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**Jerod Santo:** There you go. Yeah, plausible deniability. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** So I had that, just a piece of open source software... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Then I got people to start using it. |
**Jerod Santo:** How'd you do that part? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** So we actually got acquired. That was the data engineering company. They got acquired by a company called Meltwater. And the idea was that we were going to be like a streaming -- because we were very good on streaming. We had like a big Kafka deployment that we were managing at the time... So they kin... |
**Jerod Santo:** This is the business that you worked at got acquired, correct? Not Benthos, your open source thing. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, yeah. Not Benthos. |
**Jerod Santo:** Because that's eventually going to -- in the story, that's going to get acquired eventually, too. That's what I'm trying to track. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, yeah. So this was just like a pet project I'd been given permission to just do on my own terms... Because nobody at the company wanted anything like that at the time, so it was just like "Okay, we're happy for you to just sort of do that." |
**Jerod Santo:** Cool. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** And I was there for a while, and then I started seeing opportunities to... There were like teams that were blocked on integrations with other teams... And they wanted like a third team to help them bridge the gap, and be like the common data bus, and enforce the schemes, and stuff like that. And then ... |
\[20:08\] And I became the evangelist for this open source project internally for that -- was a while. I'm going to say a while because I can't actually remember how long it was. |
**Jerod Santo:** A couple of years maybe, or what? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, a couple of years. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Nobody's going to fact-check. |
**Jerod Santo:** No. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** 10 years I was there. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Ashley Jeffs:** And yeah, they just kept adopting it. So we had success story, success story... And then I was allowed to -- I was still almost exclusively working in my spare time. So I would build stuff in my evenings and weekends that I knew teams would want. I hadn't been asked to build it, I just kind of saw the... |
So there would sometimes be a concern of like -- to give you a tangible example, something that might actually exist in the real world, rather than abstract concepts. Like imagine doing stream joins, where you've got one Kafka topic, another Kafka topic, and you need to join them by some common ID. And ordering isn't -... |
What I would do is just say "Hey, that join - you could just use that Redis cluster that you already have deployed, and use Benthos to cache data from one of the feeds, and then the other feed you could just treat as like the canonical feed, and use that cache to obtain the stuff that it's supposed to be joined to. And... |
And it's kind of flipping the problem on its head, because what you're doing is you're saying that the thing that's streaming, the live feed, this thing that you want to keep low latency, and is very important, it's dealing with hot potatoes - that's actually stateless. And the state exists somewhere else that's kind o... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[24:21\] Right. But the ops team loves it, right? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** The ops team loves it. And you may well find that actually it works better. You might get better performance out of it... Because at the end of the day, it just depends on your use case. Like, if you're just doing a very simple join, having a stateful, window-based processing tool is quite expensive f... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, yeah. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** So it's not always going to be a winner, but when it is, you've just gotten rid of stuff that you otherwise would have needed. And that was my in. |
**Jerod Santo:** That was your pitch. It was successful, and people loved it. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** And it's open source, so then I started getting other companies getting interested, and started using it... I got really lucky with social media, that's on the internet, and I managed to get a post on the Go subreddit. And then that got me on the Golang Weekly newsletter... Shout-out to them. And then... |
**Jerod Santo:** What was that post called? Do you know? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** I think it was called like... It was what I was calling Benthos at the time, was a dull, resilient string processor, or something. I was calling it dull, and I was describing it as boring. So it was probably some combination of those types of words, that verbiage. |
**Jerod Santo:** So maybe not at that time, but at some point in benthos.dev's history - which now redirects to Redpanda, but if you find it on the Wayback Machine, your tagline was "Fancy stream processing made operationally mundane." |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, that was it. Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So maybe -- that may or may not have been the actual article title, but this is kind of your way of describing it, as like "It's going to be boring." That was like the new generation of how I would describe it. That was when I was confident enough to start calling it stream processing and not get shut ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Right. So social media splash, this got a new group of users, I'm sure... And because of the nature of the target audience, of course, Hacker News was a great place to land for that. But you started landing users who are like -- they have the problems that Benthos is solving, so they become.... |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Usually. I mean, there's lots of startups that would use it for just like a cheap way of not having to write any code, to do a very basic pipeline. So it does come in with reasonably small companies quite a lot. And it's free, so there's that advantage to it for those people. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. The price is right. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yes. It's usually teams that are large enough that they've got these data integration problems. I used to think that was going to be super-niche, because in my mind, everybody's just going to converge on some tools that they all agree, and then who cares? Like, it all just works at that point. Everybo... |
\[28:22\] So I was pleasantly surprised that the world is actually awful, and lots of people have this common problem... So the 2017, 2018 era was like a very slow process of me realizing "Actually, I might have something here, and maybe this is worth putting a bit more time into." Because I had open source projects be... |
And then eventually it got to the point where I did just jump in and say "Okay, well, I'm going to just juggle contracts, consulting contracts and support, and live off sponsorships and stuff." So just donations. That was about the 2020, 2019-ish kind of era. And that was okay. I had a lot of flexibility, so I didn't h... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Who doesn't, right? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Well, I mean, if I could go back to those days, I might actually be tempted. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the way you emphasize it, you know? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** But the problem then is I had so many different things going on. Like, there's all these different contracts, and now I've got all these different like bosses of various types... Some of them doomed to never earn me any income. There was like procurement processes, and because I'm not in the US, I don... |
And I had some great sponsors. That was working really well... But I felt like the popularity of Benthos at about the 2022 era was getting to the point where I couldn't cope anymore with just myself on it full-time. And then a few -- we had quite a few contributors at the time that are like the core blobs. The real one... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Contracting, you mean? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** \[31:40\] No, so I started a product. So the problem that I had was that I wanted to stay bootstrapped. I was open to doing a VC round, and like starting a megacorp, or also joining another company and being acquired. I was open to both those things, but I wanted to try and be a bootstrap company firs... |
**Jerod Santo:** Just to give people a picture of that, your avatar is like you making a double chin on purpose. Is that what that is? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, yeah. There's a few variants of that on various social medias. |
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