042_startups and python.vtt

WEBVTT

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Have you ever dreamt of creating a startup that will change the world?

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You and your two best friends leave the dull world of writing internal business apps and

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go heads down for three months to launch something amazing?

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Well, it turns out that Python plays a key role in many early stage startups.

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And this week's guest, Leah Culver, has some amazing experiences and stories about both.

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This is Talk Python to Me, episode number 42, recorded December 17th, 2015.

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I'm a developer in many senses of the word because I make these applications, but I also

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use these verbs to make this music.

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I construct it line by line, just like when I'm coding another software design.

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In both cases, it's about design patterns.

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Anyone can get the job done.

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It's the execution that matters.

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I have many interests.

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Welcome to Talk Python to Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the

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ecosystem, and the personalities.

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This is your host, Michael Kennedy.

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Follow me on Twitter, where I'm @mkennedy.

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Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm.

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And follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python.

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This episode is brought to you by Hired and SnapCI.

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Thank them for supporting the show on Twitter via at Hired underscore HQ and at Snap underscore

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CI.

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Hi, everyone.

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Thanks for listening.

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Let me introduce Leah so we can get right to the show.

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Leah Culver is an iOS and Python developer at Dropbox, where she works on the paper team.

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She's a former founder of Grove, Convore, and Pounce.

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She's also an author of both the OAuth and OEmbed API specifications.

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Leah, welcome to the show.

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Hi.

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Hi.

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I'm really happy to talk to you today about a whole bunch of interesting things around

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startups and investing and Dropbox.

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Great.

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Thanks so much for having me.

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Yeah, it's going to be fun.

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So before we get to those topics, let's start at the beginning.

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How do you get into programming in Python?

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So I got into programming in college.

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I took a class in JavaScript and I fell in love with it, switched majors and finished with

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a computer science degree.

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I didn't get into Python until after college.

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I was looking to build my first startup and I was looking at Ruby on Rails.

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And it didn't, I wasn't super into it and I was looking for alternative web frameworks and

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a friend of mine suggested Django.

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And I fell in love with Django and through that fell in love with Python and have been pretty

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much doing Python ever since.

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Oh, that's a cool story.

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I think a lot of people get into Python through Django.

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It seems to have really brought a lot of people in.

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Yeah.

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It's a very simple, straightforward framework.

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It's easy to learn.

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It has a lot of utility functions and a lot of, at the time, it had a lot more than some

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other frameworks and platforms and really helped bootstrap the process of building a startup.

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Startups.

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These things are really something I'm fascinated with.

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I've worked in them in various capacities, had some fail, things like this.

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But also, yeah, of course, also done some good stuff there.

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So I'm really excited to talk about this because it's kind of near and dear to my heart.

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So what was your first experience with startups?

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You said you got into Python because you wanted to start one, right?

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Yes.

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I moved out to Silicon Valley area right after college and had a job at a small startup there,

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kind of bounced around a little bit and really kind of wanted to do my own thing and work

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on my own projects.

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I was young, creative, just wanted to do interesting things, was meeting interesting people.

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And I met my co-founders at an event here in San Francisco.

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And they said, can you build this for us?

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And I said, sure.

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And so that's how Pounce got started, which was my first startup.

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It was Kevin Rose, who had, at the time, was doing dig.com.

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And Daniel Burko was his designer for Dig.

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Both very fantastic, very talented people.

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So to ask me, who I was pretty much unknown, hadn't really done much of anything, to build a website,

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I said, sure, I can build it.

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At the same time, he's like, I don't know if I can do this.

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So full of doubt.

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But I thought, I have to do it now.

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I've committed.

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Wow.

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What a cool opportunity to get started with those guys, right?

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Yes.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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And the thing is, though, I feel like at that time, there was a lot of opportunity.

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People said, can you build this?

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And just being able to say, you know, yes, I can do that was a big deal.

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Because it was a lot, I think it was a lot harder then.

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There wasn't, there was no Heroku.

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There was no Amazon Web Services.

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Actually, there was one web service, which was S3, which helped us a lot in the early days.

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But, you know, you were running your own servers.

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You were setting up your own websites.

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Doing a lot more, I think, than is strictly necessary nowadays.

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Yeah.

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I think one of the major, major changes over the last 10 years, maybe five years, is the

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amount of capital investment to get the very first thing together, right?

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Like, in that first story, you have to buy servers and software and all sorts of stuff.

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And now you need to pay $10 a month to some cloud service to try this out, right?

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Yeah, which is great.

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It allows people to build things so much more quickly now and try out different ideas and

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really focus more on the product and the business.

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Yeah, that's cool.

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It's every day.

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Working in tech is just getting cooler, right?

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Every day I wake up and think, wow, today's even cooler than it was yesterday.

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It's so fun.

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Yeah, yeah.

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I love to tell the horror story.

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When I built my first startup, there was only one Amazon Web Service.

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That's right.

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It wasn't this huge, overwhelming grid of things.

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So what was Pounce?

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So it was a social networking website.

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That allowed you to send sort of short messages to friends, post them publicly, and send like

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one-on-one as well.

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So it was kind of a mix between, I would say, Twitter and Tumblr.

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You got to attach things to your messages.

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So you could send something like an event out to people.

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This was kind of pre-Facebook News Feed being a big thing as well.

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Actually, I'm not sure it existed then.

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It's hard for me to remember what existed and what didn't at the time.

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I'm pretty sure Facebook News Feed didn't exist when Pounce was around.

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Yeah, it seems like it might not have.

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It's hard to imagine a world without a Facebook.

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But there was one.

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Yeah, pre-Facebook News Feed.

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That kind of blows my mind.

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That's super crazy.

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But yeah, yeah, pre-Facebook News Feed, pre-Facebook News Feed.

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That's a pretty good description.

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What happened to Pounce?

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It's not still around, is it?

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No, no, it is not still around.

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We ran into some issues with being too, I think, in the press a lot, very compared to Twitter.

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How will you survive?

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I mean, it created this nice drama for the press to write about.

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But it kind of took its toll on the team.

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And it was hard.

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And then 2009 happened, which here in Silicon Valley, it was really hard to raise money then.

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And so we looked at being acquired.

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And we were acquired by Six Apart, which is a blogging company.

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They have TypePad and MovableType.

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In fact, I don't know if they still have TypePad and MovableType because they were later acquired by another company.

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But at the time, they had all these blogging products and they acquired Pounce.

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And unbeknownst to us, well, I don't know if they had planned to shut it down or not.

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But after acquisition, they decided that it was time to shut it down, which was sad.

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It would have been nice to keep it.

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But these things happen.

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And I went on to work on other products at Six Apart.

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Yeah, okay.

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Was it fun to work there?

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Yeah, yeah.

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It was pretty nice.

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I had a pretty good experience.

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I've been pretty lucky in my career to always work with sort of interesting people and fun projects.

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And Six Apart was definitely, it was fun.

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It was a good time.

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Yeah, cool.

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So after Pounce, what do you work on next?

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I contracted for a little while where I worked on a bunch of startups.

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Basically, people I had known who had done their own startups at that point said,

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hey, I need an iOS app or I need some landing pages or a login system.

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So I got to work on all the fun things that you can just pay a contractor to build for you.

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And then I did my second startup after that, which is pretty interesting.

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Nice.

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What was that?

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It was called Convor.

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And it was with Eric Florenzano and Eric McGuire.

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Eric Florenzano being a fairly prominent member of the Django community.

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And we had known each other through Django.

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And he approached me and actually was like, I want to do a startup.

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And at the time I was contracting.

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And I said, oh, I could do another startup.

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It's been long enough.

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I could do that again.

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It's been a year.

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I'm fine.

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Or I guess it had been two years at that point.

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It's been two years.

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I'm fine.

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I'm going to do another one.

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And so we applied to YC and we built a prototype.

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And we're accepted to YC.

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And then I was like, I guess we have to do it now.

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We're doing Y Combinator.

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We've got to build an actual startup.

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Yeah, that'll put the pressure on.

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So you actually went through the whole Y Combinator thing?

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Yes, yes, we did.

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We applied.

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And I was pretty surprised that we got in.

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It's an interesting experience.

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Yeah, I bet.

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What other startups went through the same time as you?

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Oh, that's a great question.

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It's funny because at the time you don't know who's going to be still around, still successful.

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So we did this in winter 11.

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YC winter 11.

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I would say the best known startup from our batch was potentially, there's a couple.

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Pebble was in our group.

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Yeah, okay.

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Yeah, it was their first watch was, I hate to say that, super ugly.

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So it wasn't until they did the Kickstarter and had like a nicer design that I think they really found an audience.

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But at the time we were all like, I don't think anyone's going to want to wear that.

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It's supposed to look good, you know?

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Yeah, like who wants to wear a really ugly watch?

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Oh, poor Pebble guys.

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But the technology was good and the team was good and they managed to do something pretty awesome.

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Yeah, they're still doing cool stuff, so that's good.

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Yeah.

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Let me think.

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Who else was in our batch?

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Zero Cater, which is well known around here for catering lunches to tech companies.

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They do food delivery.

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Who else?

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Hello sign.

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The faxing and signing of documents.

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I don't know if you've used them for anything.

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If someone sends you a link to sign some documents.

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I see them a lot more doing investing than anything else.

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Like, here's our documents.

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You can sign them.

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And I'm like, oh, hello sign.

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Yeah, hey, I know these guys.

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I just know somebody.

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Yeah, yeah.

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So unless you do a lot of documents, signing for taxes or legal purposes, you probably don't see them too often.

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Yeah, luckily.

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I've more or less avoided that this year.

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Yeah.

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Being abroad, I would probably have to use something like that, right?

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Yeah, yeah.

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Yeah, super useful.

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Okay, so what was the story of this startup, Convor?

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What did you guys do there?

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What was the idea?

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The concept was, so Eric had maintained a forum, like a forums site with his friends from, I think from college.

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And he was really into it.

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And he was like, people, we should have this as a product.

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And so we built sort of a real time forum.

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So it was a mix between chat and forums.

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It was like, had topics.

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And it had groups, first of all, which was like how you knew who was in your group of people.

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And then within that, there were topics.

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And within each topic was a conversation, so like a chat.

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So it was a little convoluted.

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I think one of the problems with it as a product was it was difficult for people to understand.

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Like, is it forums?

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Is it chat?

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Who do I invite to these things?

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Like, what kind of groups is this good for?

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It was kind of very vague.

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It's like, well, anybody could use this.

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Yeah, there's a real tension between like creating something new and really different.

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Yeah.

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But then if it takes you two minutes to tell the story of why it's both different but better, like your people are gone already, right?

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Oh, yeah.

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Like I just had to explain it to you and it took me a little while.

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There's no like one liner to explain what Convor was.

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But it was a really great learning experience on the other hand, right?

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So experimenting with both forums and chat definitely gave me a lot of – I felt like I gained a lot just learning from the experience.

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And then that ended up pivoting.

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We wanted to pivot.

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Actually, the Eric's wanted to try a totally different product.

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So they founded their own company and did YC again.

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I don't know why you'd want to go through YC twice.

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It's a pretty – it's a great experience but it's also difficult and a lot of work.

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So they did YC a second time.

00:13:10.740 --> 00:13:25.560
I alone, along with an employee, we had hired someone, just the two of us pivoted and did Grove.io, which is basically – it's basically what Slack is today.

00:13:25.560 --> 00:13:28.220
It was IRC for businesses.

00:13:28.220 --> 00:13:34.460
We framed it in the context of IRC but it was a website and an IRC server.

00:13:34.460 --> 00:13:37.340
But you could just buy it.

00:13:37.340 --> 00:13:40.540
Like you could just pay money and have an IRC server for your company.

00:13:40.540 --> 00:13:41.740
Yeah, that's cool.

00:13:41.740 --> 00:13:45.580
IRC is something that's, I don't know, a little hard to get started in.

00:13:45.580 --> 00:13:47.280
It's not entirely obvious when you're new.

00:13:47.280 --> 00:13:52.300
So trying to make this more consumer-friendly-ish, that seemed like a good idea, huh?

00:13:52.300 --> 00:13:53.320
Yeah, yeah.

00:13:53.320 --> 00:13:58.120
And I'm not sure that we took it as far as we could have in terms of being consumer-friendly.

00:13:58.120 --> 00:14:03.100
And at the time, HipChat was still – it was a thing, was fairly popular in Campfire.

00:14:03.100 --> 00:14:05.860
So it wasn't unheard of to do sort of corporate chat.

00:14:06.840 --> 00:14:10.640
But our audience was definitely the more technical side of things.

00:14:10.640 --> 00:14:21.240
We had corporate IT departments, corporate sort of a lot of systems, sort of infrastructure teams, that sort of thing were our main consumers of Grove.

00:14:21.240 --> 00:14:26.220
And they were happy to pay to have it sort of set up for them and do things like logging.

00:14:26.780 --> 00:14:32.280
And we had a bot API, so you could easily write bots pretty quickly.

00:14:32.280 --> 00:14:33.940
Yeah.

00:14:33.940 --> 00:14:35.660
So that's pretty good.

00:14:35.660 --> 00:14:37.000
Yeah, that sounds really fun.

00:14:37.000 --> 00:14:37.700
Is it still going?

00:14:37.700 --> 00:14:38.360
Yes.

00:14:39.080 --> 00:14:45.420
So I ended up sort of – I was going to shut it down because it just was – it kind of wore on me.

00:14:45.420 --> 00:14:48.040
Being a solo founder is sad and lonely.

00:14:48.040 --> 00:14:51.940
It's already hard enough if you've got someone there to help you, right?

00:14:51.940 --> 00:14:52.520
Yes.

00:14:52.520 --> 00:15:02.240
I think – I mean, that's probably advice I would give anyone thinking of doing a company is to think about your team and building the people around you and having that support.

00:15:02.980 --> 00:15:04.560
And I have great friends.

00:15:04.560 --> 00:15:16.520
I just – I didn't work – I think one of the mistakes I made was not to work hard enough to build support for the company in terms of team and the people that were invested and had a lot in the company.

00:15:16.520 --> 00:15:18.360
And the people I did work with were fantastic.

00:15:18.360 --> 00:15:20.580
I don't want to downplay the team we had.

00:15:20.580 --> 00:15:25.440
But I think we could have grown it a lot faster and brought in more people.

00:15:25.440 --> 00:15:31.440
So it was definitely a factor of just not feeling enough support.

00:15:31.700 --> 00:15:34.280
And the product was actually selling pretty well.

00:15:34.280 --> 00:15:37.440
And so when we shut it down, there were all these sad customers.

00:15:37.440 --> 00:15:52.020
And RevSys, Revolution Systems out of Kansas, which is Frank and Jacob's company from the Django community as well, came in and said, you know, can we buy it from you?

00:15:52.020 --> 00:15:53.820
And I said, okay.

00:15:53.820 --> 00:15:55.560
So I think they got it.

00:15:55.560 --> 00:15:57.500
They got it probably a pretty good deal on it.

00:15:57.500 --> 00:15:59.100
And they maintained it.

00:15:59.100 --> 00:16:01.540
And it makes money for them.

00:16:01.540 --> 00:16:02.820
So that's pretty cool.

00:16:02.820 --> 00:16:02.960
Yeah.

00:16:02.960 --> 00:16:07.240
That's really cool that it's part of the Django community still in some sense as well.

00:16:07.240 --> 00:16:11.080
Oh, probably more so now than it was then.

00:16:11.080 --> 00:16:14.000
It's been worked on by several people in the Django community.

00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:15.260
So pretty cool.

00:16:16.680 --> 00:16:22.640
How much do you feel like the success of these startups is, how should I put this?

00:16:22.640 --> 00:16:27.100
Like, they had a great idea and they just executed it perfectly.

00:16:27.100 --> 00:16:33.280
And how much of it is they had a pretty good idea and they kind of did a pretty good job getting it going.

00:16:33.280 --> 00:16:34.580
But the timing was perfect.

00:16:34.700 --> 00:16:38.020
Like, how much luck and timing do you think play into this?

00:16:38.020 --> 00:16:38.280
Yeah.

00:16:38.280 --> 00:16:38.520
Yeah.

00:16:38.520 --> 00:16:38.920
Yeah.

00:16:38.920 --> 00:16:51.200
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00:16:51.200 --> 00:16:56.820
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00:17:30.740 --> 00:17:42.800
That's an interesting question because I think neither of those things is the most important thing in the success of a startup.

00:17:42.800 --> 00:17:44.180
Right?

00:17:44.180 --> 00:17:48.800
So I think having a decent product is the bare minimum.

00:17:48.800 --> 00:17:51.640
You have to make something that people actually want to use.

00:17:51.640 --> 00:17:54.840
If people can't use it or don't want to use it, that's bad.

00:17:54.840 --> 00:17:58.660
Timing is super, super important as well.

00:17:58.660 --> 00:18:00.540
You're right about that.

00:18:00.620 --> 00:18:03.240
It is really important to come out at the right time, be with the right movement.

00:18:03.240 --> 00:18:06.380
I've actually been thinking about doing a new project.

00:18:06.380 --> 00:18:09.380
I don't know if it's a startup, but I'm thinking about doing a project in podcasting.

00:18:09.380 --> 00:18:11.000
Oh, excellent.

00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:12.580
Which podcasting has been around for you.

00:18:12.580 --> 00:18:13.200
Right, right.

00:18:13.200 --> 00:18:14.260
We're on a podcast now.

00:18:14.260 --> 00:18:15.240
I'm talking about podcasting.

00:18:15.240 --> 00:18:19.360
Podcasting's been around for a long time, but the technology just hasn't been there.

00:18:19.900 --> 00:18:31.340
And I feel just in the past couple of years, there's been some new technological advances that could really change the game for doing like a podcasting network or a podcasting app or things like that.

00:18:31.340 --> 00:18:34.160
There's all these, like the technology is just so much better.

00:18:34.320 --> 00:18:35.360
So I think the timing is right.

00:18:35.360 --> 00:18:47.180
Also, things like serial coming out and being widely listened to has made podcasting a viable sort of medium for stories and content.

00:18:47.980 --> 00:18:49.180
I think you're right.

00:18:49.180 --> 00:18:52.660
And yeah, obviously that's something near and dear to my heart.

00:18:52.660 --> 00:18:53.000
Yeah.

00:18:53.000 --> 00:18:54.140
I put a lot of time into it.

00:18:54.140 --> 00:19:04.680
But I think I've been really studying that the last few years thinking a lot about how do you make something like this podcast or podcasts in general?

00:19:04.980 --> 00:19:08.800
Something that you can actually make a job or a business out of, right?

00:19:08.800 --> 00:19:10.780
And then we've had these, like you brought up Serial.

00:19:10.780 --> 00:19:11.560
Mm-hmm.

00:19:11.560 --> 00:19:21.780
Serial is one of the most popular podcasts ever, and it's definitely going to have some kind of financial impact, even though it was out of like an NPR type place.

00:19:21.780 --> 00:19:25.040
Do you listen to Startup from Gimlet Media?

00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:28.040
No, but someone just recommended it the other day.

00:19:28.040 --> 00:19:30.400
So I need to check it out.

00:19:30.400 --> 00:19:30.760
Yeah.

00:19:30.760 --> 00:19:31.140
Yeah.

00:19:31.140 --> 00:19:32.300
You should definitely check it out.

00:19:32.300 --> 00:19:45.320
I was going to ask you about it earlier because you said you went through YC, and they follow a pair of women co-founders that start basically a dating website app through there.

00:19:45.320 --> 00:19:48.840
And it's like from the very beginning to the very end, and it's super interesting.

00:19:48.840 --> 00:19:50.020
So check it out.

00:19:50.020 --> 00:19:57.860
But the reason that it's sort of relevant now is those guys left NPR, and they're like, I sure hope I can eat.

00:19:57.860 --> 00:19:58.740
Yeah.

00:19:58.740 --> 00:20:00.280
My kids are going to need food.

00:20:00.280 --> 00:20:01.040
Let's see if this works.

00:20:01.540 --> 00:20:05.360
And after a year, they were doing $2 million in business, like revenue.

00:20:05.360 --> 00:20:05.880
Amazing.

00:20:05.880 --> 00:20:11.860
And they just got $6 million in additional funding and valued at $25 million.

00:20:11.860 --> 00:20:12.560
Wow.

00:20:12.560 --> 00:20:14.420
And they've got a couple of podcasts, right?

00:20:14.420 --> 00:20:15.000
Yeah.

00:20:15.180 --> 00:20:20.100
So I think that kind of story totally works in 2015.

00:20:20.100 --> 00:20:25.720
In 2010 or 2012, I think people would have just said, there's no way we're giving you money for ads.

00:20:25.720 --> 00:20:26.160
Forget it.

00:20:26.160 --> 00:20:26.420
Right.

00:20:26.420 --> 00:20:27.120
Right.

00:20:27.120 --> 00:20:29.520
It's totally this popularity of cereal.

00:20:29.520 --> 00:20:33.400
It's totally advances in technology and how we listen to things.

00:20:33.580 --> 00:20:39.120
A lot of it, actually, it's funny because I think it rides off another trend that I'm really interested in.

00:20:39.120 --> 00:20:46.540
I'm really interested in sort of like non-professional fitness, like consumer everybody fitness, like Fitbit level fitness apps.

00:20:46.540 --> 00:20:47.200
Right.

00:20:47.280 --> 00:20:50.780
And that's just blown up in the past year or two.

00:20:50.780 --> 00:20:51.100
Right.

00:20:51.100 --> 00:20:53.520
More people are working out, running.

00:20:53.520 --> 00:20:55.780
And running is the thing that's driving the podcasts.

00:20:56.500 --> 00:20:59.880
So it's all kind of tied together, right?

00:20:59.880 --> 00:21:04.080
So one of the things, and we can segue into investing here.

00:21:04.080 --> 00:21:16.480
And one of the things I love doing and have always loved doing since I was a little, little kid is looking at trends and predicting sort of what is hot right now and what is going to be hot.

00:21:16.840 --> 00:21:26.480
And I think a lot of the problems with my startups was I was playing around with what's interesting to me, which is pushing the boundaries of where I see things and not really thinking about where people are now.

00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:27.140
Right.

00:21:27.140 --> 00:21:33.680
So doing something like Slack five years ago was like very much like I wanted to play with that space.

00:21:33.680 --> 00:21:42.940
But I don't think people were ready for that in the corporate, like the corporate product space, like the sort of enterprise apps just wasn't there yet.

00:21:43.360 --> 00:21:49.420
But people weren't really ready to be buying consumer-like products as businesses.

00:21:49.420 --> 00:21:50.800
Does that make sense?

00:21:50.800 --> 00:21:52.020
Yeah, absolutely.

00:21:52.020 --> 00:21:57.120
You know, I think is things like Campfire were about as far as it went, right?

00:21:57.120 --> 00:22:05.900
Like Slack and HipChat and these things and Yammer, all those things have sort of changed the way people communicate within large organizations.

00:22:05.900 --> 00:22:11.320
And that's a very different world than the consumers or small business, right?

00:22:11.320 --> 00:22:14.260
Those guys, they live a different world than those large enterprises.

00:22:14.260 --> 00:22:15.440
Right, right.

00:22:15.440 --> 00:22:20.620
Oh, but I never finished my last point was which timing nor product isn't necessarily the only thing.

00:22:20.620 --> 00:22:26.200
A lot of it here is support and network marketing and growth.

00:22:26.200 --> 00:22:32.320
So you can have the best product in the world, but if no one ever hears about it, you'll probably never get any traction.

00:22:33.420 --> 00:22:37.120
And if, sadly, in Silicon Valley, the money issue is a thing, right?

00:22:37.120 --> 00:22:40.020
So if you can run it without money, you're doing pretty well.

00:22:40.020 --> 00:22:46.340
But if you need to take investment, it's a lot of your network, who you know, who you're friends with, who you've worked with in the past.

00:22:47.040 --> 00:22:49.300
So all of that is a factor.

00:22:49.300 --> 00:22:55.440
And there's some wonderful mix of that that comes together to create the best startups.

00:22:55.440 --> 00:23:00.660
Like the best startups you see now, it's not just because they had a fantastic product.

00:23:00.660 --> 00:23:03.320
It's not just because they were in the right place at the right time, right?

00:23:03.520 --> 00:23:10.280
Like there's actually apps and startups that I see that are the right product at the right time, but because they don't have the right network, they suffer.

00:23:10.280 --> 00:23:12.800
And that kind of, that breaks my heart a lot.

00:23:12.800 --> 00:23:14.900
So that's what makes me really sad.

00:23:14.900 --> 00:23:17.340
But what can you do?

00:23:17.340 --> 00:23:18.700
I think you're right.

00:23:18.700 --> 00:23:21.380
There's a lot of things that have to come together.

00:23:21.380 --> 00:23:23.060
And let's say there's four.

00:23:23.060 --> 00:23:26.880
If you have three of them, even though those all might be personal, it's not enough.

00:23:26.880 --> 00:23:31.560
And it's really hard to know, especially if it's the first time you try, what's right.

00:23:31.560 --> 00:23:32.580
Yeah.

00:23:33.160 --> 00:23:40.180
And that's why I tend to look at team is because the more people you can bring in, the more of those aspects you can capture as well.

00:23:40.180 --> 00:23:43.600
So you do some angel investing yourself, right?

00:23:43.600 --> 00:23:45.640
I just started, which is funny.

00:23:45.640 --> 00:23:48.760
I wanted to talk about it because I've made one angel investment.

00:23:48.760 --> 00:23:55.600
So I put Twitter, I put it on my Twitter bio and then I was thinking, I feel like that's a little bit of a lie.

00:23:55.600 --> 00:23:57.880
Like I've done one angel investment.

00:23:57.880 --> 00:24:00.640
I'm looking at doing a second just now, actually.

00:24:00.640 --> 00:24:03.100
I'm in talks to do a second angel investment.

00:24:03.100 --> 00:24:06.860
And I put it on my Twitter bio so that I could bring some in.

00:24:06.860 --> 00:24:10.600
It was more to get people to come to me and be like, oh, you're angel investing now.

00:24:12.380 --> 00:24:13.400
I think it's awesome.

00:24:13.400 --> 00:24:16.460
And I think if you've made one angel investment, it can go on your Twitter profile.

00:24:16.460 --> 00:24:17.620
I think that counts.

00:24:17.620 --> 00:24:18.000
Thank you.

00:24:18.000 --> 00:24:18.540
Thank you.

00:24:18.540 --> 00:24:22.700
I mean, if it's going to go anywhere, it should go on a Twitter bio, right?

00:24:24.240 --> 00:24:24.740
That's right.

00:24:24.740 --> 00:24:25.120
It should.

00:24:25.120 --> 00:24:30.960
So did you see a lot of companies before you made that investment or how's that?

00:24:30.960 --> 00:24:32.020
How does it work?

00:24:32.020 --> 00:24:32.780
Yeah.

00:24:32.780 --> 00:24:33.820
How's it been going for you?

00:24:33.820 --> 00:24:34.780
Yeah.

00:24:34.780 --> 00:24:40.120
I think you asked me in, I think the initial thing you sent over for me was like, oh, do you hear pitches?

00:24:40.340 --> 00:24:41.900
So I was like, well, not really.

00:24:41.900 --> 00:24:45.900
So I've been thinking about doing it for a while.

00:24:45.900 --> 00:25:00.260
But you need to, there's some factors that you need to meet some criteria before you become an angel investor for your own safety and for the safety of the companies that you invest in, which is that you need to have a certain net worth or you need to have a certain equity stake in the company already or things like that.

00:25:00.260 --> 00:25:06.060
That the official qualified investor from the United States, something like this?

00:25:06.060 --> 00:25:06.600
Yes.

00:25:06.600 --> 00:25:07.480
What's it called?

00:25:07.480 --> 00:25:08.520
Not qualified.

00:25:08.520 --> 00:25:10.320
It's, what's the word for it?

00:25:10.320 --> 00:25:11.360
I'm just totally forgetting.

00:25:11.360 --> 00:25:12.000
Accredited?

00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:13.300
I think it's accredited investor.

00:25:13.300 --> 00:25:13.640
Accredited investor.

00:25:13.640 --> 00:25:14.380
Yes, that's right.

00:25:14.380 --> 00:25:14.640
Yes.

00:25:14.640 --> 00:25:15.080
Yes.

00:25:15.080 --> 00:25:15.920
Accredited investor.

00:25:15.920 --> 00:25:16.420
That's right.

00:25:16.420 --> 00:25:17.280
Yes.

00:25:17.280 --> 00:25:18.880
You need to be an accredited angel investor.

00:25:18.880 --> 00:25:27.220
And I don't say you need to because there's actually some laws now where you can sort of, for crowdfunding and things, to allow for crowdfunding.

00:25:27.220 --> 00:25:29.240
And that's super new, right?

00:25:29.360 --> 00:25:31.960
Like that just came out like a year and a half ago or something.

00:25:31.960 --> 00:25:32.580
Yep.

00:25:32.580 --> 00:25:33.060
Yep.

00:25:33.060 --> 00:25:33.440
Yep.

00:25:33.440 --> 00:25:37.700
So you can do small investments, a large batch of small investments.

00:25:37.700 --> 00:25:50.760
But I mean, I'm not, I'm not an expert on this, but normally it's that you need to have a million dollars in like assets and net worth, not tied up in a home.

00:25:50.760 --> 00:25:53.800
Which is definitely.

00:25:53.800 --> 00:25:55.080
That rules a few people out.

00:25:55.080 --> 00:25:55.640
Yeah.

00:25:55.640 --> 00:25:57.260
Definitely.

00:25:57.260 --> 00:25:58.280
Definitely does.

00:25:58.360 --> 00:26:00.740
But it's for, it's for the company's sake and for your own.

00:26:00.740 --> 00:26:12.880
Because if you put a large chunk of your net worth into a company and the company completely fails, which there is a 99% chance that it will, it's looking out for you, right?

00:26:12.880 --> 00:26:14.100
You don't want to lose that much money.

00:26:14.180 --> 00:26:16.800
And it's looking out for the company.

00:26:17.560 --> 00:26:22.020
You could sue the individual if they had some weird corporate structure.

00:26:22.020 --> 00:26:24.400
I'm not sure.

00:26:24.400 --> 00:26:24.400
I'm not sure.

00:26:24.400 --> 00:26:24.640
I'm not sure.

00:26:24.640 --> 00:26:25.260
I'm not sure.

00:26:25.260 --> 00:26:25.640
I'm not sure.

00:26:25.640 --> 00:26:26.020
I'm not sure.

00:26:26.020 --> 00:26:27.020
I'm not sure.

00:26:27.020 --> 00:26:28.020
I'm not sure.

00:26:28.020 --> 00:26:28.400
I'm not sure.

00:26:28.400 --> 00:26:29.020
I'm not sure.

00:26:29.020 --> 00:26:29.400
I'm not sure.

00:26:29.400 --> 00:26:30.400
I'm not sure.

00:26:30.400 --> 00:26:31.400
But if you're not sure.

00:26:31.400 --> 00:26:33.400
You're not sure.

00:26:33.400 --> 00:26:35.500
You would be personally liable for losses.

00:26:35.500 --> 00:26:39.640
It's all this legal stuff, basically, to protect yourself and to protect the company.

00:26:39.640 --> 00:26:40.420
Yeah.

00:26:40.420 --> 00:26:45.220
All the investment regulation and legal corporate structure stuff.

00:26:45.780 --> 00:26:50.280
A lot of people get into startups because they're into technology and they want to change the world.

00:26:50.280 --> 00:26:54.640
And neither of those really feel like they're really super contributing to that, right?

00:26:54.640 --> 00:26:55.920
No.

00:26:55.920 --> 00:26:56.460
No.

00:26:56.460 --> 00:27:00.600
And the best thing you can always invest in, if you're interested, investing in yourself.

00:27:00.600 --> 00:27:08.340
So doing your own startup, investing in your own education, things like that are definitely the best return on your money you can get,

00:27:08.340 --> 00:27:11.340
especially if you aren't a billionaire.

00:27:11.340 --> 00:27:13.380
That's the sort of stuff.

00:27:13.740 --> 00:27:16.720
Like, doing your own startups is really the best investment.

00:27:16.720 --> 00:27:18.920
It definitely takes it out of you.

00:27:18.920 --> 00:27:22.620
But every time, I think you learn a lot.

00:27:22.620 --> 00:27:23.480
Yes.

00:27:23.480 --> 00:27:30.320
As long as you don't just quit your job and say, I've got $5,000 a month and a half to do this.

00:27:30.320 --> 00:27:30.760
Let's go.

00:27:30.760 --> 00:27:31.700
Right?

00:27:31.700 --> 00:27:33.440
A little more net than that, maybe.

00:27:33.440 --> 00:27:34.840
But it's good.

00:27:34.840 --> 00:27:35.740
Yeah.

00:27:35.740 --> 00:27:36.200
Yeah.

00:27:36.200 --> 00:27:40.300
I mean, the worst that can happen is that you run out of money and you've learned a lot.

00:27:41.820 --> 00:27:48.640
And hopefully, I mean, in the past startups, I've gone into credit card debt and things, which isn't fun.

00:27:48.640 --> 00:27:51.700
But yeah, people don't talk about that.

00:27:51.700 --> 00:27:55.340
They don't talk about, like, sort of how rough it gets sometimes.

00:27:55.340 --> 00:27:55.940
Yeah.

00:27:55.940 --> 00:27:58.320
I think it gets, I think you can get pretty rough.

00:27:58.420 --> 00:28:01.340
So there's a lot of glamour, a lot of glamour to it.

00:28:01.340 --> 00:28:08.580
One of the things I think is interesting, I work with a lot of tech companies from a training perspective, sort of throughout the world.

00:28:08.580 --> 00:28:21.040
It seems like San Francisco, Silicon Valley, there's some kind of special going on there that seems really hard to replicate in other countries and places.

00:28:21.440 --> 00:28:23.500
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00:29:13.800 --> 00:29:24.340
Oh, it's definitely the case.

00:29:24.340 --> 00:29:27.180
It's because people move here to be part of that culture.

00:29:27.180 --> 00:29:31.100
So, like, for example, I'm from Minneapolis, right?

00:29:31.100 --> 00:29:32.040
I grew up in Minnesota.

00:29:32.040 --> 00:29:33.540
I lived there for 24 years.

00:29:33.540 --> 00:29:35.640
You'll hear that story everywhere.

00:29:35.640 --> 00:29:37.080
Like, where did you grow up?

00:29:37.080 --> 00:29:40.520
It's all over the world, basically.

00:29:40.520 --> 00:29:45.380
And then people come here because they want to know other people like themselves.

00:29:45.380 --> 00:29:47.740
Like, very creative people.

00:29:47.740 --> 00:29:49.780
Very tech-minded.

00:29:49.780 --> 00:29:54.920
Very nerdy and interested in obscure topics in technology.

00:29:54.920 --> 00:29:55.780
Right?

00:29:55.780 --> 00:29:59.660
And I think it just happened to be the meeting place for those people.

00:29:59.760 --> 00:30:01.540
It could have been any place in the world.

00:30:01.540 --> 00:30:09.380
It just so happened that because things sort of started here in the 70s and 80s that it just happened to be San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

00:30:09.380 --> 00:30:12.080
San Francisco now more days, which is nice.

00:30:12.080 --> 00:30:15.200
Yeah, it's moving back up north to the city, yeah?

00:30:15.200 --> 00:30:16.540
Yeah, yeah.

00:30:17.480 --> 00:30:18.640
I don't know if that's good or bad.

00:30:18.640 --> 00:30:25.960
I think it's probably good for young people and for the economy in San Francisco, bringing some of that here as well.

00:30:25.960 --> 00:30:27.780
Yeah, I think it's probably good as well.

00:30:27.780 --> 00:30:30.200
And, you know, there's less sprawl.

00:30:30.200 --> 00:30:31.760
There's less traffic jams, right?

00:30:31.760 --> 00:30:35.500
People aren't commuting as far because you can live more densely in the city.

00:30:35.500 --> 00:30:38.360
Most people in San Francisco that I know don't even own a car.

00:30:39.360 --> 00:30:40.380
Yeah, for sure.

00:30:40.380 --> 00:30:40.860
Yeah, it's wild.

00:30:40.860 --> 00:30:44.860
Do you want to switch gears a little bit and talk about what you do at Dropbox?

00:30:44.860 --> 00:30:46.460
Sure, sure.

00:30:46.460 --> 00:30:49.580
So I'm actually in between roles right now at Dropbox.

00:30:49.580 --> 00:30:50.020
I'm switching.

00:30:50.020 --> 00:30:52.240
I think I formally switched this week.

00:30:52.240 --> 00:30:53.540
Okay, so.

00:30:53.540 --> 00:30:54.600
It's pretty cool.

00:30:54.640 --> 00:30:55.600
New role.

00:30:55.600 --> 00:30:55.920
Okay.

00:30:55.920 --> 00:30:59.020
Yeah, so my past role was developer relations.

00:30:59.020 --> 00:31:01.720
I was a developer advocate on our API team.

00:31:01.720 --> 00:31:06.220
And I basically talked with people about Dropbox APIs.

00:31:06.220 --> 00:31:11.340
So promoting the API to kind of the long tail of developers.

00:31:11.340 --> 00:31:13.160
So like everyone using it.

00:31:13.160 --> 00:31:15.060
So not necessarily our big partnership deals.

00:31:15.060 --> 00:31:19.780
But, you know, like for example, you, if you wanted to play with our Dropbox API,

00:31:19.780 --> 00:31:23.060
those are the kind of folks we wanted to reach out to.

00:31:23.460 --> 00:31:28.080
So it's blogging and speaking and doing hackathons.

00:31:28.080 --> 00:31:30.840
And it's a really cool job.

00:31:30.840 --> 00:31:38.100
Yeah, this whole developer evangelist role seems like a perfect match for somebody who's

00:31:38.100 --> 00:31:42.120
really good with technology, but is really passionate about sharing technology.

00:31:42.120 --> 00:31:43.800
Yes, yes.

00:31:43.800 --> 00:31:46.500
It is sort of a more generalist job.

00:31:46.500 --> 00:31:48.520
You're not heads down in code all day.

00:31:48.520 --> 00:31:50.240
You're heads down in code part of the day.

00:31:50.240 --> 00:31:53.220
And then part of the day is talking about tech with other people.

00:31:54.180 --> 00:31:54.560
Yeah, yeah.

00:31:54.560 --> 00:31:54.980
Very cool.

00:31:54.980 --> 00:31:57.120
So that was last week.

00:31:57.120 --> 00:31:57.800
What's this week?

00:31:57.800 --> 00:32:00.380
So I just joined Dropbox Paper.

00:32:00.380 --> 00:32:02.960
I don't know if you can talk about it.

00:32:02.960 --> 00:32:04.560
It's a new product by Dropbox.

00:32:04.560 --> 00:32:05.540
That's awesome.

00:32:05.540 --> 00:32:07.240
I have heard of Paper.

00:32:07.240 --> 00:32:07.960
Uh-huh.

00:32:07.960 --> 00:32:09.940
Yeah, it's super new.

00:32:09.940 --> 00:32:10.520
It just launched.

00:32:10.520 --> 00:32:11.700
But tell everyone about it.

00:32:12.400 --> 00:32:18.760
Yeah, so Dropbox Paper is an online collaborative editor, similar to sort of a mix between Google

00:32:18.760 --> 00:32:19.800
Docs and Medium.

00:32:19.800 --> 00:32:24.660
Because I say Medium because it looks, it has a very clean, sleek look to it.

00:32:25.100 --> 00:32:27.480
But it has the functionality of Google Docs.

00:32:27.480 --> 00:32:31.940
So the ability to create a document, share it with someone else, and then work on it together.

00:32:31.940 --> 00:32:35.700
And has some really cool features, like the ability to sort of like highlight lines and

00:32:35.700 --> 00:32:37.580
then have a whole conversation around it.

00:32:37.580 --> 00:32:40.320
Has some fun features like stickers and emoji.

00:32:42.320 --> 00:32:43.380
It's just really cool.

00:32:43.380 --> 00:32:46.840
And we had been testing it internally at Dropbox for a long time.

00:32:46.840 --> 00:32:50.080
So my group, Developer Relations, we have to write a lot of blog posts.

00:32:50.080 --> 00:32:53.820
So we had been using it to draft up our blog posts and get feedback from the rest of the

00:32:53.820 --> 00:32:54.060
team.

00:32:54.060 --> 00:32:55.600
Like, oh, you should change some wording here.

00:32:55.600 --> 00:32:57.000
Or, oh, don't forget to mention this.

00:32:57.000 --> 00:32:58.580
Or you should link to this doc.

00:32:58.580 --> 00:33:01.900
So we've been using it for a long time.

00:33:01.900 --> 00:33:06.260
And it got to the point where we like couldn't live without it on our team.

00:33:06.260 --> 00:33:08.760
And it was time at Dropbox.

00:33:08.760 --> 00:33:12.800
So Dropbox, every 18 months as an engineer, they want you to try something new.

00:33:12.800 --> 00:33:15.440
So they have a program called Hack a Sprint.

00:33:15.440 --> 00:33:17.120
And you go to another team.

00:33:17.120 --> 00:33:20.700
You work on that team for a sprint, which is six weeks long.

00:33:20.700 --> 00:33:22.420
So you work on that team for six weeks.

00:33:22.420 --> 00:33:26.580
And then you decide either to go back to your former team and be like, oh, it was a good

00:33:26.580 --> 00:33:27.020
experience.

00:33:27.020 --> 00:33:27.580
I learned a lot.

00:33:27.580 --> 00:33:28.020
It was fun.

00:33:28.020 --> 00:33:31.100
I added a new feature for whatever team you had joined.

00:33:31.100 --> 00:33:32.920
Or you stay on the team.

00:33:32.920 --> 00:33:36.040
And I just, I'm on my sixth week now.

00:33:36.040 --> 00:33:38.020
And I joined the team yesterday.

00:33:38.300 --> 00:33:41.260
So I'm on my final week of my Hack a Sprint.

00:33:41.260 --> 00:33:43.040
Oh, that's really cool.

00:33:43.040 --> 00:33:44.060
Yeah, that's awesome.

00:33:44.060 --> 00:33:44.920
Yeah.

00:33:44.920 --> 00:33:46.160
And it's because I love paper.

00:33:46.160 --> 00:33:47.320
I wanted to work on it.

00:33:47.320 --> 00:33:52.580
So now I do JavaScript all day, which front end JavaScript on the editor itself.

00:33:52.580 --> 00:33:54.020
I've been working on integrations.

00:33:54.020 --> 00:34:00.980
So every time you paste a link into paper, so say a link to a YouTube video or a photo,

00:34:00.980 --> 00:34:03.540
it renders that in line.

00:34:03.540 --> 00:34:05.020
And that's the stuff I'm working on.

00:34:05.020 --> 00:34:05.820
Nice.

00:34:06.220 --> 00:34:06.420
Yeah.

00:34:06.420 --> 00:34:07.600
That's pretty cool.

00:34:07.600 --> 00:34:08.240
Yeah.

00:34:08.240 --> 00:34:11.100
What JavaScript front end frameworks are you using?

00:34:11.100 --> 00:34:13.420
Like Angular, JS, or Ember, or anything like this?

00:34:13.420 --> 00:34:15.180
Yeah, we're using React.

00:34:15.180 --> 00:34:16.060
All right.

00:34:16.060 --> 00:34:16.280
Okay.

00:34:16.280 --> 00:34:18.560
Which is around Dropbox is super popular.

00:34:18.560 --> 00:34:21.680
I am working at a company like Dropbox.

00:34:21.680 --> 00:34:24.940
You kind of lose perspective on what's popular within the industry as a whole.

00:34:25.440 --> 00:34:29.560
But here, React is super popular for a bunch of our work at Dropbox.

00:34:29.560 --> 00:34:32.980
And then TypeScript for static typing of JavaScript.

00:34:32.980 --> 00:34:38.420
And I'm sure we use other things, but I'm so new at the company that those are the ones I've touched the most.

00:34:39.740 --> 00:34:43.900
And I haven't dug too deep or so new at the product, not at the company.

00:34:43.900 --> 00:34:47.820
It feels like kind of like a separate company at Dropbox because it's a whole separate product.

00:34:47.820 --> 00:34:48.800
It's not Dropbox.

00:34:48.800 --> 00:34:50.500
I mean, it's a different code base than Dropbox.

00:34:50.500 --> 00:34:50.980
Yeah.

00:34:50.980 --> 00:34:53.260
It's not some REST API to some file system.

00:34:53.260 --> 00:34:53.740
No.

00:34:53.740 --> 00:34:54.860
It's entirely different, right?

00:34:54.860 --> 00:34:56.520
Totally different stack.

00:34:56.980 --> 00:34:58.740
I mean, Dropbox is mostly Python.

00:34:58.740 --> 00:35:01.920
I heard you had Jessica McCuller on the show.

00:35:01.920 --> 00:35:02.720
Yes.

00:35:02.720 --> 00:35:03.240
That was great.

00:35:03.240 --> 00:35:03.680
Yeah.

00:35:03.680 --> 00:35:04.020
Yeah.

00:35:04.020 --> 00:35:04.580
She's great.

00:35:04.580 --> 00:35:10.300
She's big head honcho here at Dropbox on the Dropbox side of things.

00:35:10.300 --> 00:35:11.880
So that's pretty cool.

00:35:11.880 --> 00:35:12.720
But yeah, they're all Python.

00:35:12.720 --> 00:35:13.620
Yeah.

00:35:13.620 --> 00:35:14.540
That side's all Python.

00:35:14.540 --> 00:35:14.960
Yeah.

00:35:14.960 --> 00:35:17.900
So what's the backend for paper?

00:35:17.900 --> 00:35:18.720
JavaScript.

00:35:18.720 --> 00:35:21.000
So is it Node?

00:35:21.000 --> 00:35:21.900
Is it something like Node?

00:35:21.900 --> 00:35:23.720
You know, it's not Node.

00:35:23.720 --> 00:35:26.240
And I can't remember off the top of my head what it is.

00:35:26.300 --> 00:35:27.520
I think it predates Node.

00:35:27.520 --> 00:35:33.920
So Dropbox paper is based off of Hackpad, which was also a YC startup.

00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:38.780
They were acquired by Dropbox, and the code base is very similar.

00:35:38.780 --> 00:35:44.620
I mean, it's not completely reused, but they took a lot of Hackpad and used it to sort of

00:35:44.620 --> 00:35:46.940
bootstrap the development of paper.

00:35:46.940 --> 00:35:54.900
That's an interesting comment because you see a lot of these startups, and some of them vanish.

00:35:54.900 --> 00:35:57.140
Some of them explode like Airbnb.

00:35:57.140 --> 00:35:59.320
But a lot of them get kind of gobbled up.

00:35:59.320 --> 00:36:03.940
And I always wonder, like, well, what does that really mean?

00:36:03.940 --> 00:36:09.820
Are we going to kind of see this thing live on, or is it just we want people, or what's the story?

00:36:09.820 --> 00:36:10.760
So it's cool to hear.

00:36:10.760 --> 00:36:12.340
Yeah, there's different categories.

00:36:12.340 --> 00:36:14.920
And this is actually something I look at as an angel investor.

00:36:14.920 --> 00:36:17.300
It's like, what category do I think this company falls under?

00:36:19.200 --> 00:36:22.400
As a startup, you can go public and go big.

00:36:22.400 --> 00:36:25.240
So the best result is that your company is huge.

00:36:25.240 --> 00:36:25.740
You explode.

00:36:25.740 --> 00:36:27.020
You have thousands of employees.

00:36:27.020 --> 00:36:28.240
You're the next Google.

00:36:28.240 --> 00:36:29.640
You're the next Facebook, right?

00:36:29.640 --> 00:36:30.920
You go public.

00:36:30.920 --> 00:36:34.820
And that's the exit point for investors most of the time.

00:36:34.820 --> 00:36:37.240
I mean, anybody can then buy shares in the company.

00:36:37.240 --> 00:36:39.240
There's nothing special about being an investor.

00:36:39.660 --> 00:36:40.100
Right.

00:36:40.100 --> 00:36:42.320
That's probably the most common outcome for a startup, right?

00:36:42.320 --> 00:36:43.300
Yeah.

00:36:43.300 --> 00:36:47.600
One in a thousand or something like that?

00:36:47.600 --> 00:36:49.380
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:36:49.380 --> 00:36:51.940
The most common, sadly, is that it fails.

00:36:51.940 --> 00:36:52.940
Yeah.

00:36:52.940 --> 00:36:53.900
You lose all your money.

00:36:53.900 --> 00:36:57.140
You run out of money, the company sets down.

00:36:57.140 --> 00:37:00.800
Another scenario is the company keeps running as a small business.

00:37:00.800 --> 00:37:06.580
A good example of this would probably be, maybe a big example would be like 37 Signals, right?

00:37:06.580 --> 00:37:10.640
I think they're still operating independently and running on their own.

00:37:10.640 --> 00:37:18.500
Yeah, those guys have some really interesting thinking around startups and companies and sort of growth rates.

00:37:18.500 --> 00:37:21.300
And, yeah, so, like, they're...

00:37:21.300 --> 00:37:22.860
Maybe not a best example of this.

00:37:22.860 --> 00:37:26.360
But you could have a company that stays private and keeps running.

00:37:26.360 --> 00:37:31.400
Maybe Craigslist might be an interesting example of this, right?

00:37:31.400 --> 00:37:35.280
Like, they're independent and have been running for goodness knows how long.

00:37:35.540 --> 00:37:38.740
I think they're still at, like, 20 employees or something like that.

00:37:38.740 --> 00:37:40.120
Right, okay.

00:37:40.120 --> 00:37:41.960
Yeah, interesting, right?

00:37:41.960 --> 00:37:43.920
That's not super common either.

00:37:43.920 --> 00:37:46.040
That's pretty rare.

00:37:46.040 --> 00:37:51.660
A lot of times you'll grow and your company will be acquired for the team.

00:37:51.660 --> 00:37:54.180
So those are small acquisitions.

00:37:54.180 --> 00:37:56.100
Sometimes they'll be acquired for the product.

00:37:56.100 --> 00:37:57.320
Maybe they'll be acquired for both.

00:37:57.320 --> 00:38:01.760
So I think Hackpad was an example of being acquired for both the team and the product.

00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:04.520
For example, Grove was acquired for only the product.

00:38:04.520 --> 00:38:07.400
My previous startup, Pounce, was acquired only for the team.

00:38:07.400 --> 00:38:10.020
Yeah, so you've been kind of involved in all three.

00:38:10.020 --> 00:38:10.520
How interesting.

00:38:10.520 --> 00:38:12.160
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:12.160 --> 00:38:13.220
Definitely.

00:38:13.220 --> 00:38:14.980
Well, I mean, you see all kinds, right?

00:38:14.980 --> 00:38:16.880
So...

00:38:16.880 --> 00:38:21.300
And then I'm working at Dropbox, which is likely going to be a big company that goes to public

00:38:21.300 --> 00:38:22.900
kind of thing.

00:38:22.900 --> 00:38:23.640
So...

00:38:23.640 --> 00:38:24.140
Unless...

00:38:24.140 --> 00:38:27.160
Unless it's a big acquisition, but that seems less likely.

00:38:27.160 --> 00:38:29.320
Yeah, it doesn't seem too likely.

00:38:30.360 --> 00:38:32.980
It'd have to be a pretty big acquisition, but I guess it could happen.

00:38:32.980 --> 00:38:34.120
Yeah, these things happen.

00:38:34.120 --> 00:38:36.940
YouTube is a good example of a huge acquisition by Google.

00:38:36.940 --> 00:38:41.060
Billion dollar, I think, something like that acquisition.

00:38:41.060 --> 00:38:42.540
I should know this.

00:38:42.540 --> 00:38:43.380
I should just...

00:38:43.380 --> 00:38:46.680
And that's another interesting Python story as well, right?

00:38:46.920 --> 00:38:48.220
Yeah, it's very true.

00:38:48.220 --> 00:38:48.780
Very true.

00:38:48.780 --> 00:38:55.740
So another thing I saw that you were involved with was the OAuth and O-embed API specifications.

00:38:56.740 --> 00:39:01.680
Is that like the OAuth that everybody knows, loves, and sometimes curses out around security?

00:39:01.680 --> 00:39:02.940
Oh, yeah.

00:39:02.940 --> 00:39:03.800
I was...

00:39:03.800 --> 00:39:04.860
Knows and loves is...

00:39:04.860 --> 00:39:06.500
Loves is a strong word for OAuth.

00:39:06.500 --> 00:39:10.620
Mostly it's knows and struggles through.

00:39:10.620 --> 00:39:11.620
Yes.

00:39:11.620 --> 00:39:12.640
Yes.

00:39:12.640 --> 00:39:13.840
That's cool.

00:39:13.840 --> 00:39:15.140
How'd you get involved with that?

00:39:15.140 --> 00:39:18.180
So my first startup, Pounce, we wanted to build an API.

00:39:18.640 --> 00:39:21.820
And we wanted to do secure authentication for the API.

00:39:21.820 --> 00:39:25.920
And at the time, SSL wasn't super popular.

00:39:25.920 --> 00:39:32.200
I'm pretty sure none of Pounce was SSL or over SSL, which is nowadays...

00:39:32.200 --> 00:39:34.200
You can be thoroughly horrified by that.

00:39:34.200 --> 00:39:36.240
Nowadays, that's pretty bad.

00:39:36.240 --> 00:39:40.360
But it wasn't easy to get SSL certifications back then.

00:39:40.360 --> 00:39:42.140
Or it wasn't common.

00:39:42.140 --> 00:39:43.360
People just didn't do it.

00:39:43.360 --> 00:39:44.580
It was expensive.

00:39:44.580 --> 00:39:48.620
And if you had to run your own hardware, it used to be computationally expensive.

00:39:49.220 --> 00:39:49.760
And it was just...

00:39:49.760 --> 00:39:50.900
There's lots of...

00:39:50.900 --> 00:39:52.000
A lot of barriers, right?

00:39:52.000 --> 00:39:53.140
It's not like today.

00:39:53.140 --> 00:39:53.600
Yeah.

00:39:53.600 --> 00:39:55.340
It sounds like I'm like this horrible...

00:39:55.340 --> 00:39:57.540
My startup didn't have SSL.

00:39:57.540 --> 00:39:59.400
Yeah.

00:39:59.400 --> 00:40:04.480
So we were looking for a way to sort of authenticate securely for APIs.

00:40:04.480 --> 00:40:11.340
And most APIs at the time were done over HTTP basic authentication, which is still used.

00:40:11.340 --> 00:40:12.860
And over SSL, that's not too bad.

00:40:12.860 --> 00:40:16.800
Basically, just passing the username and password along with every request.

00:40:16.800 --> 00:40:24.300
The problem with that is that you're allowing any third-party site to sort of capture the username and password for your users.

00:40:24.300 --> 00:40:25.320
Right.

00:40:25.320 --> 00:40:33.280
So if I wanted to integrate GitHub with Pounce, I would have had to give GitHub my Pounce password, right?

00:40:33.280 --> 00:40:33.860
Yes.

00:40:33.860 --> 00:40:34.500
Something like this.

00:40:34.500 --> 00:40:35.040
Yes.

00:40:35.040 --> 00:40:35.600
Exactly.

00:40:35.600 --> 00:40:36.640
Exactly.

00:40:36.640 --> 00:40:41.380
And that was bad because it could be used for phishing and getting people's passwords, right?

00:40:42.480 --> 00:40:51.100
So there were two problems, SSL and passwords being available to third-party applications or users entering their password into third-party applications.

00:40:51.100 --> 00:40:53.980
So those were the problems with HTTP basic.

00:40:53.980 --> 00:41:01.540
Flickr at the time had developed a new type of authentication, which they probably just called Flickr auth.

00:41:01.980 --> 00:41:03.940
And it was token-based authentication.

00:41:03.940 --> 00:41:11.400
And it was very similar to exactly what ended up being the first version of OAuth.

00:41:11.400 --> 00:41:12.500
That's cool.

00:41:12.500 --> 00:41:18.540
So you got involved to kind of bring it into your startup to try to deal with the APIs and authentication and all that.

00:41:18.540 --> 00:41:19.280
Yes.

00:41:19.280 --> 00:41:20.480
So it was a small group of people.

00:41:20.480 --> 00:41:22.980
And I was asking around, like, what should I do?

00:41:22.980 --> 00:41:24.480
And someone's like, oh, you should talk to these guys.

00:41:24.540 --> 00:41:28.640
And so I talked to them, and they're like, well, we haven't really built anything yet, but here's our spec.

00:41:28.640 --> 00:41:30.240
And the spec was great.

00:41:30.240 --> 00:41:33.280
And I got involved because I wrote the first implementation from the spec.

00:41:33.280 --> 00:41:34.440
Wow.

00:41:34.440 --> 00:41:37.260
Yeah, yeah, the first open-source implementation.

00:41:37.260 --> 00:41:39.620
I think people had played around with it on their own sites.

00:41:39.620 --> 00:41:42.080
But it was the first one publicly available.

00:41:42.080 --> 00:41:48.280
And looking back, and I think Dropbox today still has parts of it in their code base, which is pretty incredible.

00:41:48.280 --> 00:41:49.980
Yeah, that's really awesome.

00:41:50.160 --> 00:41:55.880
So did you find out, like, okay, the spec is not quite making it because we look at it?

00:41:55.880 --> 00:41:57.800
Or was the spec good enough that you could just write?

00:41:57.800 --> 00:41:58.020
It was good.

00:41:58.020 --> 00:41:58.680
It was good.

00:41:58.680 --> 00:41:59.900
There was nothing wrong with the spec.

00:41:59.900 --> 00:42:00.580
It was good.

00:42:00.580 --> 00:42:07.280
I mean, I ran into some issues, had to do some of my own, like, signature signing stuff.

00:42:07.280 --> 00:42:10.560
There was definitely some back and forth.

00:42:10.560 --> 00:42:12.460
Like, this wasn't developed in isolation.

00:42:12.460 --> 00:42:15.860
Like, it was 12 or so people working on it together.

00:42:15.860 --> 00:42:19.020
So there definitely was a lot of back and forth and collaboration.

00:42:19.020 --> 00:42:23.060
That's the other great thing you mentioned before about Silicon Valley and people being here.

00:42:23.060 --> 00:42:34.740
It's like, I just, I mean, I went to meetings, like, physical meetings with people at, you know, Super Happy Dev House, which is just, like, an event here that people go and developers go and hang out together.

00:42:34.740 --> 00:42:36.960
So we did some of the work at Super Happy Dev House.

00:42:36.960 --> 00:42:37.880
We'd go to offices.

00:42:37.880 --> 00:42:40.260
We went to the Twitter office.

00:42:40.260 --> 00:42:47.260
We'd go to Google or Yahoo or something, and we'd, like, discuss OAuth.

00:42:47.260 --> 00:42:48.520
So it was definitely a group effort.

00:42:48.520 --> 00:42:53.480
I have to give a lot of credit to Andy Smith, who helped a lot with the first implementations.

00:42:53.480 --> 00:42:59.460
He did the first PHP implementation and helped me rewrite my Python one to be not terrible.

00:42:59.460 --> 00:43:02.940
So, yeah, it was definitely more of a collaborative effort.

00:43:03.800 --> 00:43:04.340
Yeah, how cool.

00:43:04.340 --> 00:43:08.460
And then you also mentioned, or you also were involved in Oembed.

00:43:08.460 --> 00:43:10.580
And that I actually don't know what Oembed is.

00:43:10.580 --> 00:43:11.160
Yeah.

00:43:11.160 --> 00:43:15.600
It's funny because that's what I'm doing right now on Dropbox Paper.

00:43:16.160 --> 00:43:29.200
So the concept of pasting a link into a service, like, at the time, Pounce, and nowadays Facebook and Twitter, pasting a link into a service and then rendering something pretty from that link.

00:43:29.200 --> 00:43:33.060
So if it was, like, a link to YouTube, like, showing the actual video in line, right?

00:43:33.060 --> 00:43:34.320
Like, you've seen this happen?

00:43:34.320 --> 00:43:34.820
Mm-hmm.

00:43:34.820 --> 00:43:35.540
Yeah, okay.

00:43:35.540 --> 00:43:36.140
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:36.140 --> 00:43:44.820
Yeah, you've seen if you paste a YouTube link into Facebook or Twitter, it renders a little video, a little video preview that people can watch it right on Facebook or Twitter.

00:43:44.820 --> 00:43:47.040
They don't have to, like, go all the way to YouTube to watch it.

00:43:47.040 --> 00:43:48.600
Yeah, that's cool.

00:43:48.600 --> 00:43:50.580
And, like, Skype has started doing that.

00:43:50.580 --> 00:43:52.080
Slack does that, right?

00:43:52.080 --> 00:43:52.860
Yeah, yeah.

00:43:52.860 --> 00:43:55.120
It's definitely becoming more popular the last few years.

00:43:55.120 --> 00:43:55.480
Okay.

00:43:55.480 --> 00:43:55.780
Yeah.

00:43:55.780 --> 00:43:57.740
I didn't realize there was a specification for this.

00:43:57.740 --> 00:43:58.160
That's cool.

00:43:58.160 --> 00:43:58.480
Yes.

00:43:58.480 --> 00:44:00.300
So there was not.

00:44:00.300 --> 00:44:02.660
At the time, actually, this was a really unheard of thing.

00:44:02.780 --> 00:44:08.220
People were putting links into Pounce, and I wanted a way to display pretty content.

00:44:08.220 --> 00:44:20.500
So I was, like, scraping the HTML of the page to, like, you make, so on the server side, you go out and you make another request to pull in the content of the page and parse it and display whatever seemed interesting from that page.

00:44:20.500 --> 00:44:26.880
The problem was that it was really hard to do that at scale because the Internet is so vast, right?

00:44:26.880 --> 00:44:28.240
Like, not everything's YouTube.

00:44:28.240 --> 00:44:30.320
Like, you can do it for a couple sites pretty easily, right?

00:44:30.320 --> 00:44:30.980
You can do YouTube.

00:44:30.980 --> 00:44:32.100
You can do Flickr.

00:44:32.220 --> 00:44:34.120
You can do, like, nowadays Instagram.

00:44:34.120 --> 00:44:36.500
Those are the things you'd probably choose to do right away.

00:44:36.500 --> 00:44:37.180
I see.

00:44:37.180 --> 00:44:42.760
So this lets any website participate in this, so they're embeddable in this sense, yeah?

00:44:42.760 --> 00:44:44.100
Right, right.

00:44:44.100 --> 00:44:50.560
So the idea is, so we had developers coming to us, coming to Pounce and saying, hey, will you integrate with our site?

00:44:50.560 --> 00:44:55.180
Here's how, here, we've made an API for you, and you can do it this way.

00:44:55.300 --> 00:44:59.400
And I was like, well, I'm not going to do this for every, I mean, we did it for a couple sites.

00:44:59.400 --> 00:45:02.820
And they were like, I'm not going to do this for every single site that comes to us.

00:45:03.500 --> 00:45:04.500
So let's put out a specification.

00:45:04.500 --> 00:45:05.540
So let's put out a specification.

00:45:05.540 --> 00:45:09.260
And if they follow the specification, we'll pull in content from their site.

00:45:09.260 --> 00:45:11.500
And so we did O-embed.

00:45:11.500 --> 00:45:16.060
It was myself and Richard Crowley, Mike Malone, and Cal Henderson.

00:45:16.060 --> 00:45:17.980
The four of us got together.

00:45:18.660 --> 00:45:22.360
Richard and Cal were at Flickr at the time, and Mike and I at Pounce.

00:45:22.360 --> 00:45:29.180
It was kind of this fun thing, because Flickr was the provider of the content, and we were the consumers of the content.

00:45:29.180 --> 00:45:32.580
So it was like a very good back and forth.

00:45:32.580 --> 00:45:37.300
Like I said, again, most of the stuff I've worked on is definitely in collaboration with a lot of other really smart people.

00:45:37.300 --> 00:45:39.380
Yeah, that's a cool collaboration.

00:45:39.380 --> 00:45:40.760
Yeah, yeah.

00:45:41.660 --> 00:45:53.080
One of the things that I sort of heard as you were talking about these things, and I thought was a really interesting experience, is you started Pounce, and it's not still running.

00:45:53.080 --> 00:45:58.440
But it sounds like a lot of what you're doing are some of the lessons that you've learned at Pounce, right?

00:45:58.440 --> 00:46:10.080
And, you know, just sort of the theme of, like, even if you try to start up and it doesn't necessarily make it, you might have gained some really interesting experience and skills that you have no idea where they'll take you.

00:46:10.800 --> 00:46:21.920
Yeah, and honestly, I can say that I am not that sad about my startups not making it, because they live on in other projects.

00:46:21.920 --> 00:46:23.120
Like, O-Embed lives on.

00:46:23.120 --> 00:46:25.140
Slack uses O-Embed, right?

00:46:25.140 --> 00:46:30.320
YouTube and Tumblr and all these sites still use O-Embed.

00:46:30.320 --> 00:46:33.860
All these sites still use, I mean, OAuth is everywhere, right?

00:46:33.860 --> 00:46:35.520
Yeah, that's really awesome.

00:46:35.520 --> 00:46:36.060
Yeah.

00:46:36.800 --> 00:46:42.080
But you didn't, I'm sure you didn't imagine when you started Pounce, I'm going to do, like, a security API.

00:46:42.080 --> 00:46:44.400
And it had no point, right?

00:46:44.400 --> 00:46:45.920
Yeah, no, no.

00:46:45.920 --> 00:46:49.520
And actually, now I'm actually interested in security because of working on it.

00:46:51.100 --> 00:46:52.780
But yeah, I had no idea.

00:46:52.780 --> 00:46:55.560
And it's not even just the specifications.

00:46:55.560 --> 00:47:02.940
It's, like, some of the design that Daniel Berka did for Pounce is echoed through all these sites like Facebook.

00:47:02.940 --> 00:47:06.400
The Facebook news feed looks a lot like Pounce.

00:47:06.400 --> 00:47:09.020
Like, visually looks very similar.

00:47:09.020 --> 00:47:11.940
And Pounce took a lot of that from Tumblr.

00:47:12.380 --> 00:47:24.920
So there's sort of, like, this evolution of products that you can sort of see happening, taking different design ideas, different product ideas, different API ideas, different technical ideas from sites.

00:47:24.920 --> 00:47:28.400
And the best ones sort of continue on for many years.

00:47:28.400 --> 00:47:29.540
Yeah.

00:47:29.540 --> 00:47:31.420
I think that's really, really interesting.

00:47:31.420 --> 00:47:32.140
Yeah.

00:47:32.140 --> 00:47:32.880
Yeah.

00:47:33.060 --> 00:47:34.280
It's super cool.

00:47:34.280 --> 00:47:35.200
And it's hard.

00:47:35.200 --> 00:47:44.400
I think it's hard because people imagine startups and they imagine this visionary founder and this brilliant idea and things happening very much in a vacuum.

00:47:44.400 --> 00:47:46.840
And it very much is not like that.

00:47:46.840 --> 00:47:56.020
Products are definitely very influenced by a large number of people working together and sort of pushing things forward.

00:47:56.240 --> 00:48:03.320
And like I said, with the podcasting thing, without advances in technology, certain products and ideas just aren't as possible.

00:48:03.320 --> 00:48:06.240
And then the technology gets there through other means.

00:48:06.240 --> 00:48:13.280
So one of the things I'm looking at for podcasting is doing speech recognition and transcripts.

00:48:13.280 --> 00:48:16.120
And the technology wasn't there before.

00:48:16.120 --> 00:48:24.400
And now, via Siri and all these, like, mobile devices, you know, sort of speech recognition, right?

00:48:24.580 --> 00:48:27.180
So pretty interesting, right?

00:48:27.180 --> 00:48:29.380
How those things can sort of feed back into each other.

00:48:29.380 --> 00:48:29.960
Yeah.

00:48:29.960 --> 00:48:30.500
That's awesome.

00:48:30.500 --> 00:48:31.020
Yeah.

00:48:31.020 --> 00:48:32.540
Very cool.

00:48:32.540 --> 00:48:32.940
Very cool.

00:48:32.940 --> 00:48:35.560
So I've learned a lot about the startup world.

00:48:35.560 --> 00:48:39.540
So I appreciate you sharing all of your experience in these stories.

00:48:39.540 --> 00:48:46.440
And I know one of the things that hits me is that it's not just a technical thing, right?

00:48:46.440 --> 00:48:51.560
It's not like you can be successful at a startup if you're really good at, like, programming.

00:48:51.560 --> 00:48:54.060
There's all these aspects of it, right?

00:48:54.120 --> 00:48:56.880
You got to make sure you bring them in the right mix.

00:48:56.880 --> 00:48:57.820
Yeah.

00:48:57.820 --> 00:49:02.760
And I think you can definitely be successful as a technical person at a multiple person startup.

00:49:02.760 --> 00:49:08.760
But really, it is a group effort, unless you are amazingly.

00:49:08.760 --> 00:49:13.660
But I've never even heard of a startup that's been just one person who's fantastically great, right?

00:49:13.660 --> 00:49:15.180
Like, that just doesn't exist.

00:49:15.180 --> 00:49:16.200
Yeah.

00:49:16.200 --> 00:49:21.460
Just from, even if they could do everything, you know, they'll burn out and go crazy, right?

00:49:21.460 --> 00:49:22.280
You got to get some help.

00:49:22.280 --> 00:49:23.240
Go crazy.

00:49:23.400 --> 00:49:24.020
You'll go crazy.

00:49:24.020 --> 00:49:29.160
So, I mean, oftentimes you hear about the one main founder, like the Mark Zuckerberg, right?

00:49:29.160 --> 00:49:34.760
But there were all these other people as well, early Facebook employees.

00:49:34.760 --> 00:49:36.320
All right.

00:49:36.320 --> 00:49:40.260
I have two final questions for you before you go that I always ask my guests.

00:49:40.780 --> 00:49:46.580
So, if you're going to sit down and write some Python code or maybe even some JavaScript, what editor do you open up?

00:49:46.580 --> 00:49:47.860
Atom.

00:49:47.860 --> 00:49:48.720
GitHub.

00:49:48.720 --> 00:49:49.900
Atom.

00:49:49.900 --> 00:49:50.700
Atom, yeah.

00:49:50.700 --> 00:49:51.640
Okay.

00:49:51.640 --> 00:49:51.960
Yeah.

00:49:51.960 --> 00:49:52.680
Atom's pretty awesome.

00:49:52.680 --> 00:49:53.200
I like it.

00:49:53.560 --> 00:49:53.740
Yeah.

00:49:53.740 --> 00:49:56.280
I like the extensibility of it.

00:49:56.280 --> 00:50:03.380
Because especially working with things like TypeScript, I'm able to find a syntax highlighter for TypeScript.

00:50:03.380 --> 00:50:08.820
And that people can sort of add and build onto it the things that they need for their projects.

00:50:09.400 --> 00:50:09.580
Yeah.

00:50:09.580 --> 00:50:09.760
Yeah.

00:50:09.760 --> 00:50:10.140
Very cool.

00:50:10.140 --> 00:50:20.500
And the other one is, of all the PyPI packages out there for Python that you could find, what is one that you maybe think most people don't know about, but they should?

00:50:21.200 --> 00:50:27.000
I'm a big fan of Bodo, the library for Amazon Web Services.

00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:33.080
I think if you're using anything from Amazon, you should definitely make sure that you check that out.

00:50:33.080 --> 00:50:34.160
It makes everything a lot easier.

00:50:34.160 --> 00:50:35.320
Yeah.

00:50:35.320 --> 00:50:35.840
That's cool.

00:50:35.840 --> 00:50:36.620
That's a good one.

00:50:36.620 --> 00:50:37.720
I really like Bodo.

00:50:37.720 --> 00:50:45.440
And more generally, we were talking about how you used to buy physical servers that had fans and energy went into them and stuff.

00:50:45.800 --> 00:50:54.640
And now things like Bodo and the programmability of these infinite data centers at AWS and other places, they really changed the game.

00:50:54.640 --> 00:50:55.160
So, yeah.

00:50:55.160 --> 00:50:55.820
Good answer.

00:50:55.820 --> 00:50:56.180
Yeah.

00:50:56.180 --> 00:50:57.260
Definitely a game changer.

00:50:57.260 --> 00:51:06.420
I mean, at Pounce, we had the site go down once for about an hour because a power strip failed at our hosting company.

00:51:06.420 --> 00:51:08.900
And my sysinmate got on the phone with them.

00:51:08.900 --> 00:51:11.520
The guy that was sysinmate for Pounce got on the phone.

00:51:12.700 --> 00:51:19.440
And he could hear the fans in the background cooling the servers and said, hey, our servers are out.

00:51:19.440 --> 00:51:22.520
And they're like, oh, a power strip busted.

00:51:22.520 --> 00:51:23.580
It will get you another one.

00:51:23.580 --> 00:51:25.060
And they replaced it.

00:51:25.060 --> 00:51:26.100
And the site went back up.

00:51:26.100 --> 00:51:31.260
And you just, that kind of stuff, it's so nice not to even have to think about that anymore.

00:51:31.260 --> 00:51:32.000
Yeah.

00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:38.140
There are some times that things like AWS go down, but it is not common.

00:51:38.140 --> 00:51:41.540
Not like if you're running it on the cheap yourself, right?

00:51:41.820 --> 00:51:44.400
The development AWS does go down.

00:51:44.400 --> 00:51:47.240
It's pretty fun here in San Francisco.

00:51:47.240 --> 00:51:48.100
I was at a wedding.

00:51:48.100 --> 00:51:51.860
I was at a wedding once when it went down for a friend's wedding.

00:51:51.860 --> 00:52:01.060
And half of the room hops on their laptops, you know, logging into their websites, trying to bring things back up.

00:52:01.060 --> 00:52:02.240
It was entertaining.

00:52:02.240 --> 00:52:03.400
I can't get in.

00:52:03.400 --> 00:52:04.080
I can't get in.

00:52:04.080 --> 00:52:04.780
What's going on?

00:52:06.060 --> 00:52:07.740
The management console is down, too.

00:52:07.740 --> 00:52:08.320
Oh, no.

00:52:08.320 --> 00:52:12.420
Silicon Valley all hopping on their laptops, trying to bring their sites back up.

00:52:12.420 --> 00:52:13.060
Yeah.

00:52:13.060 --> 00:52:21.440
One thing that does seem to happen is if, like, the Virginia Data Center goes down a lot of AWS.

00:52:22.440 --> 00:52:26.680
There's more than one well-known website or company that seems unreachable.

00:52:26.680 --> 00:52:31.340
It's pretty amazing how it's kind of all our eggs in one basket, but it's a really good basket.

00:52:31.340 --> 00:52:31.980
Yeah.

00:52:31.980 --> 00:52:32.460
Yeah.

00:52:32.460 --> 00:52:34.020
Cool.

00:52:34.020 --> 00:52:34.340
All right.

00:52:34.340 --> 00:52:35.540
Any final call to action?

00:52:35.540 --> 00:52:37.360
Maybe people should come check out Paper, huh?

00:52:37.620 --> 00:52:38.540
Oh, definitely.

00:52:38.540 --> 00:52:39.840
Yeah.

00:52:39.840 --> 00:52:40.760
Come check out Paper.

00:52:40.760 --> 00:52:45.360
It's currently in invite-only beta, but I'll give you a little bit of a pro tip.

00:52:45.360 --> 00:52:51.920
If you know someone who has access to Paper, all they need to do is invite you to collaborate on a document, and you'll have access.

00:52:51.920 --> 00:52:55.240
And we're also letting in new users every day.

00:52:55.240 --> 00:52:56.900
So come check it out.

00:52:56.900 --> 00:52:59.060
Is there a website people can go check it out at?

00:52:59.060 --> 00:53:01.260
Paper.dropbox.com.

00:53:01.260 --> 00:53:02.420
Oh, right on.

00:53:02.420 --> 00:53:03.880
So everyone, go check that out.

00:53:03.880 --> 00:53:07.280
Leah, this has been a really interesting conversation.

00:53:07.500 --> 00:53:08.840
Thanks for sharing your stories with us.

00:53:08.840 --> 00:53:10.360
Thanks for having me.

00:53:10.360 --> 00:53:11.260
You bet.

00:53:11.260 --> 00:53:11.920
See you later.

00:53:11.920 --> 00:53:15.580
This has been another episode of Talk Python to Me.

00:53:15.580 --> 00:53:20.200
Today's guest was Leah Culver, and this episode has been sponsored by Hired and SnapCI.

00:53:20.200 --> 00:53:22.220
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00:53:22.220 --> 00:53:24.580
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00:53:24.580 --> 00:53:33.680
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00:53:34.840 --> 00:53:37.580
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00:53:37.580 --> 00:53:44.560
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00:53:44.560 --> 00:53:48.020
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00:53:48.260 --> 00:53:54.000
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00:53:54.000 --> 00:53:56.140
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00:53:56.140 --> 00:53:58.380
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00:53:58.380 --> 00:53:59.540
We should be right at the top.

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You can also find the iTunes and direct RSS feeds in the footer of the website.

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Our theme music is Developers, Developers, Developers by Corey Smith, who goes by Smix.

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You'll find the whole song on talkpython.fm.

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This is your host, Michael Kennedy.

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Thanks for listening.

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Smix, take us out of here.

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.

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First of all.

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you

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Don't put it.