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[3186.62 --> 3188.58] And we wanted to port it to Windows. |
[3189.42 --> 3193.00] And, you know, Node is doing all this asynchronous I.O. |
[3193.00 --> 3199.52] And so it uses ePoll and KQ, these non-blocking sockets. |
[3199.78 --> 3207.90] These are fairly intricate, not well understood operating system APIs that differ from operating system to operating system. |
[3208.04 --> 3210.82] And in particular, on Windows, it's completely different. |
[3211.40 --> 3215.00] Their non-blocking I.O. system is called I.O. completion ports. |
[3215.00 --> 3219.76] And we wanted to do a very proper port to Windows. |
[3220.04 --> 3227.24] We wanted to use I.O. completion ports so that Node would work as a native proper program on Windows. |
[3227.82 --> 3230.22] And this was a massive undertaking. |
[3230.54 --> 3232.74] And Burt led this effort. |
[3232.98 --> 3234.84] We collaborated with Microsoft on it. |
[3235.28 --> 3237.02] It took probably a year. |
[3237.28 --> 3240.06] But at the end of the day, Node works on Windows. |
[3240.26 --> 3242.10] In fact, Node is very well supported on Windows. |
[3242.10 --> 3243.60] And it's very fast. |
[3243.70 --> 3245.98] I don't think people run servers on Windows too much. |
[3246.08 --> 3248.26] So maybe it doesn't matter how fast it is on Windows. |
[3248.64 --> 3252.16] That was a very successful, massive undertaking. |
[3252.68 --> 3258.32] As I said, Burt went on to found this company, Strongloop, that did Node-y sort of things. |
[3258.54 --> 3260.02] Built some products on top of Node. |
[3260.52 --> 3265.20] They sold that to IBM, I think, in 2015 or so. |
[3265.20 --> 3273.52] And around 2018, I left Google and Burt wanted to leave Strongloop and our IBM. |
[3274.04 --> 3276.28] Yeah, we teamed up and started working on projects. |
[3276.54 --> 3282.02] I already mentioned this TensorFlow in Node project that we were originally working on. |
[3282.44 --> 3286.78] But we just had the idea to kind of poke around for a while and see what we could do. |
[3286.78 --> 3302.00] So after you conceived the idea of Dino and maybe you had a prototype or you had maybe even you had announced the project, was the Dino company right there in your guys' minds kind of like, okay, here's a path forward from then? |
[3302.10 --> 3306.60] Or is that a newer conception that you came up with later? |
[3306.60 --> 3313.18] So early on in Node, as I mentioned, I was young and naive about how software is developed. |
[3313.70 --> 3318.84] You know, I was very much of the idea that, oh, you know, you just throw some code out there on the Internet. |
[3319.12 --> 3320.48] You collaborate with people. |
[3320.72 --> 3322.36] This is how software gets built. |
[3322.86 --> 3329.50] But, you know, Node grew bigger and bigger and bigger and there's more and more people involved. |
[3329.70 --> 3334.64] And it becomes clear at some point that organization really matters. |
[3334.64 --> 3340.56] It matters very much to have full-time professional engineers working on it. |
[3341.22 --> 3345.90] And, you know, people can contribute code, you know, kind of on a one-off basis. |
[3345.90 --> 3354.06] But if you really want to get things done, like port nodes to Windows and use I.O. completion ports, you need full-time engineers. |
[3354.22 --> 3360.18] These people need to get paid and they need to be able to focus on a problem for a long period of time. |
[3360.18 --> 3376.08] And so you realize that, you know, at a certain scale, software becomes a lot more about kind of managing budget and trying to manage an organization and kind of the meta problems around getting funding for people. |
[3376.08 --> 3389.48] And so it's always been clear to me that if we're going to go down this route and build this programming system that is going to be very much like Node, that if it's going to ever scale, it needs to have some funding model. |
[3389.64 --> 3395.80] There's no way that this can work where people are just going to randomly work on stuff on kind of a one-off basis for free. |
[3395.80 --> 3400.60] There needs to be some way of paying people to work on the problem. |
[3401.52 --> 3408.94] And, you know, Node is not a piece of software that is unused, that is not attached to revenue streams. |
[3409.30 --> 3411.66] There's all sorts of companies using this. |
[3411.78 --> 3416.28] If I could have one cent for every Node installation, oh, how great that would be. |
[3416.94 --> 3421.30] You know, this is open source software, of course, and it's very liberally open source. |
[3421.30 --> 3426.50] And I believe in that, and I think that's important for a programming system like this. |
[3426.86 --> 3444.12] But, yeah, we see that these systems have commercial applications to them, and these can provide connections to reality for the software itself that is making sure that we're actually solving a useful problem, but also provide funding to develop the software. |
[3444.12 --> 3455.56] Yeah, I guess we've known very early that we did not know if this project would go forward or fail, but we always knew that if it's going to grow, that it would need to turn into a company eventually. |
[3456.28 --> 3458.62] At what point did the company become the company then? |
[3458.68 --> 3461.50] I know you had the announcement in March, late March. |
[3461.92 --> 3465.84] You mentioned a sizable round of seed capital. |
[3465.84 --> 3475.70] You can name names if you'd like to, but at what point was that when the company began and the team of, you know, full-time expert engineers working to prove to happen? |
[3475.86 --> 3477.60] When did that, was it chicken and egg? |
[3477.72 --> 3478.84] You know, which came first? |
[3479.58 --> 3484.26] No, Bert and I, you know, first of all, worked on this ourselves for, I think, a year. |
[3484.44 --> 3486.24] So that was kind of our first investment. |
[3486.24 --> 3490.94] And I think we hired our first engineer in 2019 or so. |
[3491.62 --> 3493.22] And, yeah, we've grown from there. |
[3493.36 --> 3495.22] I think we're eight people now. |
[3495.22 --> 3495.92] Gotcha. |
[3496.88 --> 3503.88] So if there's a video game called Build an Open Source Business, and the first step is, you know, pick your license. |
[3504.78 --> 3505.76] You guys chose MIT. |
[3505.96 --> 3509.02] That would be like, you know, setting that video game on hard mode, wouldn't it? |
[3509.14 --> 3510.70] It's like, well, I want the biggest challenge. |
[3510.98 --> 3514.36] I'm going to let my software as free as you could possibly let it free. |
[3514.36 --> 3519.76] There's a lot of startups, a lot of businesses switching over to things like SSPL, AGPL. |
[3519.76 --> 3527.48] Any concern about, you know, AWS offering, you know, competing with you or the big dogs coming in and eating your lunch? |
[3527.48 --> 3533.26] Everybody's trying to kind of figure out open source companies and how to do this properly. |
[3533.26 --> 3541.42] And one model of doing this is the open core model where your open source software would be free. |
[3541.60 --> 3548.42] But then you kind of have an enterprise edition that you add on some extra nice features and you would charge for that. |
[3548.42 --> 3563.54] You can also kind of get into some licensing trickery where maybe you make your software AGPL license and, you know, kind of allow people to run this locally or kind of in non-commercial applications for free. |
[3563.78 --> 3570.32] But, you know, once you kind of get into the commercial realm of things, you are then asked to pay a fee. |
[3570.32 --> 3577.24] I think for Dino, this is a programming system that we're asking people to program against. |
[3577.46 --> 3579.36] We're asking a lot of our users, right? |
[3579.40 --> 3581.82] We're asking them to invest a lot in the system. |
[3582.34 --> 3592.12] And I personally would be very, very uncomfortable with programming using as the base layer of my, you know, this Dino sits below all of your other software. |
[3592.42 --> 3598.12] I would feel very uncomfortable if there was some weird payment hook at that layer of the system. |
[3598.12 --> 3602.00] It would prevent me from ever even trying out the software, in fact. |
[3602.18 --> 3604.28] And I think that's the case with Dino. |
[3604.42 --> 3619.00] If we tried to make Dino itself commercial and, you know, people are looking at Python and Node and Ruby as alternatives, I think many would choose the solutions to this problem that do not have a payment hook in it. |
[3619.48 --> 3626.30] We are pursuing a different funding model or revenue model. |
[3626.30 --> 3632.38] As I said, we think the software is pretty useful and we think it's useful in different commercial applications. |
[3632.62 --> 3640.22] I haven't mentioned it yet, but, you know, you know, you download it as this one executable, but it's actually a collection of software. |
[3640.22 --> 3648.08] And we've been pretty careful in breaking up this into different bits that we can recombine in different ways. |
[3648.78 --> 3656.90] And so we have a product that we've been working on for the last six months or so that is a different runtime. |
[3657.06 --> 3659.24] It is called Dino Deploy. |
[3659.24 --> 3665.14] And it has the same, a very similar API to Dino, a very web browser-y API. |
[3665.50 --> 3669.50] It's a JavaScript runtime, but it doesn't run on your computer. |
[3669.72 --> 3670.66] It runs in the cloud. |
[3671.10 --> 3674.88] You can think of it as a dynamic CDN if you want to. |
[3675.16 --> 3679.94] So we have processes running in 22 locations around the world. |
[3679.94 --> 3685.76] And we have an Anycast IP and you can provision a domain name on our system. |
[3686.52 --> 3695.20] And when you go to access your domain name, it resolves to this Anycast IP and that gets routed to the nearest data center. |
[3695.38 --> 3699.18] So, you know, if you're in Tokyo, it gets served locally in Tokyo. |
[3699.18 --> 3705.12] And rather than a CDN, which responds with static content, this invokes a JavaScript hook. |
[3705.68 --> 3707.50] So, you know, it is a serverless system. |
[3707.84 --> 3711.72] So, you know, think AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Workers. |
[3712.24 --> 3716.16] So it's a system for responding to requests dynamically. |
[3716.50 --> 3722.88] The best way to describe it is it's a web server, a multi-tenant web server with V8 built into it. |
[3723.10 --> 3724.80] It is completely a separate system. |
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