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**Jerod Santo:** Able to communicate well. Is that what you're saying? Like, they are good communicators? When you say legible. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** It's a little different from just being a good communicator. Legible is -- so it comes up when you're trying to get a loan, for example. If you have a job like mine currently, and you go to the bank, and you try to get a loan, they're gonna be a little skeptical, because they've never seen this. T... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** I mean, there are some contracts, and that helps, but there is no employment contract, there is no W-2... And so they're like "I don't know, do you actually make this much money every year? Last year you didn't", because - well, I started recently, so I'm pretty much not legible from the bank as a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. The same or more next year. Yeah. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** \[30:08\] Yeah, exactly. So that's the legibility. And becoming legible is trying to structure what you present in a way that's familiar to the counterparty. And sometimes that means, for example, a lot of what I do is I send PDFs, I send a quote, and then there's a purchase order, and I accept pa... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's abnormal, it's hard to understand, and therefore it's risky. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah, exactly. Instead, I present myself as a vendor. You have 1000 of those. I'll go through whatever vendor assessment process you have. We'll sign PDFs, and click Docusigns, and... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. All the things required to be a vendor. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** It is, of course. Then I'm going to bill you an amount of money that's commensurate with that. And that is, I think, what made this attempt different from other attempts in the past. And I realized that I keep straying from what is this other thing that I decided to -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes, what's the new thing? I think I know what it's gonna be, but our listener does not know. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** The new thing is just being accessible as an expert. Because for example, a lot of companies that care about my work on Go cryptography care about Go and cryptography, or maybe just Go, or maybe just cryptography. And they get a lot of value out of just having me on a retainer, the same way you ca... |
A good example that I enjoyed, that I make all the time - there was this company that doesn't have as much cryptography expertise, but they maintain something that uses a lot of cryptography. And they got a PR to replace their library, an elliptic curve library. And they're like "Well, the PR says it's faster, so it's ... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's like having that lawyer available just when you need them, to say, "Hey, can you just look at this real quick and make sure it's legit?" And they spend five minutes and then they're like "It's legit." |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** Or "It's not legit", and they can tell you why. So this is more traditional consulting tied in, right? But it's not like "We're gonna get X hours of Filippo's time per month, on a retainer." |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Correct. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's more of like a development consulting thing. This is really just the advice, on-call, on-demand. What are the terms for this? Is it very loosey-goosey, or do you give them exact "I'll answer you within 15 minutes"? How does it work? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** They have a minimum guaranteed amount of meetings they can use, but I always tell them, "Look, it's unlimited. If you have interesting questions, in particular if they're relevant to the project, but even if they're not, up to a point it's going to be fine. You just reach out. If it's not working,... |
\[34:20\] They do get solved SLA for vulnerabilities, so every time a new vulnerability comes out in Go or in one of my personal projects, I'm available for the next 24 hours on a six-hour SLA if they need urgent help figuring out "Are we affected? What should we do? Is this mitigation good?" So the kind of thing that ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** They don't get preview access to anything, because of course, that's not mine to give. It's a bigger project than myself. But immediately after disclosure, they have access to that. But yeah, I usually talk about it in unlimited terms. A lot of companies understand it from the concept of a startup... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And so because it's not fixed to a time standard, it scales a little bit nicer than it would be if you were just divvying up "I've got 40 hours in a workweek", or 60, depending on how hard you like to work, and "I'm gonna divvy them out across these clients. And you get five hours, and you get 10... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** This is just an advisor or an on-call expert, in addition to the other things that you're getting, which is - let's just call it sustainability of the project, or risk management on the project continuing... And then the second one being reciprocal access. And then this -- but you said this is like a p... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly. And you're right, it's about how it scales, and how it aligns the incentives. The whole reason I can offer this advice is that I'm a maintainer that maintains this software. If I stopped doing that and started just doing consulting full-time, I would probably be out of date and not that u... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So as of a month ago, when you wrote this, you had six current customers. Is that still the number? Has it fluctuated at all? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah, it's still the number. As I mentioned, I slowed down the sales and outreach. I have two clients that I'm talking with, who we're still finalizing a deal with, and I'm hoping to get them on board soon... But now I'm mostly trying to kick the tires of the model. Like, now we got it started, le... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[38:09\] Do you have a sense of what a top would look like? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** At this point, I feel like before growing and starting to hire other people it would probably be between 15 and 20 at various places in the scale just silver, gold, platinum... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. And with six you're at a good Google salary, so I mean, you're talking double that, maybe triple it. That's a heck of a good living for open source maintenance, right? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah. I feel like it's important that there's a success path that grows, right? Because there is significantly more risk in this than taking, again, the proverbial senior software engineer job. And usually in capitalism how we reward risk is with more potential upside. So what I'm hoping becomes p... |
What started as a few people trying to make of this weird basement thing an actual job... InfoSec was very much not a job. And some people actually got a lot of hate for "selling out" when they started. And then they made a firm, and then the firm grew, and then some of the partners went off and made their own firms, a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Yeah, that would be super-cool. Curious how successful your pitch has been to get to the six customers. Obviously, you had some relationships with some of these prior to starting this, which always helps... And I think many maintainers of critical infrastructure have those relationships, kind of... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** So what was very effective is that oftentimes I had champions in the engineering org. Engineers who either work on open source themselves, or who have a past as maintainers, who see the model and want it to succeed, and then that go in and connect me with the right people internally, and help me n... |
I think I probably actively engaged between 15 and 20 companies, seriously pursued maybe 10, and of those 10, six are clients, two are still maybes, and two didn't pan out. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. Okay. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** And it's been slow, it's been painful, it's been... Enterprise sales. |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, how much of your life is just enterprise sales now? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Oh, for the first months, a lot of it. That's kind of what I'm trying to change the balance of right now. But starting out, I had to start this from scratch, so now it's different. Now I just have to keep up with churn, and eventually decide if I want to grow. But initially - yeah, initially this ... |
\[42:02\] And hey, I'm not going to claim it's easy. I'm not going to claim it's not a bunch of extra work. I'm not going to claim it's different from the work I want to be doing, or that I'm particularly good at. I'm good at, I don't know, cryptography; the stuff on that board. And talking to people about this model, ... |
But the thing that I never heard is, I don't know, a dentist say, "You know, I studied a bunch for dentistry, and I really like fixing teeth, and this is what I'm good at... But starting a clinic? That seems like so much overhead. It's not like I'm a businessman. I'm not. I just like fixing teeth. So... Too bad. I can'... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** So other professions have figured this out. Now, to be fair, other professions have the tools; other professions have CRMs for dentists, and the job of a clinic administrator is a whole job that you can hire for, and you can go to trainings for it, and you can -- |
**Jerod Santo:** They're legible. These other careers are legible. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** They are legible. There you go. |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm learning. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** You can go to a bank and get a loan to start your dentistry clinic. So there is a lot of road to pave, but I don't think it's fundamentally a deal-breaker the fact that this model involves a bunch of administrative overhead. We need to start with people like in my position, where we don't mind doi... |
**Break:** \[44:05\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's really cool that you're having success, and I think just talking about it, sharing it as you did on your blog, and encouraging other people to follow in your footsteps starts to -- you know, you create that path, and other people can kind of walk behind you in the path, and they may have to ... |
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