Full Transcript for Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple

Speaker 1

Today, my guest on the show is Anthony Eden, the founder of DN Simple, a simple management solution for your DNS. in layman's terms, if you need to buy a domain, DN Simple is the best place to do it, and then you can manage and do everything you need to do with it right there and then. It's blazingly fast and, incredibly useful. I love it.

But I also love the story of the company and how 10 years ago, Anthony started it, as a solution to his own problem, and, they're a small team, they're profitable, independent, and they're really, you know, making the internet a better place and, working on their own terms. So I want to hear more about it, and this is why we have Anthony here to talk about his company and his journey and what it's like to kind of have a family while doing a company like that.

All right, Anthony.

Speaker 2

Thanks for having me on. It's awesome.

Speaker 1

So, for starters, you know, what made you choose this company as, as something you would be working on for the rest of your life?

Speaker 2

Back at, about ten years ago, I had already been working in the domain space for quite some time. I'd started in '99, one, at one of the first, domain registrars when the dot-com TLD was deregulated. And so it was one of the first seven, and I helped build that registrar. And in the first couple months, we got a ton of money, and then things fell apart, because it was the beginning of the dot-com bust.

And so, but I was really interested in the, I stayed in the domain space off and on over the years, did everything from running a registry, so I ran the registry. For the Mariana specific islands for a while. I ran a registrar. I was in the DNS space throughout those times. I did other things as well, but I kept coming back to it. And in 2010, I was just finishing up a, a startup that wasn't, that didn't really succeed, but it was around the .mp T L B.

We had created this thing called Chimp, and it didn't work, but it was a lot of fun to do. And at the time I was, I was kind of working on my own thing, and I think I was managing my own personal domain through GoDaddy. And I, I was like, why am I doing this? Their, their DNS interface was horrible, and I'm being upsold constantly, and I was just really frustrated.

And I said to myself, this doesn't make any sense. I have all the experience necessary to put something together. I'm pretty sure at this point I kind of have a better sense of what it takes to start a business. All right, I'm going to do this. I'm going to start the Unsimple. And so that was the, that was what made, got me to the point where I started thinking I could do it.

It was after getting all the experience working for others, I felt it was time to try to take things into my own hands and build the kind of company that I wanted to build, which frankly is a, a company that was designed to support the way I wanted to live, the freedom to move around, to travel, and to be able to raise a family.

Speaker 1

Did you have a family at the time when you were starting?

Speaker 2

I did, I did. So at that point in time in 2010, I already had all four of my kids. so let's see, in 2010, my triplets would have been, nine at that point, and then my youngest, would have, been two years old.

Speaker 1

You're an overachiever. it's, no, it's, it's incredible though, you know, you, you had, so four kids at the time, right? And, how, how do you go from sort of having an income, having a job to going, to starting a company on your own while having this pressure of needing to support your family? Like, that, that's crazy. There's plenty of people who are single with really high income who never start a company because, you know, that's terrifying.

And here you are trailblazing.

Speaker 2

Well, the first thing is that I have a, a wonderful wife who was, who was extremely supportive and who really took on a lot of the responsibility, throughout the kids' early ages to make sure that they, that they were educated well and that they were always taken care of. And they, they, even if I wasn't, if I was cranking away trying to build this company or writing software or whatever it was, she was always extremely supportive of that.

And so that, that helped out massively. The other thing is I didn't quit, I, I didn't quit everything. What I did is for the beginning, about a year and a half, I worked as an independent contractor. And so I was taking on software, software development work and building products for people that needed support and doing things, whatever I could essentially to, to pay the bills.

And then after a couple years of doing that, I had the opportunity to join Living Social. And so what I did, is I carved out in the contract all of D&Simple and said, okay, this is pre-existing work. I'm going to operate this independently and the, it will not conflict with the work I'm doing at Living Social. They agreed to that in the contract and so that protected me, but at the same time allowed me to go work for them and I worked my tail off for them and in nights and weekends basically worked on growing D&Simple.

And the first three years I didn't take a salary, I didn't really take anything out of it. I was just working on it using my day job to pay for either the independent or using the independent contracting or the day job to pay for the, the development of the company. And then by the time I got to the point where I could take a paycheck, I was the third employee.

Speaker 1

Huh. Interesting. So, for, the company started in 2010 as, did it officially start in 2010 or is it when you incorporated but you've?

Speaker 2

Yes. Yeah, so we started as a Florida LLC in 2010,

and, I used an LLC that I already had, and basically ran that as a DBA for many, many years.

Speaker 1

But then how long did it take until the company was actually profitable? I guess if you don't have any employees, any money, and there's already profit, but, you know, how long was it till it was officially successful in paper where you could say, okay, this company is now paying me?

Speaker 2

I, I think, I'd say about three years in. It took three years really to get its legs under it. It gets to the point where I felt that there was enough revenue coming in, and, and we were able to have the other folks who were working on it be paid, and then I said, okay, I can start taking a salary off of this. So I started taking a salary, I think, in, in near the end of 2012, if I recall correctly, maybe early 2013, somewhere around there.

I'd have to go back and check.

Speaker 1

It's a long journey, all right? Three years is...

Speaker 2

Absolutely. Yeah. But it was also, it was something that it was really enjoyable to do because those early days, especially when something, when it's, when it's works right out the gate and where people are interested in it and you start getting paying customers immediately after launch, that's a, that's a super motivating feeling. It's, it's easy to keep going when you're solving a problem that people are willing to pay for.

Speaker 1

Is that how you approached development at DNsimple, basically listening to your customers and building what they were asking for, or did you have a grand vision that you wanted to, solve based on your problems?

Speaker 2

So I have, I have my vision and I've had a vision from early on about what, I wanted something, I mean, it's in the name, right? I wanted something that was so simple that took away all the crap that you didn't need either when managing DNS or registering a domain or what have you, and I wanted to remove all that. Because I had been, I'd built products where we had to do those types of things or we wanted to, you know, we added multiple layers or there were many steps to, to the process of registering a domain.

And I just was like, this is not necessary. We can take a lot of, of defaults and it'll work fine. And so that was the initial vision was just how can I keep it simple? And so I iterated on it and, and really, really Did a minimum viable product in three months. So I actually started work on it in April of, of 2010, and we launched in July of 2010.

And those first three months was just getting the basics of being able to take payment, being able to put in DNS entries and get them out to the DNS servers. And at the time we had four Unicast DNS servers. It's like, it was nothing compared to what we operate today. It's hilarious when I think back on it. We had one, I think we ran at one web server or something like that.

I don't even know if we need to run it on Heroku in the early days, I don't recall. it was just such a different environment than what we're, how we run now, but it was very iterative. I was just doing features that I thought were going to get us to that launch point. And then after the launch, I was just listening to the feedback from customers.

They would say, this is missing, that's missing, I need this, I need that. And that got us through up to the point where we started adding registration functionality. And then after adding registration functionality, the first version didn't have registration, it just had DNS. and then we added registration, and then we started work-- I had- at the same time, I started working on the API.

So a lot of that was just, I- I saw this basic set of functionality I wanted, and at the same time, I was listening to what the customers were asking for. And we w- I would take missteps, I would build things that somebody said they want, and like, "Nah, I don't really need it," or just didn't work very well or what have you, but I was okay with that.

Speaker 1

I have so many questions. I guess that's kind of natural for DNS, but, You know, one of the things I have in mind is at some point, maybe 2013 or 14, right? Amazon was pushing heavily on their Route 53. And I wonder what it's like to be running a small company that's trying to do something that is really simple, and yet you're kind of competing in the same arena as this like giant monster with all the features and, you know, all the things they can offer.

Like, how would you guys think about it and deal with it?

Speaker 2

Well, if you think that the origin was, we already had that big competitor. GoDaddy was a giant even back then. They're even bigger now, but they were huge. Yeah, but

Speaker 1

you have to wait for like a minute to load the interface. Who's got the time?

Speaker 2

I didn't say that they, that it was great. I just said they were big, right? And so the, the The way I looked at it was, I'm going to carve off a small niche. And I knew my niche. My niche was engineers like me, developers like me, who were building web apps, who wanted something easy, and they didn't want all the extra stuff. They didn't want hosting, for like content hosting.

They didn't want, they didn't want me to be their email provider. They didn't want any of that. They just wanted to be able to get in, set up their DNS, and then move on. And so that's the mindset that I went in with, and have tried really hard to keep even to today, 10 years later, even as we continue to advance the system, I keep pushing to, to keep in mind that original Customer, which is the one that doesn't, they don't want to care about DNS.

They don't want to think about it. They just want to get in, get their job done, and get out. And they want something they can trust in the process. And so that, that was the approach I took. And, and when Amazon first announced Route 53, I looked at it and I was like, wow, this, they're going to get a lot of business. And then Google came into the game.

I was like, yeah, they're going to get some business too. And then, you know, and then Microsoft came into the game with Azure and, and they have their DNS component. So there's a lot of different things. I said, yeah, they're all going to get business. But there's enough business out there for all of us because I can continue to service a niche in a way that I know that niche will appreciate.

Speaker 1

Well, I'm glad you exist because indeed, you guys are still the simplest and the most straightforward. And I think what's great about DNS Simple, it makes, you're fast, right? Like you can actually do things really fast and get out of there, like you said, and never have to worry about this until you need to worry about it next time. do I remember correctly that early on you had to teach yourself Erlang in order to start the company?

Speaker 2

So it wasn't really to start. The first version of... So all of that originates from running a DNS server. And initially we were running an open source DNS server called PowerDNS, which is a fantastic open source DNS server run by really, really good people. I've, I've gotten so much, so much useful, lessons and information off of the folks that run that.

That project. And we ran it for a while, and we got to the point where we have, if you're not familiar with it out there listening, we have this thing called the alias record, which is our solution for the fact that you can't put a CNAME record on a DNS zone's apex, so the root where the SOA record is, where the zone starts. So dnsimple.com, yeah, you can't have a CNAME.

Sorry, so let's say dnsimple.com can't have a CNAME at dnsimple.com. You have to have it like at www.cnname.com or www.dnsimple.com. And we had a customer come to us, I think he was actually from Heroku or working with Heroku or something like that. He's like, I really want to point at my Heroku site from the apex, from the root name by itself, the naked domain.

And I said, okay, we'll try to figure out how to make that work. And so we started developing our implementation of the alias record. And for a long time, it was a Perl script that was running inside of PowerDNS. And it was running as a code process in PowerDNS, and it worked for a long time. It was a Perl script, like a, a MySQL backend or something like that.

And then after a while, we kept growing and growing and growing, and it, and it just got to the point where that implementation wasn't scaling. So we investigated, I investigated multiple ways of possibly implementing it. At the time, I was programming some enclosure, and that, I was like, what if I could do it in closure? Well, I couldn't.

I tried. I tried it in Lua as well. I couldn't get it to work the way I wanted to. I was like, okay, this isn't working. And, I really wanted to learn Erlang. I'd tried a couple of times and failed. I was like, okay, this time I'm going to learn Erlang. and I'd already written DNS servers in the past, and I swore I'd never do it again. I've written, I've written, written one in Perl, I've written one in Java, and I was like, I'm not doing this again.

But it was the perfect situation for me to use to learn the language, and so I started just kind of hacking on something, not really getting serious about it, and I, and I found a really good DNS library that had already been written that kind of dealt with the packet, parsing and, and writing. And when I found that, I was like, oh my god, this language is perfect for this.

It's like it's designed to do, to build this service. And so I put a lot of energy into building out an Erlang name server, which is what we use in production, and we have for many, many years now, and it's fantastic. But I wouldn't say that I learned the language to start the company, I would say that I learned the language to solve a problem that we had in the company.

Speaker 1

I love it. I mean, you solve both problems. You learn a language and you solve the problem, right?

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Speaker 1

And that's the beauty of it, I think, that you're running your own business. Like, how often do other developers get to just go off on a mission and learn something cool because it could be a good idea for the company, right? You're probably stuck in the company's ways and you can do that in after hours. But here you can make part of your job the fun part that you want to take on.

And I love it.

Speaker 2

That is one of the benefits of being, being the one that runs the show. It's true.

Speaker 1

Actually, how complicated is the operation right now? You, you mentioned you've got a couple of dozen people, you know, I think we just watched the video. you've got 400,000 domains registered through you, right?

Speaker 2

Yep. Yeah. More, more than 400,000. We have about 17,000 customers. and, we We handle a lot of DNS requests. I mean, granted, not anywhere near the volume that some of the big players do, but for us, that's a lot. the, the way we operate is that the majority of the team are software developers, and all of the software developers also are required to understand operations.

So we, we all carry the pager. we do an on-call rotation that's 24 hours, including me. I still carry the pager every cycle. So we go through every one. we have well-written policies on how to deal with incidents, because things happen, and so we have a, a clear set of how to deal with incidents. So it's complex, and we have six points of presence right now, which are, are basically different locations in the world where we run servers.

And so you get a lot of interesting behaviors from everything from the servers running in Sydney that have a, the long round trip to get data from our main systems to the things that are right on the same servers as the main systems, and they exhibit different behavior. So it's, it's a lot of fun, it's challenging, but the team has gotten really good at sort of understanding that

incidents happen, we have ways to deal with them, and we work through them together.

Speaker 1

How do you think of Future development given this complexity? Because just in the example you gave about servers in Sydney,

can we know where your main servers are? Is that proprietary? Yeah,

Speaker 2

Chicago.

Speaker 1

Okay, so they're in Chicago, right? So does it, does it mean that you're going to put some servers, say, if to mitigate this issue, you'll put some servers halfway in between, I don't know, in Tokyo somewhere, or maybe the other side of the world, and then streamline that operation, right? But if you did that, that would add complexity to your system, then you probably need to add more people to maintain that.

How do you guys think about how much more to do versus just maintaining current operations and making it work for the team?

Speaker 2

So it's a good, it's a really good question. It's one that we, we constantly struggle with. What we do is we try to find a, a balance between, making sure that we continue to operate and improve the operational system, because there's always little things that we want to improve on, whether that's latency that it takes to get zone changes out to the Edge, or if it is, dealing with certain types of issuance of SSL certificates, where we have like a, a large flood of certificates that are requested.

These little details sort of can get in the way of the new projects. And what I try to do is I, we run, we run, we do OKRs, so objectives and key results, and we do that quarterly. And what I try to do is I always try to balance between these are things that we have to do in order to maintain the company, and then these are the things that we should do in order to improve for our customers.

And, and I mean direct visual improvements, whether that's in the application or in, improving certain parts of the product for, for the customers. So I try to balance that. And I think that's how we look at it. We look at it as we must keep the operational system operating, but at the same time, we always have new things that we want to do.

So let's make sure that we do that in a stable, safe, Sort of methodical way. And if you saw the, the, the way that we develop inside D&Simple, it's far from perfect, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of method to our madness. We, we are pretty structured in a lot of things that we do, which means things get done a little bit slower, but at the same time, that's just, that's the trade-off when you're running an, an environment that requires always being on and, and just solid 100% operations.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I, I mean, I can't imagine, but on one hand, you know, you still have to carry a pager and there's all this complexity, but let's talk about what it enables you to do. You said it was meant to be a business that would allow you to live the life you want to live. So what kind of flexibility do you gain out of it?

Speaker 2

Well, we've, I've been able to move, around between, let's see, we, we've been between, between France and the US back and forth regularly over the last 10 years. and I'm not talking about just Traveling, we, we do that too, but I'm talking about being able to actually move around and stay there for extended period of time. And so that's something that we could not have done without having a company that was all remote.

And that, that's the key starting point. Dien Simple was started as a fully remote company and remains to this day a fully remote company, which means that all of the processes that we put in place are designed around the acceptance that the time zones are real, that we'll have some people that will be in Europe, other people that'll be on the West Coast of the US, and you have to get really good at sort of the asynchronous communication and Maximizing the value out of those times when everybody's there together, because that's the way it is.

And that's allowed me to move around and we, for example, we, we have the, the ability, my wife and I and our kids, we have a cabin up in Michigan, it's a family cabin, and we've gone up there for summers and we'll stay a month up there. And the internet's not great, and, but we still able to run the business just the same as if we were anywhere else.

Speaker 1

Have there been any moments where that conflicted with the needs of the business?

Speaker 2

There have been some cases where it was easier to be in one location with high-speed internet for, for a bit of time. It allowed us to, for example, it, it, it, in cases, especially where we were working with other companies that weren't comfortable being fully remote, because it gave us the ability to be on the time zone. It gave me the ability to be on the time zone they were on.

And that for a lot of companies, they're still more comfortable working that way. So I adjusted what I was doing to fit that.

Speaker 1

So you, for example, would have to stay up late at night for a couple months in a row while you're still new to that company, that kind of stuff?

Speaker 2

Yeah, that would be one example, or, or just making sure that I was communicating with them at the beginning of their, their day, right? So a lot of it's just, if, if you're, as long as you're not completely around the other side of the world, a lot of, of

optimizing for companies that are still on one time zone is just Scheduling yourself well so that you can work with that time zone. And, and it, it is of course difficult if I'm in Europe and I'm working with somebody that's on the West coast of the US, there's always going to be a very small amount of, of overlap there. Or if I'm in the US and I'm working with somebody that's in Australia.

But we, we do our best to make it work. Again, we design around, for example, doing support primarily via email, which allows, which ensures that anybody on the team can pick that up. And again, just like operations, we do the same with support. Everybody on the team does support. So including myself, we all get in there and we all contribute to support.

And that's, again, something you can only do if you design for it early on.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's, that's a good lesson to have for all the remote companies to plan ahead. We kind of joked about you being an enterprise company, but Just out of curiosity, the first time I met you was somewhere around maybe 2012 or 13, right? You were just ramping up, the team and kind of growing as a company. And I assume originally it was a lot independent developers, with fairly small needs.

But have you seen the company, transition, you know, both in its culture or its customers, like as you take on more bigger customers, are the challenges different? And I'm just curious if they are different, what are they? Because in essence, as a customer, I see DNSimple as a place I can just manage completely on my own. But it sounds like bigger customers have needs that need to be addressed on one-on-one basis.

Speaker 2

Absolutely. Yeah. We've, we've definitely had to, to change some of the things that we do in order to support some of the larger customers that we have. Primarily because they, they don't want to do necessarily do self-service. Their engineers are happy to do that, but they have their own processes for procurement and for billing that have to be followed.

And the bigger the company is, the more likely that they're going to have a very structured process for those types of things. And so, for example, in the early days, you could only pay to end simple with a credit card. That was it. There was no other option. and as the years went on and we started getting some larger companies, they said, well, we just can't do that.

We need to pay by ACH. And so what we did is that we started to ensure that certain types of customers had that as a feature at their level. And of course, it's going to be at the higher tiers because you're not going to want to do a $5 a month plan that you're paying ACH every month. It just doesn't work. the bookkeeping alone is just an incredible nightmare.

So for example, we limit it only to, to yearly plans.

we limit it only to plans that are going to exceed some certain amount in a year. So for example, we don't do it on a yearly professional plan, but we do it on a yearly business plan. And so I think designing for that situation, was an important part of ensuring that we could grow slowly to meet those needs, rather than trying to build in all of these things that we thought those bigger customers were going to want in the beginning.

Because we had no, I had no idea. I didn't know how they were going to do their procurement. Even though I had worked for companies where we went through this same process, it wasn't really directly in front of me. I was a developer inside of that company, and so I would hand that off to my manager, who in turn would hand that over to, accounts, accounts payable or accounts receivable, whoever it is.

So the learning about how their processes worked meant that we had to change the business. And over the years, we've started doing things that we didn't originally do. So we have we have a system now for doing account management for managed accounts. so where we can, we can schedule regular check-ins with those customers, ensure that they have what they need,

and ensure that their, that if we, if there's something specific they need at their scale, that we consider that as a priority to work on. And so, yeah, I mean, it definitely is, is different than when we first started. But we, all through that time, we, we committed to saying we really want to make sure that we can still have that self-service thing, because that's the, that's the core of DNsimple, and we feel like you should be able to have full control, because that's what the developers want.

And again, that's our primary audience.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and that's great that in essence, you're charging your bigger customers for the features you end up building custom to for them, but that's okay because they can afford, they can afford it, right?

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 1

So, I mean, it's been 10 years. You've built an amazing business. you know, it lets you travel, lets you work on your schedule, except for the pager duties.

and, where, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? Where do you see this go?

Speaker 2

So my intention is, I still have a vision that I want to achieve, and my intention is to focus on that vision. We've, we've got the 10 years now behind us where it was building this solid, stable company that was able to, to really achieve what I wanted, which was that, That I could live my life the way I wanted to, and our team could live the way, their lives the way they wanted to, and still run a successful, good company and treat our customers well.

Now what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to, trying to see, okay, what are we missing to get to that vision? And that vision is one where the people that use DNSimple don't actually have to think about DNS. And so that's the thing that I keep pushing for, and it's not something new, it's something we've been working on on and off over the years, but my hope is that this, these next 10 years are about achieving that goal.

And as an aside, who knows what's going to happen with the internet in 10 years? If you think how far we've come since 2010 and how much has changed, my guess is that the next 10 years are going to be incredibly interesting, compared to what we've already seen.

Speaker 1

Very cryptic. But I am looking... I don't

Speaker 2

want to say too much because I don't, I don't like to, I don't want, I undercommit and overdeliver is what I hope to do.

Speaker 1

No, but I, I, I definitely wouldn't want your competitors to, you know, get, get a hint and try, try to kind of outrun you that way because I would love to see her succeed and beat them all out of business. who, did anyone say GoDaddy?

but no, that's great. I mean, you know, for folks who haven't, checked out Dien Simple, I hope they do because it's really simple and I think it's beautiful when you can build a company that does so much under the hood and yet just focuses on the key things. you know, so for everyone who's thinking about starting a business or maybe has one right now, you know, do you have any key advice that you want to share that you think are maybe, maybe even either key or something that is not obvious but definitely necessary as you go through this path?

Speaker 2

I mean, it's gonna sound, hopefully this won't sound too obvious, but it kind of is, which is, if you really want to have a business, so that means a stable business that grows steadily, you need to actually solve a problem that people are willing to pay you for. And it seems so obvious when you say it, but it's also really easy to start a business, like, especially in this day and age, it's easy to start an internet business that's, that's not really something people want to pay for.

And there are a lot of companies in the dustbin of history that, that made things that just weren't really of any value. And so I see a lot of what starting a business is about making sure that you have at least some people who get value out of your service. And then it becomes a question of how many people do you really want to bring value to? Are you happy with a hundred people paying you a hundred dollars each a month? And if you are, because that's not a, that's like ten grand a month.

And if you're running that as an independent, that's a, that's an amazing lifestyle. You can live in some pretty amazing places in the world and, and be able to live very, very comfortably for that kind of money, even less than that. But that's like a huge amount of money for many people. And so if you're willing to do that, then go in with that intention.

Build a thing that a hundred people are willing to pay a hundred dollars for. If you want to try to do something that's bigger, if you have, you know, these visions of grandeur or what have you, then build the business that's going to support that. find a, you know, start building up a team, go out there and find a problem that you can tackle where there's a large audience or a very, if it's a smaller audience, a very well-funded audience that truly has a pain that you can solve and focus in on that and just be laser focused on it and constantly be solving their problem.

and doing nothing else. Like that's, I think that's the key. If you're constantly looking at your customers and solving their problem, then you're, you should be able to develop a business, that, then it just comes down to how satisfied you are with the size of that business.

Speaker 1

Very reasonable, but very hard to forget in the day and age where you can raise a ton of money and go do something crazy and then probably fail.

Speaker 2

There are businesses though where, where raising, like there, there are cases, there are very few cases where raising, like using other people's money to make something that is, that really is impactful and changes the world is, is the right thing to do, but it's just very rare. And there are a lot more cases, I think, where You don't need to raise a ton of money.

Maybe you can raise some money. I, I, my philosophy, just real quick on raising money has always been, and I was, I got this as a lesson from one of my mentors early on back when I lived out in Hawaii. And he said, don't raise money unless you know you can take one dollar and turn it into five.

And that was his, his fundamentals. Like you don't take other people's money to build product. You don't take other people's money to, to buy equipment. You don't, that's not what you use money for. You use people's capital to make more money. And so, so it's like if you find a vehicle to do that, if you find, for example, you start a business and you find a channel where you can put a dollar in and your customers give you five bucks back, like go for it.

Take as, like spend until you've used that channel up. If you, if you think it's large enough that it's worth millions of dollars, because doing otherwise is, is kind of silly, right? If you have the wherewithal to do it and you want to do that. But also note that you have to, you're taking on that responsibility that, that that channel actually will deliver that.

and some channels dry out. So it's just, it's, if there are cases where it makes sense, but there's so many more cases where it makes sense to take either a little bit of money or no money, because guess what profit is? When your customers are paying you, that is your customers investing in your business, and you use those profits to build your business.

Speaker 1

Sounds so simple.

Speaker 2

Like damn simple, I don't know. It's, it's, it's a simple philosophy, and I will admit that I bet if I tried to reproduce it, I probably wouldn't get it right necessarily again. Because there's also a whole ton of luck involved in it.

Speaker 1

Luck is about being in the right place at the right time and making some choices that allow something to happen a certain way. and so I've been lucky. There is, there, I've been lucky by the fact that I'm a white guy born in America. That alone is, is such a huge stroke of luck that, that already I'm like, I had so many more advantages than so many more people in this world.

And the key then was, okay, I took that luck and turned it into something that I believed in and something that was good for my family and, and other families that work with me now.

I had even more luck the fact that I was born into a middle-class family. And so these are, these are things that are, that you can't say I'm a self-made person, at least I can't, because there were a lot of things that helped me get to where I am. And granted, I spent many, many, many hours in front of a computer writing software. I've spent tens of thousands of hours writing software, and I've written hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of code.

And so there was work involved, but that work probably would have never happened in the vast majority of cases had I been born into a different situation.

Speaker 2

That's really valuable that you recognize that and point that out. But, but I'm very glad that you're, you know, got lucky. Let's not, discount the tens of thousands of hours of writing code, because that's also

not simple, right? And that's, it requires commitment and,

Speaker 1

Absolutely, absolutely. When my, when my triplets were, were newborns, we had a really crazy, like, lack of sleep schedule, I will say, because they had to be fed, like, every three hours. They were premature when they were born, so it was like, it, it had to be very rigorous and exact. And I would sit up in the middle of the night writing open-source code while my kids were, you know, drinking from their bottles or what have you, or, or I was trying to get them back to sleep.

So that's, that's what I'm talking about in terms of, yeah, there's hard work in it, for sure. And I spent many of my own hours just becoming better at developing software. And I'm not even that good at it. Like, I write a bunch of really bad software, but I'm good enough at building the things that get us off the ground.

Speaker 2

Was that the key, kind of build, get it off the ground, and then find somebody smarter who can actually do a better job?

Speaker 1

It definitely worked. I mean, it was, their having people around me who were more rigorous with the way that they approached systems was, I think, a key part of our success and the ability to have that operational environment that didn't require a ton of cash or a ton of manpower, which equates to a ton of cash, in order to make the systems work.

It, it was through other people who saw opportunities to be lean, operationally lean, and build systems that were, were relatively simple in the beginning. And even today, through, through our complexity, we're relatively simple in our system.

And so, yeah, absolutely, getting the right people with you early on will make a big difference if they complement you.

Speaker 2

I guess there's a similarity there between family life and business. You get, you get the right partner. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. My, my wife, I, I could, there's none of this could have been done without her because she has a, she's extremely organized. She is, she's very solid, but she's also very in tune with, with other people's emotions and feelings. Whereas I tend to be somewhat organized, but for a long time, I just didn't even have a sense of people's emotions.

It was very, I was very logical and analytic with the way I approached everything. And there's a part of a business, if you're dealing with people, where you have to learn to be, to be a human and understand that the people on the other end, whether they're happy or angry or depressed or, or whatever it is they're going through, that there's still a person there and there are emotions that get into play.

And so being able to understand that and, and learn how to react better in situ, in Sort of high-pressure situations where maybe somebody's really upset or they're just really, they're having a hard time, I think is something that you can only learn by being put in that situation and being around people that you see do it really well. And my wife is really, really good at that.

She's good at sensing people's emotions and, and handling that in a solid way.

Speaker 2

Well, and I guess it's good for you to recognize that you needed to learn that, right? Because if you, if you never recognize or try to, you, it's not just going to happen by itself. You have to put an effort into it.

Speaker 1

I agree. Fortunately, I had people who were honest with me early on and they would say like, why are you so grumpy? They were interpreting that as being grumpy. And I'm like, I'm not grumpy. I'm just, I, I say things how they are. No, no, you're grumpy. You're always angry. And so getting, you know, like having them tell me that and then spending some time, yeah, you know what? You know, maybe sometimes I'm a little too, direct about things, and maybe I need to be a little bit more respectful of people's emotions.

I think helped out a lot.

Speaker 2

It's, it's a hard choice to manage because, you know, how far do you go in terms of helping other people with their emotions versus just getting the problem solved?

Speaker 1

And here we come to what happens to business later on, the more people you get. the, the, my role has transitioned away from building the systems and, and making the systems run from a software perspective to understanding the team and helping build systems that, that make their lives better and thus create an environment where they are dedicated to doing what's best for the business and for our customers and doing the right thing and being, being clear and honest about How they work within this business, because sometimes it's not great, sometimes it's fantastic, but sometimes people have hard times, and my job now more than ever is to just listen to the team, understand

what's working and what isn't, and then try to find solutions to fix that system, which is the human system inside of the Unsimple. so it's, it's totally an interesting change, not one that has been easy to, to work through. I've made a ton of mistakes along the way, and I'm sure I have a lot more to make, but it, it has a lot of similarities to the engineering of systems for software, in that you're dealing with, this complexity, but it just happens to be the complexity of emotions and reality, people's real lives that come in and interject on their work lives regularly.

So it's been a fun ride to do that, and I, I'm happy that I can continue to do that with this team.

Speaker 2

I'm, I'm just wondering, you run a very Human company, right? It's not very big, so it allows you to kind of know everyone who's working there and, like you said, design the company where it works for everybody's lives. But we're, we live in a world where if you're, say, Amazon and you have 700,000 employees, it's really hard to do that.

but still, is there, is there any advice you can give to, you know, tech leads and managers and what have you, how to make this, take this small company mentality and apply it to a bigger company where they can actually make their employees less miserable?

Speaker 1

Yeah, so my thoughts on that are that from the manager's perspective to the, the team that they're leading, they have to work really hard to listen and to, to really understand what those problems are. And that means communicating regularly. So, at the end of the week, we do, I do one-on-ones with every team member every two weeks. We do a thirty-minute one-on-one, and we, we have discussions that are usually around the, their, their personal goals and the things they want to develop in their career or the things that they're working on right now, or sometimes just what's going on in their lives, what I can do to help, and things like that.

And so the, the part for the team that you're leading is listening. The other part is having the leverage to go and translate that to execution to whoever's above you. And I think that's where the real challenge is. That's where things start to break down. The more layers of, of management you have to get to the point where somebody can make a decision and not, and when you don't have necessarily good systems in place to facilitate that decision-making, that's where Everybody's down to have trouble because if the person who is your leader can't actually execute on the things that they need to execute on to help you, then they can listen all they want, but that's about all

they're going to be able to do is be a helpful ear. In order to be successful, you actually have to have the ability to impact, like to make, to change things that aren't working or to take things that are working and amplify them.

And most big companies, that's super hard to do.

Speaker 2

That's, I think we can summarize it by saying, you know, carry the pager.

Speaker 1

Yeah, exactly. Do, do. Exactly. That is, do support. Like, talk to your customers. I think that, that, that's a really good way because it's super easy to, to see both the good and the bad when you have to, to deal on a regular basis with what your customers are going through. so yeah, absolutely. I think carrying the pager is, is awesome.

assuming again that you have good systems in place to,

to protect anyone carrying the pager so they don't feel like they're on the hook to be the only one solving the problem. Like, that's not how we run ours, our pager system or how we run in general at the end simple. The idea is, is that the person carrying the pager is, they're the first one to react, but the earliest thing they do for any incident that is, that impacts customers is pull in other team members.

Speaker 2

That's how a team's supposed to function, right? If, if you're doing it otherwise. Right, you'd

Speaker 1

think.

Speaker 2

Yeah. if you're hanging one of your team members to dry, that's probably not a very good team.

Speaker 1

Yeah, or, well, or the, the systems aren't in place. Again, I keep coming back to that because you can have a team that really wants to be good, but if they don't have these, the well-designed systems in place to help them be good in times of crisis, then they're going to, they're going to have trouble with it. Or if they don't have the systems in place that allow them to make improvements for those things that don't work.

And I would say that I think the hardest thing I, and again, I haven't run a large organization, but I imagine the CEO of an organization that has thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, the hardest thing that they have to do is to figure out how the heck do I help this massive organization build systems that won't just cause everything to grind to a halt.

Speaker 2

It's not a simple problem. Well, you guys, you're a systems company, so you're asking these questions from the very beginning. But I think to anyone listening, if they haven't asked those questions yet, they, you know, it's, it's good time to do that now.

I, there's, there's so much I want to know about the Unsimple and kind of everything that happens in the last ten years, but I also want to be respectful of your time, so maybe we can do another episode later. But the last thing I want to know is, you know, you've been on the internet for a long time. If, is there anything that you want to see happen on the internet or to the internet in the next decade that is unlikely to happen, but we really need to see?

Speaker 1

Yes, absolutely. I want us to move back to distributed systems, which is to say that this decision to, which is funny coming from somebody who runs a SaaS company, right? Like my job as a SaaS company is right now is to, to optimize by centralizing some of those systems. And the, that's, like, that's, we do it, and we do it well, but I'd really like to see how to, I'd like to understand how to run a business well where the actual data and software and everything is running in a fully distributed fashion.

And I think it's a super, super challenging problem, to allow everyone to have access to fully distributed systems, regardless of their technical abilities, because we can't, we can't get over the fact that the original, the way the, the internet that first originated, that was distributed by nature, was built by people who were highly technical, and it was used For, for the first, you know, I don't know, five years, maybe even longer, and was built by people of high technical abilities.

And, and so that, they were able to run servers, and they were able to do all the things necessary to maintain those servers. I don't think we can expect everybody to do the same, but I think that they have a right to control their information, their personal information, their, the stuff they do at home. Like, the fact that we're trying to tie everything into a smaller and smaller number of very big companies is a real, to me, that's a real problem.

and, and it's a dangerous situation for me, at least, from my perspective as somebody who's been on the internet for a long time, it's contrary to what I believe is the foundation of the internet. And so in the next 10 years, I would like to see us start figuring out how do we address that and still have a way to have successful small businesses run in this environment and build infrastructure for this environment.

Speaker 2

And just to clarify, we're not necessarily talking distributed systems like crypto and Bitcoin, but distributed in the sense where no particular company has all the control over a certain function of the internet.

Speaker 1

Exactly, exactly. And, and so, so cryptocurrencies are a good example of, I mean, it's a distributed ledger. So it's a good example of something that was built to take the concept of a centralized ledger and decentralize it. And in that respect, it's super interesting technology for all of the I, I'm not into the speculation, that goes on with the financial side of it when we deal with converting fiat currencies and, and those into cryptocurrencies.

Like, that's not my game. But the idea of being able to build these, these fully distributed systems is interesting to me, and I think it is also important to the internet. I, I'll give you an example that I said the other day about what I think the next, the, the next 50 years challenge is. Let's just say we actually manage to get people on Mars.

How are they going to use the internet? There, solve that problem. That's, it, that problem has to be solved if we're truly going to expand beyond this little blue ball that we're on right now, and if we're truly going to be able to run this sort of, this universal or, or this, this network that isn't just isolated pockets. So to me, and, and if you solve it at that scale, and that's, if you haven't heard of IPFS, which is the interplanetary, interplanetary file system, which is like a protocol that was kind of, that's, I find super interesting.

it doesn't, it works for some things well, but it's, it's kind of like the web, but distributed storage of all of the sites and all of the content.

they, one of their mentalities, like one of their, the original ideas that the authors came up with was like, how do we deal with a web where the, the speed of light just becomes too restrictive to communicate properly? So to me, like that's, that is where I would like to see the next ten years really start to advance. If we could take something like IPFS or its next generation or something similar and turn that into a viable business where it's not just one entity, but, but Creates a whole slew of, of businesses that can work together to carve off, like to, to support people in this and carve off their niches.

That's really interesting.

Speaker 2

And now we've got a preview as to what's on your 10-year plan for D&Simple.

We got it. You

Speaker 1

got it out of me.

Speaker 2

Simple. All right, everybody, turn on your copy machines. Internet for interplanetary communication. Very easy.

Anthony, thank you for coming and, you know, sharing your story and some ideas in management and how to run an efficient remote team. I think it's really important and what you're doing is amazing. And, you know, thank you for building the product. And I do hope that, you know, over the next 10 years, you just make it massively more awesome and accomplish the vision you have.

And, I would love to have you back on the show to talk about all the other details. but for now, you know, thanks and like, I've really enjoyed this.

Speaker 1

Well, thank you for having me on. It's been, it's been a pleasure, and I absolutely would love to come back at some point in the future, and we can deep dive into whatever you're interested in. it's a blast. I always, I always like talking about, what we've done and where we're going, and then just anything beyond that. I'm, I'm, I'm a futurist at heart, so for me, it's, it's important to just sometimes spew out these fun ideas.

So again, thanks for doing this, and thanks for providing a place where we can talk about this type of stuff.

Speaker 2

Amazing. I'll have my people talk to your people.

Speaker 1

All right, thanks for real. Thank

Speaker 2

you.