Ian Tien - CEO & Co-Founder of Mattermost | Open Source Platforms vs Closed Source Platforms

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Today, my guest is Ian Tien. He is the CEO and co-founder of Matter Most. Matter Most delivers high trust collaboration to leading enterprise companies on a vibrant open source platform. Thousands of companies trust Matter Most for vital communications across web, PC and phone with archiving, search and integrations with hundreds of business applications. Think about it like Slack Plus Notion. They won the 2018 Gartner Cool Vendor Award. Previously to Matter Most, Ian founded Spin Punch. There was an award winning online video game company whose titles were played by millions of people across 190 countries. He was formerly VP of product at FlickMe. A movie streaming startup backed by Sequoia, Warner Brothers and Sony. Before that, he ran product management for Microsoft SkyDrive and Windows Live Photo Services, which is now one drive. And he also led product management for Hotmail. Previously to that, he led engineering teams from Microsoft Office in its enterprise software business across SharePoint and business intelligence product line. He has an exceptional engineering and tech background, but he also has a really strong sales and marketing background. Surprise. He made an incredible CEO and he built Matter Most into what it is today, raised multiple rounds of venture funding. We spoke about his origin story. We spoke about Matter Most, the problems that he's solving while he chose to go open source versus proprietary, comparing open source versus closed source, scaling up a startup, finding your first enterprise customer, finding product market fit, scaling up an open source company, monetizing open source versus closed source, the problem that he was solving for, how to find a problem in the market that will actually create a great business opportunity. We spoke about remote work, why Matter Most fits into the remote work stack, why it's the end-to-end solution for remote work, and why we all these point solutions that we currently have are not going to be the future of remote work. We spoke about everything from sales, to marketing, to raising money, to hiring, and retaining great talent. We spoke about culture, we spoke about security, we spoke about evolving trends and building businesses, so we went into everything, tech, everything startup. If you like any of that stuff, I'm sure you'll love this podcast. Let's jump right into it. This is ENTN, CEO and co-founder of Matter Most. So when I was a kid in elementary school, my mom made a career change from being an accountant to being a real estate agent, and as she was making this change, she would listen to sales training tapes in the car, driving us to school. So on this little kid, and every time I get in the car with my mom, there's Zig Zigler and Sales Training and Motivational tapes and how you're in a responsible for your own career. So as a kid, I was sort of just indoctrinated with this like idea of being in sales and going and building businesses, and that just always kind of stuck with me. Now I did pick the engineering route, I did pick computer science and sort of like the STEM things, because that was really important to my parts of my family. And then you know, putting those two together really ends up in a career around technology and business. You had, so you're interesting because you are an engineer like you are technical, but you grew up with a sales background. So when you decided to start your first thing, you probably mitigated a lot of the problems that a highly technical founder would have, which is you build a great product, but then you can't sell it to anybody, or you don't know how to put it out into the world. And the great product is one thing, but then obviously getting it out there. So even walk me through like your career journey that brought you to Madermost, like Madermost, not the first thing you've ever done. So walk me through that progression in your life, and then we can go into why you started like, why was that thing that you wanted to go into and double down on that's what you built a huge, like a huge, your personal brand has now been built around this incredible success. But what was before that? Yeah, so it's a great question. I'll maybe talk about a few way points, and we talked about, you know, starting off as a kid in that sort of, you know, listening to the sales training as my mom was just becoming a real estate agent. I joined this program in high school called Junior Achievement, and we had these little sort of micro businesses, and you learned, you know, how to all, what a financial statements look like. And we sold these candles, went to the dollar store, bought a candle for a dollar, wrapped it in cellophane with the label, label said meltdown, was kind of a brand, it was the little label, and we sold them for like eight dollars. I'm like, oh, they learned about margins, and you learn about inventory and cost a good soul. That was in high school, and you kind of had the bug for entrepreneurship. You know, as I went through college, you know, worked internships at at different companies, I worked at E-Trade, I worked at Trilogy in Austin, Texas, worked at a startup in DC, and you know, had a lot of experiences. I ended up after college going to Microsoft, and there I was there for about five years, I was an engineer in Microsoft Office, I got about a dozen patents from that experience. I moved over to the strategy side and product management in Outlook.com and OneDrive, so you know, had the, had this sort of enterprise, Microsoft Office experience moving over to consumer side. And then I went to business school, you know, if I was, and if I was good at life, I would have need school, but you know, here I go again. And through B-School, I end up starting, you know, tried a lot of different ideas, and I end up on one that was on video games, and an online games. Free to play was kind of blowing up, and at the time, you know, HTML5 was this big promise, and in B-School, you know, with a friend, I put together this HTML5 game engine. So we'd use JavaScript, and we'd be, we would basically use JavaScript 2D Canvas, a lot of the HTML5, you know, affordances, and we could create these, these games online that didn't require Adobe Flash. This was back in 2012, or like, hey, this is real cool tech, you know, what can we do with it? And then, and then we got in a white combinator right after B-School, and was there for three months, and at the end, you know, with that company, with that company, with the video game company, it was called Spin Punch. So we were part of a summer 12, a YC, and that's with Coinbase, Brian Armstrong was in there, a prover from Instacart was there, the Zapier founders, you know, Wade and Mike, they were there, and, you know, Clever, Leaver, boosted boards, it was a great cohort. Paul Graham was still running it back then, and, and we had these, these video games, and this HTML5 game engine, and we couldn't figure out how to monetize the game engines, like JavaScript. No one wants to pay for JavaScript, could you license it? There's no subscription revenue. What do you do with it? So, you know, at the end of YC, we couldn't quite figure out what we were doing, but the video games we created as prototypes at YC, they were making $1,700 a day, so we're like, maybe there's a game business, there's a business here, but, you know, it wasn't subscription revenue, it was, you know, content-based, it was free to play, it was, you know, not the most sort of canonical, you know, investment there, but we ran that game business for about three or four years, and what happened was, and, you know, it's kind of chugging along, and it's kind of fun, but games are like a ton of work. It's like 100-hour weeks, it's, you know, consumer, it's 24 by seven, it's like SRE and SAS, and, you know, micro payments, it's just, it's an art pipeline, it's kind of crazy doing a games business, and as we were doing this, we're all remote, and we started using this, this online workplace messaging tool, it wasn't Slack, it was something before Slack, and this company was a startup, it got bought by a larger company, and the system started breaking down. It would, it would crash, it would lose our data, and we grew like really frustrated, because all of our 26 gigs of our data, our analysis, our game design, our artwork was all in this remote work platform, and it was failing. So, we tried to export our data, and they wouldn't let us, and when we stopped paying our subscription, they paywalled us from our own information, which was, wow, right? Like, and at that time, we had about 10 million hours of messaging in our own games, we're like, we can build messaging, so, you know, we wrote it about three times, and we ended up open sourcing, you know, the latest version that we were using, and that open-source project just took off, that was matter-most. And, you know, our first customer was, you know, a very successful electric car company that, you know, really said, hey, there's an enterprise business here, and, and after that, we got, you know, Samsung, we got a number of really great customers, we got the Department of Energy, and we just, wow, like, this is, this is something that's on fire. We raised, you know, 20 million series A, a 50 million series B, and, and here, here we are now, you know, just continuing to grow, and it's a little surrindipitous, but it really comes from, yeah, it really comes from what the market needs. So, yeah, so walk me through, so when you start this, I love, I love this story, because it's such a powerful story, the entrepreneur that finds the problem in the industry, or the vertical, or the category that they're in, and they solve that problem, they build out that solution. So, the landscape, now obviously post-COVID, I'm sure there's a much more robust landscape for that kind of software, but when you were going into this, you had one that was obviously not playing nice with, with you and your team, and they were paywalling you, and it wasn't, it wasn't the best possible solution. So, when you build something, why did you feel the need, walk me through the concept of open-source, or I understand the concept of open-source, so walk me through, why was that important for you? Because you were working for Microsoft, which is like, if I'm not mistaken, I'm not a developer, but I mean like, that's all proprietary, that's all closer, that Microsoft is not a company that adopts the open-source mentality, and many other software companies don't as well. So, you went into this open-source, you still found a way to get enterprise customers, paying enterprise customers. How did you take this to market? What made this successful? Outside of a great product, which is obviously important. What were the other things that made it successful? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's maybe just to talk about that in a couple of categories. The first is, how do you find product market fit, and how do you serve that need? And I think that a lot of engineers, they look for like intellectual logic. It's like, what is the market? What is my analysis? And what works for me is an emotional reaction. When you see an emotional reaction, there's a need. So for us, when we were on a messaging system that was mission-critical to us, and it went down, there was just an emotional response, like, oh my gosh, that's not okay. And with that sound okay, it's like, okay, what do I do to fix this? We will take money, and we will fix this because it's so important to us. Where do you put our money to fix this problem? So, that's a signal that people really wanted. Slack is super popular. So, matter most right now is an open source alternative to Slack and Notion. So, Slack and Notion and Trello. So, we were an open source alternative that goes across many categories. And, you know, for us, you know, why open source was important or why controlling it was important is you can't have downtime, right? When you're running a 24 by 7 SaaS service, when like, we weren't venture funded, we were like, this was kind of like our money. We just can't have downtime. We can't, you know, lose revenue. We can't have an outages for our players online. So, we just had to control it, right? Like, I mean, the average company has 500 SaaS services that they're using, like, if everyone's got a 99.9, you know, if they're down with 0.1% time out of 500 products, it's still really bad. So, we had to control everything, and we had to make sure it was up all the time. So, we saw their own need. So, that was super important. And then also, you know, on the data side, because, you know, when you're typing these things into real-time messaging, like, who knows where they go? Do they go on someone else's computer? Can anyone else read this? Like, that was a big concern for us. And we just found out that, like, there's a lot of engineers that have the same, a lot of engineers, SRE team, SECOPS teams that have the same need. They're sort of like, oh my gosh, I have to control my collaboration platform, because, you know, I want to make sure it's always up. I want to make sure all the data is eye control. I want to make sure that I can extend and customize it based on what we need, because it's so mission-critical. So, I think one sort of follow me in motion. But still, help me understand. Oh, sorry, to get, go ahead. No, I didn't make the truck go. And the second thing about open source is, you know, you're 100% right, and you call it out. Like, I was at Microsoft during the Steve Balmer era, which is probably the most, you know, one of the most anti-if, one of the most, if not the most, sort of un-open source cultures can kind of come from. And where, and I actually, it comes from this person, Sid, from, Sid from GetLab, the founder of GetLab, which is another sort of open source dev ops tool chain. We were at a YC event, and I was where my games company, and I was showing him on my phone, this thing, Mattermost, which is, you know, for messaging and why we built it, and said, you should open source that. And I'm like, coming from Microsoft, no understanding of open source, like, why would I do that? And his logic was really powerful. He said, if it's a prototype round, he spent three months on it. If you open source it, and it's popular, you can always close source it. You didn't really give away that much, but you'll know that it's successful. You know that people will want it. However, if you open source it, and no one cares, you should just stop working on it. Because if you give the whole thing away for free, and no one cares, then it's kind of over. Go do something else. And those are just a really powerful kind of explanation. So we tried it, and people really cared, and then we created this business off it. That was mirrored a lot off of GetLab, GetLab's licensing structure, its business model. And Sid was great. He's like, just take, just copy this, just do everything we do. Just like read our terms of service, read our license, just copy the whole thing. It's all open source, and that was GetLab's culture. And we've built a lot of our culture off of that concept of openness, the concept of like, yeah, that's the point, right? Here's something that here's software in the world, and it's open source, and you can build on top of it, and you can just generate a lot of value versus like a thousand companies rebuilding the exact same thing, and just wasting all that productivity. No, just open source it all, let people build on top and top and top, and make the world better. So there's a wonderful sort of double bottom line with open source and open source businesses. I think it's very interesting because I find that, and I want to understand the conversations that you had with VCs when you're raising money too, because you've looked at tons of businesses, and you've seen obviously that many are proprietary, many are close source, and if you even think about like non-software businesses, they're always asking for patents and IP, and what do you have protected? So when you scale this up, I think we're on the same page, but many people could be listening saying, oh, that could be a liability to the business. So when you think about scaling up an open source, what are the things that you think about? What are the conversations that you have with a VC that's investing that allows them to wrap their mind around something that may not be what they're used to in terms of, I've invested in this, and technically anybody can see what it is, and technically anybody could just copy that source code and go start their own company. That's a scary thing, so how do you solve for that? Yeah, that's a great question. We actually have an FAQ for investors, and one of the FAQs, and it's public, it's earn a handbook, and why is she looking at right now? What keeps other companies from using your open source software to create their own offerings that compete with your paid products? So that's a great question, and we actually use the acronym Tactical, so Tactical is the acronym. Every letter is a reason why they can't fork us and use our own open source software against our business. The T stands for Test Infrastructure. There's a lot of test automation that isn't open source, so if you go and fork us, that's great, but if you change it, our test infrastructure, a lot of it runs on something called Rainforest QA, which is a proprietary SaaS service where they actually humans like help test. There's no way to open source that anyway, but the fact that the test infrastructure isn't available open source means that you can fork it, but you have to rebuild all of that, so that's the T. A is alignment in terms of the architecture, so the features that developers want are free, because that's for developers. The paid features are more for IT pros and executives, and guess what? Developers, if they fork us, they don't like building the compliance features, they don't like building the exact dashboards, so that's another reason alignment of the business model. So the free stuff, don't monetize developers, there's not a business model, if I get 1% of the developers, then it'll be a big business, that's not a thing, it's the opposite, it's like you will militarize every developer against you if you kind of build it that way, so alignment's really important. The C is for core committers, so making sure that all the people in the open source project are employed by us, which is a really healthy way to grow the team, it's like you look like you're committing, do you want to work here? Yes, we do, so that's excellent, the T is for threat intelligence, so what happens is most open source projects that are sort of responsible will have a responsible disclosure policy that takes security seriously, so if they discover something in our code base, there's a very industry standard responsible disclosure policy, this is how you contact us, we will verify, we'll tell you if we think it's a bug or not, we will release the security patch, we will be 30 days, we'll release the patch, we'll tell people there's a security patch that's coming out, we won't tell anyone what it actually fixes or what the vulnerability is until 30 days after the release, so our customers are customers and our community are safe, and then we disclose what it is, and we create the person who did the report, so that's the very standard systems about how you patch vulnerabilities, guess what, if you forked us, no one's reporting those things to you, and when we release our patch and tell people what it is, then the forked system has a day zero of vulnerability, so that's why, and that's the reason a lot of reasons people don't fork, eyes for innovation, so we have a very high velocity, every month we ship new features and new improvements, so to fork that and to keep up with the innovation is very difficult, C is compatibility, so as you upgrade, all the upgrade scripts are for our genuine software, if you fork it, then the upgrades won't work, and you can install our security patches, and you know, it's going to take a lot of effort, A is for architecture, so it's very, like the system itself, there's very little reason to actually fork it, so give you an example, as our entire front end, right, can be without any forking, can be, because the APIs are open, you can replace our entire front end, so which is like, wait, you're like a slack notion alternative, like why would you replace the front end, so we had an open source project over in one of our government customers, or is in the public sector, there's three engineers that rewrote the Madermost UI in Haskell, in ASCII art, to have a terminal interface to Madermost itself, almost like replacing IRC, which is incredible, they didn't have to fork us, they can actually build a module that interacts with Madermost, so the A is for the architecture, and L is for licensing, so licensing is, the Madermost trademark is, we own the Madermost trademark, the code is open source, but we own the trademark, you can fork it, but you can't call it Madermost, so that's more work, and you don't have the brand recognition, so that's a Scott with a long answer, but the acronym is Tactical, and we have a document or a handbook, this is, if you're building an open source business, and you're talking to investors, there's a lot there, and this is built because we've seen things go sideways with other, the Elastics, the Redis's, the MongoDB's, they had a changer of licensing, there's the Cloud Giants that come in, and we've thought of that from our inception, and Tactical is the framework we use. 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You know, I love it. It's smart. It's very smart. And actually, the other thing that I think about when I think about open sources, you've built this community of people that are always like pressure testing your software. Talk to me about security. Talk to me about why OpenSpot, I've watched a couple of other interviews you're in, and just the security pointing is important. More important than ever before with the amount of people that do get compromised. So when you roll this out, and when you build an open source project, is it more secure than a closed source? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, it's not, it's many things. It's not just the open or closed model, right? It's the investment on security. It's, you know, your internal process. Security doesn't come down to, you know, one or two things. The way that, you know, think about, there's sort of three principles to think about in security. One is, nothing is secure. There's always going to be vulnerabilities. All you can do is kind of move those around. So that's, that's one. And when you're open source software, you have a lot of visibility, and your customers are very motivated to work with you on security. Everyone runs this, you know, the secure customers. We're in public sector. We're in like US Air Force, right? There's like 20,000 US air crews that rely on Madermost in order to fly planes. And the security and the rigor that we go through is, you know, at that level. And then you'll find us in many communities that have very, very high security standards. So I think that community and that understanding that, yeah, all software is vulnerable. We've got transparency and people can report to us. And we have a system to address that. That's all super important. So I think that's one on security that is for the open source model. I think the second is really about, there's a second principle, which is the effort that goes behind a breach, right, that goes behind an attack is proportional to the value of that breach. So what that means is, you know, if you can think of like, hey, I've got everything in this giant cloud system, like everyone the world uses is cloud. Great. Guess what? There's going to be like an infinite amount of like resources that will be dedicated to breaching that like mega fortress, right? And you know, all they need is a crack in the armor and they're going to be going after it. What open source and self hosting lets you do, we can do either cloud or self hosting, but what it lets you do is go is put that behind your own defenses, right? So none, one, your date is not mixed in with all these other, you know, honeypot targets. You've got, you know, your stuff is off the side and it's behind all your other security. And the only people that are breaching it are the people that want to breach you, not breaching you by accident by hitting somebody else. So I think that's the second piece. And then the third is really just about the dedication to security. So one thing that I'm actually personally proud of is our security team and how it works with how it works with the community. We just brought on a wonderful person, Jerry Porello, who was the former CISO of the New York Stock Exchange as an advisor. So, you know, that's just an example of how much we care about security and he, you know, he doesn't hold back, you know, on his opinions and what we need to do and it's super helpful. And what I'm really proud of is, you know, just a little while ago, we discovered as we're, because we vet all this, all the software that kind of comes in a matter most and we vet it very carefully. As we were vetting a certain library for SSO, SAML authentication, we found, we found a vulnerability in the GoLang language itself in the XML parser. And this, and we're like, wait, this can't be true. And we looked at it and we're like, oh crap, this is true. We never, we never, you know, that never went into, we were never exposed to that vulnerability. Our customers are not exposed to that vulnerability, but there were a lot of other people that use GoLang and use SAML SSO that had a vulnerability. It took us three months working with the GoLang team and working with the downstream libraries to figure out how do we do a coordinate disclosure. So the coordinate disclosure is tell them like we create the patch, matter must itself, not the GoLang, you know, folks, but we create the patch itself. We created, you know, a reference for how to fix it. We went through a very time series, we told the downstream libraries, we got them to prepare patches, we told the people, private and public companies, and government institutions that were exposed to this vulnerability that was there so that they can fix it quickly. And then we did a public disclosure. So we did it in a responsible way, we cascaded it, we gave people time, we let people know it was important, and this was a big deal. Like it would, you know, one of the tech giants, you know, had a delay, one of almost had a delay, one of their launches because of this issue. So, you know, that's what it means to be part of the security community and really participate in not only the safety of our products and our customers, but of the general software community itself. So I think when you think about, you know, what it means to be great at security, I think it's not one or the other, it's about, you know, how do you, what is the whole story about your investment security? And that keeps things safe. I was going to say it's also the fact that it comes down to the culture of the company and where you put your focus and attention to. So, you know, I think it's probably less about closed versus open and more about how forward thinking and looking at the company is and where they want to spend their time and attention. I think that both both could, but if somebody is so hyper focused on building the best possible solution and is so hyper focused on security all the time, like you said, like you're probably, you're probably leading the way in some security and some of the things you do for security that any other company could do, but you're doing it just because it's a focus of yours. That's sort of the takeaway that I get. But I want to pivot. So now we've spoken about like the engineering side of the business, but also, you know, the fact that you landed large enterprise customers starting a new company is it's also very impressive. So when you're taking a product like this to market, you just casually said we landed an enterprise customer. A lot of people would love that to happen to them when they're trying to take a new SaaS product to market. So how do you take a product like this to market? You you understand you solve the problem that you have, but how do you identify your ICP, your buyer persona? How do you go in and how do you sell that first version when you have no other customers? What was your what was your first customer strategy? How did that close? It's really about building something that people want. I think there's, you know, there's a simple algorithm to teach at YC, which is like, you know, talk to customers, build product, you know, exercise and exercise basically stay healthy, right? And that's that's so important because like people can burn out, but talk to customers and build product like that's the loop. And I think what happens is people realize how powerful that is. And talk to customers and just they're like, well, hey, you came to our website, you know, we open source Slack. Well, why open source Slack? And it's like, oh, we need this for like data privacy, like full stop. And we need this SSO feature. And we need we need this. And it's like, would you pay for that? Yeah, we'll pay for that. Like, that's it. Like, that's the market discovery. Just, you know, put something on the web, create, like we use discourse as a forum. So we would like be able to talk back and forth. You know, we email, hey, contact us forum. And people just fill the contact us for me, be like, okay, well, here's here's what I want to know. Like, why why are you interested in matter most? And like, and then you just put that down the drop down list. Oh, it's a hip chat replacement. Oh, it's for like, you know, we were deployed the free version. We want to get, you know, these paid features. So it's just conversations. And as you have more conversations, you can you can speed the conversations. You can have them. You can categorize things. So just don't stop talking to customers. And then don't stop building product. And then, you know, always stay healthy. That's really important. And do those three things. It's magical. How quickly you can move. I think people, they get, especially in the early stages, they get very distracted. They're like, oh, should I be speaking to a conference? Oh, should I be talking to investors? We spent very little time talking to investors. And everything just, you know, and the thing is investors don't really want to talk to, I mean, yeah, they want to kind of talk to the founders, but they really want to do is talk your customers, right? So then, you know, whatever logo list you've got on your website, they're going, they're back channeling. They're like, okay, why do you, why do you, why'd you buy that? And then when the, the good investors, when they're ready to talk to founders, they're very have the context. So just build a great business. And, and don't worry about like networking and speaking, and you know, just just talk to customers, build a product like the business. Yeah. Yeah. When you're scaling up, and, and you, you're technical yourself, but one of the things that I thought was interesting, and one of the things that is interesting now, at least for me, because I came from a SaaS company where we had a lot of, we had a lot of difficulty with this, but hiring great talent and most importantly, development talent, as a startup when these are just obviously, like these are numbers that I, I can't verify, but I, you know, you see the, the net footsies of the world paying 300,000 plus for a developer or a software engineer. And, and then some, and then you look at some of the, you just look at some of the salaries in the valley. Like, how do you find and scale up great talent and retain great development talent when you don't have a 20, 50 million plus dollar investment? Yeah, that's a great question. I like, so the people that are money motivated, great, go be, go work in hedge funds, right? Like, just, you know, don't even think about Netflix, just go straight to hedge funds, like, and because they make a ton of money and, you know, they don't really create that much value, but like, you know, you're basically advanced day trading, like go create, you know, high, high velocity training, trading, right? Like, there's, if you want to make money, just go make money. If you want to build great software, if you want to, you know, think about, you know, the impact that you're going to have, if you're thinking about the personal growth that you're interested in, whether it's a technical, whether it's the languages or it's, you know, being on the manager track or however you think about it, you know, what is growth? That is, you know, that's just a different frame. Think about the, the frame we have is impact, it's growth and it's connections, right? Connecting, connecting to the other human beings that are in that are on the mission with you, right? So for us, you know, the impact is about being open source. Like, you write it once and if you do it right, like, it never has to be written again, right? Like, we have, if you're going to do an open source slack, open source notion, open source trello, and, you know, coming up sort of open source, you know, huddles, right? Clubhouse, we're adding the audio piece too. You know, once you build that and it's an integrated suite, like, it never has to be built again. You've made your mark in software history. Like, if that's important, you know, that's, that's one of the pillars that we've got at Madermost. The second one is, is personal growth. Half of our managers at the company are promoter from within. So, you know, that track and that dedication to enabling managers and making them successful is also, you know, super important to us. And the third is, you know, we have staff in 20 countries. We have contribute, we have 4,000 contributors in the open source community. And it's the ability to sort of like, you know, walk off a plane in like, you know, 20 different cities around the world and have people greet you at the airport, have your friends, you know, show up. And I think that that connection that like concept that's like, oh, yeah, people aren't like machines in a, in a, and they're not cogs in a machine that they're here with other human beings to go build something that's meaningful together. You know, that's, you know, that's the people that we want. So, if there's people that will care about, you know, we spend most of our life working. And if impact growth and connection is important, that's what your life's about, then we want to work with you. If your life is about, you know, how many Netflix options can I have in my portfolio, then you should work for Netflix. When you, when you try, so what are some of the strategies that you use to find people like that? 56% of the staff at matter, 56% of our hires come from referrals. So the people that like, hey, I love working here. This is really great, you know, that's, that's more than half of our team. And I think when you, you think about NPS, Net Promoter Scores, like when people really enjoy working here and they tell their friends, and they get, you know, more and more people and like that, those are the best hires. No, no, I was gonna say so you focus on, you focus mostly on referrals. And then you were gonna say something else. Sorry, I think we're like the, it's like a two-second delay. So I never know. Go ahead. Sorry. You know, so referrals is, is, referrals is the majority and we'd love to continue that and then keep going because that really means that people enjoy it here and love it and they're, they're bringing on, you know, all the folks that they know. The second biggest source, and the early days definitely was the open source community, 4,000 people contributing. And, you know, just saying, hey, let's work together. Like let's, let's do this professionally. So a few months after we released our commercial version, we got this person who pinged us and they're like, look, I've never contributed open source before, but I would like to contribute a translation infrastructure for every string in your system. I have got this pull request that localizes everything and I've translated everything that is Spanish. And it's 10,000 lines of code, would you be open to this pull request, which is kind of bananas. So what happens is this person was working in South America and their company was reselling Manor Mose, but it had to be in Spanish. So this person actually translated all of Manor Mose the right way, not with hard-coded strings, but with the actual infrastructure. But every month, and we talked about why it's difficult to fork Manor Mose every month, we're pushing out new features and innovations. It took him a week to like merge it back in. So it was in this person's best interest to offer that upstream so that we could put that in the product, make it better for everyone and make that person's life easier. We hired that person. So that's just a great way to say, because it's a great offer. It's like, well, just stop what you're doing and want to work on the main lane line product rather than derivative. So that's another great path to hiring. Do you have any tips for, because you've built this exceptional community and you've done it because you built an open source, an open source focused company, but do you have tips for entrepreneurs that would like to tap into the same power of community, any things that you've done to foster a stronger community because you mentioned as well, you know, if you go open source and nobody cares and maybe you should start something new, but you never know. You do have to put an effort into trying to build and foster that community to see and even give it a chance. So maybe for somebody who like is an open source, how there's easy, there's obviously open source is an easy way, but is there other other things that you do to build and sort of support that community? Yeah, I think there's three key principles. I think there's clarity, speed and safety. So clarity is saying, this is how you become part of a community, right? For us, it's like, if you want to be a developer, here's like hundreds of backlog tickets that we're not working on. Hundreds and you can pick one of those tickets and go work on them. So that's that's clarity, right? And it's like, if you don't have a ticket, we're probably not going to accept it. So don't go and spend a whole bunch of time like, this is not Linux where like, you know, you spend a bunch of time writing something and everyone poo poo's on it in a public forum. This is, here's your tickets. Go go, they're all approved. Like go pick one of them and do a project. So clarity is really important. And then how the process works, like what the expectations on our on feedback and reviews and all those things for clarity. The second is speed, right? Like when you see when you see an open source project, you know, get back to quickly versus like over weeks or months from a volunteer system, it just creates a totally different dynamic. Like people understands like, yes, like I work really hard. And there's like looking for like a thank you or like an emoji, it's like, and it means so much to have that that speed and responsiveness. And the third is safety. Like people don't understand how important safety is to the open source community. And safety happens on a number of levels. I mean, there's also the code of conduct of course, but it's also that you don't get rejected. Being rejected is actually in some open source communities, the norm, right? Like some parts of Linux community. For us, like I think it's the worst possible experience you can give a developer to reject their pull request. And I would consider any pull request that's rejected our failure, not the contributors, because we have to have the clarity, like clear here the tickets. Here's our style guide. We have linting automated. We have you know, the code, go format, all these all these tools to get in the right way to help you get a pull request that will get merged. So if it doesn't get merged and you did all the right things, that's like that's completely our failure. So people have to feel safe. What engineers want, they want, they want to complete a close problem from A to B. And they know that if I go from A to B and I do my work, you will do your part and merge the pull request. So that kind of safety that people's time won't be wasted that, you know, they can participate in environment that's very inclusive is is so important. So clarity, speed and safety. And I think that's applicable to many other domains. No, it's very, very smart. And the last thing that I wanted to sort of get an understanding of you work in, you've built a product for the remote work worker, you've built a product for the reality that everybody has faced in the past two and a half, almost three years, got for a bit. But so what are some of the evolving trend? Like if somebody is building a business, how do people like to work? What are the best practices? What are the tools or outside of matter most? What are the tools and resources and nuances of remote work because you're living in it every single day? Yeah, I think that it's evolved. We think about three ages of remote work, right? The first one started in the 2000s. Like, oh, we have email. That's amazing. We have email and we have internet. Oh, we've got digital, right? Like, you know, 2000s, that's that's kind of like basic communication, basic remote work. I think the second is maybe 10 years ago, we came up with the point solutions, right? So it's like, okay, I've got my, here's my email client, here's my voice and video client. You know, here's my, you know, here, I've got a ticketing system over here and I've got like a incident management system over here. And here's my compliance thing. And where I think the third age where we are right now that needs to happen is really integration of the suites, right? Like, you need a suite. And the reason is because there's way too much time wasted between, well, I got a message over here and I got a ticket over here. And let me reformat this and put that over there. And, and let me, like, add, let me, let me off into my zoom so I can have a call. It's just, it's so much extra work. It's, it's toil. And, and it's, it's a really a broken experience. Here's the analogy is that I imagine took like a, like a physical building. And then you had like the conference room and the hallway and the whiteboard and the sticky notes from all different vendors. And before you could touch the door knob, you had to like, off in and put your MFA and like, okay, well, I'm in the hallway, off to off in. I have to put my MFA and it's like, oh, you're not allowed to have permission. Can I go in the hallway? Like, that's the, that's what it feels like today to work remote. And how it should feel is just one system. Everything's integrated. All the permissions are integrated. All the formatting is consistent. And it's all built to work together. So if you go back to the, you know, the late 2000s, 1990s, it was inconceivable. It's, it was, you know, today it's inconceivably of email address book and calendar is three different apps. It's just like impossible. It's like, I would never, no one here would use that. And, and that's kind of like remote work today. It's all point solutions. Your email, your address book and your calendar are all different. And like, it's just, it's, it's going to get way, way better. So I think the integration of the tools and having a smooth experience is apps like that's what the world deserves. And surprisingly, I think open source is actually delivering that faster than proprietary. And, and usually in the past, open source is lag, but, you know, open source slack with open source notion, those two things really need to fit together in terms of formatting in terms of, you know, workflows. And open source is going to be able to do that faster and close source. I was going to say because I, I agree with you like wholeheartedly, but I, it's always the issue of when you build an all in one anything, it's, it's, there's an exceptional amount of work that has to be done because you have all these points. The world is full of point solutions right now. But where you're taking matter, like that's, so I, I see where your vision is going to be for, for your own company. Like that's what you want to build for the world. That's the goal. Um, is there any, just for people to draw a reference point in any other, uh, software suite, what, like what, who's done this well before? Like would it be like Adobe with like the creative suite? Would it be like what, who else has done this very, very well that even you would be like, I want to, I want to create remote work tool sets similar to how this company has done it for this category. Yeah, that's a great question. Google and Microsoft easily. So here's the thing, Microsoft, because I came from Microsoft is all open source internally. You can see all the source code internally. Google same thing, but it's not public. So here's the thing. It's, it's actually easier to build a suite than the point solutions. Why? Shared security, shared authentication, shared permissions, infrastructure, you know, shared scaling, shared database, everything's shared. And it takes, you take away set like the, to build like five point solutions, probably costs, you know, two to three X as much as building an integrated solution. And that's why, you know, the suites from these, these tech giants are so powerful, they're open source internally. You have all the source code. You have a lot of reuse. And that's why it's so powerful. So what, what you do is, okay, how do you compete with the tech giants, open source provides that platform, complete, transparently. People can build applications inside matter most, the same way we can, like we have no competitive advantage in building these. So when we built open source notion inside of open source Slack was built on the same platform. It's technically a plugin. And then as we build instant management, right? So this is, you know, how do I escalate SRE issues and have dashboards reporting on all my outages and performance metrics. That's, that's an application gets plugged in. So the difference is, well, imagine Microsoft Office was open source. Imagine how much innovation you could create when developers can solve their own problems. Imagine G Suite was open source. People like, we know what? I don't like this button. I want to change this button. If we create plugins, they can, they can, they can manipulate however they want. But imagine that, you know, G Suite itself would absorb the innovation from the community. And that's where I think the world is going. I think in terms of sort of bidirectional read right, you know, just being able to influence, just be able to influence the platform using every day. That's like easy reason. Like that's what's going to win the market, right? So I can have something where I have to wait for people in Redmond to like make some decisions that will benefit me in two or three years. Or do I want to be able to change the code right myself, write the plugin, write the customization, talk about how cool it is, and watch that innovation go upstream into the platform and, and make the world better for everyone else for all of my peers. Like, what does that feel like? So ultimately, you know, open source is just, it's coming bottoms up, right? Boom, it took out servers, boom, it took out databases, boom, it took out virtualization with with Kubernetes and, and, you know, this whole layer, it's coming through it dev ops toolchains with get lab. Now it's coming to collaboration and software is software never breaks down. It doesn't appreciate, you know, software works. So it would build layer upon layer and the world can be more open and everyone can contribute. That's just the way that the world is moving. And I think it's a it's a really exciting place and opportunity. So we're so then to sort of finish this up because I want to do some some rapid fire just to pull some last sort of entrepreneurial insights out of you. But where do you want to take matter most? What's what's the what's your goal in the next five to 10 years? We see yeah, we we see a 15 billion dollar opportunity 30 million developers in the world. We can see a $500 like sweet $500 per year sort of sweet offering that replaces a ton of other tools. We probably can reduce people's costs by two thirds in terms of collaboration, infrastructure, and tooling, and make people more productive. So it's a it's a huge market. And we really want to be that number one dev ops collaboration platform. We want, hey, if I want to do any collaboration that's above the code, it's like, okay, I'm not making decision. We got lots of toolchains. Great. Lots and lots of toolchains. Here's where we collaborate. Here's where we bring it all together. That's, you know, and being part of that stack for the world in terms of how developers work. You know, that's what we're all working towards every day. And then also, working people reach out. So if they want to reach out to you, website, social, all that stuff, where do you want to send people? Yeah, I'm on Twitter at E&10. So I'm happy to take any questions or comments there and matter most is mattermost.com. Hey, perfect. Okay, so let's do a couple of rapid. You could you could do rapid fire. You can take longer if you want. Doesn't matter to me. You have nowhere to be. So take your time if you want. But if you had to, would you, would you, would you, if you started again, would you redo anything or would you do it all the same? But if you would redo something differently, what would that be? If I redid something on the journey, I'd probably raise capital, VC capital earlier. I think that the board is absolutely wonderful. Some of the best folks I've ever worked with, you know, Ali Regani from YC continuity and Tamash Tungas from, from Red Point are both like excellent. So Andrew Mickless co-founder page duty, she went Jane at S28, just wonderful folks. If I don't think that's funny, I've never heard that before. I've never heard somebody say they'd raise VC money earlier. It's it's because you found the right VCs. It's because you found the right people. Yeah, very good. If you had to pick one thing that right now still keeps you up at night and stresses you out, what would that thing be? Yeah, but probably moving fast enough. I think that, you know, we can always, it's always about speed of execution. So like, you know, how can we go faster? Like what are the things that are holding us back? What are our bottlenecks? And how do I as the leader, you know, make, like, remove those impedances to human beings? So it's always about speed and going faster and not missing out on the opportunities that are ahead of us. What was the, what was the worst point, the biggest, you know, shit hit the fan moment in building this? And what was that? How did you recover from it? What did you learn from it? We had a customer that had an outage because of a plugin that was contributed to it, but from the community, it was like a small tiny plugin that, you know, was de-dossing the server and just like spilling these log files, you know, all over the place. And it was just so embarrassing. But I think that was, we had a lot of, we lost trust with that customer, right? The customers like, you know, Madermost had never gone down, you know, the history of, it's the history of Madermost was for years, like 20 minutes total outage time, and that was only for upgrades, right? That's multiple upgrades. But 20 minutes in the history, and then it was down for hours because of this sort of plugin that overloaded, you know, certain systems that we didn't anticipate, and we kind of just moved too fast, right? We just, we didn't have, we didn't think through sort of scale issues and sort of sideways, sideways configurations enough. So that was still like, it's like all flashbacks, like having a customer down is just not not okay. And this is a, this is a self-hosted customer. So that was probably the, the, the most difficult, I think. Yeah, but it makes you, it makes you smarter, it makes you, it makes you a better entrepreneur, a better company when that does happen. So, you know, it's like a, it's a learning, it's a learning opportunity for sure. Biggest challenge you've had to overcome in your own personal life. What was it? Had you overcome it? Would you learn from it? Yeah, I think that the key thing is like, when you become a venture back CEO, there's, you know, you have to move at a certain velocity and you have to bring on like, you have to operate a different way. So when I was running the video game company, in the early days of Madermost, we were profitable. And, you know, you run a profitable company a certain way when you were in a VC back company, you have to deploy capital in a different way. You have to bring on a different set of leadership and you have to think in a, in a very different way. And that, that transition was, took me some time and that was difficult. And every, you know, founder CEO has to go through that and some of us make it and some of us don't. So, just catching up. And it's, you know, it's, it's that 10,000 hours number, right? It's like how do you get 10,000 hours? Now, I'm past that 10,000 hours now. So I'm like, yeah, but that's working, you know, a lot, you know, per the week. But getting, getting to be a venture back CEO takes time and, you know, to go back to the earlier comment, I wish I did raise earlier because I could have had more time the chairs of venture back CEO and, you know, learn things earlier in the journey rather than a little bit later. So, you know, got to where I needed to be, but it took, it took a minute. If you had one person, obviously there's been many, but take like one person who's had an amazing impact on your life, on your journey, on your business. Who was that person? What did they teach you? You know, I worked with this professor in B School that, you know, was a public company CEO. And that person was, you know, one of the best, you know, legendary manager, just amazing thought leader. And I just, from that person, I understood what leadership could really be. You know, this is someone who's, you know, just, there's, it's so weird, like that person could give me a look, right? Or give just have a look or have an expression. And it would communicate like so much, right? And an email, like one sentence was just so high impact, just watching how he would, um, he would trust me to do certain things with very little direction. And I would like, I'd be up to like, you know, 4 a.m. trying to like do what he asked at the highest quality I possibly could. And like, you know, how, like, what is it about that person that, you know, creates, you know, so much motivation for me to go and, and, and execute on, um, on what they're, what their vision is. So, um, just seeing someone be able to, just seeing what that was like was, is incredible for me. It's something I always remember that person's unfortunately passed away. But, um, it's something that's always with me. It's like, how good you can be as a leader. I've seen it. And, you know, how can I, how can I work towards, you know, that level is, it's something I always think about. If you had to recommend a book or a podcast or something that somebody should go check out. High output management. Uh, that's the, uh, it's a managed book. And I think every, every leader should have it. It's got so many basics. 32 years old, 34, 35 years old right now. But it's, um, it's a classic. Um, if you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be? By Bitcoin. That's very good advice. Um, and last question, what does success mean to you? Success for me is, is really, um, living up to all the gifts that I've been given. Um, I've had tremendous advantages in life in terms of family, in terms of education, in terms of opportunity that a lot of people don't have. And how do I live a life that's going to be worthy of, you know, where I started.