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**Adam Stacoviak:** "Hey, man..." I love it. |
**Adam Jacob:** That's wild. It's wild. But when I say that it's like DOS, it's because the -- it's cool we can do that. It was cool we could write Duke Nukem. But there was a lot more we could do in how we interact with computers, and the design... What are the applications you can build on top of it... All of that's ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, on that note, just take me into the world of how now, with the rewrite -- so you're now AI-native, which means you went back to square one, you threw it away, you deleted it... |
**Adam Jacob:** \[01:32:05.15\] Well, I mean, we deleted a lot of it. The core model we kept. It turned out the core model was Catnip for AI. So that was -- so all that lived. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. You did that. And then now you're at this place where you're drafting essentially what I would imagine some sort of new interface. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right? Agents glue. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does someone interface with System Initiative in an AI-native way? Are you in Claude Code? Are they in Claude Code? What's going on? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, they're in Claude Code. So the way we ship it is basically a pre-bundled Claude Code where you check out a git repository, and what it has is a pre-configured MCP server, where it's like, for your convenience, we've blessed a lot of the endpoints that are safe, and then added in the context in the... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're navigating to a directory that you've cloned down on your disk, as an individual developer, and you're instantiating Claude. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yup. And that attaches you to a workspace in System Initiative, and it's got the MCP server already configured. You could do all of that yourself. It's not a secret that that's what we're doing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, no, I get that. What I think is funny is how simple that is, really. |
**Adam Jacob:** It's so simple. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So simple, right? |
**Adam Jacob:** And it works so good. And it's way better than being like "Install the custom System Initiative agent", and you're like "Oh, man... But it can't write plans like Claude does." You're like "No, no. Just put it in plan mode, and have it go look at your infrastructure, and have it spend credits doing deep ... |
So then there's really three ways you interact with it. So one is through the agent, two is through a web UI, because you want to understand what the agent has done, and you want to be able to visualize it, or you want to be able to visualize your own stuff... So ubiquitous search, mapping... So there's still a visual ... |
And so when you think about -- and then you use all three of those modes in different ways. So in a CD pipeline, you'd be using the public API to do promotion. To basically say "Hey, take in the data about the build that I just did, and then call into System Initiative to change some infrastructure." You'd be using the... |
So those are the sort of three ways. And I think that is going to be a model that more people start to accept, is that as these agents come online and we're doing more and more with them, what we need are systems that allow us to interact at different levels of fidelity... Where like, I don't want to have to do all of ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
**Adam Jacob:** And then -- yeah. But I think things are going to in general become more multiplayer in that way. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you considered that you're the -- gosh, I'm just zooming out. So follow me with this, because I'm trying to piece together some insights that I just kind of get in real time. And I've got a good friend who's building some on prem stuff, so I'm knee-deep with my friend who's building out some co... |
\[01:36:25.22\] And largely, that's been infrastructure as code, hard to automate, TerraForm, wars, licensing... All the things. And I just wonder, have you considered that System Initiative is or can be that cloud operating system for everybody? ...put it on top of anything, whether you choose public cloud, or you cho... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. Yeah, basically. And that's why the design is generic. That's why you can create your own components, that's why you can program it from the agent, that's why you can create -- if you have your own applications deployed on-prem, they probably have their own APIs, they have their own CLIs. You're g... |
So we've had to build a lot of abstractions in order to try to make things good enough for people that it turns out when the agents are in the loop, you can remove. So there's a lot of layers here, where when you think about what the interaction model looks like, you might be able to remove some of those intermediate l... |
I don't need the higher level abstraction anymore, because the higher level abstraction was me just saying "Load balancer, please." I don't need an intermediate layer. So even when we think about it as the cloud operating system or whatever, it breaks your brain in half because you're like "Well, yeah, but what's the i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Adam Jacob:** And we're still exploring the repercussions of that. You know what I mean? I don't know where that goes or how that ends, but when I talk about it being open field running and how much opportunity there is to build, that's what I mean. The more you open your mind up to what's possible, the more you're l... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you support on-prem currently? I know you've mentioned AWS, GCP... |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, custom hardware - where are you at with that? |
**Adam Jacob:** \[01:39:47.27\] Yeah, we're nowhere yet, but what we do do is support your ability to build your own models. So if you have stuff you want to drive with System Initiative, and you have a specification, what you would do is just create the models and feed it. But we'll start. It's an obvious thing, that ... |
So that kind of mobility is just going to keep compounding, because then we're going to be like "Well, sure. We'll do VMware." Everybody wants to get off VMware... And so, okay, once you have a VMware target, and you have a whatever else target, that migration story is the same. You're just like "Well, okay..." The raw... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know I'm asking one more time about this on-prem situation, but how important is it to you to get there? |
**Adam Jacob:** It's pretty important. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because I feel like it's becoming burgeoning. Like, it's new. This new "own your own cloud" kind of situation is newer in the last two years, but there's a significant uptick in the desire. We just had an outage, we just talked about that, right? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. We'll probably start with Oxide and OpenStack, and then you start to move from there. But once people start to adopt in a bigger way, then they start to bring them. If you have the API that you want... Like, one of the things that's true in System Initiative right now is we're still in the part wh... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. A lot of fun stuff, man. |
**Adam Jacob:** So fun. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of fun stuff. Are you growing as a part of this? Do you need more babysitters, more toll booth orchestrators, more directors? |
**Adam Jacob:** In terms of employees? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Adam Jacob:** No, I'm good right this second. What I need to do right this second is bring my products to market, and get more people to understand what we've done, and turn that crank faster. And more employees would be helpful, but at some point, the thing you're doing is getting the feedback loops moving that gets... |
\[01:44:11.13\] And so today that's the most important thing in our business, is just finding those people and helping them win, and getting them successful. And that naturally will lead me to needing more employees to work on the software. But today, I don't need more employees to work on the software. I need more peo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What is it like to go to market today, in 2025? What's the hard parts about going to market? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah, it's weird, righ? So I can't speak for anybody but myself... So I would say in infrastructure, what's weird today is that we spent a lot of time teaching the market how to do the last generation of tools, because we thought that was the best we could do. And we did a really good job. So I'm proud ... |
The amount of AI noise has made any AI go to market really tricky, because people are just tired of somebody telling them "Hey, this AI thing's really cool. It's going to change everything." And you're like "Not in my life... I'm sitting over here, doing what I do. All it did was lie to me this afternoon. I gave it a t... |
And so that's interesting to me, because in my career, building configuration management, or infrastructure as code, or the DevOps movement - when it was coming up, there were people that rejected those things; there were people who looked at Chef or configuration management and they were like "Never for me. Snake oil ... |
I think the other is that on the flip side, the enterprise sell - way better. It's never been as smooth as it feels right now. So take the same technology, the same things, I show it to a CTO at a global 3000 company, and they have an existential crisis about what it means. They're like "Oh, no." And they get it immedi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you mean by "Oh, no"? What do they mean by "Oh, no"? |
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