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**Adam Stacoviak:** Next week. It ships next week. |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. Clerk.com/billing is where you'll go for that page... And what's really cool about Clerk is that it makes authentication super-easy. Kind of like Stripe did 15 years ago, or whenever they started. They made this pitch that "We want to own the credit card data at your company, and you're no longer... |
And so Clerk's doing the same thing with the user table... Which is for a lot of engineers a harder thing, but as we scale engineering into, and as it goes downstream into less and less technical folks, with AI now happening, they don't really care. They are happy to give up their user table to Clerk, to say "You handl... |
So Clerk's done a really good job to date on that argument, and winning folks over, and showing how much better it can be to build your app on Clerk that not build your app on Clerk. The next major step to that user, from a company perspective, is like "I want to make money off this user." And so that's where this new ... |
\[01:21:59.11\] So everything that we're building at Clerk in terms of billing is all native to Clerk. So we're not actually using Stripe's billing product. We're just using Stripe for payments, and eventually PayPal for payments. And you'll be able to pick between them. For right now though, all of the recurring billi... |
Then separately, there's this idea of entitlements. Okay, someone signed up for a bronze plan, and this is a person who signed up for a gold plan. Well, what do they have access to? Well, usually, if you're using Stripe or some other system, you've got to then build out these entitlements in your app internally, and yo... |
So then the entitlement scenario on actually building out your app becomes way easier than it ever would anywhere else. And I mean that sincerely, because that is the truth. So it ends up becoming just a way better experience as an engineer, and you can get to making money so much faster. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Which is the goal, right? I mean, when I recall some of the details behind Clerk, it was really great -- I think they were struggling with migration from other auths, but like really great for green. Like, if you build here, it's amazing, because you don't have to backport all this cruft that you ar... |
**Drew Wilson:** Yup. Yup. I think that's accurate. We are working right now on migration tooling and improving that stuff. That's like a separate team working on that stuff right now. So it'll all get better in the future... And what's cool is the reason Clerk is called Clerk is because we want to take on the boring a... |
\[01:26:02.07\] So what's crazy is if you look at auth, it's like a 10, 10+ billion dollar industry; tens of billions of dollar industry. But if you look at payments, and you look at commerce, that's a multi-trillion dollar industry. It's like a whole other scale. And so the way I see it is that our billing products wi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It'll be good. What else? What is left? We've got a few more minutes to chat, about three-ish from my examination of the clock here... What else is left unsaid? What's the next big idea? Can you tease your next big thing? |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. So I'm working on something - and when I say that, I mean that very loosely... Every week, I get like an hour. It'll slow down soon for me, after launch and everything... But I'm barely working on a thing called Opacity. And this comes from my experience working with teams. And I've teased Opacit... |
So this is something I'm working on with Michael Jackson. So in our spare time he created React Router and Remix, and he and I -- we live very close to each other, our daughters are friends, and we see each other all the time, so we've always wanted to build something together. And so we're working on this now together... |
And so Opacity is a way for designers - and engineers too, but mostly designers - to build and maintain components. So the idea of building a web interface... Not a marketing site, but like a web app - components are the way forward, and people have known that for a while. You don't really build things willy-nilly anym... |
Figma's canvas is not a DOM. It is a giant WebGL thing. So they can never match the same. As a matter of fact, if you look at the way they do blurs, if you look at the way they do drop shadows, they're never one-to-one with what you see in code. They're bordering; all that stuff works totally differently, because it's ... |
And they always have to build all these features, like auto layout, and this, that and the other thing, just to try to like match the DOM... \[laughs\] And so what Opacity is is a canvas that is the DOM. And you drag and drop, just like Figma, you build boxes... And the boxes that you build and the inputs that you put ... |
\[01:30:09.28\] And so you can style and design it, and you can create a component, and then you can go to the pages tab and like build out a whole page where you're creating instances of those components, dragging them, dropping them... But the thing is, everything that you're doing is actually code. And so the export... |
And as you know, with any component-based system you can actually extend props. So if you have your business logic that you want to add to these components, then you can. You can create an - an actual checkout is the name of the component, which is really a wrapper around the checkout component, and it has all your bus... |
So it's the idea of like if you were to build actual products visually, this would be the ideal way to do it, and that's what Opacity is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hmm... Eventually a Figma killer, or a Figma acquisition? Could this be your whale? |
**Drew Wilson:** Maybe. We don't want to take any investment. We just want to build it ourselves, and build a company. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Cashflow. |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. A cashflow company. I'm not saying we would never sell. I'm not saying that whatsoever. But I don't think it would be a Figma killer and that people would use this in place of Figma, because if you're designing a website that's not an app, you're going to probably want to use Figma. It's built fo... |
As a matter of fact, one of the things you get - whenever you create a new project in Opacity, you ultimately create a set of components in that project, and you can share that and you can spread that out on the web to anybody you want. And when they click to go to view that page, they don't have to have an Opacity acc... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Mm-hm. |
**Drew Wilson:** \[01:34:02.11\] So you see your components visually, and you can see the props, and change them and edit. We're not using Storybook, we're using our own thing. But it's essentially Storybook, and you can see all the components and mess with them. So when you think about it that way, that's what we're b... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So all you've got to do is get more random hours over the next however long to do that. |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm sure this next big idea will come to fruition, because you're Drew Wilson. That's how it works. At least in my experience with you. Maybe your own version of your own path is a little different, but from the outside looking into your world, that's how it seems. It'll happen. |
**Drew Wilson:** You've got to add an extra F in there. It comes to fruition and failure. That's usually what happens. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ah, yes, yes. Well, I mean, there isn't a sweet unless you've got some bitter, right? The bitter is never as bitter unless you've tasted the sweet. |
**Drew Wilson:** Yup. Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Cool. Well, I'm sure we could talk for longer... It's been awesome having you back on the pod. It's been way too long. If this didn't cover everything you wanted to, I'm happy to have you back on and dig even deeper. I mean, we barely scratched the surface of things I think we could talk about... |
**Drew Wilson:** Dude, I'm totally down. It's fun chatting with you. I've missed this, it's been great. I mean, if folks don't know, we used to run a podcast together called The Industry back in 2012... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh my gosh, man... |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. So it's been a while. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It has been a while, man. |
**Drew Wilson:** And it's always fun. It's always fun. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Jared Erondu, me and you, The Industry... |
**Drew Wilson:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The Random Show... |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The days, man. The days. And yet, we've never met face to face, I've never been to ValioCon, we've never shaken hands... |
**Drew Wilson:** Yup. Dude, the internet's crazy. You could do stuff like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Drew Wilson:** You can be a founder/co-founder situation with a buddy and never really meet them. It's wild. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I realized in this conversation, in the first few minutes of it, was that you were the person I think I had learned or heard the phrase more frequently than I ever have before, called "What the crap." That's one of your phrases you like to say, because I'm sure you like to cuss a lot, so I'm sur... |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I think I began to say "what the crap", because I'm also like that. I like to just cuss less. I'm just not much into profanity. Although I do do it... I just don't do it publicly a lot. You know, I stub my toe, I'm gonna say a bad word. I'm not gonna say "What the crap." |
**Drew Wilson:** \[laughs\] |
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