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**Adam Jacob:** \[01:07:49.01\] But what did happen was there was very quickly a community of people who we knew from Puppet and we knew from the Rails community, who really attached quickly to Chef. And then we knew that we were building a community, and it was all open source, and so we just embraced everyone who wou... |
So one of the things I used to do at the end of my conference talks every now and again was I would just -- I would ask people how many people use Chef, and how people use Puppet, and how many people use CFEngine, and I would offer to fix their problems, not by converting them to Chef, but just like, I knew CFEngine re... |
And so we just really intentionally tried to build a community. Because at the time - you know, this was Tim O'Reilly's "Create more value than you capture." All of that was sort of both in our minds and in our culture, and was starting to really crystallize around Velocity, and around the Web 2.0 Summit, and around a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, very interesting. Those initial days... You know, you're obviously deeply in community, out there giving talks, willing to fix non-Chef things, as you just said... What was the thing that people were buying? What was the paid for version of Chef? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, so initially it was going to be a hosted SaaS. So this was also the moment -- the rise of SaaS. So Salesforce had launched a few years earlier, AWS had just begun, so like S3 was just happening... EC2 had just happened... And so like SaaS was just beginning. And so our idea was that we were going ... |
And so yeah, we launched this hosted SaaS product, big multi-tenant SaaS service, that did okay, but didn't do great. And all of the large customers, banks and insurance companies and stuff would just run the open source, because they weren't willing to run a hosted product. A decade later, they would all come to me an... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Like "You're ten years too late." |
**Adam Jacob:** "I did this for you, and now I have let it flounder because you didn't care." But yeah, so that was the original business model, was SaaS. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Adam Jacob:** And then over time it turned more and more toward on-prem software, feature discrimination... All of that stuff sort of crept in, because we were trying to figure out how to monetize what was a growing enterprise user base, and just trying to figure it out... And we really struggled to do it, as I've ta... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I've never heard the story. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, I mean, we've gone through -- we went through every possible open source business model. We started out SaaS plus open source that you could run on-prem... We had the open source version, and then we took the SaaS version, and we sold that as an enterprise version. It was like "Hey, if you want th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:08.05\] What? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, it was nuts, right? And it was really condensed. And the Ruby-based Chef server just couldn't do it, and I remember going to Facebook with the Erlang Chef server on a USB key that had a little -- whatever, it was like a little bear's head on the end of it. And I brought it to Facebook, and we inst... |
So we were like "Hey, if you want the good one, pay us for the good one." And then it becomes hard to maintain both, so then you're like "Well, maybe we should just open source the good one too, but then we'll hold back some features. Maybe it'll be security features." Then maybe it'll be -- well, and then what we actu... |
**Break**: \[01:13:37.21\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Would you say those 10 years before acquisition was a struggle to find the business model then? Like, given this, in hindsight? |
**Adam Jacob:** I mean, yes and no... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because the thing was good. It was hard to make money off of it, right? |
**Adam Jacob:** We should have made more money than we did. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Adam Jacob:** So if we had made the amount of money for the value we created, that company would still exist. It'd be a public company and you'd be talking about it now. We didn't, and so it wasn't. But it wasn't because we didn't have an impact. The impact we had on the enterprise, the client list we had... We were ... |
So there's a lot of things that in hindsight weren't existential, that we thought were, and freaked out about... And then there's a lot of things that really were existential, that we freaked out about justifiably, and then fixed, and then the business model worked out. But I wouldn't say it was easy, and a lot of it w... |
At the same time, we were quite successful and it was really fun, and I have no regrets. I would do it roughly -- I wouldn't do it the same way; I'd have changed the business model if I had hindsight. But yeah, it's hard. But what that did for me was professionalize me. So there was a moment in Chef's life where - you ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What year was that? |
**Adam Jacob:** I don't remember, because I'm bad at time. But early on in Docker's life. So a year into Docker's existence, probably. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** 2015, 2016, maybe? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, maybe. And I had to give a speech to -- because the company was really down. And so Barry Christ asked me to give them a pep talk, you know? And so I went and watched -- Al Pacino did a football movie, whose name escapes me... It's Any Given Sunday. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yes. Yes. Any Given Sunday. |
**Adam Jacob:** At the end of Any Given Sunday, he gives the greatest inspirational speech ever put to film. He's basically got this bunch of football players, and he's like "Life is a game of inches, and you've got to crawl for it, and you've got to look at the people next to you...!" And he gives this incredible spee... |
\[01:19:44.15\] And so I studied him delivering this speech, because that's how I wanted to deliver it... And I wrote my speech, and I did my best to deliver it like I was coaching a football team, like I was Al Pacino. And it worked. I think it did actually rally the team; it rallied the company. But as soon as I was ... |
And I realized that the problem was that this had become my life, and not my job. And that it was -- there's a part of it being your life that's helpful, when you're trying to do something new... You hear musicians talk about this all the time, where they didn't have a plan B... That's good, and can be helpful. But eve... |
Then it had to become about the work I was doing, not about whether or not it was gonna happen for all of these people. And that really transformed who I am into a person like now, what I am as a professional CEO, I'm a professional entrepreneur... I do that, it's my job, but it's not who I am. And that's the moment th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting that your identity is wrapped up in that. Because when you say "That's who I was, it's what I was", that's what you mean, right? Your identity was deeply ingrained, tied to, tethered to... |
**Adam Jacob:** And your self-worth. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Who you are as Adam Jacob. Your worth is "Oh, is Chef successful? No? Okay. Well, you suck." |
**Adam Jacob:** Then you do suck, you know? I had people tap me on a shoulder in a coffee shop and be like "You're Adam Jacob, you wrote Chef?" And I'm like "Yeah." And he's like "Oh, I f\*\*\*\*\*g hate Chef", you know? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Dang, man... |
**Adam Jacob:** Just a random stranger, felt entitled enough... And I was like "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking about you when I wrote it. I didn't mean to hurt you." But I have way more people tell me that it changed their lives, and how it impacted their careers, and their families... And I have a million lovely stories... |
And so I just needed to switch fuel, you know? That's not because I don't have some of my identity wrapped up in those things, I do. It's been -- I'm 46, and as we've just talked about, I've been doing it since I was a kid. That is a huge part of who I am. But it's not all of who I am. And my success or failure doesn't... |
\[01:23:57.05\] But you know, just like those football players at the end of Any Given Sunday, the other team's feeling the same way, you know? Everybody else also in that game is trying to do the same thing. They're trying to win, too. And you win or lose, and sometimes it's your time, and sometimes it's not your time... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In the military - I was in the army for a bit in my life, and when we did things that didn't seem like it made sense, or it seemed like rework, or it didn't have meaning, or it had meaning, it was just too big, the response was never negative. |
It was always "Good training. That was good training." Because you do some things sometimes in life and you're like "That sucked. What purpose did it have?" It was good training. |
**Adam Jacob:** It was good training. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It wasn't "Burn Adam down", whether I'm talking to you or me, because we're both named Adam... It was simply, "Wow, I went through that to learn something, and it was good training." |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, it just -- it was good training. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Don't let it be self-worth burning. |
**Adam Jacob:** No. Because it can't be. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Or team burning. Like "That sucked for us." Like, we suck as a team because we just went through this thing. |
**Adam Jacob:** Right. Does that make us a bad team? I'm so grateful for those moments, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have had them... And yeah, but I wouldn't still be doing it if I hadn't had that revelation, that this is just about the work, and that the answer is always just more work. So it doesn't ma... |
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