Rui (00:26)
In this episode, we're joined by Timothy Chen, an engineer turned founder turned VC. For nearly two decades, Tim has been building and betting on technical products from distributed systems and cloud native platforms to mentoring open source projects.

as a member of the Apache Foundation. Whether writing code or checks, he's been operating at the infrastructure level, where the work is invisible, but mission critical. Welcome, Tim, and thank you for joining me today.

Timothy Chen (00:59)
Well, thanks for getting me on.

Rui (01:01)
I'm super excited to have you. we chatted once, but I immediately just picked up that you have a really fun and open energy that I just really want to understand your story a little bit more.

Timothy Chen (01:14)
Yeah, I know how interesting it be, but ⁓ yeah, here to share whatever.

Rui (01:19)
And also thank you Chad if you're listening for making the introduction. ⁓ Okay,

Let's see. You have built tools for builders and invested in technical funders and helped shaped this modern software infrastructure. This is obviously all very impressive,

maybe let me unwind a little bit and go back all the way to when you just graduated from college. And it's your first job at Microsoft around the financial crisis 2008.

Timothy Chen (01:53)
Yeah, I mean real full-time job Yes, Microsoft

Rui (01:57)
Why did you leave Microsoft?

Timothy Chen (02:00)
I grew up in Taiwan for the most part, actually. You I was born in New York, but then I moved back to Taiwan when I was seven and came back to Seattle when I was 16. My older sister, she got into University of Washington. I had a choice, should I come back here or not,

Rui (02:02)
really?

Timothy Chen (02:18)
My parents say like, Hey, you are, born here. You have a passport. You want to move back? You should just do that. And so I came to Seattle when I was high school and I get to know what's happening here. Everybody around here. Usually if you want to go to college, you want to go to UW. And if you're going from UW, you want to be engineer. There's really only like three places you go work at Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, maybe back then Google wasn't even there yet. Right. Uh, and so I.

basically was just trying to make it because I wasn't a computer science degree at all. Like my GPA just wasn't good enough. I couldn't even get into CS. So I got into this weird major called informatics, which is like a design plus library science kind of major. But I was really interested in programming. So I spending most of my other time doing open source and trying to learn as much possible. Like I'm doing online free classes from MIT, from CMU.

just to improve my knowledge. So I was just trying to make it into like a real engineer. just like, how do I find a job that actually is a software engineer job? Because my resume wasn't that obvious. Like I was not CS and I don't have any crazy background. you know, so I was really happy I was able to get into Microsoft, you know, as a non.

CS person, because not many people were able to in my major. It was only like two people or something like that. once I landed Microsoft, this is what I learned, right? There's levels in every society, right? when I made it to Microsoft, I made it into Microsoft IT, which is one of the newest places in Microsoft. know, like it's a reality. The world is so interesting. I didn't get to choose though, right? They saw my background and said,

You should be good to do an internship. So I was entering Microsoft first and you get to be an intern at ITP site, It just means I'm not, I'm not working any products. I'm just doing one of the like support teams. Like it might be your data center, HR system or something like that.

Like it wasn't even like doing that much coding at all, let alone doing anything interesting. And, but the worst part of it is MS Microsoft IT. You start off one lower.

one grade lower than your normal college grads. So if you know Microsoft, there's just the number system, right? Like you start with level 59, you grow. I was level 58, you know, coming in, which is like, couldn't even transfer. So that time I was, I think after like the first week, I knew I had to get out of here, but I want to stay at Microsoft. Like I really like

the company, like you are forever in Seattle, you should, right? Back in that time, it's still like the best place to be at. So I wasn't trying to leave Microsoft. I was trying to leave the team I was in to join real Microsoft team, like working on anything. I didn't even care. all my coworkers, even my boss would just laugh at me. Like Tim, nobody made it, made it life out of here.

You're stuck here forever. Which is true. The only person, any person that have left MSIT to join a product team is only PNs and only a few of them, very few of them. So really, really bizarre, you know, like I just got into like a place where like, it's like the lowest lowest level you can ever possibly imagine in the, in the hierarchy chains.

Rui (05:14)
Hahaha

Timothy Chen (05:36)
so yeah, I was so bored. I was literally so bored every day. Like there's not much to do every day, but I had to pretend you're doing something. This is the reality of being a Microsoft employee. So I can't wait. And then the financial crisis happens, right? I was actually close to trying to get internal transfer interviews.

And even had one team, one manager really, really liked me. I passed it in normal coding interviews, even though my level doesn't meet. they are willing to give me a shot. And then the last step is actually to ask my manager to approve me to get approved. And my manager even blocked that. you know, for whatever reason, So.

I was like, I'm done here. I have no choice, no place to transfer. can't do anything interesting. I'm spending all my days, ⁓ besides work, working open source projects, just improve things, work on real something interesting. I wasn't planning to move to Microsoft. I even bought a house next to Microsoft. I was married pretty much right after college. And I told, you know, Judy, like, Hey, we're probably going to stay here for a while. You know, let's go buy a house right next to Redmond.

right on the 50, 50 first street, I can even like bike to Microsoft campus, like, you know, just like anybody working at Microsoft, you just assume you're going to be there like 15, 20, 25 years. One, I saw a whole bunch of people get laid off and people are crying on the office, right? And I saw that real life, right? You have no notice, right? During that's like 15, 20,000 people layoff time. So I saw how brutal things are. And then the reality is,

Also, hit to me, like there's no job for me that's gonna be interesting internally, right? I'm just not good enough from paper of anybody. So let me go interview outside. yeah, anyway, that's how it really went.

Rui (07:26)
And then after Microsoft, when I was checking out your LinkedIn, ⁓ under one early job notes, you wrote down, company shut down soon after this is also after Microsoft. And so like then it was like six years of like bouncing between startups. Did you notice any patterns about what makes technical products like succeed or fail during that?

Timothy Chen (07:38)
Yeah.

Rui (07:53)
exploration period.

Timothy Chen (07:55)
Um, you know, my primary motivation back then, like I mentioned, wasn't even thinking about any product company whatsoever. Give me a job that does something interesting. Like I actually want to be a real engineer writing code, building products. I thought that's my job going to be if you join an engineer, like I told you, I wasn't a Microsoft just sitting there doing nothing. Right. I was just like, can I find something somewhere I can work on something real so I can actually grow?

Rui (08:14)
I see.

Timothy Chen (08:22)
as an engineer. And my first startup I joined, it was the only available option for me. But luckily for me, that company didn't work out for a whole bunch of reasons. And I still remember it. But that was a company where there's so much freedom to do things, because it's solely funded by Paul Allen. So Paul is one of the Microsoft co founders, right? He has so much money. This is one of his

experiment company, like, hey, go try out this little social experiments company and see if we can make it as a company. If we don't, I'll just fund you, you know, for a while. So nobody's there to make money in that company. I realize if you don't make money making as a goal for company, you will be a very weird company. You know, it's like, I don't know what I'm doing here. And somebody, some companies are raising a whole bunch of money also feels very similar way to.

Rui (09:03)
you

Really?

Timothy Chen (09:12)
Yeah, because your money is there. Capital can be raised pretty quickly, right? You know, why should we always like worry about making money? We can always be there. So I learned that pretty early. What does it feel like to be a company that doesn't care about revenue? But it actually helped my growth as an engineer because I was working on real systems end to end myself. I was so very rewarding, you know, it got me real programming skills because I was actually building stuff myself a lot.

If you don't give yourself somebody the power and freedom to actually build and learn and do things, you never learn as a person. Yeah. So anyway, at that time I wasn't caring about like, does your company going to grow? And I'm like, how do I know? I'm just an engineer trying to make it. ⁓

It's funny how life works, right? We join companies without really thinking a lot of factors, but when I'm looking back, a lot of these places I joined actually helped me quite a bit, even what I'm doing today.

Rui (10:01)
Mm-hmm.

Right. And so what are the some points that were sort of like imprinted in your head when you were just like randomly bouncing and just trying to make it as an engineer?

Timothy Chen (10:24)
⁓ I wouldn't say randomly bouncing. you know, the reason I put that company shut down at that time is because recruiters asked me why I keep searching jobs, not all of them is my choice. ⁓ this one did a workout, you know? was kind of following my own interests. Plus what I think will be a fun place to work at. Plus a lot of things like.

Rui (10:29)
Yeah.

Hahaha!

Timothy Chen (10:45)
which is startups are like a very natural place for it. So first one, every, ⁓ really able to like see how it is a dysfunctional company, I guess, in some level that's doesn't care about money, how the work looks like. And I, you know, I'm a gamer, so I went to a game company afterwards and I asked the most fun in my ever had as an engineer because I was working on games, working on backend of the games. I'm the only engineer working with the whole backend and was a pretty popular game back then. So it was a very rewarding thing.

but I got to taste the game development culture, right? Which is pretty toxic for sure. So I realized, okay, the culture thing actually matters. You know, I cannot just be forever not sleeping and have to be taxied back to the company after sleeping there for two days or something like that. know, I ⁓ up being threatened and all that kind of stuff that happens quite often in that kind of...

Rui (11:40)
What do mean

by threatened?

Timothy Chen (11:42)
Shed them by your bosses and other things like that. Like if you don't come and sleep in the office on an ongoing basis, you got to have different issues and just stuff like that. they basically, and you know, most engineers, if you work at a real company, you know there is like a standup, right? I don't think you ever heard of a standout before. In game companies, there's standups and there's the walkouts, the standouts. So you make sure you come into the office at certain time, like nine or whatever.

Rui (11:49)
That's wild.

Timothy Chen (12:12)
And you make sure you don't leave until like six or seven, which is like the, let's all sync up again and meet in person at six and nobody else can miss that. Right. So they added that too, right. Which is like past six 30 or seven or something like that. Okay. Every day you have to be there and you're still working afterwards, by the way, but you have to physically be there to make all those meetings. And this is just a weekdays. ⁓

Weekends are by default thinking that you're going to be working or you'll be in the office by default. anyway, this is just interesting. Being in that game environment, I can't stay there that long. My wife is super unhappy. It's just too crazy. So.

Rui (12:54)
Was it

because of the company culture where there is specific trait about gaming industry that also tends to maybe make a company to have that toxic working? I see.

Timothy Chen (13:06)
I think it's just industry as a whole

because there are too many people that want to work on games. This is pretty much a supply-demand problem. When you have a very high demand industry that a lot of people just somehow likes to work on things, so you're not afraid of churning them. Like, I lose an engineer, I'll get one. I have too many people want this job, and this job is so high pressure. There's so much

Rui (13:16)
Hmm.

Timothy Chen (13:33)
deadlines, the popularity of the game, like it's really hard to make a game, right? And I always, always describe to people, like people don't know what it feels like to work on games. And as an engineer, like it's just writing code, right? Like what's the difference, you know, like, it's really different because the goal of a normal product and the goal of a game is completely different. When you work on products, there's a huge, huge uncertainty, right? When you even just work on normal products, no matter what products, how long something will get done and shipped.

there's uncertainty. But for the most part, if your product delivers what it says it should do, we're good. That can ship, right? They just like a, kind of functional expectation, like things verified yet games doesn't have that, you know, games, the goal isn't like the game should behave this way. No, the game has to be fun. That's the goal.

It's a vibe. So the designer might have assumed this thing can produce that vibe and you cannot test it easily. So we all had to sit there and work on for quite a while and believe it will. But like at certain and Checkpoint, you play with a high fidelity enough. It's like this game sucks. ⁓ Or there's like a similar game.

Rui (14:29)
You

You

Timothy Chen (14:53)
There's another product entered the same market you assume could be the best one that just seems more fun than you. And that happened in our development. of the Zynga came out of another game very similar to what we're doing and just like, this seems way more fun and more shinier than we're doing. Delete the whole code base and start over. But the deadline is the same. Because we line up the announcement with Apple and other players. So you cannot change the deadline. But the goal is all vibes. And so.

That's why it's difficult to ship a game because your goal is actually making sure that people get addicted to this, and so you have to actually try a different experience to get to that point. And so that huge, huge like loop is very difficult to know how long that takes. And if you're having a huge budgets, it doesn't matter. Like it just always takes longer. So it sucks to work in those environments

Rui (15:37)
Interesting.

Interesting, do they have any iterative learning incorporating into how they set up the game or how they design things? Where it's really just like you only do the testing when you launch the game, basically.

Timothy Chen (15:57)
No, you try to test it beforehand, obviously. But I will say the hardest part about games is usually the marketing side, I worked on Halo 5 before, which is like a more AAA game, right? Your AAA games, your expectation is I'm going to launch at this E3 day, lined up with the head of Microsoft setting there like we shipped Halo, right? That day can't change. ⁓

Rui (16:00)
Right. Okay.

Timothy Chen (16:23)
Because a console game is also tied to the console sells too. So I cannot delay halo because Xbox, whatever a certain version is, is dependent on this thing to sell with it. Right. So it's the same, same deal. The launch date is cons is fixed, but you got to figure out something that works and games are hard to test when there's very low fidelity.

Like you can do like wireframes and SaaS apps and kind of just like, does this solve your need? Right? It's intuitive enough. can do like do Figma sketches. But games, you cannot do Figma gaming. also you're testing a bunch of psychologies.

so the testing can only be done I would say three to four months or maybe six months after a game has been worked on to be in a more degree and

But there's a huge chance that this thing just doesn't make it. And so you just delete your six months of work and start over. Yeah.

Rui (17:18)
Sounds like it's very difficult to honestly start a video game studio because you're essentially putting a lot of time in this one game. So that's why in general it makes sense if it's a big company and they can invest in a portfolio of video games, it's almost like VC, right? And then hopefully one or two or three of them actually work out.

Timothy Chen (17:40)
Yeah, yeah. our game studio, it was, have a couple of hit games. I thought it was a great company and growing, but it hits ceilings pretty quickly too. Cause it kind of find and produce even better games or cause game has shelf lives. It's never hot forever. Right.

Rui (17:48)
Hmm, interesting.

Timothy Chen (17:56)
for some time, there's a newer game now, like people's potential shifted. So we have to produce something new again. Is the next going to be better than the last one? Can we continue to do that? Most studios don't make it long. yeah, it's just, it's just, it's a tough industry for sure. And that's why it's very hard to make it.

Rui (18:07)
Hmm.

OK, so far it sounds like your dream was Microsoft. But unfortunately, your resume doesn't look as good as they normally would want to pick. And then you just want to grow as an engineer and then trying to find something that's interesting and fun to work on and then learn that culture is really important. And even like the industry itself, the nature of the industry is really important for you.

to probably be selective about, then.

based on everything that you listed out in public profile. You've always been drawn to building for technical users, at least most of the time. ⁓ Why do you think that is?

Timothy Chen (18:59)
Hmm, I think that's a good question. I think maybe because one thing I that got me to able to actually learn computer science in the first place is open source. normally you engineer, if you want to learn how to build good products, you join a company and the team that's working on those products. And maybe you work on some features or you grow from there.

I never had the luxury to do that. You know, stuck in Microsoft and low level and all that kind of stuff. So I couldn't really be able to get the opportunity. So open source nobody checks your resume before it's submitted pull requests to GitHub. Right. And so it was so free. Um, and so to me, like that was the starting place for me to feel adult for me, like, Oh, wow. I've worked on a feature that actually was, was merged into a project that people are using. And even though it's small.

doesn't have to be something crazy, but like, wow, actually that's amazing. I wrote code and I learned something, you know, and it was useful and something interesting. I don't have to wait for somebody and look, go interview me and do coding interviews and look at my resume and finally see them good enough to get to a job. I can just submit a PR and also learn in that process to get better as an engineer. So I think I just very appreciative.

of sort of these open source projects. And open source projects are always for technical users. Like for the most part, for the last 15, 20 years, it's like only engineers were able to clone a code base and do something, right? So I guess I grew up as an engineer through the open source way. And therefore I'm very interested with the developer ecosystem. And I will say, maybe this is by accident.

I wasn't really working on anything developer-fake focusing, because I worked on every with a search engine. IT was boring. It doesn't matter what it is. ⁓ And gaming has no developers, really. ⁓ But the next job I was in was called Cloud Foundry. And Cloud Foundry was a very much a developer-focused product. It's a Heroku open source kind of thing, basically. And I was really kind of drawn to it. I said, wow, dear.

When you work on developer products and it was becoming a takeoff, be something really interesting. All developers start talking about, and that sort of like vibe I never felt before, you know, this is really cool. I actually, I can be cool again in developers, you know, cause I never, I was never cool. I would never, I would never no CS degree. I was like, always trying to prove it. was always trying to make it. I'm just always trying to prove and make it, prove and make it. Like it's always in that like fighting mode.

Rui (21:25)
Hahaha

Timothy Chen (21:38)
⁓ And like, suddenly people suddenly very interested, know, when you work on games, sure, but like, I'm not the only person working on games, right? So you don't get that effect, but like developers even getting interested. Wow, that's super interesting. So I, and also like one thing I realized working open source that I felt like it's a very huge career hack, besides the no gatekeeping is the code I write becomes a resume.

because there's so much more visible what you're working on. Because when I put on resume, I work on these things, who knows how good or bad that is. But my GitHub resume is so much more obvious to be there. So I got reached out by so much recruiters when I saw that I have more GitHub stuff. And people invite me to talk on meetups and stuff like that more. And so I was like, wow, this is amazing. I want to do this more. So answer your question why I'm building for technical users. I think there's one aspect is open source that really has my bedrock of my career.

And also the type of problems I like to solve is also system problems, distributed systems problems. They tend to be more open, like engineer focused products, like databases or something like that. Otherwise you don't solve those kinds of problems that often. ⁓ And yeah, some products I worked on that become huge, sort of like by accidents. I joined Mesosphere to work on ⁓ Mesos, which become huge as well. I joined Kafka team at LinkedIn to work on Kafka. That was a pretty huge project back then.

I was able to be in part of these communities and I was so fascinated by them. Like, wow. It's the cool hype thing. It's like DeepSeek or whatever crazy thing it feels like. For a little engineer geeky nerdy people, that's the thing that they're all talking about. So it's always cool to work on something hot, for sure.

Rui (23:25)
Yeah, interesting. What I'm hearing is you grew as an engineer in open source community and you contribute back to that community. And so you built for that community. That's a very coherent story. I'm a little bit curious, before you, you know, came back to the US and came to Seattle for college, in Taiwan,

Were you also interested in engineering aspects of things? Were honestly you weren't thinking too much about it?

Timothy Chen (24:02)
If you grew up in Asia, ⁓ there's only one thing to think about. Like your parents, everybody only cares about how much your school, you know, I don't think, I don't think any of these other things are not important at all. Like, you want to do computers, make sure you study your history or geography and all. Just make sure your tests always show up to be this, like how much you rank, right? In your class. That only thing that matters. And I didn't go to international school when I go to Taiwan.

Rui (24:21)
You

Timothy Chen (24:32)
Like I went to just a normal middle school, elementary school and high school and everybody is just getting ready for the college exams, right? So I kind of grew up in that. I didn't have this like follow your passion. It doesn't matter.

Rui (24:46)
⁓ going back to building for the technical audience, even though you really like the community and you grew up there ⁓ as an engineer, what's the hardest part about building for, you know, other builders?

Timothy Chen (25:03)
You know, I was always just part of teams when I got started. So I didn't really realize how difficult or hard it is, but obviously once I started getting into open source and started to like, with others and the more popular a project is, the more politics there is. And I think all politics exists in different fashion. Like one builders all have opinions, right? Because we're all building things, you know.

There's no, nobody would agree on just one thing is the best way to do things. There's like 10 different ways to do Everybody's just coming in with their own egos and everybody wants to do this that way, this is that way. But you have to kind of agree somehow. so, and then there's like real politics behind it. like, hey, we're a company behind this project. We're trying to make money. So we have to make sure that we steer the project this way and don't make sure the other competitors can steer the project that way. And okay, that's a buyer. We had to make sure that person's thing he wants is in this project.

There's all these social engineering that kind of happens. So I would say like building for builders, for the most part, maybe it's not that different to just build for any users. Like every user had different needs, had different ways of liking different things. You kind of have to piss somebody off because you cannot please everybody. But I say open source always have like this like commercial interests behind the scenes. So it plays into the dynamics as well.

Basically, win the heart and minds of developers is ⁓ not a simple thing, just because people always feel like they know everything. ⁓ But like, mean, so you can always slowly change people's mind. Somebody's not as fast.

Rui (26:36)
And they are.

I see. So how do you build a consensus? especially open source project, right? Like people volunteer to contribute to a lot of different places. how do you build consensus to say like, this is the value that we choose. This is the type of user that we want to serve, you know, sorry, not everyone come here. We'll be happy. How does that consensus building mechanism really work?

Timothy Chen (27:05)
Like any society, it kind of works based on trust, right? ⁓ Because end of day, the people that can actually make the changes are not that many. People can complain all they want. Sometimes they would just leave or write huge blog posts and say this thing sucks, Or even fork the project. You can do whatever you want. But ultimately, it just comes out to maybe like five, three, two, or.

I would say really just less than 10 people that actually make major decisions in any community. Because you can't get everybody truly involved. They have to know the knowledge, have the expertise, have the trust between each other. Code is code. Coding, you need to have the quality to emerge because it's actually powering and touching a lot of different things, especially if it's an important project. If you break something, it will break a lot of different people's products and lives and stuff like that. So is anything in open source actually quite critical?

⁓ Which means the bar to make change is not that low. You you have to know what's going on. You have to have the background. ⁓ So consensus really comes down to like how do get these people to trust you? That's it. But then whoever knows these people and their motivation involved is the primary thing that drives these communities. Are they employed by companies that have commercial interests or are they employed by companies that have their own interests? Like we have to kind of marinate this in.

And then like, what all other forces are driving behind it? Who's paying these people? is like, all of this kind of stuff matters. Right? So it's not really consensus. When you think about consensus, like everybody agrees on something, but generally we're just like, we're trying to help each other. Cause they're really in that circle of like, you know, five, 10 people. Okay. Let's I know we might have different opinions, but we're to make sure we can ship this thing. okay. I'll, I'll let me go talk to you, iron out this thing. Okay. Can I get my feature that I really need to build my product in?

to be merged in this release, I'll help you towards next time. Like we just help each other out. And so it's really like a committee based, it's not really consensus. And you're making sure the committee actually votes to you. And so I think this is any community, essentially when it plays out, is like there's certain people that can actually earn the trust and build into that level of like trusted worthiness of group of people. And so the goal is usually, is trying to get into that place, right? If you're a committer.

Rui (29:22)
Hmm.

Timothy Chen (29:26)
or contributor to any open source. And most companies, the biggest job is to hire those people too, making sure that we have saying into that community as well. I think like the right thing is a meritocracy. Everybody submit their RMPs. Everybody have a huge debate design sessions where we should all, you can't do that for everything. Like for most of our open source are really just run by a couple of people. And they are all just driven by...

Rui (29:38)
Right.

Timothy Chen (29:56)
the interests of personal interests sometimes, but plus the company behind them. And you're trying to like play compromise within that.

Rui (30:05)
Interesting. I don't know much about infrastructure, building and product, I'm curious about whether there is any product that you've worked on that in the hindsight, if the timing or market were a little bit different, it would have worked out. ⁓ And please, please try to explain to me like.

knowing that I know nothing about the product itself.

Timothy Chen (30:26)
Yeah.

Um, okay. Well, the biggest thing I think that people know at that time, people no longer know this project anymore, but people know the primary company that I worked at a startup that I joined called Mesosphere. The biggest open source project we're working on is called Mesos. And you probably never heard of it. Um, uh, but you might have heard of the thing that replaced Mesos, which is called Kubernetes. Uh, you might have heard of Kubernetes before, Because it's more commonly known project.

Rui (30:55)
and

Timothy Chen (30:57)
Right. ⁓

Rui (30:57)
Right.

Can you explain to because some of the audience might not even work in tech. What does the Kubernetes do?

Timothy Chen (31:03)
Okay. So yeah,

yeah. these software Kubernetes, Mesos, the software is, is type of software that manage computers for you. Like I give you a bunch of computers. Like if I have a thousand computers, you don't want to treat every single computer differently. Right. I have to go. It's like, have a thousand humans. I have Bob, Alice, you know, Tim and Ruri. I have to go and check every single one of them.

Upgrade and fix every single one of them. Like it's much more simpler for me to treat them as a whole group together. I have a type of software that can treat me as one big group. So when I, when I run a type of software, I need 10 machines. I can just go to Kubernetes and Kubernetes, please give me 10 machines to run my software. It automatically knows where to put it, run it, manage it and all that stuff. So it's almost like a, we call it orchestration software, but it's like a way to, to don't think about individual computers anymore, but just give one commander.

that can do things for me and all my computers. So these software are kind of like your overall kind of like commander type of pattern type of software. And so the biggest, like if you've heard of Docker before, which is yet another type of open source software, but it very popular. It's a way to just package and run software. Like software is code, but needs to run on every computer. Docker is kind of the way to like put it into a nice box so it can fit everywhere, even though the boxes might look different.

Rui (32:13)
Mm-hmm.

Timothy Chen (32:27)
my Windows machine and Willix machines, my running Amazon or Google, it doesn't matter. No matter what the underlying thing difference is, Docker figured out a way to package it and run it nicely everywhere. And so that was this, this new group of software was born because Docker become a thing and we need a new type of commander software that knows how to take these containers and, and abstract away, ⁓ like the last generation of software does, and more. And so.

I think the interesting part is I would join a StarCode Mesosphere 2014. was first 10 employees, I think. ⁓ And the company exists, was basically trying to create a company behind this open source product called Mesos, which is one of the earliest software that is running containers, like these Docker stuff, at scale. Twitter was using in production. ⁓ Twitter has a huge amount of computers, actually.

physical clusters are running like five to six digits of computers, data centers, and they all run Mesos. And even Apple was, Siri was starting to use Mesos as well. So you have this like very large scale like clusters all chooses to use Mesos. And so, you know, if you understand or study any sort of like how any infra tooling takes over, once you see these big players start to adopt something,

You know, it's usually these tools will become what everybody else will run around because it's really these kinds of software at very low level. You don't, you don't switch around that often. So when Docker started 2013 called dot cloud, it popularized Docker. And at the same time, I think our founders sought opportunity that, Hey, we have this growing open source project called messos that Twitter is using from the Berkeley project. Let's start a company behind it.

So you can make sure that this software becomes the most popular way to run all your ⁓ applications everywhere. And therefore we can start to become a commercial entity behind it. And we can start charging like how MongoDB or any database company, you have this open source thing that becomes popular and, we can sell a better version of things. you don't, you don't have to run it yourself anymore. You don't have to hire people to run it. Like we can basically operate and run it much nicer for you. So.

You know, when I turned 20 and 14, there's no Kubernetes. Mesos was the only thing that exists. There are other classes offered before that, but it really that designed for Docker and container. So Mesos was like the number one thing back then. So we were a hot company. That's why we're like a unicorn, closer to unicorn within two years, three or three years. And I think, you know, when you see the momentum back then of how Mesos grew,

It really felt like we will be the next generation of software. You look at MesosCon, which is the typical conference around Mesos. You have like the big banks, have Twitter, Apple, you all these logos. Like wow. Like when I was working there, it really felt like we'll just take over the world on that layer. And Docker was trying to even like do the same thing with us, but it couldn't even like really take over as well. And so I think we felt pretty good.

hey, we're getting so popular. Everybody started using it. You raise a huge amount of money. OK, you're now on the revenue path now.

But I think one thing that really killed us was this sort of like arrogance, I guess, that we'll just keep being the number one option open source while not doing too much of it and just trying to make money too quickly. And then there's this other project called Kubernetes, born out of Google. It was almost like a side project.

There's only like two or three people working on it, know, Joe Beta and some other people come to talk to us. And I was like, okay, what is this thing? It's not, you know, and even like talk to us and trying to like get us to collaborate, to work on this together. And, know, was like, yeah, I know we're messes. We can take, we don't, we don't need you. You're not going to go anywhere anyways. Like you like that kind of attitude, like not me personally, but like our founders and stuff. was like the sentiment, right.

I think the sentiment was like, we have so much momentum, we'll do better, we'll keep growing. Even though it's Google or whatever, all these things, it doesn't matter. And they're not that serious anyway, seems like. We'll just make sure that we're on the winner. But we have to grow with our confidence that we'll just take over the world. Because we're way ahead anyways. And the world definitely showed us a lesson. And I don't think it's Google itself really

because of they are really that much better or anything, is I think sometimes you ignore the power of community, actually overall. Because if the community starts to not believe you're the only thing you should be using, if you stop progressing as fast, or it gives other people more oxygen to do something much more simpler and nicer than you are, once the community starts to believe, start to shift a little bit towards something else.

and you don't make sure that doesn't keep happening, the power of community compounds way faster than your revenue thing. Because revenue is just, it's a lagging indicator. Like you, get companies to buy you, it takes a longer time. Like your logos might be growing, but the community might shift, you know? And so we learned with a hard way that I think the type of selling is taking very long cycles. So you can really hard to like just scale crazy. Uh, but

we didn't really spend as much resources as possible and all the attention on open source, just assuming we would just win it because we were winning back then. know, history had taught us like community and the consensus where the committee actually votes on their feet. It's way bigger and powerful than you'd ever think. You know, so you don't ever want to really ignore the community and what phase of your software life cycle it is because it will come back and just eat you alive.

And that's one thing I learned, right? Because I think a lot of times when we're starting a new thing or like we assume like, hey, once we grow to a certain good points, even though we haven't fully be 100 % everywhere, like we're on a good path, it will just keep happening. It doesn't always, you know, there's always a possibility someone can disrupt you, even if you're early. And I think we're seeing this in AI a lot, right? A lot of hot AI projects back in two years ago, I can't even remember where they are anymore, you know? There's a huge amount of like 100K stars projects.

Like it was the next thing, look at the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. Like, I don't even where the next thing. A year ago, next thing, I can't remember anymore. Like it's just like gone, gone in history, but completely. Right. And so that's the kind of the beauty and the scary part of a community is like everybody wants to find the next shiny thing, but to be actually the next shiny thing forever is the hardest part of all. And if you want to start a company around any of those kinds of things, you have to make sure you have to maintain them, which is very, very difficult.

So you have both expectations on you at the same time.

Rui (39:45)
I love this story. And this story also made me think about the early days of NVIDIA, how NVIDIA started with this, trying to cater to the gaming industry, the graphic chips. actually, they started in a commodity market. There are probably dozens, if not more than dozens, of companies who are also trying to build such chips.

And so it's actually highly, highly competitive. They actually did their first design wrong, like their strategy was wrong because they were designed for the fact that the memory would be super limited. So they need to work with that constraint. And then they have to like shift to their strategy later. ⁓ But then somehow they end up winning the game, even though in a hot red sea. And the key there was to just keep going really fast and faster than

anyone else that can, you know, churn through the product and then so that they can get faster user feedback and then start building the community around that product itself. So this is fascinating how like sometimes you think that you're going to win and then something unexpected come up just because maybe arrogance will whatever. And then you just like slowly fade away and get killed. And sometimes you think that you are going to get killed because it's such a

hot area and everybody is trying to compete, but if you just keep paddling in a relatively smart way, maybe you can actually make out of it. Fascinating.

Timothy Chen (41:15)
Yeah.

Yeah. know, replacing Nvidia seems impossible now. It won't be that impossible forever. Right? And so the only best time to start is now. Because it's a while. It will take you another 10 years to do it. But that doesn't mean like it never happen. And so I think that's the beauty of technology is nothing stays forever for the most part

The products will link forever. Like any infraproduct you buy, like people still have Cisco routers everywhere. Like it's not like you fully replace things, but it will not, it will not be forever. disruption will happen. The market keeps changing. That's the beauty of this software market. And that's where we have a job to be honest. Like it's not going to get back a company that's gone, that host categories is gone forever. Like you back one.

it gone good, find the next one that can kill that thing, right? Like your just continuation of just trying to make sure you back something great. And it's a cycle, know, keep finding next cycles to back.

Rui (42:14)
so let's talk a little bit about your investment journey after like building so many different technical products. You're now the managing partner of, ⁓ essence VC. ⁓ let me first start asking a very off the topic question. I check out essence homepage and it has this like bright lemonade yellow bumblebee vibes. Is there a story behind that visual design?

Timothy Chen (42:42)
Like, what's my motivation, reason for that or?

Rui (42:44)
Yeah, for that specific visual, like this

black and yellow stripes.

Timothy Chen (42:51)
⁓ yeah, is it weird or?

Rui (42:53)
No, no, no, it's not. It's

just like reminds me of like, my God, I'm looking at a bumblebee. That's my first reaction.

Timothy Chen (42:58)
Ah, yeah.

I think I wasn't even thinking, you know, it's not like I have like months and weeks of design decision. Not really. think what I'm, whatever I do, I do it in a way that feels authentic to me. And I also try to say something too, right? Like, and I think for me, uh, when I'm thinking of what I want to start, actually I was angel investor first, right? I saw my company was to talk to her at 2018, started doing angel investing.

And I was just figuring out what I want to do really. angel invest, when I started angel investing, wasn't even like investing in just infrastructure. was just, I was investing with my friends. So I actually did a bunch of other stuff like food delivery app, a nail painting robot. do an HR tech. I'm just like some consumer stuff. My interest is actually pretty wide, you know, but I think one thing I realized quickly, ⁓ after some angel investment and some talking to other friends was like, okay, the ones.

The companies and spaces I don't know well, even if I done well, I have no idea how to do the next one well, if I'm really serious about being an investor. But the ones in the markets I know well, I can have a much more deeper understanding. So I have more intention, more of a thesis driven approach when it back these companies. And also I can learn from it much more better, I would think, than other ones. And so...

And I've noticed like the one, the one site did the most well with my angel investments are all the companies I back in the infrastructure space. And I was okay. This is pretty obvious. I should start a fund. If I want to start a fund, it has to be infra focused, you know, and I was like, okay, what name should this be? You know, what vibe should I, I was just sitting down and I need a website, you know, I don't know what website should I do. And I just picking random names and fonts and colors.

And like I mentioned, I work on games before, you know, I worked on like these little like really interesting type of designs. ⁓ I like, like very, you know, and the back infrastructure as well. Right. And I think one of the thought process back then is also like infrastructure software has been changing from like really traditional top-down cells where like everybody has a salesperson go in and you go buy Oracle database for like 300 K. And the only way you try out is.

set up a very specific machine and go download it. That era has changed into the Docker, the Kubernetes thing where people just download it. Whatever is a new hot thing, becomes the momentum and the new standard. And you download, you try the product, and you just start to pull it into your workplace. So it feels more a consumer product. So that was trying to say infrastructure products. I call myself Essence because we back infrastructure stuff. So that's probably more obvious. But the whole theme around it is like,

Infrastructure products doesn't, it's not your boring things anymore. Like infrastructure product, you need to, you need to create this hypey wave and hypey wave that this is the next best thing for developers that want to choose to use you as the best product in that space. And therefore it kind of chooses almost like a video game type vibe, you know, like a geeky nerdy video type vibe, coloring scheme and like a font scheme.

because I feel like that kind of represents my background when I'm interested in. And also it kind of represents infrastructure should be this young and vibrant feel, right? Because the build the next infrastructure products is no longer just like complete and visible, just highly complex software. Like I'm reading another big Cisco router, the manual or something like that. Like that kind of feel is no longer. It's like, you gotta be the...

Rui (46:28)
Hmm.

Timothy Chen (46:47)
New cool thing. Yeah. And like cursor, guess, like some of these products are really cool. Like people are all talking about all the time and it's really like high velocity, high interest. Those kinds of products are like stuff we would like to definitely like to back. And part of our value prop is, at S &BC, we also understand that motion really well. We want to be helping any founder want to do a similar thing to be the next hype thing. Yeah.

Rui (47:12)
And you describe Essence as the kind of investor that I wish I had. What did you not get as a founder that now you're trying to offer?

Timothy Chen (47:23)
Yeah, obviously we're backed by pretty good no name funds. And I don't really have like any too much complaints about it, I guess, in some level. But this is what I learned from my founder friends. Because when I was fundraising back then, I was 2016, I left Mesosphere and I was starting a company. I was first time fundraising. I don't know any VCs at all. I was really like,

trying to figure out what VCs should I even work with. Everybody's sounding like they're the best thing ever when I talk to them. We help you hire, we have to find customers, we do so many things for you. And that's why I hear all these amazing things that these investors keep telling me. And so we were sitting there with all our co-founders like, ⁓ wow, these people sound like they do everything. And I caught up with some other founder friends that already raised their seed round and stuff like that. was like,

help us out. How did you choose your investors? Which ones do you feel like you're best to work with? My founder friends, they're further on than me, just basically look at me as like, don't believe in any kind of BS they're saying. They're not going to do any of this stuff. Basically, find the ones that are to be the less harmful ones. If they actually do any of this stuff, you saw it, it's just cherry on top.

I was like, okay, I see. I see just how this works, right? So I kind of have that mindset like, okay, we're just trying to find, okay, what is the best branding and alignments and maybe the people will like enough and it's like the less harmful type of people. And so, you know, all of our investors are good. We cannot say like they're bad, but I don't think they were like that, that helpful. Like, cause I, when I think of like on our journey, what's the most helpful people it's besides capital.

are really the people that actually has helped us able to progress our business, right? ⁓ Can we able to like find a way to like find more customers we actually able to land, help us hire more people that can actually want to hire, ⁓ help us iterate on idea to help us like do something more real that make us more progress. And I reflect that on like that journey, like most investors, they try to help, but they can't really be that helpful. ⁓

I think they just have too little understanding how actually a startup works. So they are good at picking and selling the capital, but they don't ever really have to be really good at helping because that's what was the norm, that the competition of capital back then wasn't that scarce, right? And so you didn't really feel like you actually had to deliver that much. You just to make sure you look good enough. So the founders just think you're great.

to good enough marketing and that's kind of it. But you don't actually bet on them to do anything real. So what I thought about like the best investors truly on my cap table are none of these branding funds is actually angel investors. Like a couple of them, because they are so much more in tune of what's really important in our space. They actually seeing some real examples how things work out and give us much more tactical devices and actually help us in a very more meaningful way.

So when I sell my company and I'm thinking back, I think that I wish what I have in my cap table are people that actually feel like more angel investors, like a couple of them that are really good, but actually write bigger checks and work with us. Because I think that should be the real representative of a lead investor. Which are people that actually care about you in some level, also care about your space.

Rui (51:09)
Mm.

Timothy Chen (51:12)
Because if I'm just here and I have interest of your potential to exit in this construction market, but I have no interest to live and learn more about a construction market. Like then anything you tell me, update me about like the insights and things they're trying to figure out. Like I have no context, but too little, right?

So my flip side, was like, you know what? I want to invest in spaces I understand. I want to study, like obsess like you are. So I can help explore those spaces with you. can give you much more tactical concrete things to think about and real trade-offs to consider. Like I'll tell you, like you should change your product to do this. Like I would just, you change your company to do Y. Like you should do this and that. Like we have much more stronger opinions and things to talk about.

And we also help you in much more concrete ways. Of course, I can't just be noise. We have to be kind of like right as well. But if we are able to like move that needle, we're so much more useful as a fund to you because you had to iterate six months to learn that. Hopefully we can shorten that time to two months, right? Or you could change the trajectory of your company because you're pursuing a route that maybe that's not as optimal. There's a better way of.

Rui (52:17)
Yeah.

Timothy Chen (52:24)
talking about your product or positioning your product or like changing how people think and how the product overall works. This way changes the odds of your company a lot. So that's kind of like what I meant is like, feel like investors are sometimes a little bit too detached with the reality of the actual progress making of a startup. And I kind of like to flip it around, like we actually need to be involved. ⁓

you know, uh, and because by being involved, one, we can actually be meaningfully helpful. And second, we can actually learn more meaningfully more, be buying more, right? To prepare for our next, we learn a lot more from that engagement to go to the next one. And so we are in continuation of the learning.

Rui (53:01)
Yeah.

Timothy Chen (53:10)
I would ask them much more concrete, detailed questions and try to figure out some more detailed things with them and do things for them in a more meaningful way. so to me, that's more fun. It's almost feel like I'm kind of like a semi-co-founder, maybe like a 5 % co-founder or something like that. So you can actually see, I don't have to explain in context. Tim knows what I'm doing and has enough deep understanding.

And I'm willing to bring all these questions to you that I normally wouldn't even ask any other VC.

Rui (53:42)
Yeah, that's awesome. do you invest in two

companies that are technically competition with each other. How are you going to give them advice? What do you do with that situation?

Timothy Chen (53:58)
It happens so often, not intentionally. No. So, so none of this is my intention. It's like, I didn't intend to leave all the startups I joined, you know, they all shut down or whatever. Similar. When I, when I back companies, they often don't have much at all. So it's maybe just three people thinking about what to do next time. Maybe have a rough idea. Like maybe one example of our portfolio that maybe competing is like.

Rui (54:11)
you

Timothy Chen (54:26)
two vector databases like Chroma and LensDB. Like they often kind of like viewed as vector databases. it's like, the people even asked me like, Tim, why did you back two the same companies here that competing? Like, well, I backed LensDB when was Eto AI, which is really, they even haven't started YC yet and doing just something completely different. And I backed Chroma later. And then after I backed Chroma, Lens decided to even do a vector database. And then I'm like, you know,

So upfront, I have no idea. And if I know, will ask the founder upfront, are you okay for you to do this? Cause we often will skip companies if the founder actually feel like it's too much conflict. Cause the social reputation damage is not worth it in my end. Like upfront, like knowingly and doing this is something I really want to avoid. But if we're backing pre-seeds, like the company changes ideas like three times in a row, like God knows which one.

And then it's often funny enough, like in the end, if when they feel like they're competing at a meantime, most often enough, they actually end up not competing as well. You know, so it's a very interesting natural progression. ⁓ I've noticed so far in the journey. So yeah, I'm not intentionally trying to back anything that competing, but like you said, like this is all comes under trust anymore. Like if I believe Tim will tell all my secrets to the other guy, I'm not going to tell so many secrets anymore.

Rui (55:25)
you

Timothy Chen (55:55)
So we're just earning trust with the founders. That's the most important part of it, to do anything in this life. I think to be able to back more startups, have the reputation, have other people willing to put us in their cap tables with them, it's all trust. This whole world runs on trust. And so we have to be trustworthy. Our actions need to continue to show trust. And people that doesn't know us.

Rui (56:11)
Mm.

Timothy Chen (56:20)
have to hear that we are very trustworthy or even see something that willing to see that, okay, this is our really trustworthy people. And so that's something we have to just like making sure we can keep doing. ⁓ So I don't have any like a firewall policy. I only talk to one competitor at 2 a.m. another one at 6 a.m. or something like that. I don't have like, it's just me by the way. Sometimes in bigger funds, it's like that person only works on that company, that person works in that company. They don't share any information. Like I don't believe that by the way, but sure.

Rui (56:38)
Hahaha

Timothy Chen (56:50)
It's just me though. I don't have one brain here, another brain here, another Tien Chen, you know, that doesn't talk to the other Tien Chens, you know, it's just me.

Rui (56:53)
Hahaha! ⁓

one thing you also mentioned on the Essence website, it's about one value that you think ⁓ could potentially be huge for those funders is to help them find and discover and tell the story. ⁓ Was that a challenge that you had to work through yourself? What have you been seeing? Like, how are you thinking about the storytelling and positioning point?

Timothy Chen (57:26)
Yeah, yeah. My own startup was a mess. We raised funding pretty quickly because all of us were working on hot startups in the same space that we're starting a company. So was pretty easy. Not saying I'm like an open AI engineer starting a new company, but I kind of had that feeling back then. So it didn't take us that much to raise. I think raising, I realized quickly that raising money is not the hard part.

Raising money is actually the easy part. The rest is really much harder. ⁓ And so much of this part of market fit journey exploration it's a very confusing process. It's not like I can just run a very particular way and style and then just always find the data you need and everything. Huge amount of it is trying to find alignment with people that are willing to take a risk on us. And that is your solid, very particular need for them.

⁓ and people don't have much patience. So I cannot spend all my time and explain to everything, everyone does this way. So what way are we describing and focus our energy on the right people and focus our way to describe our things the best way possible, improve our odds so much more than not. And I learned that very quickly. I was trying to explain my product can do three different things. And everyone's confused. I asked them, some other friends, Hey, have you thought about what our product? ⁓ yeah. What did you do again?

Rui (58:47)
Hahaha!

Timothy Chen (58:47)
They can't

remember. And I was like, okay, this is not going anywhere. If they can't remember what I'm doing, it was like I'm telling them too much. Right. I didn't find a pain point. They're actually really having pain then and able to align us super well. I will say, so to answer your question, I think story comes into two very, very important audiences in any startup. One is to investors. Cause when you're trying to raise money, your investors is a pretty interesting audience, right? They have to make a decision to fund you.

And so they have to understand your story and get excited about your story like themselves. And then you have our customers. Your customer had to be excited about what you're doing and willing to pay the price, take the risk of using a startup product and go through that journey. Right. And those are two different stories. They're not the same story. You you cannot use the story to sell to your customers to end up coming back and try to use the same story to try to raise your funding because they're very different.

Investors care about your future. Customers care about the present. The customers care, like, what problem are you solving for me now that I'm desperately need you for? If you only sell that to investors, they'll be like, OK, that might be nice. But is that really big enough? Is there any other solutions out there? How do you differentiate between this and that and this and that? Or other potential other companies that might be going into space and not? So the future is so much important.

Like in seven years and 10 years, I'm going to become this, right? Which is very different. Just a whatever, a thing you can imagine what I'm doing today. my job, especially working with like very technical founders, their brain has never been trained or they never really had to been trained to really like think of any other audience than themselves. Cause you don't want to talk to other engineers and how do you impress other engineers?

is to talk as much detail system, crazy stuff. Hey, I look at this crazy kernel hacking thing and I just try to like, you got all the glory details, talk about all the interesting stuff, all the interesting like research papers are implementing. Like you kind of like using technical prowess to kind of like impress each other. That's like your typical thing your engineers do, right? And then you bring that into a banker, like investor.

I was like, Jesus Christ, what is this? It feels like a bunch of PhDs just like interested in technology alone, right? Not interested in making money, not interested in knowing how to do this, just hoping something happens. So my job with founders, especially very highly technical founders, which is our primary audience, is to re-change the story completely. I was just like, hey, I know what you're doing. I often tell these founders, even show me your deck. Your deck's going to be like, it's shit anyways. You know?

Rui (1:01:09)
You

Timothy Chen (1:01:34)
I don't want to see your deck, you know, it's not going to be good. And I kind of know it. So it's okay. Let me sit down with you and completely start from scratch. What are you doing? Show me your code or show me what your paper is. Show me what you're doing first. Just show me your product, your command line outputs, whatever. Show it to me and what it does This is what you're doing. This is how I would describe your company, you know, and

all the different three, five, 10, 20 minutes you've been trying to tell me about this. It's like confusing this hell. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear talking about this anymore. know, you know, please just describe your company this way. you people to be excited about you, not be confused about you, right? And you cannot change them, right? It's not like going to go through and do another PhD with them. Right. So, um,

I have to really nail down a story for them and know down two different versions of story with them, investors and their customers. And I think they have a better way to find their own thing to customers. But I think investors, a complete weird crowd for them. Like most of them don't know how to talk to them. So I often would be that bridge. It's like, I know how to package your story way better than you are. Right. Let's rewrite this whole deck, rewrite the whole thing. And I do it every single day. not every hour. ⁓

So.

Rui (1:02:51)
Now,

GPT can turn any random, ambiguous bullet points into a compelling story. Yeah, so what becomes more valuable in storytelling, especially the story that you're trying to help them to see?

Timothy Chen (1:02:57)
That's true.

yeah, that's a question. But I think what GPD doesn't know is people. Because when you're pitching to investors, it's not like every investor likes the same thing. And you don't know what investor has what story they more believe in and other things, right? We know because we're observing, we're talking to them directly. So I know

like what the top tier funds potentially individual people in the top tier funds, what they are looking for. Because we're talking about the future. We're trying to figure this stuff out sometimes, right? So the story is not generic. Sometimes I know, OK, this story probably lands with these funds, these particular funds, with these particular people. So this context is very hard. And I think.

In a day, like even if ChatGPT can give me a script to maybe tailor a little bit more I think we're always are trying to make sure that the next narrative is another breakthrough, another like big thing. So I don't think this sort of generic data collection and sort of like outputs is going to be the easiest for ChatGPT to be able to like tailor to audience. Cause I know what they want and you're not going to find all that information online. They're not going to tell you.

Right? And so it's so much more context in the middle. Yeah.

Rui (1:04:26)
one last question is just, is there a problem you're still trying to solve?

Timothy Chen (1:04:32)
Me finding a startup to solve or just solving for myself?

Rui (1:04:35)
for for yourself.

Timothy Chen (1:04:38)
I think starting a VC fund is always weird. I never feel like I make it. Even though I feel like a lot of people say, Teteh, you've done it. You back a lot of companies. You raised four funds already. You definitely have probably have everything figured out. like, not really. The world is moving so fast. AI is constantly changing. This venture landscape is constantly changing. So I think I'm always still trying to solve my own problem.

How do I stay relevant next three years? You know, I don't feel like I've always solved it, you know? And so that's probably as a career, that's probably the hardest thing I'm starting to figure out, like what is the right things we should do in this year, next year to be best positioned to do great investments the next couple of years and constantly trying to turn that through. And so I'm trying to hire the right people, maybe change our approaches, change the way we talk about our funds. Like we have to change.

on a more faster pace than other funds that have been alive before. Because I think this nature of industry is actually an ever-going change as well. So I'm still trying to change. My website you look at, it will change. Because I don't want to be subscribing myself the same way I subscribed myself even a year ago. Because we're fundamentally going to start shifting the things that are making sense for this time and era as well.