SPEAKER_00: Season 2 of The Next Unicorns is brought to you by Dell for Entrepreneurs. It's Small Business Month at Dell. Save up to 50% off select products and take an extra 5% off by going to launch.co.dell. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Get $50 off your first job post at linkedin.com.unicorn. And Zendesk. Listen to Zendesk's new podcast, Sit Down, Start Up, to hear conversations with Zendesk's leaders and the founders, CEOs, and makers on how to start up, even when the world goes topsy-turvy. Download and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. My name is Jason Calacanis. I'm an angel investor. Entrepreneur, writer, blogger. I guess I used to be called a blogger

SPEAKER_05: here in the Silicon Valley. Boy, is it strange. It's August. It's 2020. We're in, I guess I'm in day 140 or 150 of being sheltered in place. I've done a little bit of the distance thing. You know, went out to get ice cream with the girls on one of these closed main streets here. And yeah, I've been losing my mind.

SPEAKER_06: I'll be totally honest with you. You guys know I'm a social creature. I am not designed for this. And I find myself having great sympathy now for people who maybe are in solitary confinement or in prison. And I realized what a torture it is. And to compare what we're going through in this very mild way

SPEAKER_02: to what somebody in a prison goes through, I know is a ridiculous comparison, except for the fact

SPEAKER_06: that I very acutely feel lonely and I've never felt sad or depressed in my life. I'm going to be honest with the audience here. I've been kind of feeling depressed about the situation. And the thing that saves me, and I'm being really honest here with you, the audience, because you've been with me for 11 years, is when I get to do this podcast. Because I get the incredible privilege of talking to the world's smartest, most driven, creative people, the entrepreneurs out there, the investors, who really want to see the world move forward. And I'm very excited about today as a guest because he saw an opportunity and he took it. And he fits the model of what creates giant companies. And I get asked a lot after, you know, I've only been an investor for a decade. Before that, I was just a writer and a journalist and an entrepreneur. But people ask me, like, when a company gets to that kind of like really scale moment, let's say unicorn status, which is just a number, it's an arbitrary number, a billion dollar valuation. But what it basically means

SPEAKER_02: is a very important company, an important company that could change the world. And we have challenged ourselves to say, hey, what are the next unicorns? Now, there's a very easy way to do that. You could just pick companies that are in a certain valuation range. But that's not what we did here. And it's not what we did for the last series. What we're doing here is we're looking at for companies that we think are going to be world changing companies. So the first episode, we had Daphne Kohler on. She's from InCitro. And if you haven't listened to that episode, it's amazing. She's using big data,

SPEAKER_06: you know, and machine learning to try to figure out what drugs we should work on next. Now, if that works, oh, my Lord, we could figure out and in drug discovery, get to solutions in half the speed, maybe 10% of the speed eventually. Think about what that would do for humanity. Think what that would do for the edge cases. We could go after diseases that impact 1,000 people, 100 people, a million people, as opposed to, you know, the big ones that go, you know, for tens of millions of people. Then we had Nikki Peckett on. Now, she's from Homebound. You remember that one? That was our second Sunicorn in this next Unicorn series. We're going to do 10 of them. And she's trying to figure out, hey, how do we build more housing? That's an important issue, right? We have a housing shortage and we have, and then we had Gary

SPEAKER_02: from Roofstock on who's trying to figure out ways. Again, another real estate play. And real estate's a very interesting one because it's hard. Now, what does it take to build one of these giant companies?

SPEAKER_06: We're in our fourth episode here. And I gave it some thought. And really, if you're looking for signaling, an obvious one, this is the first one,

SPEAKER_02: for a company to really get giant and possibly become a public company that, you know, becomes worth tens of billions of dollars eventually, they need to have raised from the best investors in the world,

SPEAKER_05: in the private world. That's Sequoia, my boy Ruloff over there, Mr. Doug Leone, Mr. Michael Moritz, you know, Alfred Lynn. I mean, there's a tremendous group over there. Benchmark, Peter Fenton,

SPEAKER_06: my pal Bill Gurley, maybe Bond, a new firm, Mary Meeker, Index Ventures, you know, like, you know, Danny Reimer. These are the top firms in the world.

SPEAKER_02: Well, my guest today has got all of those. So that's like a pretty incredible signal. Like, these people have their choice, their pick of the litter, as it were. They need to have worked for some of the best companies. That is another signal. Now, sometimes you come around to the Gates, Bill Gates, you know, Zuckerberg, they drop out of college and they start the thing. But more often than not, they've worked at a Google, maybe they worked at a Square, like our current guest today has done. And then, they're in an exploding market. And there is no bigger exploding market than data. At its core,

SPEAKER_06: this giant revolution we're seeing, whether it's in biotech, whether it's in social media, whether it's on on demand, in e-commerce, data is just at the core of everything.

SPEAKER_02: That's what our guest is working in. Consumer Lock-In, that's kind of important, right? You need to have customers to stick around. Well, databases, people change them in paradigms, essentially. It's a paradigm shifting type technology. When you lock into a database structure, it's going to be a decade long, two decade long, maybe three or four decade long process, which is why a company like Oracle,

SPEAKER_06: which has massive competition now, is still crushing it because they have people who've been customers for 30 or 40 years. And then, finally, you need to, and this is a very subtle one, you need to have a passion as a founder for something that other people, a large amount of other people, most people,

SPEAKER_19: really don't care about. That you, you have to be such a nerd about the thing you're building that you wake up for those two decades and on the second decade, you're still passionate about it, right? That's our guest as well. Now, for me, there's a personal one I like,

SPEAKER_06: which is clever branding. I love clever branding. I mean, you know me, buy domain names inside.com launch, you know, com.com, we invested in robinhood.com.

SPEAKER_02: We like those great domain names in the world. Uber.com, great domain name. Well, today's guest, Spencer Kimball, is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. You heard my long introduction. Welcome to, for the first time, this week in startups. Great to have you on the program. How are you doing in this pandemic, in quarantine?

SPEAKER_23: How are you surviving? How's your mental health? I gave my overview that I'm losing my mind. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_25: Well, you know, thank you, by the way, for that amazing introduction. I think I have to hire you

SPEAKER_27: if you ever need a job in investor relations. Yes.

SPEAKER_28: Hi, I'm IR for Robinhood.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, actually, you know what? I, I, I totally understand where you're coming from in terms of the isolation. I think, you know, I felt some of that for sure, especially earlier on. I have also, you know,

SPEAKER_31: kind of benefited from the pandemic and that's, that's a huge privilege and I don't take it for granted. And that benefit, I think, is because my life, which was previously a headlong rush, has slowed down so that I've been able to, you know, really enjoy aspects of it, like very deep friendships of the people that are kind of in my COVID pod where previously I'd see them, you know,

SPEAKER_29: infrequently because 30% of my time honestly was traveling every week and that, that's a pretty.

SPEAKER_35: It's so weird to recapture all that, right?

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, it's like taking things back to maybe a, an earlier time in my life or a simpler time in, in, in, in sort of civilizational history and that's allowed a lot of self-reflection which I hadn't had the time for and I think

SPEAKER_36: I've come away a, you know, more thoughtful person than when the pandemic started.

SPEAKER_37: How are you thinking about haircuts? You look great, by the way. The beard is very strong. The haircut looks great. How are you thinking about hair maintenance

SPEAKER_05: right now? Let's talk about the beauty. Have you gotten a haircut in quarantine? You look like you trimmed the sides.

SPEAKER_40: You know, I have gotten, I've gotten two haircuts actually because Whoa,

SPEAKER_41: whoa, whoa. Take it easy there, Spencer. Outdoors, I hope. Or self-administered.

SPEAKER_42: No, it was outdoors although a lot of, a lot of people at Cockroach Labs did self-administered ones

SPEAKER_31: which were pretty funny but I think these days you can get, you can get a haircut in New York City at the actual salon now. You know, it's obviously people are masked up.

SPEAKER_45: May I ask, as a, as a, as somebody who was born and raised and bred in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, lived in West,

SPEAKER_05: West, West Chelsea on the West Side Highway that was my New York hoods. Whereabout in New York are you?

SPEAKER_31: I actually live in Noho for the last 15 years.

SPEAKER_50: Noho is what? That's north of Soho.

SPEAKER_31: North of Houston, yeah. So, so south of Houston and it's right between Greenwich Village and the East Village.

SPEAKER_05: Got it. Yeah, I know where you are. I was trying to think there, there used to be an Algerian restaurant there that we used to go to at four in the morning that was incredible when I was a kid

SPEAKER_54: but I doubt it's still there. What's the vibe like

SPEAKER_05: in New York by the way?

SPEAKER_31: I'm curious. I think it's improved dramatically. I mean, there was some dark days in New York. Yeah. You know, in March and April,

SPEAKER_29: it was incredible. You could go right down Broadway in the middle of the day and there wouldn't be a car on it which is pretty unusual for New York City and nowadays though, especially, you know, with the summer and the case count remaining relatively low, there's good energy in New York. There's not a lot of tourists so it's all local. That's always nice. Yeah, the restaurants have all spilled out onto the streets. They're building all these beautiful seating areas and things. Yeah, it's actually the way it should be. Permanent. Shut down St. Mark's place. Yeah, there's a lot of talk about that. You know, why shouldn't this be the way New York is? Why do we have to have so many automobiles in the city? Makes no sense. so much parking. Look at,

David Friedberg: look at, I mean, have you been on the Santa Monica Promenade?

SPEAKER_29: Yes.

David Friedberg: Like the Santa Monica Promenade, I looked it up and there are historical pictures of it with angle in parking

SPEAKER_02: and there was a big debate like all those vendors were going to lose business because the car, you know, the two parking spots in front of them were going to be gone and it's like, no, it's going to become a destination. Yeah. Well, I'm glad everybody's safe there. My parents are there. My brothers are there. I got a lot, all my family's there and it's just nice to see the turnaround and it says there's definitely something going on. Listen, I'm not an expert here but we've definitely turned a corner. They're doing massive testing there, huh?

SPEAKER_68: Yeah, a lot of testing and, you know, people I think are pretty good about the mask wearing which obviously helps and they, I think,

SPEAKER_31: made a fateful decision not to go back to indoor dining. So smart. Yeah, it's kept the case count low because outdoor I think.

SPEAKER_05: Subways, people taking them or not? Because I would not get on the subway.

SPEAKER_31: I rolled out my bicycle which is usually in storage between Burning Man every year and it's like an electric bike. I have like a little seat for my daughter on it. Yeah, me too, me too. I got the electric.

SPEAKER_71: Oh, you brought your kid, did you bring your kid to Burning Man yet?

SPEAKER_72: No, not yet. She's only three so one day. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_73: My 10-year-old wants to go now and there's a group of, you know,

SPEAKER_02: folks who bring their kids for the first two or three days, you know,

SPEAKER_74: before it gets too crowded and then, you know, they pop out. All right, listen, the way I wanted to structure the interview today because you've done so much in your careers. I wanted to start out in part one and talk about databases

SPEAKER_02: and how they've grown over the years and even touch maybe a little bit on open source and the impact that has had vis-a-vis versus Oracle and then building

SPEAKER_74: a company off of open source and I want to get into starting and running a company and then as we wrap up talk about funding which you've done just a tremendous job on. There's a couple tiny things I want to talk about around privacy and big data so that's a structure for everybody listening here of how we're going to run the podcast. If you're using an advanced podcast player like Apple's or Overcast and you swipe left on Overcast you can see the chapters so if you wanted to jump around you could do that and we're going to get through a big long list here with one of the smart folks in the industry who's worked out

SPEAKER_37: like I said Google and Square and raised from Sequoia, Bond just everybody. All right, stick with us we'll be right back.

Chamath Palihapitiya: All right, it is small business month at Dell and that means you can save up to 50% off all Dell products. Here's my Dell Chromebook with all the plugs I love. I got my USB-C I got my SD card I got a SIM card I got an HDMI cable and I even got an Ethernet cable. My studio is geared up with Dell equipment because Dell equipment is amazing. If you go to launch.co slash Dell you're going to get an extra 5% off and more information about the Dell for Entrepreneurs program. And they're introducing their new 15 inch Latitude 9510. A lot of you have been talking about this it's the world's smallest, lightest and most intelligent 15 inch business PC. And this new Latitude includes the Dell Optimizer which is a built-in AI that's going to help you with your audio settings and your battery optimization and it adjusts to the way you work wherever you are. And it's also their longest lasting PC with up to I mean this is getting ridiculous 34 hours of battery life. The Dell for Entrepreneurs program is really unique in the entire industry and they are going to help you level up all of your tech hardware. It was created to support founders by providing resources and tools. Those include free IT consulting because you probably don't have an IT person on staff. It's probably you the CEO or the founder. And you get rewards like 6% cash back on all Dell products. They've also got Dell Finance and a bunch of other stuff there. It is Small Business Month at Dell and that means you can save up to 50% off all Dell products. Check out launch.co slash Dell for an extra 5% off right now. That's the best deal you can get. launch.co slash Dell for an extra 5% off and more information about the Dell for Entrepreneurs program. Thank you to Dell for making great products. I have been buying them for decades.

SPEAKER_82: Let's get back to this amazing program.

SPEAKER_02: All right. Spencer Kimball is here. He is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. Now you've been working in databases for a bit. I know you were at Google during the formative years when I was running AdWords on my blogs and Gadget and Autoblog. We were the first case study and you worked on the database team I believe on the AdSense or the AdWords product side?

SPEAKER_31: AdWords. Yeah, actually when it was just getting started and really having incredible growth I was tasked you know partly with you know a group of other people solving some of the problems they were having with their early choice for databases.

SPEAKER_86: And what was the early choice there? Were they using MySQL or something?

SPEAKER_31: They were. They were using MySQL and they'd started off of course with just one instance and then as typically happens when you hit huge scaling challenges you do what's called sharding at least that's what Google called it and I think that's a pretty common term in the industry but what that means is that you might start with you know say 10,000 customers and they'll fit in your first instance of the database and then you say wow we're kind of right at capacity we need to add another 10,000 customers because it's growing so fast so we'll get two databases and we'll start to put the you know 10,000 ones 10,000 two so on up to 20,000 on that next database and then you get to the next one you add another shard and so forth but the problem is that you know that sounds fine and it actually is a pretty good linear way to scale up but it creates complexity so the application doesn't just talk to one database anymore now it's talking to let's call it you know two or four eight or 16 or 32 and I went through all of those sort of scale changes oh my lord and each time there was like additional complexity like there were things that just would really break and you had to fundamentally solve the problem by coming up

SPEAKER_90: with a new piece of technology that you can fit in there that would you know help ameliorate the situation

SPEAKER_02: and I think it's important for the audience especially founders to understand the evolution of technology but before that you weren't you didn't need to have strong response time from a database because in a commercial database people would go to the finance office and say hey I need this report and they'd say when you need to buy it's Friday and then we'd run report and if it took an hour if it took five minutes it didn't matter you just got the report together and you handed it to somebody but when you're dealing with something like customers who are buying ads they need to have a dashboard and back in those days the dashboard would take a minute to load or whatever 30 seconds to load but this is a distinct challenge in a real-time environment when you're displaying ads when you're trying to do dynamic things and when you've sharted shout out Along Came Polly when you've sharted

SPEAKER_49: your database it's sharted but you guys can look up the reference if you don't know what it is great

SPEAKER_92: you've seen Along Came Polly

SPEAKER_49: Rain Dance rest in peace Philip Seymour Hoffmorton who used to work out at my gym Chelsea Piers by the way and he literally looked like the guy from Along Came Polly because he was a large guy who wore clothes that were too tight and he'd just be on the elliptical sweating like he he was not playing a part

SPEAKER_02: he was literally playing the guy from that film but just you know in my I was never a database manager did a little IT back in the day but am I correct in that the issue becomes when you shard databases now you've got multiple copies of data now if I want to query that data that data may exist across multiple databases it has to be found as well and back in that day the developers who are writing the code now they used to point to one database now they're

SPEAKER_96: pointing to two but oh wait did we update that edge case code for that special thing and now it's pointing at 32

SPEAKER_97: that problem

SPEAKER_19: was basically you couldn't even throw hardware at it which is what people tried to do right they tried to throw hardware at it they tried to throw high speed fiber connections at it they tried to throw memory at it caching none of that worked because it just got too big too quick correct

SPEAKER_31: yeah I think that's a pretty good summary of it and there's there's all of those things you mentioned they help but when your thing is growing exponentially you can't just help you have to you know at some point get back to you know fundamentals and redesign and really plan for that kind

SPEAKER_103: of scale

SPEAKER_102: what was that

SPEAKER_19: fundamental change that happened in databases around that time because you also remember dynamic sites friend feed this twitter thing

SPEAKER_100: other things just constantly having their databases crash the servers obviously myspace was a complete disaster the reason it died was really because of their database structures and choices what was the big breakthrough from mysql to non-structured databases etc

SPEAKER_31: yeah that's a really great question and to kind of to your earlier point about how much friction there is once you've already adopted a database adwords stayed on that mysql path they were at 32 shards or so by the time I left the project and every morning there was a war room for like months where we're putting out the fires and things but it kind of got a bit stable there and I moved on to some other things but they didn't retire that system for 10 years and by then by around 2012 2013 14 it was already a thousand shards so they really probably the total amount of engineering time was probably it was probably measurable in the centuries that went into just wrangling that database from one shard to a thousand shards but that became an anti-pattern at Google so like obviously you start on a database you're stuck on it so AdWords was on that thing there were like points along that journey where they tried to move it to other emerging database technologies and it was always nope this isn't ready yet it's not ready we're so invested in the MySQL schemas and the requirements that a relational database you know it was it was fairly outlawed I believe just because of the immense struggle that engineering had to do to make that paradigm work and they instead decided and this was kind of like some of the brightest minds at Google Jeff Dean and Sanjay Gamowat they created what was called Bigtable Bigtable launched the NoSQL movement so things like MongoDB and Cassandra are and HBase are examples of things that were inspired by Google's efforts and they had a paper in 2004 about Bigtable and Bigtable was amazing what it did is it said okay we're going to redesign databases so these things scale automatically and they scale horizontally so it's not just about getting bigger machines which you know you can only go up so far before you're kind of at the supercomputer can't really get any bigger and your cost curve is super linear so you're paying more every time you're just adding the same amount of additional capacity so it's got a low ceiling and a super linear cost structure that's the old way of doing things that's sort of the Oracle way Bigtable was like okay we're going to use commodity hardware in these data centers you put another machine in you get that much additional capacity and the system itself will manage the growth it will rebalance things a little reach equilibrium between all of the nodes you have but in order to do this they said hey you know SQL is a decades old technology it's extremely evolved it's got a huge footprint we're not going to try to build SQL we're actually going to say they didn't call it no SQL originally but they're going to say okay we're going to make this a simpler API it doesn't do as much it's not going to have scalable and they did and

SPEAKER_107: when they first started talking about that this becomes a paradigm shift

SPEAKER_109: because you can't do the SQL queries that everybody's used to right forming SQL

SPEAKER_02: queries there's some whole business division there are some you know data jockeys who spend their entire lives you know making SQL queries and figuring things out and they're like wait a second that's going away my entire career is based on that how does a paradigm shift like no SQL you know inside of an organization even a progressive one like that what's the religious war that breaks out between the paradigms because I only died when the people who believed in them die so paradigms don't die people do so

SPEAKER_43: obviously

SPEAKER_49: the people who were in my SQL camp didn't die at Google but this religious war broke out correct

SPEAKER_31: so Google was a pretty interesting anomaly in the sense that you know the four years before I got there they were rarely using any kind of established database technology they built everything from scratch because they were trying to index the entire web and that was their original use case but they started adding use cases and AdWords was an obvious one where you actually had financial ledgers right you were dealing with all these very discrete bits of normalized data and relational database made sense so the people that got on that project were the first people to use a relational database MySQL at Google cried out for relational databases so there wasn't a culture of using relational databases that was going to be at loggerheads with this new idea of NoSQL instead it was like we need scale as the

SPEAKER_29: schema management we

SPEAKER_31: already have 500 tables that are all we're doing these complex queries between them this isn't going to work you you guys have to be you're smoking something right this isn't going to work so it was kind of like interestingly back to the drawing board pretty quickly for the big table team and they created something

SPEAKER_115: called megastore two years later

SPEAKER_95: when we get back from this quick

SPEAKER_02: big paradigm shift and the venture capital community let's face it when they looked at this they said wait a second you're not going to hire a bunch of sales executives to take people to the Knicks games and to the Warriors games and out for stake and golf you're going to try to sell to some nerd database people and build it

SPEAKER_19: start up all

Chamath Palihapitiya: right I want to give you $50 right now off from LinkedIn jobs which is the greatest place for you to find talent I have found so many members of that uses AI to optimize travel time for people's work schedule makes total sense great idea well he recently hired a machine learning engineer who started this July in 2020 and this person has hit the ground running and has changed everything for the company but here is the actual brass tax 110 relevant applications came in in four days now just let's pause for a second that's over 25 qualified applications a day for Aaron and his company MAI from LinkedIn jobs because of the $50 I gave them you are going to be able to hire great people because you all know LinkedIn has over 690 million members worldwide and who knows you might be working from home a lot you might be open to business is ready to make that next grade higher when you want to get that machine learning engineer or even an SDR or maybe your director of growth all of those people are sitting there waiting for you on LinkedIn and if

SPEAKER_50: it are second time we're doing this the next unicorns

SPEAKER_74: and we've really challenged ourselves to find companies that you our general audience may or may not have heard of probably haven't heard of a lot of these companies but here in the venture community when you start seeing two or three really notable investors piling on these are

SPEAKER_02: thanks to our partners who support it gives us the ability to do this research and find these great companies to share them with you and the lessons they've learned our guest

SPEAKER_74: new database

SPEAKER_02: paradigms come out everybody starts moving to them it becomes clear that startups don't like to pay for software because they're under resourced so you get all these tiny startups engaging in this technology correct that was the thing that happened in the what the 2003

SPEAKER_09: to 2010 time period in databases not

SPEAKER_31: just the startups but

SPEAKER_90: even less so than the startups which

SPEAKER_09: is pretty crazy when you think about it I'm not sure when when did you start in technology when was your first job in tech year wise 90s

SPEAKER_127: 1993 perfect

SPEAKER_74: same as me I graduated Fordham University 1993 after five years at school at night and

SPEAKER_02: in 93 you remember you know if you went into a company the way software was sold was to the CTO or the CIO and then they would come down from on high and say we are locked into Microsoft Oracle whatever it happened to be and here you go you going to training and that was it developers had no power but all these rabble

SPEAKER_74: rousing

SPEAKER_19: open source folks they started to apply to startups they started to play with it on the back end but that still required buy-in from big companies which didn't come till later but a company like Google I think was pretty big on this how do big companies like Google look at the open source nature of this in terms of the competitive advantage because we used to look in technology as open as how does Google decide or let's just leave them out of there since you work there I don't want you to break any NDAs but how do the big companies decide when to deploy and invest in open source and when to keep it under the hood and how do they maintain that balance of hey we found a serious advantage here for our business versus hey let's give this to our competitors

SPEAKER_130: so you're talking about big

SPEAKER_31: companies that are actually open sourcing their own software correct as opposed to using open source software out there it's pretty obvious why they use it right it's just it's a much faster way to adopt new technology used to be as you say like top down selling you'd have to go through procurement if you wanted to use something you get printed manuals there's no community online so open source just made it a much easier form of consumption for developers and when you're talking about a big company open sourcing their own stuff I think the realization and it's been proven out time and time again is that the advantage you get from software is difficult to maintain in this day and age because if you're not open source someone else is going to come along fast follow you and create something open source that's going to knock the bottom out of your profit structure that you have around your closed source product offering whatever it is you see this happen essentially in all areas of

SPEAKER_90: those guys

SPEAKER_02: it was a very interesting moment I just remember these incredible religious you know debates and

SPEAKER_74: in the aughts where like there was really a lot of FUD fear uncertainty and doubts you know by

SPEAKER_02: the incumbents who were like don't trust your business to this and then it was like but that's the fastest growing business in the world and they do so they kind of but in summary the benefit of keeping it close to the vest is not is so small when compared to the benefit of it being out there publicly that inevitably if you try to do it privately somebody is going to realize hey this needs

SPEAKER_74: to way so you might as

SPEAKER_133: well cross the chasm yourself and just deal with you know giving up that little minor advantage for the bigger protection

SPEAKER_31: I think the huge learning from at least my whole career in the past 20 years has just been that if you have a platform that has committed users you have you will be able to monetize it one way or the other and you are talking about an audience that could be orders of magnitude larger with open source than with the closed source software because it's so easy to adopt and there's just so little friction from the perspective of a developer developers are cheap and they're lazy and they want to get things done as changes and that fosters a sense of community trust sort of you know control of your own destiny that is also very appealing to the average developer mindset so it just you know I think it's it's definitely eaten the

SPEAKER_90: software world

SPEAKER_73: it

SPEAKER_02: to play with it a little bit you could have you know regional you know United States kind of set up you have a parliament you can fork it if you like you can edit it if you like and that does build trust and what is the state of the art in terms of governance when

SPEAKER_133: project I'm going to put a hundred developers on it and you start thinking about like in the Bitcoin world there was always this 51% attack kind of you know oh if you had 51% of the voting you could start voting it and you could do all

SPEAKER_74: kinds of stuff that would maybe crash the system how does one when you have an enterprise like yours that is destined to become a

SPEAKER_02: and trying to control the governance or just taking the entire thing

SPEAKER_19: and forking and saying I'm putting 500 developers on it

SPEAKER_31: we actually had a Chinese company fork cockroach back in 2016 it's called pin cap and they have a competing database called tie DB and we actually we like those guys I think they have a great product it's a bit different from cockroach in terms of some of the differentiators that it has but I think that's what you expect from cockroach and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I do think

SPEAKER_81: interesting open source world

SPEAKER_31: these are typically the people that are maintaining it or original authors that continue to work on it that just understand the depth and complexity of the system at a level that has taken them years to just throw money at something it's how many cooks can you put in better than a steady state cost of spending like say 20 million dollars of the same time frame on the core committers who already understand the project so that that's been the typical defense of someone just coming along and truly building another

SPEAKER_141: business but there's there's been some interesting developments which I

SPEAKER_02: you were to copy a genre like you know Star Wars you don't you don't get Gene Roddenberry and you don't get George Lucas and the creative team around them so there's been a million Star Wars or Star Trek knockoffs for better or worse I mean The Sopranos comes to mind as a really great homage to Scorsese and the

SPEAKER_74: Godfather right so you can build on things successfully and you can have you know those actors and folks

SPEAKER_02: move on from them but it very rarely results in something transcendent that unseats it The Sopranos

SPEAKER_74: only reinforces the brilliance of The Godfather and you know The Goodfellas only reinforces The Godfather's brilliance when we get back I want to talk a little bit about China and data and specifically privacy and we'll get in in the final act into what you've done in going from a CTO of an aqua hired company to now the CEO and how you made that transition of one of our sunicorns here on This Week in Startups

Chamath Palihapitiya: All right listen everybody knows Zendesk is the go-to tool for customer support you know that it's the standard it's the gold standard but what you may not know is that Zendesk also offers a suite of sales tools because that's part of the process right you sell into a customer you delight a customer then they have a challenge you want to be using for free for six months as part of the Zendesk for startups program and I'm going to give you the secret URL to do this in a moment you're also going to get Zendesk's community of startup founders and partners to help you better serve your customers right you're going to learn from your peers and they'll even offer dedicated onboarding guidance and support to get you up running and your company is going to be stronger like my company one of the companies we invested in STEEZY studios which is a dance app through the combination of Zendesk explore and their ticketing tagging system STEEZY can track which features their users are most excited about and they under 50 people if you're Series A or under they're going to go ahead and give it to you for free for six months and check out Zendesk's new podcast sit down startup available on all major podcasting platforms every customer counts when you're a startup especially now so start building the

SPEAKER_81: minutes with them on a podcast and we're both losing our minds you grew up in New York

SPEAKER_151: by the way where'd you grow up

SPEAKER_29: I grew up in Jersey mostly

SPEAKER_151: really where Ridgewood where are you north south

SPEAKER_29: north central kind of maplewood is what it's called

SPEAKER_151: oh okay very nice very nice and then where'd you go to college I'm just curious

SPEAKER_29: UC Berkeley

SPEAKER_151: you went to Berkeley from Jersey to Berkeley oh my lord

SPEAKER_141: I wanted to go to California no matter what I thought it was going to be the promised land that would look like Baywatch and everyone would be playing beach volleyball

SPEAKER_157: and I went to Berkeley I'd never been there before slightly different slightly different

SPEAKER_151: yeah they're not they're not they're not taking up yeah volleyball they're taking shrooms it's a slightly different vibe

SPEAKER_49: it kind of results in the same transcendent experience paradoxically but it's slightly different are you all your family and friends gave you shit for going from Jersey to California start calling California boy asking if you got a convertible

SPEAKER_42: no they I don't think I think they were mostly jealous they're a little jelly yeah

SPEAKER_151: it's something else when you move from that northeast to California where it's just like all right you defected and but then they're like what's it like

SPEAKER_162: is it actually great and it's like pretty great when I moved back they were like what would you move back for

SPEAKER_163: but why did you move back what was your thinking there you just missed the energy of the city you missed that well yeah I'd never

SPEAKER_27: I'd only worked uh in summer jobs in the city previously and so I'd never lived here but I came

SPEAKER_31: Google opened an office for engineering after Bell Labs started uh you know basically uh hemorrhaging yeah these really qualified PhD candidates so we uh I came out to help and I stayed for three months and fell in love with it and mostly it's because New York had such a vibrant social scene compared to San Francisco

SPEAKER_165: would you move out there in the aughts or so

SPEAKER_130: yeah 2004 I moved permanently

SPEAKER_74: oh yeah yeah uh post 9-11 it was is the city was in transition during that time I left in 2003 2002-2003 but man you missed the 90s in New York it was

SPEAKER_81: crazy uh that was a good time anyway I caught a little of it you know you see the meatpacking

SPEAKER_31: district and when I first came here in 2003 it was you know blood on the streets um

SPEAKER_02: literally I try to explain this to people there were there were literally two places you could go in the meatpacking there was a club called Mars by purigation yeah and it was in a five or six story warehouse building and be careful on floors three four five like it just got more and more deranged as you got to the top and this was like a lawless time in New York second there was a place called Florent which you might remember which was a french bistro that was open 24 hours a day but that was a time when there were literally

SPEAKER_97: let's just say people working on the streets in recreational uh practices in the meatpacking districts and there were two places open that somewhere around four o'clock five o'clock we'd be going to get steaks at Florent and you go get the steak frites there steak au poivre was on point and the the meatpacking would open and you would just see guys in butcher coats with

SPEAKER_41: cows on hooks running down the street it was a literal meatpacking district in the 90s

SPEAKER_31: and if if nobody hears if anyone that's listening has hasn't been to manhattan recently or to the

David Friedberg: meatpacking it is a very different scene nowadays it's literally like time square I mean you have

SPEAKER_19: the best hotels the apple store you know it's it's unbelievable every nook and cranny of that city has

SPEAKER_25: been um yeah it's like uh it's gilded right now it's posh beyond belief well I think it's I don't

SPEAKER_74: know how you feel about it but I think one of the upsides I always look for the silver lining try to be

SPEAKER_02: positive um and creative destruction the creative destruction being caused by the flight of families and professionals who can now work remote out of New York City in San Francisco is going to result in a collapse of rent which then results in people who have commercial space letting people like me in the 90s I lived in a commercial space for like 1700 bucks a month two or three thousand square feet

SPEAKER_74: looking out on the the Hudson River a giant loft um and I just built my own bathroom and it was completely illegal and that was like no big deal you just paid the landlord 500 bucks a year at Christmas you were good and it's gonna that's what's gonna happen the artists are gonna I heard people Brooklyn's more expensive than Manhattan that's true I think on and they're gonna have to redeploy all these like elite spaces and try to figure out how to get people back into the city the rents are gonna collapse San Francisco right now it is a disaster I mean I lived in New York in late 70s and 80s whoa I mean it was dicey let's talk about something dicey in your business as we get back to cockroach I could talk about this city thing forever but um you know you you you have a an

SPEAKER_02: interesting cold war occurring between the United States and China most people uh would believe a

SPEAKER_133: communist country um having access to a lot of data uh is a liability putting aside how you feel about

SPEAKER_02: our current uh management here in the United States I don't feel comfortable with social networks or networking hardware Huawei uh or Tiktok being anywhere in my house or office for obvious reasons in your mind looking at uh the situation with Tiktok and without having knowledge any social network let's put take Tiktok out of the situation any social network that is based out of uh an authoritarian country the access to the data in that database would be de minimis trivial to have access to correct

SPEAKER_31: uh if you had access to the employees and you know yeah listen I I would uh I would if I were an activist from formerly living in Hong Kong I certainly wouldn't want uh any of my personal

SPEAKER_90: communications being stored anywhere near uh Chinese uh you know access or you know any of their networking

SPEAKER_02: equipment yeah and so the idea that we would allow a piece of software on 30 40 percent of phones with access to location data the camera roll location photos your microphone your camera uh your address book this would be if you were to say I'll give all of that information on I don't know 20 percent of the population to an adversary that has a leader for life putting aside of its channel or anybody that would be

SPEAKER_31: a crazy prospect no yeah I think so I mean the reality is there's there's just no way to protect this data from these um you know for long I should say from these determined state actors and uh you know I suspect that the people that uh run Tiktok are probably um you know pretty honest and well intentioned and it doesn't even require them to build in back doors I mean the reality is there's these zero day exploits and things that uh a state actor like the Chinese government um can get into your phone if uh if they really want to explain zero day for folks who don't know it just means that uh there's there's uh nobody else presumably knows about the back door so it hasn't been patched uh and you can essentially use it it's just an incredibly effective um way to to gain entry um usually into you the whole operating system for example of a mobile device but you know these things apply to any kind

SPEAKER_90: of device uh it's just a you know an exploit that uh doesn't have any uh visibility whatsoever yeah

SPEAKER_02: it's kind of like you know like every there's this giant fortified castle and everybody goes in through like the back plumbing and they go through the pipes and then all of a sudden they made it inside the keep and they're inside the castle uh in and do you operate in China are you allowed to operate in

SPEAKER_19: China do you even think about countries like that as a as a place to participate and how do you think

SPEAKER_31: about them China's an amazingly huge market and uh you know it's the scale challenges for any business in China can just go from you know single monolithic node database you know two months later they need the biggest version of cockroach so that's extremely exciting and you know we are open source and I think that's for us right now the best way to really participate in in the Chinese market we've had a we've worked a lot with Baidu and uh they use cockroach pretty heavily and provide it you know even to their customers in their private or in their sort of public cloud which is like AWS or GCP and it you know that's a great way to work in China right now you know through a partner like that uh it's not it's not getting us much revenue at this point uh but it's getting us exposure and I think that's good I'm I wouldn't say that I'm exactly optimistic that there'll be uh reasonable relations between the China and between China and the US especially from sort of a business business perspective uh it's kind of hard to get Chinese companies to pay but I think it's best you know where we currently are in terms of our scale to really think about how can we get cockroach used by the most Chinese developers and open source is a great way to do that along with partners like Baidu yeah there's no way for

SPEAKER_109: you to stop somebody from using it but that doesn't mean you have to because your business is providing

SPEAKER_02: I assume support and hosting around the open source project correct that's right support tools so they can put up their own servers and use it and then they're contributing to the project so you get that niceness of like okay they're scaling it they're they're they're battle testing it you know in a world

SPEAKER_74: where you know their customer base is going to be you know I mean the middle class in China I believe

SPEAKER_133: is bigger than the entire population of the United States now we're close to it so you just think

SPEAKER_109: about that as a number it's pretty amazing as an opportunity but man we have to reset relations with

SPEAKER_63: that country because it seemed like engagement was working until it wasn't yeah it seems that things

SPEAKER_31: are at the nadir right now in terms of relations and um you know some of the some of the human rights issues listen I yeah I don't want to get into big political discussion but yeah you know it seems that China's changed a lot in the last 10 years and um not all of its positive some of it is I think that

SPEAKER_36: there's always a chance to improve relations and I'm hopeful that will happen it's just heartbreaking

SPEAKER_133: when you see you know something like Hong Kong fall you know and it doesn't and we and no in the in the world at least the United States it doesn't have the ability to participate in any way to say we we would rather that not happen and is there a way we can work with you or incentivize you to maybe let people sell books there and it's like yeah no we make too much money the movies make too much money over there and you know the NBA makes too much money over there and even you from a from a modest company you're like wow I got to be judicious in how I talk about this I don't want to you know ruin opportunity there and you know engagement has been great for the people of China the that 300 million people coming into the middle class there which is good for the world I think ultimately it's great for the world is because of the iPhone and because we're building stuff there so it's we're going to

SPEAKER_02: do another podcast on that but if you were to compare adversarial situations or challenging situations for you which is more acute dealing with authoritarian countries like China or dealing with juggernauts

SPEAKER_74: who want to take over every single aspect of open source like Amazon web services which is a bigger

SPEAKER_29: threat to your business uh certainly Amazon at this point Amazon web services do they play fair I mean

SPEAKER_74: every company I've talked to who's in the open source space says that Amazon web services does not play

SPEAKER_86: fair why do people say that to me over and over and over again well because in some respects they don't

SPEAKER_31: play fair but it depends on what you mean by fair Amazon I think does live their company value which is obsessed about the customer and that leads them down a different path and for example Google I don't think they still have this as their guiding value but it used to be you know don't do evil yeah and and and that there's very different outcomes if people hold that value you know relatively sacrosanct within the company and people do people adopt the values in companies it's actually been a huge learning experience for me as a CEO uh they uh they as long as your values really describe the the tenor of the company and sort of the DNA it it persists and people adopt them and so I think from Amazon's perspective they they care about getting their customers things that are less expensive uh so they really care about that price point and that are in terms of AWS at least that are very integrated in a holistic set of services that can solve problems especially for smaller companies that are you know high growth so the growth segment and and that makes sense that they're going to just take every open source product out there and typically AWS does what I'd call sort of good enough

SPEAKER_27: type offerings yeah so it's like it's well integrated it's one sort of vendor throat to choke is the terminology people use choke yeah it's like what does it mean explain the metaphor I mean the problem is that I guess it was so you know as a let's say you're a growing company and

SPEAKER_31: you have a bunch of different uh software that you use if you have that spread amongst 10 different vendors it's a lot of relationships that you have to manage every year you're kind of renegotiating your price with each one of those vendors with one throat to choke you're just it's like it all comes down to one vendor so it's like you have one relationship one person you're talking to one billing system the problem is I guess Amazon's throat is pretty difficult to choke well yeah and

SPEAKER_50: and in fairness to them the the free market economics that they're doing is they're saying

SPEAKER_02: take anything that's a cost center for Amazon which their servers are a cost center make them a profit center this is probably one of the most brilliant moves in the history of business period I mean this would be the equivalent of I don't know Nike saying uh we want to make our cost center of I don't know packaging uh sneakers and boxes we want to make that a profit center so package everybody else's sneakers and oh by the way yeah stores that sell sneakers we want to sell everybody else's stores and do third-party sellers so it is wildly innovative it's hard to understand I think as a consumer or as an entrepreneur how to feel about I certainly have mixed feelings about it because you do want to see prices go lower as they drive prices lower with Amazon web services they challenge companies like yours to lower prices which then allows more startups to be born um and it makes you

SPEAKER_133: focus like a laser if people are going to pick cockroach DB versus the does Amazon have a cockroach DB fork or competitor yet or what do they have in the database space or not that's public not that's

SPEAKER_31: public in terms of a fork they do have lots of competitive technologies uh they have something called Aurora which is probably the the closest to what cockroach is offering and do they try to

SPEAKER_06: poach your people are they like looking at your team and then just you wake up one day and 10 people

SPEAKER_74: come to you and say I got contacted by recruiters are they that kind of competitor where they just

SPEAKER_115: come in and try to that's happened in fact they try to hire me sometimes I get these emails from

SPEAKER_213: them so that's the blanket one it's like yeah hey Mr. Kimball we see that you have a passion for database projects we're from Amazon web services we're wondering if you would like to consider

SPEAKER_49: opportunities that's exactly right it's so hilarious how those it's I mean I literally get emails from people and they're like Mr. Calacanis we see you're an executive in finance um we were wondering if

SPEAKER_02: you were looking for a financial partner to help you balance your portfolio and I write them and I say um here's my book read the title uh would you I think that you should be asking if you can be an LP in my fund rather than if you should manage my money can you beat my returns and I just show them my returns and I'm like okay well my first portfolio was a three-digit IRR can you beat that and they're like

SPEAKER_22: uh no our business is taking 25 percent of your four points that we make you in some blended bullshit

SPEAKER_02: it's pretty hilarious um so what is your explicit strategy for dealing with a competitor who does not care about making a profit like Amazon web services how do you rally the troops to be better sharper and what is it like so like that's the internal question and then the external question

SPEAKER_19: is when you come up head to head with them with you said Aurora is their product yes um they're not good at naming shit that's the other thing is their names are kind of whack um I also find Amazon web

SPEAKER_133: services completely annoying like this is my experience they're like hey J Cal uh got a special for

SPEAKER_19: you we'd like to offer all of your companies and uh we would like uh to give them all the stuff for like three months for free can you give us your database and I'm like yeah I got a podcast over here I have an event over here why don't you buy everybody breakfast like we don't have a budget for that and I say can I stop you right now you're you don't have a budget for that there are 18,000 people working at Amazon web services I'm just making up a number here you you're making 20 billion dollars a year I literally banned AWS from coming to my events on principle because I would get literally 15 emails d they'd slide into my dms and they're like hey can you uh we have a new Amazon web services product J Cal can you um give it to all your companies we'll give them all a thousand dollar credit will you tweet this and I'm like what go support what I do in the world Amazon web services it like buy ads on the podcast if that matters to you buy everybody breakfast stop being so goddamn cheap and I'm speaking to the like 20 people I know over there you guys used to in the

SPEAKER_02: early days they used to buy breakfast for everybody at my events and then for some reason they're like we don't believe in marketing we believe in give it and then you know what they did to me even worse you want to talk about insulting this is when I told them all to just don't even email me anymore and I told my sales team I don't bring me anything from Amazon web services unless it's a six-figure sponsorship deal uh I don't want to even talk to this company anymore I'm so frustrated with them

SPEAKER_19: these they had the nerve the nerve to give Y Combinator companies like 50 percent more than

SPEAKER_02: our companies in our accelerator and I said yeah you know it I'm not gonna even talk to you unless you

SPEAKER_19: match it they're like no no they do more companies than you I said you know what guys you're just insulting and I'm tired of being insulted by you so don't ever contact me again and so there's a message to all Amazon web services marketing people and ambassadors and evangelists I don't want to hear from you anymore stop emailing me I'm just so frustrated with you you're so not supportive of what I do and the startup community I'm tired of it period end of story and I'm sorry to the sales team who has to deal with this now but I'm team cockroach how do you that so anyway so the how do

SPEAKER_100: you internally rally troops and then how do you beat them in the marketplace I want that's what I want to know because that's got to be like every board meeting you talk about the that existential

SPEAKER_227: yeah threat you know I well sorry to go on a rant Spencer I'm just I enjoyed it honestly

SPEAKER_68: I you know it's easy to rally the troops internally because you know we're the ones that are actually

SPEAKER_31: doing the innovation and that's what people at that's why people join cockroach like they want to work on the the cutting the sort of bleeding edge databases and Amazon is repackaging other people's software and they do a good job at that they're definitely the leaders and uh you know I think they have a really good service in many ways and obviously you know the innovation there is just astounding especially the business model innovation uh you know so it's not hard to rally the troops we don't really talk about AWS that much at board meetings because it's pretty obvious how we're going to build a business that coexists with what they're doing even if they were to fork cockroach db and and offer it themselves um I think that what Amazon's really good at and where they have just definitely won the market and it's their incumbency in the cloud is around serving high growth companies you know they they again it's like these these smaller companies they want one vendor throat to choke they want one integrated billing thing they want a bunch of stuff that works well together and that's is as inexpensive as it can be uh but the real opportunity in the market is all of the world's biggest companies that have been for the last several decades on oracle and on ibm db2 and mainframes like these companies have all the money right that high growth segment it's amazing it's huge Amazon has killed it there but what they're offering is very geared to these companies they explicitly look for ways to create friction so they can have lock-in uh into their cloud but this is not what a company that is now starting to embrace the cloud is looking for right they're very allergic to the idea of what they call vendor concentration risk and Amazon represents massive vendor concentration risk right if you use a database with Amazon as you say it's like this 10-year kind of journey that's actually pretty typical for a database these big companies are they what they don't want to do is get stuck on AWS permanently yeah and and the database feels like a good way to do that and Amazon's very cognizant of that and they they like to push that uh that high friction sort of integrated set of solutions you know what we've discovered is that we're very good at playing for these uh these we call them the global 2000 fortune 500 because what we're offering is something that meets them where they currently are on their journey to the cloud right which is going to continue over the next decade but these companies have private data centers they've got high value use cases they have a hybrid future fundamentally for the next decade they need to be able to straddle their private clouds to the public cloud when they're in the public cloud they might start in AWS because that's where they have expertise in terms of their existing you know site reliability engineers and dev ops people but they don't want

SPEAKER_213: to be stuck there right yeah they want to make sure it's a big issue how easy is it and is there a standard

SPEAKER_74: coming or under development you know from the Azure folks uh Microsoft Azure am I pronouncing that

SPEAKER_232: correct for Azure Azure I've heard it multiple I've heard multiple to Azure I think is the best way to say

SPEAKER_74: it Google Cloud uh is it Google Cloud Engine uh GCP Google Cloud Platform I guess Cloud Platform yeah

SPEAKER_02: I think they use Google Cloud Engine so GCP uh then you have things like Rackspace is there a um an anti-AWS contingent working on portability and interoperability so that people can do best of breed

SPEAKER_74: and have it work outside of this walled garden kind of AWS issue I don't see too much specifically from

SPEAKER_31: those other clouds although I know that they have all kinds of different initiatives uh Anthos is one that Google came out with recently which is really about more the private data center side but I guess it's multi-cloud too uh but there's a lot of companies I I invested one called upbound um or um yeah I think that's what it's called uh but they're building like a um sort of a multi-cloud control plane so that you can launch services in any one of the clouds they're really abstracting wow yeah yeah that's the isn't that

SPEAKER_95: the holy grail if because I was on the board of a company called Dine the DNS routing company and a topic

SPEAKER_133: that came up from a lot of customers was this ability to take their DNS and say hey send some companies to AWS and some here I mean that doesn't really exist in the world yet does it the ability to kind of route people dynamically to different cloud centers is that just too hard to maintain for people too complex or is that what like this company you're talking about that you angel invested

SPEAKER_27: in gonna do well yeah it depends on uh what you mean by customers certainly if you have your service

SPEAKER_31: and we have customers that do this where they actually they don't want to have uh their service fail just because there's a problem with a particular cloud and so they they can actually put copies of the data on say all three cloud providers or say two like say GCP and AWS and then they might have a private data center and they connect them with private fiber and what they're doing is they're constantly managing copies of the data between all three of these including copies of their execution software so their application servers right that actually do the business logic so what they can do is they let's say that Amazon misconfigures DNS in Europe and nobody can get to their data centers right and in that particular case that you would uh you know with your DNS configuration you could have those customers uh fail over to using the GCP data center the private data center and the way cockroach works is it manages all those copies in a way that's consistent so that even if AWS is no longer reachable you'll have exact business continuity no loss of data and you're now relying on the copies that existed in the GCP in the private data center so it's a it's a way to eliminate the systemic risk that

SPEAKER_90: comes with a cloud vendor um you know misconfiguring or having some bug or some big outage or something

SPEAKER_74: like that if we if we fast forward in 10 years what do you think the cloud market share starts to look

SPEAKER_02: like because there is a tremendous amount of money being invested here a tremendous amount of development a lot of open source and and some of this dynamic routing like you're talking about and people having stuff live in different places there's also this concept of serverless where you know things fire up

SPEAKER_133: maybe you could speak to serverless computing if that is going to be a paradigm shift oh yeah what will this look like in 10 so that i'm going to break it into two questions talk about serverless explain to the audience what that is and why that's important to people and then explain what if we fast

SPEAKER_74: forward because you started on this journey um in the aughts what what do we look like in 2035 i'm just

SPEAKER_141: going to pick 15 years from now wow i mean that's a that's a that's a lot of prognostication there yeah

SPEAKER_31: let's go uh certainly it's become immeasurably larger i mean things it's not just that everyone's moving onto the cloud and i was mentioning that's global 2000 that tipping points already happened in the last couple years now they're like every one of these companies is buying 100 million or 100 billion sorry 100 million in in credits over the next four years or something you're like tripping over those kinds of deals so that is already happening and that's just represents non-organic growth in the cloud market i mean it's going to be getting you know up there in the hundreds of billions in the you know maybe even close to the trillion dollar mark you know over the next 10 years crazy and uh but it's also it's not just those companies inorganically moving their spend to the cloud it's also that you can do things faster with the cloud and that's really where serverless comes in they can iterate faster you can deliver more services more applications to your end users that's how you compete whatever vertical you're in let's say you're in financial services like it used to take you know uh months just to get machines into some private data center that you could use uh for what something you were going to launch this months now you can get those things in minutes maybe even seconds especially when you're using orchestration technologies like kubernetes and things like that what serverless fundamentally is is it's abstracting all of the deployment uh all the work that has to be done around deployment from the equation and they're saying okay we're going to do this deployment devops monitoring keeping all your services up maybe some auto scaling type stuff we're going to do all that for you and all you're going to do is pay for uh pay us right and so the total cost of ownership is going to be lower you might be paying us a bit more than if you did

SPEAKER_115: it yourself but that's not counting all of the expertise that you have to hire into your company

SPEAKER_02: to run that right so if i were to put this in a model to explain it to somebody in a the most basic way

SPEAKER_74: if i wanted to put up a website a commerce site i'm selling sneakers i'm like zappos 1.0 which is very basic i'm a snap a sneaker company i in the old model i hire i buy a server i buy t1 i put it in

SPEAKER_06: my closet or then it was like i put it i co-locate in a data center then it became somebody was a managed service like rackspace then it became the cloud like aws and rackspace and other things and now what you're saying is hey here's a little bit of code so when you load the website that serverless code fires up and then shows the website and then it shuts that service down so if nobody was loading the website there's no dedicated hardware somewhere just waiting for those users and if the sneaker goes supernova because some kardashian wears them in a 10 million people go to it

SPEAKER_09: in the same day that same little code executes but goes out across any number of servers and serves them

SPEAKER_31: correct is that exactly simple explanation that's a very good one i mean the horizon that i'm looking at the 2035 question i think it's actually going to happen more like by 2027 or so is that you know developers can develop a you know mobile app uh web application all on their laptop right they have a local database and they're doing all the development but then what they want to do is they want to push that into the cloud and that's the last they want to deal with that except for paying for it to scale globally yeah right so they in other words like you might launch your new service and nobody gives a crap right you haven't done your marketing yet no one's really using it maybe your developers are poking at it make sure it works and you get like 10 requests a day you're paying for 10 requests a day you're paying for just that little bit of storage they might be storing into serverless databases right you're only paying for application servers in like because it's like a lambda or gcf function that pops up just like you say to handle that one request or those 10 requests per day so

SPEAKER_06: you're paying like cents over the course of such a crazy paradigm shift for people who are just got some you know six thousand dollar a month aws bill and they don't know what they're paying for when they figure out the serverless thing exists and exactly they could be paying 60 cents or six dollars or

SPEAKER_185: sixty dollars or whatever it is right and that would just scale up right and you want that to

SPEAKER_51: scale up so that it can go maybe you're paying literally six hundred thousand dollars a month

SPEAKER_31: because it is scaled globally and you're handling you know hundreds of billions requests a day but you're also making you know six million dollars a month so yeah you're like okay i'm happy to pay for this i mean there's there's lots of stuff that's unresolved in terms of how that happens but fundamentally you want to say as a developer i want to take what's on my laptop i want you to scale this globally and i want to pay only for what i use so if it starts off as being nothing then i pay nothing if it goes you know falls to the wall and everyone in the entire world's using this i'll pay more but you're going to do all that scaling i'm not going to re-platform it's exactly what i

SPEAKER_90: gave you that worked on my laptop now it's going to work everywhere around the world that's the

SPEAKER_02: that's the holy grail that's the dream and that dream occurs if we were to pick and you ever do sport uh gambling you ever gamble set a line you don't gamble okay so setting a line is you set the line i pick the over under so what would you say is the year that you think this becomes the uh the

SPEAKER_74: default for startups just pick a category startup startups just all go serverless but what's the year that happens you had to pick a year 26. it's never all going to go serverless but you're talking

SPEAKER_02: about like let's say the majority of them yeah yeah you know or like some actually majority is kind of silly because you have all the existing stuff but the majority of new startups so you take a y

SPEAKER_06: combinator tech stars launch accelerator those 2 000 companies the majority of them go with a serverless paradigm just for that segment because that is the future obviously yeah i mean i i'm

SPEAKER_27: pretty confident that it's going to happen by 2030 but wow you know i'm optimistic it'll happen before

SPEAKER_74: then got it so then you're taking you you might set the line at 230 and if you had to bet your entire

SPEAKER_50: net worth on it you'd say under 20 their entire net worth yeah that's how we gamble i'm not holding you to it but it just shows some kind of fun ways to ask questions hey when we were as we're wrapping

SPEAKER_74: up here i want to and and thank you for the time uh you know and it's it's it's it's really challenging to have a guest like you'll be honest because there's so much to talk to you about um but you

SPEAKER_133: know we're doing so good on the talking about tech in a way that is accessible i want to talk about the paradigm shifts that are coming and you know like i'm talking big stuff so it seems to me you know serverless is one of those paradigm shifting technologies uh quantum computing is one that's

SPEAKER_02: often cited power and power consumption uh and then cpus generally storage is sometimes a blocker when you look at things that could shift paradigms you know in the next 50 years and now you know now we're

SPEAKER_133: going to sort of go from the midterm to the long term here what are the paradigm shifts that you know our kids and and their kids will be looking at when it comes to computing well one big one that's going

SPEAKER_51: to happen in the next several years that you didn't mention uh would be 5g i i do think that uh it's rare to

SPEAKER_31: get uh latency uh significant significant improvements in latency that happens very infrequently in computing and i think that there's you know the the real-time experience is something that most people just

SPEAKER_208: haven't really uh imagined what's possible and obviously so let's stop for a second and explain

SPEAKER_06: latency as it currently stands now when i'm using my cable modem or my 4g phone lte versus what it would

SPEAKER_02: look like there and then what what that experience would open up of extremely low latency what would

SPEAKER_130: we be talking about here so when you really think about latency for most applications obviously high

SPEAKER_31: frequency trading and some gaming is different but mostly what you want to do is get under 100 milliseconds that 100 milliseconds is kind of like i guess the u.s department of defense figured this out this is the command and control system um limit threshold if it's under 100 milliseconds it feels instantaneous to a human being got it if it's over 100 milliseconds you've noticed

SPEAKER_262: the lag and so uh for certain things like a tenth of a second for people to understand correct

SPEAKER_31: exactly a tenth of a second so it's not it's not it uh doesn't seem like much but it's an eternity in in computer world but like you know the reality is that when you everyone on their mobile phone right now hits buttons and they are they find it extremely normal to wait a second or more for something to come back right and and and what what could happen is you know 5g is very much an enabling technology because it's basically going to ensure that you know for all of the users out there that have 5g you're able to get on the backbone within say you know around 10 milliseconds 10 to 20 milliseconds and that's uh you know that's kind of true with lte right now but it's it's not um it's not very consistent but the combination of 5g and um and also startup companies and bigger companies you know anyone that has a service they have to actually co-locate the application servers and the data next to the customer that's why when i was talking about this horizon where you squint at it and you say here's what serverless could be i'm talking about uh scaling globally and really what that means is giving global customers a local experience which means that you need the 5g so they can get close they get on the backbone quickly but then you need to make sure that the application and the data is stored close to the customers so you can't have an australian user hopping across to virginia and that uh that is going to be like a a really big uh paradigm shift when you can actually easily you know democratize the ability of even a startup to create a global application data architecture so that they can give customers wherever they show up let's say they show up in brazil you don't don't really know when you're a startup or tokyo or something like that you want to give all of those customers a a wonderful sort of first-class user experience and i think getting everything under 100 milliseconds in your application is going to enable a lot of uh what feels very fundamentally different in terms of how applications behave like imagine when you're sending a tweet out or you're you're

SPEAKER_27: typing something right now you might get some little uh yeah a little spinning wheel of dev little dot dot

SPEAKER_174: ellipsis whatever so and so is typing yeah exactly and and what you could do instead is really um create a

SPEAKER_31: a vibrancy through uh you know real-time interaction with the larger community right that's that's going to change how things feel you'll feel this connection uh which right now you know there's like this uh everyone spends so much time you just walk out on the street i mean less in covet times but everyone's sitting there glued to their phone we're spending hours a day like through this interface into these virtual worlds but it's very slow so the interface is like this incredible lag uh which doesn't feel so bad compared to writing a letter or you know sending an email even it feels quite real time compared to that but uh the it could feel uh more like real life and i think that's going to be a um

SPEAKER_90: that's going to usher in uh a lot of new use cases a lot of change uh and and a lot of opportunity

SPEAKER_133: fundamentally yeah when you and and the it has to be the the the double punch of hey i got this low

SPEAKER_73: latency so i requested my gmail um but if i'm in taiwan or i happen to be on vacation in sydney

SPEAKER_02: and my gmail is in the united states well that doesn't help me because now it's got to go across some backbone and it's it defeats the purpose of it which i think is what one of the things i heard and is that some services if they see that you're traveling will then move your uh database let's say

SPEAKER_06: an email database or if you were a customer who was doing uh databases and i you know as my e-commerce company my shopify store might then be uh co-located uh via what's called a content delivery network a cdn

SPEAKER_152: to those endpoints is that correct yeah there's lots of lots of different ways to do it and it

SPEAKER_31: becomes potentially pretty complex in some cases like someone was just traveling for a day through paris and then there today in barcelona you know kind of having their gmail follow them would be a lot of data transfer so you wouldn't necessarily do that but if they moved you'd absolutely want to do that does that happen dynamically do you think like just without

SPEAKER_02: putting google aside but all email servers you think they actually do that kind of stuff

SPEAKER_31: the at scale ones when i was at google gmail didn't automatically move what they call your home if you move to europe or something like that from the united states it might happen automatically now right which would be pretty sophisticated uh but it's a sophisticated move

SPEAKER_02: yeah yeah but certainly for something like i don't know disney plus if i'm pulling up the

SPEAKER_74: mandalorian i am not pulling up the mandalorian from some data center in canada i'm pulling it from some node that's very close to my house correct it's exactly right i mean it's extremely expensive for

SPEAKER_31: them to deliver that over say a transatlantic link or something like that so yeah i mean netflix does this too i mean everyone everyone that's actually delivering especially read-only content that's that's uh that's a more solved problem the really interesting stuff is like what do you do for uh things that have to be read and written like uh your uber account for example so uber has a global data architecture and they probably spent you know 100 engineering years on it like literally a century of someone's time but there's obviously a lot of people working on in parallel uh but you know that that allows them to have a holistic global service so you have uber no matter where you are and it works well no matter where you are it might not work as well when you're traveling in terms you might have a little bit more latency as your account is probably stored mostly in the united states but uh certainly if you live in australia or sydney let's say uh you're going to have a uh you know from day one you're going to have an amazing experience even though you're an australian user and that's what everyone wants to build those kinds of data architectures going forward and i think that's uh you know something that you know cockroach is an integral part of that and that's uh some of our functionality that really does enable that but there's lots of other pieces the architectural stack that are going to be need to be put into place and integrated so that even a startup is able to to get that kind of functionality yeah it's really going to be interesting also when

SPEAKER_74: starlink and some of these low earth orbit satellites get up there and they have 100 millisecond or less time you're going to have 5g in dense places and then you know everywhere is going to be blanketed so

SPEAKER_73: you're going to have this like double whammy in the next two or three years the idea and the competition that's going to

SPEAKER_06: come to that you know last mile or last whatever number of miles it is to a satellite just anywhere anybody wants to work and this is going to propel this work from home uh concept i think to another

SPEAKER_02: level because right now people are buying homes based on the internet speed like it's literally

SPEAKER_133: in the description of the home oh you want to move up to you know sawgetys or you know hastings on the hudson great you know but what's the internet in that town like uh and any other paradigms that you follow like really closely and think are just going to be transcendent like i don't know if you follow quantum computing which was supposed to be here a million times quantum computing is very interesting

SPEAKER_31: i mean you know that yeah i don't i don't exactly know when to expect that but i do think stronger and stronger forms of um you know sort of general artificial intelligence are a real possibility you mentioned our children's lifetimes uh i think that's that's you know probably somewhat realistic that some of that that will start to happen you know think about machines being or inside artificial intelligences being better at virtually every meaningful task than humans i mean that's going

SPEAKER_90: to be a such a paradigm shift and it will be probably politically destabilizing in terms of just the nature

SPEAKER_06: of human work and uh capitalism yeah it or it could create just um such a hyper capitalism that we've never seen before i was thinking about the other day i don't know if you want is it gpt3 or gtp3 i can't

SPEAKER_74: remember i'm not sure you know the the open ai did the thing where you can just put in words and it talks to you and it kind of tries to talk in your voice and it's like i haven't seen this oh yeah anyway it's

SPEAKER_06: became like all the rage but i mean there's literally going to be a moment in time talking about movies and the creation of films where you and i could be on a zoom call and be like hey let's

SPEAKER_73: make a movie that's like a star wars movie and okay let's have boba fett uh fighting obi-wan kenobi and then let's add in uh ewan mcgregor's obi-wan and a flashback to do this and then let's have him

SPEAKER_06: say something really witty uh to han solo and like literally boom it's going to be like a perfect rendering that looks no different than the star wars that we've watched over the last 30 years and instead of it being fan fiction because you could do that right now by talking into voice recognition technology you could do that in some number of hours people are making fan films

SPEAKER_133: for star wars i don't know if you've ever seen them where the lightsabers look better than they did in the original star wars trilogy but being able to then recreate the you know actors and say you know

SPEAKER_22: what let's recast darth vader with you know this voice and it'll be like boom here's the new version

SPEAKER_287: for you we ripped it and it'll just be sent globally i mean that's literally going to happen

SPEAKER_42: in 30 or 40 years i would like to see jar jar binks is like uh one of these uh evil jedis what are

SPEAKER_74: they called sith yeah let's say jaja sith oh it exists right now in the fan fiction world i mean

SPEAKER_06: and there's probably some darker things that exist than just actually there is in if you want a little

David Friedberg: are you a star wars fan at all yeah i am okay have you watched the clone wars by chance you have this is the big secret that nobody knows about i i didn't know about this until

SPEAKER_74: i was talking to john favreau um you know the director who did uh the mandalorian and uh we were in a vip room and i was talking to him about the mandalorians i kid you not and he was like well you know have you watched the clone wars i was like no he's like well you know there's a whole thing in the clone wars about the black saber there's a whole thing about the mandalor you got to watch that episode uh you know we that's part of the arc here of what's happening in the mandalorian and i was like oh that's cool i was like man disney is so lucky like man they must have backed up the brink struck or whatever and he was like jason i had to go in and pitch them like seven times

SPEAKER_09: over three years to let that get them to let me do this i was like i was like but you're fucking john favreau like shouldn't they just a second you have idea and do it he's like that's

SPEAKER_22: not how it works in this industry that's your industry but and have you watched rebels yet the follow-up to it no i haven't i just i'm almost finished with rebels what i do is i to get my

SPEAKER_74: star wars fix and to stop being you know my quarantine 15 i just go on my treadmill and it's 22 minute episodes and i watch and it's just like my childhood all over again uh all right listen

SPEAKER_133: spence you've been a great great guest um and um continued success i we i could talk to you for hours and oh we talked for an hour and a half so it's gpt3 anyway yeah you know it's like a little ai i'll check it out yeah it's just basically everybody went nuts for like 15 minutes over here

SPEAKER_19: because it literally can write in your voice and you put in some data set and all of a sudden it starts talking and you know it's sort of like you have the gmail feature where it like starts giving you like two words ahead so you're like i don't think and then it's like we should and you're like

SPEAKER_133: okay right hierarchy we should sure why not and i'm like writing this as a writer and i'm like i don't like this i don't want you to lead the witness it's like leading the

SPEAKER_22: and if it's going to lead the witness like i want to be able to pick like hemingway or joyce like can we lead the witness and make me sound not like everybody i bet that's the next

SPEAKER_141: the next uh innovation there is you can pick the the author that you want to channel and then

SPEAKER_19: the authors can get a license so you pay a penny per word to write like them wow that's a that's a good that's a good business model i like coming in 2027 from amazon web services all right spencer kimball cockroach labs.com if you're looking to work for a great company not the evil empire i'm not picking any company that's the evil empire i'm just just talking in

SPEAKER_74: general if you want to work for the tip of the spear and do innovative shit hey cockroach db uh cockroach labs.com and uh i assume you're all remote now has that been a big transition for you

SPEAKER_31: it's been a good one and we slipped into it pretty easily we were about 30 remote before and uh you

SPEAKER_25: know the great thing is this had happened 10 years ago all the video conferencing stuff wouldn't be up

SPEAKER_275: to snuff but it's pretty good these days it's pretty amazing like how effortless this has become

SPEAKER_74: uh i i was never a fan of it as an invest we didn't even get into investors i gotta have you back on the pod just talking about investors but as an investor now uh it's like i can't invest in somebody unless i'm in the room with them i gotta break bread i just gotta go for a walk with them i gotta do walk and talk i gotta have an espresso it's gotta be like two or three hours in person at least if i'm gonna cut a check and now it's like i just got on a 15 minute zoom my team's pre-vetted them i'm like here's 100 grand see you on zoom and i'm just like yeah i just i just i literally have invested in 40 companies during pandemic before million to work in 40 companies 100k each wow and just like i

SPEAKER_02: i'm like whatever if this is the new world and nobody else wants to make these bets i'm gonna be i'm gonna make the bets and for everything you give up you add something you

SPEAKER_06: know yeah what is it for you that's this is added to you as a leader of a company have you thought

SPEAKER_31: about that at all like how you've become better i think that well i mean as a company i think the big opportunity is to hire from a much bigger talent pool we used to be you know just real toronto is kind of new for us but san francisco bay area and new york city and now it's yeah the sky's the limit you know it's basically where do we already have business entities and you kind of want to stick to those because you don't want to add too much overhead but i think that's that's

SPEAKER_90: a big that's a big if you don't as a company like ours rise to meet this challenge and the inherent opportunities i think you you put yourself at a big disadvantage yeah every crisis is an opportunity

SPEAKER_74: um chaos is a ladder i mean there's a million different ways this has been phrased uh but it's really i'm just so impressed with the entrepreneurs in in in my portfolio and how they fought and really moved on a dime and and i really wish we would see that in some other aspects of our society where people maybe could be a little more nimble in addressing things like what's going to happen with our kids in three weeks for or two weeks or next week for school i don't want to get into it too much here but my lord has our government our systems failed us and we need to be entrepreneurial and that that's what solves problems is you know people taking risk right

SPEAKER_05: and taking chances and maybe we're doing none of that it's just so thinking this status quo right

SPEAKER_31: and i think that's where um this the innovation from entrepreneur entrepreneurial energy that's where

SPEAKER_275: it's best you got kids may i ask i have a three-year-old daughter okay so nursery school

SPEAKER_29: or stay stay home i guess or possibly these days yeah i think this year we're uh probably i mean her school closed and the school closed permanently i mean i can find another one but i mean she at

SPEAKER_90: three years old really she just needs to play i mean she was going to a Montessori school but oh

SPEAKER_316: me too i'm gonna have four-year-olds in Montessori so like it just i'm watching them like cut vegetables

SPEAKER_133: like you have you got them cutting the vegetables yet with the with the safe knives uh i i think they

SPEAKER_27: might have done that i didn't see them do that they arranged flowers it's really it's a cute little

SPEAKER_319: program and i think she was you go okay i'm sorry finish your sentence no i was just saying i think she was

SPEAKER_29: doing well there but honestly at three years old it's not like i'm gonna insist she goes back in the

SPEAKER_74: middle of covet i mean i went to public school in brooklyn and they were just like sit down and shut up and then they were like um this is the third time we're going to tell you mr calacanis sit down

SPEAKER_49: and shut up like it was like literally i thought my name was sit down and shut up because that's all the teachers ever told me was shut up uh i think i was the last generation of people to get hit i remember distinctly in high school getting smacked on the back of my head by brother thomas i'd never forget it he just cracked me and i was like it's not allowed he's like yeah maybe not maybe maybe not

SPEAKER_151: but i mean montessori if you just go on amazon i mean uh and type in like montessori stuff they're

David Friedberg: they're very big on whatever the child can do having them do for themselves uh whether this is putting on

SPEAKER_02: a pull-up diaper or cleaning their plates so my wife introduced me to reggio and montessori and i

SPEAKER_19: started reading about the stuff online and trying to catch up and uh now what i do is i'm like okay we're having carrots and i put out two cutting boards they're twins and i have these special knives that they you know if they were to slam it on their finger it might hurt but it's not going to slice them open we're not going to the emergency room and they just sit there and they cut the carrots up and put them in a bowl and say okay now you gotta rinse them okay now i want you to dump them

SPEAKER_133: in the steamer and i'm just slowly doing this and then you know on a weekend i'll wake up my 10 year old has made pancakes and i'm like whoa here we go and it's that like resiliency because you're you go to burning man as well sometimes yeah and and you know i i tweeted the other day i was like i'm a fan of radical self-reliance and that is one of the key tenants of burning man and i have never gotten so

SPEAKER_19: much shit on twitter i mean i have i've said some stupid stuff uh that's like kind of like twitter

SPEAKER_22: is yeah uh it's dangerous for people who like to talk uh but i i think that's what the

SPEAKER_06: defining because we're going to solve this thing and i think we'll solve it in q by q1 because we'll

SPEAKER_330: have biden and harris and they'll just shut the country down for six weeks and we're done

SPEAKER_23: and we'll get through it national mandate which we could have done in march and april and this would

SPEAKER_74: be over like everywhere else but the radical self-reliance that people picked up here that oh i can leave the city i can go find another home i can put chickens in my backyard and take the eggs and eat those i can stock up on this i can i can educate my kid at home whatever it is i can run my company even you know if the company is or my restaurant could have street seating if it never had

SPEAKER_19: that before that radical self-reliance that's the silver lining lining the entrepreneurial creativity and self-reliance which is what burning man is about which is why burning man is so easy for people to be cynical about and for an east coaster i was like yeah i'm gonna go to burning man i love going to burning man the art the people the costumes the music everything is fantastic it's the energy

SPEAKER_130: it's like it's the energy is palpable there yeah when did you first go by the way

SPEAKER_19: i guess it was uh seven years ago yeah i i think the first time i went was like 2005. oh wow so you're a long time and there were 15 000 people there and you know what they told me don't go it's all ruined it's too big ruined it's over and i went like two years ago there were 70 000 people there and i was like this is 10 times better the year i went there was just the circle and it went two streets back maybe three oh wow that's it that's it so and the circle there were like three neon signs on the entire circle that was the complete lighting of the place so you're like okay that's the disorient camp okay that's this camp and that's that camp okay i know where i am now you go and the entire i mean you see the mayan truck what's that yeah the mayan warrior the mayan warrior truck i talked to the circle this thing cost 10 million dollars it's a five million dollar laser show and you can that's what i want for my birthday anybody i'm gonna be 50 this year can somebody give me the mayan what are they called the mayan mayan warrior the mayan warrior i also like the other one what's the love the heart uh oh that's the robot heart robot heart i'm i'm like robot heart

SPEAKER_05: i like the mayan warrior what are you what do you like what do you i like both of those i think that

SPEAKER_141: i mean listen my and where you can't beat that light can't be my own warrior can't beat it

David Friedberg: yeah what about um what's the one that happens during the day there's one that's like the daytime

SPEAKER_73: one you mean an art car no not an art car there's a dance floor that's during the day a stage that

David Friedberg: everybody goes to like it's like if you want to dance at like oh like 11 to five oh it's that uh

SPEAKER_352: well i don't it's a pretty good san francisco one it's a san francisco one that's really dope i

SPEAKER_141: forgot the name of it everybody always meets there they always have this sunset there it's over on

SPEAKER_74: like uh like nine o'clock or it's not and it's there's the um like the cirque de soleil not them

SPEAKER_22: but there's like a a whole trapeze next to it and the best my best moment of burning man was i go by the sign it says like you know rule number one rule number two and like safety third and i was like okay safety third great there's a message for our children what was your best moment burning man

SPEAKER_49: you got a favorite favorite moment or favorite thing to do go to the temple or i love the temple

SPEAKER_27: a lot of people don't um i i find the temple it's pretty hardcore yeah it is hardcore but you know

SPEAKER_31: that all the sadness there is the flip side of all the happiness that generated the sadness right it's like this is two sides to a coin i find it somewhat beautiful and i've had lots of i think kind of transcendent experiences at burning man in general and certainly at the temple i think my best thing was my just my first year the first day i was there i i just i was like a kid in an amusement park for the first time you know i was like i haven't felt that way since i was 10 years old and to feel

SPEAKER_27: it again at uh when i was probably like 41 it was it was pretty mind-blowing i was like oh my god this i remember this feeling it's like this is the feeling of of just yeah excitement yeah mind-blown

SPEAKER_05: but that that was the mind too and you know i was a pretty cynical guy about it and i was like all right i'll go whatever hippy dippy nonsense i was like this is the greatest art music people are in the right

SPEAKER_06: mindset and uh you know when i say goodbye to my friend dave goldberg who passed away you know that temple i was like one of the most deep experiences i've had in my life because i just sat there with other people who were grieving people they lost the year before people don't know that there's a temple and then there's the burning man they burned the man on saturday night they burned the temple on sunday night and people go and they put a note or something they remember about a person who died in the previous year

SPEAKER_19: so you go and there might be what 500 people a thousand people around the temple in the temple

SPEAKER_111: grieving their loss and it's just it's it's one of the most beautiful things i've seen in my life

SPEAKER_31: it's very spiritual and then they burn it which is a really interesting um you know everything's ephemeral and sometimes people hold on for these things too long but you can invest a lot of

SPEAKER_36: your i think grief and pain in this and then having it all burn it's very somber but it is beautiful

SPEAKER_330: it's like a sort of a renewal yeah you know you put the yeah i see people will put up a picture and

SPEAKER_06: then they'll write the story and then you walk around it and you get to see like oh yes we are on this planet but for a moment make it count right make it count yeah all right spencer listen this has

SPEAKER_74: been deep i i will see you uh 2021 at the burn hopefully if we get this done uh hopefully i think

SPEAKER_151: we're gonna get it done if if we can get a little bit of change in the management of our uh you know of the

SPEAKER_97: nation i'm hoping for a bigger change yeah maybe we could get somebody in there who would take responsibility maybe people could pick up a couple of these adam sells these beautiful masks and they

SPEAKER_151: give one for free to some people you wear it and then it goes away i don't know all right listen be

SPEAKER_74: safe spence uh and great to have met you and great job on the pod by the way we'll see you all thanks jason next time real pleasure for me too okay cheers now bye