in a way a position of gratitude, to some degree... What do you think about that? It seems like every time you raise - which I've only seen a couple of them, but any time you have that kind of news or that kind of thing to share, you often as a founder get a chance to look back at what you've done. What is that like for you?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, I think a part of it is definitely kind of an acknowledgment of success. To an extent, in startups you kind of move from raise to raise for a while, as you build it up... And there's definitely that moment of just taking stock, and saying "Okay, I have this smart external entity here, who is willing to literally put money, betting on my future growth", and that's quite compelling. I like that.
+There's a similar type signal that I've always really liked, which is when customers expand with you. I think that's another one, where you're just like "Hey, did I just tell a good story, and sell you something that sounded compelling?" But then when they get to the point where not only do they wanna renew, continue using your service, but they actually want to do more business with you... So I think a raise is a little bit like that.
+\[04:01\] I think the other more significant aspect of a raise is that every time you raise money, you're kind of doubling down on going long... Because you get to a moment -- at a high-level, you can claim that fundraising and exiting (selling the company) are kind of a similar transaction. They're very different for the founder, but you're selling shares, whether you're selling a portion of them or the entirety. And so every time you raise money, you're committing to doing all you can to return a multiple on that money to the investors. So you're kind of going long, and every one of these journeys is exciting, but as you know, in startups every piece of the journey is its own adventure, and it's oftentimes very unlike the piece of the journey that preceded it.
+So to me, definitely the last two raises, which were kind of big - big in number of dollars raised, big in valuation - they were more about that. You sort of say from the get-go - or I did, and I believed it, but I had to commit to it again, concretely...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To own it, yeah. What's that like?
+**Guy Podjarny:** ...that this is not about a short-term \[unintelligible 00:05:11.15\], it's about a real, long-term, sustainable company.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you have to do any sort of soul-searching during this commitment? Like, "Do I really believe in Snyk? Do I really believe in what we're doing? Do I really believe --" Because it seems like everything you've done in your career has led you to do what you're doing now, which is sort of the way it is for most careers, but more so for yours. You've been security-minded forever, basically...
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're in the perfect place.
+**Guy Podjarny:** I never really had any lack of conviction about Snyk and its journey being the right thing for long-term approaches. Snyk is about dev-first security, and it's built on a core thesis. We can dig into that over the show... But it's built on that core thesis that developers have to embrace security now more than ever, as kind of DevOps happens and teams need to be more autonomous... That's kind of a core "Dev-first security has to happen", and that the way to get developers to embrace security is to build a developer tooling company, not a security company, in terms of what it looks, what it talks, what it walks like... Because you have to build tools that developers would actually want to embrace. And I think those two promises have only -- my conviction in them has only strengthened. So I don't think I had any soul-searching on that.
+I think what does always happen when you go from round to round is that you have to commit around the independence. So the journey I think I was committed to and I don't think I've ever veered away from it. The commitment to doing that journey with you in the leader seats, versus under the umbrella of a larger company - I think that's the true thing that you have to just kind of recommit to every time you do a fundraise... Because we were in a good place, where the company was growing very quickly. We've turned down multiple acquisition offers. And I think when that happens - again, it's this commitment that not only do you think and continue to believe that this is the trajectory the market is going down, but also that on a personal level you're still there; you have the energy, the drive, the desire to continue the very demanding -- very fulfilling, but very demanding startup journey, and do the next stage of growth.
+1:Yeah, because you don't have to just be good at what you do, you have to be good at being the leader. I was gonna say "what you do" again, to double-enunciate that, but -- you have to be good at leading, and sometimes you're really good at a particular skillset. And maybe you've been a good leader, and you have good leadership qualities, but you may not be the best leader to lead it to the next -- is that what you're saying? ...when each time you do that round change - are you the person that should be at the top still yet?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Well, I think there's two things that I'm saying. One is it's just the conviction on -- like, regardless of your role or what your role you play, it's just that it's almost the next phase in risk management - do you want to bet, quite literally, financially, that these shares that you have here in the company will continue to grow? ...versus take what you've got off the table... And also, alongside that, be willing to put in the sweat and tears that is involved in that. And it's not to say that you don't work hard post-acquisitions, but it's different; it's a little bit more existential when it's your own. So that's one aspect of it.
+\[08:25\] And yeah, definitely there's that other aspect, which is you don't know what would be needed off you. I personally have brought on a new CEO onto the company, Peter, who - it's probably a story in its own right that we can cover... But you know, it was my initiative, and it was an acknowledgment of both what I can do best, what the company needed, and what I want to do, that drove me to do this. So there's that bit of specifically the role, in my case kind of replacing myself as CEO... But also just the company; we're now a company of about 300 people, and we've grown very quickly, and you have to run the company differently when you're 300 people, versus when you are 80 people, which we were just like a year and a half ago, or 20 people that we were a year prior to that. So you have to want it. And you know, some people totally legitimately don't want that. They don't want to lead a company that is more than 50 people, when they can't name everybody... And I think that's entirely legitimate, but that's the decision that you have to decide - do I want to stop here? I got it very far; I'll be an employee. I'll see how long it takes me within the acquiring company, and then figure it out... Or do I wanna continue down this journey, and build something big?
+I had the luxury of this not being my first rodeo. I spent about a decade in AppSec, and through three acquisitions of Sanctum - they got acquired by Watchfire and they got acquired by IBM. Then they founded a web performance company and got acquired by Akamai, and I was CTO there for a bunch of years... So I think that the first stretch kind of taught me a little bit about acquisitions and what does it mean to be acquired and being in those companies; that sort of second journey put me in a pretty good financial state and allowed me to also learn how to be an exec in a big -- the chief technology officer of a 700-million-dollar-a-year business, C-scale... So by the time I arrived at Snyk, I was -- you know, it's never been about the money, but it was even more so about... Like, it wasn't just about proving that I can once, it was around building something that matters, something that is big, that kind of makes a dent in the Universe. So I think my conviction was there all the time, and yet it still needed to be reaffirmed every time that there was a big financial transaction that takes place.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You definitely have to recheck yourself - retrospective, recheck yourself, whatever that might be; everybody's version of that is different, because life changes... It's not just about businesses, it's about your family too, in a lot of cases. You're not just leading a company, you're leading an opportunity for your family, so you have to manage the risk level for yourself personally, how you feel about things, going day to day, to do what you do, and how does that impact your family, and then how does that impact your future in that business, and what it might do. It's an interesting perspective.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned your acquisition processes over the years... I do wanna talk about Peter McKay at some point, so let's earmark that, but I wanna go back to some of the learnings you had from Blaze to Akamai. You'd mentioned that was the one that put you in a better financial situation; I'm assuming that may have even helped you do Snyk originally... I can only assume, but it made it a little easier to do it that way, right?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But what did you learn from that process? It sounds like you've thwarted off a couple acquisition opportunities over the last couple of years, however long... But having gone through an acquisition process and being acquired, what did you learn that you didn't like about that process? Or what did you like? What did you learn from that, that made you feel the way you feel today about Snyk and its potential acquisition, or lack thereof, if there's none for you?
+**Guy Podjarny:** \[11:59\] I think Blaze was an amazing ride. If you don't mind, I'll actually go a little bit further back...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Please do, yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** It's a learning exercise. So I was in this Israeli company called Sanctum. It lived over the bubble; it was one of the pioneers of the application security space, building the first web app firewall app shield, and the first web app security scan , AppScan. And Sanctum raised a lot of money shortly before the bubble burst, and that allowed it to get out the other side... And it had great technology, but it didn't have the best go-to-market execution. Also, there was a need to rewrite... You know, as the technology of the web evolves and application security was growing, it was a constant chase to -- you know, JavaScript wasn't on pages when that started... So by the time Watchfire came along to acquire it - Watchfire was a company that audited websites for other types of problems, not security problems; it found spelling mistakes, it found broken links of websites, in big scale. And you know, some of you might disagree with me, but I think the tech was not as deep as Sanctum's, but the go-to-market was excellent; and the tech was scalable. It was around breadth. So Watchfire acquired Sanctum a little bit before Sanctum ran out of money, in a slightly more elaborate private-to-private transaction... And I moved from Israel to Canada in the process.
+And for me, the next 2-3 years were very seminal in my learnings. First, I moved, I relocated - a big life experience, seeing something that is different, which I loved, and I think I learned a lot from. Second is I got much closer -- Israel is a great technology hub, but oftentimes when you're there, you're a little bit shielded from the go-to-market. But by moving there, I got much closer; I got on more sales calls, I got on more customer conversations.
+I actually did a stint as a tech sales person, and then I took a product role; I went out of development, into product. So I learned a lot about the outside, and I learned to appreciate what a good go-to-market looks like. AppScan's sales first quarter after the acquisition were the best ever for AppScan; this is the first quarter into Watchfire, after the acquisition of Sanctum... And it was just because the sales leader there just kind of figured out and immediately saw the way it should be sold over the phone, with a certain process, very quickly.
+So to me, I think that's my first takeaway, which is appreciate go-to-market, learn the interaction, appreciate sales, as I was a part of the org for about six months, and then kind of learned that product. And then when IBM acquired Watchfire, I guess I'm gonna say that there's a bunch of things I learned what I don't' like about an acquisition. The acquisition itself was good, it was great; we moved into good surroundings, and IBM is very methodical with their blue-washing process on how do they gradually merge companies into it... But then it taught me a lot of things that I didn't like to do post-acquisition.
+I'd say my two primary learnings were - you know, one is we got acquired into Rational; this is a security company. We got acquired into Rational as a part; it's the same journey that I'm on, this sort of developer journey to build security into development tools... And one of the key challenges, which we did some right and some wrong, were really around "How do we merge this security sale within the dev environment?" So I feel like I learned a lot there about the challenges in those scenarios, which I think helped me with Snyk later on.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** The other thing I learned is the importance of some technical things, like banding. When you get acquired by a company that is a large company, it's really important to negotiate the bands, the tiers that the different team members would be on... Because it's really hard to change them inside; there's a lot more fluidity to it in the moment of acquisition around where do people rank, and it's hard to move up the ranks later on, in the ten bands, or whatever it is that IBM or large companies have.
+And I guess kind of an appreciation - and again, some was done right and some was done wrong - of how important it is to shield an acquisition. To have that acquisition be protected from the beast, from the acquiring company at the beginning... But then also, similarly, it's really important to not make the steps be too big. You have to gradually, but you have to merge it, and you can't remain a sidelight.
+\[16:06\] So I ramble a little bit, but that was a very educational exercise for me. I wasn't a founder in that journey, but I had enough of a role in the diligence of both of those acquisitions, and even acquire a company inside of IBM.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the key thing I hear there that you're saying though is that despite not being a founder in that scenario, you were able to leverage that learning to when the day came for you to be, to have that skillset. I think that's an interesting path, and something for those who are not quite there yet, listening to this, can keep in mind - what you're learning today may not be... You may not be in a founder, CEO or a leadership role, but that doesn't mean you're not learning leadership qualities... And to not discount what you're doing today.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, absolutely. And I think to an extent it's like -- you know, you get what you put into it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** I kind of joke that I don't have a first gear and a fifth gear. I don't really know how to go at speed, so I dive deep in... But I definitely use those opportunities, with the relocations/acquisitions to learn, to try new things. I like -- I think it's a Marc Andreessen statement that says "Replace career planning with strategic opportunity taking", which I feel is a good guidance. Just find those opportunities, learn from them... And it means that post-acquisition you don't need to find your corner and get comfortable, but rather look at the opportunities that we now have for growth and for learning, and see what you can make out of them.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd mentioned the banding - I'm not sure how deep you wanna go on that point, but I'm interested in the negotiation process, because the best time to negotiate or set terms is during the deal-making; that would make sense. When you talk about banding, can you go into that a bit more, in terms of how that set the teams up for success?
+**Guy Podjarny:** I'm even gonna talk about this a little bit in the context of the Akamai acquisition of Blaze. At a high level, what happens is big companies - every company; we do this now at Snyk as well - increasing (once again) to a certain size, you start tiering the employees in terms of seniority. You want to do this because the market operates this way, and that allows you to get salary benchmarks across different companies of a certain size...
+So if you're a smaller company, you might have five tiers; you might have a junior person, and you kind of progress up to your top-tier individual contributor, you might have individual contributor and manager tiers, and they would somewhat overlap... But you tier somehow. Now, because it's different people, different roles, different salaries, very different, each of these tiers does have typically a fairly broad salary range, and other sort of compensation bits... But there are other pieces that are attached to it. And moving from tier to tier is a bigger deal than getting your salary adjusted within the tier.
+Larger companies - there's a magic number of ten, if you look at IBM, and I think Google is like that... Generally, there's these ten tiers. Tech roles are oftentimes -- the minimum is like a four, and maybe one and two are the temp receptionist or janitorial roles, things that are a little bit outside the technology operation of the company... But then within those ten tiers -- and then you have executives, and executives is a little bit of a different tier.
+So when a big company buys a small company, you have these things - you have VPs, you have directors... A VP in a company of 20 is very different than a VP in a company of 20,000. It's not the same type seniority that you expect in the scope of responsibility. So there's a matching exercise that happens during the acquisition, of deciding "Okay, this person who's a VP here, or is a director here - what are they? What is their real seniority?" And there's a paycheck element to it, and I think that got a lot of focus in early conversations... But there's also an importance around your career trajectory, in terms of like that banding is very important.
+\[19:59\] So if I was to try to condense this, so the guidance is, in the moment of acquisition, that's not the most important thing. You're trying to figure out "Would your team have a good home? What's the responsibility of the team over time in the acquiring company? Would you be successful, would people be happy?" And of course, there's the financial terms of the deal itself... So this bit, of like when you look at the team, what tier they're in, like your comp - you think about the different people's comp... But the tiers are generally not as discussed. But it's just to say that the individuals, if you put them in a band, when they're kind of at the top end of that salary range, and they round it down, then it's harder for them -- once they're inside the company, it's harder for them to get bumped up to that next tier, that maybe it might have been earlier on.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+**Guy Podjarny:** So it sounds small, but it's just like a bit that was actually a topic of conversation in that IBM acquisition after... Because a lot of things were done right. Again, I don't wanna nitpick, I'm just sort of talking about this as an area of learning. When I went on to found -- I left IBM and I co-founded Blaze with Mike Weider, who was the founder of Watchfire and my boss in IBM... He joined it a little bit as a late co-founder; I started before... So the two of us sort of started Blaze.
+First of all, on a personal note, which might be interesting to people - my son was born in October. I took parental leave -- I was living in Canada at the time so you can take up to almost a year as a father, parental leave; you didn't get paid much, but you could kind of fall back to your job after. So instead of resigning, I took parental leave in January, and I was kind of feeling out what is it that I wanna do, with kind of the assumption that I would found a startup. But I had a three-month-old at home, I was kind of closing off in my bedroom, kind of geeking out, trying to build all sorts of pieces of software, just trying to learn spaces... And then I eventually landed on "Okay, I want to do this performance optimization piece", and I think by May or June I resigned. I left IBM and I kind of properly started Blaze. Blaze was a shorter journey. It was like 20 months from a corporation to -- yeah, even less than 20 months from incorporation to acquisition, it was a team and technology acquistion.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was pretty fast.
+**Guy Podjarny:** We had some initial market traction, but not really; no revenue to speak of. And then we got acquired by Akamai. And if I was to distill a little bit of learnings here... There's a whole bunch; a lot of things I would have done the same, or differently, and I guess I got the chance to do some of them the same or differently with Snyk... But I think there were a few -- I'm not sure where to start on these. There were a few key learnings from motion we did to get started.
+We started marketing before we had the product. So we had the product that made the websites faster, and we had a video on the page explaining that we make websites faster, and how we move things around inside the app, frontend optimization; we coined the term frontend optimization. And what we did is we did a video that explains it, and we said if you wanna see your website being fast or not, plug your URL here, and your email, and we'll show your before and after video.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+**Guy Podjarny:** We had an automated system that would run it through our -- very kind of duct-taped together, but... The core tech was good, but the surrounding was kind of still duct-taped together. It came out with a video that showed a before and after, which was very emotive, a very emotional response, to say "Yeah, I want that fast website, not my slow website."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... \[laughs\] Who picks slower, right?
+**Guy Podjarny:** And sent it to people. And that was probably 3-4 months before they could actually start implementing these things on their own sites...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+**Guy Podjarny:** And it got us some leadgen. That was good, it got good traction... The other thing we did is we did -- mobile performance was hot at the time; it still is, but at the time you couldn't really measure your mobile performance site, so we outsourced a little agent that would run on mobile apps... I actually bought an IKEA cabinet and some photo frames, and I bought a bunch of mobile devices, and they would sit in that sort of IKEA cabinet, connected to a server that we wrote, based on WebPageTest which is an open source software...
+\[24:07\] Anyways, we measured -- we opened a service called MobiTest that would measure your website and give you a bunch of visuals and data on a real mobile device. And we did an Android versus iPhone bake-off, and Android came out ahead. The thing made top tech news for like three days. It was a whole experience around it. I think Wired titles were like "Sorry, Steve." Steve Jobs was still alive at the time. "Android smokes iPhone", on these tests... It was a lot of iPhone fan boys coming along and pushing against the study...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Getting upset... \[laughs\]
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, we had like three days of -- somewhere between shame and glory, depending on your perspective... But it definitely kind of helped get us on the map. So I think that understanding your market presence early was definitely something we took into Snyk, even if we did things that are very different.
+And then subsequently is an understanding of the importance of biz dev and partnerships. So we built Blaze to accelerate websites, but we weren't delivering the websites. We partnered with the CDNs and the ADCs (application delivery controllers, so load balancers and the like), and we really designed the system to be integration-friendly, and integrated with a whole pile of them, given how early we were in the market... And I guess over there, and that to me is like maybe the tip - we talked before about going long versus going short, and I think it's a decision that's important. I think with Blaze we saw an important technology evolution, and we didn't really see a big company.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** So we partnered, we worked well with them, it helped locally to get better integrations and get some customers, but it really helped when it came time to the acquisition, because we had a lot of interested parties, because we filled a good hole at the time in the somewhat commoditizing world of performance optimization.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you ever hear the term "This is a product, not a company"? Is that kind of how you felt about Blaze, like it's a product, not a company? Is that what you mean by that?
+**Guy Podjarny:** I don't know if that's the right term... Maybe. Maybe it's a product, not a company. It was just limited in scope. We had thoughts about how can we transform websites for a variety of other reasons, like accessibility, maybe even visually and such, but we didn't have true conviction. We could have gone longer, but really, we felt -- and this was at the very beginning. It was probably a realization about a year in, that if you're honest and that technology really should sit alongside the entities that provide network-level acceleration and delivery of the website.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which means you would have to build that kind of company...
+**Guy Podjarny:** So either we could compete -- precisely. And there are examples - there were CDNs... There was a CDN called Instart Logic, which to my perception - and again, they might portray it differently - they basically were founded around the same time as Blaze. They built a CDN that had frontend optimization built into it. By the time they came out of stealth, because it takes a long time to build a CDN, all the big CDNs have already built or acquired some frontend optimization capabilities, and that differentiation was no longer a differentiation that held... So we chose the core feature, the capability of the product, but it wasn't so much a company.
+I ramble a bit, but I think that's my history. The acquisition itself - I think there was a lot to love there, we really picked. We had the advantage of being able to pick the right home for the team, where we thought both the team and the product should live... And the team is thriving; the vast majority of the team is still at Akamai. The branch in Ottawa, Canada has grown to own a lot more. They're executing really well, so they've grown in the responsibilities they've taken out in terms of products in Akamai. They've built other new products... And I think based on the learnings from before, we've built the right level of integration and isolation. The location helped; it was a separate location, so it was a little bit at arm's length from the rest of Akamai, which allowed more independence and to preserve some startup methodology and agility and spunk... But then we also made sure that we're integrated well and connected people.
+\[28:18\] I took the CTO role, so my role very quickly was broader than just the acquisition that we've made... And I think we -- you know, not all by intent; sometimes we got lucky, but I think that we struck the right balance of that integration versus independence in that acquisition.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned you moved into the CTO role, which gives you a chance to sort of look wider at Akamai, and potentially even be a good lookout for the team that you're sort of launching within, I suppose... It seems like a proper term there. What was your stint after that? Were you happily at Akamai for a while? How long did you stay there before Snyk came to be?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, so I stayed at Akamai for 3,5 years. It was a great journey. I really learned a ton, whether it's building business cases inside the company... There are amazing people at Akamai, so I definitely learned a lot from people and built a network. I think it's important when you get acquired to invest the time in helping others. As CTO at Akamai, I could help more, to founders and entrepreneurs in other companies around to connect them with relevant customers, in a mutually beneficial -- a customer of Akamai oftentimes wants to hear about a cool, performant startup that's around... And you have to stay clean, in terms of like I had no financial interest in any of these things... But just being helpful and connecting. And I think that type of networking and reach really helped me later... And it also taught me, once again; I learned a lot.
+To me, at this point, and some time after the Akamai acquisition, I started doing angel investing... And again, I have kind of a good phrasing from a friend, which is that when you're a founder, you learn in serial, and when you're an investor, you learn in parallel. You see different companies, you see how they work, whether you're helping those just ad-hoc, helping those companies, or whether you're an angel investor... And so I learned a lot from all those companies, and that helped me understand what I want to do better... And eventually, I moved with Akamai to London, UK after about a year and a half -- no, more like two and a half years, I moved to London. Then I kind of got the itch, and at some point I felt like -- I went to do it. I was gonna take a year off in between, and...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And that didn't happen?
+**Guy Podjarny:** ...that didn't happen. When I decided to -- it was probably about a six-month process from the point in time I decided to resign and when I was fully out, because I also had a long notice period... And when I decided to resign, I said I'm gonna take a year off, somewhere sort of mid-way I sort of said "Well, maybe six months would be enough", and then I eventually left Akamai on July 1st and incorporated on July 7th.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so a week... If. Maybe six days.
+**Guy Podjarny:** \[laughs\] And I was mostly off that summer. I got the itch, and I got stuck on the idea.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's pause there... What's the point of taking off then? How do you -- when you take off... Like, you did it before Blaze, right? You were on paternity leave, which is similar to taking off, but you were using that as a position of figuring out your next direction. When you do these kinds of exercises - or lack thereof, in this case - what is your intention with the time? Is it to recharge with family, is it to chip off at your bucket list? Not so much to ge morbid like that, but maybe things you wanna do in your life; what's the point of the time to take off?
+**Guy Podjarny:** It's a really good question. I think my primary goal was not to jump into the first thing that you see. There are a lot of great ideas, and there are a lot of great people that you can partner with, and when you're in one mindset - for instance, you're an executive in a large company - then it's very refreshing and nice to see an exciting new company, to start opening that thought of saying "Hey, can I join that, or can I found that? Get enamored with an idea and found it." And I think what you want to force yourself is not to jump on the first idea that you see, or the team that you get excited by...
+\[32:08\] So to me, when I thought about the break, part of it was "Yeah, can I rest on my laurels a bit? Can I recharge?" But in practice, I think for me that six-month period -- I had about a four-month notice period. So from the time it was announced to the team, to the time I was out, I probably had about 3-4 months... From the time I decided to leave, I was already thinking about things. I have already been engaged with a whole bunch of startups, to be fresh in that space... And so for me, I think that period of time already kind of happened in parallel to that departure from Akamai, even without the intent. I've seen enough and I've learned enough.
+I don't believe so much in regretting the time that you've invested. Both in the company and in my personal life I believe in big vision, small steps. You want to aim somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be worthy of accomplishing; it doesn't have to be a life ambition, it can be temporary, but you want to have some goals that you're working towards... But then again, you need to have the strategic opportunity-taking.
+And what you don't want to do is to do steps that you really regret. So you either win or you learn. You make a step, and if it's learning something that you didn't care to learn, then could you have avoided doing that in the first place? So I take that stance with family life as well; while I work hard, I don't sacrifice my family life in favor of the startup.
+For instance, now it's Snyk, and since the beginning of Snyk, with all the massive intensity that Snyk has, I have a block in my calendar from 6:30 to 9 PM, and I make sure that I'm home to have dinner with my kids. So I have breakfast and dinner with my kids.
+I do have some travel which I can't avoid, and that sometimes gets a bit heavy, but I try to do it. And look, oftentimes at 9 PM I'm back at the computer and I'm having calls with the West Coast from London... But that's okay for me. That's a balance that I strike. I've always been good at taking time off; even when I'm at the midst of it, I would take time off. I try to truly disconnect on the weekends...
+So I work really hard, but I have lines that I try to be very diligent about, to not cross. I don't want to be in a place in which I've, just for a few years, sacrificed family for -- now, there are balances; these things are ranges, they're not black and white... But anyways, all that said, I don't think I needed a lot more. If I could just take my foot off the gas a little bit in Akamai in the last few months, that was really all I needed for recharging. And then not press it all the way on the gas when I started Snyk. That was kind of all I needed for recharging.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When it comes to family, as you mentioned there, the way I'd see what you're describing for me is I can make a choice for a season. So if I'm gonna -- not so much sacrifice my family, to be so brash like that, but if I'm gonna trade off some of the time, I have to give myself a time period. I could do it for three months, or through this push in particular; once we get through this, I've gotta give that time back to my family. And I might even have that conversation with my wife prior to it and say "Listen, for the next three months things are gonna be a little bit different."
+The point is just I do it as a season, knowing the beginning and the end. And if I'm gonna do it, it's gonna be for a very purposeful reason, and not just for the sake of sacrificing my life, my wife, my family for something that in the end, for your life -- later on your life, once Snyk is done, or this is all through, the thing that really matters is... What? Your family, right?
+**Guy Podjarny:** \[35:50\] Yup. I think that's a great way to put it, to talk about a season. And I also think you have to think about the aspects that are in your control. When you're in a downturn - you know, like where we are right now, there's a certain amount of investment I need to do when you look at the Coronavirus crisis, that I have to invest in the company. We're in a good place and we're in good shape, as compared to many other companies... But if you get drawn and you need to invest there, that's a part of the responsibility. Similarly, if unfortunately there's some sort of medical case or some other sort of crisis at home that you have to deal with, then the company has to do it.
+So there's definitely elements that are outside of your reach, and you have to make sure that you jump off and do what you need to. And I think when you do these presses, then yeah, they have to be time-bound. I guess that's the thing about the startup. A startup is not a short journey; it's not a season. A conference season is a season; you're gonna fly around a lot in September and October, and a little bit of November, and hopefully in December and January/February you get to be home more, because there's less conferences around... That's okay, that's a seasonal decision. But I think a startup is -- you should anticipate a multi-year journey, and that's too long to say "Hey, I'll put personal life aside for that period of time." I think I rambled a bit... All of this is pre-Snyk, so I do think that you learned a lot in all of these different stages. There's always something bigger to do, which in my case was Snyk.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the opposite of a sales acronym, ABC, I like to do ABL - Always Be Learning. Always Be Learning is my key. I can see personally for me, and similarly I can see it for you - my entire journey, everything I've learned... This isn't about my story, but I'll give you a short snippet... I had been in some sort of sales role early in my career; when I was 18 I worked at a call center. This was back when making those things -- I'm 41, so making those calls at a call center as a telemarketer was a thing you did way back when... And then I went into a sales role.
+But there's so many things I've done over my career that I can see that have layered on Always Be Learning, to get me to where I'm at today... And then not only get me here, but enable me to be the best me in the position I am to do what I'm doing. And it's just interesting that people don't always see today as their learning day to do tomorrow better, or to do tomorrow the way they want... To sort of take stock of the fact that where you're at today is for a reason, and what you're learning today is for a reason... Whether it's an acquisition that went wrong, or an acquisition that went good, or whatever the case might be, to take that knowledge in and to just use it for the future forward.
+Sometimes people get caught up in the what-if and the future and they kind of forget to take stock of today and what they've done. It seems like you've done a very wise maneuver through your career to sort of understand your position today, where you're trying to eventually go... I'm sure way back when you didn't maybe see yourself as a founder, or maybe you did, but the point was that you were the whole time leveraging these opportunities and these scenarios to learn, so that today as a founder at Snyk you can do what you're doing.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, absolutely. You have to use the opportunity you have right now. If you're not growing, you're falling back. Also, it's just about -- you only have so much time on this planet, so you want to take advantage of it.
+**Break:** \[39:08\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's talk about sales. When organizations (I guess) decide to become adopted by a large user base, or provide an on-ramp, so to speak, for new users, there's often "Let's give it away for free. We get mass adoption. Everyone will use it because there's no barrier", and you've got two different models that sort of fit in there, which is freemium, which we could talk about, and there's the free trial model, which sort of enables both of those things, but there's just different ways you could slice it. What's your experience on this front?
+**Guy Podjarny:** I'm actually quite passionate about the freemium vs. free trial type model... So what I feel is that people conflate them. Snyk is a freemium model. And what does that mean? I'll extrapolate beyond Snyk for us... Which is we actually serve a use case for users that would never pay us. And we serve that use case really well for a long period of time... Again, until they basically don't qualify for that use case.
+For us, for instance, we support individual developers who want to secure their applications, as well as small teams, within our freemium tier. And there's no buts, there's no exceptions. We also support open source users. That's maybe even the first profile, or people protecting open source platforms... And those users should be - we do all we can - to make them really happy with the product, independent of whatever purchasing ability. There's a use case there about an individual developer, about an open source developer, about a small team, where the product should within the free tier truly deliver success. And in general, I think in freemium that's what you need. You need to define a use case that you will support for an extended period of time, or forever, presumably, that people would run.
+\[44:00\] Free trial is really about a chance to explore the capabilities of your product. And what people do is they call it freemium because they think of free trial as something that is only limited by time. So they say "Well, no, if it's not a time-limited thing, it's not a trial." But in practice, they don't solve any use case... So they for instance -- say you have a collaboration tool, and you allow collaboration for up to five users as something that's within your free tier. But your product really only brings true value - you know, the product that you've designed is really around large group collaboration. And collaboration amidst five people -- let's assume for a second it was like a Slack style system... Well, the value is fairly dubious. It's not really that significant. When you're five people, you don't really care about that much assisted collaboration between the five of you. I mean, you can communicate pretty well.
+So you find yourself not really solving a problem, and in earnest, you don't actually want people that are five-person teams to use it. What you want is you want the 100-person team or the 1,000-person team to start with five people. But for those people, you never started, you never solved an actual use case, an actual problem that they've had. And so this type of mistake typically happens when people think about freemium last. What they basically do is they say "Well, I'll build a --" let's say in our case I will build a security solution, I will price it by the number of developers building the application, and therefore now how do I keep people? I'll give people something for free, but I will keep it from encroaching on my commercial; I want to keep enough value in my premium tier, so that there's enough people that would move over to upgrade.
+And so they start from that, and they reduce it back down. Or they now say "Okay, I will only allow up to five developers." If I was to do that, and I would say "Well, it's only teams of up to five developers", then basically none of those is probably going to be that significant kind of a customer. If it's organizations with no more than five developers, that's not really the profile that I'm trying to reach.
+So what you really want to do is you want to understand for a given user what is the use case that you are solving for them. You start with the users you want to reach, the people that you want to reach in the first place. Developers as a whole, and then developers within enterprises. Then you wanna say "Well, what's the problem that you want to solve for them?" Let's say you have a team over there, or you have an individual developer there - what is the problem that they want to solve? Well, they want to find out if there are vulnerabilities in their code. And now you build a solution that helps them address that, helps them find those problems and be very comfortable with the fact that they will never pay you.
+And then as you expand it, when you think about like "Okay, another use case for us is developers in open source", like an open source project developer. Well, what is the use case that I solve for that user? I help them integrate into their open source project an ability to identify and fix known vulnerabilities... And I want to do that indefinitely. What I want those two developers to do is very different. The developer in the enterprise - what I want to do is I want to make them successful, but then I want them to help introduce to other team members, I want to inform them about my commercial capabilities, I want them to engage sales when appropriate, so that they would go off to the purchase.
+The open source developers - what do I want them to do? Well, above and beyond, again, like the first case, being successful and loving the solution, what I want them to do is tell the world. I want them to help the world know that open source security matters, and that Snyk is a good way to address this... So if they publicly talk about me or about Snyk, and if they help educate their peers, then that provides that value... And I shouldn't bother them around purchasing. I can also consider saying "Well, if I think that this person might work at a job, work on also non-open source projects, maybe I want to have them consider using Snyk in that surrounding."
+\[48:34\] So these are all very Snyk-specific examples, but I think that the key distinction here is when you have a solution and you think about how do you bring it to market, there's this aspiration that it'll be a freemium-led go-to-market; so you want to get these masses of people using your product, and you want some portion of them naturally growing to buy your product. And what often happens is you will unleash a freemium product and then nobody would use it, or the products would not really get adopted. To avoid that problem, or if you see that that's happening, you have to stop and think "Who are the people that this freemium product works for? What are the use cases that I'm truly solving for them, and what is it that I want them -- that I as a business (a little bit more cynically) want to get out of them?"
+And you know what - if you can't figure those out, that's entirely legit. You don't have to have a freemium model. If you don't have those solutions, if the minimum use of your product is one that really should be commercial, then it should be a free trial. But then you should adjust your methodologies, adjust your expectations that what you're really doing is you're offering them a free trial, and you should convey it accordingly to them, to say "This is a trial of our capabilities", so they don't have the misconception that your product is limited in the way that you've provided it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the distinction between freemium and then having a paid tier with a free trial... Because in most cases, in any sales opportunity, period, you have "Okay, we're done doing whatever we deliver. What is success?" And that's use case. "What is successful use of software? What is successful use of this service? What is successful execution of whatever we plan to do?" If you give them a free trial, if they require that, then that gives you something to optimize towards, which is "Hey, here's a sliver of success in a free trial." This makes you feel comfortable, gives you trust, gives you feedback to sell others on, so that you can move into this premium tier that's paid. However, if you've got a freemium model, I like the idea that you sort of maybe even have to some degree both, as necessary. For sure, freemium, if that makes sense for your business, especially as your organization has been able to align that around a use case that sort of helps the world.
+There's a lot of developers out there who need to focus on security around open source, their software etc. and so this freemium model allows you to do that, and the benefit you get as Snyk is to enable them to tell the world, because they've had success with it. And it's a band of people that will generally, as you said before, never pay; or not be in a payment scenario. Can you extrapolate on that side of things, how you know that they're a worthwhile user and you can solve problems for them, however they're never gonna really be a position to pay you?
+**Guy Podjarny:** \[51:45\] Yeah, for sure. I think a freemium user is a legitimate entity in the funnel. It's okay that they also advance to pay. The key distinction is basically, if we were to standardize the definition of what success is - a free trial's success is understanding your product's capability and their applicability to the organization. So that's really what a trial tries to do. While a freemium model - that person might indeed purchase, but in a freemium model... Like for me at Snyk, for instance, we have countless of examples of either...
+You know, for instance in one of the biggest media companies we had an open source user; an avid open source user loved the product, used the product, heard that their organization is reconsidering their open source security tooling or open source governance tooling, and introduced us into the company with a very warm recommendation, which eventually helped us go on and win the deal and then grow with that customer substantially.
+Another example actually within a financial organization is that we had a team that was more frontend-minded, that really liked our technology, and used the free tier. It was a small team, and the volume that we provided with our command line interface in the free tier that we had was sufficient for them to actually centrally find vulnerabilities and components that were submitted to them. And then they said "Okay, we want to standardize this and we want to build this up inside the organization. We want to build it into the pipelines, we want to grow it to many more developers." Both of those cases were freemium users. Both could have continued. In fact, the open source user has continued using it in a way that doesn't pay. But over a long period of time we made them successful. We didn't just try to push them down the funnel, because their use case didn't fit the funnel, but they were the right individuals to go towards the organization. But we had to understand the use cases that we are trying to solve for, for us to be able to help them be successful. So I think it's really about that definition of success, and its time horizon.
+Fundamentally, I think the easy question is "Who do you expect to use your free tier of your product, and what for, and for how long?" And if the answer to the "How long?" is "Very briefly", or just as they evaluate, or if the "Who do you expect to use it?" is just not someone you care about in your funnel, like it's just not realistic for you to do it, then that's an indicator of a problem. Then you have to think about "Okay, so what is the tie between the freemium element--" And sometimes you don't need to give as much.
+And by the way, an extreme version of this is open source-based software. People should ask the same question when they say "Should I open source my software?" Because open source to an extent is an extreme version of freemium. It's a freemium that you cannot back out of. So we have to think "Who is it that would actually use my open source software, and for what use case, and then for what use case would they use the premium?" You have to ask the same questions, of walking them down that funnel.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where do you begin then? How do you extrapolate that against, say, tiering your product? Do you begin with identifying what might fit into freemium, and then everything else is divvied up into tiers? I guess maybe specific to you, how did you define your tiers with Snyk?
+**Guy Podjarny:** I think the distinction of freemium -- so it depends on where you are. If you are an open source-based solution, then that's a very big decision. It's a one-way door to sort of go open source... Pretty much. So you have to really think long and hard to do it. And it's not that flexible. If you're a service, it's a little bit more flexible. You can make something and then not make it free, or change what you get for free. It is more significant than changing your premium tiers. Generally, changing your premium tiers is something that is really not a big deal, as long as you don't go back and try to milk old customers for more money; or if you do that reasonably, then generally you can change your pricing, and you probably will change your pricing many times.
+\[56:24\] But for free tier, if you manage to build any sort of community around it, you have to be much more careful about changing what's included. It's always easy to add, but it's hard to reduce.
+So I would say you actually probably should spend more time thinking about your free versus commercial, than the way you split up your commercial... And this at the very beginning, when you introduce the free.
+And then within the free, it boils down to the questions that I talked about. I don't have as crisp a framework for this, but it's to say "Who is going to use your free tier? For what use cases? For how long?" and then "What do I want this user to do? What do I want this user to do to sort of help my business?" If you just define -- if you sit down and you write that down, then I think it would make things fairly clear, pretty quickly.
+From here, you either got the right answers, like either you've got a very clear answer - you know, for Snyk, we started and the focus was developers. Developers get to use the product for success; it's really when it gets to large teams and when it gets to engaging with a security audience that you go to commercial. Then you just run with it.
+If you don't have the right answer, you have to either continue experimenting on what your free tier should include, so that you can find the right use case that you can support amidst this relevant user base... Or if the user base was the problem, you need to go off and say "Okay, so this is the relevant user base here. Maybe I want security people to start this right away... What is the use case that I can offer them?" And if you can't answer those questions, maybe freemium isn't for you. Maybe it is about free trial, and you can still have a great inbound, bottom-up, content-oriented -- you can still have a great community-fueled product without it being freemium. It doesn't have to be the same. But don't fool yourself, I guess, on those fronts.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a couple key points I wanna touch on, but I do wanna move into your story of Snyk and what's going on there... Dev tooling, security-first, developer-first security - all these things that are really important in today's world... But kind of layer in for me - you mentioned helping earlier; how important helping helped you later on... Maybe dovetail that into Snyk, what you've done there. Because you'd mentioned when you were at Akamai you were helping others... That's a very -- you often hear "If you wanna get ahead, help somebody." How has that worked for you?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yes, for sure. To me, a lot of it came back to the community. Some of the help with Akamai was to help the odd founder and connect them with relevant customers... But a lot of my investment at the time was helping the performance and ops communities. I was very much a part of the Velocity Conference, the DevOps movement in the early days, and helping from an Akamai perspective bring Akamai into that mix, but then also help that community thrive... And when it comes to Snyk, that's really probably one of the key tailwinds that we had, the key pushed that we got that really helped us take off in the first place.
+\[59:56\] So Snyk was founded in this combination - for me, a combination of my two journeys. So it was on one hand the application security background, the constant desire to get developers to embrace security, and on the other side this first-row view, if not actual on-stage participation in the change of DevOps, and the performance and ops industries were the first ones to be disrupted... Sort of seeing what it means to build solutions that are really dev-oriented, what's important to this community and how to work with it.
+So I built a company from the get-go with not just a technology perspective, but a community perspective. It was the idea that if you want to build a solution that really is compelling for developers, that the developers actually want to embrace, it's not just about building a developer tool, it's about building a developer tool in a company. And as that company, it implies first of all the culture of the company is one that is open, that is transparent, that the way we communicate outside is it does what it says on the tin.
+We talked about builder and breaker, and we had these long conversations about "How can we be a builder, not a breaker?" For instance, to give a very specific example just to show how deep it went - the color scheme of the website. We talked about how I tell you about vulnerabilities in your application, and some of them are very severe... So overall, our color scheme and our thesis was very much like "It needs to be warm, not a fear-mongerer." We help you build quality software, that includes being secure, and we're sort of a part of that builder community... But when I tell you that you have high-severity vulnerability, I kind of want you to appreciate the urgency and doing something about it. So we talked about the color scheme, and we got to this Magenta, sort of mid-way understanding of what the right color scheme is.
+So every tidbit about how do we work - we're free for open source, we give a lot to the community, we participate in these open source foundations... So a lot of it actually got embedded into the company of being one that works hand-in-hand with the outside world, with the developer community. We shipped a really minimalist product. I would say a pretty crappy initial product about a month in - really, it was about a month or two old - as beta, nobody was paying for it. We launched it at Velocity Amsterdam, and we iterated with the community, and that's still how we work - we ship things; we don't think we know better. We ship it out and we work with the customers, and we do it all the way from large, seven-figure, big financial or technology institutions, we work with them, we learn from them, our engineers talk to them directly and interact with them... And we do it as part of that community, our freemium users; we haven't tiered support, or anything like that. We still answer all the support calls very rapidly. We're trying to be very transparent with what we're building.
+So if I go back a little bit to the founding of it, I think that notion of brand -- not brand, but rather almost the karma of people helping out, it really helped get the DevOps community to take that leap of faith, to say "Yeah, we know we haven't liked security tools before, but we kind of trust Guy..." I also brought some great people to join me also from that community, that had some brand and some notoriety and some reach within the developer world. I added great people - two co-founders from Israel, Danny and Asaf, who were both great people, that helped embed the culture, but also brought in even deeper security expertise than what I had, and helped build the branch in Israel, because we had in Tel Aviv and London a kind of shared, two-headed monster approach from the beginning; we sort of split it into two. And that really helped get us off the ground, to build out the product and crack the code on "How do we build a security tool developers will embrace?" Revenue took a couple years more, but we managed to really break through to developers, which was the most important challenge.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:04:05.19\] Especially as you lead with this developer-first security dev sec ops - you often hear just DevOps, and you've gotta put security in the middle there... And what we often find is developers -- security is, to some degree, an afterthought; it's like performance, making it work etc, and the security of it to some degree comes after it's build, and an afterthought, in a lot of cases. And what you've been doing in these last several years has really been around bringing security into the mix... And you mentioned tooling in not a security company being sort of the position you took as -- I'm not really sure how to frame it, but just the fact that you were focused on the tooling part of it and developers, rather than just simply being a security company. You don't fix the fixes, you find them, and enable others to fix them, and help that kind of thing. So talk about that position, like why tooling was the way in... I guess why developers needed to have security baked into their processes, and how you do that with tooling.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, and I think it's more about the developer -- it's maybe more the word "developer" in the developer tooling, than just the tooling. So the key difference is practically all security solutions out there are built for auditors; they're built for security people, which makes sense, because they're also the ones buying them. And then we want the developers to use them as well.
+Then what happened was that as an industry we built auditor tools and we integrated them into a developer environment. And lo and behold, they didn't work well for developers, because developers are not auditors. They don't have the same needs, the same surrounding responsibilities, the same pre-existing expertise... So the primary change that we did was that we said "Okay, developer-first. If I'm a developer, what do I need?" And it led us to all sorts of substantial changes in how we devised the solution. And the tools were the ways to make it accessible.
+For example, in the world of known vulnerabilities, the norm is to tell you "Hey, this application uses 500 libraries. These 5 are vulnerable. Go fish. Go figure out how these five came in." Well, in practice as a developer you don't use 500 libraries, you use 15. And those 15 brought in these hundred, and those hundred brought in those 500. So as a developer, what I really wanna know is which of my 15 brought in a vulnerability, and how does it come along? I want an application context. So that was something that we learned, and we built, and we built what is fairly unique; now, it's becoming a little bit more standard, which is present the vulnerabilities in an application tree/dependency tree context. Or like our Git integration - where do developers discover tools? Well, developers want to try it out, and generally, the place where a code review happens is on Git, is in these pull requests that get opened up; you want to review it. So that's where we want to interject, that's where we want to introduce a problem.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where they're hanging out at.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Exactly. So we built an integration into GitHub, and that was really hard. We had to build the technology to take source code that wasn't built, and the dependency system hasn't kicked in yet, and approximate - build out the dependency graph without building the app, which every dependency ecosystem is its own unique snowflake, and it's really hard... And you can sort of argue -- like, it was very compelling to say "No, just run it in the command line interface, as we had before, and you ask the dependency system which libraries are here", but that didn't provide the developer user experience. The developer user experience was "I want to integrate all my source code when I do code review. I also want you to only tell me about problems that I introduced with these code changes. I don't really care at the moment about other problems that might already exist in my system. I want to know if my code changes introduced the new problem", which amazingly is not something solutions do, because an auditor doesn't care. An auditor cares about the overall state of the application. And of course, I'm generalizing here.
+\[01:07:54.16\] So all of these are just a few of many, many examples of "Think about it through the developer's eyes." And I think all of those approaches, whether it's discovery, or where do we integrate, and the core technologies, how do we present results - those were very different. And the tools is what makes it easy. Every single developer in the world, if it was the same effort to build something that is insecure and something that is secure, they would choose to build something that is secure. The problem is it's not the same effort. It's really hard.
+So what we need to do is we need to make it easier -- like, if there's a line of how much you care and a line of how hard it is, the line of how hard it is to be lower than the line of how much you care. So we're gonna inch along how much you care. We're gonna educate, we can learn security breaches, and all that; we all care about security more and more every day... But we really dropped the line of how hard it is, and I think that was the key to getting this to users, and that's where tools kick in. We had to embed the simplification, we had to embed the grunt work, embed the security expertise into the tool to make something that used to be hard, easy and compelling for dev.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Everything we do... Like, we went into container security - same approach; what is different as a developer? What do I need from a container security solution? And if I just throw one example, it's like it's a separation from the base image to the Docker file. From a security perspective, if there's an image, there are vulnerabilities there. But as a developer, night and day, if the vulnerability was introduced with my code, if you will, in my Docker file, when I installed a bunch of things on it, versus it's the base image that I pulled down.
+So a lot of these things -- and then the last example I just can't not mention, it is the automated fixing. Maybe the biggest difference between a developer and an auditor is that an auditor's job is to find problems, and a developer's job is to fix them.
+So if I build a developer tool that just finds problems, developers are not gonna like me too much. So what we've built is we've built a tool that actually finds those problems, figures out how to fix them and package that up as a pull request and opens that up to your repository.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, thank you.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Then you want that. Then you get that reaction, of saying "Why would I do that, if the tool can do it for me?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Anyways, I get excited a little bit when I talk about it, but I think there's a lot of passion because this needs to happen, and it needs to happen across the industry, to really think about developers' needs versus the security mandate and expect developers to fall in line.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I think a lot that comes with a mind change to developers, right? For a while it had just been just DevOps, and as of recently, and part of a lot of the movement you've done and the work you've been doing in community, as you mentioned of your journey, has been around changing minds. I heard you mention on a podcast recently, you said this term "shift left", and I think about changing the minds. How do you get developers to embrace security? That's the thing.
+So you can built a great tool, and it can do all these amazing things, but if developers don't consider it - well, then how do you help developers shift left?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, exactly. I actually like to say that shift left is really important. It's this notion of moving testing, and the security activities earlier in the cycle... But I like to think that the big change is not shift left, but it's top to bottom. It's this notion of shifting security from being central, and centrally mandated and controlled, to being a bottom-up movement. We expect developers, application teams, DevOps teams, to make decisions and to be autonomous, so that they can very quickly learn what they need to do, build a solution, ship that to market, learn from it, iterate again and again. The tighter the loop, the better the business results are. We expect them to build secure software, and yet we don't trust them to make security decisions. So there's a dissonance here, there's a problem.
+Security has to take the lens -- like, developers have to change, they have to embrace a bunch of these things, and the tools need to simplify it, but actually, security needs to change very substantially as well. They need to change from being ones that succeed by doing, by being the expert that understands both application and security and is able to combine the two, being a superhero, to succeeding by helping developers build secure software, or make secure decisions... Kind of like ops did when they went from more IT operations where they're operating the systems, to more of an SRE/DevOps orientation where you equip the developers so that they can build operable software, and then operate it themselves. So I think the change has to happen.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:23.07\] Well, yeah, developer-first security is an interesting concept and interesting thing; obviously, you've built a ginormous business around it... You reached unicorn status. You haven't even said that yet, Guy. I mean, you started from the bottom and now you're here. It's crazy that this last round -- I don't know if it was the last round or the round before that where you'd said "We've reached unicorn status", which is great... But as part of this community focus of Snyk too you'd mentioned not just building a tooling company, but building a company for the community that can really embrace a lot of the things you'd mentioned... A recent acquisition from you was the DevSecCon, which is a conference... Obviously, things with Covid-19 have changed some things, so I'm curious what your perspective is there on, I suppose, communities meeting online or not... But this aspect of "How do you make security not only a developer concern but a community concern?" Is that what you're doing with DevSecCon, and what you're doing with the podcast you run, and everything else?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, as part of our commitment to the community, or a part of the need for the community to go through this transition as they did in DevOps is around giving the community places where they can share knowledge. Security is really quite terrible in sharing practices. There's this sort of natural tendency by many to just hold all the information to yourself and not share, be very secretive. And that's very counter to how DevOps works. DevOps is around collaboration. We learn from one another, we communicate, we trust.
+So early on, we tried to just sort of educate and share practices, and then subsequently I started the podcast "The Secure Developer", and then we built DevSecOps, which we called The Security Developer Community at first, and then we renamed to DevSecOps And then the last big event was DevSecCon, which we acquired... All of them are really on that same mental of giving the community a stage, companies giving individuals that have important learnings to share about how do they change, how do they mobilize their organizations to embrace this new approach to security - give them a stage to share that. And this is happening across different areas. It happens when you talk about cloud-native companies like Auth0, or Segment, or companies that are more cloud-native and were born in the cloud and born with that mindset... And have them share how they did it to companies like -- I had Roland Cloutier, who was the CSO of ADP, and he's now the CSO of TikTok, talk about how does he shift, which was a pretty massive undertaking... Kind of shift an existing beast of security organization to this newer mentality, which is a process that's still undergoing... And how they work.
+And in DevSecCon, a lot of it is just around literally, physically coming together. Now, of course, Covid-19 will change that and we're making it virtual to the extent we need at the moment entirely, but it's around physically meeting. A lot of times what happens -- and again, it's all learnings from DevOps; we're replaying the playbook, versus reinventing it... It's around just knowing there's a person on the other side, and understanding what they're doing.
+So in DevSecCon we bring developers and security people - and operators are also in there - to give talks that are all security-related, but they come from both angles. So suddenly you're a developer, and you sit and you hear a security person talk about risk, and talk about how do they manage it. And suddenly, you're a security person and you sit there and you hear about Agile and Scrum processes.
+\[01:15:53.09\] So all of them are really a joint investment, and it's a commitment for us to the community. And from a business perspective, we believe that the faster the world reaches these conclusions, the faster the practices get formed, the better it is for our business, because that's the thesis on which we built the company and its offerings.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting world we're in right now, that's for sure... And the changes in just the developers and organizations - there's a lot of organizations that are being impacted, like airlines and just different sectors of business that are just severely being hit by just change; downturn in economy, from no one flying etc... But in many cases you see a lot of cuts in those businesses, and cybersecurity (to some degree) or security taking a back seat. What is your perspective of security in this world now, and how organizations need to approach it?
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, I think security continues to be super-important. Unfortunately, history teaches us that at a time when there is a lot of vulnerability, attackers kick in. So they use this vulnerability we're seeing -- all sorts of phishing scams right now that are related to Covid-19. We've seen in past crises, like in 2008, 2001 - we've seen an increase in online attacker growth... So we don't know exactly what will happen here, but we can guess that attackers are only going to accelerate, versus go down... Unfortunately, also some people that are on the cusp also revert to more criminal activities when the market doesn't give them a lot of great, legitimate work to perform.
+So it's very important that companies continue to invest in that security. you also as a company don't want to go from a financial crisis to a crisis caused by a breach. You want to do it. So it's hard... Balancing budgets is hard.
+From Synk's perspective, what we did is we actually tried to help out by giving Snyk usage for free. We've actually made an offer of six months free of Snyk usage to companies in the distressed industries, and to small/medium businesses as well, trying to help people... You know, at the moment it's hard to get -- if you're in an airline, it's hard to pay anything; you're not really sure what's gonna happen tomorrow... But the security people still want to keep the company secure, the developers still want to do that... So we are sort of opening up.
+Thanks to the last rounds, we have enough in the bank to be able to withstand this period and allow these parts of the community and our customers as well to keep secure, stay secure as they brave through these really challenging times. We also issued these cheat sheets of ten best practices for secure development while working from home...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ha-ha! Nice.
+**Guy Podjarny:** ...from what we're doing, and running a little webinar on that topic as well, with \[01:18:36.28\] and a security lead from Envision... Just again, to share practices about what should you change. A lot of it is about developer empowerment... You know, this is a time that you can't scrutinize, you can't slow people down, so how do you change to have the developers know what to do. It's around focusing on security hygiene, and also some specific security threats and opportunities, like two-factor authentication and Zero Trust Network. This notion of your home surrounding is not gonna be as secure as your corporate surrounding, and what can you do about it.
+Actually, this is a great time to start a bug bounty program, because -- again, unfortunately, but still kind of turn lemons into lemonade... But there's more people at home, with the right skills, who might be interested in making a few bucks, helping you find security flaws in your system.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** It's a good time to do that. So we try to give back... I think people have to -- if you ignore security right now, again, you're just gonna wake up from one crisis to another.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like what you said there, "security hygiene." I never really considered it as hygiene. Like you wash your hands... You want to enable certain things on your home router, because so many people are operating on Wi-Fi... I hear "Oh, the Wi-Fi is terrible in this area of the house, so I have to go to this area of the house", and maybe their Wi-Fi is insecure, they've got packet sniffing, and all these things... I can only imagine. So I wanna make sure you give me that link to those ten best practices, that cheat sheet.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Absolutely, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:20:03.00\] We'll link that up, for sure. Let's take a left turn back to I guess the future of Snyk. It was about -- I wanna say last year, last July I think... You'd mentioned Peter McKay earlier as humbly giving up your role as CEO and what that process was. You'd mentioned people over your history too, and Peter played a key role in a lot of what you did, too. So it wasn't just like you picked a random CEO and like "Oh, there you go." This is a very interesting way of leveraging all of your history and great people in your history. Can you share the story of you and Peter, and maybe even pull in some of this stuff around the need to eject yourself from the CEO role and give it to somebody that can help you lead the company in the direction you wanna go, and allow you to focus on things you can do really well.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, for sure. So Peter and I go way back. Peter was the CEO of Watchfire; so if I mentioned before Sanctum, Watchfire and IBM, Peter was the CEO of Watchfire when they acquired Sanctum. So we met for the first time there, and we were in touch and doing a bunch of things together over the course of the next five years... And then I've always kind of learned a lot from him, and I've never been shy, so I would kind of go up to him and ask questions, and I consulted him when I considered going to tech sales for a while, as I mentioned before... So I've always kind of learned a lot from him.
+When I left IBM and I founded Blaze, Peter came on my board. He at that time -- we probably got a little bit tighter, to just sort of talk through problems. And Peter is a very accomplished individual. He comes from a finance and then sales background, and then sort of really big CEO backgrounds. He's been the CEO of about five companies by now, three exits, he was the GM Americas for VMware, so he ran VMware America's business, which I think was like a 3-4 billion dollar a year revenue line...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+**Guy Podjarny:** So it's definitely sort of a big business, but also ran Watchfire, and ran series B companies. And he and I think nothing alike. We come at the same problem from massively different angles, but we share the same values, and over the course of the years we've learned to see that... And it makes our conversations really valuable. Because when we talk about a problem - you know, I would raise a problem and I would think about different attributes of it. Peter is likely to think about that problem from a totally different angle. But if we both reach the same conclusion, then the likelihood of that conclusion to be right is pretty high.
+I really kind of got exposed to that during Blaze, with him on my board, and it was really great conversations. I had Mike Weider, my co-founder at Blaze was super-smart and taught me a ton, and he and I had great conversations as well; we were just a little bit closer. Peter was further removed in terms of how we thought.
+So when I started Snyk, Peter was always involved; at that point he was a friend. We'd do some investments together where we benefit as well from the fact that we both think very differently... So again, if we both conclude it's a good company to invest in, it's more likely to be right... And I brought him on as an independent board member early on. It was great that he could do it, and he didn't have a lot of time, but because of our history, he took the leap of faith, and because he was excited about the business... And because of our familiarity, we could get a lot of value even when he didn't have enough time. It was really great having him on the board, and he was already contributing to Snyk's trajectory and already excited by it...
+So when he ended his tenure at Veeam, which was the company where he was CEO, which I think he grew from like 400 million to about a billion dollars in revenue in like 2,5 years... And when he ended his tenure there, if I go back to that strategic opportunity-taking, I saw a widow.
+\[01:23:49.13\] At the time - to switch from Peter to me - this is the beginning of 2019, but really a few months after, so April/May of 2019... Snyk has been going through this massive growth spurt. At the beginning of 2018 we were 23 people; at the beginning of 2019 we were 84 people, so it was almost 4x the company during that period. We 7x-ed revenue. It went from tech only to like I have to figure out a lot of these businesses. We did a fundraising round in that period, and a substantial -- subsequently we did two more, but still, it was a real valuation...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of money, yeah.
+**Guy Podjarny:** And what I found was that all of my time -- I have an amazing team; I think our team at Snyk is... I've never worked with such a capable team, and I've never been the founder that held everything on his shoulders. I think I was fortunate enough to bring great people on board, and they helped make the company a success, and I would fill in different gaps... And still, during that year, if I look at April 2019 to the year before, the vast majority of my time was spent internally. It was just scaling the business, finding more good people to work this way, adjusting the processes, helping the sales deals... And what I wasn't doing is what I think is my best competency, which is I wasn't being a visionary. I wasn't being out in the community to speak and write. I wasn't engaging with customers enough.
+I literally was tracking how many customer calls I have every week, and I went from my desirable several every week, to like none. Sometimes I would have three weeks without. So I was just stretched too thin, and I couldn't let go of that, because I needed that to happen. And in parallel, I saw this opportunity with Peter, so we started talking about this. My board was very supportive. They basically said "Look, everything's going well, you don't have to do this. You don't have to make any change. It's going really well. But we also see the appeal in Peter. So if you're both on board and you're excited by it, we'll roll with it."
+So we talked about it, and in July we kind of announced it to the company, and subsequently to the world, and then he officially joined in late August, beginning of September... And look, I think it's one of the best decisions I've made. First, because of Peter. I just got the benefit of this amazing individual who came on board. It was very helpful when we continued to grow, because the company went from 84 people to 250 people in that year... But it also is helping even now, with the crisis, Peter having gone through...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of wisdom.
+**Guy Podjarny:** ...the 2000 crisis, and the 2008 crisis... It really helps to just work together. So he and I in a much more intense fashion collaborate and bring those two very different perspectives into the company... Which I think makes our general decision right.
+There's specific expertise he has around scaling our go-to-market. He came in and he made a comment at some point that the R&D organization was far more mature than the go-to-market organization... And to an extent it's natural, because the company was growing so fast, but also to an extent it's my lack of knowledge. I didn't know how to grow a good market organization. I'm a techie, I'm a product visionary, I'm a community guy. So we got all of those, and then on my front, it helped me regain what I started slightly losing around the personal life, because I was trying to do all of those and it was just too much. Both the CEO, and still do the product visionary. And in practice, I wasn't doing the product, the strategy, so it helped me basically get back to that, which I think is what Snyk needed from me, and needs from me most.
+\[01:27:17.29\] So yeah, I think you always have to swallow a bit of an ego pill when you do this. There's always adjustments around finding the conversations that you can increasingly not be a part of... Like not just not be the ones leading them, but not be in the conversation; that's legit, because it's the only way you make time... And what I had the luxury of, which isn't available to everybody, is the fact that I had this deep trust and known relationship with Peter. That continues on, and I think I would make the same decision in a heartbeat. Even without that, I would encourage founders to just assess at any time... And I think maybe the key statement that stuck in my mind is "Just because something is good doesn't mean it can't be better." So you don't have to be in a failure state to make a change like the one I did. It can be in a success state, because there is an even bigger success, and even better situation to be at. You can always improve.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very wise words, Guy. I'm glad you shared this story, because I think you have a lot of people who have a hard time replacing themselves, to some degree... And luckily, a CEO hunt can be very hard, and very taxing on an organization, and especially if you're a failure state. Not so much like failure as a CEO you, but if you're in a bad state and you need a new CEO to move back in and find margin into your life, whether it's work life, whether it's whatever, having the history you've had with Peter was such an awesome thing.
+Maybe it plays a role back into your helping to help earlier on in your career, and having that mindset, because Peter was there, available, trusted, capable, already involved, you already had a lot of personal financial involvings in terms of investments, and angel funding etc. So I'm glad you shared that story, because it really shows the perspective of what it takes to appreciate that transition from getting some of your margin back. It sounded like you were really stretched thin, and what happens when you're stretched thin is you have no margin. And when you have no margin, what happens? You have no maneuverability. You're very near to a panic state, potentially, if it got too stretched... And I'm glad you shared that story though.
+Guy, thank you so much for sharing your story. I'm sure we could talk further and longer, but man, you've got some cool stuff happening. Snyk is doing amazing. 84 last year, to 300 this year, you're growing... This is a perfect time for being security-minded, and I'm so glad you shared your story today. Thank you.
+**Guy Podjarny:** Thanks for having me, happy to share... And I guess we've been talking about sharing learnings and hoping people can learn from them, and then do better.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Thanks, Guy.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sid Sijbrandij is the co-founder and CEO of GitLab, an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company they have their eyes set on taking the company public, and they're very outspoken about their culture, their open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company... But I've always been curious about where Sid came from, where did he grow up, where did he study, was he any good at school... So that's where we started.
+Sid, what kind of person were you before GitLab?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[laughs\] Still the same, hopefully... I was born and raised in the Netherlands. I'm the oldest of four siblings. My parents are still here, still together. I did well at school. While I did well learning-wise, I was teased a lot when I was younger.
+I went to university -- I was really good at physics in high school, so I figured I'd study that. I also enjoyed it -- it turns out that physics in university is a lot of math, which wasn't something I was particularly good at or particularly liked... So I switched to management science, which is kind of a combination of an MBA and a taste of all the different engineering disciplines, which was super-fun to do. In hindsight, I should have learned how to program. I liked what I did on the side as well.
+The first year of university I saw this ad on the local marketplace for an infrared receiver, so you could skip to the next mp3 track. I'm like "That's amazing!", so I ordered one, and I checked out the website, which was on Geocities, which kind of dates me...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. I loved Geocities.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[04:01\] Yeah. And it was open source, already at that time - the software, but also the hardware to run the device. And there was a big banner on the site that said "I'm not selling these." Like "Huh? That's weird. He IS selling them." And I figured out he didn't wanna deal with sending individual orders across the ocean... So that was my first business - I bought them from the person making it (he was a PhD student) and I started selling them. I asked people to send me cash with some cardboard behind it, so you could less easily spot it, and that's how I got in business. It was fun, we did that for a couple of years. After graduating I did an internship at IBM, the IBM Extreme Blue program. That was super-fun. We got to work on a conversation bot.
+After that, I had the option to get a job there permanently, and I was looking at strategy consulting... But I couldn't stop thinking about submarines, because my wife and I went to a boat fair and we saw a submarine there, and I kept calling the owner, the investor, like "Joe, hire me." There was nobody on the payroll. There was just an inventor, and then an investor. And it got down to the wire, because I had a job offer in hand, I had to make a decision, and he decided to offer me a job... But he asked what I wanted to earn, and I said something completely reasonable. He proceeded to offer me the salary he thought was reasonable, but that was reasonable 50 years ago... So I was finally poor after graduating. I always figured I'd be the poorest during my student days, but I had to move in back with my parents. I lived in their attic while making the life support system for the submarine.
+Luckily, nowadays it's a lot more professional at U-Boat Worx, but they're still around, and they make the most submarines in the world. That's kind of my story growing up...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. Well, let's back-track a little bit. I've got a couple questions and I don't wanna interrupt you, because I love hearing these kinds of stories of where people come from, who they are today - sure, definitely, you're still the same Sid. There's not much changed about you, except for maybe the external perception of who you are, what you're building... And there's a lot of assumptions that can come from that. And in many ways, what I try to do with this show is sort of demystify people like you, to some degree. Because to me, you're amazing; you've done some really cool stuff at GitLab, and we'll get into that, of course... But I like to know where you came from, to understand the building blocks of how you got to the mindset that is required to be who you are today, to do what you've done, to lead a company like you have done.
+You'd mentioned -- and I don't wanna go into this too deeply unless you want to, but you mentioned being teased. How did that affect you when you were younger? Was it hard for you to make friends, were you a loner?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, I was a loner. It was hard to make friends. I struggled with finding joy in the social processes, and I wasn't good at it, I didn't particularly like it. I stood out and I figured I'd have to befriend some people; I'd befriended people at the bottom of the social ladder, who turned on me and started teasing me instead. So I think what it gives you being teased is that you tend to be a bit less sensitive to social signals, and I think that from time to time served me well as an entrepreneur, where you go against common wisdom, from time to time.
+Most of the time you go with common wisdom. One of our sub-values at GitLab is boring solutions. We don't try to reinvent the wheel. And sometimes you have to do something that doesn't make sense to the rest of the world. And that doesn't mean you're always right. I'm still the same person that had a failed startup; I wasn't successful, so I'm not any smarter than when I had that failed startup, but if you keep trying long enough, at some point hopefully you get lucky.
+At GitLab we got lucky, and I learned to follow -- when there's a conflict between what the world says and what you think yourself, I'm able to depend a bit more on what I think myself, and I think that's sometimes really handy.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:19\] See, that's what I mean by these details - your perspective of that time in your life, and how that sort of shaped you to be resilient as an entrepreneur, to sort of go against common wisdom. To me, that's awesome. If there's someone out there that was teased earlier in their life, and you're reminding them of that, and you sort of gave them a new perspective on how you can sort of change that perspective on that moment in your life and use it towards a future that's more joyful. You know, more joy.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I like that. In high school if you stand out and if you're different, it's a problem. Later in life it's an asset to the diversity of thinking and perspectives.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I might paraphrase a little bit, because I didn't watch the full video, but I've got it in my list to check out, but I watch Tim Ferriss from time to time, because I think he's a pretty wise fella... And he was talking about being a specialist, or being a generalist. And he said the idea is to be a - again, paraphrasing... What I grokked from it most was that if you're a generalist, you could be a specialist with all of your generalist skills. So it's kind of like that. You use a lot of what you learned throughout your life to get to where you are, but then use all those skills you've learned all your life in that position. You don't just master one skill or one thing and become CEO of GitLab. You had to do several things throughout your life, and I'm sure that you still use a lot of your experiences, a lot of your skills, a lot of the patience that you've learned over your life to be and to do what you do.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, I like how what you learn in life -- I worked at a lot of organizations where I saw some things going really well and some things going not so well, and I love how when you start your own business you get to do things differently. And I don't think one organization is necessarily better than another, just different. And I like how at GitLab we optimize for speed of decision-making.
+I've seen a lot of organizations where things have to fly under the radar, because as soon as you ask people for input, you owe them involvement in shaping the final decision. So you have initiatives flying under the radar for a long time, because as soon as you pop up, you wanna get to a conclusion quickly, otherwise you attach so many people that you become paralyzed in the decision-making process. And that's something we're trying to avoid at GitLab - like, no, you share your decision openly, so you can get more input and more data, but only the directly responsible individual has to decide, and you don't owe everyone an explanation, you don't owe anyone a joint decision.
+There's many examples like that, where we've tried to learn from what you've seen in your life before, and try to improve upon it. It doesn't always work, and that's not an ultimate solution, but it's fun to try something different, and to articulate why, and try to add something to the world.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Would you say that some of your values - if not all your values - capitalize on vulnerability? I wouldn't wanna connect the dots, but you've had some vulnerability younger in your life, and that's a value I see being portrayed... Leveraging your vulnerability is pretty interesting, because it lets you be transparent. Transparency is vulnerability, to some degree, or can be perceived in that case.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[12:01\] Yeah, what we say is that allows us to do iteration and transparency. Some of our most important values is kind of a low level of shame. We're not afraid of sharing that something isn't perfect yet, which is necessary for iteration. If you wanna get something done quickly, it's not gonna be perfect and you've gotta live with it, like "Hey, you could do better work, but you don't have the time to do it." I think we as a company try to have the confidence, like "Okay, this isn't done yet."
+One of the web pages I'm proudest of at GitLab is our Maturity page, which shows for every part of the product how good it is. By being frank about that, we can be open and we can iterate and we give ourselves room to ship something that isn't perfect, because we're not pretending it's perfect. I think that's really important. And that comes from the \[unintelligible 00:12:59.05\] had earlier in life. I sent the infrared receivers, and I sent them by postal mail, and most of the time they would arrive in a week, sometimes in two weeks, and sometimes in three weeks. It was just all over the place. We promised to ship them in two weeks, but there was this 5% customers for whom it would arrive late. To this day I kind of regret not being open and just communicating, giving the range to people, and instead pretending something that isn't completely true. So that's what we try to do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It sounds like you value owning flaws, or owning just truth, really. Because sometimes the truth hurts (as that saying) and obviously being honest isn't being vulnerable, but being overly honest can be seen as a vulnerability. But you sort of capitalize on being overly honest, because that's -- you can't make excuses for the truth. Truth is truth.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, I think that the truth is the first step towards fixing something. Yeah, some things aren't great, aren't where they should be. Take the speed of gitlab.com. We want that speed to be higher. But you could argue with the benchmarks, because they're never perfect, and everything else... But if we do that, we kind of put energy in that instead of energy in actually fixing it. And take the maturity of certain parts of the application - by having that page out there, it motivates our team to increase that maturity and make sure that things become better.
+If you're in denial about things as an organization, it makes it really hard to remedy the underlying cost, because you're pretending there's nothing wrong.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well said. You mentioned earlier on you were interested in physics... It seems like you were also interested in psychology. Did you read any books in particular, any classes, any studies at all into psychology to understand vulnerability, shame, these kinds of things?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I think that every human is interested in psychology. One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is about common misperceptions. What I also like is mental models of how you view the world. Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo has a great blog post, and he even wrote a book about it - the mental models he finds repeatedly useful. That's just very interesting, to have all those worldviews exist at the same time, to be aware of all these different ways to view the same facts and figures.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I couldn't help but quickly google "DuckDuckGo mental models" and find Gabriel's blog post, and I was skimming that for just a second... Skate to where the puck is going. That's an -ism, but it's definitely a concept to use to explain things, to explain how to do things in business even. You'd mentioned that before, going against the common wisdom. That's a mental model.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[16:06\] Yeah. There's so many core competencies... Conspicuous consumption, price elasticity. The list goes on and on. I'm actually reading the blog post now, during my accent removal classes, and it's been fun to go over them. Many I already know, but there's a lot of new ones, and it's fun to see all these ways of viewing that people invented over time.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I got into -- you said every human is, to some degree, interested in psychology. I could agree with that. Maybe not even self-admitted; not everybody wants to admit that. But I've kind of found some appreciation for it when I was studying behavioral economics, and I was just trying to find -- I got really interested; I'm a curious person, and I got curious about how people make financial decisions. The idea of sunk cost bias, for example, when you continue through something even though you know you've invested -- I'm paraphrasing the behavior, but basically you keep going even though you've put a lot of money in. You know it's a losing game here, but yet you continue, you persevere, sometimes to your detriment. To me, that's what got me interested in psychology, and we started that show called Brain Science.
+What we actually talked about recently - not mental models, but mental frameworks, which I believe are pretty much synonymous, but our framing of it was mental frameworks... How you view the world, how you see things, how you model what's in your brain, how you perceive the world and continue on. It was a fun show.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** And it helps you. For example, there's loss aversion. We count a dollar lost -- we experience it as much more painful than a dollar gained. So if you know that, all of a sudden you know why we do insurance. Insurance is overhead. We might as well just save, for everything but the largest expenses, that you really can't bankroll yourself... But it doesn't make sense to insure something you can afford out of pocket.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** But it makes sense if you view it from the perspective of loss aversion, because you're okay with paying from insurance, you're not okay with taking some cash loss on things. So I think it's really interesting, and it's a great way to understand yourself and the rest of the world.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Let's dig deep into the early days of GitLab, and let's go back as far as you want to... When I recall the earliest days -- now, I've been around for (I would say) a while... Just to preface it, we began our primary show called The Changelog back in November 2009. So we just last year celebrated our tenth anniversary, which was awesome. We've since spawned a full-on network of developer podcasts that we really love... And we've been doing this for about ten years now, so we've been paying attention to this space very closely.
+And the early days, I can recall, was this perception that -- you know, GitHub was really popular, and then we see GitLab, and it's an open source version of it; change a few letters, very similar. Take us back to the earliest days of GitLab that you can recall. Why did you get involved, what was it for you? Why were you even concerned or involved in these problems that it solves?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, so GitLab was created by my co-founder, Dmitriy. He created it because he needed it. He had two things he wanted to improve. He wanted running water, and he wanted better collaboration tools at work. And he started with the latter. When he created GitLab, it was to solve his own need, but he also open sourced it, and within a year he got 300 people contributing back to it.
+\[20:05\] That's when I saw it on Hacker News, and I thought "Oh, that's interesting." I'd recently become a developer; I became a developer later in life, and I was surprised that all the tools I used were open source. I was a Ruby on Rails developer, and it's amazing what ecosystem you get with Ruby on Rails, and all of that came for free... Except there was GitHub, and it was not free and it was not open source. It struck me as very ironic that the thing you collaborate with is not something you can contribute back to.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** So when they started GitLab, I thought that makes a ton of sense. These collaboration tools should be open source. I looked into it, I opened up the codebase, and the codebase was pristine. It was really high-quality, which is remarkable. Most of the time you either have the founder doing it in their spare time; they might create something to test a new technology, or something like that, and you get kind of a non-idiomatic thing, where they took this pattern and kind of over-used it a bit, because that was what they were doing at the time. But that wasn't the case. It was really beautiful, and idiomatic Rails. Also, all the contributions from those 300 people were integrated perfectly. So I thought "Wow, that's a really good start."
+Then I looked at what was missing. What was missing was you couldn't try out GitLab. You had to install it before even giving it a spin, so that's why I created gitlab.com, so it would be software as a service. I was aware of the success of Salesforce, SaaS was the future. I didn't create it yet, I just made that landing page, allowed you to sign up, and posted that to Hacker News. When that trended, I had a couple hundred people that were interested, and that's how we got started.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. I never heard the story of how it actually began that way. I mean, Dmitriy beginning, and even having a pristine codebase - you're right. Usually, it's somebody tinkering with a new thing, an interest, and the codebase is (as you said) not idiomatic, and not the best patterns, not the best examples of the code, or the best examples of the framework, for example, to go that route.
+Given the timing of GitLab/GitHub, what do you say to people, especially those who were there in the early days, that look at maybe the interface, and the name, and the mascot..&gt; The similarities. What do you say to them when they say "Well, you're just simply a copy and paste of GitHub"? What do you say to them?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** GitHub and GitLab share a common ancestor in GitWeb. So GitWeb is the interface that came with Git out of the box. It allowed you to run a simple server. So in my mind, I don't know how the name GitHub came about, but I can imagine that it was inspired by GitWeb. Now, the project already had a name when I met it, and if you change it, you change people's URLs, and download directories, and the whole thing... Especially for software, a name change is very disruptive, so we never changed it.
+**Break:** \[23:48\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about where you're going. Let's fast-forward quite a bit, just to sort of tease where we're heading. You're planning to IPO this year; November, if I understand correctly, is that right?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, that's what we have set as a goal in 2015. I don't think it's likely we'll make that date in November, but we're getting pretty close. We're over 100 million dollars of revenue. We're still growing at a healthy clip. We're unlikely to go public end of this year, but it's getting really close. We're now five years after taking our first external dollar, so that's been an amazingly fast trajectory.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. Over 400 million currently raised, I believe, if I got my numbers correctly. Current valuation - roughly 2.75 billion, which is what I wanna go into... GitHub was acquired a couple years back for 7.5 billion. They were valued at the time for two billion. You're valued now over what they were valued at then... And I'm just curious, when you choose to go -- so their route was a private acquisition, rather than going public (IPO). What is it that makes you choose that route for your company?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[28:05\] Well, first of all, it's not always your decision. The majority of the company is owned by investors. It's not my decision, it's a joint decision with the investors, and if someone came about and offered something that's way more than we ever expected, that we can get to in the future, then I think it'll sell.
+The reason that we have the ambition to become a public company is because it would allow us to stay independent. If you stay independent, it's more likely that you'll be a good steward of the open source project, and that we'll be able to preserve and further improve our values and the way we live them. That's important to us, so going public would be a good way to maximize the chances of achieving that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, also given the fact that you're pretty focused on being transparent, which is to some degree an oddity for a public company. Public companies have to be, by regulation, very transparent with their fiscal reports and things like that, but you're already sort of practicing all the practices that you would need to master as a public company, currently.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Well, yes and no. It's ironic that it's in the name, public company, but apart from the things that they're forced to disclose, they tend to disclose very little outside of that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly, yes.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** If we go public, we'd probably be the most transparent public company. It'd be fun to try that and to kind of push the envelope of what we're disclosing. The more you disclose, the more things people have to sue you over and to cause problems... So it'd be interesting to see how we manage to stay and increase our transparency as we become a public company.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, there's a lot of risk in it. Even doing things like this, once you go public, you're gonna have to be very careful with what you say to someone like me... Even though I'm not a journalist, I'm just a podcaster, but it's written, it's recorded, it's in history, it's stuck, so you have to be very careful once you're at that stage... Because it could influence your stock price, it could influence selling or buying, it could influence a lot of different things. Your perception of the business...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** For sure. But there's kind of rules around that, and the rule for this is material information, so it's fine to talk about how GitLab started as a company. It's not so great to say "Oh yeah, we're over 100 million in revenue. Actually it's (let's do an imaginary number) 650 billion today." Like, wow, that was a material disclosure. You can't do that as a public company, because this podcast is not a channel in which we regularly communicate in information, and anyway, you and your editors would know it before the rest of the world, which is also not great.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** But I think we can navigate that, and we'll see. We now have over 5,000 pages of our internal processes that are open to the public, and there's gonna be some more disclaimers on there, but we'll see what we'll be able to keep having. It says on our Transparency value that it's not gonna be easy all the time, and we're gonna have -- you're basically providing a ton of content for your future short-sellers. Short-sellers - they short a stock, and then make a case why it should be worth less. They're doing a useful job, but it's very annoying running a company having to deal with that. And now, you're giving them 1,000 times more things to weave into their narrative that they'll be presenting.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[31:57\] So that's gonna be super-interesting, to see if we have the resiliency to deal with that as a company.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I believe in you, that's for sure. What I wanna get into - you mentioned that it was not just your decision, but your investors and others who make this decision... And I really wanna understand - if GitHub can be acquired for that amount of money, at that same valuation, and given the annoyances you mentioned that could happen as a public company, and you know... You can share what you'd like, but I would imagine you have at least some early offers, or some indication of interest from people that would be willing to acquire GitLab, or bring you on to a Microsoft-esque, a Goliath like Microsoft... Why go through the pain of being an IPO company, and the scrutiny, when you can be the same company you are with no change whatsoever? How do you factor that decision to continue to go towards IPO, versus an acquisition that kind of gives zero opportunity for disruption of culture.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. Well, first of all, a shout-out to our investors relations person, Tony... Speculating about becoming a public company itself is something that is regulated. And the closer you are to becoming public, the less you can do of it. So the fact that we can talk about it now is only because we're a private company, with no immediate plans to go public.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** We don't necessarily wanna cash out the company, a so-called exit. I like to keep going. I'm having fun, it's interesting, we're adding something; I think the people at GitLab are producing great work... And the community is really helping the product become better at a rapid pace. On the 22nd we'll have GitLab 13 come out, with all kinds of great new features... The reason that we need to do something is that we raised money in 2015. As soon as you raise external money, they wanna get that back, hopefully more, and you need to get to a liquidity event. The two options are selling the company, or going public. And selling the company, you need to have interest.
+A thing I can talk about is that in 2014, when GitLab was less than nine people, and I was living in the Netherlands, and we never took an external dollar - we got an offer for ten million dollars to sell the company. The company was owned completely by me and Dmitriy at the time. And my accountant said "You should sell. You'll never have to work again." My response was "I really like work."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. \[laughs\]
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Of course, if you think it will be worth much less in the future, you should get out. But the most common reason to get out is it's draining, it's tiring. So that's why we try to not get tired.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Wouldn't you be able to stay though? I mean, if you got acquired, wouldn't you -- I mean, you're the negotiator, you can negotiate your ability to remain as you are. Why would things have to change given an acquisition?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, generally there's some change, but that doesn't have to change.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** It changes over time. There's a couple factors - who is the acquirer? Some companies are better than others, I think. Microsoft has shown, for example with LinkedIn, they can do a great job of letting the company run by itself. It also changes over time. It tends to be straight after the acquisition you still have a lot of control, and then it dilutes over time.
+But most of the time when a company is acquired there is a strategic benefit. The company is of more value combined with other things than before. For example, what you see with GitHub is they have now all kinds of Azure DevOps functionality, like packages and code spaces. It's now branded as GitHub and shipped as part of the GitHub product. And that's creating a synergy.
+\[36:07\] During the selling process you probably make a plan for what you're gonna do, but you should expect that to continue. And you might not always agree with it. In the end, it's not your company anymore. Over time there's gonna be more and more things you have to do that you don't agree with. So most founders end up leaving after a couple of years, or something like that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Personally, you're saying that you like working, you wanna keep working, and any acquisition would possibly change that. Well, not just you, but you know...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah... Well, first of all, the decision whether to sell or to get acquired is not about me. There's a ton of investors, they have the majority of the company. There's also 1,200 team members, so it's not so much about what I want. The only thing is if I wanna stop working on GitLab, there's no super-obvious successor. There are some really talented people that can run the company well, but sometimes that's a reason where the investors say "Well, if the founder is no longer there, it's a good time to sell."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** But whether we sell or not depends on what's best for everyone involved, of the shareholders, as well as the shareholders that are \[unintelligible 00:37:30.20\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's dig into something that makes you quite unique... You're all-remote, and in many cases, especially in today's climate of the world, there's a lot of press out there, a lot of interest in working from home and doing it well, ways to work remotely... And from what I can understand, you've always been all-remote. Is that correct? Always all-remote?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. I think the only exception has been Y Combinator, where we stayed in Mountain View for three months with the whole company. But other than that, we've never congregated in an office.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if you've always had this as a thing -- how did you get to all-remote? Was it just by accident, and you stumbled into it, or you sort of developed some values around it, and you were like "Well, this really makes sense for us, because of these reasons..." How did you get there? How did you get to all-remote?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, it started with me being in the Netherlands, Dmitriy being in the Ukraine, and our first team member, Marin, being in Serbia. So it wasn't practical to get together. Then I hired a few people in the Netherlands and they came to my house (I had a spare desk) for a couple days... But after that, one day they just didn't show up, but they were online, so I'm like "Hm. Interesting." They never asked permission, but they just didn't see the use of commuting to my place every day when all we did was work online anyway.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** And after Y Combinator, they told us that there's been very few companies that were all-remote successfully, so they advise us to get an office, and especially for the non-engineering functions, centralize them at the office. But after we got an office, the local people stopped showing up after a while. Kind of the same way as in the Netherlands - they came in for three days, and then they saw that it had little added value, and they didn't ask for permission, but they just stopped showing up, and kept doing their work.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** So we're kind of remote because there's just no added value in being in the office.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So they didn't ask for permission... That means that you have a perspective of giving individuals an opportunity to make choices in their position that best-suited themselves, as well as their position and the work they do. They didn't have to ask for permission because you already sort of gave them permission to make their own choices, it seems...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Never explicitly...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:04\] Right. Just through your demeanor.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** They never asked me. But the other people were working remote, so I figured that they didn't think it was a big deal.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** At what point did you begin to develop values around it? You've got a lot of -- like you mentioned, 5,000 pages of written material that describe and help people understand your culture, as well as internals and externals... So how did you get to this point where everything you were doing was documented?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, in Y Combinator we kind of changed our ambition. Before going to Y Combinator we wanted in five years to be a company of 50 people. During Y Combinator we changed our perspective. We want to be a company valued at at least a billion dollars, which kind of means at least 1,000 people in five years.
+Then I was on-boarding someone and I was like "Darn, I'll have to explain this..."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Again.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** ...again and again and again. I'd better start writing some things down... And it escalated from there. I think every significant company has a knowledge system or something resembling our handbook... But most of the time it falls into disrepair. It's not updated anymore. It's stale. So one of the most important things we do is work handbook-first. If you wanna communicate a change, you should change the handbook and communicate the change you make to the handbook. You shouldn't use a presentation or an email or another medium to communicate that change.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting, because that was my next question, "How do you then sort of become handbook-first?" and that makes sense. So if you wanna initiate change, it being in the handbook doesn't mean that it is change; it's sort of initiating change, because you or others have an opportunity to iterate on that and contribute back to it, and disagree or agree... Do you often have fights, to some degree, or spats, or however you wanna describe them, on changes?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Well, disagreements...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, sure.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yesterday I wanted to change something in our values. We have a value in transparency, like explain why, but we also have this mode in how we operate - the directly responsible individual doesn't have to consult with everyone before making a decision. And it wasn't clear what wins. Does the DRI have to explain themselves? And I'm really afraid of decisions flying under the radar, because if people find out about the decision, you'll have to explain yourself. So I wrote up "No one's owed a WHY. DRIs don't have to say why."
+And then someone in the organization, Emilie Schario, said "Well, I disagree with that." We called about it, and she had some good points, so I asked her to close my suggestion and make one herself. I'll review that, and I assume it's gonna be better than mine, and we'll merge that and it's set.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. How do you think your company has been better because of this? Communication-wise. Not just helping you to onboard. That was sort of a selfish - for good reasons - initiative early on, but it's now blossomed into this highly-communicable handbook that 1) clearly states to the outside world that has interest of working at GitLab, the kind of company you are, the kind of ways you operate, but at the same time it's highly-communicable to the people inside to foster and develop and ingrain in black and white, in text, your culture, who you are, how you operate.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. I think externally it really helps people opt into the organization. A lot of the people that ended up joining GitLab were people that saw the handbook and were like "Yeah, I'd like this way of working." I bet there's also a ton of people that see our handbook and are like "I don't like that way of working", and never end up working at GitLab.
+\[44:17\] So I think that companies are gonna become more differentiated. As remote working becomes more common, you don't have to appeal to all the people in your immediate area. If you can appeal to a small group of people, but all over the world, that is enough. So you can be much more opinionated as a company.
+I think internally, it causes us to be very intentional. For example, we're very intentional about informal communication. Being remote, you have to design informal communication. It doesn't happen at the water cooler, because you don't have one. But you can still facilitate that, so we have the concept of coffee chats. You are scheduled with someone else once a week, and you get to meet that person for 25 minutes. And it's like having that water cooler conversation, except it's a random person in the company. It could be from another country, it could be from another department. You don't just meet the people on the same floor.
+I think intentionality is on average a good thing. Same way with our values - there's not just six words, there's a whole lot of context on what we exactly mean, and then there's 14 ways in which we reinforce those values.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What are your values?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** So the acronym we use is CREDIT, and it stands for Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, and Transparency.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Iteration.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, for sure. Iteration is, I think, the value that is toughest at GitLab. It's the value everyone coming in externally says "I love iteration..." And then internally, we do it because it works really well, but we dread it, because it's so hard to have this idea about the future, and then have to break that up into smaller pieces.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. How did you get there? I mean, sure, you've got these six values, but did they just develop over time? Did they naturally bubble up, like "Okay, these things seem to be common trends throughout our documentation, throughout our ways we present ourselves, the way we present new changes to our guidebook..."? Was it a committee decision, was it you? Who did this?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I think early on we took the material we created and what was happening and we said "Okay, what are our values?" and I think I took the lead in that. We had 13 values. Then I quizzed a few people, including myself, and no one could remember more than three of them, so they were a bit too many, and causing people not to know... So I work with my CEO coach at the time, John Hamm, to cluster them. We tried to cluster them, and we came up with these six overarching values that now we recite from memory, so it's getting a lot better.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** And we checked them against five dysfunctions that can happen in organizations and made sure we address those five dysfunctions... And those became our values. I'm very proud -- if you look at the bottom of the Value page, you'll see an Edit button. If you click that and then click History, you'll find that these are living and breathing values. They continually get refined and refreshed. Not that the six big words change frequently (we've had those for years), but we continually try to improve the explanation of them. I think that's what's important - it has to be a living document.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you happen to know the five dysfunctions by memory?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** No, I don't.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[48:03\] I was curious about those, because I like how you pair that up with these six core values against the -- it could be more dysfunctions, but five most common dysfunctions in organizations. That's an interesting perspective, to identify and capitalize on the opportunity to establish these values - I don't know how to describe them besides just saying values - against the dysfunctions.
+Actually, I think the five dysfunctions is in your list here, so... I think it's "Absence of trust" -- this is based on your Docs, so thank you, Docs... Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know where that came from. There's a link to that, too. Maybe that goes somewhere else. Wikipedia!
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** It's a book by Patrick Lenicioni.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. We'll put that in the show notes for everybody to listen to them too, so you can find that... That's awesome, I like that. I'm always curious how these things come about. Over time, organizations become to better document themselves. Some, as you said, they'll start these guides or these handbooks, or some sort of knowledge base, and it becomes into disrepair, not look at often... But it seems that you've found a way to not only communicate in text that everybody can contribute to and edit and scrutinize how you operate, but you've been able to keep it alive. It's a living thing for your organization.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, and it's remarkable - there's more updates to this than fit on one page in this month that we're currently in, so that's great to see... Actually, I think now we have 14 ways in which we reinforce our values. I think we're gonna add another one, because I think we've just launched the GitLab Songbook. So we'll have a 15th way in which we reinforce our values.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's fine-tune down to an execution -- I'm not sure where those might stem from from a value, but it's definitely something I value that you've shared with the world. We've put a post out there from you on Changelog.com called Family and Friends First, Work Second... And it was an explanation by you, saying why GitLab publicly shut down for one day. Now, this (I believe) was back on May first, if I got the date correctly...
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yup.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Take us back to the Slack post on Friday, April 17th, where you shared why. Give us the behind-the-scenes of that post, and what Family and Friends First, Work Second means to you.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** What it means to us is that we understand that work isn't the most important thing in people's lives. A lot of companies make you pretend that it is, and I've always thought that was weird. Obviously, family and friends come first, and if there's something that you have to attend to, that is more important. We try to give people that space.
+We've noticed that after Covid, people were more productive than before. We've always been a remote company, so that wasn't the change; it's logical that people can deal with that. But it's strange that if people now have to take care of their kids, because the schools were closed, and still overall productivity was up... Maybe not for all the people with kids at home, but overall, because there were fewer distractions, people just started working more. And we wanted to make a statement at the company level, like, although we appreciate everyone contributing, this is kind of weird. We want people to take time off. That's why we said, "Okay, the first Friday of the quarter we'll have a no-work day if you can, if your function allows it." We're not gonna have any meetings, and we're gonna work on other stuff.
+\[52:03\] It wasn't so much about that day, it was about the message we send... Like, "Hey, we recognize that everyone is working hard", and people should allow themselves some time off, because it's intense... And if you've worked remote before, you know you're more productive per hour, and you should use some of that productivity to work fewer hours.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I have a quote here from the article - one thing you said was "Over-working or maintain the status quo during a crisis is not a badge of honor. In fact, I'll be more proud if employees were taking time off to reset and refresh, or spend time adjusting to this new normal with their families."
+Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I don't know many IPO companies that are on that trajectory... Maybe companies are changing, I don't know, but this to me doesn't seem like a public company kind of thing. It just seems like you're gonna be the opposite of what public companies do out there, because not everybody is saying that kind of thing, Sid.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. You get what you measure, and I've always found it strange that companies measure hours put in and hours worked and hours behind the desk, and kind of celebrate that internally.
+For example at GitLab you're not allowed to praise someone publicly for working outside of office hours, for that person. Or working hours, I should say, not office hours. And that's a very conscious decision. We wanna celebrate results. We're a very driven company. People work very hard, but we make it about working hard and achieving results, not about working long. Many times, people should be good stewards of their time, and make sure that they make the hours count... But we're not counting the hours. That's not what we're about. We're about results, not input measures, and that's what we want to articulate.
+Last year we tripled the size of our team, and a lot of people come from companies where the competition is who can take the least time off, and we want the competition to be who can get that work done, but take the most time off. That's what we're trying to do... But not very successfully, because we see people working very long hours during this crisis. It's a tough thing to change, and it's a tough thing to have that focus on results, and sometimes people try to make up for it by working long hours, and sometimes it's even needed. It's a complex subject, but I'm proud of the way that we celebrate people taking time off.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is a complex subject, because -- I'm reading this book called Indestructible, and it's so interesting, because the story in there is about a woman who is dealing with a crisis in their life, and she got addicted to this pedometer application. The problem wasn't the pedometer, the problem was the crisis in her life, and the thing she could control was her ability to do what the pedometer said, essentially... To earn the points, and do the steps, and be active, and stuff like that. So her opportunity for control in her life, in this story, in this book, was the fact that she could control listening to the pedometer, and doing what it said. That was her lever of control. And it is complex, because if you take someone's ability to control their work - maybe the only thing they can control in a world like we're in right now - away from them, then that can have ill effects as well.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, for sure. And people are like (as I was saying), "What am I gonna do with all that spare time that I have, since I can't go out?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "I just wanna work!"
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[56:05\] Well, I've found a solution. It's called City Skylines. It's a super-awesome computer game, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. But it's hard, and the interesting thing is "Why are games so much fun?" I think one attribute is that level of control. Another attribute is -- I call it transparency, but you have a lot of insight in how the mechanics work. The rules are very clearly defined.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's boundaries.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** You know how it works, it's understandable. And it's an important lesson - what people want at work is a sense of progress (that's the most important thing), but they also wanna know clearly how it works, what the rules of the game are, and they want something where they have a high degree of control and autonomy to influence the results.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Let's focus a bit on - for this last part here - maybe some hypotheticals, or actuals (we'll find out). I'm curious, given GitLab's future and what you know you're gonna do, what are the things you're most afraid of, and the things you're most excited about, about the future of GitLab?
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** I'm afraid of the company failing, and we made a nice web page about that. If you google "GitLab biggest risks", you'll find that. I'm super-excited about the impact of the product and the community around it. We're making people more productive. With GitLab you can get from having an idea to coding it and having it used and getting feedback about it and getting people excited about it in a shorter amount of time. And that's one of the things that make games fun - a very quick reward cycle, a very quick cycle time between doing something and seeing the result. And with GitLab we're making that easier for developers, operators and security people. I think that's super-fun, and I'm very proud that every month more than 200 improvements in the product come not from our team members, but from the wider community around GitLab.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's ask this final question on the horizon - I call it my horizon question. What's on the nearby horizon, that not many people are aware of? Not so much that it's brand new, or unknown, but something that people are less aware of, or not very aware of... On the nearby horizon for you, for the organization, that you could share today.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah... I think what's super-interesting is that it's clear now that a DevOps platform makes a ton of sense, and we now see our biggest competitor, GitHub, starting to ship more features. How that perception in the market changed a couple of years ago - everyone assumed that old products would be connected to each other and you'd have product marketplaces, and now it's clear that the idea Kamil (an engineer at GitLab) coined a couple years back, "Let's make it a single application \[unintelligible 00:59:23.21\] That's kind of gone silently, and unnoticed... But I think it's a really big development, and it will greatly help people be more effective.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sid, it's been fun talking to you. I love to go back into your history, into the early days of GitLab, and even yourself, to sort of grok where you came from. We didn't go too deep, but deep enough; maybe one day we'll have a chance for a part two, but I really enjoyed learning a lot about you and a lot about the DNA of the business you're running, and a little bit more clarity around why IPO versus private sale... Still more questions for me, but we'll live it there for now. Thanks, Sid. I appreciate your time.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, this is great. I'm always up for a second round.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Awesome. We'll make sure we do it then. Thanks, Sid.
+**Sid Sijbrandij:** Thank you.

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade and an entrepreneur by accident. I've been following Jeff's journey for the better part of Ugmonk's existence, and I'm also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts, and in addition to my appreciation for Jeff's product design abilities, I also look forward to his monthly email of the finer things he's digging... So that's where we're getting started.
+Jeff, one of the things I love about you is this aspect of sharing. You've got this simple email - that thing has become like a cornerstone of your personal brand, "Five things I'm digging." I bought stuff from what you've done, and I've checked out different houses around the world, because you have this aesthetic, this style you're into... How did that email originate for you? What made you start shipping that thing?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, it's a funny story... Most of the things like that that happen are not on purpose, and it was not some master plan to start sending out this email every month... It literally was I didn't have anything else to talk about; it was an in-between time. I think some of our product got delayed, manufacturing got delayed, and I was like "You know what - I haven't sent out anything, but I've got a lot of interesting things that I've seen and come across online..." and I was like "Here's five things I'm digging."
+\[04:04\] It was nothing to do with Ugmonk, nothing to do with me; it was just fun to spotlight some other things, whether it was architecture, or an album I'm listening to... And then from that, I got all these replies, like "Dude, thanks for sending this. This is cool. I didn't know about this band. I've never seen this new typeface..." And it was like "Okay, maybe I should do this again."
+That was 2-3 years ago maybe at this point. I don't know how many I've sent, but now it's like the monthly most-clicked email that I send out.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I just did a search for "five things I'm digging" in my email, because I can search by subject, and - I mean, it goes back a while. I think I have like a hundred in my initial view, first search... No, 50. And there's several pages of this. Like, lots. You've sent a lot.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah... It's different, because for me it's truly things that I'm into, things that I enjoy, and part of the Ugmonk brand and what I'm doing is looking at the world through my lens... And it attracts other people that like similar things, or are exposed to certain things that have a similar mindset, a similar design sense... And that's really what I think has kept Ugmonk Ugmonk - it's because it's me, and all of the products are going through that same lens, all the emails are written by me... And people are attracted to it; they either get it or they don't get it. And I'm totally fine if somebody's like "I don't understand what you do and why designers geek out on this." I'm never gonna sell them on it. But then the people that love it are like "Dude, this is the only email I open every month. The only one I look forward to opening."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that it happened by accident, like a downtime, which -- I don't know, I guess you seem to leverage the spaces, I suppose; the margin of life. And not too often do people really appreciate margin; as a designer, you totally appreciate space. Even the initial start of your business, which from my understanding - please give me the full story, but - is like you wanted to see your designs on shirts, and things like that...But you understand how to use space, and all too often we don't know how to capitalize, or even create necessary margin in our lives.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. I mean, Ugmonk from day one was this side project that was to keep me busy, because I wanted to make sure it's what I thought looked cool, everything has been a layer on top of that, year after year after year, still with that same mentality. I think when we create things that we're passionate about, and you're doing something that you love, there's a different authenticity. And I know that word is overused, but there's a different authenticity and passion behind that thing than if you're starting in business and truly putting a business hat on, "How do we get X number of users? How do we get this monthly revenue?", because you're driven by totally different forces. And while money is definitely important and revenue sustains our business, and we need those things, for me it has to start with "Am I even passionate about this? Do I care enough to invest time in this idea, this concept, this product?" And then I think what happens on the other side is people see some of that passion come out through my emails, and photos, and Instagrams, and videos; hopefully, they're getting a sense of like "Man, Jeff is really into this thing. It must be worth looking at."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a reason for it, yeah. There's a reason he likes it. And then you have a pretty particular style, that I think others appreciate as well. That's why you became successful. It might be helpful though -- I know you pretty well, or at least I think I do. I'm not a Jeff stalker by any means, but I've known you for a while, and I've been a fan of yours... I'm kind of bummed that I don't have your shirt on today; I've got at least a couple... So I felt like an idiot not wearing one of your shirts, but that's how it is... But give us a framework, give the listeners a framework of - not so much when you began, but kind of give me some timelines, the fact that you're a dad... Give me and them some sort of framework to understand Jeff.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, so I'll start way, way back - when I was a kid, I've always been into art, making things, creating things, designing things... I didn't really know that that was uncommon; I thought everybody just wanted to do that. I'd have friends over and be like "Do you wanna draw? Do you wanna color?" and they were like "No, I wanna do something else."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] Play G.I. Joe and get dirty.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[08:08\] Yeah. And I did that stuff, too. But I would sit there with my Lego set, or like Knex or any type of thing, and spend hours and hours obsessing over creating things from that. Not just following the instructions, but trying to make things. And I think that is in my DNA, because I've always looked at the world through that lens, and I always love looking at something, building things, making something out of nothing... And that's what's carried through, all the way to Ugmonk, even to this day. We're talking about products that I'm making today are still -- it's things that I see in the world, and things I wanna solve for myself, and I'm able to assemble and bring in all these parts to make something out of that. So I eventually studied design, and then launched Ugmonk in 2008, which is crazy, because that was a long time ago...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 11 years ago.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** The internet was a different place back then.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it was. Way different.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** E-commerce was just getting started, there was no social media... I think maybe YouTube was around, but I don't think Twitter was launched... Facebook was in its infancy... It was just completely different. You could name the five independent T-shirt brands on one hand. That existed at that time. And I happened to start around that, where the playing field was so empty; there was nobody really doing it, and I was able to carve out this niche for Ugmonk, and for the style, the minimalistic style that I'm doing now.
+I think timing plays a lot of the key part of why I'm still doing it... Because starting a brand today, starting a T-shirt brand, a lifestyle brand, a design brand - it's hard, man. There's thousands and thousands of people just showing up on Instagram, launching companies and then closing down a couple months later because it's just so crowded.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the hardest part? And how long is that list?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** So many, yeah... We could be here for another two hours. For me, the hardest part -- well, two things. Before I had kids, I would say the hardest part was just focus and deciding what I should be working on, and what I should be delegating, what I should say no to, because I have a tendency to just dive in head-first to anything, and then realize a couple months in "Maybe this project wasn't the best use of my time" or I'm getting distracted with all different ideas... I have no shortage of ideas, I guess is the thing.
+Some people say it's hard to come up with ideas... I'm more of the opposite. I've got so many ideas, I've gotta figure out "How am I gonna figure out which ones to work on?" But then after having kids, the hardest part is certainly juggling being a business owner and being a dad, and being a business owner and being a dad, juggling all of that stuff... Because it's completely different parts of your brain, and there's obviously time constraints when you have kids, and all the things that come along with that, that have changed the dynamic of Jeff just running his business however he wants. I have to be more intentional with my time. It's also been (I think) a healthy change being able to have those guidelines in place, so I'm not just working sun up to sun down every day.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And I imagine you work from home, right?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Your studio's at home...
+**Jeff Sheldon:** For now, yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For now, right.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, the kids are in the background, and there's pros and cons to it. I mean, everyone's working from home right now, but I've been doing this for my entire career pretty much...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I'm with you on that front.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Same. In a lot of ways, we could probably commiserate on stories, because -- let me try this one out then... I call them micro-moments. Some people might think "Gosh, you work from home. That must suck, to go get coffee and get bombarded by your kids." Nope. Love it. Those are my micro-moments. I get to spend infinitely more time with my kids throughout the day, because I take a break. We do dance parties; I'll invite my sons into the room, and we'll turn off the lights, we've got a little disco ball, chilling over there, kind of thing... Boom, it turns into a dance party. I love those micro-moments. What do you think about that?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, definitely. I mean, I love the moments that I get to have, and the fact that we eat three meals a day together practically every day, because we're home, and we're cooking... That's why quarantine didn't feel that much different for me. We're just always home, never going out and meeting people for lunch... But I love those moments, and I think there are a lot of things that I get to see that I'm not even realizing how grateful I should be, because it's always been this way.
+\[12:11\] If I was traveling and never home, I would have missed so many of these little moments with my kids, with them crashing into my office and taking all the stuff out of my cabinets, and dumping it on the floor, and pretending to work... They both say they have to come in and do emails, and they get up on my computer and they're trying to pretend to work. They're two and four, by the way...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** So yeah, I love that aspect of it, and then I think there's other times where I can switch out of the business owner hat, the designer hat, and I get to the point where I'm so side-tracked with them that there's this tension of like "Oh, I'd love to just keep playing with them, but I've got limited hours in the day, and they're gonna need dinner on the table", and they're gonna need the whole bedtime routine, and all that stuff is coming... So there's this tension back and forth, of like letting myself just relax, enjoy those moments a little bit longer than just a couple minutes, or just say "Sorry, kids. I've gotta go back so that I can spend the rest of the night with you after I'm done with work." There's no delineation. So it goes back and forth.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you structure your day then? Do you do 9 to 5, or has it got to be more sporadic because you're just naturally more sporadic in needs?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** It's fairly standard, probably anywhere between -- well, they get up super-early, so it could be 7 to 5, it could be 9 to 5, it could be 6 to 4... It kind of just varies, because they're always up at like 5 or 6 AM...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which is the unfortunate thing...
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Which is not necessarily my favorite thing, because I'm not a morning person.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, nobody likes to get up at 5 or 6 unless they are getting up to work out, or take a run... And even then, it's still a slog. It's tough.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think that you've got this aspect - what you're keying on though is while you and I may be on the fortunate side and we get to 1) work from home, and I think with quarantine you have a lot of people doing that, some enjoying it and some not... But we've had this luxury and blessing to be able to do that with our families... And same - breakfast, lunch, dinner with my family, every day. Now, sometimes I'm more busy through the afternoon and I might swing by for lunch or grab something quickly, or I eat in my office or something like that, but most times I'm trying to balance things.
+What I'm getting at is this -- you hear this, even the word "authenticity", you hear "balance". "You need to balance." I've heard this idea of work/life harmony, versus work/life blending, or work/life balance. How do you try to frame your balance?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, I think it's an impossible balance. There is no right balance that we're all seeking or striving for, because you're never gonna get to a place where things are perfectly harmonious and you're like "I'm working the exact right number of hours a day, and I feel like I'm with my family the exact number of hours I should be... Because the reality is work ebbs and flows, and there's times where I have to work straight through lunch, or I have to put the kids in the bed and I have to work that night to get something done... But then there's other times where it's like "You know what - it's Wednesday, and there's nothing going on..." This was pre-Covid, and we'd be able to say "Let's go to the zoo", and we would just take a day off.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right...
+**Jeff Sheldon:** No one's at the zoo in the middle of the week, because we would just go take the kids there. So I think it's more of a give and take and ebb and flow for what it looks like work and life... I'm very grateful and very thankful that my work is something I'm passionate about and I enjoy, so it doesn't necessarily feel like work = hate, life = enjoyment. So it's not just working for the weekend, it's certainly like "I enjoy this, I enjoy being with my kids, there's times where I don't wanna be with my kids, and there's times I don't wanna be working."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** But yeah, I think that question comes up a lot. We're all seeking this utopian state where we just figure out how to work-life balance everything.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's always changing, right? It's never static, it's always changing to some degree. There's some similarity in the change, but even the change is different and unique... So you can't say (like you said) "It's this way every single day, and my life is like this, and it's boring, and it's the same..." No, it's dynamic, and always in some sort of rhythm of change.
+\[16:12\] Something that you and I align on when it comes to, I would say, life and something that we've adopted in our business is "Slow and steady wins." Now, we add on "Wins the race", but life is a race of some sort, I don't know... Maybe the race is not necessary, but slow and steady wins nonetheless. For me, that's my North Star. If we're moving too fast, slow down and check yourself. Now, I added that one on, so I hope you don't mind... So in addition to "Slow and steady wins", it's like "If you're moving too fast, slow down and check yourself."
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How has slow and steady been something for you?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, totally... That's been a key differentiator, I think, of how I've built my business and how you build your business. I have never tried to build it to get this rocket ship growth where I can just turn it, get huge, get noticed, flip it, sell it to somebody else and cash out... Because for one, I can't really do that the way I build my business, because it's me; it's so closely tied to my identity; I guess I could sell myself to someone. But the actual idea of just putting one foot in front of the other and showing up every day, and doing things consistently - that is the thing that I think sets me apart from a lot of other designers that have started their little lifestyle brand or T-shirt brand. At some point they gave up... And I'm just here, like -- I'm not making huge, giant releases and crazy things all the time. I'm just putting one foot in front of the other. And for 12 years I've been doing that, to the point now when we launch something I have these passionate fans and friends and community around me that do help us have big product launches... But I call it the 12-year overnight success.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I have to admit I haven't bought Analog yet, or got on the Kickstarter, but I plan to.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Alright.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not an early adopter, but I'm an adopter for sure. And you've got like 30 days in a Kickstarter, so no matter what, you're early. So I'm late early...
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...but I do plan. Now, before we go into Analog, I do wanna mention Gather. So you've launched shirts, you've launched new things, you've got other people's products in the Ugmonk store, you've got coffee - different interests; we're both fans of Fellow, I love Fellow brand stuff. You've got a couple coffee things that are way out of my price range, so I'm not gonna buy those... But we at least appreciate the design and style of things.
+Now, you've launched other things before. Gather, in particular, was one of your most recent larger, singular products, that was sort of tangentially, mostly in the design space, not so much laser-fit into Ugmonk... But you sell things that are useful, to people who care about aesthetics, simplicity, minimalism, essentialism, whatever it might be, however you frame it. How would you compare the launches, the state currently? I know we're still in the launch, but the inertia of them. There's some sort of velocity you can at least recognize.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, up until 2017 - that's when I launched Gather, and that's the modular desk organizer that's all customizable... That Kickstarter blew up way beyond our biggest expectations. We tried to plan for worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, and it just blew the best-case scenario out of the water. Ended up raising $430,000 in 60 days on Kickstarter. And that was awesome, and then also really hard, because what that meant was we had this product that we had to ship to thousands of people, we had to manufacture... We were going through manufacturing overseas, and learning about all the things, and doing things at scale - handling customer service, handling lost shipments... All of that growth, which was amazing on the frontend, and people see the numbers on there and they're like "Oh, cool. So you get to pocket half a million?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, "Jeff, you're rich. You're loaded, Jeff."
+**Jeff Sheldon:** "What are you gonna do with all that money?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "You're going on vacation now." \[laughs\]
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[19:51\] But it was a really big learning experience. The product has been really successful, people love it, we're still selling them to this day... And it really just brought a lot of things back full-circle in that learning experience. Doing things at scale, and launching a product, and going big set us up to get on shows like Shark Tank, and things like that, where we're just gonna be this big brand, we're gonna try and get into West Elm, and Target, and all this... Because the Kickstarter did so well, it sent us down that thought experiment of "Oh, what if we could just cash out, and do this thing huge, and sell it off?" and none of that really happened. So it was really successful direct to consumer, direct to our customers it's still very successful, but I realized in that moment "I don't really wanna be the guy at a trade show selling one product for the rest of my life, trying to get into all of these big stores, and strike up retail deals."
+So after that whole process of going through that, realizing my eyes got big, wanting to go huge with that, and then coming back full-circle to like "I just wanna make more things. I wanna make more products, I have more ideas I wanna put out there... How do I get things done? How do I bring the manufacturing local? How do I have everything under one roof?" and that's where we are today... I launched a second Kickstarter called Analog, and I'm approaching it completely differently. So it's still going huge as far as the number of backers - over 3,000 backers at the time we're recording right now - raised over $300,000, and we're gonna have a lot of work to do to ship all these out... But I think the approach that we're doing with this is very laser-focused on like "This is a product for a specific need, for a specific group of people, and we're gonna sell it directly through our site", and really that's it.
+We're not gonna try and push this into other retail outlets, we're really trying to make a product, make it here in the U.S, and make it really well, even if our margins aren't as big, and ship it directly to the people by our own team. We're gonna ship out thousands of these. We're not gonna outsource that; we truly wanna bring this all under our roof. So we're doing things the long, hard way, is what I say.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a lesson there, the long, hard way. It's interesting that kind of choice though, because Shark Tank has this inertia... Right? Millions of dollars, big success. Even whenever you watch it, they have internal commercials of other entrepreneurs and founders who've come on Shark Tank, and "They started out here, and this is where they're at now", and it's painting this life - which I'm sure is great for some, if that's your choice... But what I like about someone like you, and what I think is important to key on, is that that path isn't the path for you, and you know that... But you took the time to think through it, and not just go down that path because everybody says "Well, Jeff, you've been successful. You should go this route. This is the default."
+That's what I like about you - you're alternative, but still not non-mainstream. You're still influential, and thoughtful, and that kind of thing... And so too often do people just go down the path they think they should go down, because everyone else is going down that path, and it's the default path... Or that the allure is truly the millions, or being on Barbara's team, or Mark's team... I would love to have Mark as a business partner, because he's probably crazy, man; he's probably amazing. But, gosh, what kind of weight would that put on me? Would that make me change my business to suit Mark's psyche, or my psyche? ...in terms of like "How do we think about business?" And I think that's what I like most about your approach, because you've taken the time to analyze "What does Jeff really want from this business?"
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. I mean, you probably wouldn't be eating lunch with your kids every day had you taken on investment, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** My gosh, no. I'd be eating lunch with them.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, exactly. And it's not "Slow and steady wins" anymore, it's "How do we get to the next ABC point as fast as we can?" or "How do we double that as quick as we can?" Because the reality is they wanna double their money, they wanna triple their money. That's why investors are investing in things. So not having that external pressure to please anyone, and just going at our own pace, and doing things knowing that we'll never have -- I can't burn $100,000 on Facebook ads and just be like "Oh, that didn't work", because I don't have money to play with. I've gotta be really conscious of how I'm spending the money in the business, and how we're taking steps to launch new products, versus just "Let's see if we can do it" and "Oh well, it didn't work. We lost the investors' money."
+\[24:24\] It puts the pressure on your own back, to be more conscious of that... And just to know that there's probably a ceiling. Like, I'm never gonna be a multi-billion-dollar company. Even multi-million. I don't see myself growing to a huge company, because what I like to do is make things, tell stories, and sell things. That's the thing that I really wanna hone in on; that's what I wanna be doing for a long time.
+**Break**: \[24:52\]
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:19\] Well, it's one thing to say "Slow and steady wins", it's another thing to live it... But I'd say more so to keep living it. Because you can do it one time, and it's like "Okay, great. This one time, slow and steady wins." But how do you come back to that every single time? Do you feel the pressure to go faster, go a different direction? How do you keep remembering "Slow and steady wins"? Because that's not easy.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, definitely not. And if I talk to any other e-commerce friends, or different circles of business owners, and Twitter, and all this stuff where you hear - everything is usually focused around growth, or celebrating acquisitions, or celebrating these big things, and you almost feel left out, like "Well, yeah, I'm never really gonna make a giant splash in the world, because I'm not gonna get written up on any site for how much money we've raised, how our fancy, new team and all the crazy stuff that comes along with how they spend the money, and advertising, and have a billboard in Times Square, or whatever it is - we're not gonna ever be that", and you just really at the end of the day have to be okay with it... Like, "This is not who we're trying to be."
+I'm not trying to be another direct-to-consumer brand that has done amazing things; I think that's a whole separate path, and it's not wrong, but I just know it's not me. I don't wanna be the next Warby Parker, and Harry's, and Allbirds, growing these huge companies, because that's just not what I like to do. I don't like to build and scale companies; I like to make things. So if I'm chasing people that are doing something like that, and doing it very successfully, at the end of that I wouldn't actually be fulfilled or enjoy the process of getting there, because that's not what my skillset is even designed for.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's about knowing what you want, and that's too easy to say. It's about knowing what you wanna optimize for. You have a particular style, a particular way you wanna live your life, particular things you value... And I think a lot of the journey for an entrepreneur is "What do I personally value?" Because once you understand that, and you have those things -- if not written down, at least etched in your mind somewhere, on your hard, in your soul, it's a little easier to take that first next step.
+And like you had said before, it's one foot after the other, not the other way around. It seems kind of logical, but maybe that's because we've been doing this a while individually, and then -- you know, this is your story more than mine, but I feel like that's the same for me... But I've been living it, so it's easy for me to say that, because it's second nature... But for some out there, it's like - they need representation. They need to know it's possible. It's okay to not wanna go down that route, because you value eating three meals a day with your family. Or when the pandemic is not in the state it is and it's easy to go to the zoo - "Hey, Thursday was kind of a suck; I wanna take the afternoon off, or the morning off, or whatever. Let's go do something fun. What do we wanna do? We have a zoo membership; let's go to the zoo. Great! Or let's just go on a walk, or a hike, or whatever." Not everybody understands that that's possible, I suppose, and I think it comes down to understanding your values.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, that stuff doesn't show up on your balance sheet, and when you're pitching someone to raise money. There's all these intangible things about designing a business the way you wanna design it, and I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all. I think some people are good at managers, and good at scaling businesses, and good at sales full-time, and that's what they should be doing, but I don't think everybody should follow that path and feel like bigger is better... Or like "Why are we sprinting to the end, to cross the finish line" and then you get to the finish line and you're like "Oh, I guess I'll just do this again"? Why not just pause and enjoy the journey, enjoy the process, learn from those things... It's the same thing that I've been doing - just learning. The entire 12 years I've been doing this has been one giant learning process, and I think that's -- you can't put that on paper. You can't go to college for that, you can't do anything to get that, except for truly experience it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:12\] Yeah... Learn by doing, for real, basically.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about -- maybe it's too deep, or maybe it's just deep enough, but... Actually trying to ship what you've gotta ship. So it's one thing to make it, it's one thing to design it, it's one thing to even find the unique way to create a video that markets it the way that Kickstarter allows you to do, but it's another thing to fulfill it all. You mentioned this idea of local, in-house... What makes you feel that way, versus outsourcing? I think it's kind of obvious, to some degree, but why do you care about local? That kind of aspect. Bring it home.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, it's a little bit counter-cultural in the way of Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek - outsource everything, outsource your life... And I think there's actually valuable things in that book, and valuable things that Tim would talk about... But this idea of "If I outsource everything, I can basically just sit in my chair on a beach and vedge, and all of those parts of the business work for me..." The reality is that doesn't work. There has to be hands, and people, and processes in place, because things don't go right all the time... And outsourcing things, in theory, should be the best way of doing it, because you outsource to someone who's better at that specific skill, whether it's shipping a physical product, coding a website, writing copy... But the reality is when you outsource, it doesn't just magically happen and come back finished, perfect, done, every single time. And there is a cost of actually doing those things.
+For us, outsourcing our shipping, outsourcing anything else that we try to do - the cost of losing customers' trust, or losing that brand recognition and brand value that we built is everything... Because I'm in this for the long game, and I'm not in it just to sell a product and then turn around and start up something else. The Ugmonk brand is what I've invested in, and when it comes to shipping a physical product, I think those relationships - whether it's customer service for something that went wrong with the product, or a shipment, all the way down to just physically inspecting the products, going through our hands, not trusting some fulfillment service or Amazon to say "Yeah, your product looks good..."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** So it's closing all of those gaps and really making an airtight business to bring it all in-house, have everything here - it's expensive; again, it's the long, hard way of doing it... But I do think at the end of the day the customers get the best experience, and it builds that lifetime value for us.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You had said something there too about - and this is where we align, too - this idea of... Did you say customers' trust? Is that what you said?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm trying to phrase it properly... And for us, the similarity to that is listeners' trust. We obviously are a podcast -- podcasts; we have six active podcasts on Changelog.com... We've been doing it for a long time, shipped lots of shows... We have great brand name sponsors, that we love, that help us build our business, and they're great, amazing partners... But sometimes we get the odd question where -- not that they intentionally want to, but somehow, someway we objectify or get asked to objectify our audience, which basically erodes listener trust.
+So similar to you, if that's our line, we never break that line. If we break that listeners' trust, it's for nothing. If you're listening to this show and you don't trust that this show is authentic, that I'm literally talking to Jeff, and Jeff is a cool dude, and I've known him for years and love his story, and finally he's on this show - if that is broken, what's the point? If I make choices in my business that make me objectify that or break that rule, it goes against everything.
+So customers' trust for you - when I read what you're digging, or I know you're launching Analog and for some reason it's applicable to you (or maybe it's applicable to me), but because I trust you, I can think your next thing you launch is probably because you've put a lot of thought into it. That's the brand I think of when I think of Jeff, and Ugmonk, and what you're doing - you're very thoughtful, you're meticulous, you're minimal, you have certain aesthetic qualities you like, and I'm gonna trust that when you do something, because of the choices you've made, that's still true.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[36:21\] Yeah, that's the thing that you can't buy or just pull out of thin air. You can't spin up a new brand tomorrow and have instant trust with people. That's why people have celebrity endorsements and all these things. They're trying to show "No, we're legit, we're legit!" But the better way of doing it is just to show up, be authentic, show that you care, deliver on what you say... A lot of people are really jaded about Kickstarter because they've never shipped the products that they backed, and "I don't know if I wanna back anything again, because these creators screwed us over..."
+Now it's like, for 12 years we've delivered products. We've built this trust that people don't have to wonder if we're gonna ship their product, if it's gonna arrive, what condition it's gonna be in, if we're gonna take care of them if there's a problem. Our repeat customer rate is through the roof. I don't know what the industry standards are, and stuff like that, but I can tell you for sure that ours is way, way above that.
+Now, our top-line revenue number might be way below some of our competitors or some of the people running similar brands, but our loyalty is so strong, and I feel like that's more important to me. I'd rather have the 1,000 true fans, the Kevin Kelly article that's been around for years and years... 1,000 true fans who will show up and buy and trust and support me for whatever I do, because they actually care, not because I have half a million people following me on social media.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You act differently when it's the long road... Like you said, the long, hard road. When it's the long-term, the long play, the long tail. All too often in business do we hear advice, seek advice even potentially, from those who are short-term players. And it's not that they're wrong, it's just they have different goals. They fit them, for whatever reason; they're optimizing for short-term versus long-term, and you just make different choices.
+I can't help but notice you've got this aspect of longevity and very high personal touch in all the aspects of business, and then obviously you have scale problems, as businesses eventually scale, whether you want them to or not... You can control it as best you can, but still, businesses are little animals and they grow; it's just how it works, and sometimes you just have to make hard choices.
+How do you follow that line of CEO/business decision-maker/designer? How do you structure your week, your day? How do you even mentally create the frameworks to "Today I'm CEO Jeff, tomorrow I'm designer Jeff. Today I'm packing boxes Jeff', I don't know... How do you juggle all these different facets?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, some of that I've figured out over the years; that is truly worth delegating and bringing on other people. I'm obviously not the one shipping out every single product we sell, or I would never have time to make things... And what I've really tried to do is bring in people that complement the things that I either shouldn't be doing, or the things that I'm not good at. So I have my sister-in-law who runs all of our operations, customer service, and is really taking that over in these last two years... And she's been able to off-load a lot of this stuff from my plate that I was just doing, like admin work, and invoicing... I just did it, because that's what I just always did, but what that meant is as this stuff grew, there was less and less time to create new products and less and less time to do anything, to record podcasts. I just didn't have time to do those things.
+So finding specific people that you can trust to take those things off my plate - that's what's been the key for figuring out "How do I create this space and time?" And just being self-aware of what I wanna be doing... Like, "Do I wanna be designing all day? Do I wanna be scaling a business all day? Do I wanna be speaking at conferences?" Going through that thought experiment to figure out too exactly what I wanna do, and then how do I get there, how do I get rid of -- okay, I don't need to be the person ordering inventory right now. I should have someone else do that. Or "How do I figure out someone else to source packaging for us? I don't need to be the person sourcing it, I just wanna design it." And going through these little things of like figuring out the exact lane I wanna be in day to day.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:19\] Yeah. How do you do that though and not lose touch? Because that's what I find hard. Delegation - I'm not saying that's not a good answer, but at some point you're like "Now I've lost touch, because I've delegated." How do you keep a heartbeat with the process, in touch with the tangibles that you've let go? How do you maintain the things that are extensions of you, since a lot of Ugmonk is very much like an extension of your personal likes and dislikes? How do you keep in touch?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, I mean - we're still at such a small scale that I don't have like... You know, an all-staff meeting is three of us; it's not like 50 of us.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... Okay. And it's usually at breakfast.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** I don't have to be like the Undercover Boss TV show where I sneak back into my company and nobody even knows that I'm their boss.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a cool show, by the way. I still love that show.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah... I mean, I'm still very high touch on a lot of things, and the processes or the ways that we do things is not like "I don't know what's going on over there." I think I'm very much involved, but maybe the action that it takes to ship a product, or the action it takes to reply to customer emails - I'm still aware of those things, but I'm not the one doing the physical work when it comes to that. So I don't know, I don't think we have it dialed in perfectly, and there's still things I'm doing that I really shouldn't be doing, and things that I wanna be doing more of... So I think it's a learning process too, but it's an interesting way, because we have a family dynamic; it's a family-run business. We're all here locally, so we can actually be in-person, we can see our products, rather than this 50-person team scattered across the globe and nobody really knows what's going on, except for what's in Slack.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Does that make the family dynamic difficult, by any means? Is Thanksgiving easier or harder because of - I don't know, somebody's slacking, or... Just hypotheticals, of course, but at some point there's relationship tension, family or not. Is there some sort of unspoken, or maybe spoken bonds, like "Hey listen, we're family, we're doing this, but the thing that matters most is family, so first and foremost if you've got an issue, we're family"? Do you foresee any future issues? Are you curbing against those? What are your thoughts on that dynamic in business?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** When people find out that I work with my family, there's two reactions. Either "Dude, that's awesome! You employ your mom and she does all your shipping?" Or "How the heck do you work with your family? I would kill my brother/ I would kill my sister." So I always preface it by saying "For our family, the chemistry or whatever it is seems to work well." Not that we don't have our differences, not that there's tension involved, but it just seems to work well, and there's a lot of trust, and a lot of closeness in our family... But I don't recommend it to everyone. If you knew you would bite off your brother's head as soon as you started working with him, probably not a good idea to go into business with him.
+So there's not really a definite line between "Okay, this is family time. We're not talking about business." I think it blends, because it's all...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Already blended.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** ...one thing, and we're getting together... And I don't think that's really been a problem. I mean, there's times where work probably takes too much precedent, and inventory has physically overrun my parents' house, because that's where all the things are still stored, up until -- a couple of months from now we'll be moving it all out, but... Yeah, I have a very supportive family behind me, and that's something also that I can't just take for granted, because not everybody has that support system.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[43:42\] Yeah, that's true. For my wife and I there's times where I tell her about my day, and she's involved in things, too; maybe not in all the details, but she's emotionally and mentally involved, and helps me behind the scenes discuss things and weigh options, and opportunities, and reminds me slow and steady wins, and "Slow down and check yourself if you're going too fast..." She helps me be my rudder to like "Don't go too far into the deep end." There's times when we're having our time, and it ends up becoming -- or I end up bringing up stuff from work, and next thing you know it's 20 minutes later and I've just talked about a bunch of work stuff.
+But she loves me and she's supportive of me; it's a unique process that you have to be aware that "Don't go too far. There's still a relationship there, there's still a marriage there", in my case. In your case it's your sister-in-law. I don't know what your wife has done for the business or where she operates at, but it's gotta be a challenge and you don't want work to overrule and the relationship to suffer as a result... And that's what I was hoping to get some wisdom from you - this idea that in the end it's family; it's not business first, it's family first.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, keeping those things in check is hard. It's not always the natural thing, where I'm ready to jump in and play with the kids if I've just had something crazy happen during the day with work. I wanna tell my wife, I wanna go into all this detail about these things, and she's like -- you know, they're ready to eat dinner; they wanna come play with you...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They wanna do Legos.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** ...and climb all over you and turn you into a playground, and all that stuff... But trying to just get those reality checks. It's more of a self-awareness thing than it is anything, just to be like "Okay, I'm doing it again. I need to stop. I've gotta put work aside, and we'll come back to it later, or when the kids are in bed we'll talk about this."
+It's hard, because -- you know, if I hated my job, maybe it'd be different, because I'd be like "Fine, I get to leave the office early and I don't have to deal with that person." But when you enjoy it, it can have the opposite effect, where it can still overrun your life, but in like a bad way, where the tension becomes "Can you just let work go for a minute? Can you stop talking about work?"
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. What are your thoughts on how you work is perceived by your children? And I'll frame it like this - my wife and I were talking about this recently, and she's like "Babe, it's kind of weird, because your son..." Sure, it's pandemic, let's preface it with the fact that we're all in quarantine anyways, but as we said before, prior to that - we both already work from home anyway, so this is life; how we do things is life. It's not different because of Covid or the quarantine. She's like "You walk across the house and you go to work, and then you come out... Other kids don't have that perception. So how do you take what you've done as a father, but impress them how work is different, or how work can be different?" And I think it's also important to see your passion for what you do.
+My son had to do this thing for school -- he's in pre-school, he's four years old... And he had to explain what his dad did, and it was comical. I loved it... Because apparently, I listen to music all day.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** You've got headphones on and you're just jamming out...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've got headphones, we talk into mics, we have music on our podcast, I edit, there's music involved... You know, there's definitely music involved, but his perception of what I do is uniquely different than most other kids... And how does that shape him? What I mean by that is how do you let what you do for work, impress your kids in who dad is, and your passions in life, and the things you value? ...from that perspective, from a work perspective.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, that's a good question... My kids are two and a half and four, and they're just now to the point of questioning things, deeper questions... What did my son say the other day...? "Where do strawberries come from?" He was just genuinely curious, like "Do they come from animals? Do they come from a tree?" Just like things where you don't think about... And they're starting to pick up on different things about work... I have all these damaged pieces from the \[unintelligible 00:47:48.12\] around, and they play with them, and they're putting stuff in, and they pretend like "Hey, I'm sending \[unintelligible 00:47:53.13\] to someone."
+They're kind of starting to get the concept, like "Hey, we make and sell physical products", and then they're trying to reenact it... But I don't think they understand that most of the time, most kids don't get to see their dad all the time, or walk in on him in the middle of a call, and all that... Now it's becoming more normal, because everyone's at home... But there's things where, as they're growing up, I wanna make sure that I'm being intentional with showing them what I do, how I do it, how it's different, and also for them to be grateful for the time and the perks that they receive, even though they didn't have a choice... But for them to see, like "Hey, not everybody gets to see their parents this much. There's a lot of things where it feels normal to you guys..."
+\[48:34\] And I'd love to get them involved in the business in some way. Not like they have to inherit Ugmonk and have to carry on the family name, but just to show them what it looks like to pack 100 orders, and get all sweaty carrying boxes up the stairs. That's part of it too, and I think that's gonna be fun, just to bring them into the whole idea of what we do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. That's such a cool thing, I think... And I feel so fortunate, because we do podcasts with my son that we have, The Eli Show. My son's name is Eli... We haven't done one in a bit, but we do a podcast together every once in a while. It's usually about trainings, or certain colors, or questions like "Where do strawberries come from, for example?" We'll just talk on this thing, and like -- I want him to see that it's uniquely different than what other dads he sees out there in the world might do... But it's not that it's different or better, it's just unique. It's different. I want him to even feel welcome. I don't know how you are with your office or your workspace at all at home, but I don't want my kids to feel like "You can't come in here." I want them to come in here. "Be careful of what you touch, but you can come in here. You're not not welcome. I want you to be able to come in. Obviously, there's times and places where it's more or less better, but for the most part I want you to feel like this isn't dad's world; you're welcome in here."
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, I have this one cabinet back here that's their cabinet, and it's just got all the extra hardware, and pieces of stuff in it, and they come in and take it all out and make a big mess... But they know that's their one cabinet that they get to play with, and pretend to do work, and deliver me my coffee, and all these things.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** So yeah, trying to keep them incorporated... And big-picture, what I desire is that they'd be able to see how many options there are to do what you wanna do in life. You don't have to follow a certain path, and I think so many people are just assuming, like "You have to do this. You have to go to school, you have to go to college, you have to be this, you have to work your way up the ladder", and a lot of people just don't fit that mold, and there's so many other things that you can do with your life. As we're seeing college and things kind of fall apart, and the whole virtual thing right now, where people are like "Wait, why am I paying $100,000 a year for this virtual Zoom college?" There's just a lot of different opportunities out there, and different ways, that are not better or worse; to go to a trade school, to become a podcast editor, to design, to do any of those things. There's just a lot of opportunity, and I hope that they see Ugmonk being such a different thing that it gives them ideas to do what they wanna do.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. Let's laser in on Analog, because I'm really curious about the inception. It's literally a physical list that you handwrite, it's a unique system... From what I can understand, you've been doing it for years... What's been the process of creation, and what does it mean to you?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, so Analog is what I'm calling "The simplest productivity system." When I describe it, one of the key things is this paper to-do list - it's 3x5 index cards that I've designed - does not replace your digital system. It's not like "Oh, instead of writing emails, now I use a typewriter and a carrier pigeon. Ah, that's better, because there's no distraction." No, this actually helps me work better digitally, because I'm able to pull my tasks out, put up the ten things on this card, write them down, and have it stare at me all day, every day, or right next to my monitor, and that's what keeps me focused.
+There's something about that, and the tangible crossing things off, having it there, not having to swipe up and look at it, or switch tabs to look at it. That has worked really well for me, and that's why I created a product out of it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:14\] What is this system? Is it simply a daily thing, or is it like a long-term, "Here's a week goal"? Is there more to it than just simply every single day?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** I use it daily. So there's three cards; it divides everything into Today, Next or Someday. The Today card is what I start with every single day. If I don't start with that card, I'm usually in my inbox, or scrolling YouTube or something, and before I know it, half the day is gone.
+The Today card I fill out every single day, and then anything that doesn't get crossed off automatically goes on the next day's card as I start that day. And what happens is you start carrying over these tasks that you're not doing or not getting to, and by the fifth or sixth time you're like "Either I don't need to do this, or I just need to get it done first, and finally pick up the phone, make that call, and do all the things."
+It's beyond just being an index card, and being a well-designed index card with this wooden holder. It's really a way of thinking, and it's about prioritizing, it's about constraints... It's about really saying what is enough, like "How much did I do today?" If I have a digital list of 53 things and I only get to five, I feel guilty; there's this productivity guilt. I didn't get to enough things. The Analog card constrains things to up to ten things; sometimes I only put two or three things on there that I have to get done that day, cross them off, and I'm done. There's a sense of completion.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about the design process to this? How did you get to this framework where you just literally -- you know, somebody else's 3x5 cards, turning them vertically, writing things down... Or was it a blank sheet? How did you get to this system to think "I should design this and make this a thing" and get to where you're at now. How did that play out?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, years and years of using regular index cards, and saying "This keeps working for me. Maybe I should design a custom one, print out some ones just on my own printer..." The card itself is really simple, but what I did was pull in other ideas and concepts that have already been established as ways to be productive, getting things done... You know, things that other people have shown me. Bullet journaling... A lot of these concepts -- I'm not taking the credit that I created them, but I brought them all into a format that seemed to work for me, in this card format, rather than like a big journal or something else. So I brought all these concepts in, and then the card is just very simple, but it's effective enough and it's open enough that you can use it however you want. You might not use it the same way that I do, and I color in half the circle if something is progress, and fill it in if it's all the way complete, put in an arrow if it's delegated... But the card itself can be used in so many different ways, and it can be used for other things.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just simply, yeah.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** People are even telling me -- some of the friends I had testing it was "I bring this to meetings with me. I bring one 3x5 card to a meeting, and that's all the notes that I can take, and then I leave, and I don't bring my laptop." The difference is made in the clarity of discussing things without having browsers showing up, and you get distracted, "Let me show you this, let me show you this." So just like -- I don't know, I think it's really a shift of mindset more than it is just a physical invention, because people already write things down. I don't have to convince anybody to say "You should write this down." "I already use post-it notes, I already use a journal, I already use this..." or "I lose it. I can't find this. I put it on the back of an envelope."
+So I'm really just pulling in all of these concepts, both physically and mentally, and making Analog what it is.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And if you're listening and you're thinking "I wanna see this thing", I'm sure you can just google "Analog Kickstarter." A-N-A-L-O-G, like Ana, Log. Kind of like ChangeLog. Just kidding... But there' s a video at the top there, a well-done video. Jeff, there's nothing that you do -- gosh, sometimes I hate you, but sometimes I love you... You're so good at presenting things so well, man. I'm very impressed with how you show off your shirts, how you show off your products, the way you approach creating videos like this... It's just so good. So good.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[56:04\] Thanks, man. Yeah, I actually shot the video and edited the video myself, because I was planning on going down to shoot with a whole film crew, and editing, and all that stuff - it was gonna be like a whole production. But then Covid happened, and I was like "Oh, what am I supposed to do now? Do I just wait till this is over?" and here we are, months and months later. So a friend challenged me, and he's like "Come on, you can do video. You've done some other stuff before" and I'm like "Ah, I don't know if i can make it good enough. I really want this video to be awesome."
+So I spent like a month just planning it, working on it, diving into Final Cut, trying to learn all of the things... I had my brother over for a couple times to hold the camera. People were asking me how I was holding the camera with me at the desk... The two of us just worked together, and then I just edited it, I hired an animator to do some of the animations, and spent way, way too many hours working on that final video.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Scrutinizing the details, man... Yeah.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, I love obsessing over that stuff. That's maybe one of my strengths and my weaknesses. I could spend all day, just weeks and weeks working on a single thing.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a future "Sweat the details" shirt coming soon?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Say it again?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was tongue-in-cheek, meaning you sweat the details...
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Oh, sweat the details... Yeah, I did have a shirt that says "All in the details."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** All in the details.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's definitely it. If you're not obsessing over or sweating the details - those are the two ways you can kind of frame that. That's what we tend to tell ourselves. But then it's also "Perfection is the enemy." Sometimes when you're sweating the details, you're sweating perfection; and are you serving perfection, or are you serving done? And you can sort of ebb and flow and flying it from there... But you've got such a good delivery, and kudos to you for making it work, and still delivering the Ugmonk style that I'm used to seeing. It's well done. It's really well done.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Thanks, man.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm very impressed.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** I think it goes back to, again, that process. I actually had a ton of fun in that process. I had the story in my head, worked through so many different revisions of scripting it out and storyboarding it out, trying to get a concrete -- like, "How do I get this idea communicated? How do we shoot the BeeRoll, and how do we get this concept across to people in a three-minute video?" And even though that's a challenge, and it can be hard, and I don't feel like I'm a professional filmmaker, I do enjoy trying to figure that out, dissecting other people's work, studying other film and understanding that stuff to a point where I'm like "I'm gonna try this." And not to claim that I'm gonna win some film festival award ever, but to get something to the level where people would be like "Wait, you shot that yourself?" and I'm like "That's the best compliment you could get."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ha-ha! Well, you did go to -- what was it? Iceland? Or was it Greenland?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, that was a point-and-shoot camera in Iceland, and that video blew up. That was probably the most watched video I ever made.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's impressive though... We'll link it in the show notes for the listeners. That video was amazing. To me, one aspect that I like about what we've been able to do here at Changelog is that it started out as just a podcast. Just. That keyword "just". But then it got into all these other tentacles of things I love to do - photography, film... We haven't done all these things all the time, but we have done some of them over the years... But it's like this playground of "Okay, here's the core interesting brand, but here's all these other tangential interesting sub-things I like to be involved in", and this gets to be a place that I can make my long-term play, and an interesting playground to do not just podcasts, or JUST podcasts, but to do so much more than just simply that. That's what that is for you. It's like, I'm impressed, but I'm not surprised, let's say it like that. I'm totally impressed, but not surprised... Because I saw that video that you did, and sure, it was just point-and-click, but you've got a certain style, and if you can study somebody else enough, or people that impressed you, then... Mimicry is -- I don't wanna say it's easy, but if you're good at what you do already and you already have this designer aspect to you, with a little effort, the surprising thing is that most people can do a lot of things they don't think they can do, like this, for you. I'm not surprised, but I definitely am impressed.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[01:00:20.27\] For me it's more about training my eye to see things in just that natural understanding of the way that I can see the world, or just understand why I like something... I think a lot of people will say "I like that", but they don't really know why they like a certain thing.
+For me, it's a tricky balance. I think we all face this, but it's not about having the latest gear; I didn't rent some $20,000 RED camera. I have this camera that's a Micro Four Thirds that's probably 5-6 years old, decent lends... It's a decent enough setup, but really what it comes down to is nobody is going to like or dislike that video based on what camera I had; it was more about how I communicated, how it was shot, what was the story behind it. Did that story connecting with people, or did it not? And getting past some of that gear, and tech, and tutorial stuff - that's where a lot of people seem to stop. It's like, "I can use this camera really well", but you can't tell a story with it. It's gotta be more than the gear.
+And again, I'm not trying to put myself on a pedestal, like everything I do is perfect, but I do know there's forums and forums of people debating audio and video gear, and what did you actually make with it? What did you create? What story are you trying to tell with it? And a lot of times what it comes back to is just talking about gear, just talking about code, and all of these techniques, and not actually building something. I like to see people that build things, regardless of if it's an iPhone video, or if it's a full-on produced video.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, all too often do we get kind of gear-crazy, like "I've gotta know what Jeff's setup is. What does he have on his desk? I can be Jeff if I'd just know what kind of machine he uses, or camera he's used." And then that's a part of the story. The other part is the passion, and showing up, and fine-tuning the craft, and getting through the suck, and saying no to a thousand things, caring about those thousand true fans... Slow and steady, sweating the details. That's the stuff that I think is the value, not just simply like "Oh, I use this camera, or this lens, and this light, and with this angle, with this aperture or whatever, and so you can go and do, too." Sure, you can, but it's not just simply the specs.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. Taking time to hone your craft is different than learning a new skill. Somebody could teach me how to play the trumpet in probably a couple of days. I'd be terrible at it though. It takes a lot of time to keep working and keep perfecting one thing, and in a world where there's a million options to do everything, and we can pick up any type of skill... I can be a coder, I can be a photographer, I can be an actor... People don't stick with something long enough to really perfect it, and then when you see people that have, and you see professional athletes, professional musicians - you're like, "Man, they're amazing", but you don't see the 22 years that they've been just sweating it out, literally sweating it out to get to that place to finally be recognized for it. Because people don't wanna spend that much time doing anything.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, if it was easy, everyone would do it.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ain't that right?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Exactly.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's put some urgency on the audience then... For those who are like "Man, I'm sold. Take my money, Jeff." How can you take their money? I'm just kidding...
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Lots of ways.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, how can they get involved with Analog? What's the next step? I know it's in Kickstarter right now. Listeners might be listening to this after the fact, I don't know... Let's say they're listening to it pre-Kickstarter being over, and then post-Kickstarter being over. What is the process, tiers...? What do you say?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[01:03:55.19\] Yeah, we'll make it easy. Ugmonk.com/analog. That will forward you to the Kickstarter if you're listening to it now. And then after Kickstarter, that will forward you to a page on our site where we're gonna continue selling Analog. But the Kickstarter will be the best price, the best option to get in. We're offering special deals and perks to the people that get in early, while the campaign is running... But we do plan on turning this into a long-term thing, where we're gonna be selling these cards - the cardholders - on our site. I'm even thinking about doing a subscription, and things like that, where you get automatic refills on a monthly basis, those kind of things. You can check out the whole campaign if you just go to that URL.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. Refills, I like that. I didn't think to ask you about that, how do people get refilled. Well, we'll definitely put those links in the show notes, so that those listening can follow along. And you've reminded me of one question I didn't actually get to ask you about Analog... And I can't stop there, because I've gotta have this question answered. You mentioned before about what to focus on, the biggest challenges that you faced, one of the biggest ones was like "I've got lots of ideas, but which one should I do? Which one should I do next?" We kind of know the story of Analog, but more particularly, how did you know you should have done it, and how did you know other people would appreciate it? What were those things that you did? Did you have a committee/cohort of people who were like "I'm trying this, Jeff. I love it"? Did you refine it with other people, or was it simply in isolation?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** It was a little bit of both. So because I've been using index cards for so long, I thought -- originally, it was too simple of an idea to even launch, because people can pick up index cards and basically replicate what I'm doing with Analog right now. And if they wanna do that, that's totally fine, but we're using nicer paper, it comes with a stand, it has the bullets already ready for you... It's this framework and structure to get you thinking about it. It serves one purpose, whereas an index card - we all have stacks of them, but they can serve any purpose.
+So I knew that there was something there, because I kept going back to it, and it kept helping me. I'd try a new to-do app, and then a week later I'd wanna switch. I'd try a new task manager, then I'd switch... And the index card kept being a thing for me, so I started sending out samples to friends. Once I printed up a short run and been like "Hey, do you wanna try this thing out? This is what it's doing for me. Tell me what you think", and just had a small group of friends testing it. 9 out of 10 of them were like "Hey, when do I get more cards?" and I'm like "Okay, I'm on to something." Like, "I'm using these cards this way, and this is how it's helping me."
+And these aren't just random people, they're people in high-performing roles, that have a lot of responsibilities, and things like that... And that really validated it past just me saying "This helps me." And beyond that, it was like "Well, let's go for it. I think this is gonna help a lot of people."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note, did you anticipate the idea of refills, or was that sort of discovered as a part of that process?
+**Jeff Sheldon:** \[01:06:46.12\] I mean, because you're writing on a physical card and it's not erasable and reusable, we knew that there was an option to do something like a subscription. So part of the business that's different is that it's gonna be a very low price point compared to Gather and compared to a lot of other things we sell on our site, but the idea is to bring people back through our doors and say "Hey, are you ready for more Analog cards?" If you've found it useful, it's basically gonna be a no-brainer to keep using it. We haven't decided on the price, but for somewhere around $10/month, if this is actually helping you get work done, it should be a no-brainer.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Boast about some of the numbers too, real quick. I've been following you on Instagram, I check your Instagram stories... By no means am I even on Instagram every day; I check in maybe like three times a week. I don't post anymore, I'm weird. I've sort of backed away from social media in that regard, but I still lurk, which means I still pay attention to certain people, and you're one of them, at least as of recent, with Analog and your frequency going up, and stuff like that... But I've seen smaller numbers, and then this excitement of bigger numbers, and now a much bigger number, which is just huge... Those are your numbers, you share them.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, so we're a 3,448 backers as the time of the recording, so hopefully that's even higher by the time people are listening... And $305,284 raised for this campaign. We still have two weeks left, and honestly, it's gone as good as it could possibly go, and I'm super-stoked on how people are responding to the campaign.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Are these numbers you expected? Are you blown away? Are you just happy? All the above.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** I'm blown away. Again, I'm trying not to be over-confident, but we knew that there would be some level of success with Analog, because we had run Gather and had done one other Kickstarter... But this is way beyond -- this is the top of the top scenarios that we played out and calculated and figured out. And you kind of have to be ready for it to not hit that, but then for it to blow past it... And just to see how many people are really wanting to buy in as a system; they really want Analog to be here for the long-term, and the questions we're getting asked are "Well, I live in the U.K." Well, you have refills available over there. "I wanna make sure I'm getting enough cards for a whole year." All of these questions of like -- people see the value in this before they've even had it, and 90% of the pledges involve more than just the cards; they're buying the cardholder with it. So that was the big surprise - how many people see this as "I want this on my desk. I wanna buy the cards and I want refills long-term", and that's where I'm like "This is exactly what we would love to see."
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so cool, man. Alright, Jeff, I have two final questions for you. The first question is my super-secret question... It goes like this - what's on the horizon for you that no one knows about, or not many people know about, that you can share here today? And the second question is "My biggest lesson learned" question. When you give advice from your journey, Jeff, what's the one thing you hold on to? That one lesson that's near and dear to your heart? We'll get those answers from you in just a second, Jeff... But hey, audience, if you want to hear Jeff's answers, you have to be a Changelog++ subscriber. Join Changelog++ and make the ads disappear, plus get extended content like this, and so much more. Head to Changelog.com/++ to become a subscriber.
+Jeff, thanks so much for your time today, man. It's been many years... I'm glad to finally get you on Founders Talk, I'm glad to dig through a lot of this stuff. I'm sure we could have covered so much more, so hopefully one day you'll say yes to coming back again, and we'll have more to discover and more to talk about. Maybe the next Analog, the next big thing... But seriously, thank you so much for your time today; it's been great to have this conversation with you.
+**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me on.