Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:00 · Dan Lorenc
[00:00:00] S0: I think the next year or two, we're we're gonna completely shift the way software is written for the last thirty or forty years. Different programming languages, different tools, but at the end of the day, people, you know, still been running this stuff by hand. The tools have gotten a little bit better, but, you know, there's been no massive step function increase in productivity since the first programming languages came out. And now all of a sudden, that is getting flipped on its head and the entire way we build software and products and ship features and road maps is just kind of thrown up in the air and everyone's trying to figure it out all at the same time.
00:00:30 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:00:30] S1: Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. 90% of the software that we use all day, every day is open source, built by strangers on the Internet, and most companies have no idea if the code they're running on is actually safe. Dan Lorenc is on a mission to change that. He's the founder and CEO of Chainguard valued at over $3,500,000,000. Chainguard cleans, secures, and rebuilds open source code so that more than 600 companies and counting can trust what they're running on. In this conversation, we'll talk about why software security has never been more urgent, how Chainguard is becoming the most trusted layer for every company that runs on code, how AGI is actually in some ways already here, and what changes when writing code is no longer the bottleneck and our ideas are. Let's dive right in. If you're running a startup, we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com. And with that, I'm really excited to welcome Dan. Dan, first of all, thank you so much for being here today. I'm really excited to get to spend some time with you, and additionally, just really excited that you're here in New York City. [00:01:44] S0: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
00:01:44 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:01:44] S0: Yeah, thanks for having me on. [00:01:46] S1: I'm thrilled. All right, Dan, I want to start from the beginning. I always like to ask, especially founders who have built multi billion dollar companies, you've raised $600,000,000 valued at north of $3,500,000,000 in every way, you are a true outlier founder. I wanna start with your childhood. And if you had to say one or two things that really stands out that you think has contributed to you being able to be an an original thinker, what is it? [00:02:15] S0: Yeah. So I grew up in the nineties, which... Crazy, crazy to think about how long ago that was. But yeah, the world has changed a lot since then. In my childhood, I was always building things with my hands, was just running around outside playing with tools, my dad and my grandmother's garages that I probably shouldn't have been playing with as a, you know, eight or nine year old kid. Amazing. I didn't lose any fingers or anything in in any of that time. [00:02:37] S1: Amen. Thank god for that.
00:02:37 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:02:37] S1: Amen. Thank god for that. [00:02:39] S0: Yeah. Building everything. Like, you know, it was pre Internet, so it was just... You know, we we would get magazines and find things in those to build, and, it was everything from potato cannons to race cars to go karts. And it... When you're figuring all that stuff out on your own and you get to kinda see the result of doing that with your hands and putting things together and getting to use them and falling off and getting hurt and doing it again, I think it's it's a different kind of experience, I think, than a lot of kids have today pre... With social media and all that stuff where you don't see that anymore. People are more scared of that. [00:03:11] S1: I think that's exactly right. If you were to think about any... Like, what has given you comfort to take risk, what would that be? You know, obviously, you spent time at MIT studying mechanical engineering. You spent a decade at Google working on infrastructure and open source, which obviously gives you a lot of of sort of background for this. But where do you think that comfort with, like, branching out on your own really came from?
00:03:11 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:03:11] S1: I think that's exactly right. If you were to think about any... Like, what has given you comfort to take risk, what would that be? You know, obviously, you spent time at MIT studying mechanical engineering. You spent a decade at Google working on infrastructure and open source, which obviously gives you a lot of of sort of background for this. But where do you think that comfort with, like, branching out on your own really came from? [00:03:37] S0: Yeah. I think it's just being willing to try something you haven't done before, and that, you know, got to do a lot of that in college. I switched switched careers too. Right? My background was actually mechanical engineering at MIT. Half halfway through that, I took my first programming class, and we had to learn MATLAB, to do simulations and that kind of thing. And I thought I hated programming before this, but I'd never really done it. And I realized it was actually not as bad as I thought it was gonna be, and it was a lot faster. You could, you know, create things on your laptop in a dorm room instead of having to get time in the machine shop and order parts and wait for those to show up and screw up and then have to reorder more parts. You know, it kinda condenses that cycle of weeks and weeks to actually get something built to hours, and there's kinda no limit there.
00:03:37 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:03:37] S0: Yeah. I think it's just being willing to try something you haven't done before, and that, you know, got to do a lot of that in college. I switched switched careers too. Right? My background was actually mechanical engineering at MIT. Half halfway through that, I took my first programming class, and we had to learn MATLAB, to do simulations and that kind of thing. And I thought I hated programming before this, but I'd never really done it. And I realized it was actually not as bad as I thought it was gonna be, and it was a lot faster. You could, you know, create things on your laptop in a dorm room instead of having to get time in the machine shop and order parts and wait for those to show up and screw up and then have to reorder more parts. You know, it kinda condenses that cycle of weeks and weeks to actually get something built to hours, and there's kinda no limit there. [00:04:17] S1: That's awesome. So you you enjoyed the speed. Yeah. Well, so let's go back to 2021 when you started Chainguard. What was the moment? Obviously, as I said, you'd spent almost a decade at Google. You had really been deep in open source. Where did the idea come from?