Tom Preston-Werner with Chris Dixon: Building Companies and Developer Communities

Transcript

[Music] thank you [Music] thanks again for being here so um so obviously you know you're the founder co-founder of GitHub which is a incredibly important and iconic company and so how did the idea for GitHub come about that was that was while I was at Power set and we were using git internally a little bit I was working on an internal project with erlang and a co-worker that I was working with Dave faram introduced

me to get he was like this is the greatest thing like the Linux the Linux kernel uses this it has this really nice branching and merging model and I and I he showed it to me and I was like this is this is pretty awesome it's you know the command line stuff is a little hard to use and like you have to have a an account on a Linux server somewhere and pushing and pulling from repository to repositories a bit awkward um but I definitely saw the potential and so we started using it internally at Power set and and going to the Ruby meetups in San Francisco I just started thinking about how great git was and but nobody was using it and nobody could really harness what was the what was the dominant uh what were we using what were most people using that subversion was

the most prominent open source see some people would be using CVS some people were using perforce yeah um but it was really about trying to trying to make it possible for people to harness the power that I saw and get and being a web developer I was like I I know how to make websites I know how to write you know code that can read from a disk and pull get objects off of disk and get them into Ruby so that they can be exposed in a Ruby on Rails website and I thought that would be a cool project that I could work on that I could then use to share open source projects with people that I knew and just started showing it around the community and so you built this website and then you put it up and did it immediately kind of get popular or did did it take a

long time we we did a we did a thing that we stole from from Google a marketing trick that they did with Gmail where you you had some invites so we gave people five invites and then they could invite they could send invites to their friends and so there was this this kind of artificial scarcity I mean it was real scarcity too because our cert we you know we had some very small server that we were running this thing on and uh and so it was sort of a dual a dual effort to to leverage some of that artificial scarcity that you know that makes people wanna you know they're like I want I want in I want to you know everyone could see it but not everyone could have an account and so we manage the accounts that way early on and I think that was right so

anyone could read anyone anyone could anyone could see it and pull the repositories but you couldn't necessarily sign up right you had to have an invite to sign up got it so that worked I don't know if that works anymore I haven't seen people do too much of that anymore but at the time it was it was quite successful like it created a lot of Buzz um you know people just talking around I think Twitter was quite early then but people were talking about it on Twitter and and people really seem to like it and and it was I don't know just people started signing up for it pushing up random bits of code here and there and it and it immediately I think struck a chord with people as far as the capabilities of Version Control and what you could do once you realized that you

had easy branching and merging offline capabilities it was super super fast and now with a website where you could push up code and collaborate on it um and and make it so that you could use git and have it not be the hardest thing in the world it just it just it grew linearly our user base grew linearly for almost the entire time that I was there it was this was not a a super exponential curve like you see in a lot of startups that you're always like I need that exponential growth curve or I'm doomed for us it was it was quite linear we'd grow by some X thousands of users a month and we we sustained that for for months and months and months and even into the years and those numbers would

grow so it wasn't exactly linear and then you know over time it would get faster but it was mostly it was it was quite linear but the income was also linear which was nice the income just kept coming as well did you have the business model at the beginning for the sort of pay for privacy um free for public it was always that that was a very I think that you were the Pioneers I still think of that as like a one of the cleverest models business models yeah I I'm trying to remember if we pulled that from somewhere else I don't think we did I think it was just it felt right where it would be free for open source because we were open source developers we loved the open source Community Ruby on Rails

open source gets open source we wanted to give back to the open source universe and so we thought hey what if we made this free for open source that would be great for the community and also grade for marketing where if you have all these open source projects on GitHub and especially if we can get some prominent ones on there then people will come to GitHub to use those projects and then you get some viral element of it so that was all win-win on that side and then if you're a company you have money that you're willing to spend to solve problems and so if you want privacy then you pay for privacy right and so it always was that from the very beginning and it just because it just felt right the and today I think about I think of GitHub is not only a great kind of

front-end forget but also really a social network um and sort of a global collaboration tool did you think of it that way in the beginning was that was that like kind of your vision all along or or did that emerge we I think initially it was not as much as it became but we always from the very beginning did namespace the URL by user so it's always github.com username and then project name and I think that's one of the biggest reasons that GitHub was successful like that one decision in order to do that right using user slash project versus project slash so putting the user first as a sort of the entry because what you saw in the other in the other uh hosting code hosting platforms at the time which were sourceforge and

Google code they both had top level namespaces that people would use for projects and especially on sourceforge if you recall you had to get permission to use one of those top level namespaces you had to write to them and say Hey I want to use this project name and then three days later they would write back to you and tell you whether that you could use it or not and so we thought that was ridiculous and we wanted an easier way for you to get code up and any code and on the Google code side they forced you to have a license and they forced you to make certain decisions that that that we thought were unnecessary where it's like why do we make you do anything just put code online just get it up there if you don't want a license don't put a license

I mean you should have a license right it's helpful to have a license but there's no mandate that says that you have to have a license right the default license for anything that you put online is that you maintain copyright but that you know other people can't use it without your permission so I it just we were trying to reduce the barrier to entry as much as possible just strip every possible thing away that we could think of to make it easy for you to get code online and the social elements the social elements came from that then that was that was now the way that you would share your repository so if you go to a conference and someone gives a conference talk about an open source project or anything that they're working on and they want to share something they put a GitHub URL on the screen and then

that gives it this really really beautiful viral element that that also supports the social aspect and but but to be fair GitHub does not have a tremendous number of social tools built in yeah the um it's also interesting the business model as I recall sourceforge was in this kind of death spiral of like more and more banner ads they didn't have a business model right so they I mean like as elegant as yours and so they they it was more it was a little bit like a lot of frankly websites today that are just sort of more and more right there's more and more Craft um to support them and I think they're in sort of a death spiral where the more crough they have the less people that go there and then the more crucial they

have to add and I feel like Source forger's in that you you call much better probably but was in that desk spiral and you guys came along with this really clean experience and you had a and you had like a kind of a pro user business model yeah yeah it wasn't exploited I think that was a that was a really important distinction people could look at GitHub and say there's no ads this interface is designed for developers we put the readme in front of you like when you go to the to the to a GitHub URL it's a file listing and then the readme and that was extremely rare now you see that everywhere but that we were the first really to do that and and when you go to sourceforge it was like some some You Know download page or some marketing stuff like a description but

in a different way that wasn't close to the code and and ads everywhere and and it was it was that but it over the next couple of years after GitHub started to be available sourceforge kept declining more and more rapidly and and just they made a lot of bad decisions and so they they sort of destroyed themselves I think they could have they could have made it better but they made the wrong decisions and Google code Google code was never a priority for Google it always felt like kind of a side project for them yeah but they came at you at GitHub pretty hard at one point right like how did why did that not work was it was it the thing you described that it just never serve as a social network or I mean it wasn't the top priority but it was a real project it was yeah I mean it

was I think it was probably the leading place that you would put and share your code but it was subversion and so they I don't I think I can't remember if they added git support or not but if if they did it took them forever and so it was almost the point was moot by the time it mattered everyone had already switched over to GitHub and then at some point Google code shut down and they're just like just go to GitHub like we don't have time for this what um uh were there sort of big Milestones like for example I don't know like Linux moving over or were there some like you know big projects I assumed there were some you know the open source Community is very strong opinions on things and I assume there's some pushback at some point and maybe at

some point people sort of said hey this is a great solution yeah I think the most there's two projects that really paved the way for many more the first was was many people probably won't even know it was called merb it was a ruby um web framework that that was kind of trying to compete with Ruby on Rails so it was it was much smaller it was much more kind of less code more streamlined and but it was It was kind of popular at the time as an alternative to Ruby on Rails and so they came over quite early on and started using it and and that brought some people and people like oh like that's a real open source project people use it like this is this is legit all right let's come over but then the bigger one and the most important one

was that Ruby on Rails came over and it was only maybe six or eight months after we launched publicly that they moved over so they were they were quite fast movers even though to us it we reached out to them and we're like hey you should consider putting Ruby on Rails on GitHub you know with githubs built with Ruby on Rails and get is way better than subversion the community would love it and initially they were like no we can't like we have to way too much tooling built up around subversion and the whole Community knows how to contribute that way and it's just not feasible so they initially said no and then three or four months later they came to us and they're like all right we're moving so help us do that and we were like yes absolutely we will help you do that

and uh and that was amazing because then the entire it felt like almost overnight the entire Ruby all of Ruby on Rails community and and Ruby on Rails sort of you know drags a lot of Ruby the Ruby the the broader Ruby Community along with it and so almost overnight it was just like shook and everyone in Ruby went from subversion to to GitHub to get and GitHub by Language by language like you got Ruby first and then whatever python or something yeah it was in the early days it was very much sort of language by language or it would be an open source community so maybe a part of a language that would come over maybe some PHP project came over I can't remember the sequence of all the projects that came over but you know one at a time you know someone you know some projects that are

more Cutting Edge would say well if Ruby on Rails can do it like we can do it you know they have good taste they seem to be having a lot of great velocity and the developers like it so that reduces the risk equation for them they can come over and the more that that happens the more that other companies and organizations and projects see it and start to say this is this is less risky if everyone's doing this and a lot of developers know it and really love it then we can we can do it open source projects did it and then companies started seeing that it was possible and the developers in those companies were demanding it they were starting to say like we need to be using get and GitHub for our for our company because how we can't work with subversion now that I've

tasted the sweet nectar of git like the taste of subversion is just the worst and I can't tolerate it anymore in the end so the developers really drove the demand within their own organizations everywhere and what you got besides building besides sort of building a developer you know a product that you yourself wanted as developers you know clearly you did a lot around the product um to make it appealing to developers what did you do on the sort of quote marketing side did you do I mean you know and by that I mean that in a broad sense of like you know talks or direct reach out or like and and I guess you know we're obviously getting to the topic of like you know what are the kind of lessons I guess that you learned on the kind of on the developer sort of

relation side there were really two main things that we did marketing wise and neither of them were traditional and we didn't spend a ton of money on them so the first one was in San Francisco we did what we called at the time drink UPS which I don't think you can really do anymore but this was a different era we did drink up so basically we go every two weeks we go to a bar in San Francisco and we'd message people in San Francisco and we'd say hey the founders are going to be at this bar you should come and we'll buy you drinks and so people from the community would come and join us at the bar and we'd just hang out and have some beers or whatever and and just talk and it was in the early days it was amazing because bringing a

community of people together where it's not huge these you know these things would be 40 50 people sometimes but they were never you know massively big but you'd get a lot of people that had a similar interest they all cared about get they were all like git is great and then they're probably using one of the languages that that has come over to get so they're probably doing Ruby um or JavaScript or PHP or something and so you get 50 developers in the room together and you just have amazing conversations like whoever you talk to they're doing something interesting and they're all Cutting Edge they're all they're all you know because if they're on GitHub they're on The Cutting Edge because we only did this for the first couple of years but it was really I think powerful to to create super fans and we had a we talked

a lot about super fans and how we create super fans and how do we serve super fans what can we do to surprise and Delight our users and turn them into super fans and so that was we did these drink UPS we also went to conferences so we we would pay for anyone in the company to go to conferences every year and and we know you know at first we didn't cap it we're just like if you can get a speaking slot at a conference to talk about whatever you want but we love if you talk about git or GitHub related things then we will pay for you to go to that conference and we will pay for someone to go with you so that you have a buddy and then we would often have those people that would go be ambassadors and

hold their own drink up so we'd often then sponsor one of the After parties or we would just pick a bar in the vicinity of the conference and and not even be a sponsor because many times at these large conferences the sponsorships were super expensive and we were still bootstrapped um and so we would we would kind of hack the model by being like Hey we're going to be at this bar come over and we'll buy you beer if you want to come to this party that happens to be happening at the same time as these other sponsored events so we did a lot of that and though and I went to many of those and they're just it was the same experience but now it was all over the world and so we went to conferences everywhere and we had employees kind of being like

laying down the sea planting the seeds of of GitHub in various locations and then you could see that those seeds would grow into communities of git and GitHub users in all these places around the world all we had to do was go and talk about it in front of some developers and they'd be like why haven't I heard of this before this sounds awesome and they'd start using it and then they'd start asking their friends to come and and collaborate with them on their open source projects and then they'd go to conferences and then they put their GitHub URL on the screen and other people would be like GitHub what's that and then they would go to that URL and they'd be like wow I want this too I want to be able to show everyone my open source code and so that was our sort of plant the

seeds model when you say super fans like this it's interesting because you're able to directly reach out to them so there can't have been that many right so we're talking like thousands not tens of thousands of people is that right yeah in San Francisco so we so in GitHub you can put in your location address so we would look at that and we'd we'd like find all the users that had put in San Francisco or or somewhere nearby or when we went and did a conference somewhere else we'd like look through the list of user locations and then we would send them a message um I'm not sure that that's gdpr compliant things are a little more tricky these days but it was great you know people loved it I mean it was early enough that nobody was angry at us for you know spamming them or reaching out

to them they were always just super excited to hear from a founder of GitHub and be invited to go grab drinks or meet up and talk about the stuff that they loved so I think the things that you can do when you're a small company end up being quite different than the things that you can do when you're a large company and you can you have to take advantage of that it's a it's a superpower that you can that you can take advantage of and you guys were GitHub is often cited as a example of a success story that was a distributed team um I'm just curious like how do you think about that and what have you learned about sort of you know distributed teams over time and how do you we we ended up quite distributed but we did not start that way exactly so in

the beginning everyone was in San Francisco and we but we did not have an office so we had a chat we started on IRC and we had an IRC chat room that we coordinated with and we'd be working from home or we'd often get together at a coffee shop and uh and so the four Founders were all in San Francisco and then we our first non-san Francisco hire was our first tech support person who lived in Colorado and he was in the IRC Channel and just he was he was loving git and GitHub and he'd be just giving people technical support for free just he would like hang out in the channel and and just help people out and so when we it was time to to try to free up some of our time from doing tech support customer support so that we

could concentrate more on the product we reached out to him and said hey do you want to work for us we had never met him never seen his face never heard his voice and we hired him because he was doing the work he was already doing the work so we were like well just we'll just pay you to keep doing this and then do more of it and so he was our first non-san Francisco person and so but it was fine because we were all in chat all the time anyway that was our primary way of communication and then over the next couple of years we did most of our hiring in San Francisco almost exclusively until we were maybe 20 20-ish people then we'd hire maybe one or two that weren't co-located in San Francisco if they had a skill that we really needed and we thought they were

an awesome person and then after that we became more and more distributed but we always had the San Francisco office and San Francisco was always the Hub so it wasn't a fully distributed company like you see today where there is no office we always had the the office well after the first two years moving from working coffee shops we had the office so to fast forward to today I think you know when you were doing GitHub there were there were other kind of very interesting kind of developer focused startups I think there's many the sense I get is there's many more today it's there's a whole kind of broader category I think you're involved like you're I believe you're you're an angel investor in like netlify and a whole bunch of these right and kind of developer startups yes

um now that it's sort of more crowded and maybe you can't just kind of go do a meet-up um and and get you know I guess what how do you think today about how startups would um should reach out and and and uh to developers um I think you can still I think you probably could still do that with the right Community I think if you have a community of people that's that's um cohesive enough that is a small enough like where everyone shares the same interest you can still get people together in person maybe right now in history that's not the best time to do it but we have all these great tools to do things online and things like podcasts I think are now

a really great way to build communities as well where you go and you you ask people who are are experts at whatever your subject is or people in the community that that your user base might want to hear from and you go and ask them to hey come on a podcast and and chat and you could replicate some of that same feeling you could have a a Discord server or something going where your community can talk to each other I think there are still ways to replicate that without necessarily doing it in person um but there is something really beautiful about the in-person thing I don't I don't think I don't know that it wouldn't work assuming that you know we can all actually leave our homes I think in San Francisco and other places that have enough density

it could work for whatever you're doing but if you're not in one of those locations that's obviously much more difficult and then you would want to draw on online communities but it's all about finding the people that care a lot about one topic get them together with like jam stack as an example and it's a relatively small I mean not real but you know thousands let's say not maybe or maybe thousands who who are like the most influential and you think those people tend to be kind of concentrated still around San Francisco and that you can you know you know hopefully pandemic ends and we can have meetups again it's I think it's less concentrated in San Francisco than it has been before and I think it's I think the trend will be to continue that it's

just it's very difficult to to be in San Francisco and do a startup I don't I don't know how people do it the startup that I'm building now is based primarily in Berlin because it's too expensive to hire in San Francisco it's just you can't give people the quality of life that that we want to give them and we you know we we hire people um so my current startup is called chatterbug and it's a language learning application so foreign language learning if you want to learn French or German or Spanish you can check out chatterbug we do all our own curriculum and so we hire curriculum developers we have a team of 12 curriculum developers and you can't if they lived in San Francisco there'd be no way that we could it just would be unfeasible for them to live here they

couldn't do it they the the the the salaries that they would demand would be too high we'd burn through Capital three or three times faster than we do right now and so I think you're seeing less and less concentration of these types of Technologies in San Francisco as San Francisco has has sort of maxed out its ability to to to do this as well as we used to use people used to come here now it's people leave because it's it's almost become unsustainable to live here and there's a lot of work to do in San Francisco I'm still I still live in San Francisco I'm in San Francisco right now I love San Francisco don't get me wrong it's just become a different place than it used to be and the challenges are much bigger but I think that I think the

community is everywhere yeah it'll be interesting like like we see different models like there's people that just say you know I'm going to be based in Berlin right or some other City there's people that um sort of I think kind of what strike maybe has done where they have a they have the headquarters in in you know San Francisco or South San Francisco or some Bay Area and then they have a whole bunch of other offices you know we see other people that just go fully distributed um I think the fully distrib my sense is fully distributed it's my you have to be it's like an advanced level management skill to run that um yeah it's definitely harder in some ways to be distributed we have so we have essentially two two bases we have the founders mostly are here in San Francisco and then everyone

else pretty much is in Berlin we have one or two people also in the Berlin time zone but it's tough because I'm managing a team of product designers right now and I get about two hours of overlap in the morning where I can talk to them and I have kids so I'm taking them to school Under normal circumstances and so it's like that's the time that I get to to do meetings is is two or two or three hours in the morning and then and then the rest of the day like right so I have to my mornings are always packed and and so it's it's challenging you have to be able to work asynchronously where they they're doing work and then they're putting it online and then making asking things or making comments and then you come in and do the same

thing asynchronously afterwards once they're done for the day and so things like GitHub things like slack things like Zoom become really critical um the advantage is that you can hire in wherever you want to hire if you want to have a multi-office set up certainly you can do that and GitHub did that as well so we had San Francisco was the main office once we got to 200 300 people San Francisco is the main office a bunch of sort of satellite remote people on their own but then little one you know Offices here and there where you'd have three or five developers and and more now I mean github's thousands of people so they they do this more a lot of sales people now

um but it's it's a challenge if it's it's always easier when you're co-located when you can just sit across the table and just have a meeting whenever you want and you're in the same time zone that's easier communication wise but again it's harder hiring wise and payroll total payroll cost wise you're you're depending on where you are it gives you advantages building I don't know how I don't know how many San Francisco startups you're finding these days but like it's I don't know how anyone does a startup here anymore it's very hard it's very hard I think a lot of people are trying to be creative about new models but you know um the the the sort of so-called Israeli model is popular I think where you have r d and we have we have a bunch of in

our crypto portfolio a bunch of people that actually Berlin is very popular for example uh as an r d head uh headquarters but then maybe you put kind of business slash marketing you know Etc in San Francisco or something yeah but uh yeah I mean the rents are just maybe that will change if the economy changes but up until recently have just been unsustainable right yeah I'll just add one more thing about uh distributed or remote working one thing I think we did really well at GitHub to solve for this was we always thought of ourselves as as primarily as distributed first remote first so all of the things that we did would always be streams so we had a every Friday we'd do an all hands and when I was CEO I'd get up in front of

the company and I'd give kind of a speech about philosophy or something that was on my mind or that I needed to communicate to the employees and it would always be streamed live to anyone in the world and it would always be recorded and it would go up into a place where we had all of our talks and anyone could could watch them or re-watch them whenever they wanted we'd have a segment beforehand where we'd bring in people that were remote on you know video you I think we had used blue jeans at the time or something we'd bring them in and they'd be on the screen and you could you know talk to them and it'd be like a chance for a remote person to get some face time with the rest of the company and feel like they were more involved as well as all the things on GitHub like

everything that we did at GitHub was on GitHub as much as humanly possible all of the content creation all the legal work everything went through GitHub which is asynchronous really good for asynchronous communication just naturally and and partly because we worked that way that everything goes through that's the coordination point for for most work uh and so if you are going to have multiple offices if you're going to do anything but just be everyone in One office I'd say you need to shift to that way of thinking where you're really serving the remote people that's the first thing you think about when you when you think about the company and how it works you have to serve people because otherwise there's remote people will they'll never be as effective as you need them to be they'll always feel

left out if you don't kind of Go internet first with everything exactly yeah I know like stack Overflow I believe they have a culture where they just leave like Google Hangouts on like all day like it's just a normal thing to do you're sitting in your office coding and you've got you know this sort of this kind of environment we have here um just all sorts of other I mean there's I think there's a lot of my my understanding is a lot of ways to make it work but you have to be very thoughtful about it in a way you don't have to be when everyone's just sits in the same room together yeah and the other the other caveat would be so for chatterbug our All Hands also look like this we don't you know even though there were 36 37 people right now

almost everyone's in Berlin 30 30 of the people are in Berlin we still do all hands this way everyone gets on a computer and the same should be true like when you're doing meetings with people if you've got say five people who are all co-located in one place and you've got a meeting room it's very tempting to be like all right let's you know the five of us go and jump in the in the meeting room together and then we'll conference in you know Susie and and then she'll participate but the fact is that that she won't she'll be the the you know The Spectator hard to get a word in the much better solution when anyone in a call is remote everybody's remote hmm interesting and so you also have a new open source project right Redwood yeah

so just recently a couple of weeks ago I I announced and pushed out the first version of a new open source project called Redwood JS which is a web framework and it's built on top of jamstack technology so jam stack the jam and jam stack stands for JavaScript apis and markup and so Redwood is is a way that I think that we can build full stack web applications and be able to deploy them to the edge in an easier way than really anyone's done before um yeah I just read it my blog on my cdixon.org my personal blog on jamstack and it went from like three second load time to like 200 it's using netlify and

you know markdown and all this nice stuff and it's also really nice because I can just uh edit I'll just give a little marketing promo here for jamstack um I added straight in GitHub right so I just edit the in markdown and GitHub and then it just instantly deploys there's no updating of various blogging software there's no security it's just a static website it's really elegant yeah so this descends kind of from work that I did way back at GitHub on a static site generator called Jekyll Jekyll is is still one of the most popular static site generators although others have have supplanted it stars number of stars wise on GitHub much to my chagrin but they're great I mean they're all these amazing systems so like Gatsby for instance uses react as

the the rendering layer so they're starting to use these these different um Frameworks and libraries for doing rendering and things but what I'm really interested in is the ability to say so I'll just give you a quick primer on how Redwood works so you write your web application front end in react so you have a fully JavaScript react-based front end and then you can deploy that on say netlify and it gets pushed to a CDN so it's fully static so you have a statically deliverable react based front end that goes on the CDN so it can be on the edge and then you have a back end that is a graphql API so it's an implementation of

a graphql API and you can deploy that onto AWS Lambda which you could also put those nodes distributed around the world and have your business Logic on the edge so the front end in a browser you load up a redwood site in your browser the browser requests the react client you download the react client or the parts of it that you need initially then you would make requests to the graphql API via graphql obviously the run your business logic and then give you the response and then the third part is the database and so right now the database is kind of the least well defined part and Redwood is still Alpha like pretty pretty heavy Alpha so we're still figuring these things out but once we get Incorporated something like faunadev which is a

distributed database it you could put also your your data on the edge and now your Lambda functions would talk to fauna for instance or a distributed relational database and we have really good relational support right now uh and now you could have all of your web application fully uh deployed to the edge and so that's that's kind of the architecture that we're going for uh and it's people are a lot of people are very interested in what we're doing but it's still super early that's awesome so we have a bunch of uh questions here from the um students uh from Francesco uh once you have the code it must be tempting to build a whole array of services around that code while GitHub is very pluggable it does abstain from providing infrastructure for

deployments for example how do you think about what to build versus not build so while I was there and I haven't been there for a number of years now while I was there we want it to be fairly agnostic because we wanted the ecosystem to sort of flourish and build tools so it was like GitHub could be the core of developer collaboration but all of the things that people want to do around that collaboration we want people building as much as they can we want as many tools as possible for people to plug on top of GitHub to make their development experience better and so we thought by taking a a more agnostic a more language agnostic stance

on that and even even some of the tooling I mean GitHub does have at the time you know it did have a number of things like issues so there's a simple bug tracker that you could have um but that felt sort of uh a thing that you would want to integrate very closely but for things like continuous integration we're like let let people build different kinds of solutions we don't want to build one ourselves and then discourage people from building their own because what if we get it wrong what if we don't do it what if our imaginations are not as great as the sum total of our community when it comes to building these things the idea being that then eventually maybe years down the road it would be

interesting to start bundling some of those things in once the territory had been explored and you'll see this in Technologies a lot this sort of cycle from debundling and and pulling everything apart having all the pieces separated to then integrating and taking a bunch of tools and pulling them all back together so you can see this happen at Apple all the time where for many years now they've been on an integration run where they want full control over their Hardware so they they now make their own chips and they make their own RAM and they make their own you know eventually they'll probably make their own screens they want to they want to have control over as much as possible because the value is in the very slick integration

of all of the pieces that go into something like a phone but before that it was more interesting to have a lot of choices a lot of plugable modularizable things you look at servers at the world of of servers or even even in looking at computers it's like do you want to go out and have a million pieces of a PC that you can put together and build or do you want one slick computer I guess that is kind of the PC versus Mac that's that that's that division right which one do you want you can get a better experience when you control everything and everything is beautiful and perfect and works together and so this is a this is a question for Redwood as well you see this all over the place so Redwood in the JavaScript

world right now if you write any JavaScript you probably know this in the JavaScript world there's a million choices for everything and nothing is together right we want to create an application in the JavaScript world with react well you're not only choosing react you're choosing react plus about 50 other technologies that you're gonna then try to integrate together to create one application and each of those things there's like 50 choices for each one of the how do you do CSS how do you do State Management how do you do what's your API look like what you know all of these different layers have choices and Redwood tries to to do the integration work to say enough has done been done in the exploration phase now what people crave is a fully integrated

experience that makes everything super easy and so so the same was true at GitHub it was let the community build as many choices as possible and then eventually we can start integrating and now you start seeing GitHub to do some of that integration work with things like GitHub actions there's still there's still it's it's very choosy in what it's pulling in and there's still a big ecosystem on top of it that that you can hook into and plug in and GitHub takes great advantage of that um so I think it really depends on the context and what what people are craving are people craving integration are they craving debundling and having choice great another question from Arya um uh most for-profit companies rely heavily

on open source code how are you thinking about the future of Open Source incentives and economics do you have thoughts on how to do sustainable funding for open source GitHub donations is an interesting take on funding public goods if you looked at ideas like quadratic funding just like more broadly like what's yeah I guess more broadly like you know future open source how do you fund it I'll just add to the question there's all these interesting things going on now where the the cloud platforms are kind of sucking a lot of the value of the open source uh and maybe not always giving it back and and so I don't know so you know editorializing I'll let you take from there yeah open source I think is still is still is probably more vibrant than it's ever been so I don't think open source is in any danger of

collapsing or of there being like a open source Apocalypse of some sort I think that's because the this Prime element of Open Source still holds true and that's that people love writing code and and helping other people accomplish things and are very happy to put open source into the world with no with no idea that they'll they'll get some great Advantage out of it I think that's still true and I think that's still a really important part of Open Source so I don't think it's like super broken I think that what about like you know but as you know a lot of these things are helped by corporate like you know Intel contributes to Linux and whatever and elastic have these sort of

corresponding for-profit companies like so but so most open source still starts with that model of hey I had an idea and I hacked it up and I put it you know out there and people started liking it now there's another phase of Open Source that's exactly what you're talking about which is open source that gets popular enough that people want to monetize it and and work on it more and so you'll see things like Gatsby for instance which I mentioned before they started as an open source uh static site generator and and then became a company or elastic search the same deal or nginx all of these things started as open source got popular and then was like oh there's opportunity here let's turn into a

company now this company support the open source which I think is a beautiful that's also a beautiful model where you have companies working on open source and at GitHub we did the same thing we hired several people to work full-time on git itself which was great because a we get to give back to this project that is the reason that we got to exist and so we can we can be good citizens of the world of get that way and two it allowed us to have more control over the future of what git became because GitHub had demands of git we there were certain things that we needed git to do that literally nobody else in the world needed because of our scale and so nobody was going to work on those parts of git unless we worked on them so we'd work on them and then we would

contribute them back to the git project itself so either a company can be monetizing an open source project and then paying you know they pay for its development and also take contributions or you can have a company that uses something that they didn't create and then hire people to work on it full time which I think is one of the most underutilized versions of people working on open source I wish companies did a lot more of that that they would say have a critical technology that they use and they would hire several people one or one or several people or at least give some people time to work on those open source projects and many companies do a lot of people do give back to these open source projects that they use but I think it could be an

order or several orders of magnitude more of that style and and in to me that's that's working I think there are other really creative models for people to to work on projects through crowdfunding and other things there's now some foundations that are collecting and distributing money to you know like you as a company can pay into the this Collective I can't remember the name of the specific one but into this Collective and then they will distribute the funds to these various projects depending on what you're using so you just give money to one party and then they can handle the distribution because the thing is for companies to give money directly to projects is really hard like that division between a company and an

individual especially a large Company is almost unsurpassable like how do you how do you do that what do you pay for and this is where support models can be really valuable too like if you want to go down that route professionally and you have an open source project that you think is getting popular one way that you could do it is to offer support and say hey big companies I will provide you support if you give me money and the companies it's a lot easier for companies to pay for that than it is for them to just be like we like your project here's 10 grand for nothing right they need to buy something makes sense um so uh from Sarah and Danny uh love how you prioritize community and super fans of GitHub how are you carrying

Lessons Learned there over to your current Ventures what are the things you would do to create super fans and quote surprise and Delight super fans so you could maybe maybe hear not just you know you have feel free to talk about any startup you're involved with or cool things you're seeing today or yeah I think it's it's about scale this is something the program has talked about a lot in the past but doing things that that don't scale at first and I touched on it before with things like the drink UPS or whatever so one thing that we've always done at a chatter that we did at GitHub and now we're doing it chatterbug and I'm even doing it with redwood is is sending physical things to early users so with GitHub we sent stickers with redwood I'm also sending stickers

so when I when I launched Redwood on that same day I was like I'm just gonna I'm just gonna send stickers like some Redwood stickers which look like the stickers as cool as the octa-cat well it's it's just the logo for now we'll get there it's it's you know it's give me time any time um but I said I'll send stickers literally anywhere in the world I don't care where you live anywhere in the world I'll send stickers to you for free and that and there's just a there's just a URL that you can go to that I can send people and they can get stickers and it's not that expensive I've sent a thousand stickers and it's cost me 300 400 so I mean it's not super cheap but it's those people are gonna put those stickers on a laptop they're and I

always send five so once they're allowed out of their houses they'll give them to their friends who will then put them on their laptops and it's this really simple and cheap way to get your brand more exposure uh through people that love what you're doing and they're and if they're willing to put your sticker on their laptop then they're willing to endorse what you're doing and and to your friend to their friends and and kind of vouch for you so this touches on branding which is one of my favorite things in the world I love a lot of The Branding the work that we did at GitHub we have the OCTA cat we really leveraged it but one thing I think that people don't understand as much as they should about branding is that it's never about you and your company it's always

about what you are providing for your customer so there's a there's a woman Kathy Sierra Kathy with a k who I encourage you to look up and read some of the blog posts that she did they're very they're quite old now um but they're they're Timeless and one of her big things is when it comes to creating product it's not about being cool for the sake of being cool whatever it's always about how can you help your customers kick ass it's how she puts it help your customers kick ass because when your customers succeed then you succeed but you succeed in a much better way than if you're just like hey look at how awesome I am look at look at me look at me this is great

right and you just try to get people's attention that way and say let me help you be better let me help you be more awesome then that is a much better thing to do and that that is the reason that people would put a sticker on a laptop it has nothing to do with your company as such it has to do with what they believe they are communicating to others with that sticker or with that shirt or with that whatever it is when someone wears a GitHub shirt it's a signal to other developers to say I care about open source I kind of like it to be fun and I'm I'm just I love coding I love this can I love being part of the community

um and they're sharing it's a shortcut for communicating values so if people share the same values as GitHub or chatterbug or Redwood Js then they can communicate those in a shorthand way by putting their brand your branding The Branding of the company on something that they own whether it's their body or laptop and so it's always about that communication of values so for your own companies I encourage you to think that way about branding like what are your values because if you have no discernible values then nobody will care about your brand because it's not communicating anything there's nothing to believe in there there's nothing to there's nothing to to there's no reason for them to ever put it because it's not a shortcut for

anything right so you have to believe in something and you have to communicate that belief very strongly and then The Branding kind of takes care of itself that makes sense um well it's awesome Tom thank you so much for running out of time now but um but thank you so much for taking the time it was great absolutely happy to do it and um and stay uh stay safe and and uh hopefully you'll get some some good uh coding and other things done during this time I try but we have a seven-year-old a four-year-old and a one-year-old and that makes it a little bit hard to get a lot of coding done awesome well thank you so much time all right thank you

[Music] thank you