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**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. Okay... Of course, this is a deliberate decision, based on what you've just said... Do you imagine yourselves going open source? Is that even an option that you may want to go back to? Or are you pretty set that it's just going to be closed source? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** No, nothing is set... Especially not for a company our stage. You never know, but again, we would need a good reason for having bits of the product be open source... And even when it is, it's never gonna be 100% open source. Again, you need to have a commercial strategy around this, and it begs the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Things change all the time, yeah. Of course. You always learn something new, then it stops making sense, and then you just do the right thing, whatever that may be. Okay. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah. In the case of Docker, Docker would not be as successful as it is today if it hadn't been open source in the first place, obviously. What I think is extremely interesting with Docker - I think the open source model of distribution here worked so well that we got all caught into how successful... |
There was a situation where the project was so successful that companies would call to ask how they could buy, but we didn't have anything yet to sell... And that is the whole paradox about this thing. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, that's an interesting one. So I know that there is this InfoWorld article written by Scott Carey titled "How Docker broke in half." And you wrote "Docker was a life-changing experience for me, and I wish things turned out differently." Is this something that you'd like to expand on? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** It ties back to what I was answering before - of course, I would have hoped that the commercial success of Docker would have matched the success in terms of the impact it had on the industry. What can I say on this...? There's so much emotional aspect to the Docker story that it's always complicate... |
\[44:08\] Just to give you an example, the week that I joined Docker was my first week in the U.S. I moved from Europe to San Francisco to join Docker. On my first day I was told "We're leaving for Redmond tomorrow. We have to meet with Microsoft for a partnership." |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** That was the unreal situation in which we worked in... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Your first day... Wow. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, that was my first week - flying out to Redmond to talk to Microsoft employees about Docker... Which I had literally joined two days ago. The whole thing was a tornado. And of course, you start thinking "Yeah, this might actually be a significant business. This might actually make a significan... |
It's too bad that it didn't get the commercial success it deserved. But that's what it is. And again, I also said that this is not the end of the story. The company still exists, there are still good people working in this company, and for whom I wish, of course, the best possible success. They have a better focus now ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I know this is impossible for our listener to see, to experience. I'm going to try and do the best job I can of conveying this... But I could see the spark in your eye when you were talking about Docker. I could see a shift in the body language... And this is, again, impossible to capture. But I can t... |
I'm wondering, what would you have done differently? Do you wish you would have done something differently? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I don't wish I would have done anything differently. I've done my best, and that's absolutely the best I could do, and that's pretty much it. The only thing I could regret - but of course, that would have been a different world - is having joined Docker at a time where I had more experience, and ma... |
I think at this point truly the only thing that I care about is hoping to make an impact on our industry with Echoes in the same way that we managed to make an impact on our industry with Docker. And I know that may seem like a stretch, given that we're talking about two wholly different topics, but the truth is I thin... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So what makes Echoes special, in your mind? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I think what makes it special is the fact that we're actually trying to do something that is virtuous for everyone - virtuous for companies and virtuous for the engineers. And I think this is really the key here - not all tools are positives. And you know, there's this motto that the tools is not g... |
\[48:05\] And that I think is really why I'm putting my soul into this project, is to make sure that yes, we're actually gonna be able to do something that improves somehow the quality of life of our peers working in this industry that is fascinating, that is challenging. I'm really attached to all those people, whom I... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So how would you like the world to help you with Echoes? In what way would you like to receive that help, and what sort of help would you need right now to make Echoes a success? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** We're super-early. We're at a point where any feedback is good to take. Clearly, what I would love is for people to check our website and send over any questions, feedback, doubts they may have. I'm of course happy to give as many demos as I can, and get people started on the product if they wanna ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Those are very good reasons, and I'm sure that there are many like-minded people which would like to contribute to that vision in some shape or form. So that's what I'm thinking about. |
Who would you recommend Echoes for? And by the way, it's Echoeshq.com, not Echoes.com. I checked. There's a great story behind that... Do you wanna share the story behind Echoes.com and Echoeshq.com? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I don't know about the story... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, okay. So I did a bit of research, and I was typing Echoes.com... Apparently, Adam Stanley is the owner of that domain. And that domain is registered in early January, 1995. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, I saw it was a pretty old website. At some point, if the company is successful, probably we'll try and buy the .com. This is not my priority right now. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Of course. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I haven't told you, by the way, about the reasoning behind the name, but... I'm a big Pink Floyd fan, so a lot of the projects that I've worked on are actually named after Pink Floyd songs or Pink Floyd albums. This is what brought the name Echoes. There's actually an Easter Egg in the logo that re... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow, okay. Challenge accepted. Anyone else that's listening, if you wanna get into this... Okay. I like this game. I like riddles like these. Which is your favorite Pink Floyd song, by the way? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I think it's Dogs, but Echoes is not far behind. Naming the company Dogs would not have been great, so... Echoes was a better fit. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I would agree with that. Even though it's D and Docker, I can see the resemblance... But Echoes, I like it. And the signal, right? The signals that you're trying to send - I think it fits really well. That's fascinating, how things just kind of make sense in weird and wonderful ways..... |
**Arnaud Porterie:** It feels the same in software. You know when things are on the right track. There is a magical thing, it's the foresight that just happens when pieces fit together, and you can tell that it all makes sense and you're actually on the right path. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's something which I'm constantly looking for... Like, when does it make sense? And you know it. It's like a gut instinct. And when it feels right, and there's so many -- you have the signals, you have the echoes... But maybe you're not picking up on them, or you don't even know where to look. But... |
Who would you recommend Echoes for, by the way? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** \[51:49\] Honestly, pretty much any engineering organization that I would say is above 20 engineers, and needs to have visibility into how they operate. I don't think there is a bigger discriminant behind this. What's very clear in our conversations is that we're not a good fit for engineering mana... |
I actually think that users of Echoes have to be comfortable about the fact that this is gonna show transparency about how engineering is operating, and also about the quality of the management itself. Because you know, it tells more about the quality of the management organization than it says about the quality of the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's the one thing which I really liked. Actually, one of the many things which I liked. First of all, Echoes never accesses the code. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It can never count lines of code contributed or deleted, and that's done on purpose... And I think that's a great, great thing. The other great thing is about making this a shared field, where we all meet, and we can see how well the different orgs, groups, units interact between themselves. You're tr... |
And I like how you combine all the things, the Why, the What is happening, the day to day... You're literally solving, I think, a problem which I had, and that's why when I reached out to you, I thought "Well, this may be it. This just may be it." |
So even though at Changelog there's just a handful of people, would you still recommend Echoes for small teams? Three, four, five people. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, of course. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** We're using Echoes internally, of course, to manage our own roadmap. You know, there's this thing that if you're very small, you are extremely resource-constrained, and that means that you have to be laser-focused. And one very easy way to be laser-focused is to challenge yourself and to measure ho... |
I would say it's somehow a different use case, because in this case you don't have this very high level of certainty as a larger group what everybody is doing. But still, you get this data-driven aspect of your work that helps you reflect about how you're truly allocating your efforts. And again, there's only 24 hours ... |
At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is just be deliberate about the things you do and the things you don't, and this is how we can help. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Intent. Coming back to that - intent, vision, impact. All those important things; very good ones. I don't know if this is possible, but I would love to see a screenshot of Echoes for Echoes. I would love to see that. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, I think we could do it. I don't think there's anything really hidden there. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, please. That would be amazing - to see that, to have that visibility into how Echoes is using Echoes, to see what is important to you, what is the progress that you're making towards that... Because I remember the screenshot that you had; I think this was in -- actually, it was one of your tweets... |
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