text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Adam Stacoviak:** You were CTO? Is that what your title was? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, I was CTO. And we searched for my replacement, and then I slowly backed away from all of the work I was doing... But I didn't tell anyone I was backing away. I just kind of stopped showing up, and let other people take care of it. And they all just figured I was really busy. Because I was usually ... |
And then we hired my replacement, and he was fantastic, and we had a great relationship, and I helped him move in. I'm really proud of how I left Chef. I stayed on the board, so I was involved in the transaction... I can't go into too many details about that. |
\[01:44:01.15\] But then - yeah, I took some time off, and then... You know, with System Initiative, back to what motivates me as a person - this is how I'm looping you back into that answer. Like, in my work, outside of my personal life and the people I love - those are my atomic family, but also my chosen family. I h... |
In my work, now that I know that I'm a professional and that I'm quite good at it, I want to build the best possible thing I can imagine. Because I really think that we can not only build technology that is foundationally earth-shattering, but we can do it in a way that the people who built it are having the best exper... |
And so what we decided to do with System Initiative was rethink the foundational abstractions of how we think about automation. So throw away as much of the prior art as we needed to, to see what would happen if we went a different way. And it's been roughly five years of engineering and R&D. We're going to launch a pu... |
And so I love the newness of it, I love the art of it... And it's starting to turn over like a business, and I love that too, because you get -- there's nothing more validating in some ways than winning through revenue. When somebody is willing to pay you for it, that's good juice. So that is also motivating to me. Yea... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So let's laser into the thing at play currently. We've talked about the past, we've cliff-noted the exit... I don't think there's necessarily anything to dig into there. I think it's good to be proud of how you exit something, because - you know, don't burn bridges. Be a great person. Be the p... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, it's a hard thing to decide... If your exit isn't perfect, isn't magical, then you're making decisions about how it impacts everyone's lives in a really meaningful way. So do those early employees get enough money to send a kid to college, but the newer employees will make less? And so maybe there... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you, in fact, get to step away and take some version of what they would call a "break"? Did you get to rest a little bit? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, I took like six months off, basically. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you think about anything at all? Did you just listen to metal all the time and go for walks? |
**Adam Jacob:** \[01:47:58.00\] I sat in my office, quote-unquote, which was actually just a bathroom that we had never gotten around to renovating, in this apartment... Not apartment, house in San Francisco. And I played Dark Souls, because I really wanted to learn how to do that... And so I played Dark Souls, I wrote... |
I built a laptop and noodled around with my environment... I played with operating systems, because I love playing with operating systems. So I played with my operating system. And yeah, and thought a little about what I wanted to do next, but mostly I put it all down. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Was that hard to put it down? |
**Adam Jacob:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was actually easy. |
**Adam Jacob:** I was tired. That was a lot. And I had already seen that what we were doing wasn't going to work long term, so I knew that the returns we were getting from the work we had done for those large enterprises - which was transformative - that the teams we transformed were incredible, but that the drop-off b... |
And so I had already gotten a little tired of playing myself on TV, where I knew what I needed to do, which is go to those companies and tell them that they should do it anyway, and tell them that it was going to work out, even though I knew in my heart it wasn't. And I didn't love that. I didn't love -- as soon as tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you were able to take a break, which is great... You had a good reason to take the break. You've got family, you've got this beautiful walk with your daughter... I'm sure that's a memory that in your mental picture you can recall in this very moment, and it's very pure and very enjoyable. I think... |
**Adam Jacob:** You know what I learned about myself the other day? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What did you learn? |
**Adam Jacob:** So when people talk about the mental picture, they actually see pictures in their head. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You can't see a picture? |
**Adam Jacob:** I see nothing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, dude, I'm sorry about that. |
**Adam Jacob:** I'm not. I mean -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, you're missing out. |
**Adam Jacob:** I believe I probably am. It's like facts, it's like lists of... But I know, I remember it, and I do feel fondly about it. It's not like -- I do feel nostalgic for it. But anyway, anyway. I don't see the picture. Anyway, yes, keep going. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm sad for you on that front, because I can various moments in my life -- now, my son, he has got... And this is because of my wife. He's got the literal ability to look at something and see it forever. |
**Adam Jacob:** Oh. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** He's got that, whatever it's called, picture memory or whatever. |
**Adam Jacob:** Photographic memory. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Photographic memory. Thank you. He and my wife both have that. It's a blessing and a curse, because like sometimes you can't see the bad things, because you can't unsee the bad things. But at the same time, if I'm looking -- here's my superpower with my son. Give me a side tangent here, okay? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:51:54.02\] We're at the grocery store, and I'm on the app and I see the product I'm trying to find. And I've not bought it before. I'm trying to make marshmallows. I'm looking for, I don't know, something, an ingredient. We were making homemade marshmallows this past weekend. And so that's why ... |
**Adam Jacob:** Amazing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So anyways. |
**Adam Jacob:** Sick. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But the point is is that I can see clearly various moments in my life. Like, more recently me and my son's fishing. I have two sons. And I have a daughter as well, but in this moment it was just the two sons. And so we were fishing. I can clearly remember sitting back, just thinking "Adam, don't los... |
**Adam Jacob:** Like, hold this in your mind forever... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just pause all the stresses that you might have of them falling in the water or getting hooked by the fish... All the dad concerns. Just put them over there, and just take a breath and just calm down. Because I should be calm anyways. Why should I be stressed? We're fishing. We're gone fishing. |
**Adam Jacob:** It's literally what it's for. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I take this mental picture and I can see it in my mind right now. I can see the sun glistening off the water, I can see the stream, where it's at, and I can see my two sons just like being silly. The most joyful moment ever. I can just see it so clearly. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. I can't see any of that, but what I can do - but I know exactly how I felt. So when I hear that, what I translate that to is how it felt in that moment. And I know exactly how it felt to hold my daughter's hand while I walked her to school every day. I know exactly how it felt when she was born, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Uh, I don't know where I was going with that, but I'm sad that you don't have that, because... |
**Adam Jacob:** I mean, I have the feeling, which I think to me is enough. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It is enough. It is enough. Let me be sad though, that you don't have what I have, which I think a lot of people do have, is this mental picture. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, I think it's normal that people have that, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a lot of people who don't have it, and I don't know what the phenomenon is of people who do and don't have it, but there definitely is -- |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.