Zac Smith
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So I was really used to small organizations that didn't really have advantages in terms of global scale or amount of money or you know, brand or anything else like that, but you had agility, right? So you kind of like organized around speed, organized around ability to change. And that's what I love about startups because I love to experiment.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I love to lean in with new ideas and I love to go fast. I'm a person of action. And when we became part of Equinix, I would say after about one year where we had a little bit of a grace period, we were off to the side and kind of got our bearings. This is a 15,000 person company that had a very different kind of culture and They were a market leader.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
They had decades of success doing their business. They had a lot of kind of experience and leadership there. But that comes with bureaucracy, right? It comes with more people, more checks and balances. They had a matrix structure, which I'd never heard the word of. But basically... you know, it took me a while to figure out, well, who makes a decision here?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You know, and the answer was, well, you know, everybody has to get aligned and then, you know, decisions can be made or something. Right. And so for me, that was super different. And I will admit, like at first it was very, very frustrating. And I had to take a, step back and really learn some new skills, which once I took kind of a learner's mindset or growth mindset, I really enjoyed.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I'm not going to say I enjoyed all the experiences of cross-functional work because it's a little bit different than my personality, but I enjoyed the learning of how to figure that out. Because you basically had to think, hey, how do you get 15,000 people at a company to march in a direction together? Right. Or to do things that might feel uncomfortable or to try new stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And the answer is like not that much different than marketing that you would have to do to go convince customers to try your thing. So a lot of those skills I started to use internally and figure out how to explain and communicate things. in different channels and in different ways. And that was super powerful. I think those are skills that I'll take away with me and other things that I do.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And then you also get a little bit of a different lens on the world. Running the digital side at Equinix, I was more of the technology-focused person at a big global real estate company. And so I had a first person view working with our partners like Nvidia, like with Intel, like with Dell, with VMware.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Those were all very different conversations than I would have had as a startup because we had something that they really wanted and needed. It was very different than, you know, conversations that a startup has with those kinds of big organizations. So that was super cool because we did some awesome stuff and we were able to unlock things that would have never been possible
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I think, for a smaller organization. But then after three years, which was, I would say, a very measured process that we had with Equinix, they wanted to acquire the business to help make their platform, which is hundreds of data centers around the world, more digital.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so the first two or three years were about kind of working through at the pace to integrate some of those capabilities from the packet acquisition into that broader company. But we always knew that there would be kind of an integration process.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And then, you know, for me, after three years, it was the right time to go, say, use my skills elsewhere, primarily because that kind of integrate and scale function as a leader is not actually my best quality. Yeah. I'm more of a driver and creator rather than a kind of a manager and a process person. So for me, that was a good transition. I think it was right for the company as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I was a little bit more mentally prepared than my first startup in 2012 I sold with Raj. That was really emotional because he was like your baby. And you're like, don't touch my baby. But I was much more mentally prepared going into the transaction with Equinix around, hey, this is your company now. And how can we make it work for you? And how can it last well beyond me? which is the point.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so it was easier to step away when the time was right. Still had a lot of, you know, relationships and touch with the customers that I, you know, obviously miss, but it was the right time and it was a good, healthy transition, I think, for all parties.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
That's pretty cool. Yeah. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, I, uh, I took away from it something, and I saw this with a lot of larger companies, and it really gave me this newfound respect both for market leaders and for startups. And I used to see them as very in conflict. And actually, I can see why great market-leading companies have muscles around acquisitions.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Because in market leading companies, there was a really good book, I think it's zone to win. I'd ever read the book zone to win. It basically talks about, you know, there's four zones, a company's lifecycle or where its products are. And the upper right zone in the quadrant, just think of a two by two, is the kind of market leading. Like it's, you know how to sell it. You're leading the market.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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You kind of, everybody knows that you do it. Like that's where it's all working. Then you write kind of like below it, you have the stuff that's like starting to work. And I think they call them like horizon one and horizon two, something like. It's right here or it's like a future opportunity. And then they're over on the bottom left. And I'm totally bastardizing this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So please, like somebody Google it and it will make a lot of sense. But on the bottom left, you have like innovation, which is this kind of like incubation zone.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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uh which is not even a thing yet we don't even know right it's super weird it's super scary we might fail probably will fail we're not sure and then you kind of got this like adoption zone where it's like oh it's starting to work what i realize is that you know these the zone up in the right hand side where it's winning you know it's that way because it actually focuses you know it figures out what works for example with equinix interconnected co-location works
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
They dominate the market. They've been doing that for a while. Everybody knows that that's what they do. And they then build processes that keep that market leading around it. And so internally at the company, and I'm sure that this is at other market leading companies like, say, Google right now with their ad business. there's a very protectionist approach.
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Like don't distract from winning at the thing that is working. Like don't get us off track because we're nailing it every quarter. The customers love it. We're dominating the market. Keep doing that. But what that can do is that can obviously take something that looks not working yet, e.g. incubation or some sort of innovation and kill it. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Cause it's a distraction to the market leading component of the business. And so, um, that was definitely one of the challenges we had at Equinix was they were trying to figure out how this 20 years of market leadership they had around a single thing, you know, well, what happens to the next thing?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You know, what did they say about like, there's this, a funny phrase, you know, it's like, I went broke slowly and then all at once, you know, it's like, it's like it was working and I was the number one until, I mean, look at Intel right now until I wasn't. I think that there was a good self-awareness at Equinix. Like, Hey, how are we going to upgrade our,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
products and our experiences for the next thing. And so acquisition is part of that. And I think startups play a great role because there is no past. all they have is future. So there is no, you know, zone that is swapping away innovation. Everybody's like all hand, all ideas are good because we need to figure out how to survive or, you know, make the next wave.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so I think that's like super interesting. The companies who have figured out how to do that over and over and over again. And like, whether they figure out how to incubate, like what, you know, maybe certain companies do with labs divisions or open source or side projects or through MNA. Like I, I had a, very much, you know, a renewed appreciation for that, for that cycle.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, they're not in the performance zone. That's what it was called. You got the performance zone.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Summarize in three sentences what zone to win is all about.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
There we go.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, yeah, I mean, that's what we say with startups. They're finding product market fit, right? Startups are finding fit. They don't even have anything working yet, which is an awesome muscle.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Incubation, transformation, productivity, and performance.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, I think what I learned, I'd always respected Intel as a company, but what I learned working with them pretty closely was how hard of a task they had ahead of them, right? I mean, first off, we think of market leading for 10 or 15 years in something. They've been market leading for 40 years.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
It's really, really hard when you're used to own a 90% of the market to change anything. And I think that that has to be You know, appreciated because I didn't appreciate how complicated cultural changes when it starts to go off track or when you forgot or couldn't figure out how to innovate the next thing because you were so busy making all the money. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And like, you know, you know, winning all the market. Right. Because why would you do anything else the next 86 years? you know, great data center CPUs and desktop CPUs because it's working. And so that's what I kind of appreciated out of that. I would say that I was surprised. I did find that all the chip companies really struggled.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You know, it's kind of like blindingly obvious and at the same time, not in the realm of possibility that the chip companies all needed some sort of recurring or subscription revenue. They have huge, huge increasing investment cycles around CapEx, whether that's designing their technology or that's producing it with Intel and their fab.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But they have these huge things where then they go and then they just sell the chip one time. And increasingly, you know, they're competing against, I believe, their biggest customers, hyperscale clouds, which are also making their own chips. But they have a nice, juicy recurring revenue model. So they get to make money on those chips every day or for years and years and years.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I believe that that look to me – and I was very surprised. I was like, hey, y'all, we should work on that together. And – Every chip company, when we would talk to them, was kind of like, yeah, we should, but could you guys just buy the chips from us, please? And we're like, no, let's practice the other thing. Let's move to the Apple subscription model.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Versus the buy your phone through Verizon. Let's figure out how to do that. And let's also solve things like circularity and full recycling and reuse of components and all the other stuff that goes with that. It can be better, not just more stable revenue. It can also just be better. And it's kind of what customers wanted too. Because customers kept expressing, hey, I want access to this stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I don't want to be sold more kit all the time. But it was so hard for the organizations, and I still think it is. I haven't seen any meaningful approach. And I'm kind of curious right now, especially given the dominance that NVIDIA has within its business you know, if it's going to try and change the model of transferring its IP, you know, the GPUs on as a service basis versus on a CapEx basis.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I just, I haven't seen that yet. And I'm quite surprised by that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I mean, I wouldn't, you know, we can get into the crazy wild idea. That's part of this podcast at some point. Let's do it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I wouldn't be surprised. I think that the verticalized model of make your silicon and offer it as a service in data centers is amazing. working really, really, really well for a couple of big clouds right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I wouldn't be surprised that some of the chip companies do something like that, whether it's through a proxy like Intel, I believe, spun off part of its business in a joint venture called Articulate with an infrastructure fund. And I know that NVIDIA has just invested heavily in a lot of AI data center businesses, right? So they're making their moves to support that distribution.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But I wouldn't be surprised that they would go more direct if they could find a way to kind of get their heads around that. But just to go back to as a service, I think it's even more basic than that. And I'm like, just think of Apple, who I think just has a master class in this. They used to sell you phones, but now I just go on this upgrade cycle all the time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And they take back the physical device from me and finance it on their Apple card or whatever. All I know is every –
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
18 months to two years it's super super easy for me to get a new phone and the other one goes back into the back of the store on roller skates you know or however like the apple cut comes out and brings me the new one and um that's for a physical device i hold my hand all day long the access of like most data center equipment is much easier because most people never touch it they never see it it just goes into a big data center in one of like 40 markets around the world
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
which means we know exactly where it lands. Nobody really touches it except for service providers. And so I think there's a real opportunity to kind of do an upgrade cycle or a kind of circular model where it's like, instead of buying computers with
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
an intel chip in it you buy a subscription to intel technology that allows you to have always access to the latest stuff and that could be in your data center or somebody else's data center i think that that's you know one part is financing and service model and the other part is like where does it sit but you know these things aren't going into random places they're going into pretty well-known places
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
It's the concept. It's just like concept. Yeah. It's the concept would come back to, well, how would we, you know, sell you the chip first, you know? And it was like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how it's going to happen. Like, well, who would be the OEM? You know, it's like, well, maybe there wouldn't be one.
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You know, and like, you know, just those things that their whole departments of managing the OEMs would be like, well, what do I do in that? You know, and so I think that those are the conceptual issues that got in the way. Not like, could we could we physically figure out how to do it? I think that wasn't actually the issue. We almost never got there.
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It was like, yeah, of course we could if we wanted to. But why would we? Because of all these reasons.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. You know, the problem is that, you know, and I noticed this when I was at Equinix as well, an experiment is almost not that useful because it's so tiny. Oh, so what was wildly successful and we managed to do thousands of these things in this awesome new way, it would still be like 0.01% of our revenue. Wouldn't be meaningful.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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So we should, you know, we need to do something at real scale, but we can't get behind something at real scale because it's super scary to do something that you've never done at scale. And so there's this little chicken and egg. It's a hard thing. It's like obvious, but it's hard to get through. And so I think that's why some companies have practiced. They recognize it. They're self-aware.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And they practice that through M&A or they practice it muscle. Like I really love the Google SRE handbook chapter. What is it? Two outage points or something like that, you know, where it's like people's bonus and the SRE team is not built around 100% uptime because that means you're probably going too slow and not taking enough risks.
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So it's more like how do you balance outage points with customer pain and There's got to be something that's not 100 and not zero. It's something more in the middle. And I think that's kind of difficult in scaled businesses because you're really – you can tell it like even with Intel right now. They don't get a lot of room in the public markets to mess up.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so experimenting is hard in a big business.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, you said it very well. I think to even dumb it down a little bit more, it feels more consumer. Because that's what we have a lot in our consumer life. And what you said there is like, hey, I want access to the latest technology. And then you can see, well, okay, well, how do I remove the friction of an upgrade cycle? And how do I make that beneficial for all parties?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And usually that's what SaaS is about. You have to buy packaged software once every 10 years. Just give me the latest updates all the time. I'll pay you monthly. Yeah. Let's be aligned in terms of I'll keep paying you if you keep delivering me great updates. And I think that that alignment is where the real unlock comes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I just believe that you can do it with hardware models and I think operating models. And most people are just desperate to say, nobody's raising their hand saying, please ship me all the computers and all the cables. I love putting them all together. Yeah. Nobody says that. They just like, I need to have the outcome.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I personally enjoy it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, but doing that all over the world and in 25 markets and dealing with import duties and I'm missing the optics for this thing and this one broke and nobody loves that part. And I think that the upgrade cycle is really important because I do believe we're moving into this new architecture, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
We were kind of going from, in my simple brain, I've been living in the world of IT that is basically client-server plus Ethernet for 25 years. String together a bunch of computers. It didn't really matter if the computers were the same type or version. we're going to run Linux, we're going to connect them with Ethernet, we're going to scale out workload is going to be hunky dory.
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Now we're moving more almost back to like mainframe style integrated systems where the new architecture of computing with machine learning and AI is much more dependent upon a rack scale or a pod scale or system level architecture with the right networking, working with the right hardware, with the right software actually makes it possible.
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I accidentally got myself into three community orchestras. So I'm like super busy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I think that that architecture shift going from commodity COTS computers into highly specialized integrated systems represents an opportunity to change that experience of how you consume it. Which is like, oh, you're going to upgrade this on a regular basis and it all has to work together. You don't just get to piecemeal, bits and pieces whenever you see a good deal on DRAM, you know?
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Like, I think that's going to make a real difference in how people go through these cycles. And we've been used to an Intel CPU TikTok cycle that's more like six years. Like, I mean... maybe they were doing it every two, but really you didn't need to upgrade, you know, except for every four or five years. There was no true need for the, there was no true need, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
You played the TCO on power and speed and density, but like, it wasn't like we were, we were, the Moore's law curve had slowed. We're not, we're just the beginning of that curve right now in accelerated computing.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I play bass. Okay. Stand-up bass.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
So I think that's going to represent an opportunity for a more delivered model versus here, buy the kit, call your Dell rep.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Just a pin in it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And one I've always been in. Well, not always. For the past three years, I've been in what's called the New Conductors Orchestra. So we're a community orchestra that gives a platform for emerging conductors to practice. And then we do three concert series a year. And then... I joined this one in the summer because they just had like a really good program.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
I think it's a great question because they've got a trade-in program. They'll take your old MacBook. It's like no real difference, but you're right from a conceptual standpoint. I don't think about it, and I think most consumers don't think in the same way. I think this is the power of... You know, reframing, like, why do you go to the grocery store?
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And it's like, same grade formula, just a new box, right? And it's like, wow, it's purple now. It must be different. While they're telling you it's exactly the same. There must be some science spy and consumer branding and marketing where the phone was just a different model. We were used to it. being an upgrade.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
We were used to like, oh, you know, but our desktops, no, we put that there and stuck there and, you know, we did it and we bought it and we owned it. I don't know. Maybe there was this because phones came through carrier. That's what I think it is. And it was just like the consumer behavior was more used to it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And often you finance your phone through the carrier. So I think it was just consumer behavior was very comfortable with this. And I think the fascinating part for me in data center is we're very comfortable with this with the vast majority of our computing called cloud. We get it like that. We don't have to think about the cable that broke or this, that, that. We just get upgraded EC2 instances.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And so I think that it can translate, but you have to rebrand it in some way, or maybe you have to say it. You can't just say, hey, we'll rent you the server versus or the chip. It has to be a totally different value proposition or at least presented as like, I don't know. There must be somebody out there who's got a creative left brain that can think of a way to say this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Because I think the emancipation for most customers is, hey, man, I'm in the banking business, not in the buying computer business all the time. Could you just really make sure I have access? And I think that's been the attractive of public cloud challenges is it's still a bell curve offering, right? It's still like a mass market multi-tenant bell curve offering.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And when you have this really differentiated technology coming out of diverse players like Nvidia, this is where enterprises make their alpha, right? And they're like, I want to adopt that now or at my pace, in my way. And I think therein lies the opportunity to bring that as a service consumptive style desire. Maybe it means operated. Maybe that's just the thing that I'm noodling on.
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It's basically high school and college music teachers that come during this when they're on break and play together. But they always need. I mean, this is the story of my life. Everybody needs a bass player. Right. So they needed some more bass players because we were playing this smaller symphony, which had like as many basses as you can possibly get on stage.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But I think there's an opportunity to bring that to enterprises beyond just like a lease. You know, it has to be a better experience than just financing.
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You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Yeah, it's depreciating.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And then a buddy of mine harangued me into a different one, which is a chamber orchestra. So, you know, that's what I'm doing tonight. And it's kind of odd for me because we're rehearsing in Lincoln Center in what used to be the Juilliard dorms, which is where I live when I first came to New York. And I haven't been in that building in like 25, 30 years. So all kinds of memories.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, I think therein lies the opportunity. I think the most interesting part about a subscription, in theory, I mean, I know why businesses love it. They're like, dude, I get $10 a month from you or $20 or whatever, right? I sold you a bed, now I get $20 a month. It's amazing, right? I'm not sure there's that much value being given out of it for the app or the thing or whatever.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
But what it does in theory and what I've always loved the concept with chip companies is that it aligns your interests. to some degree, right? If you're in the sales business and you're just like, here, buy this stuff, buy the product.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Then when I have new product, I'm actually like the business model of Intel was specifically built around ticking and talking to you so that you would have to buy new technology on a regular basis. But what if I'm totally fine with the old technology? I want to keep using it. What if you could just do updates to the chip you made three years ago that made my
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Linux kernel optimized and I get to keep running, I'd be happy. Or maybe just lower my price a little bit. That'd be great. We would be aligned in terms of that. Right now, that's not the case. They got to sell you new stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
And I believe beyond that doesn't align the overall economic interest between the customer and the vendor, that it actually doesn't align a whole bunch of the sustainability issues that come out of that. The amount of waste that we produce in
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
creating, making, shipping, delivering effectively a bunch of sheet metal and copper so that we can sell you an upgraded CPU is asinine, which there's not repeatability. And it's kind of funny because people will argue over, I'm not paying, and this is a CPU line, maybe it's a little different than GPU, but CPU would be arguing over
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
$10 on an $1,100 CPU while we're throwing out $1,200 of power supplies, which is like forest through the trees here. Why don't we figure out a way to have reusable power supplies and reusable all the things around it and slot in the new upgradable CPU thing, blade or whatever, and everybody goes home happier? But those incentives are not aligned.
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That's one thing you notice being in a data center company is just the amount of old crap that has to get thrown out. There's a lot of work in this industry to get stuff into data centers, and there's very little about what to do with it after.
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Circular, yeah.
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I'm going to come back when I was just a pipsqueak.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, the circularity aspect, I think, is critical. Right now, there's not a big incentive, actually, to make it better, to fix it.
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Well, I think what it would mean, I think Apple, let's use the example there, when they take your old iPhone, they normally don't sell it to some random company. They do for a certain percentage. The vast majority, from my understanding, I've talked to the techs. I'm like, where do these iPhones go? They're like, we take it apart. We make new iPhones with it.
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And they're building iPhones so that they can take them back because they know they're getting them back. Obviously, that has a great side effect that they remove a bunch of the secondary market and they control that. But they get to take all the materials and reuse them, which probably saves them a whole lot of money in their supply chain, as well as meeting some of their sustainability goals.
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It's expensive to dig up all that stuff and process it and do all those things. And so I would see circular and computers would be where there would be a benefit to, whether it was, say, Intel on the chip side or Dell on the computer side, wanting to have their thing back. I think Cisco does it pretty well with its switches. They control their secondary market really, really well.
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And my understanding is over 90% of their products are disassembled and remade. They really focus on a circular supply chain, which is good for the earth and good for economics, which is awesome.
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Yeah, because I guess they borrow a rehearsal room there. And I haven't been back since I was 18. You had to live in the dorms freshman year at college, which was good. I was 17 years old and had no right living in New York City on my own. But then I moved out of the dorms and didn't really ever visit again.
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Yeah, I mean, so I think the trash side of this is really, we can't ignore it. I mean, this is hundreds of thousands or millions of computers a month coming out of data centers. Where are those going? They are generally not recycled.
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I mean, they go to landfills and like, you know, scrap and in not great ways, in very destructive ways, which is really unfortunate considering my understanding is like 70% or so of the carbon impact. I heard this from the, there was a company several years ago built around taking OCP gear and giving it a second life.
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Dean Nelson has done a bunch of this within the infrastructure masons on just taking hyperscale equipment and trying to give it two or three more years worth of life after that upgrade cycle. But my understanding was something like 70% of the carbon impact of a computer over its entire life is making the computer 20% is running it the whole time.
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And 10% is what they can recycle from it is the energy impact. And so like that to me says, wow, the best thing you could possibly do is not make another computer or at least 80% of it. You don't have to make new parts on. Right. And so, yeah, I think that there's a, there's an alignment issue and opportunity where, uh,
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The industry would want that to be more circular, where in data centers, we would have collection points where Intel, NVIDIA, or Dell or HP wanted their things back so that they could upgrade them and change the parts and do the things. Or even better, you would design the data center differently so that it was upgradable by default.
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It would make multi-generation systems instead of buy a new kit and build a new kit. What Brian's doing at Oxide is super cool. You like that? Yeah, I mean, I love the rack scale concept there. Super timely and applicable. And he and his team have done just such a great job at building open, right?
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You know, like literally building a whole new computer versus just skipping a whole bunch of the hard stuff around firmware and bootloaders and related, which is awesome. Awesome. And I presume makes them super confident and running awesome computers for people. And I know that they've been able to offer a really high quality experience with these oxide racks because of that.
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But I think there's also this opportunity for them to maybe think, and I don't know because I've not bought an oxide rack, but I'd love to. I'd love to have a reason to, which is to change the economic model too and allow people to subscribe to them, which I think would be super cool and really give them that competitive edge.
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I'm sure they're thinking about it because Brian's super smart and thinks ahead about 15 steps. Yeah.
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Oh, no, I'm all good. Me and my college years are fine. We're at peace with each other. Good. No jitters.
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I mean, I know this well because I think the entire value proposition of Packet was built around this problem, which was how to normalize this super fragmented, disjointed system integration world and make it just work. Like how to turn on a bare metal computer a million times and get a success ratio of multiple nines, right? And the answer was...
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mainly not in physical hardware issues the answer was mainly in that bios doesn't work with that uefi with that nick with the firmware on the nick that you don't even know how to flash right with that hard drive on the nvme something or rather on something you know it's like it was a A little matrix of compatibility issues that you had to do. And so we solved it. I don't know, solved it.
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Yeah. Instead of begging to take my money for school, now they just try to beg my money to give it to them. So it's different. A lot less pressure.
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We worked on it and improved it through almost chaos style, like run thousands and thousands of boots and reinstalls and processes a day to find out these bugs. Right. But yeah, it's super frustrating. And you would get into like, oh, well, it's the Mellanox card. It's like, okay, well, it's Mellanox Connect X5. They're like, no, no, no. It's a Dell branded Mellanox. That's totally different.
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Like, wait, it's still Connect X5. They're like, no, no, no, no. It's a different one. Like, oh. So. Yeah. It's just a computer. Well, I tell my wife, I was like, she's like, what do you do every day? I was like, just making computers turn on and off. That's all we do.
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That's all we do.
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And it's like, it's all about that basement.
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Not handy.
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We can go into a pretend world?
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Do you see the little line between my professional career doing internet infrastructure that is absolutely invisible and nobody realizes it's there unless it's not there? And then everybody's like, wait, it's not working anymore.
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I don't have my crystal ball, but I do attempt to do what I refer to as the 10-year thing, which is I just try and think out 10 years, which is super scary because it's like 2035 almost. that sounds really scary to me but you know you just try and like stretch your brain and be like all right well 10 years ago was 2014 15 okay so you know kubernetes didn't exist and
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Software was hard and VMware was ruling the world. And, you know, it was pretty different. GPUs, that was just for gamers. And, you know, data centers were a bad business, right? And like, you know, all this stuff. And so I think 10 years from now, probably pretty different. So how do I stretch my brain? to think about that and imagine.
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And frankly, that's one of the things I love about not working right now, kind of taking some time off because you have nothing else to fill your head. So you do a lot of daydreaming and thinking about whatever. And so as it pertains to infrastructure, I daydream about a few things.
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One is that I daydream that our digital infrastructure is like a core pillar, if not the catalyst for our energy transition. Instead of a consumer of energy and resources, it's a catalyst and transitionary, almost like policy for that.
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So I'd really love, I think the amount of money, dollars, interest, and the type of customers, creditworthy customers who consume the vast majority of digital infrastructure means we have this massive opportunity. I think we've started to see it like what Microsoft did with Three Mile Island a couple of weeks ago with Constellation Energy, what Google's doing with SMRs, the amount of
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what Evol's doing over at ECL on hydrogen-based data centers, these can be baseline load for extremely expensive long-term energy transition investments that we can't make otherwise. They'll just take so long because we won't have a clear customer. We won't have a clear demand driver. It won't be as urgent. And I love the idea of this phase of
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I like a supporting role in my life.
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power hungry you know intensive energy driven applications driving positive change in our society versus just adding to the problem of using all the power using all the grids using all the stuff right driving up the price so that's one thing i daydream about because i certainly would like to live in that and be part of that versus be like
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the data centers that sucked up all the energy so that we couldn't transition other parts of our economy to carbon neutral or zero carbon. So that's one. The other is that I think we'll see a radically different OEM. I think OEMs are Sorry, I love the Dells and HPs and Ciscos. I think the OEM model has to change. That is going to be so radically different.
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Where technology was kind of brokered through folks, which was really bell curve driven. It was how to get x86 PCs and Windows laptops to a million or two million or three million businesses. That's just a different model now. And I think there's only a few thousand really... intense, large scale infrastructure consumers of which the top 10 consume like 60 or 70% of the market already.
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So it's like super concentrated. And so I think the OEM model is going to like change dramatically. I think because of that, the chip model will change. And I would, I believe this is again, we're in imaginary Zach mode here. I think the chip companies are going to be in direct competition with their cloud customers. It's going to get knives out.
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And because of that, we're going to basically see these as national interests. It's geopolitics. It's not just business anymore. And we're going to figure out how to protect that or break things up or more regulation and more government involvement is going to happen in this part of the industry. And because of that, we're going to see this kind of duopoly kind of competition between
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We have a few, but not a lot. There's not a lot of double bass solos. But it's OK. I don't mind. I like playing in the section. Frankly, what's most exciting for me is playing in an orchestra with like 80 or 90 other people, because it's this auditory, very physical representation of what a good organization feels like.
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chip companies and cloud companies because are they really any different right now um right who's the second largest producer of gpus is google that's just for them though um and so you know graviton and their cpu and their nick business at aws these are very very big initiatives so i think chip companies and oem is going to change dramatically my hope is that that's more aligned to a
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kind of responsible long-term resource use. You can see sustainability is driving heavy in my thinking, but also hopefully allows better access to tech. Like that's one thing I miss.
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Like when I got in the internets in 2001 after Juilliard, you could just walk to your, walk, you could just kind of go over to your neighborhood ISP and get a quarter rack of colo and a port on a router and like start mucking around on the internet. And that was cutting edge technology. You were using the same stuff that the big guys were, you know, just like whatever.
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That is just not possible now. Look at this stuff that like open AI is doing. You just can't plunk down a billion dollars to just be in the game, just to start, just to learn, just to play. And I think that that would be really awesome as we maybe see a shift in the chips and the OEMs and the clouds, there becomes better access. Because I think we need the innovation.
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I think we need thousands of new companies that don't do it the old way. And I'm very worried of... a megalopoly or whatever you want to call it of like the mega seven, do all the tech and you shall, what did you say? And you shall like it.
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You will own nothing and you will, you will, you will like it. I think that that's just not going to be good. You know, I think we're in need to see more messy innovation. That's going to be more oxides, but look how hard that was a required, like that had a huge amount of like the VC saying, I will do anything plus the right Brian at the right time to create what one, uh,
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new computer company in the last 20 years, probably. That's not enough.
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I don't know what's going to happen or not, but... I'm not going to get into election politics and how that plays in, but it doesn't seem like either candidate is a huge fan of megatech. So I think you're right. I think that there's... just this run that we've had of, you know, kind of advertising-based monopoly.
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I think I got a quote or I read an article, I could be wrong, about one of the initial Google trials that led up to this. And they asked the jury, like, you know, which search engine do you use or would you use if not Google? And I think, like, seven of the jurors like said, there's another search engine.
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You know, like there's another, I didn't know there was one. Right. And that was just like, well, that's probably not going to fly.
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I look forward to it. I'm actually really curious if, you know, and, what, you know, privacy oriented models can work. And certainly as we see AI become a little bit more, you know, search was, got creepy over the past couple of years is everything followed you. And like the results are like, I mean, I don't know how many sponsored results you see on your Google search, but it's like 20.
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because you have 50, 60, 70 people of varying backgrounds and things and whatever, all getting together, doing something. And you can tell when it works really well and they know how to work together, which is so much harder when you're building companies or working in organizations. The feedback loop is so much slower than it is. So I like it, being in a group. I don't need to be out in front.
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Before it gets to anything, you know, that isn't an ad these days. So I think the younger generation, I've talked to my kids about it. They just don't believe any of it. They're like, that's not real. So I think that that plus AI where it starts ingraining itself with personalized responses and data is going to freak people out.
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And they're going to, you know, both governments and people will switch towards more privacy oriented models, which I'm a fan of. So I think like, yeah. Government, like the internet, is a big part of our lives, and that means policy's coming.
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That it kind of feels that way.
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I don't know.
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I'm going to get your tinfoil hat for you, buddy.
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But yeah, I agree. That's a little creepy. And so I guess if I were to zoom it out, my prediction is the internet is going to be a lot less flat. It's going to get a lot more siloed because there's going to be more and more regulation that keeps data within places that... makes things act different ways. It starts enacting different rules and policies.
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Like our little, do you approve on the cookie tracking, allow all annoyance is the beginning of our upcoming hell. And I hope, I find it with myself, I'd rather pay. I'd rather pay 10 bucks to have the thing that I don't need to. A friend of mine is developing a mapping thing called Over a story, I think.
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Basically, it's paid mapping because he's so upset about being targeted while he's trying to get a route. It's trying to give you ads on where to stop. He's like, I don't want that. I just want to have... And so maybe we're on to that. Maybe a couple more subscriptions for Adam that come with no ads.
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The one that pissed me off the other day is I think I pay for subscription for like every single different – because my kids watch soccer and the other one watches NFL. So you end up paying for every streaming thing whether you want to or not. Totally. And one of them, I don't know, it was Paramount or something. Like we pay for it. And then it gives us ads when we hit the pause button.
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And I was like, oh, that's a step too far, man. Like I hit the pause button and then it was like, well, you're Boz. Let me just advertise to you. And I was like, oh. I pay you already. Stop.
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Well, I think that they might not own it, but they're going to cause it to occur as customers. I think they're very different businesses. Some are high margin, high growth. The other ones are used to being regulated, non-growth businesses. I think the big shift we're having right now is that energy is gone from basically we reach peak load.
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in the 90s and it's been slowly decreasing or like growing very minimal to it's actually growing by a few percentage points a year which is crazy and we're not used to it so you know we might see some energy businesses go private and turn into like growth businesses basically right i mean you can see constellation which is the nuclear operator doing that if they figure out that they can build
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10 or 20 more new nuclear plants, which hasn't happened since the 60s, it'd be a growth business. So I think we'll probably just see a lot more. Well, we've already seen it, like even in Ashburn, Virginia, which is the largest data center market in the world.
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Just the local planning board saying, hey, I'm not going to approve this building permit because you're going to bring in 500 diesel generators or you're going to use our water. You're going to use 50 million gallons of water a month. We don't want that, actually. That's a municipal thing that we need. We want no diesel generators next to our school and we need the water for our other stuff.
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I think these things are mixing only because it's just become a bigger part of our lives. And it's a critical part of a lot. It's not just a nice to have. It's a must have, I think, in most ways. So that just means more involvement between public policy and private companies.
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And maybe that results in just straight up regulation, or maybe that just results in better partnership or, you know, that being on the talking points of our next podcast. You know, local election is how we're going to support or not support these types of initiatives.
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And I think like that's become the lingua franca of digital infrastructure is like way more available than it was a couple of years ago, where even though I've been in this industry for 25 years, my mom didn't know what a data center was. And now she knows all about data centers and chips. And it's not for me.
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Yeah, it's pretty obvious.
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I mean, the news. Chipsack, this is delayed, coffee conversation, what's AI? It's all in the ether now, so it's much more aware. And so now people are like, oh, data centers. I mean, you hear data centers like that word probably a thousand times more than you did three years ago or five years ago.
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in the news and publications like every single you know article comes up in some business thing there's something related to this and so i think it's just becoming more part of the public consciousness and because of that you'll see more stuff whether that's rules or you know, yes, I want it or no, I don't want it. So it's coming.
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I think we've actually done pretty well for critical infrastructure, you know, data centers and the relates I've been relatively unregulated. Now it's just coming. It's like a big, big part of the industry, big part of the economy. So it's coming.
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Playing in the gigs for free.
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Yeah, so for those who know me well, no, I don't sit still. It's not a great quality I have. So Jacob and I, my brother, we've done a bunch of investments over the past 10 years through a little family office we called Humans of the Internet. We like to back humans who work around and with the Internet, as well as a couple of specific social causes.
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And so we've invested in 50 companies, which has been great. So we spent a lot of time supporting the founders. They're all very, very early. Some of them have grown to be not early, but we like to support the early ones because that's where we feel we have some experience and some value to add.
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I didn't see it.
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And then, yeah, I'm just swimming around working on a couple of things, both in open source, some standards around liquid cooling through the Linux Foundation, as well as exploring some open source software ideas around service provider stuff that I wish has existed. So I've been working on some of that, mainly as hobbyist stuff at this point. But, yeah, we'll see.
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Yeah. Was that the one that was about the Juilliard school thingamajigger? I know there was one. Somebody said I should see it.
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I love to build, so I'll definitely build something. Just got to figure out where. My answer is almost always I say yes to everything. I'm like, that looks interesting. I should work on that. And before you know it, I'm really busy.
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Yeah, so we have a... There's an organization, part of Linux Foundation, called the SSIA, where... we created a – think of it like a USB standard for single and two-phase liquid cooling between server manufacturers and chip guys like OEMs and data center operators. So that way we could have the right size coupler and start to things like color-coded.
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So that way you had a computer, you slid it into a rack, and you would be able to plug – liquid loop into it. And the idea here was that if we could standardize that interface, as well as some of the more complicated stuff around fluid, like flow rates and pressures, that the industry could more holistically adopt liquid cooling, which is dramatically more efficient in terms of removing heat and
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and using less energy in data centers. And it seems almost obvious, except for computer manufacturers release computers every one to two years, data centers change every 20 to 30 years. They're on very different timeframes, so there needed to be more of an open standard.
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So we've been working on that, working along with the OCP crew, as well as different organizations and the Green Software Foundation.
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which is also in Linux Foundation, to just try and figure out how this standard, which is published under what's called the JDF, Joint Development Foundation, a little bit different than open source software, which you can actually put in GitHub and put like a BSD license or Apache license on. You can't do that for just words on drawings on a spec.
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And so we worked with Linux Foundation on the JDF, which has been awesome. And, you know, I'm not, I wish we were more successful, meaning I wish it was more common, but I can see, yeah, like a ton of the work we've done has been adopted and consumed in practice or in some sort of principle, like the new NVIDIA stuff looks basically like what we did, which is great.
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They're taking inspiration from that. OCP's new liquid cooling side for its hyperscale customers looks very similar. So I think the supply chain is starting to really gel around this. My hope is that Cisco, Dell, HPE, and the longer tail of the data center industry can kind of align.
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towards a standard versus trying to think that being proprietary differentiates themselves which it doesn't it just makes it harder for everybody so i'm hopeful that we'll get there but i'm not you know doesn't move fast sure community-based organizations where everybody gets to have a say they move slow you know but that's okay
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Located adjacent to.
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Absolutely. I mean, that's why I wouldn't build a data center right now. It's because where is my time and energy best spent when I can – think outside the box a little bit, right?
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Move about the cabin, as my brother likes to say, which has been super useful because I'm not stuck within an existing organization that has to answer to its shareholders this quarter and do this and that, but I still have touch points and trust within it. So areas that I've been focused on there, and I totally agree with you, Adam, that we can take these areas.
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I've always believed in building businesses was about building a bigger tent, right? Right. It's like, how do you create more opportunity? That's good for society. It's not just about how do you create something that's valuable? How do you create opportunity that people can?
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I mean, the biggest joy I've had out of building several companies has not been the money I've made, although that hasn't hurt. It's been that, you know, a thousand people said, wow, I got to have careers that started here. Right. Or like, I grew up my family because I worked at this company. That is awesome to me. So I like the bigger tent policy of creation.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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But where I was referring to earlier related to aligning civic infrastructure, like energy, with the... Awesome capitalistic movement. If you can harness that stallion called hundreds of billions of dollars going into digital infrastructure right now and use it towards the right thing, well, shoot, that's amazing. That can benefit society in way bigger ways than...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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I got chat GPT or the AI can answer my thingamajiggers or target my ads better, right? It can say, wow, that helped decarbonize a whole bunch of our grid. Or on the water side, I'm invested in a hydrogen-based data center business, which I believe to be a foundation. I just got back from the Atacama Desert in Chile, which has this project too.
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It's like has the highest solar radiation percentage annually of any place on earth. Why? Because it's so high, it's so dry, and it's so sunny. And it's only a couple hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean. They have this plan to create basically the Saudi Arabia of hydrogen there with this like huge amount of energy they can produce that they can turn into a portable fuel.
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That when you burn hydrogen, what do you create? Water. And it's pretty amazing. We built a test or not we, but you've all in the ECL team built the test site over in Mountain View. They have a one megawatt hydrogen-based data center. It produces hundreds of gallons a day of water. That's the byproduct, right?
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Versus a normal data center, which uses thousands of gallons of water a day through evaporative cooling. Sometimes millions. I think there is really an opportunity to take existing technology, whether those are like battery storage technologies, for example, been exploring a heat-based, like a thermal long storage solution. These are awesome opportunities.
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Your data centers create heat and also use a bunch of energy, but they can store energy, which is really important. So I think that there's some ways that we can start thinking, and my challenge is how to activate that between, The let's call it sub 50 people who build and operate all the data centers in the world, the capital that flows around it.
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And some of these weird innovation things that are so hard for that group to see because it's not part of their big scaled organization and how they've always done it. Right. Like there's almost what was the thing? I was discussing somebody who was building a new data center in a far off place. And I was like, why are you building it with all these standard rows and no storage space?
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And I was like, you realize nobody's ever going to go there. It's in South Africa. It's like 16 hours on a plane ride from Paris. You know, like nobody's going to the data center. Why are you not building it for robots? And like, you know, five lights out people who are going to rack and stack everything. And they're like, well, we always build it this way. Why would we change that?
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We built like hundreds of data centers like this. Why would we change the design just for South Africa? And I think like Theron represents where I'm most interested in intercepting is, could I take some of my relationships and experience and, gather some of these new potential opportunities and help normalize them. So that way we can build a hundred new hydrogen-based data centers.
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I know Yuval's building a gigawatt facility in Texas. You're going to produce a lot of water. The challenge is right now he's going to use kind of gray and blue hydrogen. But he'll probably be the largest customer for some of the new hydrogen plants coming out of the solar and wind energy in Texas, which is awesome.
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The oil and gas industry in Texas can start to produce hydrogen from all the excess renewables that sit. You know, in the western Texas side and like that's awesome because there's going to be a demand driver called a big ass data center who says, give me your hydrogen and I'll pay you for it versus like a government subsidy or some sort of like other thing that would take a long time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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So yeah, that's where I'm kind of swimming, happy to help, really anxious to be able to make a positive impact there. And I think that this moment right now that we're going through with a lot of change and opportunity in the digital infrastructure space represents like a unique spot. blessed to be sitting here. Yeah. Able to do some of that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Yeah. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Yeah. Just, just the energy of the water.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Amen, man.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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You said it very well. I came into working on the internet in a very, I'm going to call it altruistic time, the mid-90s, where it was the free software movement and also just connecting people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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And I was moved, actually, in the early 2000s, I went to United Nations IT, I don't know if it was ITF or something, but it was like the telecom side of the United Nations, and they hold like a meeting at ITF. At NYU or Columbia. And I went there and I learned that that was the only group within the United Nations where every country on earth participates.
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And I was like, so we can talk to each other. And I just love that about the internet as well, which is this kind of like communication and is so powerful and being able to connect people. And I think we're just at one of those moments where we get to say, okay, what was the phrase somebody said? The brightest minds of our generation are working hard every day to make people click on faster.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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And like, that's not very inspiring.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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So how can the brightest minds work towards things that improve and benefit society? I think that's a better challenge. I don't think it's reasonable to say, Hey, you shouldn't use the thing. I'm not a Luddite. Right. So I'm like, instead, like, Hey, how can we do the thing in a way that's better? Right. For, for all of us. So.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Do we run out of tape?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Oh, very cool.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
There we go.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, I'm a big consumer of podcasts, so thank you for doing that. And now I need to know about the plus plus.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Thank you. See you later.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Well, the intensity that you have to have to be in any high performing thing, whether it's like, I'm sure we started off talking about the Jets or something like, man, you know, like any high performing sports or music or, you know, I'm sure other intense engineering organizations or business or sales teams, like it can get, you know, people when they all want the best and they have a lot of A players, you know, all shooting for the top, right?
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Yeah. can be pretty intense sometimes. So there was several uncomfortable moments I had when I was at school, but I, you know, you develop thick skin as an artist because you basically spend most of your time paying people or seeking out ways to get criticism.
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Right. Which is like for people to tear you down and tell you, you don't go to a, a lesson with your teacher for them to tell you about all the things that you're doing. Well, You want them to help you be better, which requires criticism. Right.
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And that's for me as a as a manager was so difficult to transition from being like this music major, you know, criticism oriented, you know, self-criticism, you know, dominated music.
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you know, human to like, that was my relationship always with people who were senior than me to then doing that in business world where it turns out that that was not always motivating to people where you would constantly just forget to tell them a good job, but you know, where you could improve is here. You just go immediately into all the places that it could improve.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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And so I had to constantly remind myself when I, you know, over the years as a manager to like, remember to tell people the things they're doing well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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I had a baton thrown at me. How about that?
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No chairs. No chairs.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Well, it's an interesting topic around criticism, right? What you brought up there around sports, my sons play sports and trying to seek out the right coaches and whatnot who they respect, who help them be better and also can be part of that motivational circle. I'd had a few mentors growing up where I'd had one which was a cheerleader.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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And then I had another who was very much on the criticism angle. And I remember coming back from my first lesson with the criticism guy. And I was just crying. And I was like, this guy sucks and whatever. And my mom said, well, you should go tell him how you feel. And I did. I was like, why did you just tell me all the things that I did bad?
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And he says, well, if I didn't think you could be better, I wouldn't have bothered even telling you that. Right. And that really stuck with me as like, well, criticism is there to help you improve. Now, that has to come from a place of positivity. That can't come from a place of meanness of spirit. Just tearing you down because somehow that makes me feel better.
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So obviously you have to, you know, surround yourself or be able to tell the difference of mentors or leaders who are coaches, you know, who have your interests at heart and actually just want to see you do better. versus those who want to put you down. But I guess that's a maxim for a lot of life, right?
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Man, we got really into the deep stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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What, this gray hair? No. Okay.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Yeah, man. Well, let's see, 21, man. That was just the end of the mask-wearing COVID times, I think, right? I think we're just getting out of our little cages at the time.
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And we're peeking out. We're like, is our shadow gone?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
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Well, I would say I've always been a small company person. I've had the pleasure of building a couple of startups and being part of, I think, the biggest company I was ever at for any substantive period of time was no more than 100 people. Packet at its heyday was about 120.