Featuring: -Dave Nielsen -Tom Preston-Werner -Nate and Niki Kohari
Rob: In our last episode, Scott, Sarah and I talked to some developers about the worst projects that they've ever been involved in. They all seemed to share a common theme.
Nate Kohari: He decides one day, in mid-January, that um, he is unhappy with C sharp, because he can't follow it, and he doesn't understand the code I'm writing. Start over...
Niki Kohari: No
Nate: No. Yes...
Niki: [laughs]
Nate: In Access.
Niki: [laughing in background]
Nate: He came in one time with a, uh, ya know, I don't know this for certain, but it sure looked like hookers on either arm. And he sort of flaunted them, walked up and down the aisles, flaunted them, ya know, introduced us to them, you know, and it was like Bambii and Bimbo, or something, I can't remember their names.
[Musical Interlude]
Rob: And then somehow, I got pulled into this.
Scott: Yesterday you told me that you cashed in your 401(K) to do this. And now I can see, see you ending up in a story like this. You hired someone to do TekPub with you, heh heh, flaunting around the office with hookers an your'e doin coke off the desk, presumably on a Macintosh. You know, when you risk, when you risk that much you, Rob, are now the unstable, weird manager guy.
[Musical Interlude]
Rob: The unstable, weird, manager guy. How's does that happen to a person? Are you born that way? Or do you slowly wack out over time. Being an entrepreneuer, risking it all, isn't easy. It does different things to different people. Today we're gonna take a look at those things, take a look at the forces involved when you make risky decisions. Episode twelve of This Developer's Life. Drive.
[Musical Interlude]
Dave Nielsen: It was, it was New Year's Eve, and I'd gone out with my friends, we actually had a decent time. Then it was like two in the morning and I knew I was gonna have to deal with this, so um, I had this couch all scoped out that was in the basement and I know that the, I have the key and the way to get in and all tht kinda stuff because we were already out of our office, and um, so I found my way into where the storage was and slept on the couch. I think I slept there lke two nights.
[Musical Interlude]
Tom Preston-Werner: Why wouldn't you want to work at GitHub if we offer you a job? Who knows, five years from now, we're making a ton of money in revenue every year. Why can't we be one of the only companies that has ever IPO'd without taking investment?
Nate: I don't, I don't think I would have been able to take the product and turn it into a business without Nik. That's what she was really able to, you know, make work. Yea, it would never have worked, I'm convinced of that.
Niki: [laughs]
Nate: I'm not sayin' that just cus' she's sittin' next to me. I would theorize that it's actually simpler in a lot of ways, um, if the business partners are married.
[Musical Interlude]
Scott: Alright now, that was three interesting segments, but that first segment there... uh, he's sleeping in his garage. That uh, let's just say that stands out a little bit.
Rob: Ha ha, that's my friend Dave Nielsen. Serial entrepreneur with about five different projects going all at once. Did you ever see that movie, "Rushmore"?
Scott: Of course, of course. This is the movie that actually made Jason Schwartzman's career. Who, you know, we've seen him in everything. He's in iPad and New Yorker advertisments, and he's on TV all the time. And in the movie, his character, he's this high school kid. But that he wants to be involved in everything.
Rob: Yep
Scott: He's got awful grades but he's in every club in school. Backgammon club, and French club, and he even starts a little group called the Max Fischer Players.
Rob: Exactly. Everytime, it's funny, everytime I try and describe Dave, uh, to a friend that hasn't met him, Max pops right in my head.
[Movie Clip Plays]
Man: What's the secret Max?
Max: The secret?
Man: Yea, well, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max: Gee, I dunno, uh... I think you just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it's going to Rushmore.
[End Movie Clip]
Scott: Alright, well, I think this is gonna be a good one. I need to hear how this guy ends up sleeping in the storage space of his office.
Rob: Yea, I never get tired of hearing this.
[Musical Interlude]
Dave: Yea, it was pretty crazy. That was definitely rock bottom, uh, at least so far, and I really hope I never go anywhere near that again. Um, I had, it was a series of ridiculous events. My girlfriend and I at the time, we were having a litle bit of trouble but we wanted to make it work, and so I moved out of my apartment and into her apartment, uh, across town. And at the same time, like 9/11 had just happened, and, um, the business was struggling. It was just a tough time and the fact that my girlfriend and I moved in together is probably what broke us up. It kinda made us realize that this just wasn't going to work. And I'd already rented out my apartment, so I was, I had no place to go.
Dave: And at the same time the business was tanking, so since I didn't have much money, I just took the opportunity to live out of the office, the loft. And I lived there for like three months and I then had to get rid of that place because the rent was too high. So I moved into another little office space that was like two tiny rooms, and I remember there was, in the transition, a period where I literally had no place to live. I had the one place with clothes and the other wasn't available for a few days so I was literally, uh, hiding out in the basement of the office building that we had been renting.
Dave: It was embarrassing, quite frankly, just on myself. I thought, I am, it was New Year's Eve, because that was when the lease was up, the end of December. I had gone out with my friends, we actualy had a decent time. Then it was like two in the morning and I knew I was gonna have to deal with this, so um, I had this couch all scoped out that was in the basement and I know that the, I have the key and the way to get in and all tht kinda stuff because we were already out of our office, so I found my way into where the storage was and slept on the couch. I think I slept there lke two nights. It was kinda a dungeon-y like place. It just felt [sigh], uh man, I felt homeless. I felt like
Rob: Well, you were homeless
Dave: Oh, I know, technically, I was homeless for a couple of days. Yeah.
[Musical Interlude]
Dave: You know what's really funny about this too is that I did have a car, so I guess I could have slept in my car. But the uh, funniest thing is that before I moved into the new office, like a couple of days later, well, I should say, while I was moving into the new office, my car was stolen. [Laughs] uh, my God... So I remember I didn't have a place to stay, my car was stolen, and it, it was just... One of my friends said, "Dave, you know, it cannot get worse than this. This IS rock-bottom."
[Musical Interlude]
Dave: That was, uh, definitely etched, it etched a, a sort of like a mark. A low mark, in my life and in my career that I never wanted to go back to.
Rob: So the funny thing is, I've known Dave probably longer than most any friend I have. We grew up two blocks from each other in Los Angeles, uh, met while we were in grade school, and uh... You know the funny thing, I ran against the guy, uh, for student body vice-president, believe it or not.
Scott: I am, I am disturbed that you still remember this. You are still hanging on to high school so many years later, but more importantly, who won the election?
Rob: Me of course, why would you ask?
Scott: [Laughs] I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. I should have known better than to ask, uh, but still more importantly, Dave. How is Dave doing now?
Rob: He's doing really well.
Dave: I'm the found of CloudCamp.org, and it is a series of events that we put on around the world to help educate both developers, techies, and uh, non-techies about cloud computing. And, I also have a consulting company called Platform D where I help companies market their technologies to other technology people, like web developers. And I get my background in this area from being a developer myself through the nineties, um, running a web services user group for ten years now, and uh, having a job at PayPal where I ran their, or I was their first technical evangelist and eventually ran the PayPal Developer Network.
Rob: So Dave is one of the most tenacious, ah, people I've ever known, if it's not clear by now. It's actually kind of ridiculous. Uh, again coming back to, uh, Max, uh, as you said, Max doesn't care, Max never cared about his grades. He's purely focused on the school as a social system. And Dave is somewhat the exact same way. Um, he's the kind of friend you have, well he's one of those guys you you tell stories about. What's Dave doing? What's Dave going to do? Uh, it's, he's a laugh riot. And you know, so, so for example, he goes to Cal-Poly San Luis Abispo, in northern California, and he wanted to join a fraternity. Uh, they didn't have a fraternity that he liked, so guess what the guy does?
Scott: Okay, so he couldn't find a fraternity he liked, he made up his own fraternity.
Rob: Exactly right. He goes and he founds Pi Kappa Alpha, the Pikes. It's a pretty well known fraternity. Uh, yeah, and the guy founds a fraternity, ya know, and he goes back to San Luis Abispo, he's treated like a king. At the frat house.
Scott: Wow, that's impressive. Okay, so he's a force, he's a force of nature. Does what he wants, uhh, you know, and presumably he does this without any fear. Seems like the perfect employee. I assume he has the history of working for himself.
Rob: You got that right.
[Musical Interlude]
Dave: I thoroughly enjoy working for myself and the freedom and the creativity, but it, if, if the right type of project or company came along that just seemed really cool, umm, you know, or fit in with what I want to accomplish in life, I certainly have no, uh, problem with that. It's not the fact that i want to work for myself that drives me, it's that I want to do something that I enjoy and that I'm passionate about. And unless a company comes along that has a job and a product and a service that I feel passionate about, then, uh, I probably won't take it. You know if there was some technology that I felt very confident in, something around cloud computing or web services, that I thought was an incredible opportunity to make a big difference in the developer community, which is the community that I care alot about. Uh, or, you know, maybe just the general public, umm, I'd consider it. You know, it'd have to something pretty innovative and game-changing. Uhm, I would really, I, I can't imagine myself working for a company that's just doing the same thing it's been for ten years. That's just, I can't imagine that. It doesn't keep my attention. I think I'd be bad at it. Uh, that's probably the number one thing is I don't want to be bad at what I do, and if I'm not inspired by the work, I probably will not do it well.
Dave: It's kinda like Microsoft has never really, even Google today, I live in Mountain View, I've been invited to interview for jobs at Google and at this point, it just seems like such a big company, I just feel like I'd be lost and I don't, I don't know if I'd have much of an impact unless I found the exact, right position there. Uhm, and even then, it just, it doesn't feel like I'd be making much of a change or a difference, so, umm... yeah, I think I'm, I'm not a, I'm not a nine-to-fiver, now once I have kids maybe that will change a little bit, I don't know, but up until now, my priorities have always been about trying to find something that was, uh, unique or valuable and need, needed, and just needed to be out there, and people needed to learn about it. It really depends, because right now, I'm doing quite well at what I'm doing, and I think it's uh, you know, they'd have to have a pretty powerful, uh, incentive for me to leave that, so. But I think it's really important, I once learned that you need to be able to walk away from anything, umm, otherwise you just don't know if you're getting a good deal, and I think, you know, that, that mostly applies to like when you're buying a car, or, you know, or, any important purchase decision you make. If you cannot walk away from it the seller will smell blood and just take you for all you're worth, and I think it's the same way with a job, or you know, anything that's, that's not family, or you know, life critical. You need to be able to walk away, and I, I, I feel that even about what I'm doing right now with Cloud Camp. I really enjoy doing it, and it's, it's a lot of fun, and I think I'm helping alot of people learn about this important technology, and game, or life-changing technolgy in some cases. But, umm, it's, it's not the only thing I would enjoy doing.
Dave: Would I rather be more successful, but have very little control over my destiny? And therefore, uhh, not feel that it was my own? Or would I rather be, have more risk and therefore have a greater chance of not being as successful, but having made that path myself? And the latter is certainly much more appealing to me. Uh, as long as I can put bread on the table and, umm, you know, not stress myself out too much.
[Musical Interlude]
Scott: Okay now, this is confusing me... ehh, this guy cannot possibly be married. I mean, how would this work out in a relationship?
Rob: Ahh, it takes a wife who's patient, who's understanding, who's willing to go along with the ride to watch you fulfill your passions and so on. But still, it's a good question, I mean, I uh, asked Dave directly, "How do you get away with this?".
Dave: Yeah, well, it's a good question. I ask myself that sometimes, in fact, my wife asks me that as well. [laughs] Uhh, cuz, umm, she tells her friends about our, uh, check, our checking account, uh, ups and downs, and, and they really get nervous because it certainly goes, uhh, it goes pretty crazy. Crazily close to, uhh, you know, not being able to make payments, which fortunately to this day, I've always made our mortgage payment, but I've missed some other things, that's for sure.
Scott: Okay, well this is a little beyond, uhh, what I think I would put up with.
Rob: I, totally, right, there's no way I could do that either.
Scott: Well, really? Don't make me go to the archives. I, you know, you said for yourself, you like the start-up scene, you left the uhh, Microsoft, and what did you do? You started, up, very risky. And I remember telling you, "That was stupid.". Yesterday you told me that you cashed in your 401(K) to do this. Is that true?
Rob: [laughing] Good one... good one. Well...
Scott: Bazinga!
Rob: Yeah, okay, well, you know, alright, fair enough. But I don't think I'm gonna end up homeless. I mean, I don't think I'd go that far. Ahh, you know what? In fairness, Dave wouldn't either.
Dave: I, I knew that things would turn around for me, I knew it. It was, I really didn't fear that this was a permanent situation, but it certainly helped me undestand what, what people might go through who have no opportunity or way out. And uhh, you know, you find a, you get creative. And unfortunately, some of those creative options start becoming normal. And I think that's when people start spiraling down is, is, they start feeling that it's normal to live in these unusual, street-like situations. And it, you know, thankfully, I never got comfortable with it, but if you did, I could imagine somebody saying, "Hey, this isn't so bad, I could do this.". But, I couldn't, I couldn't do it. One of the smartest things I ever learned from anyone else was, one of them was from my dad who was also an entrepreneur, and, but he didn't know when to say, "Stop", and so he always worked for himself, and I think he had some difficult times that he'd perhaps, he didn't really need to, uhh, go through. And he died young of cancer, and I don't know if that led to it or not, but, you know, maybe it did. I think he led his life that was more stressful than it needed to be. And so that's part of the reason why I ended up taking a job at PayPal, is that, I was going through a stressful time, and it was a good opportunity to, to relieve some of that stress. And it turned out to be a great move to meet new people, and it was a good time for, in the company as well, so I benefitted from that. I think that was a good lesson. And another lesson I learned was, especially when you are young, get paid to learn. There's a lot of opportunities when you are young, where you have a fresh outlook, you have kind of a clean slate, and there are people who are wiling to invest in you, to get you to learn whatever it is that they need you to do. And they will pay you to work while you learn.
Rob: Many thanks to my good friend, Dave Nielsen, for sharing the ups and downs of his professional career. And, if you want to know more about what he's doing, go check him out... CloudCamp.org.
[Rushmore Movie Clip Plays]
Dr. Guggenheim: We're putting you on what I call 'Sudden Death Academic Probation'.
Max: Can I see some documentation on that please?
[shuffling of papers]
Man: Too many extra-curricular activities, Max, and not enough studying.
Max: Dr. Guggenheim, I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but the fact is, no matter how hard I try, I still might flunk my math class. If that means that I have to stay on for post-graduate years, then so be it. But if...
Dr. Guggenheim: We don't offer post-graduate years.
Max: Oh, we don't offer it yet.
[End of Rushmore Movie Clip]
[Music Plays]
Rob: Working only for yourself, chasing your dreams, risking... Well, you know sometimes that means that you don't pay your bills when you should, or maybe you end up sleeping on a couch underneath a building. Or does it? Sometimes, people actually have it a bit easier.
Scott: Oh yea, yea...
Rob: Speaking of, Scott who's this voice we're listening to now?
Scott: Okay, now this is a guy who gets things done. This is Tom Preston-Warner, who's doing the same kind of thing as Dave, except his results are a little more, ummmmmm, concrete, and explicit and world-changing.
Rob: Tom Preston-Warner, yeah, he's the Gravatar guy. He's, uh, the one that invented gravatar. He, uhhh, he's also done Jekyl, the, umm, static blogging system. He's also got the God gem, and, uh, he did something else too, didn't he?
Scott: Well, yeah, a little something called GitHub.
Rob: GitHub, yeah!
Scott: This is the guy who basically blew up the hosted project space. He made something very remarkable. He, he, how it's happend is pretty remarkable as well.
[Musical Interlude]
Tom: Yeah, the way that GitHub really started for me was, I was at home, and I had, I had sold Gravatar a few months earlier, and that was my side project. That's what took up all my time when I wasn't at work. And so I had kind of an empty void, and I was searching for a new side project, something to work on. And Git had become, we had been talking about it in the Ruby community circles up here in San Francisco in some of our meetings, and we were using it at work. My friend Dave Ferrin (sp?) had introduced me to it. And I thought it was interesting, but we were using Subversion. And I didn't, I didn't realize how awesome it was at first. But after using it for a little while, it became clear that just the branching stuff, just the branching alone, changes everything. And I'd been using it, and, and trying to get a grasp on what, what it could be, and what it was, and what the failings were. And I wanted to start using it with more people, because that was supposed to be what it was really good at. It was supposed to be a distributed version control system, that let you work on projects with other people in a better fashion, that wasn't as crappy as Subversion. And it was obviously better than Subversion, but the sharing part was realy difficult. At Powerset, we had sort of started using it illicitly, because all of our stuff was supposed to be in Subversion, but we were like, 'I'm gonna use Git for this project.'. And all of our repositories were on servers, and we all had direct server access to them, and that's how we shared. There was no interface, we didn't even really use the interfaces that get shipped with at the time, which were pretty crappy, and still are not that great. And so there, there felt like, you should be able to share, but you can't very well. And we talked about this at the Ruby meet-ups that we had, and we kicked some ideas around, and none of them ever felt right. At one point, I was at home, and I , I was thinking about this, and I said, 'Well, I'm a web programmer, and I know a lot of web programmers, and what if I just, what if I just want a little site that I can make and play around with that would be an interface for, uhh, for Git repositories. And that could be a place where you could upload them, and then share them with other people. So, a moment that I had that was really special, was I sat down, and I started writing the Ruby bindings to Git, called 'Grit', which is what we still use today. And I just started writing them, and I think the first thing I implemented was the log command. I just wanted to be able to, with Ruby, say, 'Grit.(dot)new', and give it a file location, a, a directory path of a Git repository, have that object, and then say, 'that repository.[dot] log', and have it output an array of commits. That was the first thing that I implemented. And I didn't know anything about how the storage worked, or how, anything, I didn't know how Git worked at all underneath when I started doing this. And I thought, 'Well, I'll probably learn something along the way.'. So I started in a very naive fashion by figuring out just a nice way to get the log output, as much detail as I could, and then just parsing it as a big string. And I did that, and I shoved those strings into a commit object, and I parsed them out, and I returned the array, and, and the first time that I went into IRB, and I ran the, that set of commands to be able to do that, and it spat out a list of commits from a repository, that, that had never been done in Ruby before, and, and that was, that was the point where I was like, "This, could actually happen. I can actually do this. This is feasible.". And a few days later, we were at a Ruby meet-up, and afterwards, we went to a bar that's not too far from here, in Soma, called Zeke's, and, and I was, I was taking a break from the talk in back, we were all kind of clustered around a couple of tables in back, and I went up to get a beer, and uh, I sat down at a table and was playing with my iPhone or something, and Chris Wanstraff walks in, he had come a little late or something, I don't think he was at the actual meetup. He walks in, I said, I said, "Hey Chris, come, come over here. Come over here and check this out. Check out, Check this out.". I had my computer with my obviously. I open it up, and I went into the IRB thing, and I, and I showed him. I was like grit dot new, filpath, dot commit. Bam, there it is. And I said, "I'm starting to write these Ruby to Git bindings.". I had been working on crisp previously with some code through Git, so he understood that it was terrible to share. And I said, "I want to do a site that let's you share Git repositories easier.". And he looked at me and he said, "I'm in.". Cuz he, he, he knew it too. He saw it, and he knew it. He, he had thoughts about sharing Git repositories of his own that were somewhat similar and somewhat dis-similar, but I think it was just that the, the reality of seeing that in Ruby code was, was powerful for both of us. And he was a hard-core Rails guy, and I didn't really want to do Rails anymore, I wanted to do more back-end stuff. And so I saw him, and I was like, "Chris would be perfect for this.".
Rob: Well, people who use Git really love it, and people who use GitHub, well, that just makes using Git all the more fun. Well, that was amazing. Just about everyone has heard of it, just about everybody has used it. The idea for GitHub just seems obvious. And it fell right in Tom's lap. Even to this day, there is nothing like GitHub. So we asked Tom, "Are you amazed that there's just nothing like GitHub, even today? That your idea is just, still going?"
Tom: I'm, I'm kind of bewildered everyday that we don't have more competent competition. It's, it's a huge market, and I don't know, there's something about code hosting that the traditional knowledge is that you don't make money building developer tools. That's the traditional knowledge. And maybe the big corporations, that's true. Maybe the kind of money that they would want to make from that is irrelevant in terms of their overall ????. For big companies like Microsoft, maybe they don't even care. It's irrelevant, that kind of money would be irrelevant to them. But it's certainly relevant to me. And I think that they might be mistaken, in that there's more and more developers created everyday. And the better the tools are, the more developers there will be. And that's clearly the direction that languages are going, that tools are going, just having Git and GitHub around so people can share code, open source can be made faster and faster and easier, and getting people involved without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. All of this stuff means that more developers are going to be created than there would otherwise. So by building good tools, you're creating an even bigger market. And I don't know specifically why there was no big competitor to us in the early days, and there are now, but there's nobody that does the combined private and public hosting has a community like ours. We have more than 560,000 users now. That's a pretty significant portion of the overall developer community.
Scott: This is a guy who just can't get it wrong. I mean, you know when somebody does something right once, they are amazing. Some people spend their whole life trying to get something right. Here's a guy who's getting it right over, and over, and over. I mean, the universe itself is conspiring for Tom's success.
Rob: Yeah, you know it's amazing for people who start their own company, or just have any idea, like Dave Mover and Shaker Guy, you know, out there, trying to make stuff happen. I mean to have something literally fall in your lap is just maddening, you know, as an entrepreneur it makes you want to smack yourself when you see someone else just back their way into it. But then again, Tom did give up something that was pretty compelling. At just about the exact same time that Tom and Chris were throwing together the code for what would become GitHub, turns out that the company that Tom worked for, called PowerSet, a little start-up in the Bay area, well, it was bought by Microsoft. And Tom received a very nice package deal for coming to join Microsoft, that well, it involved a lot of money. Your an entrepreneur. What do you do? Chase your dream? Work for yourself? Or take the money and run?
Tom: Ah, I very distinctly remember that day, I was at the PowerSet office, and it was the last day that we could decide on our Microsoft offers. So I was at PowerSet at the time. They'd just been acquired by Microsoft, and they gave everyone in the company offer letters which had varying levels of retention bonuses attached to them. And I had let it sit on my desk until, I think we had something like three days to decide. We didn't have very long. And so, I would, I looked at it, and read over the terms, and you know it's one of these thick 20 page things with all the, all of the various terms and conditions of employment, and the compensation, and what-not. And I wrote a blog post about it afterwards. The amount was $300,000 retention bonus, plus a pretty generous salary, a raise from what I had been making. And so I thought about if for a long time, and yeah, my wife was in Costa Rica at the time, and I had been talking to her about it the last couple of days, and it would have been an obvious choice to say yes, except that I was doing GitHub on the side, and we had even started making some money from GitHub at that point. So it wasn't as brutal of a decision, I wasn't facing as difficult of a decision as I could have been, if GitHub had not been making money and not had really good indicators of success in the future. But at the same time, I mean, I didn't have money in the bank account, I had debt, ummm, we had a place in San Francisco, it's very expensive to live here, and a start-up is always a gamble. And so as I thought about those things, I also thought about what was it that I wanted to do with my time? And PowerSet, while it was a great company, and working there was awesome, and I worked with a ton of really great people, it was still a job, it was still working for someone else. And there's nothing that I love more in the world than just working on new projects. New things, things that are exciting, new technologies, things that I want to work on. And things that when I work on them, I can feel pride in them, and know that that's affecting my future in a very direct way. And so I'm always working on side projects. I'm always, I always have something. Right now, I'm kind of doing some stuff with electronics. I'm getting back into electronics, which I used to do alot when I was a kid. So there's always something, I don't, I never know where that's gonna take me, but it's always fun to play around and see, because those, that's where you can really be free with what you're doing. When you're working a job for someone else, you always have to be very careful that you're, that you're doing the right thing by them. When you're working on your own thing, you can do whatever the hell you want. And that was really what made the decision, was, do I want to spend my time as a Microsoft employee, and watch my two co-founders continue building GitHub, and potentially being the kind of people in the position that I want to be? And I don't think that I could have ever lived with myself if I had done that. And so the only decision that I could have made was to leave Microsoft, or what would become Microsoft, and, and just put all of my efforts into GitHub. And so I, so I went into my boss' office, and I said, "This is great, this is very generous, but I'm, I'm not gonna do it. I'm, I'm quitting today." And he said, "I knew you'd say that."
Scott: Okay, well that's absurd.
Rob: I agree. But then again, you know, like Dave, the guy's focused on working for himself.
Tom: People ask us all the time what our long term plan is, and what we would do if we were faced with a big acquisition. And, right now, we're in a good place, because we have no investors, we have no outside investors, we've never taken VC money. So we're not pressured to sell. We would not be pressured to sell, in that case, all the pressure would come from ourselves within the company. And honestly, the company that we've built, is so damn fun to work for, that I almost wouldn't even care what that price was right now. And I say that because tomorrow, or a year from now, whatever number they had on the table is gonna feel like pennies compared to where we're gonna be in that amount of time. So my question is, as long as you have, and can demonstrate upward motion, and really good growth, and eveyone in the company is having a really good time, and you're hiring the best people, and the skys the limit, why are you entertaining offers at all? Because, what's it gonna be like in a year? What's it gonna be like in two years? What's that landscape gonna be like? And maybe there's gonna be a bubble, and maybe the ground's gonna fall out from underneath you, but honestly, we were very little affected by the economic downturn. People still need to write software, and guess what? They're looking for ways to save money and work more effectively which means they're even more interested in paying for a hosted code solution so they don't have to run their own servers. So in a way, that was probably good for us. So we are well protected from alot of these things. And there's always gonna be more coders, and there's always gonna be more code, and there's always gonna be a need for better tools. So what I want to do, what I would prefer to do is build the best team that there is, so that we can get the best talent that there is, because why wouldn't you want to work at GitHub if we offered you a job? And, who knows, five years from now, we're making a ton of money in revenue every year, why can't we be one of the only companies that's ever IPO'd without taking an investment?
[Musical Interlude]
Scott: So one guy creates opportunities for others, ah, another's more like you, kinda keen on what comes his way. Dave obviously is working very hard to convince folks that his agenda is right. Now Tom doesn't have to do anything, he doesn't have to work at all, and things just work out. But, ah, the thing that's common between them is that they both know that they are right. And they're apparently both willing to tell you all about it.
Rob: Absolutely, and there's been more than one time where Dave has been talking, and I, you know, to a group of people and I've been cringing in a corner just thinking, "Oh my goodness, how can a guy just be so self assured?". He can just come right out and kind of, speak his mind, not in an overly agressive way, but just so self assured.
Scott: Well, you know, a person that is sure of themselves can be considered self assured, and driven, and you know, visionary. But, if you don't like their idea, then they're cocky, and arrogant, and a bunch of other, you know, potentially not so nice names. Ah, the point here is not what you think of them, but it's kinda how much they care about your assesment.
Rob: Yeah, and that's where things get pretty interesting. Dave's a pretty caring guy, as I mentioned before, he's a very good friend. But he also doesn't care one bit when, you know, you shrink in the corner as he, as I said before, kinda steps into the lights, and starts pounding his chest a little bit stating his opinion really loudly. He doesn't really have that 'Off' switch, if you will. Umm, you know, people look at him and say, "Oh, you're arrogant and cocky.", he's, he just really doesn't care, he states his mind.
Scott: No, of course. I mean, these guys believe so much in what they're doing, that it's really impossible for them to see how anyone could disagree with them. Ah, they can't even hear you. Their, their idea is that, you know, is that correct. They believe in it that much.
[Woman Voice]: Actually it wasn't.
[Man's Voice]: No, we only had one person meeting, ah...
Scott: Okay, I hear some voices in the background, I assume that's you doing that. Who, who, who is this?
Rob: This is Nate and Niki Kohari. They own agilezen.com, it's a project management site.
Scott: Yeah, yea, it's a fantastic project, uh, it's really ah, representative of best practices in a number of ways, both technologically and ah, from an agile perspective. Nate is a phenominal technologist.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. He does a lot of open source work in the Microsoft arena. He does ninject, IOC Container. He's also a prolific blogger. And he did something that I consider rather remarkable. He started a business with his wife, and not alot of people do that. Especially not a start-up, ah, especially not a tech start-up. Ah, that in of itself is interesting, but what's really cool is, nine months after they created it, they sold it. Now to a lot of people who start their own business, if your idea is good enough, if your business is valuable enough, for someone to want to come along and buy it, well, that's a big fat pat on the back. So that's where I want to pick up this story, and I asked them, "What was it like when you sold your company?".
[Musical Interlude]
Nate: Ahhhh, I think there was, ahh, it was surreal, I think for awhile.
Niki: Yeah, definitely.
Nate: So, you know, you know there was champagne involved and all that kind of thing too, as you might expect. But mostly it, you know, there was a lot of stress of going through, you know, the whole due diligence process, before that, the negotiation process, and you know, before that actually, like, launching and running the company too. That, uhm, you know, for it to be, you know, we were really only in business independant for (asks Niki, "How many months?")
Niki: Not very long...
Nate: Eight?
Niki: July to August? Er, no. July to April.
Nate: April, yea.
Niki: Yea, so...
Nate: Our betting onset is, I can't count...
[Niki laughing]
Nate: But.. I mean it, you know, it happened so fast. Ah, we had no intention, I don't think, of, you know, of, umm, you know, selling the company that quickly. But, ah, you know, it worked out, it was the right decision to make, you know, at the time and everything, so, umm, yeah, I think it was more surreal than anything else.
Niki: Yea, I think it was a mix of emotions, and I don't think that we really understood the magnitude of it until much, much later.
Nate: We didn't really understand, I think, what we had done, I mean again, ah, that sounds like what we've done is just incredible, which honestly, it's not. But, um, I think we underestimated it for a long time, and then even just Rally being interested in in buying the company was, you know, justification for what we'd done and... But then we had, you know, we had a lot of encouragement along the way too from, you know, our customers and everything. That, I mean, you know, we had, we had kind of set up some goals in mind, you know, for what we wanted to achieve and, and we beat all of them. I mean it, you know, and, I mean maybe our goals were conservative, but, you know, and we thought too small, but, you know, we, we, just continued to, to do well. And so, umm, I think that's surprising.
Niki: We launched at like, ten or eleven in the morning, and woke up the next day, and Nate goes, "You won't believe how many people signed up.". I was like, "Oh, I don't..". He was like, "Guess.". I was like, "Oh, I don't know, you know, couple hundred or whatever.". He's like, "A thousand people.". And I was like, "I don't even know a thousand people.". Like, that seemed like a really ridiculous number to me. So, I was, I'm like, "Okay, maybe we underestimated ourselves. Maybe people were more interested than we thought.". And then it kind of went through a series of things from there. It was like, "Oh, we just made a sale. Oh, we just made a sale for a year. Oh, that's interesting, people have confidence that we'll be here a year from now. That's actually pretty good.". And then, you know, later on, we had conversations with, ah, other people who worked at places that were not Rally, let's just say that, and they were like, "Yea, you know, we should acquire you guys for a lot of money", and we're like, "Oh, yea, that's funny.". We had a good laugh about it. And not a couple of weeks later did rally come to us and, and talk about partnerships or acquisition. And we're like, "Okayyy...".
Nate: And I think even before that too, we had applied for a grant too, in Northeast Ohio. And, you know, that was a whole process of, you know, going and pitching to them, and you know, explaining what the business was and everything like that. I mean, essentially what you do, you know, for investment of any kind, although, this is non-recourse, you know, they would take a slice of the company, and ahh, we had, we had pitched once, and actually gotten rejected. And then we went back and pitched again after we launched, and it was, it was really interesting the difference to be able to talk about, um, you know, the adoption rate, and that kind of thing. I do remember, um, when they called to, ah, you know, tell us we had been awarded the grant. Which was, you know, twenty five thousand dollars, which, you know, for a bootstrap company is, like, that was amazing. It basically doubled our runway, you know, that we had. Um, Niki was actually at school, um, you know, with her PhD classes, and uhh, they called, and, you know, I answered. And then Niki came home, and you know...
Niki: Yea
Nate [asking Niki]: What did I say to you?
Niki: I don't remember, but I was like, "No way...".
Nate: Yea
Niki: "No way.". I will say though that when we pitched that, that second time, I really felt like when we left, I was like, "We nailed that.". Like, that may have been the best thing that ever, that I've ever done.
Nate: There was, there was a lot of, umm, I think there was a lot of, like, um, escalating moments of...
Niki: Yea
Nate: Of success. And umm, you know, it part of me does still wonder, you know, had we continued to, you know, stay independant, would we continue having those escalating moments of success? Um, not that I regret the decision to sell the company or anything, but, umm, it was, ahh, you know, we had, uhh just kept climbing and climbing and climbing while we were independant. Um, you know, we had, I still kind of wonder where it would have went, you know, sometimes.
Niki: Yea.
Nate: A lot of people ask us, you know, if it's strange to be, you know, a married couple and start a business, and you know, now work together at the same company and everything like that. You know, I think at this point, now, it would be weird if we didn't. Ahh, I think...
Niki: Yea
Nate: But I don't know if it's for everybody, I think we, we're that way about most things, I mean, you know, we just kinda have a rule that, you know, nothing is off limits, in term, in terms of, you know, conversation. It's important to talk about everything, you know, freely. Because you can't do that, if you, you start walking on eggshells about stuff, and you worry too much about hurting the other person's feelings, about, you know, the truth, umm, you get into trouble. You know, I think, I actually think we, and we've talked about this since, we thought it was gonna be harder than it was.
Niki: Yeah. I thought being married was gonna be harder than it was actually.
Nate: Yeah.
Niki: And so the whole thing, the whole thing has exceeded my expectations.
Nate: Right.
Niki: We, I mean we do fun stuff together, we absolutely grab a bottle of wine and just hang out, and talk about something other than work. [Laughs]
Nate: Sure.
Niki: And, you know, we play games, or whatever. We, sometimes, some video games, now we play them together. So that's...
Nate: Sure.
Niki: I've learned to like some of those things, and Nate's learned to go to the mall with me on occasion. So...
Nate: Right! Yep.
Niki: It's all working out.
Nate: She's a great second player in like, Super Mario Galaxy...
Niki: True.
Nate: And stuff like that.
Niki: I took, I play Team Fortress 2, and I always play as a medic because I'm collaborative like that, and then I, I actually like watching people play video games. I know that sounds really crazy. But I've always been like that, so I'm not very good at anything, but if there's something where like I'm the second player and I don't have to do a lot, I'm very much into that!
Nate: You just instantly made a bunch of geeks jealous.
Niki: [Begins laughing]
Scott: Certainly the part about them selling their business while keeping a happy marriage is interesting, but the, she plays video games with him too. Now they, now they're just showing off now.
Rob: Yeah, they're kinda like the Osmonds, I suppose, if you will.
Scott: Okay, well that's an interesting approach, I mean what is the core thing that one would want from another business partner?
Rob: Trust. Absolutely trust. Knowing that they're going to do their part, and if you say to them, "Listen, I really have to talk to you about changing something", you know that they're gonna listen.
Scott: Umm hmm. Well this is a little bit like the reverse of what we talked about earlier, you know, that these people who successfully launched a start-up and sell it are naturally driven, and are very likely incapable of understanding when someone would complain for all the, you know, bad things that are going on in the company.
Rob: Yep. Yeah, and if you put Nate and Niki together, they do become a Dave or a Tom. I mean, Niki is absolutely driven, it doesn't take too long to ah, to talk to her, to hear just how smart she is, and how directed she is, and she was a Ph.D. candidate, you can hear it in her voice. I mean, Nate also has drive, but it's a little bit more along the technical lines, I mean, he's kinda like Tom and that he's able to see an idea and then execute it. Carry it through.
Scott: Mmm hmm.
Niki: It, it didn't seem strange to me at all that we would start a business together. I always knew that Nate wanted to start a business. I knew that since we were sixteen. Umm, and there was always a goal to make that happen in some way, and I think our original plan was, "Hey, you know, I'll go to grad school for a couple of years, umm, I'll come out, I'll get a job so we have healthcare, you know, and you can go and just do what you wanna do. And start a business." And then it kinda happened that Nate had an idea, I was into it, and I said, you know, "Let's just do it now."
Nate: It wasn't really until, you know, she started saying she was interested that I, you know, I took a step a back and I said, "Well, wait a minute." You know, that makes perfect sense. You know, it, you know, we both have the same kind of, you know, drive and um, work ethic, and, you know, we're both forthright and good communicators and all that kind of thing. So, you know, starting the company together really started to make more sense than me being alone, you know.
Niki: Yea, and I think we have complimentary skillsets, and we know what our deficiencies are, we're perfectly happy with them being that way.
Nate: Yea, we're honest about it.
Niki: Yeah.
Nate: I, I can't keep something running. I'm not good at keeping things going and organized. I'm the most disorganized person in the world. So, but I could set something up, and I, you know, I could see what it will look like, and I could create things from nothing, you, I'm, I'm and engineer, that's what I do. Umm, but in terms of, you know, handling support, and you know, the accounting and, you know, actually making the business operate like a business. Not just, you know, I can build a product, but you know, I don't think I would have been able to take the product and turn it into a business without Niki.
[Musical Interlude]
Scott: Well, they, they always say when they're talking about Microsoft that you need to have both a Bill, and a Steve. You have to have a technical head and a business head. Alright, so, in this context, ah, Niki is a little bit more like Dave. You know, she's, she's the business person, she loves Nate, and she wants to make sure that he'll fulfill his idea. Some people build to see things through. Tom, Nate, yourself. You get a vision, you put your head down, you say, "Get outta my way, here comes the vision train.". And, then you know, this is why guys like you who have a hard time delegating, and divorcing yourself from the idea.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. I am a horrible manager. Uhm, you know, and then there's people who are a bit more like Dave. Makin' it rain, showing people what's possible, and trying to change their lives. Um, I mean, truthfully, I think that kind of sounds a bit like you too.
Scott: Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.... Maybe. I don't know. I don't think I have the head for being a start-up person although. Maybe if I could drink all the diet soda I wanted and have tacos all day I would, I would do a start-up like that. But I would still never let you sleep in my garage. But, but let's bring this home. So in the beginning, we asked the question, um, you know, who are these people? I, I think that we know that. I think we know who they are now.
Rob: They're people who believe in themselves, and they belive in their idea. Ah, sometimes to a level that puzzles others, and makes them uncomfortable. I mean, I belive in my ideas. But I'm not willing to sleep in my garagae, or your garage, or turn down a truckload of cash just because I wanna work for me. I feel like I have an off switch.
Scott: What I wanna know, though, is how do you deal with these people when you work for them? You know, how do you manage up, when someone belives in something so strongly?
Rob: That is the question, and I think that's probably what's on a lot of people's minds, but, unfortunately, we're a little bit out of time, but I think that sounds like a great topic for the next show.
Scott: Ha, ha... Managing up!
Rob: Time to queue the music, your favorite part!
Scott: My favorite part.
[Music begins]
Scott: No Lady Gaga please.
Rob: [laughs]
[Musical interlude]