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**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Adam Jacob:** But it was the same people dreaming about how do we figure out how to start a business, how do we figure out how to build a company that IPOs? How do we figure out how to do all of this? We wanted it, but we didn't know how to get it, and so we just kept taking shots, you know? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it H-J-K? Is that right? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you created a consulting company... Did you essentially do it by yourself, and then bring in clients, and then enable your friends to join you? Is that kind of how it panned out? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, so I found the first contract where -- basically, what we sold was you'd pay us a fixed fee and we would automate everything. So application deployment, monitoring, trending, operating system installation, identity management, backups, database management, all that stuff. So a big, long list. And ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not sure you should say that given the history you've shared. |
**Adam Jacob:** \[laughs\] But this is how I met Jesse Robbins, who is sort of integral to the Chef story. So Jesse was the master of disaster at Amazon. And if you ever meet him, he's a larger-than-life human. He's an incredibly motivating person. He has a deep and foundational belief in both himself and other people.... |
\[48:07\] And it was Jesse who was like -- we tried to recruit him to our little consulting company and he was like "No, I'm not leaving my job as the master of disaster at Amazon to come join your fucking consulting company. But if you build a product, call me." And so we had grown, we had a couple of people working f... |
Either way, what it meant was we would sell all this automation to these people, and it would work 100% of the time, 80% of the time. And then 20% of the time it just wouldn't work at all. Or it would take five times as long. And people didn't love that. And so that was frustrating. And then there was this bug where su... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What...? |
**Adam Jacob:** And it would be replaced with just a checksum. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No way. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, totally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the worst ever. |
**Adam Jacob:** It was so bad. So this happens to our biggest client, right? And I hop on IRC, and I'm like "Yo dogs, have you seen this horrific thing happen?" And the channel is like "Oh yeah, we know about that one", and links me to the bug. And I'm like "What?! You know? What memo did I miss?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "And this isn't fixed?" |
**Adam Jacob:** How did this not pop to the top of the community stack? I was paying attention. I was pretty involved. And I didn't know. So anyway, this bug comes in, and in the bug report - it's filed by this kid in New Zealand. And he files the bug, and Luke responds, and he's like "I tried to reproduce this, and I ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...go somewhere. |
**Adam Jacob:** "Don't do that." And I was like "Dude, I'm not paying you. I'm not going to pay you money to fix this bug. I'm willing to fix it, but I'm not willing to pay you to do it. I'm willing to put my own time against it, because I've got a consulting company to run", we weren't making that much money... It's n... |
And so he gave me access to the system in New Zealand, and I spent a week figuring out this bug, and we fixed it. And he accepted the PR, but was very angry at me, because I had undercut his model, and taken food from his children's mouths. |
\[52:04\] And so I was like "This probably can't stand. We can't continue to be -- I don't want to be the consulting company that is the best in the world at this technology, but the guy who writes the technology hates us." That's not a very tenable business position. And they were completely uninterested in talking ab... |
And so I started writing Chef on the side. So my partners took over all of the work, and then I essentially took a couple of months and wrote Chef, intending to use it for our consulting company. But then it was so cool that I showed it to Jesse Robbins, and Jesse Robbins was like "We should raise venture capital for t... |
And so Jesse joined us as the CEO, and we raised venture capital, and I showed it to Ezra Zygmuntowicz at Engine Yard, who - rest in peace, Ezra - would have written Chef if I hadn't written it. He was already thinking about doing it. But I had written Chef, and he was like "This is what I want." And so before we even ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. I can remember some DMs with Ezra... And I was sad, because obviously, he passed away... And I had met Ezra around at the Engine Yard offices in San Francisco. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. South Park. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't live there, so it was a big deal for me to be there and to meet him, and even hang out with him. |
**Adam Jacob:** They were so generous. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They were. They were so cool. He's like "Come on in." We went upstairs, and sat down on the couch... The two-story \[unintelligible 00:53:59.25\] |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, that's where we perfected Chef. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. That's awesome. And I was like "Dude, you're so cool." |
**Adam Jacob:** He was so cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "You run this company... I mean, you're just so cool." |
**Adam Jacob:** He was so cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I think it was -- I forget what year he passed away. It was several years later. But I wanted to get him -- obviously, I'm a podcaster. I wanted to get him on a podcast, eventually. And I was going through my brain of people that I've met over the years that were influential to me, and I was thi... |
**Adam Jacob:** So much. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And like the early Ruby hosting days, for sure, but then also a lot of the cloud development that's happened, and stuff that. It was just pivotal. |
**Adam Jacob:** Oh, yeah. Way ahead of his time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was, yeah. |
**Adam Jacob:** But when you think about that early internet, and the culture and the people and open source, Ezra is a perfect example. Ezra had no ego about -- Ezra a hundred percent could have written Chef, and it would have been a bigger deal than me. I didn't matter. He didn't have to do that for me. Like, he had ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Rest in peace, Ezra. |
**Adam Jacob:** \[55:58\] Definitely. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Going back to Luke - Puppet is open source. He wants you to pay him. |
**Adam Jacob:** He did. Yeah. Which was fine. I wasn't upset that he wanted to get paid. I was upset at -- there's this severity one awful thing -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The severity, yeah. |
**Adam Jacob:** ...and his answer was basically "You must pay me or I won't fix it", and I was just "I can't even with that. Why wouldn't you see that this is a thing you must fix? It's obviously terrible for your product." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the part I want to dig into, the whole "You must fix." Because I'm sure you know open source works, Adam. I'm talking to the person I go to for answers when I've got deep philosophical questions about open source, and the way it merges with our freedoms in it... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** He's free to not fix it, right? |
**Adam Jacob:** He's 100% free to not fix it. |
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