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**Adam Stacoviak:** But you're like "Dude, come on. It's so bad you should", right? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You used the word "must", is what I'm trying to dig into. |
**Adam Jacob:** Because product-wise, you must. What Luke wanted most -- and we'd spent time together. I knew. Luke wanted the ring. Luke wanted it all. That was what he wanted. And so this was a terrible business decision. And so the argument I was having with him wasn't demanding his time for free. I was like "Homie,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was the thing to use. Right? |
**Adam Jacob:** It was absolutely the thing to use. And it was great. And here's this time bomb, sitting in the middle of your product, and like, that's not the thing? And I just didn't understand it. And for me, it's not that I demanded he fix it, because I was willing to fix it myself... I wasn't upset that he told m... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. That's what I wanted clarity on, because I was like "Man..." |
**Adam Jacob:** Fixing it myself was a fine answer. Him being like "Look, I'm too busy. I've got stuff happening, I've got to feed my kids..." I'm like "Great. Feed your kids. I'm willing to do it." But he was mad I fixed it. That's how it felt to me. I'm sure if we get him on the podcast, he'll be like "No, I wasn't. ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure, because there's perspectives. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, there's perspectives. Luke's not a bad guy. Whatever. We're not besties, but I don't hate Luke. I'm not carrying around a weird grudge or whatever. But yeah, it was more those pieces that I couldn't understand. And then for me, building my business -- and I was out stumping. I was going to confere... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The inevitable resolve conf file getting overwritten with a checksum. That's just -- |
**Adam Jacob:** Right? That's bad news. It was tough. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That you couldn't even personally reproduce... |
**Adam Jacob:** No. It happens at random... Yeah, it was bad. So it wasn't that I demanded that he do the work. "Must" was "Clearly, you must fix it for your survival, for your own best interest. And for mine, because I'm trying to build a business on top of your software, and I can't do it." And he was kind of annoyed... |
And then we raised venture capital, I think before Luke did, which I think annoyed him, too... And certainly the existence of Chef annoyed him, because it felt like we had stolen from him... We didn't. But you know, that's how it felt at the time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you begin from first principles? I know you didn't steal any code, obviously, but did you did you borrow any -- I mean, because open source is... It's art. And art imitates other art. There's borrowing that happened. There's influences that happened, obviously. |
**Adam Jacob:** \[59:51\] A hundred percent. Look, it was a hundred percent influenced by Puppet. There's a bunch of things that Luke invented. The declarative resource abstraction, that idea that you would just say "This is the file, and here's the shape that I want it in", and then here's a package, and I want that i... |
So a lot of the fundamental underpinnings, that was Mark. But Luke was the one who put that user experience on top of it, that gave you that abstraction. And you've got to praise the man for it. If he hadn't done that, we would we be on a fundamentally different trajectory. And like Luke Kanies is a genius. He's brilli... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. Yeah, it's interesting just how that plays out, that you can be a part of that... And I think one thing you said was that you were using Puppet in ways it was not -- I'm trying to paraphrase, to some degree. You said in ways beyond it was planned to be used... You were hitting the edge cas... |
**Adam Jacob:** I mean, not planned. We were using it more than most people. So most people were using a little Puppet in their stable compute lab. And we were using Puppet to be like "No, I'm writing reusable content that I deploy really quickly across... And it's thousands of resources. I'm fully managing every aspec... |
Because at the time - this was the beginning of Web 2. So this was Facebook apps, so people couldn't get enough stuff, couldn't get enough gear... We had a customer I liked, who was one of the first music sharing things. It was a Facebook app, and so they had a billion users immediately. That was unheard of. That was n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. It was all Chef. |
**Adam Jacob:** It wasn't Chef. That was Puppet. That was all Puppet. We were using Puppet to do that. And big deal, right? It was a pretty fun, interesting era. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So if my notes are correct, this beginning of OpsCode - not Chef - was in 2008, roughly. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, that's probably right. Ish. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So let's say maybe 2007, but it happened in kind of 2008. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. HJK had been going for a couple of years. So you can backdate that to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:03:57.20\] Right. Did you literally -- I mean, this is probably boring minutiae to some degree, but did you literally convert the company, HJK, to a different company called OpsCode? Or did you just end the consultancy and founded a new company? |
**Adam Jacob:** We started a new company, and then that company acquired our -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Assets. |
**Adam Jacob:** Our assets. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And you didn't have to do any due diligence because you knew what was tehre, right? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, we knew what the diligence was. Yeah, this introduced me to a bunch of new, interesting ideas. So one was that you could -- and Jesse knew these things. Jesse had been studying the business of venture capital in a way that I hadn't. I had been, but I was uncertain still, and Jesse was not uncertai... |
And then he had lots of -- he had helped start what would become Velocity, with Tim O'Reilly... And so he was sort of connected to that whole scene, which eventually became sort of the epicenter of how Web 2.0 evolved, and how that entire generation of cloud and all that stuff sort of happened. Those people were connec... |
And we met Bill Bryant at a coffee shop in Seattle, which was near his house. He held court at this coffee shop. And we gave him our sad, dejected pitch... Because everybody told us to raise less money, basically. And so we had started out asking for two and a half, and we had gotten all the way down to "Please give us... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "No!" "Yes!" |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, exactly. He was like "No, but I'll give you two and a half and worse terms, you know? And that worked. You just did it until it worked. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. So two and a half mil. That was your initial funding. Is that right? |
**Adam Jacob:** I think so. Probably. Or three. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Did you have a product? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. But we hadn't launched it yet. So we announced the fundraising, and we launched Chef at the same time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you launch Chef as open source then, from the beginning? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yup. And we published the fundraising announcement, a blog post on what Chef was, a blog post about why we chose the Apache license... We had Ezra write a blog post on his blog about it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** On Engine Yard, or personal? |
**Adam Jacob:** His personal. But we referenced Engine Yard, because they were already using Chef. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And so you'd already done all that automation for Engine Yard prior to even this pitch and fundraise? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So you knew, you had faith in what the software was able to do in its infancy. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. And it wasn't a great launch, you know? Our color scheme was gray and blue, and it was a website built by systems administrators, lots of squares... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
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