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**Adam Jacob:** And then when they IPO'ed, they sent me a little thing and were like "Hey, thanks for the patch. Here's your friends and family thing", you know? It was great. The early era of that -- that era was very... It was really rich and interesting. |
And it was also where I saw the first people -- I became a free software person, so the idea that that was important... That's how that happened for me. So why I care so much about open source and why I care so much about licensing and all that stuff is because if it wasn't for that moment, I can't imagine how my life ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting how pivotal Linux is to so many people's lives. And just the idea of open source. I mean, I have a similar story - not the same, obviously. I haven't been to 17,000 different ISPs with various nefarious folks involved or not involved, like you have, and have the journey that you had... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, it makes it sound I worked for crime families. So I didn't. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, you may have, Adam. I mean, it sounds like you may have, honestly. |
**Adam Jacob:** \[laughs\] Maybe just the one, but not -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just the one...? |
**Adam Jacob:** Not like a lot. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, sure. I mean, you worked for a company that was staging a coup. I mean... |
**Adam Jacob:** I mean, boardroom coup... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You were in Succession, basically. You've lived a movie. |
**Adam Jacob:** I wasn't in the room. I was just the nerdy kid they called -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You were the kid in the back that was told to push the off button, and then suddenly push it back on, and there was no on button. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. And then I had to push the off button for thousands of people, and that was a bummer. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you watch the TV show Succession? |
**Adam Jacob:** I watched a lot of it. I didn't watch all of it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Man, I couldn't put it down. I was into it. It was really well acted. |
**Adam Jacob:** It was incredible. Yeah, I just -- it's so dark. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:02\] It is dark. |
**Adam Jacob:** At some point the bleakness overwhelms me, and then I have to -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I can agree with that. There's so much backstabbing, constantly. I couldn't imagine. I was thinking -- is that how billionaires with way too much money act in family? |
**Adam Jacob:** It makes you not want to be one, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, yeah. I mean, it was really disgusting. But I couldn't stop watching the train wreck. |
**Adam Jacob:** I get it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was just -- all the way to the very end. I'm curious, though, about an ISP stack... Is it boring? Is it fun? In those early days what was the stack to run an ISP? |
**Adam Jacob:** Oh, yeah. I mean what you had were sort of -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And from hardware to software. Give me a rough breakdown. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, yeah. So in the in the very beginning you had -- in the dentist office it was racks of regular PC modems you could buy off the shelf, plugged into PCs that were just loaded up with serial ports. And then eventually there was specialized hardware that you would buy, that just had racks and racks of... |
I think peak, for me - we were running Red Hat 4.2 in production at the ISP in Arizona... Which - that was us. Me and my friends were the ones who decided to do that, and saved a bunch of money, because we weren't buying Sun gear... So we were just putting rack-mounted systems together, either by hand, or eventually bu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Adam Jacob:** I was a big DJB person, so there was a lot of -- we were running qmail, and we were running his DNS server, and we were running all that stuff... And yeah, that was pretty much the stack. And then eventually the stack grew, so... Again, money shows up, consolidation starts to happen... |
So the coolest consolidation story I have was this set of old McCaw Cellular guys, who had made a bunch of money when McCaw Cellular got sold to AT&T; we made a deal with the tribe in Phoenix. So there's a reservation sort of in the middle of Phoenix, kind of, that now has a casino. That casino, the bootstrapping money... |
\[36:00\] And so then they went around to all the ISPs, and went "Stop running your own POPs. We've got all the modems, and we'll just route the traffic directly to you. So just buy colo space next to our huge bank of modems, and then you don't have to manage all the modems anymore, and you can just run your gear right... |
And the guy who set that up was humongous. He was -- I don't know, in my mind he was 6'8". He wasn't that tall. He couldn't have been. But in my head he was like an ogre. He was huge. And as soon as you went in there, the first thing he would do is take you to his office and show you his bathroom... Because he had a cu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Mm. Interesting. That's like a weird version of cloud, in a way. It's like modem cloud, right? "Come colo next to me." It's very similar to the cloud story, right? |
**Adam Jacob:** Well, because that's the story. It just happens over and over and over. We're seeing it now. It's going to repatriate back to the edge again. We're going to wind up seeing more and more people not running in the cloud, both for the cost savings, but also because it turns out it's a superpower to underst... |
Now you can do a lot of work without knowing anything about how any of this stuff actually works. If you need a load balancer, you can just make an API call and get one. You have no idea sort of how that's working or what the stack looks like. I remember when load balancers -- when we first built them, when there weren... |
**Break**: \[38:08\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is the era that you learned Linux... Well, learned about Linux. Linux affected your thought process around open source. At what point did you really come to understand the true importance of open source? Not just yourself, to your personal story, but then everybody else, to then eventually f... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. There's a couple of things. So Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman - Nat Friedman would go on to be the CEO of GitHub, and a bunch of other things... They started a company in the early days called Ximian. I don't think that was the original name, but basically they were the GNOME company, and they r... |
So we started our own contracting company, and hired everyone, and gave them all a 20% raise, and just took a smaller net, you know? So we were already kind of in that zone of like "How do we figure out -- let's figure out how to make a bunch of money", basically. "Obviously, there's a bunch of money to be had. We shou... |
So when they started Ximian, I remember being like "Oh, man. It's all open source." They described how they were going to make money... I was like "That could work." You could have all of the goodness of the openness and the sharing, and that could then make you into a bigger business. And that was the first time that ... |
And then there was a series of others that sort of moved in that early era. There was VA Linux and the people that now run one of the Red Hat clones, Rocky Linux. Those guys had a company called Linux Care, that's sort of infamous for its terrible booth babes. When you look back on it now, it's "Oooh... Bad..." You kno... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... |
**Adam Jacob:** So there was a couple of those things happening. And then Red Hat, of course, happened. And I loved Red Hat, and they treated everyone so well in that era, really... And when Red Hat IPO'ed, they made a ton of people wealthy, and I was just like "Yeah, that's the way. We should figure that out." And it ... |
And I think what evolved over time was that there was a -- I love that strain of human goodness that lives inside of open source. I love that ethic of sharing, and that more is more. The pie can get bigger and then everyone can eat. That's such an ingrained thing in me now. But yeah, it was very motivating and very, ve... |
\[44:10\] And so they had IPO-ed, and my stock basically vested, and for the first time it was also above water. So I would have made - you know, not life-changing money, but meaningful money. It would have been life-changing at the time, because I didn't have a savings account, because whatever, I was a kid and spendi... |
And so I picked up my piece of paper and I left their office and I walked out of the building and I called my best friend who had built that ASP with me in Arizona, and I was like "Hey man, you hate working for IBM. These people obviously don't give a \*\*\*\* about me, you know? So we should start a consulting company... |
And so I walked, and started a consulting company. And we started building fully automated infrastructure for startups. |
And that became HJK Solutions. So me and Nathan Haneysmith And then we added some more people, Barry Steinglass and a few others. And eventually, that became Chef. |
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