The Swyx Mixtape

I enjoyed learning about how Cockroach is leaderless and synchronous and that makes it a lot more resilient than alternatives.

Audio source: https://changelog.com/founderstalk/75

Spanner paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf

Share/Comment via Tweet: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1376470276918050818

Adam Stacoviak: [00:00:00] So when did you encounter the problem that you're solving today? 

Spencer Kimball: [00:00:04] Yeah, so databases it turns out that they have been extraordinarily central in my career. Back as early as the.com startup. I did, we go systems we built sharded, Oracle and sharded Postgres as the two sort of flavors we supported. And I got to tell you when I was at Berkeley, I wasn't very interested in databases.

I mentioned graphics. That was really. Probably my key interest databases. I didn't take until my first and only year of grad school. And I just kinda took it to get some credits. I ended up being pretty interested in the course, but I didn't really think they'd be central to my career. But as soon as I hit the quote, unquote, real world databases became a central problem of big source of frustration at Wego.

And then when I got to Google, that was one of the first projects that got thrown onto, which was the AdWords system, which you know, was nascent then in 2002. But it was running into problems with sharded, my SQL. And you hear this word, "sharded", but it really, you know, for listeners that aren't aware of what that implies it's, it's about taking a monolithic database like Postgres or my SQL or Oracle that really is meant for you know, a single machine.

Even if that machine can be quite large and you say, well, maybe this is going to be large enough. And this is the case of ad-words when I got put on that project. So you'd say, okay, we're going to use two databases. I'll put half our customers on the first database, half on the second. And maybe at some point you start reaching capacity on those two.

And so then you say, we're gonna use four, we're going to use five, or we're going to use it got up to about 32. I think when I was at that project at Google and all these different problems started to occur as you started, you know, the application complexity became quite high. Just one ridiculous practical example:

the, my SQL databases had too many connections coming into them and you know, that started to cause them to cavitate. And so we solve these problems. Every morning, we had this ads war room to solve the latest set of problems related to this just basically scalability challenge with the database.

And you know, I would just say that in Google AdWords by the time they replaced that sharded my sequel architecture, they'd gotten to a thousand shards. So it became, you know, thousand my SQL instances. And I've heard that Facebook has hundreds of thousands of my SQL instances. So there's kind of no end to both how scalable that architecture is.

But also how much time you have to put in to truly keep scaling it. So that's, that's a scalability challenge. There's also resilience challenges.  And that is you really don't want to have a database that has a primary and a secondary, and that's been the standard way to operate databases for, you know, most of my lifetime.

The problem with that solution is that the secondary. He's getting an asynchronous replication stream of data. And even if you put it in another data center, so you have a really nice failure scenario, so you can lose a data center and fail over that fail over might imply data loss because that asynchronous replication stream might not have fully made it over to the secondary when the primary dies.

So you've switched over to the secondary and you realize, Oh, wait a second. I thought I had just sent that email out as an example, but it's not in my outbox. What happened? Well, the replication stream just didn't get that email into the outbox on the secondary. So it's almost like you've moved backwards in time.

You've regressed to an earlier version of the state that you had in an application. And that causes huge headaches, right? I mean, if a data center was lost at Google back in 2004, let's say it would be many teams scrambling to figure out what might've gone wrong. You know, did we charge a customer twice?

You know, are there. Consistency problems in the data. Cause some of the stuff got replicated and some other stuff didn't and you'd have to write cleaners and scripts that would go through things. And you just try to reason through what might've gone wrong with your use case that that's not the right way to do database replication.

And certainly not. In 2020 Google started to play around with better ways to do that. As early as 2004, 2006, they built big table. Then they built in called mega store and then they built something called Spanner. And Spanner is really what inspired cockroach. And so there's scalability, there's resilience.

Those are two of the biggest problems that I've faced with databases in my career that sort of gold standard these days with databases is to do what's called consistent synchronous based replication. The popular ways to do this is something called Paxos. There's something called raft and that what they do is consensus.

So instead of just writing to a primary and asynchronously replicating to a secondary, you actually write to. Three data centers or three replication sites, and you are going to be committed if the majority of the replication sites respond positively or affirmatively to any particular, right? If, for example, you only write to one out of three data centers that write.

Can't be committed. So you need two out of the three. And so as long as you always have two out of three, if you lose any one data center out of those three, you always are guaranteed that one of the remaining two has the exact data that you need. So as long as you only lose the minority, you have total operational sort of continuity.

The tweet thread here: https://twitter.com/AdamRackis/status/1370874399390367756

This is the edited audio of our conversation; Coding Career community members can find the transcript and video on Circle!

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introductions
• 01:35 Coding on the Fly
• 09:09 Use Terminology
• 13:29 Fundamentals over Frameworks
• 17:27 TypeScript
• 20:18 Storytelling
• 29:30 Misc: Ownership, System Design, Teaching
• 37:45 Working at Spotify
• 40:28 Svelte vs React
• 45:45 Reading Tech Books
• 51:21 Tech Careers in Non-Tech Hubs

This has a slow start but REALLY ramps up toward the end. Hang in there!

Also featuring the voices of 4 Phantoms - Simon Bowman, Earl Carpenter, Ramin Karimloo and John Owen-Jones.

Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE6SRBnDHx8

See also: Nicole singing Never Enough

Nicole's bio on WIkipedia

Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOo6XSYW66c

Spencer took on the competitive threat of OpenDoor at Zillow when he didn't need to, taking a tiny competitor startup seriously and pivoting a $5 billion company into a $30 billion one without a crisis.

News at the time:
- https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/14/zillow-surprises-investors-by-buying-up-homes/
- https://www.geekwire.com/2018/zillow-group-will-start-buying-selling-homes-taking-open-door-expanding-real-estate-footprint/

Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] Normally, I try to make these clips under five minutes, but for today I absolutely could not because this is one of the most fascinating business stories and business moments that you can encounter. And this is the best explanation of a recent pivot that was very, very high profile and very successful. So I want to give you the story of Spencer Rascoff pivoting, Zillow as a successful company, not against the wall, and succeeding. Despite having an incumbent startup where the classic disruption theory would tell you that he had an innovator's dilemma. He got past that, and it was just nearly a train wreck, as he will tell you towards the end. But he had enough friends to give them good advice and he took it and he paused at the right time and he went for it at the right time. And it was just an amazing, amazing, real life story.  

Spencer Rascoff: [00:00:51] And then I guess the second takeaway from Zillow would be the importance of disrupting yourself. And this is all about Zillow's move into ibuying and the business of buying and selling homes directly, which was a very controversial, difficult decision that I made. And it was very much the right one.

It's what moved Zillow's market cap from 5 billion. A couple of years, post IPO to 30 billion today was deciding to put at risk the core business. Of selling ads to real estate agents by launching a new business of buying homes from people, renovating them and selling them to other people. And pulling off that business transition or business extension was a lot of sleepless nights, but it was very much the right move.

Do you mind 

James Besheara: [00:01:37] walking me through almost the specifics of one of those sleepless nights and what that internal dialogue was like and where that internal for use uncertainty lied? 

Spencer Rascoff: [00:01:47] Sure. Let me paint a picture. So as Zillow goes public in 2006, We do 16 acquisitions. We buy Trulia, we buy StreetEasy in New York.

We buy hot pads at the top rental site. And now here we are in 2000, like 12 ish, and it's about a $5 billion market cap. We've got like a thousand employees top of the world. We won, online, real estate and we consolidated the category. Victory is ours. Okay, we're done. But then we see this startup Opendoor.

And open doors, buying homes for people sight unseen. And we're like that's crazy. That's not going to work. And we have to decide, do we enter that business? And the first, the first thought that I had and the team had was. What about the core, w we have about a billion of revenue selling ads to real estate agents.

And if we start buying houses ourselves, real estate agents, aren't gonna like that very much. Because there might not be agents in those transactions. Now, it just so happens that when we eventually entered a year or two later, we did put real estate agents in those transactions as a way to, to keep the peace.

But after I left Zillow started. Hiring those agents themselves at Zillow and cutting agents, other agents out of the transaction. And so now Zillow's in, in unchartered territory with respect to the, how the industry perceives it and that might or might not, we'll see put a strain on the core business of selling ads.

So it's very similar just to give an analogy that can listeners have experienced as a consumer. Think about the Netflix business with DVD by mail. So Netflix has a great business DVD by mail. It's probably a I dunno, $10 billion market cap company. This was whatever, five, five, 10 years ago.

What about streaming? The idea that you could press a button and start to see the movie right away on your computer was crazy. Like instead you just press a button and the DVD arrives in the mail to, two days later, but Netflix decided to disrupt their core business and shift to streaming and put at risk the whole core business and.

It worked and then they did it again when they decided to create originals. Cause like they had a great business. Now they're a $50 billion market cap, but you know what, all their content comes from the studios. And now they say we're going to create our own shows. How are the studios going to feel about that?

That's crazy. Don't do that. Like why risk it? You're doing great. They have a 300 billion market cap today. Why? Because. They pulled off the pivot to originals. So Netflix is like the rare company I can think of has done this twice. Zillow has basically done it once so far. But anyway, so back to the decision-making first risk is what happens to the industry, the perception of Zillow and the impact on the core business.

Second risk is the investor community reaction, which is to say, we had public market shareholders that are like. Don't do that. That's crazy. You've got a 95% gross margin business selling digital advertising. Why would you move into it? The business of buying and selling houses, which is cyclical, risky, complex, operationally intensive.

It's a real estate flipping business. Rather than a digital media business, you're going to trade at a lower multiple, I didn't sign up for that. I'm an internet hedge fund. I'm an internet mutual fund. Like I buy tech stocks, not real estate stocks. And so there were a lot of naysayers from that community.

And then there were naysayers from the employee community, also back to the importance of people in culture that were like, I don't get it. Like they just don't do that. Why would we risk everything for that? What is that even that. I'm compressing about six months, 

James Besheara: [00:05:11] six minutes.

How did it, how did you navigate it? How did you mentally nap? Did you S did you know there, did you almost have like faces in your mind that you were going to piss off by making this decision and you were like, yes. 

Spencer Rascoff: [00:05:24] It, it's very stressful as a executive, especially when you feel like you'd won, like at an earlier stage, a pivot, right?

Especially a pivot driven by your backs and feeling of necessity, right? Yeah. It's okay, COVID happened. I talked to a company today that, that ran an events business and they suck, and then COVID happened and they successfully pivoted to virtual events and it's wow Bravo but you had no other choice, in this case it's Zillow, we HAD another choice just like Netflix had a choice to not move into streaming and not to move into originals. And so the status, when the status quo, it looks attractive. It's even harder to pivot. And so what we did, I'll tell you the two steps that we took to arrive at the decision. The three steps, the first was we tracked competition closely and we started looking carefully at Opendoor data and Opendoor metrics.

How many listings do they have? How quickly are they selling? What do we think their unit- level profitabilit...

Audio source (with video): https://thisweekinstartups.com/tobi-lutke-on-shopifys-impact-on-the-creator-economy-covid-forcing-focus-early-internet-breakthroughs-evolving-as-a-remote-manager-much-more-e1184/

Software and Blacksmithing

swyx: [00:00:00] So recently Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Shopify was on theThis Week in Startups podcast with Jason Calacanis and he has some really interesting thoughts about software, which I shared. But it sounds better coming from him around why software engineering is an attractive career it's because we get to make tools that we then use to help us the next day. And so if you apply this over a 40 year career, you can really compound your productivity and your output. And here he is:

Jason Calacanis: [00:00:30] Do you still write code ever? I think sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. You miss being, 12 hour a day, coder.

Tobi Lutke: [00:00:36] Yeah, it's a really good question. I think the 12th hour day coding has never been a goal, but sometimes happened just because there wasn't anything more interesting going on in plateau and figuring something out to read like it's so in a way that's not the objective, but I love coding. I find, I think the, all, I think the narrative around programming is more interesting than people have realized just because really, since blacksmithing, we never really had a craft that makes whether the craftsman actually make their own tools.

And I think there's,  the who's had it first we make two of the tools and number two, it's make us I'm making this part of it. Yeah. I think, 

Jason Calacanis: [00:01:15] I mean, to make tools, right? Like you see this gorillas take sticks and stick them into the Antell to get the bugs out, to eat, to get the heads out, to eat and say 

Tobi Lutke: [00:01:24] it's purely cause and effect vote for four primary purposes.

I think what we do is I'll give you a genetically no different in the last 70,000 years, we event like so the difference between aspect van, and now it's really the tools we have available that don't really invent the stories we tell each other. And it's amazing that we can put people on the moon or, go to space on your usable, the rockets and do all these things and have internet based on just to a building point to a building.

And then of course softwares, like what would you make of. Plenty of leverage because you have zero marginal cost copying infrastructure that everyone on planet earth can add to and constantly come up with trying to come up with better ideas. So I'm like, this is the thing that I'm really excited by and why I love being here programmer, because for leverage, you get as an individual, being able to build something that then is available to everyone.

It's just enormous. I'd like obviously Shopify as a good example of that. And I, I think that's that's really important. There's so many stories about, w what you said earlier is totally true about, Ethernet, like DSLR camera and an SM7B microphone.

But in a way If you need technologists to come in and make it so that someone can buy a single thing and then plug it into one thing. And then all of this needs to work well. And you need to marshal the complete infrastructure that we've built around machine learning to to take tiny microphones and make them sound good.

And we need to like all of this. Like it needs to be like significant movement to make the setup you and I have here, which we can do because we have tinkerers available to everyone, this kind of democratization of goodness studio. Yeah. It's important. 

Jason Calacanis: [00:02:57] Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting.

I love the thought of the compounding nature of software and it's also happening in hardware. Now, if you just think about what happened with the smartphone revolution, If we hadn't an Apple hadn't produced and Android phones, billions of smartphones and billions of batteries and billions of charging stations and got obsessed with how fast can we charge these phones?

It would have never trickled down into your Tesla and that would have never trickled into your quad-copter. And now the quad copters, I don't know if you said Joby is going public Reid. Hoffman's taking a public Mark Pincus. I said, read on the pod, talking about it. That would have not been possible if Elon haven't made a million cars with those battery packs, because now the battery management and fast charging allows you to have a Vitol.

So you're going to be able to go from Ottawa to the airport in a veto, and it's going to have eight rotors and it's going to I would never get an, a helicopter. Those things are death traps, but a veto with eight rotors and to go out and it just the software it's like, Oh, two Rutgers are out just.

Redeploy the energy and it's done, and it feels like that's happening with software so quickly. Startups today, I had a startup that built a million dollar business, basically on Slack, like just charging people subscriptions to go into a soccer room. And I was like, there's no, you don't have any developers.

So no. We just charge people on this Stripe account to go to this landing page. And then they are in a Slack instance and we built some glue with Zapier. If this, then that. The no code startups I'm seeing, which actually is what Shopify is right too. And people can build an online store with no work.

 swyx: [00:04:33] I think if you've been in software for a while, you've probably thought about this where one thing that we do builds on another thing that someone else did and so on and so on and down the stack. And it's just really empowering. And I really like this discussion from Toby.  

Listen to Part 1 and the original audio source from Spotify here: https://media.swyx.io/podcasts/learn-in-podcast/enclosures/2c3fb8da4708f4c7-caa6db45.mp3

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:00] So nearly a decade after Napster shut down, Lars Ulrich got another unexpected call from his manager cliff. We 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:05] got a call from cliff again, saying that Sean Parker wanted to talk 

to 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:10] us.

I'll let Sean and Lars tell the rest of the story from 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:13] here. 

Sean Parker: [00:00:14] So I finally was able to a meeting and they said we want you to come up.

We want to meet on our turf, come to our studio up North of San Francisco, where they've been operating for decades.  I was very nervous. They said, come alone. Don't bring an assistant. Don't bring anyone, come by yourself, 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:33] Cliff encouraged him to come alone. And,  he showed up at HQ in San Rafael and, came in and was brave walked in through the door.

And there were the fourth members of Metallica. 

Sean Parker: [00:00:43] I'm walking into this room full of people who I've been in litigation with, and I've never met and they've never met me.  And I'm way out numbered. Like  I don't know what I'm walking into, , is this some sort of, am I going to regret?

I was sweating profusely, it wasn't even that hot. It was just like a normal. Cool day in San Francisco. And I just remember feeling like clammy and just thinking I'm like, what am I, what have I gotten myself into? Because this has all become very real now, 

Lars Ulrich: [00:01:14] obviously.

None of us are assholes. None of us are nasty people. Hi, how are you? Come on in. Nice to see you. Would you like a beverage? Like some cheese, some coffee, whatever. We're trying to make him feel comfortable and obviously. It was pretty clear that he was I don't know, nervous, uncomfortable, 

Sean Parker: [00:01:30] whatever somebody I and I walk in and, they're all they take me to this room kinda just like a nondescript conference room with a bunch of Metallica branded merchandise everywhere.

And. They're all sitting around the table, just waiting. And I go around and introduce myself, but it's like not a normal, it's not a normal introduction. Because we have no idea where this conversation is going to go. And the first, I don't know, hour was almost like a group therapy session.

Lars Ulrich: [00:02:02] And she came in and we try to make them feel at home and be respectful. And we had some very good healthy discussions about the past about his view and how he felt about everything that had happened in 2000, 2001. And then we talked about our experience and our version of those events.

And even though. We agreed on some things. And I think we very much felt that both of us were unprepared for what happened and making it up as we went along to the best of our ability and we said, we were quite open about that. We agreed to disagree on certain elements of it, but I think it was very respectful.

Sean Parker: [00:02:43] But when he when we got talking about what we were really feeling like, what did it feel like, to live through that kind of scrutiny and what did it feel like for him? And he made it really clear that it really hurt him that we took down all those Metallica users and I said, I kinda did that to you.

That was my. That was like, that was definitely a calculated move, to try to punish you guys for. For what you did. And then Lara said, this one was a street fight, Wilson's nothing personal. We're just two rival gangs. It was a bra. And I said, yeah, it's just, I was just 19 at the time.

So you guys were a lot more mature and really successful. And I felt powerless. And so we had this sort of kumbaya, like group therapy session and I feel like I teared up a couple of times and. Somehow out of that process, I had this realization that, so I, we had been so vilified by some, but also embraced by others.

And we were at the center of this maelstrom and Metallica was equally, had put themselves in the center of it and our experience of being in the middle of this media moment and dealing with the positive and negative ended up having way more in common with each other. Then. Then let's say if I met a random Napster fan on the street and they said, I used to download a hundred hundreds of songs on Napster.

I loved Nasser was so great. They didn't live through the street fight. So th there's this realization that I had a lot more common experiences, shared experiences with Lars than I did with most people. 

Lars Ulrich: [00:04:07] There's a word you learned, that's not necessarily part of your vocabulary when you're 19 years old and full of Spock and that's the word empathy.

And so when you start understanding things from another person's point of views, your adversary, in this case, it helps a lot. And I felt a kindred spirit and Sean. And so to have the dialogue, to be able to get the points of view across, to be able to express how we ended up. In that street fight and why we ended up in that street fight and help be willing.

It was for us to pick that street fight and then get a chance to sort of 10 years later. Just explain our points of view and get that out there and get a chance to do it the right way felt so satisfying.

music: [00:04:52] Not 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:04:52] long after this meeting, Sean and Loris appeared on stage together for the first time at a press event for Metallica officially announced that they were going to add their full catalog to Spotify. And the fans loved it in 2019 alone, Spotify to stream Metallica over a billion times, Metallica gone from poster child for the war on piracy to messenger of the digital revolution, not a half bad ending to that back alley brawl.

Right. .

Audio source: https://anchor.fm/spotify-rd/episodes/00-The-most-epic-battle-in-music-history-es7j2l (10 minutes in)

- I Disappear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Disappear#Release
- Metallica v Napster Inc. lawsuit

Highly recommend subscribing to this Spotify miniseries, it is excellently produced and Episode 2 has nice technical detail on the founding of Spotify from Daniel Ek.

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:00] In fact, Sean estimates that about 70 million people were using Napster at the height of its popularity, but not everyone was a fan. 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:07] We were all completely in over our heads. 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:10] That's Lars Ulrich. You may know him as the drummer in Metallica, or you may know him as a plaintiff in the now historic Metallica versus Napster lawsuit.

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:18] It's easy to sit 20 years later and see the chain of events and how one domino would cause another domino and cause another domino to fall and so on and so forth. And then we ended up. Basically in this shitstorm  and ended up, suing each other and ended up being on Capitol Hill and blah, blah, blah.

And it was such a circus. You know,

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:00:50] the circus started when Lars got a call about an unreleased Metallica track. called "I disappear" from  long time manager, cliff going, "There's 

Lars Ulrich: [00:00:56] a radio station in St. Louis, Missouri, that's playing "I disappear"".  That was if he had called up and started speaking Russian to me. So a day or two later, I get a call back going well, there's a company called Napster who offer the service over the internet, where you can go and download songs and then people can play him. Basically long story short, we tracked down the fact that this I disappear song. That was a work in progress.

We hadn't even decided which version of the song we were going to share with the world at leaked through this Napster. And then now I think subsequently 20 or 30 radio stations in America were playing the song. We felt so,  I guess violated, is the right word because the song wasn't even done and then all of a sudden it's being played on all these radio stations.

So these people took our song. So we're like, well, let's get our song back.

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:02:03] What followed was were both Lars and Sean referred to as a back alley, brawl. A back alley brawl that was about to get much, much bigger than just one song. In April, 2000 Metallica, officially filed charges. They accused Napster of "copyright infringements, unlawful use of digital audio interface, device, and violations of the racketeering influenced and corrupt organizations act".

And they sought a hundred thousand dollars per illegally downloaded song in damages. Two weeks later, Lars showed up unannounced at Napster's office. A rundown old bank building in San Mateo, California, with a special delivery for Sean and his co-founder a complete list of the 335,435 Napster users who had illegally downloaded Metallica songs, all neatly printed out on 60,000 sheets of paper.

Lars Ulrich: [00:02:56] This cavalcade of black SUV shows up and Lars, or it gets out of them with the sunglasses on. And ceremonially marches in with the first box followed by an army of people carrying the other boxes of names  and  made a point to do this in person, the 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:03:13] camera. So they clearly knew how media worked.

The 

Lars Ulrich: [00:03:15] San Mateo police had had come because there were crowds of protesters who were angry at Metallica. And then there were crowds of Metallica supporters who were cheering them on, and then they weren't just like casual kind of looky-loos who were, who were. You know, interested in the spectacle. And, and so I, I was there when, when Laura's walked those names into our office and sort of like glanced at me and glanced at Sean, the other Sean, and it was sort of the extent of it.

Then we snuck out. So the two of us went outside and just put like hoodies on and walked across the street and just watch this bizarre spectacle, 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:03:50] but Lars wasn't the only one adept at working the media. Sean struck back hard Napster did ban the Metallica fans on largest list, but when they open up the app, every single band user, all 335,000 of them.

So a popup window that simply said band by Metallica. This was like a punch in the stomach to Lars for decades, Metallica private itself on being fan friendly. And now overnight, they were being presented as the symbol of corporate greed. The effect was immediate and devastating. We 

Lars Ulrich: [00:04:21] made it about Metallica, Napster, Napster made it about Metallica and our fans.

And that was the smartest move that they could do because they, they took themselves out of the equation. But it was this thing of you're either for Napster or you're against Napster. If you're against Napster, you're greedy. And if you're against Napster, you're a Luddite and you don't understand technology.

And if you're for Metallica, then it's about money. We had always been, so fan-friendly we had always been into tape trading and we had been into sharing music through cassettes, and we had encouraged people to come and record our shows for free. And we were really pro bootlegging and all this type of stuff.

And we were sitting there going, what Metallica they talking about? We've spent 20 years being the most fan friendly band on this planet, I mean, it was so surreal because we couldn't correlate who they were talking about in the press to who, how we viewed ourselves at the time.

we may not be against giving our music for free. But you should ask us that question before you make our music available. 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:05:31] The back alley brawl had become nothing less than a national conversation about the future of music.

By July, 2000, Laura's even found himself testifying in front of the us Senate judiciary committee. 

Lars Ulrich: [00:05:41] We should decide what happens to our music, not a company with no rights in all recordings, which has never invested a penny and on music or anything to do with its creation.

The choice has been taken away from 

Gustav Soderstrom: [00:05:54] us. And then in 2001, just two short years after Napster had first launched a circuit court in California, ruled in favor of Metallica and issued an injunction against Napster to delete every single Metallica track from its users libraries, a task that was by definition, impossible on a peer-to-peer network.

Instead Napster voluntarily ended service and eventually filed for bankruptcy. But Sean knew instinctively what every good product person strives to understand what the consumers actually want. And once the consumers had tried it, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. 

See my notes here on DX Circle!
Audio Source: https://a16z-live.simplecast.com/episodes/a16z-infra-1-2iEyBTf5

a16z on Infra

Introductions and Backgrounds [00:00:00]

Martin Casado: [00:00:00] So this is the a16z infrastructure show. This is actually the very first one.  Where are we going to be talking about infrastructure companies investing in them, building them products? It just turns out that we're three GPS at a16z, and we all have a lot of experience in info.

Like all of our companies were infrastructure companies. We do a lot of infra investing. So the way that we're going to structure this session is first, we're going to introduce, our backgrounds in context of that. Many of you know, us, many of you have worked with us. But we do want to give you a sense our relationship with infrastructure and how we went through it.

So we'll and we each go through our own kind of bios that way and I'll orchestrate that. Okay. Th then we're going to talk about why infrastructure is different. This isn't B2B, this is an enterprise, this isn't vertical SAS. It's specifically infrastructure. And it's my it's my favorite topic and my favorite area.

So we'll go through that. We've got a lot of great questions on Twitter, and so we're going to try and get through those. And then if we still have time, then we'll open up to questions. Uh, for everybody else. So that's rough, we plan to have this every two weeks and we want to cover everything as things go, we want to cover category creation and we want to cover open-source and we want to cover the shifts and go to market and the cloud and investing and everything else.

So we're going to go ahead and start with our intros and just, yeah, very quickly. So for the, if you don't know, so I'm Martine I'm a GPN Andreessen Horowitz, and. I actually want to start by introducing Ben actually having him introduce himself, but I want to let you know how I met Ben. So I was doing my PhD at Stanford in the networking space, and we spun out and we started a company called this Sera.

This is the software defined networking space. And we started it right before. Like the great recession, the nuclear winter had set in and we were struggling. And one of our investors who was also on our board was Andy Rachleff, who was actually a professor at Stanford at the time, but he's this super famous investor from benchmark.

And we were at the, we were at the bottom of the recession and we're like, we had a professor as a CEO and he needed a new CEO and we were talking with Andy Rachleff and we're like, who would be the best person on earth? It's well, there's this guy that just sold the company to HP.

And his name is Ben. And I had never heard of him at the time. And and we should talk to him. So this I, this was in 2008, so I got introduced in the band and he came in, of course, Ben's you have so insightful and he'd just done it. Like he just built a company at the same thing. And uh, so I asked Ben if he would be our CEO, actually.

Ben, do you remember what you said in response to that? I don't. I don't. I said, no, you said I'm too rich.

You're like to be CEO of a company like this. You gotta be piped in. And so instead, however, Ben and Mark invested Ben ended up joining the board. And so much of what I've learned has been with Ben. And so I thought it'd be great if Ben, most of you know him, but it'd be great if he just gave you a quick rundown of kind of his background with respect to infrastructure that we'll move on to David.

So Ben, if you wouldn't mind. 

Ben Horowitz: [00:02:36] Yeah. Sure. And that, that did bring that a, man's got to know his limitations. If you know how hard a job is if you're going to give somebody a really, really hard, nearly impossible job, it's it really helps if they're not rich, I have to say, yeah, that's a good hiring tip as well.

At some point, rich people are just like, this is too hard. I'm going to the 

Martin Casado: [00:02:54] beach. Things we learned multiple times, I think, in, in our 

Ben Horowitz: [00:02:57] careers. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah kinda my career, actually, my, probably my career in infrastructure, I started way back when I was an engineer at Silicon graphics and kind of the first.

I was working on, we were, we had to put, we had an operating system called IRX or truss Unix-based and we were the first we had built the, the original multiprocessor machines. And so there was this task of having to. Put semaphores on all the Colonel processes and so forth so that they went collide and you wouldn't have all these weird race conditions, which was I would say probably the most complicated engineering job I ever had, but.

Eventually then eventually went to a company called Netscape where I was in charge of kind of the web servers and then we needed a directory kind of project. And so we that's where we. I got the idea to  popularize LDAP and kind of make up the directory standard.

And that was like my big infrastructure thing there. And then Mark and I founded a company called LoudCloud, which was one of the first or the original kind of cloud computing company started much too early. Ironically, because there wasn't enough infrastructure like principally, there was no virtualization, for example.

And so you couldn't really do cloud computing in that way, but the tools that we had so we transformed that company into a company called Opsware and that's the one that I sell to HP, which made me to to rich, to take Martine stock. 

Martin Casado: [00:04:21] And since joining Andreesen, you've done a lot of infra investing actually so comfortable.

It'd be great to just go through that a bit. 

Ben Horowitz: [00:04:28] Yeah, sure. Made a bunch of introduced structure investments. The first  investment I've made is on a company called Okta, which was very familiar to me from my directory days. And more recently I've invested in a company called Databricks.

And then, most recently one called any scale and Databricks is infrastructure for AI and big data. And any scale is a new way to, how do you get the kind of processing power that you need, at the growth rate that you need. Now that Moore's law is definitely not going fast enough to support the hunger of AI and it can turn it can basically Make the cloud look like your laptop and make it very easy to program in parallel.

Martin Casado: [00:05:10] Awesome. All right. Cool. So I was one of Ben's investments. He joined, we were definitely for a journalist Sarah networks. I was gonna say there was another one, sorry about that. Yeah we so very honestly I learned so much of what I know by having been on my board.

We ended up selling the company to VMware where I ran that business. And when I left, there was about a $600 million business and end to end, that was about an 11 year journey. And then I joined Andreessen Horowitz where I also focus on core infrastructure. And as part of that, I'd always heard of Dave

But I met him and I don't know if you ever have these moments where you're like, I dunno, you meet someone new and it's like talking to a long lost brother, but I feel like he's lived this parallel life to me as far as the company he's built and what he's done. And so super happy he was able to join as well.

And do you, if you're cool with it, it'd be great to get your personal journey thro...

After this podcast recording, I wrote Technical Community Builder is the Hottest New Job in Tech which went into further detail on my thoughts on Community!

Audio source: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/developer-love/ep-15-learning-in-public-with-shawn-swyx-wang

SHOW NOTES

• Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm
• /r/ReactJS
• Taming the Meta Language by Cheng Lou
• Avis is No. 2. We Try Harder
• Metcalfe’s Law
• Reed’s Law
• Clubhouse
• CMX
• Udemy
• The Community Fund
• Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal
• Hacking Communities by Laís de Oliveira
• Prettier
• Transistor.fm
• Stripe

TRANSCRIPT

Patrick Woods: Awesome. Swyx, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

I'm really excited to have this conversation.

I'm sure lots of folks are aware of who you are and probably follow you on Twitter, but for those that don't, would you mind giving us a little bit of an overview about who you are and what you're working on?

Shawn "Swyx" Wang: Sure. Thanks for having me on.

Been enjoying the podcast, and this is my second Heavybit podcast alongside JAMstack radio.

So I'm Shawn, I also go by Swyx, that's my English and Chinese initials.

It's a complicated history, but I was at Netlify, passed through AWS and most recently just left AWS to join Temporal.

And have been primarily active in the front-end/ serverless space.

And I've been very interested in this whole idea of developer experience.

I did not know to call it developer love until I came across Orbit.

And I think Orbit's model is fascinating and really nails it.

But to me, the way I've been breaking down developer experience is developer tooling and developer communities.

So kind of straddling both.

I was a moderator of r/ReactJS subreddit, going from about 40,000 members to over 200,000.

Recently stepped down from that to help run the Svelte society, which is the community organization for the Svelte framework.

Patrick: Yeah. Thanks for the overview.

So you mentioned developer experience as a concept and a practice that you're very interested in.

What do you think led to that point for you?

Swyx: Honestly, it was Netlify branding their developer relations people as developer experience engineers, which I was pretty skeptical about, because if you are devrel, just say your devrel, don't try to put some unique spin on it.

But then I think they really envisioned something bigger than traditional devrel, which was building our integrations and also working on community building, which is not like me talking to everyone, but also enabling others to talk to everyone else.

And so I think many to many is a really noble goal.

It's very challenging obviously, because you have to influence without any formal authority, but it's also a very appealing goal economically, because then you don't have to scale their number of employees linearly with your number of users, which I think makes a lot of sense.

Patrick: So you mentioned developer experience for you is really comprised of tooling and communities.

Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between those two pillars?

Swyx: I don't know if I have a formal relationship in my head.

The framework that I come from is actually from Cheng Lou, who used to be on the React Core team.

I think he's on the Reason or ReScript core team now. And he gave a talk at Facebook's internal conference called Taming The Meta Language, and the argument of that--

And it's a very good talk. I recommend people check it out.

The argument on that talk was essentially that every programming language or every framework has a core and a periphery, and the more developed it gets, the core which is kind of like the code that runs, is a smaller and smaller part of it.

And really the middle language starts to go around it, which involves tutorials, docs, workshops, community, jobs, third party libraries, yada yada.

And so in his original slides, he had a long list of these things that are wrapping around a very popular framework, which for him was reacts, but you can extend this to basically anything.

But for me, I think it essentially just breaks down to, okay, the code that is not core but makes all the developer experience much better, so that's the developer tooling, and then developer communities, which is all the people around the code, which isn't core to the code, but makes using that code a lot better.

So it's just code and people.

Patrick: Yeah. I love that.

So as a project or a framework grows the core, maybe it becomes smaller as a percentage of the overall footprint with the periphery, the middle language increasing.

What's that tipping point look like, do you think, when it switches from code to community being the bigger part?

Swyx: Yeah. This is something you can tie in to Geoffrey Moore's idea of Crossing the Chasm.

So for people who haven't heard about this, it's like a five stage adoption process going from 0% of the total population to 100% of the total population.

And then it's a bell curve from 0% to a 100%.

So the early stage is kind of the hobbyists, like super early adopter types.

The only thing that they care about is this is cool.

I can hack on this in the weekends, and this is technically better on some basis, right?

Like in theory, I really want this thing to exist. I look at all the existing solutions out there and none of them fit me, be...

Audio Source, and Shaan's viral thread. Transcript below.

"Write Drunk, Edit Sober" - Hemingway

What Reaction is this meant to get?

1. LOL
2. WTF/Outraging
3. AWW/Heartwarming
4. AWE/"Wow"
5. Confirmation bias, aka "Finally, someone said it"
6. "Did you know", aka Take a familiar thing and share a new fact about it:

- the Duolingo business model
- Tom Cruise's real name
- Made to Stick
- Contagious

How to Edit for Virality

swyx: [00:00:00] Shaan Puri had a viral tweet about clubhouse recently, and I was interested in that, but also more interested in the way that he drafted it for virality. So here he is explaining it to Sam Parr on their podcast, My First Million. 

Shaan Puri: [00:00:12] I just went on this rant on the phone about this. It just  came out of my mouth, but just the way I  explained it here and,  without the whole like,  dramatized TV show script, but just the reasons why I think it's going to struggle. That was great. That was amazing. And I was like, shit, I should have wrote that down. I feel like that would have been  a good piece of content. And I was like, I got to go and I hung up the phone and I went to my computer and I just typed the whole thing out 

I did your tip, which was, I took a break for an hour, went and did something else, came back and I edited it for about 30 mins 

Sam Parr: [00:00:40] Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a viral tweet, a good email, editing is the magic. They say, write drunk, edit sober. 

Shaan Puri: [00:00:47] Oh, that's a great one.

I've never heard that. I love that. I used to just edit in the moment like I'd write it, that was a mistake. The tip you gave me a while back was go do other shit. Let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 

Sam Parr: [00:01:02] minutes, the science behind it.

I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a shower thought. So there's like science behind, like doing something really hard and then not doing it. And then things hit you. There's. Science behind why that works. So that's  what you're doing, 

Shaan Puri: [00:01:16] basically like the brain relaxes in some way.

And then when it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a new way. At the top of every page, I have a template. At the top, there's  seven lines. It says, what reaction is this meant to get? And I have seven emotions. LOL like this is meant to be really funny. Is it WTF where it's like, dude, what the fuck? And that's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or people are pissed off. Then there's other ones like, Aww, something really cute. AWE awe. Like that's something that's awesome. Like, wow. That is kind of amazing.

Sam Parr: [00:01:46] So the way to go viral is  you start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone we already know that certain emotions get more shares. For example, creating depression or sadness that doesn't get shares. Creating outrage gets far more. And what small tweaks, you can make something sad, outrageous, and that's far better.

Right. 

Shaan Puri: [00:02:04] So it's either amazing. It's super funny. It's really outraging. It's really touching and heartwarming. That's another one hard to do. And then the one I had for this, which is  like a new emotion, which was, I wrote FINALLY, SOMEONE SAID IT and I actually think that's its own genre that I didn't even have it in my template.

Cause I was like, I think this is going to go viral, but it doesn't match any of these. I was like, I think for some people is going to be WTF. Like, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What an asshole. But I thought, no, it's going to go viral. Because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking, but they've been afraid to say, or they couldn't put words around it.

Exactly. But they had this hunch. They will share it because they agree with your 

Sam Parr: [00:02:39] idea. Do you have recognizing something that you feel that you weren't sure if other people feel, but you see it on paper?  The emotion that you just evoked was like, finally, I didn't think I was the only one who thought, like it's a recognizing something type of vibe 

Shaan Puri: [00:02:51] and they're really sharing because I, like, I knew it I'm right.

So they're not saying, wow, he's so right. They're actually saying, I'm right. Read this, this proves I'm right. Which is like a real subtle thing. But I'm so interested in studying the psychology around why people do what they do. Why do they share what they share? Because I want to grow an audience and this is the best way to grow it.

Sam Parr: [00:03:10] When I start with the emotion, then I start with. The package, like, how am I packaging this? And then I start with the headline, then the preview image.

And then I work backwards from there. the exact emotion that you just had of this guy is crazy. That is the emotion. Wow. I am trying to evoke by sharing that so I can tell that story and probably five tweets and I bet it will, like by reality, it's pretty impossible to predict. But I can bet that there's like a three out of 10 chance that it's going to hit, that it has legs.

I can say this has all the checks, all the box to get popular. Anyone who says that they're gonna be able to predict it the wrong, like Shaan's thing just reached 5 million people. He was like, this is not going to work. 

Shaan Puri: [00:03:47] The other part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we've all seen. It's a relatable. Oh yeah. I've I filled one of those in and you, so you took it. Oh, very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is like really cool. Like yesterday I saw, Tom cruise, his name is not Tom cruise. His real name. No. What is it?   It's really Thomas Cruise Mapother IV. I don't even know how you pronounce that. Yeah. Tom Mapother versus Tom cruise. And so you take something really familiar.

We all know Tom cruise, right? Boom. Here's the uncommon did you know? And then it's like, Oh, sweet. Like, wow. You know, and that one doesn't have as much shock factor. So it won't go super viral, but it will get a lot of likes. The closer you can get to that, the surprise gap between what I thought I knew. And what's real, the more shares people will give.

Sam Parr: [00:04:29] Yeah, I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I liked the book made to stick and I liked the book contagious by Jonah Berger. Contagious made to stick as how to say something. So people remember, and contagious is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular, how to make them spread like a virus...