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**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That's a great answer. |
**Chris Anderson:** We were hanging out on IRC... I think it was \[unintelligible 00:06:12.00\] who came out to Portland for OSCON, like we were talking about... We were already buddies from online. And then after that, Damian invited the Brain Trust out to his place in Asheville, North Carolina, where I said "Hey, let... |
**Jerod Santo:** Tell the story of that company from there. Tell the story. As long or as short as you want it to be. |
**Chris Anderson:** So there's a lot that went on, but the thing that really sticks with me is the fact that we kind of accidentally incubated Node.js. We had people like Isaac Schlueter and Ryan Dahl hanging around the office, mostly because of Mikeal Rogers, rest in peace... And it was that crowd that was just inform... |
**Jerod Santo:** My first exposure to CouchDB was via - now we're name-dropping - a Geoffrey Grosenbach PeepCode on CouchDB. And he made it look so cool. I was just a fledgling Ruby on Rails developer, of course, dipping my toes into the JavaScript ecosystem, and kind of exploring databases at the time, and like wonder... |
**Chris Anderson:** Legend. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, a legend. It made CouchDB look like this is where the cool people are coding... And it turns out it was true; I mean, from your story, it's like - yeah, a lot of very talented people are involved in the project. |
**Chris Anderson:** \[08:10\] You have to remember 2008-2009, that was the very beginning of the API revolution. The idea that you could put your database behind a REST API. Almost nothing was even JSON yet. So we were all frustrated with XML, we were all writing kind of monolithic servers... And by the time that proje... |
**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm. Was it good business, too? I mean, you started a business around it. Was the business good? Was it hard? How'd that go? |
**Chris Anderson:** It was good and hard, and in some ways, we brought like a cultural cachet that allowed us to, as we discussed on episode 54, merge with Membase, who had a whole bunch of really smart people who understood the market and how to drive a startup to success. |
So Steve and me, who I learned revenue from over there, is now on the board of Vibes DIY, and helping me do the right things here. It took a while, but they IPO'ed. They IPO'ed about five years after I left... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. |
**Chris Anderson:** ...and I'm always watching it real close. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what's your journey from leaving there to Vibes, Vibes.DIY, which is your current thing? |
**Chris Anderson:** Well, I bounced around a little bit, checking out other database technologies, worked on FaunaDB, which I still maintain; it has some of the strongest integrity that you can get. Then I went to McKinsey and Company... Kind of a fun story there. Like, you wouldn't think that -- my whole family was li... |
I built a deep tech thing, along with Mikeal Rogers' team at Protocol Labs, who did a whole bunch of research on immutable data structures with content addressing. I joined that team for a little while, and saw the potential of it, and built an embedded database that runs in the browser, with end-to-end encryption for ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's dive into that. When you say cryptographic data provenance, what do you mean exactly? |
**Chris Anderson:** So it goes back to Rich Hickey Clojure and the immutable data structures that they were pioneering around the same time we were doing Couch. And what you see in those data structures - as soon as you have an invariant that you're working with immutable backing storage, you have to do everything diff... |
\[12:27\] That means you can only talk about stuff that's already been written. And that means that every time you're doing these B-tree like updates, you're either going to churn data in a real heavy way, with lots of kind of write amplification that's unnecessary, or you're going to solve these hard, hard problems th... |
**Jerod Santo:** So... Fireproof? Firestore? What's it called? |
**Chris Anderson:** Fireproof. |
**Jerod Santo:** Fireproof - is this your implementation of these concepts, or...? |
**Chris Anderson:** It's my essentially making it so easy to use. We talk about technology, especially databases, and one of the phrases people like to say is "a footgun", right? A footgun is when if you don't do everything exactly right, it blows up on you. |
And the requirement I had for this technology is no footguns. It's literally designed for the code school dropout. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So you can't actually shoot yourself in the foot. |
**Chris Anderson:** Right. And that turned out to be the right place to be, because -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Because we've got a lot of people vibe coding. |
**Chris Anderson:** Well, even more than that, I'd say with LLMs and GPTs and all that, we have an infinite supply of code school dropouts. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, true. Yeah, exactly. They are infinitely supplied... Depending on how much money you have, right? There's another one there; assuming you can afford those tokens. So you're working on Fireproof, you're building this, making it simple for people to build things with it. And then where does Vibes DIY... |
**Chris Anderson:** So we were going to market with Fireproof after the technology got mature, and there's use cases like black box recorder for self-driving car. Things that are very serious, that are served well by this content-addressed immutable data structure. But there's not very many people who need that, and th... |
When we started to see in our Discord people coming in and saying "I haven't programmed in 15 years, but I built this drum machine along with ChatGPT and your API, and it worked right out of the box", we realized we've got vibe coders. |
And so I brought in an old friend of mine, this guy Marcus Estes, who I've known for like 20 years, and he's just a hustler. He makes it happen. He understands where the opportunity is and how to go after it. I've been looking at this vibe coding stuff, thinking "That's fun. That's cute." He realized "No, let's just do... |
The big difference, the real difference that matters is my kids, who were so sick of hearing me talk about Merkle CRDTs and all this stuff, now they're grabbing my phone out of my hand. |
**Jerod Santo:** You're cool again. "Dad's cool again", you know? |
**Chris Anderson:** They just want to make apps. They're like "Dad, can I make an app?" |
**Jerod Santo:** "Dad, can I make another Merkle tree?" You know, no one ever says that. |
**Chris Anderson:** \[laughs\] Right...? |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:12\] What kind of apps are being built with this thing, or can be? |
**Chris Anderson:** Well, I was really inspired -- I was trying to see essentially what's the lowest common denominator that we can address... And the answer to that is I was using ChatGPT Canvas and Claude artifacts and thinking about how for like a normie, somebody who doesn't already know their way around the next J... |
And we had this tremendous validation... We just got back from Render ATL. It's a tech conference in Atlanta, where we had a deep line at the booth, crowded up with people who had kind of maybe never even heard of vibe coding, or if they had, they hadn't tried it yet... Or if they had tried it, they thought the existin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... What's on the sticker? Is it like a QR code, or an install kind of thing, or launch it? |
**Chris Anderson:** The way we install it in here is with the near field communications chip. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... |
**Chris Anderson:** I actually learned about that at like a Burning Man event, where someone was doing manicures with NFC chips in them. |
**Jerod Santo:** Really? |
**Chris Anderson:** Yeah, which is super-hot. Like, "Here's my number." |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. You can just embed a little bit of information on that chip and then carry it around in your fingernail. |
**Chris Anderson:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** That sounds very Burning Man. |
**Chris Anderson:** Yeah. You learn a lot. You never know where you're going to learn a lot. |
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