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**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So dark side could mean a couple things. One, it could mean literally bad; dark as synonymous with bad. Or dark as in shady. And we're not sure, it's obscured in terms of what's happening. And so let's use an Instacarter or a Dasher - to use their terminology. I happen to be a DoorDash user, so I kn... |
\[35:59\] You could say it's below the API, but I wonder, if you've spoken with these people, or people that live in what you call below the API, because I would imagine they're not doing that because they're being forced. Like, it's an opportunity for them. |
**Shawn Wang:** Oh, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I remember when I was younger and I had less opportunity because I had less "above the API" (so to speak) talent... And I do agree there's a class here, but I wonder if it's truly bad; that dark is truly bad, or if it's just simply obscure in terms of how it's gonna play out. |
**Shawn Wang:** This is about upside. They will never get to that six figures income with this thing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Not that job. |
**Jerod Santo:** No. |
**Shawn Wang:** It's really about the class system, which is the dark side. You don't want to have society splinter into like a serving class and whatever the non-serving class is. It's also about the upside - like, I don't see a way for these people to break out unless, they really just take a hard stop and just go to... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Here's where I have a hard time with that... I'm not pushing back on that you're wrong, I'm just wondering more deeply... |
**Shawn Wang:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I imagine at one point in my life I was a DoorDasher. |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I washed dishes, I did definitely unique jobs at a young age before I had skill. And so the path is skill, and as long as we have a path to skill, which you've show-cased through FreeCodeCamp in your path, then I think that dark side is just simply shady, and not bad. |
**Shawn Wang:** Okay. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I'm just trying to understand it, because I was truly a DoorDasher before DoorDash was available. I washed dishes, delivered papers, I had servant-level things; I was literally a server at a restaurant before... And I loved doing that kind of work, but my talents have allowed me to go above that... |
**Jerod Santo:** Until we have all the robots. Then there is nobody underneath. At that point it's all robots under the API. |
**Shawn Wang:** Yes, and that is true in a lot of senses, actually. Like, farming is mostly robots these days. You do have individual farmers, but they're much less than they used to be. I don't know what to say about that, shady or dark... I think it's just -- there's no career track. You have to go break out of that ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I see. |
**Shawn Wang:** I see these stories of people who used to be janitors at schools become the principal. Companies used to invest in all their people and bring them up. But now we're just hiring your time, and then if you wanna break out of that system - good luck, you're on your own. I think that that lack of upward mob... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, I could agree with that part there, that there definitely is no lateral movement from Dasher to CEO of DoorDash. |
**Shawn Wang:** It's just not gonna happen. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Or VP of engineering at DoorDash. I think because there is no path, the path would be step outside of that system, because that system doesn't have a path. I could agree with that, for sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I mean, the good news is that we are creating -- there are paths. This is not like a path from X to Y through that system, but there are other alternate paths that we are creating and investing in, and as well as the API gets pushed further and further down in terms of reachability - we now have ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** True. |
**Jerod Santo:** So there are opportunities to get out, it's just not a clear line... And yeah, it takes perhaps some mentorship, perhaps ingenuity... A lot of the things that it takes to succeed anyway, so... |
**Shawn Wang:** \[40:05\] I'll give a closing note for developers who are listening, because you're already a developer... So the analogy is if you're above the API, you tell machines what to do; if you're below the API, machines tell you what to do. So here's the developer analogy, which is there's another division in... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Shawn Wang:** So how do you break out of that class division? I'll leave it out to you, but just keep in mind, there's always layers. |
**Jerod Santo:** I love that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the discussion around it, but I'm also thankful you approached the subject by a way of a blog post, because I do believe that this is interesting to talk about, and people should talk about it, for sure. Because it provides introspection into, I guess, potentially something you don't really t... |
**Break:** \[40:58\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So another awesome post you have written lately is about [Cloudflare and AWS](https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go/). Go - not the language, the game Go... I know very little about the language, and I know even less about the game... And Chess... How Cloudflare is approaching things, versus how AWS and Go... |
**Shawn Wang:** Okay. The TL;DR of that post is that Cloudflare is trying to become the fourth major cloud after AWS, Azure and GCP. The way they're doing it is fundamentally different than the other three, and the more I've studied them - I basically observed Cloudflare for the entire time since I joined Netlify. Netl... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's as simple as that. |
**Shawn Wang:** And then there's DDOS protection, all that stuff; very complicated. Go look up the Netlify blog post on why you should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify, and decide for yourself. But Netlify now taking on AWS S3 - S3 is like a crown jewel of AWS. This is the eighth wonder of the world. It provides ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right? You know what's funny - I don't even consider us at Changelog AWS customers; I don't even think of us that way. But of course, we use S3, because that's what you do. So yeah, we're very much AWS customers, even though I barely even think about it, because S3 is just like this thing that of cours... |
**Shawn Wang:** There's been a recent history of people putting out S3-compatible APIs, just because it's so dominant that it becomes the de-facto standard. Backblaze did it recently. But Cloudflare putting out R2 and explicitly saying "You can slurp up the S3 data, and by the way, here's all the cost-benefit of AWS eg... |
\[44:17\] So I always like these analogies of how people play destruction games. I'm a student of destruction, and I study Ben Thompson and Clay Christensen, and that entire world, very quickly... So I thought this was a different model of destruction, where you're essentially embracing rather than trying to compete he... |
That is a genius, brilliant move that I think people don't really appreciate, and it's something that I study a lot, because I work at companies that try to become the next big cloud. I worked at Netlify, and a lot of people are asking, "Can you build a large public company on top of another cloud? Our second-layer clo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Next week, probably... |
**Shawn Wang:** Okay, alright... So they're both highly valued, and - like, can they be hundred-billion-dollar companies? I don't know. We don't know the end state of cloud, but I think people are trying to compete there, and every startup -- I nearly joined Render.com as well. Every startup that's trying to pitch a se... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So do you see that R2 then -- I think it's a brilliant move, as you described it... As I read your post, I started to appreciate, I think, the move, more than I did when I first read about it and I was like "Oh, they're just undercutting." But it seems they are doing more than just that. But do y... |
**Shawn Wang:** This is the top question on Twitter and on Hacker News when they launch. They are going to make money on this thing, and the reason is because of all the peering agreements that they've established over the past five years. As part of the normal business strategy of Cloudflare, they have peering agreeme... |
But yeah, I mean - straight on, it's not a loss leader. They plan to make money on it. And the reason they can is because they have worked so hard to make their cost structure completely different in AWS, and they've been a friend to all the other ISPs, rather than AWS consuming everything in its own world. Now you're ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what do you think is a more likely path over the next two years? Cloudflare -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Prediction time! |
**Jerod Santo:** ...Cloudflare steals just massive swathes of AWS customers, or AWS slashes prices to compete? |
**Shawn Wang:** So I try not to do the prediction business, because I got out of that from the finance days... All I'm doing is nowcasting. I observe what I'm seeing now and I try to put out the clearest vision of it, so the others can follow. |
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