text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Adam Jacob:** I don't know, my daughter was taking a random test on the internet and she was like "Dad, can you see pictures in your head?" And I'm like "No, that's metaphor." She was like "What?!" And I'm like "Every time people say that, it's just metaphor. They're just... It's metaphor." She's like "Dad, that's no... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Okay..." |
**Adam Jacob:** \[laughs\] Yeah. Anyway. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I would love to go into System Initiative, but not so deeply. I think the major questions I have, and I think we may have asked you loosely in past conversations, but the conversation was less focused on that, was why be in stealth for five years kind of thing? Like, how did you finance the early pa... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. With System Initiative - so we had three founders: me, Mahir Lupinacci and Alex Ethier. And I think one of the reasons we were in stealth for a long time was just that we actually didn't know what the solution to the problem was. I had some ideas about what it would be, and Alex had some ideas abo... |
\[01:56:04.16\] Was it valuable to be stealthy? Like, over five years, probably, in that if you tell people how great something is, and then five years later it shows up, they're like -- you kind of missed your shot at like capturing their attention. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. You built it up a lot, yeah. |
**Adam Jacob:** System Initiative - we launched it as open source, and you've been able to download it and try it and do stuff with it for a while, and people have been... But now it's kind of in the shape where the fullness of the experience is compressing in a way that you'll be able to use it, and it feels good, and... |
In terms of funding the business, the only real struggle there is that five years is a freakin' eternity in startup land. And we felt like we were close for a really long time, because we've sort of known what the answer is... But because we had to build all this foundational technology, you just didn't really know whe... |
Luckily, System Initiative is incredibly compelling, and so our ability to keep it funded and to keep our investors sort of happy is pretty great, because what we're building is transformative and very cool, and so they're in. That said, it's gotta get into the world, and people need to use it, and we'll see if people ... |
And again, as a professional, that's my job. What I do is I take venture capital money and I try to build the best businesses I can build from it. And one of the ways you build the best business in technology is you have to have foundationally great technology. If you do, you have a better shot at it being transformati... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Timing is key, right? Timing is key in any launch. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, it makes a difference. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wouldn't you say? |
**Adam Jacob:** Timing is key. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, you have a history of the timing with Chef... |
**Adam Jacob:** Chef had particularly good timing, I think. The market was really ready for it. I think the market's really ready for stuff like System Initiative 2. I think when you look at market timing and you think about -- the question there usually is more about like... It's difficult to time the market, but it's... |
\[01:59:52.27\] So some of it is external market timing. For Chef, that was like the rise of SaaS and hyperscale, which sort of sets the stage for needing ubiquitous automation, because without it you can't scale quickly enough. But with System Initiative it is those failed DevOps experiences. It is that when you ask p... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess what I was potentially trying to get is to ruffle your feathers a little bit. Not so much your feathers particularly, but mostly just to consider - with Chef, you battled the rise of Docker and a change in the ecosystem. And we talked about your five years of stealth, and it's a wonderful th... |
**Adam Jacob:** We were in stealth for like three of the five. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Three of the five, sure. Thank you for correcting me. But nonetheless, even now you're in open beta, and it is open source, and you can see a lot of it. It's still in motion to become -- |
**Adam Jacob:** Pretty high barrier to entry though. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you mean by that? |
**Adam Jacob:** Well, you have to like download the source code and compile it and run it on your laptop. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, that's kind of what I'm getting at. It's still -- it's not easily accessible by everybody. I can't go and free-tier it today. |
**Adam Jacob:** But you will be able to soon. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Do you see any looming Dockers out there to System Initiative? |
**Adam Jacob:** \[laughs\] I mean, no. If I could see them, they're not a Docker. The thing about Docker is that nobody saw Docker. And then Docker happened, and everybody was like "F\*\*k! Docker!" You know? That was an avalanche of like a real sea change in the experience of what was possible. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Major change. For the better, right? Would you agree it's for the better? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yes. I would agree Docker was for the better. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I mean, my spicy hot take is I don't think Kubernetes was for the better. I think we're actually net worse on most vectors. But I'm alone pretty much in my feelings on that. But that could be because I'm a grognard. You know what I mean? It could just be that I'm, whatever. Old. So yeah, if I ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Adam Jacob:** But I don't know what it is. I think the biggest challenges for System Initiative aren't there's some other disruptive technology that sort of eats my market share. I'm far enough ahead in terms of what the technology is and does that you'd be insane to try to do what I'm doing, because it would also ta... |
I think our challenge is more that it is fundamentally a different approach to solving these problems, and that means that the experience of solving them is also fundamentally different. And so our big challenge isn't going to be "Is there some competitive technology that beats us?" It's just going to be, "Do the peopl... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[02:04:09.19\] For sure. |
**Adam Jacob:** It was still the best thing I could build. It was still the best thing I could imagine. It was still the best way I could have possibly thought about using that capital to try to build something that I think has the potential to be truly transformative. And I want to build things that are transformative... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does this work? ...I suppose your outlook on the rise of platform engineering. You've grown up and you were there when DevOps was born, as you said in past conversations with us... I think it was John Allspaw is that right? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know if it's his last name or not. |
**Adam Jacob:** That's his last name, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, I thought so. I'm just like "Did I get the name right?" |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And now you have this rise of platform engineering. Does System Initiative dovetail and play well with this change of sea? Because you still have DevOps, but maybe DevOps serves platform engineering, and not so much developers, because platform engineering serves the ecosystem of developing teams on... |
**Adam Jacob:** I kind of settle it by thinking about what people are going to do with their time. So what System Initiative is good at is it's so much quicker and safer and faster to use System Initiative to model infrastructure, and to look at how the system could work or should work... And it's dramatic. And it's mu... |
Platform engineering is a marketing response and a technology response to the same fundamental problems that System Initiative looks at. You look at that same problem that says "Ah, DevOps teams - they're not working as well as you hoped they were." They've been struggling to like deliver the results over a long period... |
We've had this conversation a bunch of times as an industry, where it's like "We need portals. You need a developer portal, you know? And so you build a developer portal, and they could click a button and they get their little development environment. And then they don't have to think about all the details, and it's go... |
I think it's a dumb bet, because it's being built on top of the same foundational technologies that delivered the terrible user experience you didn't love. So how exactly is papering over that going to be better? It won't. It won't. Because you've already fixed the experience at the bottom. You were like "No--" The sha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[02:08:03.25\] Good name, though. I like the name. |
**Adam Jacob:** Incredible name. Great technology. Great people. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Cloud Foundry is an awesome name. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.