Podcasts about founders talk

This week Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph for a “2 years later” catch up from his last appearance on Founders Talk. This conversation is a real glimpse into what it takes to be CEO of Sourcegraph in an era when code intelligence is shifting more and more into the AI realm, how they've been driving towards this for years, the subtle human leveling up we're all experiencing, the direction of Sourcegraph as a result — and Quinn also shares his order of operations when it comes to understanding the daily state of their growth.

This week Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph for a “2 years later” catch up from his last appearance on Founders Talk. This conversation is a real glimpse into what it takes to be CEO of Sourcegraph in an era when code intelligence is shifting more and more into the AI realm, how they've been driving towards this for years, the subtle human leveling up we're all experiencing, the direction of Sourcegraph as a result — and Quinn also shares his order of operations when it comes to understanding the daily state of their growth.

Summer Jam is the biggest street basketball event in the Southern Hemisphere and was founded back in 2012 to encapsulate the pick up game culture, music and fashion around Melbourne. We are joined by founders Eamon Larmon-Ripon & Daniel Ella who saw an opportunity to create something special which has not only supported the growth of basketball in Australia but has connected with brands like Jordan and Footlocker and is attracting the best of the best Basketball talent outside of the professional leagues. I feel this event is more a movement of culture with basketball intertwined and its coming to you this weekend. The Unlaced Podcast will be there capturing the men's tournament, the female tournament & the dunk contest with so much more. This episode is here to inspire creativity and give light to two guys from Melbourne making waves. Hope you enjoy! Get Your Merch - https://theunlacedpodcast.com/Hit Subscribe or follow on our channels below!Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theunlacedpodcastTikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theunlacedpodcastFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/unlacedpodcast/Join Dabble today and gain some easy winners following the greats across various sports. Sign up code is 'Unlaced' to get a jump start in the account: https://dabble.onelink.me/cUev/d56c5betSummer Jam Tickets - https://www.summerjam.com.au/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In der neuen GLOWCAST Special Serie "Founders Talk" begrüßt Miriam Jacks die Unternehmerin Julia Albutashvili, Mitgründerin von PHILO Family Things. Julia und ihr Mann Giorgi haben in Pfaffenhofen, nahe München, einen einzigartigen Family Concept Store geschaffen, der trotz der Herausforderungen durch COVID-19 geöffnet bleibt. Miriam und Julia tauchen gemeinsam tief in die Essenz dessen ein, was PHILO Family Things so besonders macht. Sie erkunden, wie die persönliche Beratung und individuelle Betreuung den Kern des Unternehmens ausmachen und nicht nur ein Merkmal, sondern eine strategische Stärke darstellen. Diese Intimität und Aufmerksamkeit für Details unterscheidet sie von großen, unpersönlichen Ketten und bietet eine wertvolle Lektion in Sachen Markenbildung und Kundennähe. Weiterhin wird diskutiert, wie Live-Instagram-Führungen nicht nur die Produktpalette zeigen, sondern auch den USP des Ladens verstärken können, indem sie individuelle Kundenwünsche live erfüllen. Solche interaktiven Erlebnisse stärken die Verbindung zur Online-Community und zeigen, wie digitale Werkzeuge das physische Ladenerlebnis erweitern können. Der Fokus, der oft im hektischen Alltag eines Ladengeschäfts leicht verloren geht, wird als entscheidend für den Erfolg hervorgehoben. Miriam betont, wie wichtig es ist, die eigene Vision klar vor Augen zu haben und strategisch auf die Ziele hinzuarbeiten. Julia und Giorgi bringen alles mit, was es braucht, um ihr Geschäft erfolgreich zu führen: Unternehmergeist, Hingabe und ein Auge für Ästhetik, gepaart starken Ansätzen der digitalen Präsenz. Diese Episode erkundet, wie man diese Qualitäten nutzt, um ein Unternehmen zu formen, das sowohl online als auch offline erfolgreich ist.

Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast! Today we're excited to be talking with Mike Ulin and Tanguy Chau -- creators of PaxtonAI -- about the AI legal assistant they've developed. In this episode we discuss: Our guests' backgrounds and why they became interested in the legal AI space Some of the best use cases for legal AI tools How Paxton is different than other AI platforms The main advantages that AI has over classic legal research tools What concerns attorneys have about using AI in their legal practice How Paxton AI can help law school students The future developments that are in the works for Paxton  Resources: Tutoring for Law School Success (https://lawschooltoolbox.com/tutoring-for-law-school-success/) Paxton Legal AI (https://www.paxton.ai/) Ironclad (https://ironcladapp.com/product/ai-based-contract-management/) Casetext (https://casetext.com/) Podcast Episode 425: Exploring the Legal Tech Ecosystem (w/Colin Levy) (https://lawschooltoolbox.com/podcast-episode-425-exploring-the-legal-tech-ecosystem-w-colin-levy/) Download the Transcript  (https://lawschooltoolbox.com/episode-430-the-paxtonai-founders-talk-about-their-ai-legal-assistant/) If you enjoy the podcast, we'd love a nice review and/or rating on Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/law-school-toolbox-podcast/id1027603976) or your favorite listening app. And feel free to reach out to us directly. You can always reach us via the contact form on the Law School Toolbox website (http://lawschooltoolbox.com/contact). If you're concerned about the bar exam, check out our sister site, the Bar Exam Toolbox (http://barexamtoolbox.com/). You can also sign up for our weekly podcast newsletter (https://lawschooltoolbox.com/get-law-school-podcast-updates/) to make sure you never miss an episode! Thanks for listening! Alison & Lee

In his episode, Randall speaks with the M-T Strickland, Braxton K. Davis and Ecleamus Ricks, Jr., Founders of Metric Mate, about their appearance on Season 14 of Shark Tank, turning down a deal from Kevin O'Leary, if “The Shark Tank Effect” uplifted their business after their appearance on the show earlier this year and more.

On this episode of the Hockey Cards Gongshow podcast we start by honoring the NHL's greatest player to wear the number 91 for episode 91, Sergei Federov (3:19).  Next, the Las Vegas Golden Knights have won the Stanley Cup.  We discuss the hobby impact to Jack Eichel, Adin Hill and Matthew Tkachuk (18:43).  In Hobby News, the Ottawa Senators have a buyer and a huge sale for a signed Wayne Gretzky jersey (35:33).  Joe and Zac from Second String Leather Company join the show to talk about their unique company and product lines where they make wallets and other leather goods from NHL goalie and player equipment (40:11).  We preview our favorite hockey cards in the current PWCC Weekly Auction (1:30:10).  2021 Fleer Ultra and 2021 Upper Deck ICE are out, we've opened boxes from both products and we give our instant reactions (1:48:36).  As we do each Thursday, we end the show by answering your Listener Mailbag questions (2:02:50). Partners & SponsorsOur Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/HockeyCardsGongshowPWCC Marketplace - https://www.pwccmarketplace.comSlab Sharks Canadian Consignment - https://www.slabsharks.comSign up for Card Ladder - https://app.cardladder.com/signup?via=HCGongshowSecond String Leather Company - https://secondstringleather.comFollow Hockey Cards Gongshow on social mediaInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/hockey_cards_gongshow/TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@hockey_cards_gongshowFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/HockeyCardsGongshowTwitter - https://twitter.com/HCGongshowYouTube - http://youtube.com/@hockeycardsgongshow 

This week Adam is joined by Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. Scott shares his journey to the CEO role, how he's leading the company to not only grow revenue, but to also invest in developer facing features, their shift from a enterprise sales focus to a PLG driven model, and we even talk about Docker Desktop, the competition it faces, and the struggle they face when considering making it open source.

Today we are joined by the cofounding forces behind Goldfinch, Blake West and Mike Sall. They share with us about what they learned from over 70 user interviews from everyone from Blackrock, Apollo to retired nurses, as well as their excitement around the user experience improvements for the entire Web3 and crypto space and how that UX and UI improvement will impact the Goldfinch Protocol. They also dive into how they saw 162% year-over-year growth in 2022 with no defaults. Blake and Mike give us insight into their thoughts on how crypto will reshape the global economy, expanding access to capital around the world and what they're building to make that possible. But first they give us the TL;DR of Goldfinch as well as what they're both focused on.

This week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he's building his sales organization for growth.

This week Adam is joined by Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO at Redpanda Data, to share his builder journey to create the Redpanda streaming data platform.

The founders of the Latina Mom Squad join me in a conversation about how they began this beautiful community of women. Damaris and Diana are friends who early in the pandemic joined forces and created this group that rapidly grew popularity on Tiktok. Don't miss out on this lovely conversation about women empowerment. Click here for the Latina Mom Squad (LMS) facebook group Click here for the Latina Mom Squad (LMS) tiktok page. Send your listener letters to truelessonspodcast@gmail.com Follow on IG: True Lessons Podcast Show your support and subscribe today! Want to know more about your host? Visit- https://linktr.ee/lillyjeanette Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/truelessons/support

This week Adam is joined by Jori Lallo, Co-founder of Linear, to talk about creating magical software and building high-quality software teams.

In the quest for knowledge at work, it can be tempting to think that finding what you need is like a needle in a haystack. But what if the haystack itself could show you where the needle is? That's the promise of large language models, or LLMs as they're known, and it's the subject of a this week's episode of NVIDIA's AI Podcast featuring Deedy Das and Eddie Zhou, founding engineers at Glean, in conversation with our host, Noah Kravitz. With large-language models, the haystack can become a source of intelligence, helping guide knowledge workers on what they need to know. Glean is a Silicon Valley startup focused on providing better tools for enterprise search by indexing everything employees have access to in the company, including Slack, Dropbox, and email. The company raised a Series C financing round last year, valuing the company at $1 billion. By indexing everything employees have access to in the company, LLMs can provide a comprehensive view of the enterprise and its data, making it easier to find the information needed to get work done. In the podcast, Das and Zhou discuss the challenges and opportunities of bringing LLMs into the enterprise, and how this technology can help people spend less time searching and more time working. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/03/01/glean-llm-enterprise-search/

This episode, just like the Wu-Tang Clan, is for the children. Or rather, the parents of those children: we're joined by the founders of Parenthood In Music, which aims to improve working conditions for parents in the music industry. Parenthood, they believe, remains one of the main drivers of inequality in the workplace. We find out why, and what changes they're hoping to make. Parenthood In Music is an initiative founded by Steffi von Kannemann (founder of the agency Better Things) and Marit Posch (General Manager IDOL Germany/ Co-founder of Hyper Culture). Parenthood, they say, often means that mothers and single parents end up not reaching and holding managerial positions, or must switch to new jobs in other industries. They want to “build a music industry that doesn't marginalise parents, but supports them.” So we wanted to find out more: why has this happened, what changes should be made, and what the benefits are for the industry as a whole. Fun fact: because all of us are based in the same grimy city of Berlin, this is the first ever in-person Music Ally Focus Podcast! Parenthood in Music: https://www.parenthoodinmusic.com/home-eng Most apple sauce eaten in one minute: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/412530-most-apple-sauce-eaten-in-one-minute ------

Jaime Chapman and Stephanie Brown are on a mission to empower military spouses. Both military spouses themselves, the two founded and run the U.S. Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce. Here they talk with Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein about the unique challenges facing military spouses, why the population is often drawn to entrepreneurship, and the work the Chamber is doing to foster military spouse entrepreneurs. Relocation, pay disparities, and other facts of military life Jaime and Stephanie both describe their own journeys as military spouses. Stephanie tells Sam that she was a business owner in Washington, DC, more than two decades ago when she met her late husband, got married, and moved overseas. “I very quickly became unemployed and unemployable,” she says. Jaime had served in the Army Reserves for six years and thought she was done with the military when she “married into the army” nearly seven years ago. Before they knew each other, both women shared the experience of learning how difficult it was to maintain their professional careers as military spouses, and both were involved in the world of entrepreneurship. Many factors combine to make employment complicated for military spouses: they relocate a lot, there's often a lack of affordable—or any—childcare, and there's often a lack of family or friends to help out due to the relocations. On top of that, they note, there's a big disparity in pay between military spouses and other civilians. Perhaps because of these factors, military spouses have a particularly high rate of entrepreneurship. Both Stephanie and Jaime were entrepreneurs with a passion for helping others, and the two were initially brought together by a mutual colleague who recruited first Stephanie and then Jaime to work on a Military Spouse Entrepreneur Task Force. It was while working on that task force that the idea of the Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce first came to Stephanie. “I one day said to Jaime and [another colleague], you know, we really need to have a military spouse chamber of commerce because I've been working on this certification for military spouse–owned businesses for a long time with USAA and we need a forum through which we can provide this certification and really change things for spouses and small business owners,” she recalls. Launching a network for military spouse entrepreneurs The two women launched the U.S. Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce in 2020. As Stephanie describes, gaining recognized certification of military spouse-owned business was a driving force. “So what we began doing is researching how other third parties and the Veterans Administration actually reviewed and certified veteran-owned service, disabled veteran owned, minority owned, women owned, et cetera. And so we took those best practices and narrowed it down and kind of customized it for the lifestyle of the military spouse.” Another key aim of the organization, Jaime explains, was to help military spouse entrepreneurs with essential business functions like setting up retirement plans and employee benefits for themselves and their employees. “Because the first thing you should be asking when you're self-employed is, how do I save for retirement?” she notes. “But most people are more worried about setting up their website and logo and getting their business off the ground and marketing it when they should be thinking about taking care of themselves.” Today, Jaime notes, the Chamber has 1,100 military spouse members spread across 35 states in five countries running businesses ranging from artisanal handmade products to multi-seven-figure firms. The organization is involved in several legislative initiatives, including a push to streamline occupational licensing for relocating spouses. But Stephanie says one of the biggest benefits has been the recognition of the value of the community. “I think we also are beginning to recognize that there is a huge network out there of other military spouse, business owners that we can turn to, to collaborate, to mentor, which is really kind of the secret sauce,” she says. In terms of how others can support military spouses (and, in turn, support veterans and active military members, who also benefit from their spouses' success), the two suggest a two-pronged approach. First, doing business with certified military spouse–owned businesses, either as an individual or as a business hiring contractors, helps them succeed. And second, anybody can support military spouse–owned businesses by seeking them out and buying from them.   Full transcript here 

The guests in this episode are David and Claudia Arp, the founders of the 10 Great Dates Program, which fosters fun, romance and intimacy in several easy steps for married and engaged couples. One of our apostolates, Date Night at the Basilica, will be hosting the program on a monthly basis starting on September 17, 2022. In part one, the Arps talk about why the program has been so successful over the years and how couples can benefit by going on a Great Date. Stay tuned for part two, the final episode, which will air tomorrow and feature four Date Night at the Basilica leaders who will add their insights into why this program will help couples who attend a Great Date.  To sign up to attend the first Great Date on Sept. 17, 2022 -- you can attend one, some or all the 10 Great Dates in the upcoming months -- please click here. There is no charge. If you need babysitting, there is a $10 flat fee per family. Please sign up and register your children for the childcare service by Sept. 3, 2022.   

This week we're re-broadcasting a very special episode of Founders Talk. Adam was invited by our friends at Square to host a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey as the featured finale of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack is one of the most prolific CEOs out there. He's a hacker turned CEO, often working at the very edge of what's to come. He's focused on what the future has to offer and an innovator at scale. He's also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

This week we're re-broadcasting a very special episode of Founders Talk. Adam was invited by our friends at Square to host a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey as the featured finale of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack is one of the most prolific CEOs out there. He's a hacker turned CEO, often working at the very edge of what's to come. He's focused on what the future has to offer and an innovator at scale. He's also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

This week Adam is taking the show off the beaten path to speak with Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Revel Bikes. Yes that's right, this episode features a founder of a bike brand, not a tech brand. Adam Miller's journey to create Revel Bikes is paved with many ups and many downs, a failed partnership, super scrappy weeks and months traveling the world to find the best manufacturing partners, the latest innovations in suspension tech and modern geometry to hit the mountain biking scene, a strong team that's been with him every step of the way (many of which are as close as family), and truly some of the best premium bikes available on the market today. BTW, Adam (host) is an owner of a Revel bike — he has a T1000 colorway Rascal that he's ridden on downhill trails, all-day epics, and everything in-between. If you enjoy this episode, please us know in the comments.

This week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale. Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk through his first experience in raising capital, what happens when the bar is raised on the reliability of the world's software, and why their mantra is “Hire great people, who build, sell and market a great product, and you'll have a great company.”

Adam was invited by our friends at Square to interview Jack Dorsey as part of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack Dorsey is one of the most prolific CEOs out there — he's a hacker turned CEO and is often working at the very edge of what's to come (at scale). Jack is focused on what the future has to offer, he's considered an innovator by many. He's also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin. What you're about to hear is the fireside chat Adam had with Jack at Square Unboxed 2022. Jack and Adam discuss the vision Square has for the developer platform and why it's so central to the company's strategy.

Fresh off the heels of a $50M Series C round last November, StarkWare Industries closed a $100M Series D round on Wednesday, giving the Israeli-based startup a valuation of $8 billion. The fundraise was led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, and included Tiger Global amongst others. StarkWare aims to bring efficient, affordable blockchain transactions to the masses through its ZK-rollup technology, which addresses blockchain congestion by compressing multiple transactions into ‘STARK proofs' that are then passed on to the underlying blockchain. In this episode of The Scoop, StarkWare co-founders Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny sit down with host Frank Chaparro to discuss what their firm has been building, and how their technology will allow blockchains to scale. According to Kolodny, the trustless computational integrity enabled by StarkWare technology will be very useful to society: “It delivers something that is dearly missing and dearly needed in modern societies and the way they're doing their computation. That is something very simple: it is integrity — the ability to know that something was done the right way, even when you weren't watching.” Despite bearish sentiment across markets, StarkWare's recent fundraise shows VCs are excited about the opportunities unlocked through StarkWare's scaling technology, and are willing to continue providing the developer with capital. StarkWare's two products, StarkEx and StarkNet, both serve as Ethereum scaling solutions, with the former being "scaling as a service," while the latter is permissionless. StarkNet completed its launch earlier this year, allowing any developer to integrate the platform into their application. ... For more visit theblockcrypto.com/podcasts Episode 46 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block's Frank Chaparro and StarkWare Co-Founders Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson. Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com. About Coinbase Prime Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime. About Cross River Cross River is powering today's most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River's API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Connor Sears, founder and CEO of Rewatch, joins Adam to share the journey of creating Rewatch. What began inside of GitHub to help them thrive and connect is now available to every product team on the planet. Rewatch lets teams save, manage, and search all their video content so they can collaborate async and with greater flexibility. We talk about where the tool's inspiration came from (spoiler alert, inside GitHub it was called GitHub TV which you'll hear during the show), how teams leverage video to reduce the constraints of communication, how Connor and his co-founder knew they had product-fit and how they grew the team and product, and of course the flip side of that — we talk about some of Connor's failures along the way, and knowing when it's the right time to take a big swing.

This week Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, is back talking with Adam about all the details of their massive IPO last October 2021. To set the stage, this episode was recorded on Feb 1, 2022. During the show Adam mentioned they IPO'd at a $13B market cap, but they actually ended their opening day at approximately $15B. That's a massive win for open source, GitLab, Sid, and the rest of the team. For loyal listeners you know we've had Sid on this show before, so of course we had to get him back on the show post-IPO to get all the details of this new journey.

This week Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cal.com, joins the show to talk about building the “Stripe for Time” — with a grand mission to connect a billion people by 2031 through calendar scheduling. Cal has grown from an open-source side project to one of the fastest-growing commercial open source companies. We get into all the details — what it means to be an open source Calendly alternative, how they quantify connecting a Billion people by 2031, where there's room for innovation in the scheduling space, and why being community first is part of their secret sauce.

Founders Brandon Hunt of Austin-based Via 313 Pizzeria and Otto Othman of Miami-based Pincho Burgers & Kebabs discuss how the landed their $20M of growth funding for each of their businesses. They discuss details with Andrew about how they prepared, negotiated and closed the funding – their feelings pre and post transaction – and what the future of their brands is going to be in the coming years.

The fact that spellcheck still doesn't know how to spell perimenopause kind of says it all. A wide-ranging lack of knowledge and utter confusion (even among gynecologists) around perimenopause, menopause and women's health during this transitional time of life are why today's guests, Gwendolyn Floyd (CEO) and Julie Kucinski (CMO)—along with founding partners Judy Greer (yes from Arrested Development!) and Corey Scholibo—founded Wile Women. Wile Women makes products to support women's health after 40ish. Using plant medicine supported by clinical studies, the brand demystifies and embraces hormonal health. Products support and regulate the big three: estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol, with tinctures, supplements and drinks. Instead of using single ingredients to tackle symptoms, the brand says: "Wile looks at women and formulations holistically, because that's how our bodies and nature really work."That's why, for example, their Drinking Your Feelings, Un-Anger, and Tranq Drank, products contain a blend of ingredients that work together to combat unwanted symptoms. In this episode, we discuss the flawed Women's Health Initiative study of 2002, which, incredibly, 20 years later is still scaring us away from hormone treatments. We also discuss naturopathy, medical gaslighting and so much more. I learned so much from these two during our conversation and I hope you will too!Wile has also offered a generous 20% discount to Mean Mag readers! Use code MEAN20 for 20% off your entire order. Links: Wile WomenGwendolyn FloydJulie KucinskiJudy GreerSupport the show (https://patreon.com/meanmagazine)

Two DAO-Minded Co-Founders Talk Present Day Market Movements Sign up for Token Metrics at https://tokenmetrics.com Token Metrics Media LLC is a regular publication of information, analysis and commentary focused especially on blockchain technology and business, cryptocurrency, blockchain-based tokens, market trends, and trading strategies. Like the podcast to let us know you like the content!

Two DAO-Minded Co-Founders Talk Present Day Market Movements Sign up for Token Metrics at https://tokenmetrics.com Token Metrics Media LLC is a regular publication of information, analysis and commentary focused especially on blockchain technology and business, cryptocurrency, blockchain-based tokens, market trends, and trading strategies. Like the podcast to let us know you like the content!

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We love lifting up emerging remarkable retailers that may not have (yet) hit our audience's radar screen. So this episode we welcome Rachel Bentley and Carly Nance, the co-founders of The Citizenry, the fast-growing, thoughtfully designed, ethically crafted, home furnishing company. We dig into the inspiration for the brand, the "white space" they seek to address. and how social impact is at the center of what they stand for.We also delve into the challenges of ethically sourcing products from all over the word, discover how they make their unique leadership partnership work and explore the role of customer-based analytics in growing their brand. Lastly we get a peak into their strategic growth roadmap.But first we take on the news of the week, including "inflation nation" and how input pricing challenges might manifest for different retailers. We also discuss the current mess that is Peloton and what Canada Goose's earnings whiff suggests about luxury retail's future.About Carly & Rachel met in 2004 at university. They led multiple organizations and founded a conference that's still impacting lives today. After careers on different coasts, they reconnected over a frustration with the mass-produced goods and soulless brands in home décor. Together they created a vision for The Citizenry: a brand that could stand for quality craftsmanship, transparency, and social responsibility.CARLY NANCECarly spent her early career in brand planning & global marketing strategy, helping leading brands connect with their consumers in a more meaningful way. During those travels, she was inspired by the design and stories of the people behind the products she purchased abroad. Carly earned her Masters from Northwestern and her Bachelors in Marketing from Texas A&M. At The Citizenry, Carly leads product design, brand strategy, marketing & ecommerce experience.RACHEL BENTLEYAfter years in strategy consulting, Rachel wanted to establish a business that would make an undeniably positive impact. While at Bain, she spent time in the private equity and retail practices before finding her calling: helping companies launch and redesign consumer products. Rachel earned her MBA from Columbia, her Masters in Finance, and Bachelors in Accounting from Texas A&M. At The Citizenry, Rachel leads our artisan partnerships, production & planning, operations, and finance.About UsSteve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus  Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  ,      The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois and now in its second season, Conversations with CommerceNext!  You can learn more about Michael   here  or on     LinkedIn. Be sure and check out Michael's latest venture for fun and influencer riches - Last Request Barbecue,  his YouTube BBQ cooking channel!

This week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients. Why should Titan exist? In Joe's words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn't sit well with us. So, we built Titan.” On today's show Joe shares the journey, the why's, the how's, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed.

This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.

This week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you'll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what's to come.

Listen to the Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/467Essays: https://www.swyx.io/LIP https://www.swyx.io/api-economy https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go TranscriptJerod Santo: So swyx, we have been tracking your work for years; well, you've been Learning in Public for years, so I've been (I guess) watching you learn, but we've never had you on the show, so welcome to The Changelog.Shawn Wang: Thank you. Long-time listener, first-time guest, I guess... [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Happy to have you here.Adam Stacoviak: Very excited to have you here.Jerod Santo: So tell us a little bit of your story, because I think it informs the rest of our conversation. We're gonna go somewhat deep into some of your ideas, some of the dots you've been connecting as you participate and watch the tech industry... But I think for this conversation it's probably useful to get to know you, and how you got to be where you are. Not the long, detailed story, but maybe the elevator pitch of your recent history. Do you wanna hook us up?Shawn Wang: For sure. For those who want the long history, I did a 2,5-hour podcast with Quincy Larson from FreeCodeCamp, so you can go check that out if you want. The short version is I'm born and raised in Singapore, came to the States for college, and was totally focused on finance. I thought people who were in the finance industry rules the world, they were masters of the universe... And I graduated just in time for the financial crisis, so not a great place to be in. But I worked my way up and did about 6-7 years of investment banking and hedge funds, primarily trading derivatives and tech stocks. And the more I covered tech stocks, the more I realized "Oh, actually a) the technology is taking over the world, b) all the value is being created pre-IPO, so I was investing in public stocks, after they were basically done growing... And you're kind of just like picking over the public remains. That's not exactly true, but...Jerod Santo: Yeah, tell that to Shopify...Shawn Wang: I know, exactly, right?Adam Stacoviak: And GitLab.Shawn Wang: People do IPO and have significant growth after, but that's much more of a risk than at the early stage, where there's a playbook... And I realized that I'd much rather be value-creating than investing. So I changed careers at age 30, I did six months of FreeCodeCamp, and after six months of FreeCodeCamp - you know, I finished it, and that's record time for FreeCodeCamp... But I finished it and felt not ready, so I enrolled myself in a paid code camp, Full Stack Academy in New York, and came out of it working for Two Sigma as a frontend developer. I did that for a year, until Netlify came along and offered me a dev rel job. I took that, and that's kind of been my claim to fame; it's what most people know me for, which is essentially being a speaker and a writer from my Netlify days, from speaking about React quite a bit.[04:13] I joined AWS in early 2020, lasted a year... I actually was very keen on just learning the entire AWS ecosystem. You know, a frontend developer approaching AWS is a very intimidating task... But Temporal came along, and now I'm head of developer experience at Temporal.Adam Stacoviak: It's an interesting path. I love the -- we're obviously huge fans of FreeCodeCamp, and Quincy, and all the work he's done, and the rest of the team has done to make FreeCodeCamp literally free, globally... So I love to see -- it makes you super-happy inside just to know how that work impacts real people.Like, you see things happen out there, and you think "Oh, that's impacting", but then you really meet somebody, and 1) you said you're a long-time listener, and now you're on the show, so it just really -- like, having been in the trenches so long, and just see all this over-time pay off just makes me really believe in that whole "Slow and steady, keep showing up, do what needs done", and eventually things happen. I just love that.Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's an infinite game mentality to this. But I don't want to diminish the concept of free, so... It bothers me a little, because Quincy actually struggles a lot with the financial side of things. He supports millions of people on like a 300k budget. 300k. If every single one of us who graduated at FreeCodeCamp and went on to a successful tech career actually paid for our FreeCodeCamp education - which is what I did; we started the hashtag. It hasn't really taken off, but I started a hashtag called #payitbackwards. Like, just go back, once you're done -- once you can afford it, just go back and pay what you thought it was worth. For me, I've paid 20k, and I hope that everyone who graduates FreeCodeCamp does that, to keep it going.Adam Stacoviak: Well, I mean, why not...?Shawn Wang: I'd also say one thing... The important part of being free is that I can do it on nights and weekends and take my time to decide if I want to change careers. So it's not just a free replacement to bootcamps, it actually is an async, self-guided, dip-your-toe-in-the-water, try-before-you-buy type of thing for people who might potentially change their lives... And that's exactly what happened for me. I kept my day job until the point I was like "Okay, I like enough of this... I'm still not good, but I like enough of this that I think I could do this full-time."Adam Stacoviak: I like the #payitbackwards hashtag. I wish it had more steam, I suppose.Jerod Santo: We should throw some weight behind that, Adam, and see if we can...Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. Well, you know, you think about Lambda School, for example - and I don't wanna throw any shade by any means, because I think what Austin has done with Lambda... He's been on Founders Talk before, and we talked deeply about this idea of making a CS degree cost nothing, and there's been a lot of movement on that front there... But you essentially go through a TL;DR of Lambda as you go through it, and you pay it after you get a job if you hit certain criteria, and you pay it based upon your earnings. So why not, right? Why not have a program like that for FreeCodeCamp, now that you actually have to commit to it... But it's a way. I love that you paid that back and you made that an avenue, an idea of how you could pay back FreeCodeCamp, despite the commitment not being there.Jerod Santo: Right.Shawn Wang: Yeah. And Quincy is very dedicated to it being voluntary. He thinks that people have different financial situations. I don't have kids, so I can afford a bit more. People should have that sort of moral obligation rather than legal obligation.I should mention that Lambda School is currently being accused of some fairly substantial fraud against its students...Jerod Santo: Oh, really?Shawn Wang: Yeah, it actually just came out like two days ago.Adam Stacoviak: I saw that news too, on Monday.Shawn Wang: Yeah. It's not evidenced in the court of law, it's one guy digging up dirt; let's kind of put this in perspective. But still, it's very serious allegations, and it should be investigated. That said, the business of changing careers and the business of teaching people to code, and this innovation of Income Share Agreements (ISA), where it actually makes financial sense for people to grow bootcamps and fund bootcamps - this is something I strongly support... Whether or not it should be a venture-funded thing, where you try to go for 10x growth every year - probably not... [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Yeah...Jerod Santo: So after FreeCodeCamp you didn't feel quite ready, so you did do a bootcamp... Did you feel ready after that?Shawn Wang: [08:03] Yeah. [laughs] I did a reflection, by the way, of my first year of learning to code, so people can look it up... It's called "No zero days. My path to learning to code", and I think I posted it on Hacker News. And doing everything twice actually helped me a lot. Because before I came into my paid bootcamp, I had already spun up some React apps. I had already started to mess with WebPack, and I knew enough that I wasn't understanding it very much, I was just following the instructions. But the second time you do things, you have to space, to really try to experiment, to actually read the docs, which most people don't do, and actually try to understand what the hell it is you're doing. And I felt that I had an edge over the other people in my bootcamp because I did six months of FreeCodeCamp prior.Jerod Santo: So this other thing that you do, which not everybody does, is this Learning in Public idea... And you have this post, Learn in Public. You call it "The fastest way to learn", or the fastest way to build your expertise - networking, and second brain. I'm not sure what the second brain is, so help us out with that one... But also, why is learning in public faster than learning in private.Shawn Wang: Yeah. This is a reflection that came from me understanding the difference, qualitatively, between why I'm doing so well in my tech career versus my finance career. In finance, everything is private, meaning the investment memos that I wrote, the trade ideas that I had - they're just from a company; they're intellectual property of my company. In fact, I no longer own them. Some of my best work has been in that phase, and it's locked up in an email inbox somewhere, and I'll never see it again. And that's because tech is a fundamentally open and positive-sum industry, where if you share things, you don't lose anything; you actually gain from sharing things... Whereas in finance it's a zero-sum battle against who's got the secret first and who can act on it first.And I think when you're in tech, you should exploit that. I think that we have been trained our entire lives to be zero-sum, from just like the earliest days of our school, where we learn, we keep it to ourselves to try to pass the test, try to get the best scores, try to get the best jobs, the best colleges, and all that, because everything's positional. For you to win, others have to lose. But I don't see tech in that way, primarily because tech is still growing so fast. There's multiple ways for people to succeed, and that's just the fundamental baseline. You layer on top of that a bunch of other psychological phenomenon.I've been really fascinated by this, by what it is so effective. First of all, you have your skin in the game, meaning that a lot of times when your name is on the blog posts out there, or your name is on the talk that you gave, your face is there, and people can criticize you, you're just incentivized to learn better, instead of just "Oh, I'll read this and then I'll try to remember it." No, it doesn't really stick as much. So having skin in the game really helps.When you get something wrong in public, there are two effects that happen. First is people will climb over broken glass to correct you, because that's how the internet does. There's a famous XKCD comic where like "I can't go to bed yet." "Why?" "Someone's wrong on the internet. I have to correct them."Jerod Santo: Right.Shawn Wang: So people are incentivized to fix your flaws for you - and that's fantastic - if you have a small ego.Jerod Santo: I was gonna say, that requires thick skin.Shawn Wang: Yeah, exactly. So honestly -- and that's a barrier for a lot of people. They cannot get over this embarrassment. What I always say is you can learn so much on the internet, for the low, low price of your ego. If we can get over that, we can learn so much, just because you don't care. And the way to get over it is to just realize that the version that you put out today is the version you should be embarrassed about a year from now, because that shows that you've grown. So you divorce your identity from your work, and just let people criticize your work; it's fine, because it was done by you, before you knew what you know today. And that's totally fine.And then the second part, which is that once you've gotten something wrong in public, it's just so embarrassing that you just remember it in a much clearer fashion. [laughter] This built a feedback loop, because once you started doing this, and you show people that you respond to feedback, then it builds a feedback and an expectation that you'll do the next thing, and people respond to the next thing... It becomes a conversation, rather than a solitary endeavor of you just learning the source material.So I really like that viral feedback loop. It helps you grow your reputation... Because this is not just useful for people who are behind you; a lot of people, when they blog, when they write, when they speak, they're talking down. They're like "I have five years experience in this. Here's the intro to whatever. Here's the approach to beginners." They don't actually get much out of that.[12:17] That's really good, by the way, for beginners; that's really important, that experts in the field share their knowledge. They don't see this blogging or this speaking as a way to level up in terms of speaking to their experts in their fields. But I think it's actually very helpful. You can be helpful to people behind you, you can be helpful to people around you, but you can actually be helpful to people ahead of you, because you're helping to basically broadcast or personalize their message. They can check their messaging and see - if you're getting this wrong, then they're getting something wrong on their end, docs-wise, or messaging-wise. That becomes a really good conversation. I've interacted with mentors that way. That's much more how I prefer to interact with my mentors than DM-ing and saying "Hey, can you be my mentor?", which is an unspecified, unpaid, indefinitely long job, which nobody really enjoys. I like project-based mentorship, I like occasional mentorship... I really think that that develops when you learn in public.Adam Stacoviak: I've heard it say that "Today is the tomorrow you hope for."Shawn Wang: Wow.Adam Stacoviak: Because today is always tomorrow at some point, right? Like, today is the day, and today you were hoping for tomorrow to be better...Jerod Santo: I think by definition today is not tomorrow...Adam Stacoviak: No, today is the tomorrow that you hoped for... Meaning like "Seize your moment. It's here."Jerod Santo: Carpe diem. Gotcha.Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, kind of a thing like that.Shawn Wang: I feel a little shady -- obviously, I agree, but also, I feel a little shady whenever I venture into this territory, because then it becomes very motivational speaking-wise, and I'm not about that. [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Kind of... But I think you're in the right place; keep showing up where you need to be - that kind of thing. But I think your perspective though comes from the fact that you had this finance career, and a different perspective on the way work and the way a career progressed. And so you have a dichotomy essentially between two different worlds; one where it's private, and one where it's open. That to me is pretty interesting, how you were able to tie those two together and see things differently. Because I think too often sometimes in tech, especially staying around late at night, correcting someone on the internet, you're just so deeply in one industry, and you have almost a bubble around you. You have one lens for which you see the world. And you've been able to have multi-faceted perspectives of this world, as well as others, because of a more informed career path.Jerod Santo: Yeah. When you talk about finance as a zero-sum game, I feel like there's actually been moves now to actually open up about finance as well; I'm not sure if either of you have tracked the celebrity rise of Cathie Wood and Ark Invest, and a lot of the moves that she's doing in public. They're an investment fund, and they will actually publish their moves at the end of every day. Like, "We sold these stocks. We bought these stocks." And people laughed at that for a while, but because she's been successful with early on Bitcoin, early with Tesla, she's very much into growth stocks - because of that, people started to follow her very closely and just emulate. And when she makes moves now, it makes news on a lot of the C-SPANs and the... Is C-SPAN the Congress one? What's the one that's the finance one...?Shawn Wang: CNBC?Jerod Santo: CNBC, not C-SPAN. And so she's very much learning in public. She's making her moves public, she's learning as she goes, and to a certain degree it's paid off, it's paid dividends in her career. Now, I'm not sure if everyone's doing that... When you look at crypto investors, like - okay, pseudonymous, but a lot of that stuff, public ledgers. So there's moves that are being made in public there as well. So I wonder if eventually some of that mentality will change. What do you think about that?Shawn Wang: [15:45] It's definitely changed for -- there's always been celebrity investors, and people have been copying the Buffett portfolio for 30 years. So none of that is new. What is new is that Cathie Wood is running an ETF, and just by way of regulation and by way of innovation, she does have to report those changes. [laughs] So mutual funds, hedge fund holdings - these have all been public, and people do follow them. And you're always incentivized to talk your book after you've established your position in your book...Jerod Santo: Right, but you establish it first.Shawn Wang: ...so none of that has changed. But yeah, Cathie has been leading an open approach...Jerod Santo: Is it the rate of disclosure perhaps that's new? Because it seems like it's more real-time than it has historically...Shawn Wang: Yeah. I mean, she's running an ETF, which is new, actually... Because most people just run mutual funds or hedge funds, and those are much more private. The other two I'll probably shout out is Patrick O'Shaughnessy who's been running I guess a fund of funds, and he's been fairly open. He actually adopted the "learn in public" slogan in the finance field, independently of me. And then finally, the other one is probably Ted Seides, who is on the institutional investor side of things. So he invests for universities, and teachers pensions, and stuff like that. So all these people - yeah, they've been leading that... I'm not sure if it's spreading, or they've just been extraordinarily successful in celebrity because of it.Adam Stacoviak: This idea of "in public" is happening. You see people too, like -- CopyAI is building in public... This idea of learning in public, or building in public, or exiting in public... Whatever the public might be, it's happening more and more... And I think it's definitely similar to the way that open source moves around. It's open, so it's visible to everyone. There's no barrier to see what's happening, whether it's positive or negative, with whatever it is in public. They're leveraging this to their advantage, because it's basically free marketing. And that's how the world has evolved to use social media. Social media has inherently been public, because it's social...Jerod Santo: Sure.Adam Stacoviak: Aside from Facebook being gated, with friends and stuff like that... Twitter is probably the most primary example of that, maybe even TikTok, where if I'm a creator on TikTok, I almost can't control who sees my contact. I assume it's for the world, and theoretically, controlled by the algorithm... Because if I live in Europe, I may not see content in the U.S, and the algorithm says no, or whatever. But it's almost like everybody is just in public in those spaces, and they're leveraging it to their advantage... Which is an interesting place to be at in the world. There was never an opportunity before; you couldn't do it at that level, at that scale, ten years ago, twenty years ago. It's a now moment.Jerod Santo: Yeah. Swyx, can you give us an example of something learned in public? Do you basically mean like blog when you've learned something, or ask questions? What does learning in public actually mean when it comes to -- say, take a technology. Maybe you don't understand Redux. I could raise my hand on that one... [laughter] How could I learn that in public?Shawn Wang: There are a bunch of things that you can try. You can record a livestream of you going through the docs, and that's useful to maintainers, understanding "Hey, is this useful or not?" And that's immediately useful. It's so tangible.I actually have a list -- I have a talk about this on the blog post as well... Just a suggestion of things you can do. It's not just blogging. You can speak, you can draw comics, cheatsheets are really helpful... I think Amy Hoy did a Ruby on Rails cheatsheet that basically everyone has printed out and stapled to their wall, or something... And if you can do a nice cheatsheet, I think that's also a way for you to internalize those things that you're trying to learn anyway, and it just so happens to benefit others.So I really like this idea that whatever content you're doing, it's learning exhaust, it's a side effect of you learning, and you just happen to put it out there; you understand what formats work for you, because you have abnormal talents. Especially if you can draw, do that. People love developers who can draw. And then you just put it out there, and you win anyway just by doing it. You don't need an audience. You get one if you do this long enough, but you don't need an audience right away. And you win whether or not people participate with you. It's a single-player game that can become a multiplayer game.Specifically for Redux - you know, go through source code, or go through the docs, build a sample app, do like a simple little YouTube video on it... Depending on the maturity, you may want to try to speak at a meetup, or whatever... You don't have to make everything a big deal. I'm trying to remove the perception from people that everything has to be this big step, like it has to be top of Hacker News, or something. No. It could just be helpful for one person. I often write blog posts with one persona in mind. I mean, I don't name that person, but if you focus on that target persona, actually often it does better than when you try to make some giant thesis that shakes the world...Adam Stacoviak: [20:22] Yeah. Too often we don't move because we feel like the weight of the move is just too much. It's like "How many people have to read this for me to make this a success for me?" You mentioned it's a learning exhaust... And this exhaust that you've put out before - has it been helpful really to you? Is that exhaust process very helpful to you? Is that ingrained in the learnings that you've just gone through, just sort of like synthesize "Okay, I learned. Here's actually what I learned"?Shawn Wang: Yeah. This is actually an opportunity to tie into that second brain concept which maybe you wanted to talk a little bit about. Everything that you write down becomes your second brain. At this point I can search Google for anything I've ever written on something, and actually come up on my own notes, on whatever I had. So I'm not relying on my memory for that. Your human brain, your first brain is not very good at storage, and it's not very good at search; so why not outsource that to computers? And the only way to do that is you have to serialize your knowledge down into some machine-readable format that's part of research. I do it in a number of places; right now I do it across GitHub, and my blog, and a little bit of my Discord. Any place where you find you can store knowledge, I think that's a really good second brain.And for Jerod, I'll give you an example I actually was gonna bring up, which is when I was trying to learn React and TypeScript - like, this goes all the way back to my first developer job. I was asked to do TypeScript, even though I'd never done it before. And honestly, my team lead was just like "You know TypeScript, right? You're a professional React dev, you have to know TypeScript." And I actually said no, and I started learning on day one.And what I did was I created the React to TypeScript cheatsheet, which literally was just copy-pasteable code of everything that I found useful and I wish I knew when I was starting out. And I've just built that over time. That thing's been live for three years now, it's got like 20,000 stars. I've taught thousands of developers from Uber, from Microsoft, React and TypeScript. And they've taught me - every time they send in a question or a PR... I think it's a very fundamental way of interacting, which is learning in public, but specifically this one - it's open source knowledge; bringing up our open source not just to code, but to everything else. I think that's a fundamental feedback loop that I've really enjoyed as well.Break: [22:31]Jerod Santo: One of the things I appreciate about you, swyx, is how you are always thinking, always writing down your thoughts... You've been watching and participating in this industry now for a while, and you've had some pretty (I think) insightful writings lately. The first one I wanna talk about is this API Economy post. The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy. You say "Developers severely underestimate the importance of this to their own career." So I figure if that's the case, we should hear more about it, right?Shawn Wang: [laughs] Happy to talk about it. So what is the API economy? The API economy is developers reshaping the world in their image. Very bold statement, but kind of true, in the sense that there is now an API for everything - API for cards, API for bank accounts, API for text, API for authentication, API for shipping physical goods... There's all sorts of APIs. And what that enables you to do as a developer is you can call an API - as long as you know REST or GraphQL these days, you know how to invoke these things and make these things function according to the rest of your program. You can just fit those things right in. They're a very powerful thing to have, because now the cost of developing one of these services just goes down dramatically, because there's another company doing that as a service for you.I wrote about it mainly because at Netlify we were pitching serverless, we were pitching static hosting, and we were pitching APIs. That's the A in JAMstack. But when I google "API economy", all the search results were terrible. Just horrible SEO, bland, meaningless stuff that did not speak to developers; it was just speaking to people who like tech buzzwords. So I wrote my own version. The people who coined it at Andreessen Horowitz, by the way, still to this day do not have a blog post on the API economy. They just have one podcast recording which nobody's gonna listen. So I just wrote my version.Jerod Santo: You're saying people don't listen to podcasts, or what?Shawn Wang: [laughs] When people are looking up a term, they are like "What is this thing?", and you give them a podcast, they're not gonna sit down and listen for 46 minutes on a topic. They just want like "Give me it, in one paragraph. Give me a visual, and I'm gonna move on with my day." So yeah, whenever I see an opportunity like that, I try to write it up. And that's the light side; a lot of people talk about the light side. But because it's a personal blog, I'm empowered to also talk about the dark side, which is that as much as it enables developers, it actually is a little bit diminishing the status of human expertise and labor and talent. So we can talk a little bit about that, but I'm just gonna give you time to respond.Jerod Santo: [28:05] Hm. I'm over here thinking now that you're not at Netlify, I'm curious - this is tangential, but what's your take on JAMstack now? I know you were a professional salesman there for a while, but... It seems like JAMstack - we've covered it for years, it's a marketing term, it's something we've already been doing, but maybe taking it to the next level... There's lots of players now - Netlify, Vercel etc. And yet, I don't see much out there in the real world beyond the people doing demos, "Here's how to build a blog, here's how to do this, here's my personal website", and I'm just curious... I'm not like down on JAMstack, but I just don't see it manifesting in the ways that people have been claiming it's going to... And maybe we're just waiting for the technology to catch up. I'd just love to hear what you think about it now.Shawn Wang: Yeah. I think that you're maybe not involved in that world, so you don't see this, but real companies are moving on to JAMstack. The phrasing that I like is that -- JAMstack has gone mainstream, and it's not even worth talking about these days, because it's just granted that that's an option for you... So PayPal.me is on the JAMstack, there's large e-commerce sites... Basically, anything that decouples your backend from your frontend, and your frontend is statically-hosted - that is JAMstack.I actually am blanking on the name, but if you go check out the recent JAMstack Conf, they have a bunch of examples of people who've not only moved to JAMstack, but obviously moved to Netlify, where they're trying to promote themselves.Jerod Santo: Sure, yeah.Shawn Wang: So yes, it's true that I'm no longer a professional spokesperson, but it's not true that JAMstack is no longer being applied in the enterprise, because it is getting adoption; it's moved on that boring phase where people don't talk about it.One thing I'll say - a thesis that I've been pursuing is that JAMstack is in its endgame. And what do I mean by that? There's a spectrum between the previous paradigm that JAMstack was pushing back on, which is the all-WordPress/server-render-everything paradigm, and then JAMstack is prerender-everything. And now people are filling in--Jerod Santo: In the middle.Shawn Wang: ...I'm gonna put my hands in the Zoom screen right now. People are filling that gap between fully dynamic and fully static. So that's what you see with Next.js and Gatsby moving into serverless rendering, partial rendering or incremental rendering... And there's a full spectrum of ways in which you can optimize your rendering for the trade-offs of updating your content, versus getting your data/content delivered as quickly as possible. There's always some amount of precompilation that you need to do, and there's always some amount of dynamicism that you have to do, that cannot be precompiled. So now there is a full spectrum between those.Why I say it's the end game is because that's it, there's nothing else to explore. It's full-dynamic, full-static, choose some mix in the middle, that's it. It's boring.Jerod Santo: Hasn't that always been the case though? Hasn't there always been sites that server-side render some stuff, and pre-render other things? You know, we cache, we pre-render, some people crawl their own websites once, and... I don't know it seems like maybe just a lot of excitement around a lot of things that we've been doing for many years.Shawn Wang: [laughs] So first of all, those are being remade in the React ecosystem of things, which a lot of us lost when a lot of the web development industry moved to React... So that's an important thing to get back.I mean, I agree, that's something that we've always had, pre-rendering, and services like that, caching at the CDN layer - we've always had that. There's some differences... So if you understand Netlify and why they're trying to push distributed persistent rendering (DVR), it's because caching is a hard problem, and people always end up turning off the cache. Because the first time you run into a bug, you're gonna turn off the cache. And the cache is gonna stay off.So the way that Netlify is trying to fix it is that we put the cache in Git, essentially. Git is the source of truth, instead of some other source of truth distributed somewhere between your CDN and your database and somewhere else. No, everything's in Git. I'm not sure if I've represented that well, to be honest... [laughter]Adam Stacoviak: Well, good thing you don't work for Netlify anymore. We're not holding you to the Netlify standard.Shawn Wang: [31:58] Exactly. All I can say is that to me now it's a good thing in the sense that it's boring. It's the good kind of boring, in the sense of like "Okay, there's a spectrum. There's all these techniques. Yes, there were previous techniques, but now these are the new hotness. Pick your choice." I can get into a technical discussion of why this technique, the first one, the others... But also, is it that interesting unless you're evaluating for your site? Probably not...Jerod Santo: Well, it does play into this API economy though, right? Because when you're full JAMstack, then the A is your most important thing, and when the A is owned by a bunch of companies that aren't yours - like, there's a little bit of dark side there, right? All of a sudden, now I'm not necessarily the proprietor of my own website, to a certain degree, because I have these contracts. I may or may not get cut off... There's a lot of concerns when everybody else is a dependency to your website.Shawn Wang: Yeah. So I don't consider that a dark side at all.Jerod Santo: No, I'm saying to me that seems like a dark side.Shawn Wang: Yeah, sure. This is the risk of lock-in; you're handing over your faith and your uptime to other people. So you have to trade that off, versus "Can you build this yourself? And are you capable of doing something like this, and are you capable of maintaining it?" And that is a very high upfront cost, versus the variable cost of just hiring one of these people to do it for you as a service.So what I would say is that the API economy is a net addition, because you as a startup - the startup cost is very little, and if you get big enough where it makes sense for you to build in-house - go ahead. But this is a net new addition for you to turn fixed costs into variable costs, and start with a small amount of investment. But I can hire -- like, Algolia was started by three Ph.D's in search, and I can hire them for cents to do search on my crummy little website. I will absolutely do that every single day, until I get to a big enough point where I cannot depend on them anymore, and I have to build my own search. Fine, I'll do that. But until then, I can just rely on them. That's a new addition there.Jerod Santo: One hundred percent. So what then do you think is the darker side? You mentioned it, but put a finer point on it.Shawn Wang: Yeah. The dark side is that there are people -- like, when I call an Uber ride, Uber is an API for teleportation, essentially. I'm here, I wanna go there. I press a button, the car shows up. I get in the car, get off, I'm there. What this papers over is that the API is calling real actual humans, who are being commoditized. I don't care who drives the car, I really don't. I mean, they may have some ratings, but I kind of don't care.Jerod Santo: That was the case with taxis though, wasn't it?Shawn Wang: That was the case with taxis, for sure. But there's a lot of people living below the API, who are economically constrained, and people who live above the API, developers, who have all the upside, essentially... Because the developers are unique, the labor is commoditized. My DoorDash pickers, my Instacart deliverers - all these are subsumed under the API economy. They're commodities forever, they know it, and there's no way out for them, unless they become developers themselves. There's a class system developing below and above the API. And the moment we can replace these people under the API with robots, you better believe we'll do that, because robots are way cheaper, and they complain less, they can work 24 hours, all this stuff.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Shawn Wang: So that's the dark side, which is, yeah, as a developer now - fantastic. I can control most parts of the economy with just a single API call. As a startup founder, I can develop an API for literally anything, and people will buy it. The downside is human talent is being commoditized, and I don't know how to feel about that. I think people are not talking enough about it, and I just wanna flag it to people.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Adam Stacoviak: So dark side could mean a couple things. One, it could mean literally bad; dark as synonymous with bad. Or dark as in shady. And we're not sure, it's obscured in terms of what's happening. And so let's use an Instacarter or a Dasher - to use their terminology. I happen to be a DoorDash user, so I know they're called Dashers; that's the only reason I know that. It's not a downplay, it's just simply what the terminology is...[35:59] You could say it's below the API, but I wonder, if you've spoken with these people, or people that live in what you call below the API, because I would imagine they're not doing that because they're being forced. Like, it's an opportunity for them.Shawn Wang: Oh, yeah.Adam Stacoviak: And I remember when I was younger and I had less opportunity because I had less "above the API" (so to speak) talent... And I do agree there's a class here, but I wonder if it's truly bad; that dark is truly bad, or if it's just simply obscure in terms of how it's gonna play out.Shawn Wang: This is about upside. They will never get to that six figures income with this thing.Adam Stacoviak: Not that job.Jerod Santo: No.Shawn Wang: It's really about the class system, which is the dark side. You don't want to have society splinter into like a serving class and whatever the non-serving class is. It's also about the upside - like, I don't see a way for these people to break out unless, they really just take a hard stop and just go to a completely different career track.Jerod Santo: Right.Adam Stacoviak: Here's where I have a hard time with that... I'm not pushing back on that you're wrong, I'm just wondering more deeply...Shawn Wang: Sure.Adam Stacoviak: I imagine at one point in my life I was a DoorDasher.Shawn Wang: Yeah.Adam Stacoviak: I washed dishes, I did definitely unique jobs at a young age before I had skill. And so the path is skill, and as long as we have a path to skill, which you've show-cased through FreeCodeCamp in your path, then I think that dark side is just simply shady, and not bad.Shawn Wang: Okay.Adam Stacoviak: And I'm just trying to understand it, because I was truly a DoorDasher before DoorDash was available. I washed dishes, delivered papers, I had servant-level things; I was literally a server at a restaurant before... And I loved doing that kind of work, but my talents have allowed me to go above that specific job, and maybe even the pay that came with that job. I've served in the military before, got paid terrible dollars, but I loved the United States military; it's great. And I love everybody who's served in our military. But the point is, I think the path is skill, and as long as we have a pathway to skill, and jobs that can house that skill and leverage that skill to create new value for the world, I just wonder if it's just necessary for society to have, I suppose, above and below API things.Jerod Santo: Until we have all the robots. Then there is nobody underneath. At that point it's all robots under the API.Shawn Wang: Yes, and that is true in a lot of senses, actually. Like, farming is mostly robots these days. You do have individual farmers, but they're much less than they used to be. I don't know what to say about that, shady or dark... I think it's just -- there's no career track. You have to go break out of that system yourself. Thank God there's a way to do it. But back in the day, you used to be able to go from the mailroom to the boardroom.Adam Stacoviak: I see.Shawn Wang: I see these stories of people who used to be janitors at schools become the principal. Companies used to invest in all their people and bring them up. But now we're just hiring your time, and then if you wanna break out of that system - good luck, you're on your own. I think that that lack of upward mobility is a problem, and you're not gonna see it today. It's a slow-moving train wreck. But it's gonna happen where you have society split in two, and bad things happen because of it.Adam Stacoviak: I mean, I could agree with that part there, that there definitely is no lateral movement from Dasher to CEO of DoorDash.Shawn Wang: It's just not gonna happen.Adam Stacoviak: Or VP of engineering at DoorDash. I think because there is no path, the path would be step outside of that system, because that system doesn't have a path. I could agree with that, for sure.Jerod Santo: Yeah. I mean, the good news is that we are creating -- there are paths. This is not like a path from X to Y through that system, but there are other alternate paths that we are creating and investing in, and as well as the API gets pushed further and further down in terms of reachability - we now have more and more access to those things. It's easier now, today, than it ever has been, because of what we were talking about, to be the startup founder, right? To be the person who starts at CEO because the company has one person in it, and they're the CEO. And to succeed in that case, and become the next DoorDash.Adam Stacoviak: True.Jerod Santo: So there are opportunities to get out, it's just not a clear line... And yeah, it takes perhaps some mentorship, perhaps ingenuity... A lot of the things that it takes to succeed anyway, so...Shawn Wang: [40:05] I'll give a closing note for developers who are listening, because you're already a developer... So the analogy is if you're above the API, you tell machines what to do; if you're below the API, machines tell you what to do. So here's the developer analogy, which is there's another division in society, which is the kanban board. If you're below the kanban board, the kanban board tells you what to do. If you're above it, you tell developers what to do. [laughs]Jerod Santo: There you go.Shawn Wang: So how do you break out of that class division? I'll leave it out to you, but just keep in mind, there's always layers.Jerod Santo: I love that.Adam Stacoviak: I love the discussion around it, but I'm also thankful you approached the subject by a way of a blog post, because I do believe that this is interesting to talk about, and people should talk about it, for sure. Because it provides introspection into, I guess, potentially something you don't really think about, like "Do I live below or above the APi?" I've never thought about that in that way until this very moment, talking to you, so... I love that.Break: [40:58]Jerod Santo: So another awesome post you have written lately is about Cloudflare and AWS. Go - not the language, the game Go... I know very little about the language, and I know even less about the game... And Chess... How Cloudflare is approaching things, versus how AWS and Google and others are... Given us the TL;DR of that post, and then we'll discuss.Shawn Wang: Okay. The TL;DR of that post is that Cloudflare is trying to become the fourth major cloud after AWS, Azure and GCP. The way they're doing it is fundamentally different than the other three, and the more I've studied them - I basically observed Cloudflare for the entire time since I joined Netlify. Netlify kind of is a competitor to Cloudflare, and it's always this uncomfortable debate between "Should you put Cloudflare in front of Netlify? Netlify itself is a CDN. Why would you put a CDN in front of another CDN?" Oh, because Netlify charges for bandwidth, and Cloudflare does not. [laughter]Jerod Santo: It's as simple as that.Shawn Wang: And then there's DDOS protection, all that stuff; very complicated. Go look up the Netlify blog post on why you should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify, and decide for yourself. But Netlify now taking on AWS S3 - S3 is like a crown jewel of AWS. This is the eighth wonder of the world. It provides eleven nines of durability. Nothing less than the sun exploding will take this thing down... [laughs]Jerod Santo: Right? You know what's funny - I don't even consider us at Changelog AWS customers; I don't even think of us that way. But of course, we use S3, because that's what you do. So yeah, we're very much AWS customers, even though I barely even think about it, because S3 is just like this thing that of course you're gonna use.Shawn Wang: There's been a recent history of people putting out S3-compatible APIs, just because it's so dominant that it becomes the de-facto standard. Backblaze did it recently. But Cloudflare putting out R2 and explicitly saying "You can slurp up the S3 data, and by the way, here's all the cost-benefit of AWS egress charges that's what Matthew Prince wrote about in his blog post is all totally true, attacks a part of AWS that it cannot compromise on and just comes at the top three clouds from a different way, that they cannot respond to.[44:17] So I always like these analogies of how people play destruction games. I'm a student of destruction, and I study Ben Thompson and Clay Christensen, and that entire world, very quickly... So I thought this was a different model of destruction, where you're essentially embracing rather than trying to compete head-on. And wrapping around it is essentially what Go does versus chess, and I like -- you know, there's all these comparisons, like "You're playing 2D chess, I'm playing 3D chess. You're playing chess, I'm playing Go." So Cloudflare is playing Go by surrounding the S3 service and saying "Here is a strict superset. You're already a consumer of S3. Put us on, and magically your costs get lower. Nothing else about it changes, including your data still lives in AWS if you ever decide to leave us." Or if you want to move to Cloudflare, you've just gotta do the final step of cutting off S3.That is a genius, brilliant move that I think people don't really appreciate, and it's something that I study a lot, because I work at companies that try to become the next big cloud. I worked at Netlify, and a lot of people are asking, "Can you build a large public company on top of another cloud? Our second-layer cloud is viable." I think Vercel and Netlify are proving that partially it is. They're both highly valued. I almost leaked some info there... When does this go out? [laughs]Jerod Santo: Next week, probably...Shawn Wang: Okay, alright... So they're both highly valued, and - like, can they be hundred-billion-dollar companies? I don't know. We don't know the end state of cloud, but I think people are trying to compete there, and every startup -- I nearly joined Render.com as well. Every startup that's trying to pitch a second-layer cloud thesis is always working under the shadows of AWS. And this is the first real thesis that I've seen, that like "Oh, okay, you not only can credibly wrap around and benefit, you can actually come into your own as a fourth major cloud." So I'm gonna stop there... There's so many thoughts I have about Cloudflare.Jerod Santo: Yeah. So do you see that R2 then -- I think it's a brilliant move, as you described it... As I read your post, I started to appreciate, I think, the move, more than I did when I first read about it and I was like "Oh, they're just undercutting." But it seems they are doing more than just that. But do you think that this R2 then is a bit of a loss leader in order to just take a whole bunch of AWS customers, or do you think there's actually an economic -- is it economically viable as a standalone service, or do you think Cloudflare is using it to gain customers? What are your thoughts in their strategy of Why?Shawn Wang: This is the top question on Twitter and on Hacker News when they launch. They are going to make money on this thing, and the reason is because of all the peering agreements that they've established over the past five years. As part of the normal business strategy of Cloudflare, they have peering agreements with all of the ISPs; bandwidth is free for them. So... For them in a lot of cases. Again, I have to caveat all this constantly, because I should note to people that I am not a cloud or networking expert. I'm just learning in public, just like the rest of you, and here's what I have so far. So please, correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll learn from it.But yeah, I mean - straight on, it's not a loss leader. They plan to make money on it. And the reason they can is because they have worked so hard to make their cost structure completely different in AWS, and they've been a friend to all the other ISPs, rather than AWS consuming everything in its own world. Now you're starting to see the benefits of that strategy play out. And by the way, this is just storage, but also they have data store, also they have service compute, all following the same model.Jerod Santo: So what do you think is a more likely path over the next two years? Cloudflare --Adam Stacoviak: Prediction time!Jerod Santo: ...Cloudflare steals just massive swathes of AWS customers, or AWS slashes prices to compete?Shawn Wang: So I try not to do the prediction business, because I got out of that from the finance days... All I'm doing is nowcasting. I observe what I'm seeing now and I try to put out the clearest vision of it, so the others can follow.I think that it makes sense for them to be replicating the primitives of every other cloud service. So in 2017 they did service compute with Cloudflare Workers. In 2018 they did eventually consistent data store. In 2019 - website hosting; that's the Netlify competitor. In 2020 they did strongly-consistent data store, with Durable Objects. In 2021 object storage. What's next on that list? Go on to your AWS console and go shopping. And instead of seven different ways to do async messaging in AWS, probably they're gonna do one way in Cloudflare. [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: [48:34] A unified API, or something like that...Jerod Santo: Yeah, they'll just look at AWS' offerings, the ones they like the best, and do it that way, right?Shawn Wang: Yeah, just pick it up.Adam Stacoviak: Maybe the way to get a prediction out of you, swyx, might be rather than directly predict, maybe describe how you win Go.Shawn Wang: How you win Go...Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, what's the point of Go? How do you win Go? Because that might predict the hidden prediction, so to speak.Shawn Wang: Okay. For listeners who don't know Go, let me draw out the analogy as well. So most people are familiar with chess; individual chess pieces have different values and different points, and they must all support each other. Whenever you play chess, you need the Knight to support the pawns, something like that... Whereas in Go, you place your pieces everywhere, and they're all indistinguishable from each other. And it's more about claiming territory; at the end of the day, that's how you win Go, you claim the most territory compared to the others... And it's never a winner-take-all situation. Most likely, it's like a 60/40. You won 60% of the territory and your competitor has 40% of the territory. That's more likely a mapping of how cloud is gonna play out than chess, where winner-takes-all when you take the King. There's no King in the cloud, but--Jerod Santo: Are you sure...?Shawn Wang: ...there's a lot likely of territory claiming, and Cloudflare is really positioned very well for that. It's just part of the final realization that I had at the end of the blog post. And partially, how you take individual pieces of territory is that you surround all the pieces of the enemy and you place the final piece and you fill up all the gaps, such that the enemy is completely cut off from everything else and is surrounded. And that's what R2 does to S3 - it surrounds S3, and it's up to you to place that final piece. They call it, Atari, by the way, which is the name of the old gaming company, Atari. They have placed AWS S3 in Atari, and it's up to the customers to say "I'm gonna place that final piece. I'm gonna pay the cost of transferring all my data out of S3 and cut S3 off", and they cut off all the remaining liberties. So how do you win in Go? You claim the most amount of territory, and you surround the pieces of the enemy.Adam Stacoviak: Which, if you thought maybe that was oxygen, the territory, you might suck the oxygen away from them, so they can't live anymore, so to speak... And maybe you don't take it by killing it. Maybe you sort of suffocate it almost, if their space becomes small enough; if you take enough territory and it begins to shrink enough, it's kind of like checkmate, but not.Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's also a concept of sente in Go, which is that you make a move that the opponent has to respond to, which is kind of like a check, or checkmate -- actually, not; just the check, in chess. And right now, AWS doesn't feel the need to respond. Cloudflare is not big enough. Like, these are names to us, but let's just put things in numbers. Cloudflare's market cap is 36 billion, AWS' market cap is 1.6 trillion; this is Amazon's total market cap. Obviously, AWS is a subset of that.Jerod Santo: Sure.Shawn Wang: So your competitor is 40 times larger than you. Obviously, Cloudflare is incentivized to make a lot of noise and make themselves seem bigger than it is. But until AWS has to respond, this is not real.Adam Stacoviak: Nice.Jerod Santo: So as a developer, as a customer of potentially one or both of these... Let's say you have a whole bunch of stuff on S3 - I'm asking you personally now, swyx - and R2 becomes available... Is that a no-brainer for you, or is there any reason not to use that?Shawn Wang: You're just adding another vendor in your dependency tree. I think for anyone running silicon bandwidth, it is a no-brainer.Jerod Santo: Yeah. So over the course of n months, where n equals when they launch plus a certain number - I mean, I think this is gonna end up eventually on Amazon's radar, to where it's gonna start affecting some bottom lines that important people are gonna notice. So I just wonder - I mean, how much territory can Cloudflare grab before there's a counter-move? It's gonna be interesting to watch.Shawn Wang: [52:12] So Ben from Vantage actually did a cost analysis... Vantage is a startup that is made up former AWS Console people; they're trying to build a better developer experience on top of AWS. They actually did a cost analysis on the R2 move, and they said that there's probably a hundred billion dollars' worth of revenue at stake for Amazon. So if they start to have a significant dent in that, let's say like 40%, AWS will probably have to respond. But until then, there's nothing to worry about. That's literally how it is in Amazon; you have to see the numbers hit before you respond.Jerod Santo: Yeah. It hasn't even been a blip on the radar at this point, the key metrics to the people who are important enough to care are watching. You said you started watching all of these CDNs. Of course, you worked at Netlify... You take an interest in backends. There's something you mentioned in the break about frontenders versus backend, and where you've kind of been directing your career, why you're watching Cloudflare so closely, what you're up to now with your work... Do you wanna go there?Shawn Wang: Let's go there. So if you track my career, I started out as a frontend developer. I was developing design systems, I was working with Storybook, and React, and all that... Then at Netlify I was doing more serverless and CLI stuff. At AWS more storage and database and AppSync and GraphQL stuff... And now at Temporal I'm working on a workflow engine, pure backend. I just went to KubeCon two weeks ago...Jerod Santo: Nice!Shawn Wang: What is a frontend developer doing at KubeCon...?Adam Stacoviak: New territory.Shawn Wang: It's a frontend developer who realizes that there's a career ceiling for frontend developers. And it's not a polite conversation, and obviously there are exceptions to frontend developers who are VPs of engineering, frontend developers who are startup founders... And actually, by the way, there's a lot of VC funding coming from frontend developers, which is fantastic for all my friends. They're all getting funded, left, right and center. I feel left out. But there is a Career ceiling, in a sense that survey a hundred VPs of engineering, how many of them have backend backgrounds, and how many of them have frontend backgrounds? And given that choice, what's more likely for you and your long-term career progression? Do you want to specialize in frontend or do you want to specialize in backend? Different people have different interests, and I think that you can be successful in whatever discipline you pick. But for me, I've been moving towards the backend for that reason.Adam Stacoviak: Describe ceiling. What exactly do you mean when you say "ceiling"?Shawn Wang: Career ceiling. What's your terminal title.Jerod Santo: Like your highest role, or whatever. Highest salary, highest role, highest title...Adam Stacoviak: Gotcha.Shawn Wang: Like, straight up, how many VPs of engineering and CTOs have backend backgrounds versus frontend.Jerod Santo: Yeah. I mean, just anecdotally, I would agree with you that it's probably 8 or 9 out of 10 CTOs have -- is that what you said, 8 or 9?Shawn Wang: Yeah, yeah. So there's obviously an economic reasoning for this; it's because there's a bias in the industry that frontend is not real development, and backend is. And that has to be combated. But also, there's an economic reasoning, and I always go back to the economics part, because of my finance background... Which is that your value to the company, your value to the industry really depends on how many machines run through you. You as an individual unit of labor, how much money do you control, and how much machine process, or compute, or storage, or whatever runs through you. And just straight-up frontend doesn't take as much. [laughs] Yes, frontend is hard, yes, design is hard, yes, UX is crucially important, especially for consumer-facing products... But at the end of the day, your compute is being run on other people's machines, and people don't value that as much as the compute that I pay for, that I need to scale, and therefore I need an experienced leader to run that, and therefore that is the leader of my entire eng.Jerod Santo: I wonder if that changes at all for very product-focused orgs, where I think a lot of frontenders, the moves are into product design and architecture, and away from - not software architecture, but product design. And it seems like maybe if you compare - not VP of engineering, but VP of product, you'd see a lot of former frontenders.Shawn Wang: [56:03] Yeah.Jerod Santo: Maybe that's their path. Do you think that's --Shawn Wang: Totally. But you're no longer a frontend dev. You suddenly have to do mocks...Jerod Santo: Yeah, but when you're VP of engineering you're not a backend dev either.Shawn Wang: Yeah.Jerod Santo: So you're kind of both ascending to that degreeShawn Wang: Backends devs will never report to you, let's put it that way.Jerod Santo: Okay. Fair.Shawn Wang: [laughter] But somehow, frontend devs have to report to backend devs, for some reason; just because they're superior, or something. I don't know, it's just like an unspoken thing... It's a very impolite conversation, but hey, it's a reality, man.Jerod Santo: So do you see this personally, or do you see this by looking around?Shawn Wang: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Yeah. You felt like you had reached a ceiling.Shawn Wang: Well, again, this is very impolite; there's a ton of ways to succeed, and there are definitely exceptions. Emily Nakashima at Honeycomb - former frontend person, now VP of engineering. I don't know, I could have done that. I have interest in backend and I'm pursuing that. So I will say that - this is a soft ceiling, it's a permeable ceiling. It's not a hard ceiling.Jerod Santo: Sure.Shawn Wang: But there's a ceiling though, because you can see the numbers.Adam Stacoviak: What is it in particular the VP of engineering does that would make a frontender less likely to have that role? What specifically? I mean, engineering is one of the things, right? Commanding the software... Which is not necessarily frontend.Jerod Santo: Well, frontend is also an engineering discipline.Adam Stacoviak: I guess it kind of depends on the company, too. Honeycomb is probably a different example.Shawn Wang: I haven't been a VP of engineering, so I only have some theories. I suggest you just ask the next VP of engineering that you talk to, or CTO.Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.Jerod Santo: Yeah. That'd be a good one to start asking people.Adam Stacoviak: What do you do here? What is it you do here?Shawn Wang: What is it you do here?Jerod Santo: Exactly.Shawn Wang: [laughs]Adam Stacoviak: Well, I just wondered if there was a specific skillset that happens at that VP of engineering level that leads more towards a backender being more likely than a frontender to get hired into the role.Shawn Wang: I think there's some traditional baggage. Power structures persist for very long times... And for a long time UX and frontend was just not valued. And we're like maybe five years into the shift into that. It's just gonna take a long time.Jerod Santo: I agree with that. So tell us what you're up to now. You said you're doing workflows... I saw a quick lightning talk; you were talking about "React for the backend." So you're very much taking your frontend stuff into the backend here, with React for the backend. Tell us about that.Shawn Wang: Let's go for it. So at Netlify and at AWS I was essentially a developer advocate for serverless. So this is very cool - it does pay-as-you-go compute, and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it. But something that was always at the back of my mind bothering me, that serverless does not do well, is long-running jobs. It just does not do well. You have to chain together a bunch of stuff, and it's very brittle; you cannot test it... It's way more expensive than you would do in a normal environment.Jerod Santo: Yeah.Shawn Wang: And it made me realize that in this move to take apart everything and make everything as a service, we have gained scalability, but we've lost basically everything else. And what I was trying to do was "How do we reconstruct the experience of the monolith? What are the jobs to be done?" When you break it down, what does a computer do for you, and what is not adequately addressed by the ecosystem?I went through the exercise... I wrote a blog post called "Reconstructing the monolith, and I actually listed it out." So what are the jobs of cloud for a computer? You want static file serving, you want functions, you want gateway, you want socket management, job runners, queue, scheduler, cold storage, hot storage. There's meta jobs like error logging, usage logging, dashboarding, and then edge computing is like a unique to cloud thing. But everything else, you can kind of break it up and you can locate it on one machine, or you can locate it on multiple machines, some of them owned by you, some of them not owned by you.The thing that serverless -- that had a whole in the ecosystem was job running. Not good. Basically, as an AWS developer right now, the answer is you set a CloudWatch schedule function, and you pull an endpoint, and that should read some states from a database, and check through where you are, and compute until the 15-minute timeout for Lambda, and then save it back in, and then wait for the next pull, and start back up again. Super-brittle, and just a terrible experience; you would never want to go this way.[01:00:08.13] The AWS current response to that is AWS Step Functions, which is a JSON graph of what happens after the other, and this central orchestrator controls all of that. I think we could do better, and that's eventually what got me to temporal. So essentially, this blog post that I wrote - people found me through that, and hired both our head of product and myself from this single blog post. So it's probably the highest ROI blog post I've ever written.Jerod Santo: Wow. That's spectacular.Shawn Wang: It's just the VC that invested in Temporal. So what Temporal does is it helps you write long-running workflows in a doable fashion; every single state transition is persisted to a database, in idiomatic code. So idiomatic Java, idiomatic Go, idiomatic JavaScript, and PHP. This is different from other systems, because other systems force you to learn their language. For Amazon, you have to learn Amazon States Language. For Google Workflows - Google Workflows has a very long, very verbose JSON and YAML language as well.And these are all weird perversions of -- like, you wanna start simple; JSON is very simple, for doing boxes and arrows, and stuff like that... But you start ending up having to handwrite the AST of a general-purpose programming language, because you want variables, you want loops, you want branching, you want all that god stuff. And the best way to model asynchronous and dynamic business logic is with a general-purpose programming language, and that's our strong opinion there.So Temporal was created at Uber; it runs over 300 use cases at Uber, including driver onboarding, and marketing, and some of the trips stuff as well. It was open source, and adopted at Airbnb, and Stripe, and Netflix, and we have all those case studies on -- DoorDash as well, by the way, runs on the Uber version of Temporal.Jerod Santo: There you go, Adam.Shawn Wang: And yeah, they spun out to a company two years ago, and we're now trying to make it as an independent cloud company. And again, the

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This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.

This week on Becoming Fearless, meet Mary Ralph Lawson and Kennedy Crichlow, co-founders of Daily Drills, a fashion company specializing in everything we wore during the pandemic — and everything we wear every day! Mary and Kennedy were inspired to launch their brand during the pandemic, starting with four staple activewear pieces and eventually expanding to loungewear. Between Mary's strong social media presence and creativity and Kennedy's preference for behind-the-scenes business work, they were a perfect pair. Join Annie, Mary, and Kennedy as they talk leveraging your platform, connecting with your audience, leaning on your partner, and redefining success.

Today Adam is joined by Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. They talk about building the platform that's making the web faster and lets front-enders do their best work, his framework for leading as a CEO, what's next for Next.js and Next.js Live, and how everything for Vercel is built on “Develop. Preview. Ship.”

Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan's journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he's been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source.

Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He's been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They're just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we're excited to share today's show with you.

Lahore Soccer Tournament (LST) is one of the oldest and most popular futsal tournaments of Pakistan. Its founders, Azaan Ali Wajid and Syed Sachal, talk to us about the tournament's upcoming 8th edition, and how their 15 years of struggle have built up to this moment. They also outline some exciting plans to expand their brand and event to another level! LST 8 is taking place from 13th to 17th October at Royal Arena, Askari 11, Lahore, Pakistan. To register or find out more: https://www.facebook.com/events/31446... https://www.instagram.com/lahore_socc... Follow us on: FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/onthemicoffi... INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/onthemic_of... TWITTER https://twitter.com/on_themic Connect with us: INSTAGRAM Umer Fasie Bashir (Editor): https://www.instagram.com/umerfasieb/ TWITTER Ismail Farooq (Host): https://twitter.com/thehalfspaces #LahoreSoccerTournament #PakistanFootball #FootballTournament

Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they've iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.

On today's episode, Ellie sits down with Lisa Pastrich, Founder of La Strada Showroom, to talk about how she built the first mobile accessory showroom in South Florida. Lisa's idea of marketing in today's market and some tips on remaining consistent and achieving your dreams by finding your true passion. To learn more about Lisa and La Strada Showroom, check out their Instagram @lastradashowroom and @the_accessory_hoarder

Ellie Vail Jewelry is kicking off Women's month with a special guest on our WTF! Podcast; 12th Tribe owner, Demi Marchese.Demi is a California native who started her empire in her mother's kitchen and now owns one of the most successful e-commerce businesses in LA. Ellie, collaborated with Demi for this month's special celebration of women and shared some of their best known secrets to a successful e-commerce business.We hope you enjoy this episode and make sure to check out 12th Tribe to get the coolest clothing in town!

Eddie and Trent, founders of the Sayless Lifestyle, talk about how they set their goals, stay motivated and say less! Welcome to The Sayless Lifestyle Podcast, the podcast for those who have a vision for their lives and are all about doing more and saying less. Co-founders Trenten and Eddie Scott interview high performers and discussing the habits that make them successful so that you may apply them to your own life. They will also occasionally discuss various topics themselves about how our generation can achieve big things by doing more and saying less. Be sure to stay tuned and Sayless! Text SAYLESS to 844-567-9949... To sign up to our Text Message Service! Stay up-to-date on the latest news within the Sayless Lifestyle community, as well as receive special perks and rewards such as - New gear drops - Special YouTube videos - VIP discount codes - Exclusive apparel - AND MORE!! #sayless saylesslifestyle.com IG: @saylesslifestyle Twitter: @saylesslife TikTok: @saylesslifestyle INSPIRING OUR GENERATION TO DO MORE AND SAYLESS.

Do CEOs and founders worry about compliance too much? In this episode, Yana wants to discuss some things that are more fundamental, like problems, issues, or misconceptions that she believes have been around for a long time. She hopes that this conversation will show you a different way to approach and think about compliance. Yana will share her perspective on addressing some of these things and how to think differently in different areas like misconceptions or lies about compliance that live in many founders' mindset and belief system, plus much more on this Compliance That Makes Sense episode.  Want more? - Subscribe to Yana's super popular newsletter everyone is talking about! If you enjoy this episode, please share it with friends, leave comments and reviews, and join the conversation.  Today's episode: [00:34] Hello, my friends! [01:41] Yana will state a belief, misconception, or lie and then give her perspective. [01:54] Compliance is a big cost or a burden. [02:20] Yana shares her perception of this belief. [03:40] It is hard to find good people in compliance. [03:54] Yana gives her insight into this comment. [05:30] I don't have the money to invest in compliance. [05:52] Yana gives her view on this belief. [08:51] Have you invested enough in compliance?  [10:06] Founders look for a complete list of everything that is required to be compliant. [10:48] Yana addressed this issue in Episode 11. [11:45] Founders feel like they want to drive their compliance decisions by themselves. [12:39] Yana shares a warning for anyone who believes they can do it on their own. [14:13] Yana says they can learn compliance, but if they are a CEO or founder, they probably won't be doing your actual job. [16:04] Yana feels like many founders and CEOs worry about compliance too much. [18:46] Thank you for listening! Additional Materials: Is your compliance lean and agile? If you are not sure, go to www.competitivecompliance.co/lean-compliance-quiz and answer 6 questions to get specific recommendations on how to reduce your compliance cost.

One of the leading producers of Raspberry Pi HATs, cases and other kit, Pimoroni dominates the Pi ecosystem. Founders Paul Beech, who designed the Raspberry Pi logo, and Jon Williamson join us to show off some exciting new products. Ash shows how to stress test your Raspberry Pi and Les has a brand new Raspberry Pi tablet to talk about.

So happy to have the founders of Sproutable.com on the show today!!  Alanna Beebe and Julietta Skoog are on a MISSION to be super helpful and supportive of parents raising kids under five. They are on the show to share their offer and what inspires them to work with families. Enjoy! Resources: www.besproutable.com Facebook l Twitter l Instagram ::::::::: Support the Podcast! Interested in giving back to the show that has given you so much?  Head on over to www.patreoncom/joyfulcourage to become a monthly supporter.  There are a variety of levels to give back to - and every dollar helps to sustain this good work! ::::::::: Stay informed! Click here to sign up for the Joyful Coruage Newsletter to get support and stay informed about all the newest offers. ::::::::: Join the community! Don't forget to join our growing Facebook community for like minded support and conversation - Live and Love with Joyful Courage