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**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Like, not serious -- yeah, there you go. There it is. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So not serious business here. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** And the mascot is a blobfish. The docs were very facetious. There's a lot of sarcasm in there... Which is good. Even if you've got like a professional group of people that are working on your docs, they acknowledge that. But the problem is that if you -- it doesn't scale. Imagine Microsoft saying like... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Everybody has to write in that same voice. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, exactly. Everybody has to have the same tone. It doesn't scale. So I like the idea of having a really small, lean operation and keeping it cool. So I wanted to try it. But again, it's just the procurement process. Like, actually getting these big -- because a lot of our users are these big enter... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's the thing about a cloud-native product, is like you have the customers with the money. That's the thing that I know about cloud-native, is that's where the money is in the open source world. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah. There's a lot of companies with massive budgets for these pipelines. But the problem is I'm just some kid in the UK. I don't want to spend all day, every day. Like, I don't have somebody full-time doing these procurement processes, and like all these contracts and stuff... So it just doesn't sca... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's that whole enterprise-ready chasm that is talked about there. You go from how do you become SOC 2-compliant, how do you become, enterprise-y? You can't be snarky or sarcastic in your docs, you've got to have proper contracts... You have to charge way more than necessary, because they expect to ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Could you try going downstream to like the -- you know, if it fits on a credit card, you don't have to do any of that kind of stuff? Like petty cash. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** So that was what I was trying to do. I am also not good at marketing, in that I'm very good at putting together marketing materials, but I'm just not good at using them. \[laughter\] So it just goes on my YouTube channel -- |
**Jerod Santo:** You just don't show anybody? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, at that level as well, it feels like begging. It feels like begging for sponsors, except this time you also get access to this web app I made. And to me it just didn't feel like enough. Like, it didn't feel like I was doing enough. I wanted to have like these serious c... |
\[36:07\] And it was potential. Like, I had enough income that I was -- I existed. And that was a success in my books, because I had the lifestyle that I wanted. But the problem is then I had kids. So then I've got to justify "Daddy. Father. Why don't you work at Google?" And I've got to explain "Well..." \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Do your kids ask you that kind of stuff? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Not yet, but at some point I'm going to have to explain. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The expectations of our children. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah. "Father, why are we burning Klang manuals to heat the house? Why can't you have worked at Google?" And you know -- |
**Jerod Santo:** That's hilarious. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** It just got to the point where I can't really justify not doing anything at this point. I have to like try and -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What year was that? End of 2022? |
**Ashley Jeffs:** My kid was born in 2022. Towards the end of the year. It was August time. August time, I think. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, August 2022. Gotcha. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** If you can give me 15 minutes, I'll go get the documentation and I'll give you a definitive answer. But it was about August. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Get the birth certificate. Let's confirm. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** I'm not sure I did that yet. Was I supposed to do that? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Somebody was. |
**Jerod Santo:** "Father, why don't I have a birth certificate?" |
**Ashley Jeffs:** "Why don't I officially exist, father?" \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** "Don't look at me, I don't work at Google." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "I've been too busy trying to work at Google!" |
**Ashley Jeffs:** But yeah, it got to the point where it was like I'm really enjoying the lifestyle of just spending as much free time as I want, not really having like serious obligations... Because I had like contracts and stuff, but that was easy to keep going. It definitely wasn't like a full-time job. But I was de... |
It got to the point where it was like -- this project is going to reach a point where it's going to be too popular amongst enterprises for other companies to ignore that. They're going to start building up a Benthos shop. And then I'm at the risk of "Well, if their team is bigger than my team, and their team is more pr... |
And it just so happened in 2024 that it really got to the point where in the data engineering industry people were taking it seriously, o there was like lots of companies suddenly discovering it, and realizing "Oh, hang on a minute... We can get rid of Kafka Connect." And desperately then clinging onto it. It got to th... |
And then it just so happened that it got to the point where it was like "Okay, there's enough industry interest in this that we can arrange something." And then Redpanda reached out, and they had a great plan... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They came to you with a plan, like premeditated. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** So yeah, I mean, the whole thing is -- it makes sense. It's like a bigger picture thing. Like, if you're the Kafka that a company is paying for, they can't just have Kafka. They have to have connectivity to all these other things that they're doing. And they have to have all these annoying chores that... |
\[40:20\] Whereas if you have a tool in-house that does all those integrations, you have full ownership of how it's developed, you can add more stuff to it, you can be very clever about what you're adding, because you're fully competent... You have ownership of the people who understand the engine. Then these contracts... |
And - I mean, I've been talking to Alex for years. Like, we've known of each other. I considered him a friend for years past. In fact, he got me a lot of attention at one point, because they had their big -- like, Redpanda was big on Hacker News for a while. I mean, it's obviously reappeared lots and lots of times, but... |
So we did -- I think it was their first blog post, as in their first like partnership kind of a blog post. And I put it on the Benthos website as well. And it was basically... I think we called it something like we're bringing simple back to streaming. The famous Justin Timberlake song... |
**Jerod Santo:** The JT. You're the JT of big data. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Yeah. But both of us. Like a mangled combination of me and Alex is this Justin Timberlakey fellow bringing simple back to stream processing... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I believe it. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** ...if you can imagine that. If you can get an AI rendering of that on the screen now, I think your audience would appreciate that. |
**Jerod Santo:** I think that's an easy button. We can do that. Thank you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What I'm confused about though is the state of Benthos. And was it a company? Was it an open source project? You had a team, you were getting sponsorships, it seems... I'm trying to understand the context through your story and not interrupt, but it sounds like not legitimate company at this point w... |
**Ashley Jeffs:** I still need to unpack what I was doing. Mentally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Please do. |
**Ashley Jeffs:** Basically, I had a company -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What were you doing...?! |
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