00:06:34 · Aditya Agarwal, Waseem Daher
[00:06:34] S1: Okay. So you did kSplice. It's actually a really cool piece of technology. I don't know whether it's now for... Is it standard issue for most Linux kernels now? [00:06:45] S0: I think... I mean, it's definitely still part of Oracle's Linux offering, and I think Red Hat has its own version and, like, some of the other providers, I think, maybe have their own version. [00:06:53] S1: Got it. I mean, listen. I mean, I... So were you at Oracle for a short while? [00:06:57] S0: I was at Oracle for a year and a day. [00:06:59] S1: Okay. Great. I was at Oracle for six months and a day, let's say. But you stayed there for a year and a day, and then you left to start Zulip. And, you know, Zulip was actually kind of a phenomenal product, arguably maybe a little ahead of its time. But I'm curious, tell me a little bit more about the early days of leaving and arriving at that idea.
00:07:20 · Waseem Daher
[00:07:20] S0: Sure. And so I think our thinking evolved really for all three of these companies, which is for Ksplice, The process was basically Jeff has this cool technology. We're all Linux nerds. We think there are other Linux nerds in the world that would want this. Let's build a company around it. And that was basically the extent that we rigorously analyzed the problem or the domain. With Zulip, it was like, okay, well, what was the problem we were solving? The problem we were solving is at Ksplice, we were in search of a robust group chat tool for businesses, and this was... Just to set the stage, this was like pre Slack. Like, the state of the art at the time was like IRC or HipChat or Campfire. They didn't have mobile apps, and HipChat was like an Adobe Air app. It was like Flash kinda. The stuff did not really work very well. And so we said, Okay. We think that we could build something better that has a mobile app, that has good search, is a nice robustly built modern web app. And also, we sort of had another take on it, which is we thought that if you... Embedded threading as kind of a first class notion in the application, that you would get something that worked well both synchronously and asynchronously. And then we thought, well, okay. Fine. How big could this be? Well, actually, you know, every business does have this problem. And so I think we were right about the market size in the sense that if you look at the adoption and the valuation and the growth of Slack, like, the time and shape were basically right. So I think we were correct in the thesis. I had only have some notes for us on how we executed, but that's that's a little bit about how we got there. It's... Again, it was a problem we had when we were operating k splice, which is how do we... You know, what should we be doing for chat?
00:08:59 · Aditya Agarwal, Waseem Daher
[00:08:59] S1: So did you I'm always curious to dig into the details. This top down ideation? Is this bottoms up in the sense that top down you identify a market, then you go and essentially build out the business case for it and then go out and essentially build it? Or was it a little bit more like, ah, this could be cool. I'm going to go start building it and then essentially let the overall narrative come out of the act of building? Or were they somewhere in between? [00:09:25] S0: For Zulip specifically, it was, again, about a specific problem to be solved. So it was not a top down analysis. And the the origins of Zulip specifically is there was a group chat tool at MIT called Zephyr, which was this, like, nineteen eighties messaging tool that was kind of contemporaneous with IRC and, like, used in a very, very niche way at MIT. And it was actually what we used internally at Ksplice. And so one of the pitches, kind of as we thought about it, was like, can we bring this idea of Zephyr to the masses? Can we actually successfully have it be a robust tool that people use at work? [00:09:58] S1: I see. So Zephyr then got acquired into Dropbox. That's where I met Waseem, and then Waseem spent three or four years at Dropbox. [00:10:04] S0: I was at Dropbox for two years. [00:10:06] S1: And one day? Two year... Yeah. [00:10:07] S0: I think probably like two years and then a month or two. [00:10:09] S1: Okay. Alright. [00:10:09] S0: And then I took six months off, and then we What started [00:10:13] S1: did you learn about startups from Dropbox?
00:10:13 · Aditya Agarwal, Waseem Daher
[00:10:13] S1: did you learn about startups from Dropbox? [00:10:15] S0: A lot, actually, which is Dropbox was either tied with or a close second to it, probably tied with MIT on just sheer talent density. So we had done our first two companies in Boston, and I think we had a little bit of a chip on our shoulder about that, which is we're like, oh, you can build a good tech company in Boston like it is possible. [00:10:36] S1: I didn't know that KSplice was in Boston.
00:10:38 · Waseem Daher
[00:10:38] S0: Oh, yeah. Because we were just... Was right out of MIT. And so we, like, just... You know, we were down the street in Central Square. We, like, we just feel like... We stayed in our hood. You know? And then, actually, Drew came out, like, a bunch because he was back for MIT stuff. He was like, you guys have to move to California. This is kinda where it's all happening. And so I think we were, like, a bit... You know, there was inertia. It's like, well, you know, my friends are here, and it's, like, it's annoying to move. I think one of things we saw at Dropbox is like, oh, wow. The talent density here is just, like, enormous. So I think that was piece one. And then piece two is, like, there are disciplines that I kind of knew nothing about, that I had sort of, like, been a little bit self taught on by virtue of doing our startups. Because remember, before this, I, like, had not had a real job. Like, I had done summer internships. Like, I was an intern at AOL. Was an intern at Amazon, and I was an intern at Google. But, like, I had not really worked at a real company before. And so at Dropbox, I think it was, like, very instructive to see, like, oh, this is, like, world class design talent or this is what really good sales looks like or this is what the marketing team even does. Know, it's stuff like that. I think it really broadened our horizons and then also gave us a little bit of a preview of, like, okay, this is what a company looks like at this size and stage and scale, and these are the things that are working, and maybe these are the things that are not working as well. And I think that was actually very helpful in thinking about the roadmap for Pilot.
00:12:00 · Aditya Agarwal, Waseem Daher
[00:12:00] S1: You do Zulip. You get acquired by Dropbox. You stay there for two years. But then this time around, instead of kind of jumping into your next thing, you decide to come to SPC very early. Right? And this is when the first SPC office, I think, at 112 South Park, maybe 27th? [00:12:18] S0: South Park. Yeah. That's [00:12:19] S1: right. When Ruchi was kind of, like, running it. So what prompted the slight change in your ideation kind of, like, maze? Like, why join SPC in the early days?