Solving the Hardest Problems in Dev Tools | Jake Cooper, Founder of Railway

25:39One thing that I say often is grit, process, repeat. So don't try and automate things right off the bat, right? There's that like very famous XTCD, which is like you automate like very small task that happens very infrequently, but it takes you an entire week to go in and do. It's like, well, that's a waste of time, right? Like you're just, you're not going to get a return on investment there, right? So we talk about leverage. I'm looking for opportunities that I can put in a bit and get a lot out of it, right? And so running that calculus on every single thing that you can actually go in and do, that helps us kind of like quantify leverage.

26:11Turner Novak:So I think there's a lot of different spots. And I think like, you know, the reason people really, really like AI is because you put in a little and you get out a lot. Right. And so this is kind of your equation, regardless of whether you're using AI to go and do this thing. Right. Like put in a little, get a lot. Right. Have there been any examples where like personally or internally that you guys have gotten the most leverage? which the one that I reach for often, and people are like, wait, this is nuts, is we built our own support tooling. There's a couple of startups that do that. There are a couple of startups that do that.

26:44Turner Novak:There's also, when you look at the whole meme of AI is going to replace all software, that's a common example. We built our own support system. Yes, exactly, right? So we built our own support system, and it's awesome. I was using it the other day, and it's a bit of a mess internally. this last quarter because we've been like pushing a ton on like growth and like also like turning off a bunch of our like google cloud machines to move to our own like bare metal infrastructure so it's been like a total zoo from just like people have questions you know stuff like that right and we built this system that's like i feel like i'm like basically playing like starcraft like like it's like high apm like gaming where i'm just like in there just like in the support system in the support system and it's genuinely it's like it's a deeply wonderful experience where you're just like tearing through this thing, right?

27:29And you're just like, it's this. I've got like macros for like common questions. I've got like a little AI prompt on the side that like gives me context on like the thread. And all of this is like stuff that we've built internally, right? And so like, this is a thing where, you know, we have a million users.

27:43Turner Novak:We have three support people, right? And we all rotate like kind of like throughout the queue, but we build a system so that we can actually go and operate and like figure out how quickly can we get back to these users with the level of quality that we really, really need, right? Because for a time, we were actually like really, really bad at support. Like people would give us tickets and it would take like five or six days to like respond on some of these things. It was awful, right? And we looked at this thing. We're like, damn, this is horrible. You know, totally understand where customers are coming from, et cetera.

28:11I was like, how do we get to 24-hour SLA on everything, right? And then like lower than 24 hours on like enterprise and anything else like that, right? So we build all of the tooling around that, right? Some of that is AI. Some of that is like building these things ourselves. Some of it is like, you know, just doing like solving hard problems of like design and engineering so that you can actually gain all the context you need. Because Railway is interesting because since you can deploy anything, people ask a lot of questions about a lot of disparate things. Right. And so trying to figure out ways that you can kind of like pool together knowledge or like start putting people together in the community.

28:42Right. Like we can't answer every single Python question. Right. Like we just it's just untenable. Right. So how do we give these people like topics or, you know, we have these things called bounties in the community now where it's like, oh, cool. if you're having like throughput issues on Python or anything else like that, we can actually go and kick it to kind of like a queue of people in the community who are going around and solving these bounty questions. They get paid every single time they go and solve any of these problems. And we also go and push those people together. So it's like, oh, that person is like an expert on Python, right?

29:09So the Python questions are actually getting routed specifically to that person and they can go and help and solve those things, right?

29:15Turner Novak:So is there like a internal forum or something somewhere? Or, okay. Yep. we're like maybe maybe a contrarian take that we have is like forms unfortunately like have come the way of the dinosaur and everything's been kind of like pulled into like discord communities so there's not a ton of stuff that's indexed right so we'd actually went out and build a ton of tooling around like indexing these threads writing users together pulling any telemetry and information from actually any of the railway projects to say oh this person is deploying python and they've recently kind of done these things etc these are all hints of like how we could actually potentially solve the problem for them do you build like a lot of custom stuff it sounds like but it's it's not core to the actual railway product like how have you rationalized let's build this cool interesting unique thing versus let's just buy one of the dai customer support like is there forum software out there like how did you decide on what to do there so i guess for us it was what are like other people bad at almost that's like an arm for us basically right and so what are your competitors bad at i wouldn't say competitors necessarily but almost like what is the industry as a whole bad at right like software infrastructure as an industry right like add customer support i don't think they're very good at customer support i don't think they're very good at you know developer experience etc so ease of use all those other things um and i don't think they're good at speed right so we've chosen to invest really really deeply in all three of those and have them all kind of like essentially feed into each other right so our customer support experience is a product experience that we design.

30:46We work in it in-house, our designers work on it and our engineers work on it. Everybody works on it because it's part of the product. Right. So that's kind of tied in there and it's fast, right? Like you should be impressed with the level of support that you get and you should be impressed with the product. And now we routinely have people being, what is this piece of software? Like, how did you get, like, is this open source? And we're like, no, we built this. Right.

31:03Turner Novak:Would you ever open source it or sell it? Well, what we'd like to do at some point is actually bring more, you know, we're having conversations with companies to bring them onto the platform as like almost a discussion space because you see a lot of these things where people are like how do i get the voice in my community how do i go and do all this other stuff right what we can do because we have all of the telemetry we can figure out let's say you publish a new version of your software you go and send it to the community now you have issues etc we can take all the stack traces anonymize them and go and send them back to you and say hey listen on this version of redis or on this version of whatever you introduced a bug on this line, you should go ahead and fix it.

31:39And it's now affecting these 10 ,000 people. Here's a funnel right to these 10 ,000 people if you want to talk with them and figure out actually how to solve, reproduce, et cetera, these things. So those are things that I don't know if we would actually sell this offer outright, but we want to basically make sure that it's not just a cost center, but actually a revenue generation center. And it is because we do an open source kickback program. So if you host anything on Railway and you go and build the template for it, you get 25 % of any of the revenue that you go in that people get when they did or that we get when people go and deploy that piece of software

32:12Turner Novak:oh interesting so it's almost like the notion template type strategy for infrastructure right yeah the figma plugins or anything like that yeah interesting okay uh and then like so we talked about like super like complex complicated product we started with just databases like how did you think about expanding over time like any key product decisions that you feel like you've made it's a lot of the same thing that i mentioned previously which is like no no no fuck yes let's do it right so this listening to the users not necessarily saying we're going to ship everything right because we don't want to make like software nachos we want to make like actually a really really solid product it's a software nacho well it's like everything in the sun you're just adding everything to it um it's it's from like the bear right like when there's a there's a chef that's basically the restaurant show yeah right where it's like he's working on fine dining thing and you know the chef is basically like you made nachos right this is like not a fine dining experience right so we want to make something that's a very very like you know like concrete and deliberate and you know it is this thing right so that's that's kind of what we want to go and do from that perspective what was there a point when you felt like things were really starting to work like customer like there's like almost like a tipping point in business modeling some like finding pmf it was like a certain thing where it's like holy shit i think railway is like a thing like this is going to be like a pretty big like it's really working yeah i i would say honestly it's in like the last six months where it's it's like you know we had a conversation with the team where I was basically like, the oil rig is set up.

33:38Like we can run this thing straight upward, right? We just make it faster for people to build and deploy software. We make the experience better. We go and push towards this vision that we have of a unified new way to kind of like build software. This can definitely work, right? And we're seeing it now. We're seeing it with the inflection point of so many new people kind of like coming onto the platform and trying to build and deploy something, right? and then running to edges of the platform

34:04Turner Novak:that we're like, oh man, I guess we gotta fix that, you know, right? But it's just so many like new people just doing this, right? Where it's starting to, you know, really kind of like take off in my mind, right? So it's the like, it's the closest to product market fit I've ever felt. So, but it only keeps getting crazier, right? So I'd say it's like, it just keeps going. One thing you mentioned, you built your own data centers. Yes. this is a railway metal t-shirt it's like metal and it spells real yeah okay so maybe that's the answer to this question and maybe it's like one of a couple answers to this question but what do you feel have been some of the more bold product decisions that you've made over the past couple years i would say metal is really like one of them making one click infrastructure and templates is another one that like is paying off we have like people in the community making like six figures off of these templates right so they're like actually getting like okay so so what is it's like a back-end template like if i want to do this and i'm listening like holy shit i can make six figures a year making real templates like what am i making yeah so you know it's software that people want to go in and deploy right so whether it's like a system design kind of yeah right so if you're saying hey you know i want to start a software project and you know i write python and i want stripe and you know it's kind of like these boiler boilerplate things that people have like gone and built right um or it could be like packaged versions of software that requires a little bit of kind of like almost like DevOps handholding to go in and spin up and scale.

35:34So like we provide the tooling for it. You kind of consume this package in a way that you are none the wiser of how it should scale. And then the person kind of like maintaining it actually goes and figures out how this thing should scale over time, right? Like, so like, you know, self-hosted click house or like N8N or like plausible or any of those other things, right? And so it can start with some community version of the thing being hosted and then it can kind of move towards like a first party version of you know redis or click house or whatever like hosting their their self-hosted distribution on railway right so if i'm using

36:07Turner Novak:someone's template and they make a change to the template does it change my infrastructure setup no so you get a you get you get a notification that there's a new version of it right and so you can go and consume that right you can go and read about the changes you can go and see all of those things in there right i want to accept their change of like they figured out a way to actually speed something up by changing like 25 faster on you know workloads for like asynchronous rights or something like that right and then you're saying oh okay cool i've had those issues in general right so instead of this being a thing where you know github is like through no fault of their own like a series of broken pointers you're basically saying okay well how do i go and get the new version of that software how do i go and update is like a home chart is like something else like as a new docker version or something figure out where they host the change log or anything else like that it's like we put all those things together so you can kind of like riffle through this like version of software and then get the latest version of it and then also pin it so that you know you go and downstream push of a version of this and then now breaks everybody's apps or anything else like that you know like versioning control for infrastructure sort of yeah and so this is the point of the earlier problem like we're solving a lot of problems it's like how do you not just like deploy your software but like how do you evolve it over time right like how do you iterate on it in a safe way right like actually at large companies most of the software outages it's not part of like a software error like you shipped a bug or anything like those big outages that happen like facebook cloudflare like whatever that's a config based outage like it's actually a property that they were trying to go roll out when they were upgrading system and just something got fucked up during the process because you know the the peek under the hood and like how the sausage is made is essentially you know there's a version of a piece of software and then there's an engineer whose job is it to like version and update that piece of software right and how that happens can range from one click really easy to like consume to i'm doing basically like open heart surgery on this like piece of software to get it from like version n to version n plus one and we automate the entire life cycle of that interesting and then you also built your own data centers yeah what was the thinking on that like do you do you have a cloud service that you're offering to people like can you just kind of explain this whole concept yeah so the thinking behind it is that we can actually do a lot of really, really cool stuff and build a better experience because we have our own hardware, right?

38:26Like we are moving from the realm of milliseconds down to like microseconds, right? That's like some sort of experience that we can actually make better. It's a portion that we can make faster, right? Like we can push the edge of that experience because we're not actually beholden to, you know, operating through the primitives that the cloud providers offer, which, you know, they're solid. But at a certain point, those things end up falling flat from both ability to drive the experience and also, you know, kind of outcomes that you'll have at scale, right?

38:59Turner Novak:So for people deploying on the railway cloud now, yeah, so it's essentially like a cloud that you can go in and deploy on, right? So yeah, the reason to go and do that is to drag the product experience forward, right? And do things that other people possibly can't. so what's an example of something that they wouldn't be able to do well so like on aws or gcd or anything else like that we can spin up workloads you know it'll take like a few seconds or anything else like that like we can get into millisecond like deploy times now right because we have a lot of our own infrastructure and it may be possible to like go in and push those things out and he ends up a lot done a lot of like really really cool work on just like spinning stuff up but it ends up being on the realm of like a second ish right and for something to be imperceptible from a user's experience perspective, you're looking to try and be in the 100 millisecond range.

39:47So we want to be as quick as possible. And racking our own services allows us to move even closer to that kind of metal of moving really, really quickly.

39:57Turner Novak:It also allows us to offer a significantly reduced price to our users because we are running our own infrastructure and because we build our own orchestrator and because we've done essentially all of the hard work of going and doing these peering relationships. so we pay for network at a metered rate instead of like a per gigabyte rate um so that allows us to drop that price significantly which is super cool in a lot of the ai workloads because they're pretty data intensive yeah that's right and you you wrote a post a couple years ago it was called it was called the inward draw of capitalism did i say that right yeah yeah that's a deep cut is this sort of related to this concept sort of in the sense that i think there's only two modes hard problems doing hard things or are they not related no so they're they're like related like at the edge basically right so the the the point of that post was that it's easier to make basically like money with money than it is to make progress with money right and we've moved because we moved out the gold standard to actually a system where we're like moving money around right and that results essentially in people you know doing jobs like being a day trader or you know a banker or like a twitch team or right like moving those things and there's nothing wrong with that in general it's just that we've made a lot of the kind of like exterior a lot more difficult to do right and so if i want to go and get a loan and like build you know uh build a factory or anything else like this is before ac steinzee and the whole like yeah it's easy now just just raise 50 million from ACCZ and build a couple of factories.

41:35Yeah. Right. So maybe, maybe I was like ahead of something or whatever, but like, if you want to go and do that, you have to go through like regulatory burden. You have to like find construction workers. You have to like go, you have to go and do all of these other things, right? There's a lot easier ways to make money. Right. But that whole point was that we're losing a lot of the like actual like fringes of, of society that allow us to kind of like push towards progress and like actually building things, right? And so another reason and like, you know, we're not here using investor money to like fulfill this like, you know, philosophical like burden or whatever, right?

42:10But we believe that there is a strong ARB in terms of doing complicated or difficult things that are almost becoming like a lost art, right? Like if you think of the people who are like racking and building data centers, right? You've like three people, AWS, GCP, Azure, right? Like those are the kinds of big people that kind of come to mind, right? And so over time, you're getting less and less and less of these people who these as are the chariotic skills and And, you know, you can extend that to kernel knowledge, right? Like you have, you know, people who are working on the like Linux kernel maintainer list, right?

42:38Like, you know, they're having difficulties getting maintainers to like have like have this knowledge and work on this thing.

42:45Turner Novak:There's a core part of like literally everything that we run on every piece of software. It's every single thing, right? And that thing is such esoteric knowledge and they're having issues pulling in maintainers and people who are going to like go in and push this thing forward, right? Like it's, it's like, it's crazy that that knowledge is kind of like getting more sparse over time. Right. I like, so you've made some of the, a lot of like pretty bold batch. Are there any other big ones that you've made and maybe any that didn't go well or didn't work or anywhere you got a lot of pushback from investors or people on the team?

43:22Turner Novak:They're like, Jake, this isn't going to work. Don't do this. What are some bad ideas that we had that we did? I mean, we spent like a million dollars on a domain, which I think was actually good, where it works well. Just the railway.com domain, right? Who owned that before? Some guy in a flyover state, you know. So I think it was funny. I looked at his LinkedIn, and he was working at some sort of company for a while, and then I think he recently retired. So I don't know if they're correlated or whatever. You've been in the domain. You paid for this guy's retiring. Yeah, who knows? Or his college fund or something.

43:57Turner Novak:um so that was good the metal data centers was solid we've done a lot of like experimental stuff in terms of like how do you build out an organization internally we talk about a leverage a lot and so you know i've tried to build out a pretty deliberate management stack internally of like how do we stay lean but also like have some level of like hierarchy so the decisions can get made there can be dear eyes there can be stakeholders you know all of those other things that you need at a company while also simultaneously avoiding a lot of the blood that comes with you know growing really really quickly or anything else like that so we've done a little bit organizational kind of like operating right like the org is still mostly flat and we have 28 people right so i essentially have like 25 people reporting right and so that's you know probably a bad idea over time and so we're kind of like lowering that the kind of like managerial burden on that as we kind of like flush it out but it also makes you know it's really really important to have operators be also managers, right?

44:57Like the worst thing that can happen is you hire a career manager who can't execute on the tasks at hand. Shit hits the fan. They can't actually kind of like step in or anything else like that to aid or help. And it makes the organization feel very, very fragile or helpless over time, right? And also from talking with a lot of people, like I was at Uber, you know, post Travis,

45:16Turner Novak:post, you know, anything. A lot of the experiences that I have from chatting with people, they were saying like, oh yeah, we like Groot really, really quickly. Like there was a year where I think they forex headcount or something like that. It was insane. Right. And so the cultural sheer that actually happened over that, that period of time was kind of nuts. Right. And you're like, yeah, it wasn't like the same company. I was like, yeah, like kind of no shit because you know, 80 % of the people after one year are new. Right. And so when you think about that from like a cultural perspective, it's like, how could they possibly understand the most operandi of that company?

45:45Right. So yeah, I think that, that we've tried to innovate a little bit on the organizational structure to try and grow, you know, our, our gold standard is we want to grow. 5X year over year, 1.5X headcount.

45:57Turner Novak:Oh, grow the business, revenue, 5X. Yeah. Metrics in general, right? Metrics, okay. Yeah. So like acquisition, top of funnel, margins, you know, stuff like that, right? You said you grew 5X in the last six months or something, right? I think you slipped that out earlier. So you guys had a plan. Yeah, well, so I had on that one and then, you know, revenue is in a really, really solid spot. We'll have doubled since the start of the year, which is great. so we're we're things are going uh i would say quite well nice what's like current state of the business you're like allowed or open to sharing publicly with people we're like in the tens of mil from like a revenue perspective so somewhere between 10 and 99 yeah basically yeah okay you know like wide range right uh so that and then we're like 28 people staying super lean we've raised some money the last announced round that we did was like a series a and like one and two or something but we raised an uncapped safe about a year ago oh interesting what was the thing you got doing that we didn't want to take any more money but people wanted to deploy capital so it was like well the only way we're gonna do it is on an uncapped safe and they're like all right wow that's how do you think about that as a founder then like do you think i should probably try to convert this for them at some point or is it like it's it's an investor we really, really like working with.

47:15So we will definitely be converting it at,

47:17Turner Novak:you know, like not egregious, you know, like we really like working together in general, right? So our philosophy is like, they wanted to put in more capital and we really, really like working with them, right? So this allows us to kind of like continue to push the business into like a really, really awesome spot as we continue to look for a potential excellent, you know, additional board partner for that, you know? Yeah, I think there's an interesting thing too about not getting your valuation too extended from a standpoint of also recruiting. Like you, let's say the business is valued on paper at 50 million and 500 million, right?

47:52Turner Novak:I have no idea how close any of this is to like the actual numbers, but like if you're trying to recruit someone and you say, hey, you're getting your options or your RSUs at 500 million versus 50, you've taken out 10X upside from them and the interest in joining, like the opportunity that they get from joining. So, you know, you want to balance that. You don't want to like delete yourself too much. you want to you know maybe make existing investors feel like they're making money and so like it's like that balance of like not getting too far ahead yeah 100 right you also want to be able to like reprice equity at some point to show it's like oh it's not just like mystery money or whatever right it's not like is there is there valuation or money exactly right and so there's actually a whole kind of like mechanics surrounding this and like what is the optimal right like even from like a employee stock option pool when you grow it when you not grow it you know like when you raise money when you not raise money all those other things right so yeah so that's where we're at right now and and talking to people just kind of before we did this a couple people said you have a philosophy around just hiring really opinionated talented people and maybe like not specifically telling them what to do but just kind of like unleashing them and like just seeing what happens and like trying to kind of guide it i guess i don't know if i'm explaining this right but yeah so what's the what's the philosophy there the philosophy is that nobody joins a startup to be told what to do they join a startup to work on hard problems and to go ahead and push themselves to like execute on hard problems so from that kind of like standpoint we're really looking for people who are like hyper autonomous right so we try and say hey we'll give you kind of like a structured onboarding, it's like eight, six weeks of like, here's how we're going to ramp you from having zero context about how the business works or anything else like that.

49:42I mean, maybe not zero because you have some of it from external or whatever, but like our operating procedure, we've written a little bit about it, but it's like very, very different when you like come and join the organization. Right. So from nothing to, I want you to do things that are like very, very important for the business, right? Like go in and start and figure out how are we going to do networking, go in and figure out, you know, maybe data center procurement, go in and like, how can we rapidly, rapidly, rapidly get you to a point where you are building real things that you are really, truly interested in?

50:11Because I believe that we're going to, you know, get the best out of people when they're really, really interested in building something, right? So I try to ask them, what thing are you interested in? How can we set you up for that immediately, right? And we're going to go and ladder your onboarding experience to get you to that point where you're going and making decisions right and so this can be actually very uncomfortable for some people who like operated a company where you know they have a manager and the manager like tells them what to go in and do right and so we've kind of like structured the process where you have two weeks of tasks you know really straightforward stuff of like go and make this change in the code base this thing is evidently broken you know here's sort of where it is right we do two weeks of problems which is we have this problem you know how are you going to go in and solve it right you'll have to put together like a little document it's called an rfc you just basically say here's

50:59Turner Novak:the problem here's requirements for the problem here's my suggested solution here's some other stuff that i've got and then the team will kind of like rally around and say okay like maybe this this these things and then you know they'll move through that and then the last two weeks is what we call opportunities which is what do you think the company needs right so within one month right we've basically stopped telling you what to go in and so this is your six month onboarding process Six weeks. Yeah, six-week onboarding process. It's specific tasks for the first two. It's problem, like figure out how to solve this problem.

51:29Turner Novak:Here's the problem. The problem is evident, and we've written it down, and we need you to solve it. There's varieties of different ways you could solve it as like a solution, et cetera, right? You would just be like, we need to grow, or like we need to set up a data center, or we need like, it's just like. Yeah, things like our observability, you know, product sucks. Like how do we fix it, right? Like these things, right? And so they're nebulous. Right. Because that's what you want early stages. You want people who are going to basically take these like nebulous things and convert them to like tractable outcomes.

51:57Right. And that's like what we're aiming to like, not like test for, but like ladder you up and basically say, hey, here's how you should be thinking about a lot of these things. Like you're trying to move the business forward in either solving immediate problems or identifying opportunities that are going to allow us to grow really, really rapidly over time. Right. So getting you to that point of like making those decisions and like identifying them and making mistakes and all the other things it's like something that we like try and teach people in general so that they can operate completely autonomously right because otherwise it's just a company is a series of you know executives ranging from like managers to like poor people like telling people what problems to like like things to do right and again i think the most awesome people that's not really how they want to like live their life in general they don't want to just like be told exactly what to go in and do.

52:46They actually want to go in and unleash themselves on where could I have the most impact, right? Like people are looking for like impact in general, right? So we can kind of almost be a conduit for that and saying, okay, here's how you can actually ladder up to having really, really awesome impact on the organization, shipping all the stuff that you've ever wanted to go building out the thing, whether it's like your sales process or your go to market or product or design or anything else like that. It is a blank canvas for you to go in and push forward.

53:15Turner Novak:So it's like more help, like making an environment where people solve problems versus complete tasks. Yes. Yep, exactly. Right. And so that's part of the whole like operating autonomously thing. Right. And that's the thing that we really, really try and hammer home because, you know, we're again trying to innovate on some of the org structures of basically saying like, how do you keep a company lean? Right. And if you have people that you're consistently like being like, hey, you know, how's that TPS report or whatever, right? Like you just need managers and people to like close these loops. And then the people are kind of like going away because it's not that interesting or anything else like that.

53:49Like part of the reason to start Railway is like it is a ocean of interesting problems, right? The other businesses, but there's some businesses that are actually like deeply boring, right? and I would far rather work on those interesting problems as an engineer or you know in my you know spare time as like trying to design things or anything else like that like those are the things that like will keep my brain occupied and so that's the space that we want to kind of like cultivate for people to come along and say oh that's really really cool I'd love to solve this thing or build this or do this thing right whether it's networking product go to market anything

54:23Turner Novak:support stuff like that so how would you gauge like something's a worthwhile problem to solve like when you when you're going through this like like you just want to solve this problem not that problem like how do you figure out what's the intensity or severity or like mission criticalness and crucial to solve of a problem versus not so we have a planning process and we're switching essentially we we went from projects previously or we just like put a bunch of projects and we're like okay roughly these will like solve these problems and we can go execute on them, shoot problems, right? And as part of that planning process, what we do is we have, we have essentially like co-sires, right?

54:58So you'll, you'll see a problem or you'll see a project previously, and you'll go ahead and you'll put your name down beside it, right? And then we will essentially stack rank and prioritize all of these things. And we will go together. And for that one week that we're actually going to go on plan, we're going to get consensus on which problems are really, really important. Let's stack rank of these problems, who like, who roughly might be a good fit to like go and solve these things. And, you know, how many do we think we can actually accomplish, right? And that kind of just like provides a list from like tip to tail.

55:27Let's start on these things. Let's go down the list and like just essentially see how far we can get on those problems, right?

55:32Turner Novak:So you kind of have like, it's like a product roadmap, like a problem roadmap. Kind of, right? But it's also kind of like fueled by, hey, we want to go in and do these things from a product perspective, right? So if this is the vision, I issue this thing what I call, I can turn away called guidance, which is, you know, it's like all the companies that issue guidance, especially on financials and whatever, right? But I issue it from like a product perspective of like, this is what we want to go in and build, right? And so if we have this expected state that we want to go in and get to, and we have our current state, like, the problem is, is that this shit doesn't deploy fast enough, or, you know, all those other kind of like problems that are along with it, right?

56:07And so you can almost like quantify those, like either problems or opportunities as like, we want to be here, and we're here. And so for us to be here, we have to solve these problems, right?

56:15Turner Novak:Do you feel like there's anything that people miss there? Like, or just generally in culture setting, like a lot of founders or startups get wrong? I mean, my hot take is like, I don't think you set your own culture. I think at best, you as a founder get to steer it and you get to clarify it, right? So you essentially say, you know, you're gonna hire some people and at some point you're gonna look up and you're gonna realize that the people that you've hired, mostly all actually have the same rough-ish kind of like core, right? And that's kind of your culture, right? And if you can figure out how to like write down what those things are that make you, you, and that make people, you know, like people who work at Railway, like really, really successful or like enjoy the work that they go and do, et cetera, like that thing is your culture, right?

57:00And you as the founder are kind of like the steward for your own culture, right? And so it's your job to identify it. It's your job to like be really, really clear about it. It's your job to like, whenever you go and chat with candidates to say, hey, this is what we are. and the entire subset of everything else is a thing that we are not right it's really really important to to quantify what you are and what you aren't right so that people have a really really good shot and i think this is a thing that i messed up really really early was that i wasn't as clear or deliberate about these things about like what made us us right two candidates right and as a result we hired people and we had to let them go at some point right and it was you know through no fault of their own it was we're not clear about this is this is our culture and this is how we operate and all these other things.

57:42And so as a result, I've like continued to issue blog post after blog post. Like, here's how we work. Here's how we think about problems. Here's how we operate, right? Like, you know, jumping in a podcast, talking about like how we're trying to like innovate and build on our structure to say, if you believe in these things and the same things that we believe that like infrastructure is stuck in like stone ages and, you know, you can build beautiful design for this and, you know, this lost art of kernel and data center and all these other things, and, you know, organizations should be filled with people who solve problems and identify opportunities instead of, like, receive tasks, then, like, you may, you know, you may be a fit for railway.

58:21Come on down.

58:22Turner Novak:Small plug. You've got to do that kind of, like, work to quantify what that culture is, right? And so for us, it's like, we have four things. We have honorable, accelerating, reliable, and direct. Say those again? Honorable, accelerating, reliable, and direct. Spells hard. and it helps you solve hard problems, right? And so whenever you're trying to decide, do I shift this thing today or do I shift this thing tomorrow? It should be accelerating. Do I tell this person this feedback? I should be direct, right? Do I show up for this thing? Am I present? Am I putting myself in a situation where I'm on call, but actually I've just left my laptop at home?

58:58I'd rather be reliable, right? And then Honor does a lot of nebulous capturing of like, well, what is honorable, right?

59:04Turner Novak:Try and figure it out generally, right? So that's kind of a cool, cool. Did you come up with it? Or like, was it like a team effort? Like, let's figure out some kind of like, you know, fortune cookie type, like, you know, acronym thing. So I came up with it because I think most values are bullshit and people go and they put them up there and it's like, what do these things mean? Right. Like at most companies, it's like, you know, ask, ask any employee the values. Right. And integrity, some shit like that. Right. It's like, it's like transparency or anything like ensure maybe those are like good things.

59:34Right. But I really, really wanted the values to have, like, deep value for people to, like, help them navigate those things, right? Like,

59:42Turner Novak:I don't know if it's a value or if it's a concept or, like, whatever, but, like, Uber has this thing called toe-stepping, right? It was, like, basically, like, you know. Yeah, right. Like, stepping on someone's toes? Yeah, right. And it was, like, a value that they had, right? They were, like, you know, right? Do or don't do it. Do it. Do it. Do the toe-stepping thing, right? I was like, what the fuck? Like, that doesn't, that's kind of rude. That's just a bad value. It's like, et cetera. But then I realized that like values for lots of people are actually almost like a lens through which you can navigate the culture a bit.

1:00:08Right. And so you can think about it. Right. And so if you think about Facebook's most like famous kind of value of like move fast and break things. It admonished anybody of any sort of almost like wrath that would they would incur because they had broken something because they could point to the culture and they could say, but we move fast and we break things. That's what that's what makes us Facebook. Right. Like and so if you have this kind of like shared tendency that you can kind of all rally around, you can say, well, you know, so and so wasn't a fit because they weren't moving fast and they weren't breaking things.

1:00:38Right. And then you layer that with multiple values, tenets there over time. And then you kind of figure out what what is you. Right. Like what makes you you as part of like the company and like the people that you kind of bring on and the people that you attract and all those other things. Right. And so you're almost like cooking this like cultural concentrate, you know.

1:00:53Turner Novak:so how would you intentionally set that out because it's not like you you messed it up a little bit or you didn't quite stick it and land it in the beginning um and it sounds like maybe most people see it as just like uh you know where our values like you know transparency integrity maybe it's like how do you how you get like the thing that actually is tangible and moves a needle and then like not make the same mistake you did no man i i wish i wish i could tell you other than like you just have to like trial and error almost right and be be really really aware of like what what do you want to i don't know give people as a value yeah it seems like values is like the things it's like acceptable that the company leads into as being its thing yeah okay yeah it's like it's a compass for like how are you going to like operate as a company right that's the way that i've looked at values in general but again i think it's one of those things where you don't really set it you hire some amount of people and at some point you realize that like that's your shared common kind of like denominator you know yeah yeah angelo on your team mentioned that you kind of like wrote your way or tweeted your way into being a founder like what is what what does that mean yeah so i i think it's a lot of that kind of build in public kind of type thing right where i'm like i'm writing you know blog posts but like you know the the inward draw of capitalism or whatever right i'm just like putting out things and feelers and all those other things you're almost like was it i think it's nival or whatever that's like you got to create the surface area for luck or whatever to like it sounds like a nival quote yeah right or something like that right so it was a lot of basically just how do i put myself in in the arena to like go in and try and like catch some of this this luck in general right and for me it was more just like a i think that anything that stands has to stand to public scrutiny or it doesn't stand at all right and so if you put yourself in that arena and you start going and putting those things out there you're going to figure out really really quickly like whether you are correct or not on a lot of these things because in a public forum like especially on the internet or whatever people are not shy to call you call you out on a lot of this stuff right so anonymous account that's nothing you'll lose it's like you're an idiot some person with an anime avatar and six you know followers can ruin your entire week you know like it just yeah and so you wrote a post and it was may of 2021 i think you actually referred to it earlier it was called how we work i think it was like how we work at railway it's just how we work yep what was the post was like the general kind of framing and and how do you work at railway yeah so this was this is like the first version of that blog post of like oh oh no like you know we've we've messed up hiring and we had to like let go of somebody and like we need to figure out a way to like not do that because like you know these are real people's lives of course right like so you don't want to do that right so i wrote a post a post called like how we work we're a remote company so we work with people you know like dubai japan spain thailand montreal you know every time zone every time zone is hit australia right like so we have to work in a different way and this is kind of like part of the we're innovating a little bit on the org structure because i think that that's really really interesting one of our investors pointed out he's like not really a lot of like big remote companies you know right like git lab is the biggest lab is kind of the the like one exception in general to like that rule but generally there isn't right and we had a conversation about why that that is in general right and there's a few kind of nuggets of basically like standard org structure doesn't work as well from that perspective you're saying like the management's like mba type org structure thinking right and and the the like short reason for this is actually like if somebody tells you something that you don't like in an office or whatever you still have to kind of show up to the office generally right like you have to kind of work etc right you continue to have to like show up to this job right if somebody if like if you're doing things that like people don't like in general as a remote work employee what do you do you close the fucking laptop you go outside right you just like basically you can you can quiet quit or you can whatever right and so essentially from an org design perspective you have to design an org which is interesting enough for people to say oh yeah like actually the reason i'm signing on the reason i'm doing like all of these things is actually because i'm really really really interested in the work right and so you had to kind of change a few of the like structurings and in that right but the how we work blog post is the first path the very elementary kind of like stuff of like this is how we work differently than most companies to combat that problem to make sure that people can kind of like continue to ship a lot of the things that they want to go to attract talent that can work on really really hard problems to make sure that we like don't have to get into that situation of like hey you have that dps report in general and the person says yeah like great and then close the laptop and like you know goes right so anything you talk a little bit about like how you've changed like cadence team design or structure related to how you work are there anything else anything else you probably want to say related to how you work you haven't kind of hit on yet it kind of makes the structure of the team and the company a little bit unique um there's a bunch of different things but i would recommend just like in the interest of time like have a look at those like more blog posts that we have in terms of how we work okay i'll um i will throw a link in the description of the show we'll get all the links and throw them down there for people and you it feels like my general takeaway was minimize meta work and maximize real work i think that seemed to be like succinctly that's kind of what you're trying to do particularly like it's a productivity like get stuff done and in specifically in a remote setting you you could create a lot of meta like you can always create a lot of meta work like work to get work done and you're like trying to remove as much as this like the work that isn't actually real work and it's like adjacent work you try to minimize how often that happens yeah we try and we try and do that right so we like do meetings on like mondays and fridays right because meetings are the number one kind of like you know contributor to a lot of that meta work right it's like it's like oh how do we solve this problem it's like well let's like let's let's have a meeting about this problem you don't solve the problem even if you have a meeting solve the problem you don't actually solve the problem in the meeting because you didn't ratify that decision by pulling it out like out somewhere where everybody could like have a look at it and it would stand to scrutiny etc like i don't know why you know i assume you know jeff bezos has you know memos because it's it concretifies those things is that whole thing that like clean memo like messy meeting or whatever right but you really really need to be concrete in the writing so that again it stands to scrutiny right there's that whole point about like powerpoints is like allows you to kind of like smear logic through the thing if you write it you have to write it you have it has to stand to scrutiny right and so you know we try and minimize the amount of like metal work and it's like okay put it together identify the problem identify the requirements be very very clear about it okay cool that's awesome right let's go and let's move on that thing right and it sounds like a lot of work but like once you get actually like reasonably good at the muscle you can crank out these like rfcs in like five minutes to do a really really complicated thing right like yeah i wrote one i don't know this week about like some sort of you know like database hardware offloading that we're going to go in and do to make like provisioning databases like way quicker and like actually like database latency for rights, right?

1:08:16Put it out in like five minutes, had some comments on it. People like, what about this thing, et cetera? I got alignment. I covered like somebody else pointed out a thing that I completely missed. I was like, oh crap, like let's go and fix that. And then I was like, cool, way of the races, right? All that happened, guy in London, you know, just I saw it randomly and was like, boom, okay, cool. And then I've like worked on it and I'm going to go home after this podcast.

1:08:37Turner Novak:I'm going to go and finish it up. And is this all happening on Discord? You guys run the company on Discord, which is not what you normally hear no most people like running on slack and the reason we run it on discord is drop in communication right so remote companies don't have that like office culture like serendipity etc which is like actually deeply valuable like you want to actually be close to your your co-workers in general and so yes you can spin up like a huddle in slack but like discord has this really really cool feature where you can see everybody kind of like in the kind of meeting rooms right at the top right yeah that's true there's like there's different like audio jacks or i guess video to you can like see who's in them you can see it's it's like the michael bloomberg glass door meeting room policy for the internet of things or whatever not the internet of things but like the internet or whatever um so that's kind of why we do that in general and it's worked it's worked quite well for a lot of things and then there's like some things that we have to like build slack bridge extensions for yo is there any like you know i mean discord is made for gaming not working a business organization funny we're like trying to make like a really concrete like you know decision of the company and then you get like a fortnight ad at the bottom of it you're like okay this is awesome do you uh do you wish that more people more like founders and organizations talk publicly about how they do the kind of team and structure things yeah 100 100%.

1:09:58I think how you construct a company's work structure is like, one, it hasn't been changed in a while. And two, actually, it's like, one of the number one complaints that I hear from employees who have gone through like hyper growth periods, right? I have friends in various different companies, where they're like, man, we'd like really fast. And like, our management stack really sucks. Like, we're not setting up our managers for success, we're not setting up people to kind of like scale into these roles like there's no quant like like almost like jd like what does a manager do right it's like you know how do you give these people really really awesome tools to be able to innovate on this thing that is like very very standard mba kind of etc business stuff so i would love if people like wrote on on a lot of these things i don't think a lot of people are doing that in in general not even just like the writing thing i don't even think they're just like innovating on it it's like the standard kind of like a manager's path which there's nothing wrong with that right like having a day like that's probably the closest like rubric concrete manager manager kind of operationalizing but i i think that there is arb in changing a few things there right especially when you run a remote team and i can run one-on-ones at weird different hours right i can go out in the middle of the day have a run go have you know lunch or something like that brunch with a friend or something and then come back and and kind of like have a meeting at, I don't know, 8 o 'clock or 11 or something.

1:11:25Turner Novak:When you talk about, you see the issues with these hyper-growth startups that don't do org design or team design correctly. What's the mistake that seems to be made? It just seems like a almost just like a lack of concrete operationalizing of what do managers do at those companies. What is a manager supposed to be responsible for? how can they you know encourage the excess of their employees like just a very very concrete example like do they or do they not write code right like that's the thing that like is is like some some companies like have management stacks where they just they simply don't even write that and it's like a completely different experience across across different culture or different different teams on that culture right and so you have this like almost sharing or different ways of operating which there's not like a really a standard on that right other than like industry standard etc what's like the most interesting uh operating procedure policy that you've seen even if you don't use it at railway but it's like the thing that pops the most is like that's a very opinionated way of doing something i mean the one that that i like is the like clean memo messy meeting or one from like amazon that one kind of just like makes sense we try and like write memos generally for meetings but it doesn't happen every single time obviously what other things are really, really solid operating procedure.

1:12:49Turner Novak:I like a lot of the Netflix stuff. If you've read the No Rules Rules book, there's a lot of really, really solid stuff in there. I don't think I have. What's an example from that? Well, a lot of it is kind of on just giving people as much slack or whatever as possible, like a ton of different freedom, right? There's an example from that book where it's like, well, who approves my marketing expenses? And it's like, you don't. you have a credit card and you go run the marketing expenses. And if you need to write a PO for any of these things, like go and do it. And they're like, well, what's the like budget?

1:13:23What's all these other things, right? And it's like, make good decisions that are in the good or the interest of the company and go in and execute on those decisions. And, and, you know, if it's great, that's awesome.

1:13:33Turner Novak:And if it's bad, like tell us why it was bad. Right. And it's like a lot of kind of like freedom stuff like that. You know, I'm saying you feel like maybe too much like a daycare versus like a science experiment. Your words, not mine. okay yeah well let's fair i'm i'm happy to take that the brunt on that one so the i mean when it comes to having a remote team lots of different time zones lots for people doing different things different procedures or different uh uh work modes different like cultures around the world one thing i know you have a really strong opinion on is not working on the weekends so why do you think that yeah so uh i got lambasted on twitter the other the other day for this one where i said i forget what the actual quote was i think it was um you know my hot take is that you should uh not be working weekends and if you end up working weekends uh you suck at planning right and so i personally try to both champion the idea that you should be on when you're on and you should be off when you're on when you're off when you're off yeah sorry you know and the reason for this is horsepower gets you a lot of the way but at a certain point you need to refine your technique right and if you figure out that you're working all the time you don't really have a space to kind of like decompress figure out where you kind of like lost essentially lost time if you think about it in terms of like almost like a slalom scheme thing right like i had this deadline and i was ahead of it why was i ahead of it right what decisions did i make actually allowed me to kind to like move really, really quickly there.

1:15:06Or I had this deadline and I was behind it. Why? For what reason was I behind? Where could I have like bought back those seconds essentially, right? And if you are like always absolutely rip it and grip it and gunning it, it's all these things. And your default modus operandi is to simply double down and continue to work weekends. You're not going to be able to identify those areas in which you can actually get, you know, outsized value returns on simply changing one small aspect of how you are operating so that you can get faster and faster and faster, right? It's kind of like, you know,

1:15:42Turner Novak:performance athletes or anything else like that, they'll push themselves a ton and then they'll give themselves a little bit of space to kind of like cycle out, right? So it's not like you don't work and you like close your laptop on Friday at 5 p.m. and you open it back up at 9 a.m. on Monday. No, no, no, right? Like it's, if I do my job perfectly correctly, 100 % of the time, which I never ever do because I'm human or whatever, right? I will not work any weekends and I will not get paged when I'm on vacation. That doesn't happen. I worked the last like six weekends, right? Like getting like a bunch of these things.

1:16:15But as a result of working those last six weekends, I've kind of like put things into a spot where I can say, this is the reason I've been working the last six weekends, right? This class of work, we probably actually didn't even need to let go of it down and do. We were just doing it because, you know, either org planning or, you know, reactionary or anything else like that. So I can go back through there and kind of audit my time and say, where can we buy back 20 % of our cycles? Where can we go in and do that? Right. And then we go and write it down and creating that space to be able to go and do that almost like time audit, decompression, et cetera, is really, really key for figuring out ways that you can actually go really, really quickly again.

1:16:54Right.

1:16:54Turner Novak:It's like the, you know, you build the race car, you run the race car, you figure out where it rattles, you bring it into the pit lane, and And then you go and you tune it again, and then you run the race car. So it's almost like you almost like try to be a weekend warrior. Like you live for the weekend because you make your week so efficient and so good that you can take the weekend off. Even if you don't actually necessarily get to do that a lot, but that's what you strive for. Yeah, that's exactly the goal, right? And because like my brain will naturally just like pull back towards work anyways, right?

1:17:24But it's different kinds of work, right? It's work that's not like doing, right? It's work that's like thinking, right? So I pull myself away from the keyboard. I go, maybe I'll take my journal. I'll go to the park or the sauna or something like that. It's still thinking about work, but it's almost like the technique of like, how could I have improved on this thing? How could I have whatever, right? So that's kind of why I think that like, you should delineate these like concrete lines, right? To say, okay, I'm going to go hard on all, like Monday to Friday, I'm going to go hard, right? Like I'm probably working into like, you know, 11, 12, sometimes 1 a.m., right?

1:17:57And then I'm up at like 8 a.m., right?

1:17:59Turner Novak:going to go hard during the week and then buzzer stops weekend etc if i have stuff that i have to do because i'm getting pulled in maybe i'm you know on call or anything else like that obviously i have to go in and do it right but i should strive to basically try and disconnect as much as possible and figure out why i'm getting pulled back into these things where i lost time or anything else like that so that i can prove myself over time do you feel like sort of like the culture of Silicon Valley has seeped into that being a necessary thing. Like you must work weekends, maybe not Silicon Valley, just like business in general.

1:18:35Turner Novak:I think marketing is truly underrated. It's a skill that if you're really, really good at marketing, you can fuck up almost everything else. And so I think that marketing has only even gotten more and more important. Right. And so there's a lot of almost like, like almost gratuitous, like grind culture of like, I'm just going to like grind a ton on this stuff. And, you know, because you're putting out that content, like those are things that people are generally seeing, they're amping it, et cetera. Right. So I think it's changed a little bit in terms of people are doing things for almost like visual optics reasons in some ways versus what can we do that's actually like highly impactful or stuff like that.

1:19:18Turner Novak:Right. So I think that that's kind of more where it's kind of like gravitated towards. And as a result, you know, you see a lot of like really just like absolute grind culture or, you know, really flashy kind of like, you know, things that you're like, what is like, what is this? Right. Like what product are you actually selling? What thing are you actually solving? You know, stuff like that. So one actual question I probably should, we should probably talk to this a long time ago, but Erica at Redpoint was like, oh, make sure you ask this. so you probably could have taken a really big concentrated bet on ai models at some point and i mean i don't think you have what's what was the thinking on that so i'm a big fan of jim collins i don't know if you've ever read it yeah good to great great by choice what was the other one yep i don't know the one i think of mostly is good to great right and it has this principle in it called the hedgehog principle um and so it's essentially like what is the surface area of things that you can be like basically top three in the world i think it is and if you can't do that and you can't operate on those things like probably shouldn't move into that adjacency zone just yet right and so there's a shitload of competition in terms of like doing you know the the model hosting etc right and so from this point right like i don't think that we can be you know we could if we invested all our eggs in that basket but i don't think we can be top three to five in the world while also doing all the things that we want to go in and do.

1:20:41So it's almost a concerted effort to say, that's really, really cool, but we have to say no to this at this time. We have to exercise a lot of focus to basically say, we're going to execute on the things that we are really, really set up for and really, really do excellently well. Let's go in and push on those. And then once we get to the point where we are dominating those things in that field, what can we span to? And then figure out, okay, cool. you know when we can do compute and data centers and you know orchestration and and everything else like that so well that we are literally top in the world right and we're pushing towards that

1:21:16Turner Novak:as of right now i think in a really good spot maybe we can do that for dpus right and maybe we can slice and dice gpus and maybe we can give you timeshare on a kind of like basis of oh cool i really want to just like just this slice of of a gpu for this period of time right and that may or may not be a thing that we'll do in the future you know just like maybe like a road map sneak peak but maybe not maybe maybe maybe not right it's like a like at some point that will probably be a thing that like is worth doing right okay that's fair this is not like a one drop like next week we're doing gpus or something else like that you know yeah yeah so you mentioned good to great by jim collins do you have any just like favorite historical businesses or ceos or founders that you've kind of gotten a lot of inspiration from and it can be recent ancient times, you know, anything that you've, anyone you've really drawn a lot of inspiration from.

1:22:10Turner Novak:I don't really have like like founders or whatever. It's not like, you know, like Steve Jobs is great. You know, it's like a good person to look up for for a variety of reasons. For some other reasons, not so great. It's kind of like rude or whatever. I don't necessarily have like a specific person where I'm like, oh my god, this is like my idol or whatever. I like take various different things from people and try and like personify them, right? One example is like And not even really a founder. There's this YouTube video of Jonah Hill talking about why Marty Scorsese is like such an excellent director.

1:22:42I swear I'm going somewhere with this. And he's talking about it. And he's basically saying like, imagine yourself doing, you know, as an experienced chess player with a infinite amount of time. Right. And you make a move and, you know, you keep going or whatever. Right. they are really really good because given a super super small subset of time they're going to make a better move quicker right and so those are kind of things that i like going and say i'm like okay why is that person excellent why are they truly truly good at their craft and what makes them so and is there a way that i can go and take that kind of like skill and get really really good at right so i try and make decisions like really really quickly and intelligently now because i believe that like that is one part of like being excellent right so that's just kind of one example but I take pieces from various different things where I kind of see them, you know?

1:23:30Turner Novak:You try to find like who or what is really good at specific things and seeing what you can learn from them. Yep. Anything recent you've learned from that? The one that kind of comes to mind is like, it's like Mark Zuckerberg. And it's not really like a thing, but like I think Mark has like really, really, really good patience and really, really good identification of like things that are important, right? And so they are very happy to go in and work on the hard problem like VR because they know like they're going to shell a ton of money into that thing because they know at some point VR is going to be really, really, really important.

1:24:06Right. So they have the patience to go and wait out for like a ton, a ton of time so that they can potentially be first in this market and just kind of like way around. right so that's kind of like one example of a thing that i've been like i don't know if i learned it recently but i i developed a deep kind of like appreciation for how good i believe that they are at this thing right it's like waiting for the right time and then acting and then being a really

1:24:28Turner Novak:really good spot you know it makes sense with kind of thinking about maybe the railway product roadmap ways where you like roll things out where you thought about what you offer where you compete just be really really deliberate about that stuff wait for users to really tell you exactly what they want out of something right because if somebody says like oh i want this specific integration and you're like all right well tell me why or like what what problem or anything else like that it's a bit always a bit flat right but then when a user like begs you for like oh my god i need better observability i can't like tell any of this like i don't want to use you know this specific thing anymore right like we these are all the problems i need to solve right i need to be able to be notified when you know my apps crash or i need to be able to like know when like latency spikes or anything else like that like you're starting to get really really concrete information because you've said no to this person a lot, like, and these people in neural for a long while, you're accumulating a lot of this information so that when you actually go and the time is right to go and act on that, you have a litany of feedback that you can actually go in and be like, okay, cool, like, these are all the things that we should go and execute on.

1:25:28These are the problems. These are the things that we're going to, like, actually try and really push the envelope on, right? Your plan is really, really concrete instead of this almost, like, frenetic, like, reactionary thing of, like, oh they want this so i'm gonna go and build this thing right i feel like that's a good sort of way to end it with the way like it's almost like the whole railway uh

1:25:49Turner Novak:like the experiment of building this company has been like a very intentional way for the right moments to do things even thinking about like how you've incorporated certain products and features just like like make sure you take a feedback and know when you're acting like you act from position of strength almost yeah well this has been a lot of fun thanks for having me this is excellent it was a ton of fun where can i if somebody's like man this jake guy is like he seems like it seems like a sharp guy we mentioned your tweet so what's we can we can we find you on twitter or you can find me on twitter or x or whatever you want to call it nowadays it's just jake so j-u-s-t and then jake you know you can follow me to varying levels of i don't know interest or whatever i'm sorry i'm sorry or you're welcome you know depending on how you read the tweets or whatever so yeah and then do you write on sub stack still i didn't actually look at the dates on your posts.

1:26:36I haven't written in a while. It's mostly kind of like, you know. Actually, I might have written something a little while ago. It's very kind of inconsistent. It's whenever the kind of like need strikes to get something out there in general, right?

1:26:48Turner Novak:You mentioned the domain, your million dollar domain, railway.com is where you can find more. You can find us at railway.com. Cool. Yeah, we'll throw links to a bunch of stuff we talked about in the description and people can dig in a little bit more if they want to. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it. Cheers. Thanks for having me. And thank you for listening. And thanks to Ramp for supporting this episode. Upgrade your corporate card and get$250 at ramp.com slash the peel. If you missed it, check out last week's episode with Matt Mullenweg at Automatic on how WordPress grew to power over 43 % of all websites on the internet.

1:27:21Turner Novak:And the week before that with Grant Lee on how Gamma grew to over 50 million in ARR with only 30 employees. Tune in next week for Garrett Lord, the founder of Handshake, whose college recruiting platform has emerged as a leader, filling a massive opportunity in the AI data labeling space. If you like this conversation, please comment, like, subscribe, and name your next AI model after me. And if you don't want to miss a future episode, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening.

1:27:54Turner Novak:See you next time.

1:28:01you