Brian Cardarella (00:02.954)
Okay, all right. Welcome everybody to another interview here. Today we have Foy Savas. And Foy and I go back quite a ways, a little bit of DockYard history here. DockYard may not exist if not for Foy because he handed it off one of, I think our second paid project ever, Tapology, if I'm sure you remember, and Greg.

Foy had built it in, I think Rails 3 at the time. It was like pretty close to that Rails 3 conversion and you're moving on to another project and you reached out to me and I took it over. I worked with Greg for maybe, I think close to a year. And so it was one of those kind of like really early consulting projects that eventually I was able to transition into something larger, which eventually became DockYard. So.

Foy Savas (00:56.399)
That's amazing, Brian. And guess what? I ran into Greg on the street just about two weeks ago. We went Christmas shopping together. And I mean, it's such a success story. He told me, wow, look, it was 14 years ago that we worked together. And he's running this thing. This is his life. Tapology is his baby. And it's grown like crazy. And

Brian Cardarella (01:01.098)
Oh, you did?

Brian Cardarella (01:05.991)
Oh, that's excellent.

Brian Cardarella (01:16.706)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (01:22.171)
It's cool. He's sitting down. We chatted about the stack. We chatted about everything. And Greg was such a fun guy to work with because he wasn't just the guy that, you know, oh, yeah, I've got this idea for a startup. He really wanted, even as a non-tech guy, to become as technical as possible, to increase that technical prowess so that he could run the company well. So I taught him how to use Vim. We were coding in Ruby together.

And all of those things are to this day empowering him. And as you said, eventually, I had to tap out of the project. We built the proof of concept, but yeah, it was great passing it on to you and it's such a great success story.

Brian Cardarella (02:03.938)
So for those that are curious, you can go to topology.com. It is a MMA website. And I think still probably, it's probably one of the better built MMA sites out there. Definitely at the time, the MMA sites were kind of like, here's a BBS system we stood up on some website and just have everyone yell at each other. And he wanted to take something that was actually building community around.

And yeah, I was always impressed with his ability to pick things up quickly. He didn't come from a technical background. He learned as he went. Um, and he, uh, you know, Greg could have probably, I think at some points during it too, everyone questions like whether their company is going to go under or continue to be sustainable. And he was probably questioning whether or not he goes off. Cause I think he came from a marketing background, right? He, um, was in marketing.

Foy Savas (02:54.875)
Yeah. Yeah, he was in the marketing and ad tech world. And I mean, that's really enabled him now, too. Like he understood the business behind what he was building. But the technical understanding of what he needed to do was lagging. And I think it was it was great for him to connect with both me and you. And wow, it's a it's a success story and I think a great one.

Brian Cardarella (02:59.262)
Yeah, yeah. Yep.

Brian Cardarella (03:16.91)
Um, so from there, I ran a conference, uh, Wicked Good Ruby in Boston and Foy was, I think our closing keynote. Um, and I've always been a big fan of Foy. I think he first got to my radar was, uh, the Addison Wesley book that you had written, um, for, uh, for Ruby. And so while I didn't say it now, but everyone has probably gotten it. We both got to know each other through the Ruby community at the time. Um, I have since gone off and

done other things and Foy has also gone off and done other things. So that's what we're here to discuss. So Foy's background, I think your education was also in business and finance, correct?

Foy Savas (03:58.56)
I studied math, guys. I studied math. I've got a bit of a peculiar background. At one point I was just hanging out at the grad department of... Yeah, yeah, I did. I did. I did, yeah.

Brian Cardarella (03:58.838)
Some study math, okay, all right. Well.

Brian Cardarella (04:05.142)
But you found a way to marry everything, though.

Brian Cardarella (04:13.014)
But yeah, sorry. I wanna hand it over to you. Tell us about that, your kind of career trajectory coming from, you've seemed to have achieved like high level aptitude in most things that you've set out to get into. And how does that go? How do you make a decision where you're at a pretty senior level and you're like, I'm gonna go and just like, leave this and go off and like do something completely different.

Foy Savas (04:39.787)
Well, honestly, it makes talking about my career history a little bit difficult. Because there's always this aspect of multi-threadedness in everything that I do. I've got something happening on the back burner almost at all times. But yeah, I came out of school and I started working as a tech consultant. And I really love that kind of work. I love working with startups.

Brian Cardarella (04:45.918)
Okay.

Foy Savas (05:07.371)
I love technology. I just, you know, I'm like, I mean, I have been coding since I was maybe five or six. I accidentally got into it. And I found that I could just build things quickly. And it's really the not just, you know, technical things that interested me, but actually getting things done. I loved going to market. I loved, like, really building a thing. I remember when I was in college, you know, people would come up with...

crazy ideas and maybe we're at the dining table and they come up with a crazy idea and I'm like, okay, let's go do it. And I'd go and I'd do it. I'd build it right there. So this aspect of spiking on anything that seemed interesting. Go ahead.

Brian Cardarella (05:53.03)
I wanted to get your thoughts on this because I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently. And it could be, you know, just with age where I'm like, you know, I'm getting older now and I kind of view things a bit differently, but I feel like, or could it just be that the problem sets are more difficult to achieve now? Like in those early days of like rails, you know, mid 2000s, it did feel like that where someone could come up with an idea and then over a weekend, you could spike it out.

Do you feel like that's still achievable nowadays?

Foy Savas (06:25.227)
Not in the same places. I think it's always achievable, but it's always in a hard-to-find place. More likely, you're going to find a good business opportunity somewhere where you're going to have to work for a couple months, maybe a year before you really have a nice product market fit. But yes...

Brian Cardarella (06:44.794)
But in other words, have all the low-hanging fruit been achieved at this point? So not to say that achieving Twitter scale is easy, but at least the very idea of the status updates and posting the form, that was probably a fairly, like the concept is easy to achieve through web frameworks. But are there, I mean, every new technology opens up a door on all these possibilities. So now with machine learning and AI, we have this whole new set of low-hanging fruit that could potentially be achieved.

Foy Savas (06:49.182)
No, no, it's

Brian Cardarella (07:13.974)
But it can also be like a bit of a hammer and nail problem too, right? Like, are we just going to apply ML to everything? And does that make sense always? But it's, it's kind of like, do we, are we coming out of that, um, that period where we're now moving into a state of maturity in the tech industry that it's going to take six months, it's going to take a year to bring up like a product to market that people feels that the quality that they're going to use and resonate with, or are, are there still opportunities for like

three people to get together, lock themselves in a room for a few days, and come up with something that in a few years is going to be a huge hit.

Foy Savas (07:51.943)
I think there's still opportunities for that. But they're in weird places. And even though you get that whooshing, I think I remember the early days of social media, right? Before pre-Facebook, I had built out a social networking site for my high school. And then when I went to college, I thought, oh, I'm going to build the same thing. And I even thought, oh, I'm going to have to gate it somehow. But there's no way that I'm going to be able to gate it.

It's not like a high school where I can see who's real and who's not. I'm going to have to find some way to figure that out. Like, oh, I'll use school email addresses. And I was building something like that. But just to go back to the high school social network I built, there was a whooshing. I built it, and then within 48 hours, everybody in my high school was on it. And that...

Brian Cardarella (08:45.646)
Well, that's what you get addicted to, right? People using what you've built.

Foy Savas (08:49.175)
That was amazing, but the reality is that even when you have that kind of that whooshing that comes on and I've experienced it a few times with projects that have built, it's still just the beginning. It's still just the beginning. You know, you get that early user base, but how are you going to retain them? How are you going to the business hasn't even been conceived, right? It's just, it's just this early signal telling you that, wow, there's something here. Something's changing. There are secular changes in how people want to interact. How, what kind of technology they want to use.

But it's still the beginning. So yeah, maybe it comes out in a few days. Maybe it's a weekend project. But really, it's also a bit of a 10-year project to figure out how to grow that thing and how to really make it into the beast that it becomes. So yeah, those quick wins, I'll be cautious of that. And one early, when you think about it, you build something quick.

Brian Cardarella (09:32.62)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (09:47.755)
You give it to people. It tends to be a project that's just going to burn cash, right? Think about all of the AI projects out there right now that were, you and I, Brian, you and I, we could go and build something interesting in a week using large language models, stable diffusion, something like that, stand it up online, get tons of people interested in it. But then we're going to run into the problem at the end of the month and say, hey, look, this is how much we're losing.

Brian Cardarella (09:54.677)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (10:19.339)
Do we keep this thing online? Yeah, yeah.

Brian Cardarella (10:19.586)
It's like Pokemon Go, right? It's like, was it the big thing for one summer, everyone was using it and then like, all right, how are we going to make money off this? Or how do we keep this sustainable? I mean, there is a sense of like trendiness that comes with tech consumption. And so like getting things, something to stick for the long term, you're right, that's definitely the hard problem to solve. But it...

Foy Savas (10:29.235)
Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (10:45.438)
It's always felt like at least for the Rails type frameworks now, when you're just doing like CRUD type operations, there's not a ton of ground left over in most of the probably the problem sets that people are being exposed to. But it's those new technologies that, oh, AI, ML is saying, okay, now we can take this and do a twist upon it. But...

Is the market also kind of... So like in the JavaScript client side application development world, the running kind of gag is that every few weeks a new framework, it's not the case now, the cadence isn't as high as it used to be, but every few weeks new framework come out on Hacker News, right? And so the fatigue was set in there. And then within companies, it was constant churn on we need to change over to this latest JavaScript library. And...

That just became a huge like debt nightmare that managers and stakeholders eventually became wise to. Does the same happen to products in the wild where it's just a fatigue of constantly having to go out and consumers learning new products, like consuming new products, or is the appetite always there or is it generational where those younger people that are coming up are always hungry for the next thing. They don't wanna be using what's been out there already.

Foy Savas (12:10.983)
I do think that we have a culture where every generation, we want to change. We want to do something different. We want to be somewhere where the previous generation wasn't. But as a technologist, I really do think that emerging technologies always open up new possibilities and new ways of doing things. And people love that. I think there are ancient texts written in hieroglyphics.

Foy Savas (12:42.198)
a poet saying that all the good work has already been written. Look where we are now, right?

Brian Cardarella (12:47.31)
It's like when the, what was it, not the copyright office, but the US, you put a, you basically qualify something saying, this is mine, like in late 1800s, the United States said like, oh, we've invented everything that could be invented by this point. And we're not growing really, but now there's been more like copyrights applied for in the past hundred years, like then there were, sorry, in like 10 years nowadays, and there were in the past hundred years up until that point. Like it was,

Something that this idea that innovation runs, I think innovation can run dry in a closed set, but when you consider like, you know, new potential technology frontiers, then it's almost infinite at that point. But is the play to like, oh, we're gonna take something that Atlassian has done, and we're just gonna like, do a twist on it with this new tech and go after them, or is it like,

possibilities on something completely different that we've never even heard of before. Like for some ways, when you think of like our current set of tech leaders, these are in many ways just play upon preexisting markets like Uber is the reinvention of taxi companies. You have Amazon, which is a reinvention of especially like nowadays of what was that catalog? Was it, it wasn't Filene's. It was, you know, you could order a house.

Foy Savas (14:10.029)
Sears and Roebuck?

Brian Cardarella (14:11.986)
Yes, Sears. So this is like the modern day Sears, that sort of thing. So are we kind of in this cyclical cycle where those that are established, like the big enterprise companies are risk averse and they're in that position to not really take on these new technologies and there's always a door open for someone to come in and compete against them, or is it going to be more viable to try to open up entirely new markets?

Foy Savas (14:37.875)
You know, these are big questions and I'm not sure how to answer them. And I think being optimistic about there being possibilities out there. I think if you're an entrepreneur, yes, there are opportunities and there are definitely opportunities for small teams to outcompete large teams, to see opportunities in new emerging technologies that others don't.

Brian Cardarella (14:43.12)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (15:06.859)
the big companies are always going to be laggards. But hey, there are economic cycles, there are changes in how much financing is out there. I mean, I worked in venture and you have to think about, okay, well, what are the liquidity events associated with a potential investment? Are they going to get acquired? Are they going to IPO? Where is this going? So, yeah.

Stay optimistic. I think the reality is that humans are more or less the same. We're not evolving faster than our technology at this moment. That's clear. So our basic needs are the same. But what technology is enabling is us to increasingly figure out the nuances of those needs.

Brian Cardarella (15:42.638)
Mm.

Brian Cardarella (15:49.356)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (16:04.491)
and restructure our society and restructure our activities to better solve those problems. And I think we're still, humanity in general is still very, very early in solving human needs. Yeah, we do. We do. So stay optimistic. I mean, AI, large language models, this is extreme early days for this kind of stuff. Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (16:16.694)
I would hope so. We've got a long road ahead of us.

Brian Cardarella (16:29.856)
Yeah. So let's go back to like your career history. So you got into, you were talking about your experience building a social network for your high school, you know, and then as you stated at the beginning, you went into a mathematics concentration in university. Where do you go from there?

Foy Savas (16:51.363)
I started working as a tech consultant. I started working with startup groups. I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I needed to make money. So the next best thing was consulting those groups. And I had so many adventures, making companies that didn't grow to IPO, but are still amazing tech companies, to things that were clones or flops or stuff like that.

Brian Cardarella (16:58.434)
Mm.

Foy Savas (17:21.023)
And I did work with a number of companies that, particularly in the ad tech space, where I was building out data warehousing systems and they got acquired and were big wins. And so I was, yeah, I carved out a bit of a name for myself. And, you know, at the time, I think early in my career, you know, when I was in high school, I was using PHP mostly, right? And then, I mean,

People weren't even using, a lot of shops weren't even using version control back then, right? But I transitioned to Ruby and Ruby was probably one of the first languages I truly loved. I think Matz's philosophy in crafting Ruby was just, it's perfect, right? Like you want to maximize, what? Go ahead.

Brian Cardarella (18:12.326)
Did you discover Ruby before Rails, or was that part of the onboarding for you?

Foy Savas (18:19.612)
I'm not quite sure. It's so long ago, I have no idea. And maybe it's not worth going totally into that, but yeah, I was really big in the Ruby and the Ruby on Rails world. There were some things about Rails, around Rails 2.0 that I started not to like. And I think it was somewhat caused by...

the proliferation of different little web frameworks. And I had always found because I was the guy that spiked on code and took you from zero to nothing and then grew it from there, that I always wanted to find the fastest way to go from zero to one. And Rails, despite it being amazing, was giving me problems. And that's when I got attached to Merb.

very early on, and in particular with Datamapper. I loved the ORM that we had over there.

Brian Cardarella (19:17.226)
And that's, I think, wasn't Topology the data mapper? I think it had, I think, I think actually I rewrote it for Active Record because, but it was, I think it was originally data mapper was the ORM.

Foy Savas (19:21.862)
Yes, it was.

Foy Savas (19:25.78)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (19:33.267)
And I post that if we want to talk about ORMs. It's kind of interesting, like to this day, I think the beautiful thing about Datamapper was it was one of the earliest ORMs that uses full-out query algebra. And we did it in Ruby, and it solved the n plus one problem and that kind of stuff. But then you use it enough, and you start to realize that, OK, an ORM is great for CRUD. But when you really want to get those...

complicated queries, you want to go back to SQL. You want to go back to SQL. You want to be able to optimize it. And I, to this day, respect SQL as an amazing innovation. I mean, but let's not get detoured. I'll go back to my career. So I was working with all these startups and then I had a friend who was an angel investor and a VC and he said, hey, can you help me out?

I'm looking at this company, it's in the data space. I want you to like suss it out for me. Tell me if the team is real. And I found that my work as a tech consultant and as a technologist was so useful in being able to do that diligence. That, wow, this is fun. And he asked, hey, maybe you could help me do this a little bit more often. I'd like to do more angel investments.

And then he said, well, actually, I also run a fund of funds. And this is Alessandro Pio, which is an amazing angel investor. And he was operating also a fund of funds which invested in top tier venture capital. So I started interning, effectively interning. A little old to be interning, but I did it anyway. And I started interning at this fund of funds, observing all of Sequoia, USV, etc.

And then the next task was, hey, look, we're thinking about bootstrapping a data fund. Some, think about it, whatever you wanna do. And I was like, okay, it's time to create some kind of machine learning fund. And I helped them, I stand that up, and those were my years in venture capital. I've got some interesting stories from that as well.

Foy Savas (21:54.544)
And then, yeah, go ahead.

Brian Cardarella (21:56.752)
So you were pulled into that world rather than it being a career goal.

Foy Savas (22:04.415)
I think I always had wanted to work in finance. I remember I watched barbarians at the gate sometime when I was a kid and I was like, okay, yeah, you know, private equity, this kind of stuff is very interesting. And I was a little bit financially, a bit of a financial wonk. Like I used to read accounting principles for fun.

Brian Cardarella (22:07.528)
Okay.

Brian Cardarella (22:25.142)
Yeah. There is something attractive about like the energy in that world. Like it definitely feels like there's a lot of highs and lows. And if you're looking for something that's a bit more even, that's not for you. But if you get it, like if you really, you know, if you want to like get deep on something and you kind of get off on like those, I guess those thrills, like that definitely seems like a world that would be attractive to.

that type of personality. And also I imagine the number of problems that you get exposed to as well is probably very attractive.

Foy Savas (22:57.631)
Yes, that was an exciting thing. I loved going and actually being semi-operational with these teams. Is there a key moment in time that I can come in and help them? It was weird. We had portfolio companies I would say, okay, hey, I'm going to come in, I'm going to spend a couple of days with you guys. Let's figure out where your technical debt is, what you can change about your tech team and stuff like that. I think that was pretty unique in the VC world to be that operational.

But I loved it. And the sourcing and screening bit, too, was also great. I loved going in and meeting teams and then talking to every single developer. Like, you know, we were early stage investors, right? So we were finding either seed or series A and deploying capital there. And when you're early stage...

Your emphasis is on looking at the team and saying, okay, is this a team that isn't gonna break apart or explode or something like that? And of course, you have to think about, okay, well, is the market good? Is the tech good? But the first thing is the team. And again, the reason is if the team's bad, it doesn't matter if the market's good or if the product's good, the thing's gonna explode. And as a technical guy, I loved going in and saying, okay, look, we're gonna invest in this founder.

Brian Cardarella (24:03.522)
Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (24:11.924)
Mm.

Foy Savas (24:19.763)
Who did they hire? Which programmers are willing to come in here and work with them? And I was delighted. I think probably one of the best finds in the portfolio that we constructed it occurred when I went down, I went to, I did kind of like the second round of diligence on this company. I sat with each developer and it was just kind of like.

felt like, OK, what are their energies? What are they interested in? Why did they work at this company, et cetera? And I was blown away by the team. I said, we've got to do this. That was Socure. And Socure now was a big win for us. But yeah. I've got some war stories about that, too. I think we invested. I love that company we invested in.

Brian Cardarella (25:00.64)
Oh.

Brian Cardarella (25:04.427)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (25:16.123)
Four months in, we got a call from the founder, and the founder said, you guys have some unfortunate news. We're shutting down. We can't meet payroll. It's over. And the senior partner at my firm, he looked over at me. He didn't want to do this deal at first. Anyway, he said, I'm not giving them more money. I'm not giving them more money. And I said,

There's no way they're shutting down. Tell the team that I will personally find them jobs if we can't get them capital. And I went and I did the best matchmaking I could and I found another firm that was super excited about the vision and they stayed alive. And startups are that way. They're always on the cusp of dying and someone's there driven to keep them alive.

over those locales.

Brian Cardarella (26:13.014)
Some may say that consultancies are always on the cusp of dying as well. It's...

Foy Savas (26:16.939)
Oh yeah, well that's for a different reason, right? But it's true. Anyway, so I did that. I've also bootstrapped a SaaS company, a very sizable SaaS company with my wife, which I thought we were gonna go raise venture money for that, but didn't get any takers. And then I said, okay, whatever, just gonna do this. We're just gonna do it ourselves. We got the cash.

Brian Cardarella (26:20.342)
Yeah, I know.

Foy Savas (26:46.599)
And that was painful. It was a slog for the first few years. And then finally we hit product market fit. And wow, the internal growth on that has been huge. That's a company called Auxpanel. We provide analytics for dental practices. And so yeah, guys, I've got a really hairy career.

Brian Cardarella (27:08.738)
Did that product market fit come after? So how much of your original vision on that product maintained before you found that fit? Or did you have to go through multiple rounds of customer feedback, making adjustments, maybe not a full pivot, but definitely deviating from your original vision? Or did you, it was just a matter of time in achieving enough viability?

Foy Savas (27:32.535)
Oh, there was a lot of pivot. So I was at NYU. I was a visitor at NYU, and I was leading a deep learning seminar. And we were doing convolutional neural nets. And I looked at this, and I was like, oh, this is interesting. This is the cusp of something exciting. And this was 2014. And I said, OK, well, where can I find good labeled images that are pretty regular

we'll deploy this and dentistry. My wife was previously a dentist. I mean, she's still a dentist, but she doesn't work as a dentist. And I thought, okay, well, dentistry, I knew that dentistry had this kind of images. And I thought, okay, my first thought was, I just need to go get access to huge training sets and then I'm gonna make something interesting. And...

At the time, I named the company Oxoid, etymologically, ox as in helper and oid as in like. And then an investor told me, oh, I don't like it. It sounds like hemorrhoid. And we changed it. So even just names and stuff like that. But what we found was that this idea, and really what I had been chasing was this idea of, okay, I'm going to go deploy convolutional nomads on this stuff and provide a clinical edge for...

for these offices wasn't what they wanted. What they really wanted was really great business intelligence. And I ended up building a business intelligence app almost as if it were a Trojan horse to get into these offices, to convince them to start deeper integrations with us so that we can get those training sets. Never did it, never did it, because I realized that the business intelligence was such a great business. And there were secular trends in the market. So now we have users, you know, they're doctors,

Brian Cardarella (29:26.239)
Mm.

Foy Savas (29:31.423)
They're OMs, they're regional directors, they're CFOs at large chains, they're auditors that come in and use our system, they're syndicated loan admins will come in, PE firms will use it, analysts. It's an amazing product, it was not what I intended to build, but it's there and it's great.

Brian Cardarella (29:57.851)
The history being from like technologist to I guess seeing how the sausage is made behind the investment scene and now to product owner and is that, do you see yourself staying in that role for the foreseeable future or do you have something else that you wanna get to at some point?

Foy Savas (30:18.695)
Oh, I'm always itching to do something new. You know, I like to think of myself as an adventurer of some sort, right? I'm looking for that new adventure. Maybe I prefer to call myself sometimes a tech appreciator because I like to increase the value of things, but at the same time, I'm in it for the journey. I'm not just in it to make money. I want to appreciate the act of crafting new technology.

And wow, are we on the cusp of new exciting technologies. So, yeah.

Brian Cardarella (30:53.398)
That's what I want to get to next is what we've seen. I think like Google just announced today, or they're going to be pulling a trigger on it sometime in the next few days, but a layoff of like 30,000 tech workers. And we're going through this. Would you say that this is a reset in terms of like the tech world for, not necessarily job security, but it feels like there's a turnover that's happening right now.

And it's not quite what it was, say around like '99 or what it was around 2008. This one feels a little bit different. And I don't have my finger on it exactly. I don't know if it's because we've seen such, um, like huge growth on, on like tech, uh, overhead within companies. Um, if that overhead in terms of people was always necessary or if what we're looking towards the next few years is.

a fundamental change on how companies are approaching their technology spends. Are they going to be more conservative or are they going to be, now that maybe we're coming a little bit out of the inflationary period, are they going to go back to business as usual?

Foy Savas (32:09.767)
Yeah, as if I know. I know, but thanks for asking. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, so I understand finance very well. I mean, I worked in the finance space for a while. I even went through a program where I'm like a CFA charter holder. So I went through the series of testing to, I could become your financial advisor if you really want.

Brian Cardarella (32:14.034)
I know, I know, but I'm not gonna come back in six months and say, Foy, why'd you say that? It's more like, what is your sense?

Foy Savas (32:39.831)
But there's a lot of nuance in the situation right now. And I think that you would see that broadly speaking, people do believe that we're at the end of a business cycle. But does that mean that we're about to enter into a recession? It's a little bit complicated. And at the same time, there are very interesting secular trends happening. We see this emergence of AI at a macro level. Is that going to?

be this boost to TFP that we've never seen before. But then again, it may also result in a bit of a structural change, right? Like, okay, how many people do you need in order to do certain things? But we'll go back to the fact that human basic needs have not yet been solved. Like, okay, sure, maybe we'll see less people working at Google, but how many other products and businesses do genuinely need to be developed in order to satisfy human needs that have

to this point gone entirely ignored. So I'd like to stay optimistic about that, but yes, I do think that we're gonna go through a wave of structural changes. I do think that we're at the end of a business cycle. And when you think about the end of a business cycle, you're thinking about, okay, maybe a risk premium, the cost of capital, certain dynamics there. Inflation is kind of a bit...

crowding that out, but I think in the startup space, the multiples, the multiples aren't so great, right? So, if you've got a great company and you're in control of it right now, I would say, why sell it? If you have the opportunity to double its revenue and pay out dividends, you are in a way better position than selling your company, right, at this moment.

So that's something weird. And because we're in that state at this moment in time, the amount of capital that's gonna be deployed into things is gonna be generally reduced. I think we had a glut of investors come in, in a number of spaces, in venture. There was a lot of money that was thrown into crypto in an unhealthy way.

Brian Cardarella (35:05.528)
Hehehe

Foy Savas (35:07.259)
Yeah, don't give VCs immediate liquidity. You create bad, bad things. And then you also see the emergence of things like private credit, right? So private credit or venture debt, stuff like that. A lot of changes. And again, end of the business cycle. Yeah. What is venture debt? So typically, it's a lot of money.

Brian Cardarella (35:29.128)
What is venture debt?

Foy Savas (35:35.939)
When we think about venture capital, they're just talking about the equity stack. I'm going to come in, I'm going to give you some capital, and then you're going to give me some equity in exchange for preferred stock. But venture debt, typically, you'll find a firm that's going to come in, and maybe they will take some equity, but at the same time, maybe their LPs are actually...

Brian Cardarella (35:41.346)
Mm.

Foy Savas (36:02.847)
syndicated network of lenders that are going to come in and they're also going to add some debt to your company. So typically this happens a little bit later stage, so we're not talking about super early companies. But I have also seen that private credit and venture debt has been approaching smaller and smaller companies. So the middle market has become hotter and hotter. But at the same time, yeah.

Brian Cardarella (36:08.494)
Mm.

Brian Cardarella (36:26.104)
Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (36:29.606)
Do you feel like... So I actually have a couple of different directions I could go in I guess the first one I'll start with is when you mentioned that we were at the end of a business cycle, what's been interesting I've observed at least is that whenever we have hit that end of a business cycle over the past few decades, there always seemed to be like a new technology to kind of like pull us out, right? Or bring us into the next one. So like '99, you had like...

Well, really Rails. Rails was like one of the first frameworks to come along and say, hey, we can do it better, faster, cheaper. And then after the housing crisis, this is even though they existed prior to this, but this is when the social networks really took off and that space was huge. Do you see now AI being that thing that will pull us out of the, if this is the end of a business cycle, bring us into the next one?

Foy Savas (37:23.4)
I'm not necessarily going to place a bet on AI, but I'll tell you, generally speaking, what you've observed is something that economists have also observed. And there's a very famous economist, Carlota Perez, who talks about this extensively, that there is an installation period, and then there's this second wave. And the first installation period tends to decimate the companies that come in early.

Brian Cardarella (37:31.023)
Oh.

Foy Savas (37:50.955)
there tend to be some highly disciplined companies, a la Amazon, that survive and prosper on that second wave. But that first installation period is really about just getting the tech out there. And the second one is about making the money. And yes, I do think that AI companies right now, and AI tech in general, we're going to see that decimation of AI companies, but then we're going to see...

people who come out in the second wave and they really know how to make it a business.

Brian Cardarella (38:23.814)
That's what I've always felt too, is that it takes time. The technology comes out first, and people are like, oh, this is cool, but what can we do with it? And it just takes time, sometimes years, for that technology to have that fit, or for people that are product-minded to start wrapping their mind about how to apply this technology to new products. And it's usually anywhere from a five to 10-year period, but I kinda get the feeling that with...

That is accelerating. That time is getting compressed, maybe in part because there's more people in technology now, so there's more opportunity for those things to get accelerated. Maybe it's just that technology itself is mature enough. Like AI, well, machine learning really has been under development for a few decades at this point. It's just that now the average person's being exposed to it. But I mean, I think all along the waves, I've always been able to look ahead and say like, oh, this is gonna be the next thing, this is gonna be the next thing, this is the next thing.

I honestly don't know what the next thing is going to be after like better machine learning or the AI, just the general AI, if that ever becomes a real thing. But beyond that, I mean, it's starting to feel like a bit, I know this is probably the wrong thing to say because something will come out and just say, Brian, you're wrong, but starting to feel a bit like we're a bit tapped out idea-wise.

But I also have not been super tapped into the academic scene. Like years ago, so I, out of high school, my father's accountant was also Marvin Minsky's accountant, the father of artificial intelligence at MIT. And I was applying to college and my dad's accountant was like, oh, I want you to meet someone. So I went in and I met Marvin Minsky. He gave me a tour of the MIT media lab. This was back in like '97, I think, '98.

And I got to meet Dr. Steven Strassman, who wrote the Unix-Hater's Handbook. He gave me a signed copy. I still have it. And at that time, I was going through the media lab. They showed me this device. I was like, what's that? And it was an early like prototype of a 3D printer. And now downstairs, I have a toy box that I got my kids for Christmas, $300. And they're just printing out toys left and right. And that took two decades, two plus decades to get to two and a half decades. And, you know, so.

Brian Cardarella (40:48.778)
I don't know if you're particularly tapped into what's on the cusp of academia technology-wise, but I do feel like that's something that I need to start. I've been too heads down on like the today and not enough heads up on what could potentially be coming in the future. But I think there's also like a balance to be had in terms of like, how do you take advantage of where we are versus how do you continuously put yourself ahead of opportunities that may come about in the future?

Foy Savas (41:13.827)
Yeah, that was a fascinating story, by the way.

Brian Cardarella (41:19.247)
So I could talk about, so Minsky's house was amazing. Like you walk into his living room, it was just stacks and stacks of newspapers. Like newspapers as tall as me. And he had a trapeze bar in the middle of his living room. And I went in there and I sat down, I was talking to him. And his granddaughter was there and he was looking over his granddaughter. But what was strange,

was it felt like he was observing his granddaughter and like trying to figure out how she worked more than like being like a grand, I'm maybe speaking out of place here. But the funny thing is that I ultimately, he wrote a college recommendation for me and he did it because I fixed his wifi. His wifi wasn't working and I was able to fix his wifi, got it working on his Windows machine. He's like, oh, thanks, I'll write you a college rec. And I go, okay. And that's my Marvin Minsky story.

Foy Savas (42:11.783)
That's okay. So you got into college because you fixed moment minutes gets qualified.

Brian Cardarella (42:14.761)
I fixed Marvy Minsky's Wi-Fi.

Foy Savas (42:18.555)
Minsky is an amazing guy. I think, you know, I mean, when you think about AI, you can't skip Minsky. And I've met him before. I've chatted with him. I've sat in on some of his classes. But he was also wrong about the early days of AI. And if you go back and think about AI, you know, he was obsessed with what we now call GoFi.

right, like good old fashioned AI. And it was this idea that, okay, we're gonna create these symbolic logic systems and they are gonna somehow achieve general artificial intelligence. And when you read Perceptrons, which is interesting that Minsky wrote that book, in some ways it was a way to actually conceptually

kill out the sub-symbolic team. And the XOR problem with a single perceptron, oh, it can't do XOR, stuff like that. But yeah, I'm sorry, I know so much about the history of AI and there have been great AI winters in the past. So I do think we'll probably experience one again. I think it'll more be a decimation of companies.

It's not going to be like the GoFi days. I think, you know, but then again, think about Lisp, right? Like Lisp found great opportunities to enable startups. You think about Paul Graham, you think about Viaweb you think about there was a cohort that was leveraging Lisp in a way that it gave them the edge over the big companies to be able to write code in a way that others couldn't. So even if the big trend gets it wrong,

Brian Cardarella (44:05.654)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (44:10.371)
There always seems to be some kind of tech that comes out of it that enables the developer.

Brian Cardarella (44:15.986)
And is that an edge that startups should be on the lookout for taking advantage of? Um, like where, where is the, so you said you, you evaluated startups upon three things. There was the product market fit, market opportunity, the people, and then the tech stack. Like how important were the tech decisions? I'm sure if something was just like a ball of mud, you know, this isn't going to scale or we're going to, if it was a good idea, you'd probably come and say, we got to reboot this, but.

Was it a significant driver of decision there? And was it something that a, you know, making the right tech decisions can give you that burn rate, a longer burn rate to get lucky, or you're not gonna have to incur, like were the cost considerations deferred to later, where it's like, okay, you know, we can pay for scale. And is that still tolerated nowadays?

Foy Savas (44:52.024)
I mean, it's...

Foy Savas (45:14.187)
Well, I mean, it depends upon the industry. It totally depends upon the industry. I would read Paul Graham's essay, Beating the Averages. It's a great one on why use Lisp when the broader market isn't using it. Why should you, as a startup, use Lisp? And we're on the Elixir Roundtable podcast, so you could just replace Elixir right in there. And of course, the truth is that you do need to beat the averages in one way or another. But you

how it's helping you do that might be different at a different time. Maybe it's about being able to write the business logic quicker and faster and find that product market fit faster. Or maybe it's actually about cost savings. Maybe it's about being able to deploy cheaper. And I think that the nuance of that is going to be different in each individual case. So I'm not going to give you a...

advice that applies to everybody. And you know, I mean, I spent time sussing out medical devices as well. Right. So and I will say in the medical device space, tech really matters. Like you better make that thing work upfront. Yeah, no, it's, it's got to be perfect. You know, it's got the machine learning has to be good. And I have some horror stories from that too. But

Brian Cardarella (46:26.038)
Yeah, can't turn off.

Foy Savas (46:41.963)
Yeah, any technology that enables you to do things faster or cheaper, you've got to think about your market and you think, okay, what differentiates me from the competition? But more importantly, what helps me better serve the customer? If your product is more consumery, yeah, well, okay, let's hold off on that. If your product is more enterprise, if your product is more enterprise.

Normally, the pitch goes, okay, you're pitching to enterprise customers. Tell them how much you're going to save them. Tell them how much you're going to save them, and then they'll immediately sign up. But even though that's the pitch, I would tell you internally, think about how much you're going to, how much growth you're going to enable your enterprise customer to do. Because really, when you're working in an enterprise space, if you're giving your

customer or tool that's going to enable rapid growth, you're also curling your own company rapidly.

Brian Cardarella (47:46.006)
Well, that's why I wanted to ask is when enterprise level companies, because like making a 1% change is usually a large dollar amount for companies of that size. But if you're introducing something that's cheaper, are they thinking that this is going to be now capital that they can reinvest into their growth? Or are they thinking that money is going to be going elsewhere?

Foy Savas (48:09.467)
Companies are growth oriented, right? The market is growth oriented. If you're in that space, it's about growth. I mean, there are certain sectors where bringing down cost is important, but generally speaking, growth is what the market loves. And when you think about cash flows and how they're discounted, they're discounted based off of two things.

What is the prevailing cost of capital effectively? And then what is the growth of your company? And those are the two major factors discounting or helping you determine what the valuation of your company is. So if you can enable growth, I think, yes, go for it. Growth is great. Actually, you know what? I have a little bit of an aside, though,

I know we're on the Elixir Roundtable podcast, and I've never written a line of Elixir ever. But I do have a story about Elixir, and I really want to bring this up. So in 2009, and I have to date myself because the date is relevant, I was asked by some students at Northeastern University to come give a talk.

like an ACM kind of talk. They were having programmers come in and talk about things. And they had seen me give a kind of like a talk that was exciting about the difference between Rails and Merb and they said, can you do that for programming languages? Can you give us an exciting talk where you pit the programming languages against one another and then tell us what's best? And so I gave this talk and I gave them this

huge landscape of all the programming languages out there. And, you know, honestly, programming languages, you know, most part they're all Turing complete. It tends to be implementation and libraries and stuff like that really made the difference at any point in time. But when I was done with the talk, someone raised their hand and they asked...

Foy Savas (50:24.903)
Okay, so tell me, what's the future programming language? What programming language is the future? And I said, wait, you want me to pick one of these? Which one's gonna be the programming language of the future? And they said, no, it doesn't have to necessarily be one. What is the future programming language like? And I said, I looked at the board with all the languages and I said, it's gonna be a mashup of these two things. It's gonna be a mashup of Ruby and Erlang. Erlang because...

Brian Cardarella (50:51.371)
No.

Foy Savas (50:52.395)
Because the implementation, you know, you want these transparent processes. You don't want to have to think about the hardware. You want to be able to scale efficiently, that kind of thing. You know, this is, it's such a unique value prop. BEAM everything, that's what you want. And you know, I had played around with Erlang back then, but at the same time, it's like, getting a developer to switch to Erlang is hard. And then I look at Ruby, no.

Brian Cardarella (50:57.419)
Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (51:15.722)
Yeah, when you got to put periods at the end of your statements, it's like, what am I doing?

Foy Savas (51:23.621)
Yeah, and it's such an amazing piece of work, Erlang. The syntax aside, the thing that I was looking at for Ruby, though, and why I wanted to see this mashup was that Ruby enabled metaprogramming. And metaprogramming allows you to encode business logic as quick as possible.

And so the combination of those two things, being able to cheaply scale without having to think about re-engineering your product all the time and being able to encode the business logic as quickly as possible, that is a very powerful combination. So that was 2009. Elixir did not exist. And here we are, you know, 2024, living in the future. And literally that is the future programming language right now. So yeah.

Brian Cardarella (52:14.474)
Yeah, I mean, that is by and large some of my reasons for heading this direction with Elixir. But I mean, what we've been really betting on is that, like it solves a lot of problems. But what's also true in tech is that there's a lot of followers too. I don't mean that in a negative sense, just that if like Facebook comes out with a framework, it immediately like has a certain percentage of market share. If Google puts out a programming language, it gets a lot of attention.

And so what's always been missing for Elixir is a big enterprise champion to kind of like give it credibility. There are companies using it. Apple's using it. We're on a couple of Apple projects using Elixir. Um, like Discord is using Elixir. WhatsApp is the huge Erlang success story, but none of them have really kind of like planted their flag and said like, this is our tech and that's, that's really what unfortunately has been missing thus far. And it's, DockYard is not a big company, but we, we have a big presence in this space.

Our hope is that we continue to invest in it, we continue to develop it and then we'll eventually hit that product market fit with the technology, like just like you did, and we'll grow alongside of it. So we made this early investment in this tech space. We, we see all the values it has, but it's still a bet. It's, you know, it's still a risk. I believe in it to the point where I, you know, bet my company on it, but it has everything that I've ever wanted in a program language, nearly except for a type system, which Jose is actively working on right now.

Um, but it, it's also a programming language that I haven't had as much fun in writing since Ruby, which is rare. It's really tough, you know, doing years of JavaScript, I think gave me a lot of PTSD and I'm, I mean, the under like, you know, discount people with actually PTSD, just that it was, it wasn't fun. It felt like work. This doesn't feel like work to me. Um, but.

Foy Savas (54:08.663)
I think it's great to disclose that weakness with Elixir, which is effectively that it does not yet have a spawn point. Other languages have these spawn points. Developers are just dropping into JavaScript because, hey, that's what the browser's got, right? Or they're dropping into Python because that's what they see in the academic world.

Brian Cardarella (54:28.126)
Yeah, I don't think it's a problem talking about the deficiencies of something because otherwise, if you're ignoring it, it's not going to get fixed. It's not going to be addressed. If you're talking about it, then maybe we incentivize at some point one of these companies or even if there's a big company that's coming up the ranks looking to adopt it. But it's going to happen at some point, just a matter of what part of the tech cycle that's with. For me too, the other nice thing is because Erlang has been around for...

Foy Savas (54:35.391)
Yep. Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (54:57.09)
30 years. It's pretty, it's kind of like semi-permanent in its stability. Whereas I kind of felt like with other technologies, I was on that merry-go-round. Like every few years, especially in consulting, you constantly have to reinvent yourself. And I was, I mean, I'm only 44, but I was exhausted doing that. And so I'm hoping at least with this time that there's going to be a long future ahead of us. But even if there's not, I'm enjoying the ride so far. It's fun.

Foy Savas (55:28.02)
Yeah. Well, I'm curious to ask, are there other technologies or things on the cusp, nascent tech that's intriguing you right now?

Brian Cardarella (55:40.692)
Outside of Elixir?

Foy Savas (55:42.251)
Outside of Elixir, yeah.

Brian Cardarella (55:45.238)
It's hard because my day is so focused on, and Elixir does, I don't know if you saw, but Chris McCord who created Phoenix, he just released this thing called Flame, which completely reinvents serverless. It actually solves a lot of the serverless problems built in Elixir. Then there's the Nx I'm sorry, I'm talking about Elixir. You're asking about things outside of Elixir. Honestly, yeah, for me, a lot of it is in the machine learning space. A lot of it, I actually have a lot of interest in hardware as well. I think like micro devices, things with screens,

Foy Savas (56:03.517)
No, that's fine, that's fine.

Brian Cardarella (56:14.966)
Like the whole hobbyist scene around Raspberry Pis, in part supply chain messed up that scene because you have a lot of companies that are doing professional stuff with these hobbyist boards that just bought up all the supply, but that's starting to turn around now that the boards are becoming, like the Pi Zeros are back in stock, or at least were. I've been doing stuff like that. So one thing, this is pure just hacker stuff. So I should probably have posted a video of this.

For Halloween last year, I went to Home Depot and I bought all these like animatronics from A Nightmare Before Christmas. So we had like Jack Skellington and I forget the woman's character then the guy in the sack and I had just hooked them up and they were just like playing and I'm looking at it and like oh these are just like low voltage wires going to each servo And so for this year, I ended up buying I got a bunch of Pi Zeros beforehand and I hooked every single one up

And I wrote a script to control them. And so it was like, I had that house in the neighborhood where you go by and then next year, what I'm thinking about doing is I can take the songs from the, I was just playing like the music over speaker. I can take the songs from the movies and then use machine learning, or I could just do it by hand and isolate the section of the song that a character is singing at. And so that it's sending like, okay, for this section, so I'm gonna move their mouth now. So I'm basically reinventing like

early Disney world in my house to a certain extent. There were wires running everywhere and driving my wife nuts. But I think when I get excited about something is when I can get away from building polished products and get more to the hacker stuff, where it's like, okay, I can do something quickly, have it be cool, but this isn't something I can sell. This is fun to do.

Those are the things that I think I get most excited about outside of like my professional work. And then of course, like we have this whole, we're doing some R&D projects around sailing and building out machine learning intelligence for sailboat racing. And that's a passion of mine as well. So I think that Elixir leaks into that, but they're not Elixir specific in any way. They're more kind of like the concept of just, I mean, it's fun to be at that point in my career where I have an idea of doing something, and like, I can do that.

Brian Cardarella (58:36.558)
I'll just go ahead and do it. It's kind of weird, but I'm gonna do it.

Foy Savas (58:40.5)
Those are cool projects. I know you have two kids and doing that kind of a hackish project in front of them, incorporating them is such a great way for them to learn and get excited about technology.

Brian Cardarella (58:49.814)
Yeah, there's these little breadboard kits. I think, I forget the name of it, but it's a company, they'll put out like this little box and it comes with an Arduino. And it's like a puzzle you get to solve with the board and like wiring up the circuitry every single day. I bought this with my son and went through it with him. He doesn't have the attention span yet to like really sit it out for like an hour and a half one.

But the shorter ones were kind of cool. And then we haven't built it yet, but there was this build your own like eight bit handheld gaming unit. And that's, I mean, along with the toy box too. Like it blows my mind that my, it's like the 3D prints are not just like these basic, like here's a little like heart or something like that. They built out these articulating, you know, things that have spinning wheels on it that have, it's like, it's a.

It's a puzzle almost where each of the pieces can bend. So, or you can print out the separate parts and put it together. It's actually past the point of being like toy type stuff where it's like serious. And I actually think 3D printing is a huge, huge future. I don't know if you've like really watched that space too much, but what's really interesting there are the, so like we have the regular kind of like the like printing each of the dots with the hot.

plastic version. There's a new version where it's like it dips down into the emulsion and then it comes up and so you no longer have like the print lines around everything. You have 3D printers that are using powdered stainless steel to create like stainless steel products. They're starting to look into fiberglass and carbon fiber. Like that to me is a huge future because right away if you start doing like replacing supply change with 3D print shops you can have

like carbon emission footprints significantly. It's probably the only business model that could potentially attack Amazon and take it on at this point, other than Amazon destroying itself over time or getting deregulated into like a million different pieces or regulated into a million different pieces. But yeah, 3D printing I think is a really, really interesting concept that is so, so early in its life cycle.

Foy Savas (01:01:04.323)
Yeah, it's true. And it's exciting. And it's something that's real, real fun to do with kids as well. Like I've got one of those, you know, FDM 3D printers where it just drops like the PLA and builds it up. But they've also got those resin printers and those resin printers just thinking of dentistry, like in dentistry, those are used to actually at offices in the back in the lab, print out effectively what becomes a clear aligner for you. So let's say you want to straighten your teeth.

Brian Cardarella (01:01:10.454)
Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (01:01:14.946)
Yeah, that, yep.

Foy Savas (01:01:34.415)
They may do a 3D scan and then start their resin printer up. And then afterwards force the thing that becomes your clear liner. So it is, they print them right there in the dentist offices. And of course, there's also CAD CAM stuff that's been used to mill out stuff. But as far as resin 3D printing goes, a lot of the clear liners are printed in office.

Brian Cardarella (01:01:45.902)
So they're printing it in the dentist offices now?

Brian Cardarella (01:01:56.897)
Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (01:02:03.007)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (01:02:03.721)
which is amazing and you'll find that there are a lot of dentists that geek out about that. But yeah, yeah.

Brian Cardarella (01:02:09.497)
It's cool. I mean, it's like as close as we can get to like Star Trek Replicators at this point.

Foy Savas (01:02:15.979)
I, with my kid, my kid, my kid's, he's four, but like, we'll go into various programs and we'll extrude stuff and then we'll go print it out and he loves letters. So we'll go and we'll, we'll extrude letters. Maybe he likes weird letters that aren't used anymore. Maybe like a thorn or something like that. We'll go and we'll make, we'll make a thorn magnet or maybe we'll go into blender.

He'll go into sculpt mode and sculpt out his own world and then we'll print it.

Brian Cardarella (01:02:47.322)
That's my next thing is I need to start learning 3D modeling. I've toyed with it, but what's the term? It has to reach a certain, there's a requirement in order to send it through the 3D printer, right? Or also just like prints out. What's the term for the 3D model? Has to be like, not complete or closed or something like that. There's some sort of like modeling. I don't know.

Foy Savas (01:03:08.055)
I mean, typically, you'll export to something like STL, and then you'll need supports, right, in order for it actually to be printable. But yeah, I mean, every model is going to be a little bit different. But there's some amazing stuff that's like print in place, and it's fully articulated. I found somebody who had made a fully articulated hand with a bit of a lever, and then you can actually open and close the fingers. This is print in place, print in place. I'm like, wow, this is cool.

Brian Cardarella (01:03:33.338)
Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. My son's been into Rubik's cubes recent over the past year and he's gotten pretty good at them. And he saw that there's a Rubik's cube to print. Like, I don't think it's a real Rubik's cube. And he printed it, it was just like a solid cube and he was so pissed off. He was like, why can't this thing work? I'm like, you know, it just kind of blew my mind. I'm like amazed by this and he's disappointed by it at the same time.

Foy Savas (01:03:37.743)
Um.

Foy Savas (01:03:50.156)
Oh, yeah.

Foy Savas (01:03:56.644)
Someone's got to have the files up.

Foy Savas (01:04:01.963)
Hmm. Yeah. I actually, my son requested that we print a one by one by one, which is kind of like a joke Rubik's cube because it's always soft. But yeah. Yeah. So other technologies that I'm really interested in, you mentioned hardware, I'm very interested in hardware specification languages and how the technology that's been used there for a long time, in particular things like modal logic have not been used.

Brian Cardarella (01:04:09.996)
Just a cube. Yeah. Yeah

Foy Savas (01:04:32.643)
in the software space yet, which is fascinating. And I think we're probably on the cusp of being able to use modal logic in ways that no one's really thought about yet. I don't know if you guys know about, if you look into languages like TLA plus or stuff like that, aspects of safety and liveness, but yeah, I'm interested in that kind of stuff.

Brian Cardarella (01:04:57.326)
Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, in that as well, so what I've noticed, like the pace of technology advancement is super fast.

Brian Cardarella (01:05:12.706)
Like a lot of the leads that still come into DockYard, I feel like most of the entrepreneurial crowd or the product-facing crowd may not be aware of even what like modern or even like a few years old technology is capable at this point. And they're still thinking about like how to solve problems with what we were capable of like 10, 15 years ago. It's tricky like how like communicating the current potential.

on technology outside of like, oh, it's faster. It can scale better. Like just the, some of the facets that help differentiate one tech stack versus another have been a difficult kind of bridge to cross with product people, or they just don't, they're like indifferent to the tech implementation. They're more interested in the problem set, which is fine. But I feel like that if more entrepreneurs were aware of, or had a better grasp on the potential

like the potential of today's technology, they may be looking to solve problems a bit differently that would potentially have a better, more unique product fit than going out there and saying, like, I'm gonna build another sneaker shop or some, I don't like, you know, putting it down, just that it's, there is a, there's the, you know, the will to do something, but there's also like, okay, the how, what tools do I have to solve this? And what potential do these tools bring to my idea?

that feels like either the technology is just advancing too fast for people to be ahead of it, or they need someone like yourself that knows they can go in and guide them, or they are, maybe they're right, that the particular idea that they have, despite it being a bit, I don't know if you can use the term old fashioned, but just more, not as cutting edge as it could be, perhaps is better. It's a...

Like for, so we did a product for Netflix and we had built it as a progressive web app. And the idea was we were gonna build it once and it's gonna deploy on everyone's phones. But the problem that we couldn't get people past was the installation process because they were, you know, some of them had iPhones, they didn't have, I've got to click on like the bookmark thing, I got to bookmark it to my screen. Once they did that, everything was fine. But they're so like learned on just using the app store.

Brian Cardarella (01:07:37.794)
that they were like, these weren't like, like technology focus people they're just average consumers. That the idea of going out and re-educating everyone on how to install an application, didn't feel like it was worth it. You know, it was a better solution, just like we're gonna knock this down and rebuild it in native app.

Foy Savas (01:07:56.383)
Well, now, I mean, with Apple, you can actually submit progressive web apps, you can get them in the app store, but it's true. You know, distribution is a big roadblock for a lot of technologies. And, you know, when you have that distribution, it's one of the things that allow a tech stack to win. And I think, for instance, even JavaScript, right? Like, is JavaScript the best language?

It's interesting, but it's definitely not the best language, but because it's got that distribution, right? And it's gotten better over time. But still, that distribution is the thing that enables it.

Brian Cardarella (01:08:25.532)
It's the winner though. It's actually what's number one? Yeah.

Brian Cardarella (01:08:35.702)
I'm curious what TIOBE has listed as number one. Is it JavaScript, Python? Oh, JavaScript's number six. I always figured JavaScript would be higher. But Python I can see, you know, yeah.

Foy Savas (01:08:44.341)
TypeScript? Is TypeScript distinctly on that list?

Brian Cardarella (01:08:48.146)
Oh, that's a good question. 38. So even if you add it on to JavaScript, it's not going to be too much different. I mean, TIOBE is a questionable ranking system to begin with, but. You know, if it's generally the top five are pretty popular. Um, so, okay. We're past time, but I want to wrap up. Foy, thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate your time. And I, and, uh, knowing that you're in Boston from time to time, I want to get together, we should go get dinner or something.

Foy Savas (01:08:59.976)
Yeah.

Foy Savas (01:09:16.819)
Sure, sure that'd be great. Okay, all right.

Brian Cardarella (01:09:19.522)
Brooklyn, you're invited. I'll fly you in. All right.

Brooklin Myers (01:09:22.404)
Heck yeah, absolutely.

Foy Savas (01:09:25.191)
All right. It was a pleasure chatting. Yeah. All right. See you guys.

Brian Cardarella (01:09:27.658)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's been too long.

Thank you. All right, so hold on. We'll cut it on our end, just that there's an upload that happens in the background. I think we have to stop the recording, right?

Brooklin Myers (01:09:34.785)
There's a.

Brooklin Myers (01:09:42.138)
Yep, I can.