SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, we've got a great show for you today. Sourcegraph CEO, Quinn Slack, who is building Google for CodeSearch, is on the program. What a great company.

SPEAKER_01: They've become a unicorn and raised money from the best investors in Silicon Valley. It's a great story.

SPEAKER_00: We talk about SaaS pricing and a bunch of other interesting topics. He's a good guest. But first, I want to follow up on some stories we covered earlier in the week. Head of Instagram, Adam Wasari, made some comments comparing social media to the car industry in terms of harm done and the value of cars in a recent podcast appearance. So I'm going to break down that comparison. I think it's actually not a bad one and tons more drama in the NFT space. Jay-Z is suing his Rockefeller Records co-founder, Dame Dash, who's trying to sell NFTs. Jay-Z already sold his NFTs, yada, yada.

SPEAKER_01: And we talk a little bit about OpenSea and the issues they faced. There's an update on their employee who was front running the market or doing insider trading, however we want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_03: Stick with us. Great episode. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join the Zendesk for Startups program and get six free months of Zendesk products. You'll also get access to an exclusive community of startups for advice and connections. Visit Zendesk.com slash twist today to get started. Lemon.io Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at Lemon.io. Go to Lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. And marketer hire. Need expert marketing help fast? Hire vetted marketing specialists this week from the company that's already used by Netflix, Allbirds, and more. Get $500 off your first hire at marketerhire.com slash twist.

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SPEAKER_00: Okay, the head of Instagram, Adam Mossari, is facing backlash for comments he made on the Recode Media podcast, an excellent podcast with Pierre Kafka. I've been on it once or twice. He basically compares social media and the dangers of it to the car industry. Let's listen to a 70

SPEAKER_10: second clip, and I'll give you my feedback after. As head of Instagram, do you feel like the product should not be available to certain kinds of people? I mean, if this is something that genuinely could make, and you don't know yet, right, that you're saying we don't, we don't, we're not fully confident in the research, but if there's a chance that this is a product that could really harm people in the same way that, you know, cigarettes could harm people, that you guys should be restricting it

SPEAKER_12: or maybe taking it off the market? Absolutely not. And I really don't agree with the comparison to drugs or cigarettes, which have very limited, if any, upsides. I think that anything that is going to be used at scale is going to have positive and negative outcomes. Cars have positive and negative outcomes. We understand that. We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar. I think that we do a ton to help people connect with those that they love. We've helped advance a number of important social causes, particularly Me Too and Black Lives Matter. We help small businesses make a living. We help creators find ways to express themselves. There's a bunch of them. We give voice to those who've been historically marginalized. There's a ton of value that we create. But yes, of course, there are also

SPEAKER_16: issues as well. All right. They have it, folks. So, you know that quote, in case you missed it, we know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents. But by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's fine. I think using analogies is how we figure out how new things impact us. A couple things to think about with cars. Cars go through a lot of regulatory testing and have massive amounts of regulation. In the beginning, they had none because they were new. And then they went through massive, massive regulation. And there was many actions taken against the car industry because they knew that airbags and seatbelts and three-point harnesses would have absolutely saved more lives. And they kind of took their time in adding those because they added a lot of cost to the car. And a lot

SPEAKER_18: being, you know, hundreds of dollars. And it would have saved millions of lives or probably hundreds of

SPEAKER_01: thousands of lives over the years. Since 30,000 people a year, I believe is the number die in car

David Friedberg: accidents. And there is a minimum age for driving and people take driving lessons and they get a

SPEAKER_00: driver's license. So if Mossari is a fan of this, great, great metaphor. How about kids have to take a course, pass a test, and they get a social media license if they want to use social media before the age of 18 or 17 or whatever it is, if we know that, you know, and it's proven that this causes, you know, anxiety, depression, etc. in one third of teen girls, well, then maybe they should take a course before they get on it. That seems completely reasonable to me. It seems like the social media, the downside to social media might be actually more than the downside to driving. So great analogy, Mossari. Yeah, let's regulate social media for kids exactly the same way cars are, which is don't let them use it. Right? Kids are not allowed to use social media until they hit the age of 16. And there are situations are allowed to use it. And there are sometimes not allowed to go on the highway, right? You get a learner's permit, you're allowed to use it. But during the daylight, you have to have a driver with you. I like that analogy as well. What if to use social media, your parent had to be, you know, or your guardian had to be on the side right next to you. In other words, they had access to the account, they saw what you posted, maybe they approve what you post, you can easily build that into Instagram. How about a tool where with Instagram, you add who your parent or guardian is, I'm sorry. And that person then sees all of your interactions, everything you posted and everybody you followed. And they would give you the ability to approve like I do on my iPhone, I will approve the apps my daughters want to add, they've requested the parental controls I edit. So let's put parental controls on Instagram, where if somebody wants to post, and they're an underage person, they're, you know, I guess 13 is the starting age. But let's say anybody who's, you know, a teenager, not 18 yet, their parents have to approve their post before they post it. Easy to do, right. So I think metaphors are helpful. And I actually kind of like this one. Why not highly regulate social media for kids, it makes total sense. US News published an article in February about the impact of social media on teen girls, mental health. There's a quote from that article, we found that girls who started using social media at two to three hours a day or more at age 13. And then increase that use over time had the highest levels of suicide risk in emerging adulthood, said the study author Sarah coin, she is an associate director of the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Suicide rates of 100,000 people in America have risen steadily, since social media took off in the late 2000s. So if you look, we would have 11. If you look at this chart, suicide rates, you know, 10.8 11 10.9 up until 2006. And from 2006, we had straight up growth in the number of suicides in the United States that correlates exactly when Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram all became super popular. Is that the correlation? Is it opioids? Is it something else? Who knows, but it's definitely something that is so obvious to anybody who's a parent or anybody who's used social media, that social media is not something children should use. It's obvious to every parent, parents give into it, I understand it's really hard if the other kids in the class have phones, they have tick tock, it's hard to police, you don't have unlimited time, we've all got to work and have other obligations as parents. But this is where Musari needs to take more ownership. And I would, the idea is here, they were covering up this information about, you know, these results, at the same time, that they were proposing Instagram for kids. So this is

SPEAKER_18: absolutely crazy. I don't know if I like the cigarette analogy, as much as I like the car analogy. So, another

SPEAKER_00: quick update on this Facebook fallout after the Wall Street Journal article published on Tuesday, following happened, three Democrats from both houses of Congress sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking for answers like, quote, please provide copies of all external research Facebook has commissioned or otherwise access regarding the mental health of your children and teen users. Here's another quote, please provide copies of all internal research Facebook has conducted regarding the mental health of your children and teen users. And third, and finally, a quote, will Facebook agree to abandon its plans to launch any new platforms for children or teens, including versions of Instagram for children? If not, why not? So you're going to see a lot more legal investigations. And I think Facebook, you know, we should, our expectation is Facebook cares more about growth and revenue than they do our children. You should not trust Facebook with your information, and you should not trust them with your children. And certainly, you should not trust the Chinese Communist Party, and let your kids use Tiktok. My best advice to you as a parent, and I'm not saying this in a preachy way is no social media till 16, or 17. That's going to be our plan in our household. And I understand not everybody has the resources I have, or maybe there's, you're a single parent, and you don't have the time to monitor everything. There are apps now that will let you monitor like our pack, I think is one where you can put this on your kid's phone or iPad, and you can watch their usage, see what URLs they open, see what instant messages and what they do, how much time

SPEAKER_18: they spend in each app, and in fact, to block them from certain apps. And of course, none of this is perfect. And I respect your right to choose as a parent, what you think is the best, but our Lord, do some research on this, because, and if you know anybody who lets unbridled access to their kids, I think parents need to sort of team up on this. Because if you have three or four kids in a group who are allowed to use Tiktok, and four or five who are not, we all know what's going to happen, they're all going to share the Tiktok and probably something they could handle at 16, 17, 18 years old, something like that. But I think we all know at 10, 11, 12, 13, probably not something they should be doing. So it takes a village. And how do you sleep at night, Facebook executives, I hope the money was worth it because you're all gonna regret it when you get to the pearly gates. Zendesk is the go to tool for customer

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SPEAKER_00: platform, the marketplace, has given an update about the insider trading, front running, however we want to frame this behavior. OpenSea updated the original blog post, we covered this on Wednesday show announcing that an employee who was involved in insider trading of NFTs has resigned. Here's the quote from the blog. We have a strong obligation to this community to move move it forward responsibly and diligently. That's a, you know, a nothing sentence. The behavior of one of our employees violated that obligation. Okay, they're admitting that this occurred and yesterday requested and accepted his resignation. That would be the lowest form of sanction is that you accepted their resignation. I'm kind of disappointed by that. Here's another quote. We do not take this behavior lightly. If you're just accepting his resignation, I think you do. Upon learning of this conduct, we immediately commissioned a third party to conduct a thorough review of the incident and make recommendations on how we can strengthen our existing controls. That review is ongoing, but we are committed quickly implementing its recommendation. So that quote is a standard PR tactic. We hired an outside investigator. Here's how it actually works because I've been involved in this before. You hire this outside investigator. Those investigators, who do they

SPEAKER_30: report to? Who pays their bill? Okay. OpenSea pays their bill. They report to the CEO and the board of

SPEAKER_16: OpenSea. Those shareholders can take that report and throw it away if they don't agree with it. They don't have to act on it. They can create a second report. They can do whatever they want with these

SPEAKER_38: reports. The fact is, what this person did was really dirty. And it really is going to tarnish the entire

SPEAKER_00: space. Because if one person did this, I'm almost certain 10 other people did. And so the actual response should be, we are going to pursue legal action against this employee. You probably should if you are a trading platform and somebody is screwing the folks in your marketplace, literally, this person was screwing the buyers and sellers in the marketplace, you should pursue some legal options. I know that's hard to say. But when somebody steals or does something like this, the actual way to take the

SPEAKER_18: behavior lightly is to let them resign. You want to take legal action. That's what they should have done here. They should have pursued it with the authorities. There might not be anything you can

SPEAKER_00: pursue. I don't know if this is exactly legal because OpenSea and other folks are claiming these are not securities. So it's not a security. And how is it exactly insider trading? They just bought a company. It'd be like buying a comic book that you knew was going to be promoted by Marvel Comics and then holding it. The problem is these NFTs are accelerating in cost on the first day. So this is more like that story we had of the Nike vice president. And she was her son was buying all the, you know, shoe drops before they came out. This is more along that. So more along that line. OpenSea's response

SPEAKER_01: timeline, they found out in quotes about the employee actions on Tuesday, forced their resignation on Wednesday and announced they will potentially pursue legal action and changing their anti front

SPEAKER_00: running control. So maybe they will pursue it. I give their response here like a six. They didn't mention investigating all other employees and checking to see if anybody else had done this. I bet you somebody else I would say dollars to donuts 60 70% chance somebody else in the company has done this, or somebody else's family members have done this. So while this person got caught, you know, somebody could have just told their family member, their cousin, their friend from college, hey, go buy a

SPEAKER_18: bunch of these for me, they're going to be huge. And we'll flip them two days later and chop the money up. So there's probably some other stuff that's going on here. That's my best guess. But I'm saying

SPEAKER_00: guess as well. Now in more NFT news, NFTs have captured people's imagination because people will buy them. And they're basically worthless digital assets. The only value they have is the value that is bestowed upon them by collectors. So there's no intrinsic value in any of these. Essentially, maybe

SPEAKER_18: somebody can tell me if there is one that comes with rights to borrow, you know, a boat or something or you know, people are selling NFTs for time on private jets or, you know, usage of an actual real

SPEAKER_00: world private club. I'm not sure if they do. So in more NFT news, Jay Z sued Damon dash, his co founder at Rockefeller records over auctioning off copyright to Jay Z's debut album as an NFT. So this is going to get really complicated. So in June, Jay Z's Rockefeller records sued its co founder game dash after hearing about dashes plans to auction off his stake in the company as an NFT. Now, why would be if he has a stake in the company? Does that stake in the company come with residuals to that album? Is there any value to it? Do you have a voting mechanism? Is this company active? And are these rights active? Who knows? In July, Dame Dash launched an auction with a starting bid of 10 million for his one third share of Rockefeller is one third share of reasonable doubt and a commemorative NFT representing the certificate of ownership. This is the NFT. It looks terrible. And it says it's the rock. It's the diamond. You get the idea. Quote from the website. Damon dash is auctioning his one third interest in Rockefeller Inc, which owns reasonable doubt Jay Z's first album. I don't know what it owns. Does it own all the rights to it? Can you then sell the songs on reasonable doubt to a movie and get one third of the fees? So if somebody wants to use it in a TV show, ie licensing or have those rights been sold? The highest bidder will also receive the commemorative NFT. It's the rock representing certificate of ownership. The Bloomberg article explains the convoluted legal argument as quote, Rockefeller says that while dash holds a one third stake in the company, it owns the album itself. And he has new legal right to sell the NFT. Essentially, Rockefeller saying dash has no right to mint a stake in the record

SPEAKER_18: company or the album itself as an NFT and sell it. And I'll just add here like, I think they're trying to screw the person who's buying it. Like, what are they actually buying? You're buying yourself into a

SPEAKER_00: lawsuit. Seems pretty dumb to me. Dash was blocked from selling rights to the album and agreed to wait till the lawsuit was resolved before continuing the auction, according to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article quoted Dash's lawyer who stated that quote, Dash is just trying to assign the rights to future

SPEAKER_01: royalties. He's entitled to as one third owner, Rockefeller, as artists have done for a long time. So I guess you are getting the rights to future royalties. You get all of them, you get them up until the price you

SPEAKER_00: paid for a 10 million. And then you split them. I don't know what the contract here is lawsuits ongoing. So dash is NFT auction has been put on hold. So I mean, he's talking about selling his stake, which would be securities as an NFT. And we're having this discussion or NFTs securities. Well, this one is specifically designed to act like and represent a security. So this one for sure is a security. Are other ones a security? Or are they a trading card that just happens to accumulate a lot of value? To celebrate the 25th anniversary, a reasonable doubt his debut album, Jay Z sold his own NFT via Sotheby's for 138k. On Sotheby's website, it notes the NFT was on sale from June 25 to July 2, with a starting bid of 1000. And it's a slightly better looking NFT, I guess. Yeah, I mean, this is the Wild West NFTs. Basically, people are looking at them and saying, this is a way for me to get somebody with a bunch of crypto money to give me that crypto money. And I give them back a JPEG that really has, you know, probably little to no value. And if it acts like a security, and you know, I guess it's a security, it's really hard to tell in these cases. Because these are something new. They're not exactly securities. But if people are buying them, because they increase in value, and you're selling collections of them, you have marketplaces, I can see people making an argument they are. And they can obviously be used for all kinds of money laundering, and washing of money that was obtained illegally. So you know, these are this is a really interesting, dangerous, weird thing that has occurred. So if you're into this NFT space, you made a ton of money, suggest doing a little profit taking, have fun out

SPEAKER_18: there. But if it's 99% of your net worth, and you can buy a house with half the money, or pay off your college debt, that's never a bad thing to do. I wish you luck. Be careful out there. Have fun. You

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SPEAKER_49: lemon. Okay, check it out everybody lemon.io slash twist. All right, really excited to have our next guest on the program. His name is Quinn slack. His company is source graph. They've been on fire. What do they do? They're basically Google for code. What does that mean? If you're a developer, and you're sitting there, and you're coding, and you need some ideas of how to get your job done? Well, it would be great if you could search a Google like repository for solutions. Well, he built that in over the last seven

SPEAKER_51: years, it's turned out to be a huge business. In the past year, 800,000 developers have used the product. So he's going to blow past a million soon. He's raised a bunch of money. And we're going to talk today about the developer class and what he's building over at source graph. Welcome to the program. Quinn slack. Thank you. It's great to be here. So when you see the app, and the SaaS software company slack emerge, and somebody in your team says, Hey, Quinn, we should use slack. And they install slack at your company. And everybody's like, Hey, Quinn, are you on slack? Is Quinn slack on

SPEAKER_55: slack? I mean, what happens? Is that? Yeah, slack. And having slack.org. It feels weird. But yeah,

SPEAKER_58: I think to be fair, Stuart Butterfield should change his name to Stuart source graph. So I'd

SPEAKER_59: like to make that happen. Fair play. Fair play. I just want to make sure people understand your name

SPEAKER_61: is slack. Your last name is slack. Do people call prior to slack existing as a SaaS product? Did people

SPEAKER_28: refer you as slack? Like people call me Calacanis? No, I was never that cool.

SPEAKER_65: I love coding. And I've always loved coding. And so I was never a get called by the last name

SPEAKER_67: person. But that's okay. All right. So you founded source graph in 2013. What was the origin story

SPEAKER_38: here? Like, was there not an a place to search for code back then? Do people use GitHub to do that?

SPEAKER_69: Or did it not exist? Or was it just not well done? No, there wasn't the amount of code in the world is

Chamath Palihapitiya: growing exponentially. And it sounds crazy. But we had to go build it for every company out there. And now we have some of the world's best engineering teams using source graph. Three out of five of the fang companies are other customers are Uber, which I know you're involved in and plaid Lassian GE. And one staff that I really love is there's a billion people in the world that are using products that are built by people using source graph. So before we came along, there wasn't any kind of way to

SPEAKER_72: have universal code search across all of the code. And we built it.

SPEAKER_38: Now, where do you get all this code from? Because people for a long time were very proprietary and secretive about their code, they didn't want to let that out that was considered a competitive advantage. Open source obviously came out. And that led a revolution that is driving a lot of, you know,

SPEAKER_28: the massive innovation we see in the economy today. How do you get code into your Google of code?

Chamath Palihapitiya: So picture yourself as a developer that works at a very large company with, say, 1000s of developers with decades of legacy code. There's so much code in that company. And you as a developer have a job which is to build new things. But most of the job is reading and understanding and maintaining code. It's not writing code, that's about 5% of the job. And so all the code in your company, that is the primary thing that you use source graph to understand and fix and reuse. There's also a ton of code out there in public, all of these open source components that companies are using more and more. And that's a thriving ecosystem. But first, we set out to solve the problem

SPEAKER_38: for a company's own internal code. Got it. So it's internal searching of that code base. And then they use other tools to document it and etc. How do you make money from this?

SPEAKER_65: It's per seat. So developers use source graph many times a day in the same way that people use Google

Chamath Palihapitiya: many times a day for everyday questions for developers, you know, maybe 10 times a day. And if they are using source graph inside of a company, then we get paid. And so it's nicely aligned. And it's an organic viral product that spreads, again, much in the same way that Google spread. Google,

SPEAKER_65: you heard about it from, yeah, yeah, slack as well. It's free for up to 10 users. Is that correct? And

SPEAKER_88: then when you hit your 10th developer start paying, what do you pay per seat?

Chamath Palihapitiya: It depends on what features and components you're using. It's a tiny fraction of what companies are paying to hire and retain and keep their developers happy. And when you look at how important it is for every company to be building more software to be staying ahead of the competition to be innovating, because we consumers we demand so much better software each year. That's an imperative. And though you're going to win, if you can innovate, you're going to lose if you can't. So every company knows they need to be a software company. And if you can give them something that truly helps their developers move more quickly, ship more products, grow revenue. That's the holy grail. And that's

SPEAKER_38: something that we are able to do. And the company's grown rapidly, but it was a little bit of a slow

SPEAKER_80: start. You spent maybe a couple years building this out and didn't have much traction from what I

Chamath Palihapitiya: understand. Yeah, there was a lot of work going into it. So let me give you the backstory. I have been a coder all my life. And I've seen what it's like to work on really big code bases. I was working on open source projects. I also was working with my Sourcegraph co founder at Palantir before this. And we're working inside of two really large banks, JP Morgan and Bank of America. And we felt the pain

SPEAKER_65: of being devs in an organization with a ton of code. And to find code that we can reuse, or to understand how this works, or to fix a bug, a lot of times we'd have to go tap someone on the shoulder, we'd have to go on SharePoint. So many times we had to fly to meet another person to have an in person

Chamath Palihapitiya: meeting with them just to learn how this piece of code works. Now, if we could have read the code, or found the code, then that would have taken instead of $10,000 and a week, maybe three to five minutes. And so we felt that pain, it is so hard to make progress as a developer. And then you zoom out and all these companies that have this imperative to write more software, well, it feels like, wow, we are not able to ship enough new products and look at all these other companies out innovating us. It all comes back to their developers are finding it so hard to work in this exponentially growing amount of code and complexity. So we had felt the pain. But there's another thing that we saw in my co founder had been at Google before. Now, Google also has a ton of code, 10s of 1000s of developers every single day adding more code. But they have this secret weapon, they have this internal Google for code, and they even had that, you know, more than 10 years ago. And so

SPEAKER_65: every Google developer is constantly using their internal Google for code to find existing code to reuse to fix problems to onboard to understand code. And if you quit Google, a lot of times the thing you

SPEAKER_78: miss most is not the free sushi or the foosball. It's this internal code search, this internal Google for code. So Google.com I think is there, like an external version, which is completely

SPEAKER_69: different. This is an internal secret weapon that doesn't want to give other companies because they

SPEAKER_88: want to have the edge. So 300 bucks a year for the software 25 bucks a seat, I'm just seeing a Google

Chamath Palihapitiya: results as ballpark. Is that about right? It depends on what features you're using. On average, it's trying to, you know, it's, you know, something between basically, it's less than 1% of what you're going to pay a developer a year.

SPEAKER_66: Dell developers crossed 125 150k 1% will be 1500. That'd be like 100 bucks a month. So it's,

SPEAKER_38: yeah, it's not cheap 150 bucks a month, but you get a lot of value out of it. Because if you save, but one, one week a year would be 2%. So if you save just three days of a developer's banging their head against the wall, pays for itself.

SPEAKER_105: Yeah, that's right. And here's the scenario. It's so easy to question about this. Why are

SPEAKER_49: you so secret about the pricing? Why are SaaS companies secret about price? I noticed on your

SPEAKER_16: website, while we're talking about this, there's no pricing on the website. Is it that people consider it a competitive advantage? I know this has always been frustrating for people. In fact, invested in a company called capiche.com that was going and asking all the people who own SaaS

SPEAKER_108: software, how much they pay, and then putting it up there so that people could negotiate harder

SPEAKER_51: against, you know, SaaS companies who don't put their pricing on it. Why do you choose to not have like, transparent pricing on the website? I'm curious.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, well, I'll tell you why. And we are a very transparent company. So you know, you can look at our handbook, you can see, you can look at our code, I'm just talking specifically

SPEAKER_65: about pricing. Yeah, yeah. So developers are our audience. And if you look at the state of tooling available to developers, a lot of people think, wow, they must be using these amazing, super high

Chamath Palihapitiya: tech minority report like interfaces, because they're building the future. But no, the state of tools that developers use is very, very poor. And you look at that compared to what a trader and finance would have Bloomberg, where that's 10s of 1000s of dollars per year, you don't see that for developers, even though that's what developers need to be much happier and much higher velocity. And so from this background, it's really easy to get started with source graph, you can

SPEAKER_30: What does that have to do with the pricing, though? That's not going to answer my question about pricing. I'm asking you very specifically, why do companies who are SaaS not just disclose the

Chamath Palihapitiya: pricing? Because the price that it takes to get started is often a lot lower than the price once it's rolled out to a whole company and the CTO and CIO and so many internal business processes are kind of dependent on it. And if you show the price to get started, then those people are going to be anchored. And if you show the price that is once it's delivering tremendous enterprise value, then the devs are going to say, that's way more than, you know, I am comfortable with. And this is a market failure.

SPEAKER_49: This is interesting. See, that's the reason why I asked the question three times two or three times

SPEAKER_51: is because I knew there was an answer. So there is a sticker shock that occurs in SaaS. I'll take this outside of source graph, because this is an issue I see across a lot of SaaS products. And it's very frustrating to consumers. But the reason SaaS companies do it, this makes total sense to me, is that the sticker shock of Oh, I've got 1000 developers and I pay 1500. Why would I pay a million five for this? We could build it internal. That sticker shock that somebody might have or have 1000 developers is 1500 $1.5 million a year, you kind of have to have a discussion with them of why that's actually worth it and that they would have to put 50 developers on this project, which would cost them $10 million a year to build it and they could just have it right now for 15% of that cost. But that's not a conversation people can have with the web page. Yeah, that's right. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_16: It's a very interesting observation, or realization. I was always wondering what it is. But that's,

David Friedberg: if you get them on the phone, and they see it. But some people do have when people say that to you,

SPEAKER_88: hey, why should I pay a million bucks a year? You have people were paying seven figures a year for

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SPEAKER_49: higher.com slash twist. For those folks, when they say to you, why don't we just build this ourselves?

David Friedberg: How do you and your sales team overcome that challenge?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, so first, let me talk about how we get to that level of investment from a customer and then

SPEAKER_65: thought about why they're still using sourcecraft. We get to that level where we started at a fraction of a million dollars. And a lot of devs were using it. A lot of times say a company has 2000 engineers,

Chamath Palihapitiya: the company thinks, well, this is a brand new thing. We've never seen code search before. We don't know how many people will use it. Let's start with 200 users 10% of our dev team. We know we've seen this play over and over again, that it's going to spread virally, but we don't want to create any barriers. And so we're upfront about that. And fine, yeah, start with 200. But then it grows, it spreads, and starts to get to the point where 2000 devs are using it. And then they're starting to use it not just to find code to onboard to understand code, but also to push out automated fixes. And they're getting so much more value out of it. And just like I said about those Google devs that when they quit Google, they miss this code search tool so much. Devs can't live without code search, they can't live without source graph. So it's this organic growth, and we have proven so much of the value. And the person who's making the decision can ask any single developer on the team, and they're gonna say, you can never, ever, ever take this away from me. So that's how we get to that level. And we like proving ourselves, because we think we can do it. And so if we were to share that price to someone to whom we haven't proven ourselves, it's gonna be a weird conversation. And also, that's not what we charge before, you know, it's been proven out to a whole team.

SPEAKER_124: Right. So it might be 25 bucks a month, or you just come up with some flat rate or whatever.

SPEAKER_38: The Chrome extension seems to be in the core of all this people are working in Chrome all day,

SPEAKER_88: and they're very comfortable that but you have other people building Chrome extensions to work with the product. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_65: The main part of source graph is the web based code search that looks like Google, you are,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you pull up source graph for your company, and there's a big search box. And that's where you type in what you're looking for, or what you're trying to learn. And that's the core, the Chrome extension is a great way for source graph to be integrated into some of the other tools that your team uses, like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and so on. But the core of it is this web application for code search again, just like Google.

SPEAKER_130: Right. But then I saw on your site, people were creating like, or I don't know if these are people

SPEAKER_88: who work with the company, but you have other Chrome extensions that people build or sort of like an open source community. Is that correct? Or they're not from extensions, they're actually source graph

Chamath Palihapitiya: extensions. So you know, here's an example of that. If you are a developer, you get a page at 3am in the middle of the night, and your site is down, you want a single pane of glass, when you're looking through the code to help you figure out where the issue is, you can get the site back up. And with source graph extensions, you can show inside of a customer, for example, this code is deployed here, here's who last touched it, here are all the error logs. And it lets you put any kind of context right on the code so that everyone can see it whether you just joined yesterday, or you've been at the company for 10 years.

SPEAKER_16: Got it. How do you deal with competitors in a space like this and open source competitors as

SPEAKER_130: well? I know anytime somebody builds a big company like this, and they get Sequoia and these legendary investors and you pass that billion dollar valuation, everybody's eyes are all of a sudden going to be on it. Do you have a lot of me too? And, you know, also ran companies now? And do you have face competition from open source? And how do you contend with that?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I know a lot of people are skeptical about this, but we don't face right now, traditional commercial competition. There are some open source code search tools. But the primary challenge we face is most devs and most companies have never used code search. And we see this growing so quickly, but we are the ones educating. Sometimes we wish that more people were talking about code search, that there are more code search tools in the market, and I'm sure that there will be. But the key thing for us is we are universal. So you take most companies have code in so many different languages scattered across a lot of different systems, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, legacy code, we look across all of those. And a lot of the usual suspects you might imagine to be competitors, for example, GitHub, or, you know, Google or Amazon, people wouldn't trust them to be vendor independent, GitHub is going to make, I think, in the future, better code search for your code on GitHub. But if you're the company that has code scattered across seven different places, and you've acquired other companies with code elsewhere, you need search across all of them, because you need to be able to certify, yes, I fixed this problem everywhere, not just in this tiny little fraction. So

SPEAKER_140: that's why it's so important that we are universal with respect to competition.

SPEAKER_130: Companies are all going, obviously 100% virtual remote work work from home. Because of the

SPEAKER_38: pandemic, some are trying to get people to come back seems unlikely, developers are the easiest

SPEAKER_130: group, I think, to manage remotely, because you see their commits and, and they're in high demand, so they can work from home if they want to, or find a job pretty easily. I wonder if you're seeing in

SPEAKER_38: the data or anecdotally with your partners, and as a developer, more developers internationally working for us companies, because of this work from home movement, where companies like Google and Apple, and Facebook, which demanded people come to offices, now are not doing that. And how is that changing the industry as a whole? Now that work from home is the standard, not, you know, for, you know,

SPEAKER_30: 37 signals and, you know, Matt Mullen, when I get WordPress and automatic, like, now everybody's doing

SPEAKER_147: it, it's not just 37 signals and automatic.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, well, we are an all remote company ourselves. And we went all remote about a month and a half

SPEAKER_105: before the pandemic started. So we have felt this and what we saw is

SPEAKER_108: you saw six weeks before February, you saw like an early in December, that this was going to be a

SPEAKER_138: work from home type situation. No, we decided totally independently with no for knowledge.

SPEAKER_150: Interesting. Wow. You must look like a visionary for making that decision six weeks before the pandemic.

SPEAKER_110: Well, we were prepared, we had gotten all the home desks and chairs. And we knew what it was going to be

Chamath Palihapitiya: like for companies that were thrust into that work from home, all remote situation. And used to be, if you were working with a bunch of other devs in an office, you had a question about code, go tap someone on the shoulder, or you'd been to lunch with them last week, and they mentioned something, you had so much context, it was so much easier. But now all of a sudden, you're working at home, you're completely isolated, how do you get answers to these questions? And yeah, Sourcegraph is

SPEAKER_38: there's no tap on the shoulder, right? Yeah, you can't go walk to lunch and say, Hey, how do I find this out? So that that is an incredible wind at yourselves. What is the pandemic been like, you're like the ultimate example of a company, other than say, zoom and slack,

SPEAKER_130: that would be massive wind in the sales to how much did you grow in 2020 and 2021 versus pre pandemic on like a percentage basis? What was the velocity change?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think it coincided with us getting, since we started in 2013, to the end of 2019, that's when we finally built the product that was selling repeatedly that a dev could bring into their company, and it just would spread and work. And so those two things did coincide. But we've been

SPEAKER_105: growing really quickly. So you know, more than four x year over year, tremendous year over year,

SPEAKER_159: wow, four times as many customers one year to the next or revenue or both. That's extraordinary.

SPEAKER_38: What have you learned as a CEO, running a company that's growing four x? Like,

SPEAKER_130: what didn't you anticipate that you've had to like add to your skill set as the founder CEO?

SPEAKER_110: Well, it's been pretty crazy. We grew from around 30 people in January of 2020 to now 210 people.

SPEAKER_168: So I feel like my job, I think everyone's job here is changing all the time.

SPEAKER_130: And you added a person every other day, just so you know, I think the mess is basically a new

SPEAKER_110: person joining your company every 48 hours. Yeah, you know, look, all these companies have so much

Chamath Palihapitiya: code, the background problem that we're dealing with big code and helping companies grapple with that's getting worse and worse. And you have this pandemic, which has accelerated a lot of these trends and also made it so developers are isolated and need more help. You have all these trends that are going in our favor. And then what's going to happen for many decades to come is the number of software developers is going to be growing at nine to 10% year over year. So it's this long term

SPEAKER_65: secular trend that is both creating the problem that we solve and you know, making such a big

Chamath Palihapitiya: opportunity for us. And I just want to get back to that because all these devs writing code, all that code still exists, it's piling up like a landfill. And 10 years ago, when Marc Andreessen said, soccer is eating the world. Now every company is drowning in it. And there's more code written in

SPEAKER_58: the last few years than in the entire history before that. So this problem is just getting worse

SPEAKER_130: and worse. And we call that technical debt in the industry. If you're not documenting your code, if it's not clean, if people don't understand it, my Lord, that that's just like a really bad

SPEAKER_47: foundation, you know, on a skyscraper. Yeah, perhaps a, perhaps a callous metaphor on my part, given what's happening with the Millennium Tower. I don't know if you saw that in San Francisco, but they tried to fix it and it sunk faster. I mean, what is going on in the world that we, those idiots didn't build pylons and they built on sand and unbelievable. I'm not asking you to

SPEAKER_175: officially comment on that. I'm just going on a little bit of a software engineer, not a civil

SPEAKER_110: engineer. And I believe that what software engineers do is way, way worse and create way more

Chamath Palihapitiya: tech debt. And I am one and I get it is there's such pressure to move quickly.

SPEAKER_130: I mean, that is one of the big problems. Here's a really weird thing. That's occurring from the work from home movement. Developers are talking about this on Reddit and Hacker News. They do they take two jobs. And I think the New York Times even got to this story later. And then they just do like a bingo kind of thing where they try to Jenga their schedules and they deliver code. If you're an

SPEAKER_49: elite developer and you deliver your code perfectly to two different companies and they are pleased with

SPEAKER_175: you and you're in the top 10%, is this moral, unethical, elite, awesome? How do you think about that?

SPEAKER_110: I think you need to be transparent about what is going on here on both sides. I think companies

Chamath Palihapitiya: would love to get to the point where there was a clear contract and it was entirely measurable. I don't think it's ever going to get to that point. But on the dev side, I think this highlights that a really talented developer is adding way more value to their company than that developer can capture. And that is a problem slash opportunity as well. If you're one of your top five developers

SPEAKER_47: at source graph was working two jobs, and somebody ratted them out, what would you do? Would you fire

SPEAKER_184: them? Or just double their salary? I have not thought about this. That's why I'm asking because

SPEAKER_65: it makes it super interesting for your answer. If they were contributing, then I would think that's a

Chamath Palihapitiya: genius move. And I think it's important to be transparent in there. So I wish that they would have told us because that insight about how they are so productive in two different places at once, we could learn so much from and we're unique in that we are all about increasing dev velocity and most companies probably wouldn't celebrate that and say, Oh, what can we learn about that? But I would,

SPEAKER_108: I would find that fascinating, personally. Yeah, it's a snap promotion for me. It's like, well, we obviously did not challenge you enough, manage you properly. Let's have I'm taking that

SPEAKER_38: person to a Warriors game and sitting courtside with them and figuring out exactly why they're not the co founder of the company. I mean, my God, you have to be brilliant. Now, the one I didn't like was somebody was said they were they claimed, you know, who knows, these are all like anonymous discussions. But one of them that somebody highlighted for me, they claimed they were outsourcing to a team in, you know, wherever. And then they were just cleaning up the code and then

SPEAKER_83: publishing. And I was like, that's also clever. But that feels just insane and nuts. Don't do that.

SPEAKER_58: Very strange. Yeah, well, a lot of developers have side projects in open source that they do. And

SPEAKER_196: it's a great way to learn. So I get it. What do you think? You? It's obvious what the gains are from

SPEAKER_38: working from home. People are happier, you remove commutes, they get to spend time with their families if they have them or on their hobbies. Or both. I don't know if that's actually possible. I have

SPEAKER_88: three kids. I'm not sure if you can have hobbies when you have kids. But what is lost? And then how are you thinking about that? Because based on what you told me, 90% of your company has never met you

SPEAKER_38: and or been in an office space with you. What does that do for culture? Does it matter? Are we overthinking the value of being in a room? Or is something actually lost? And how do you think about

SPEAKER_130: the culture at your company, which is a company that let's face it, 90% of the people working there have never been to the source graph office, if there even is one anymore? Yeah, well, all remote

Chamath Palihapitiya: today during a pandemic is totally different from all remote outside of a pandemic. What was a big reason in us going all remote was I felt a closer connection to some of our team members in Europe, who I traveled to and spent quality time with went around the city went to the Berlin Zoo, really got to know them, I felt closer to them than some people in the office who I saw next to the water cooler Diet Coke fridge. And so that quality time can build strong bonds. The problem is we're in a pandemic now, and it's much harder to travel and build that quality time.

SPEAKER_65: So once the pandemic subsides more, hopefully, all remote is this best of both worlds, the quality

Chamath Palihapitiya: time plus the focus and the choice on how you live your life and where you want to live. But I also think something a lot of all remote companies are going to need to grapple with is we're in this honeymoon period where all remote is strictly better than a company that's temporarily remote and uncertain about when they're going back. But soon, we're going to be competing with companies that are back in the office. And there are a lot of great things about being in an office. So we all remote companies are going to have to compete. But hey, I love that companies competing to make better places for devs to work. That's great.

SPEAKER_201: I mean, the great news for you is if people in your company are like, we really need to have an office,

SPEAKER_38: I want that experience, you'd be like, great, we now have an office in London or Berlin. Yeah. And the seven of you can go create an office. And if you want to invite people to come work here, you can have them join the office and do whatever the heck you want. And yeah, we have a lot different roles, right? I mean, I think, you know, Netflix. I heard Reed Hastings say like, Yeah, no, we're adults. We're all coming back to work. Forget it. It's not happening. You don't get to stay home. Apple took the same position. And man, they flipped. They flipped. They know they're not going to retain talent. I mean, it's that's the bottom line, right? You're seeing that back channel

SPEAKER_145: as well, where people are like, Yeah, if you force me to come back to an office, my resume is out, I'm done.

SPEAKER_105: Yeah, it feels like people want to be trusted to work in a way that they best work. And trust is so important. And if someone feels like they're not trusted, then I can understand why they feel that way.

SPEAKER_130: I think you make a very good point, though, about quality time versus like this performative, like being in

Chamath Palihapitiya: the same space time. Yeah, don't go all the way across the world and hunch over in a co working space on your laptop and not talk to your colleague next to you. Go and hang out with them. Clear your

SPEAKER_91: calendar have fun that those bonds are so important. The the great bond making trips we had was, you

SPEAKER_130: know, when we did our Australia launch festival, like some of the team members, scuba diving, you know, on the Great Barrier Reef, I took in two years or a year or two later, we went to Hamilton Island, and went to the Whitsunday is the most beautiful beach rated in the world. Went wave running. I mean, it was sick. I mean, yeah, it's just totally sick. And those are the bonds that last. And those are the memories is for I don't know, do you have kids yet? Two kids? Yeah, so you know, like, there's a real big difference between like being with them on your phone at the beach, or being swimming with them in the ocean, or playing chess with them versus watching a movie with them when you're engaged with them. My Lord, you know, that is the memory when you the ski trip,

SPEAKER_16: the, you know, times you're playing chess, whatever, not when you're, I don't know, all on your iPads or whatever. And I think that's, I think you're absolutely right. I'm so excited to have all these team members I haven't met, and just go on vacation and have a retreat with them and do fun stuff. Yeah. And I hope this thing ends. All right, listen, congratulations, everybody go check out Sourcegraph, you're hiring, we know that you're hiring a person every other day. What are you looking for? And what is it like to work there? Why should somebody come work at Sourcegraph?

SPEAKER_65: First, if you want to see what it's like to be on our team, go read the Sourcegraph Handbook. It's

Chamath Palihapitiya: how we work. And it's completely public, because we're a very transparent company. So we are looking for people that love code or love the idea of way more companies in the world, way more people in the world, building technology, whether that's a developer, a designer in sales and marketing,

SPEAKER_58: we're all about this idea of in the future that everyone's going to be coding, and we want to prepare the world for that moment. Dude, this is brilliant. I'm totally going to steal this idea.

SPEAKER_28: Everybody go right now. It's amazing how the last five minutes of these interviews, something amazing drops, it happens like every time, if you can only listen to like 10 minutes of an interview on This Week in Startups, just go to the last 10 minutes. About.sourcegraph.com

SPEAKER_66: slash handbook. About.sourcegraph.com slash handbook. Company, all remote, asynchronous

SPEAKER_49: communication, strategy, goals, team, org chart, teammates, career, CEO, communication, content guidelines, customer first, and then each department. So if you're in the marketing department, product marketing, content tools, editorial, creating and editing blog posts, blog hackathon, demand gen, I mean, literally, you just gave the entire employee experience handbook to the world. So why would you ever read a job description when you just go to this and see

SPEAKER_175: the goals of the company and the strategy? Oh, my God, dude, this is wrong. Where'd you get this idea from? This is a level of transparency. I've never seen. Well, I mean, we're inspired by GitLab here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: GitLab is also an all remote, very transparent company. And you need this. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes people have sent me a link. And they've said, Quinn, oh, no, I think you actually made all this public. It's happened like four or five times. But we're really transparent. Look, it's such an important decision. When you go join a company, we want people to know what they're getting into. And we feel like it's a great place to be. And so we're pretty proud of it.

SPEAKER_49: This is such a great idea. Is this something that's just sweeping through the developer communities?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Not as much as I think it should be. So anyone can go and copy our handbook,

SPEAKER_49: if you're starting a new company, go fork it. I'm looking at GitLabs, and I'm looking at yours. How many other companies have done this? Have you ever seen anybody else do this? There are a few. This is such a killer idea. Hey, producers, let's do a segment on this. And

SPEAKER_51: let's let's bring this to our founders. I've never seen any of my companies do this. What a great idea this is. All right, listen, continued success. Thanks for being like, super honest and engaging as a guest. Quinn. Thank you. Come back. Come. You're a good guest. Let's have you come back in a year and get an update from you. Okay. Would that be all right? Yeah, absolutely. Everybody go. If

SPEAKER_16: you're a developer and or marketer, and you want to work at a rocket ship, companies taking off. And if you look at your investors, my Lord, it's like a it's a bestie parade. You got craft my bestie David

SPEAKER_47: Sachs. You got Sequoia. My besties over there. I mean, what a great group. Oh, valor. Antonio Gracias. Well, look at all these red point a lot of good folks. Uh, yeah, really impressive. But

SPEAKER_227: you worked at Palantir, right? Why are people so scared? Should people be scared of Palantir? Is

Chamath Palihapitiya: that what is going on over there? I love the people of Palantir. I was on the commercial side with my co founder beyond. We the reason why is I got the security clearance paperwork. I'm like, Oh, that's a lot of government forms to fill out. And I want to be put in the most intense team. So, you know, with this tiny team, they're starting to work on the JP Morgan Bank of America engagement. So, I don't know a lot about, you know, Palantir. I know that there's a lot of great people there. And it gave me this opportunity to see what it's like to write code inside of massive banks.

SPEAKER_145: So you were there working on something very narrow. So you don't they actually silo all those projects,

SPEAKER_65: because they're all I don't I don't know how much they silo on the government side. My involvement was on the commercial side with banks and organizations like that.

SPEAKER_231: Should people be scared of that company? Like people seem nervous about what Palantir is doing?

SPEAKER_232: I I don't know. You're the pundit. I'm just a lowly CEO just trying to make it so everyone can code.

SPEAKER_61: But you're being a magnanimous or I tried at least just so the audience knows I tried. I tried to get some inside information on Palantir. I'm trying to have the I've been trying to have the Palantir

SPEAKER_38: founder on for a while but like they don't like to talk about what they're doing. But I guess maybe that's part of the appeal. All right, listen, continued success. Thanks for coming on the pod. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.