Peer Richelsen | Algora TV

Learn about Cal.com from one of the cofounders

Peer Richelsen

Watching now

zaf: hey hey!

rfc: hell yea

IoannisFlo: looking good guys!

rfc: (@andreasklinger here)

dahal: Hey guys Puru @itspuru here 👋

IoannisFlo: that was very helpful!

chronark: :wave

chronark: 👋

IoannisFlo: great question about distribution & open source

zaf: torvalds

dahal: Re: cofounder - great question 🙌

IoannisFlo: 👏 this was super fun and insightful, thank you Peer!

zaf: great session ❤️‍🔥 looking forward to the next one!

natedunn: This is a VOD but does my message persist?

natedunn: Hmm it does

00:00 good you know going live I imagine it's just a footer so that's not many hey everyone this is

00:06 the first commercial open source office hours I'm happy to do them every Friday I'm actually

00:11 completely booked into way until May so pretty crazy as many many people who are joining so

00:20 I'm excited to go live on actually I think I think I'm also live on Algorand.

00:25 So that's pretty cool.

00:26 It's like a developer first streaming platform.

00:30 And yeah, I mean, first things first, I'm Pierre, co-founder of Cal.com.

00:36 Been probably in startups for like the last 12, 14 years.

00:42 But I'd say most recently for the past three years in open source.

00:45 And I really found a nice home here.

00:48 I'm really enjoying it.

00:50 I'm not a huge expert.

00:52 I've never taken an open source company public like GitLab, but I know at least the early

00:58 stage and I'm really interested in the early stages of companies as well.

01:02 And so I think this is a great place for you to ask you know product ideas or product feedback fundraising advice navigating

01:10 you know large communities or small communities and everything else I think

01:16 we can just start with some introduction so I know a little bit what what

01:20 everyone's up about yeah Charlie you wannaan, do you want to go first?

01:26 You're still not muted.

01:30 It's me, right?

01:31 Yeah, you can go first.

01:33 Yes, sure.

01:34 So my name is Charan.

01:36 And previously, I was a software engineer.

01:39 I was an AI researcher for the past four years.

01:42 I worked at places like this Microsoft and Amazon.

01:47 And after that, like recently I've been working on this new idea, which is named by Permian,

01:53 our company name is Permian.ai. You can check the website out. What we're essentially building is,

01:58 we're trying to turn the boring static videos into a one-on-one live chat.

02:06 And we are doing this by using the recent innovations

02:13 in the AI.

02:14 I can dive more deep into it,

02:17 but this is a short introduction for myself.

02:21 Cool.

02:26 Next one.

02:27 Who wants to go next?

02:28 Pontus?

02:35 Oh, you're muted.

02:36 Sorry.

02:38 I think I muted you.

02:39 Can I unmute you?

02:40 Yeah, I think I did.

02:41 Yeah, OK.

02:41 There you go.

02:42 Oh, can I speak now?

02:43 Yeah.

02:44 Yes. All right, perfect. So I'm Pontus. you yeah i think i do yeah okay there you go oh can i speak now yeah yes all right perfect so so

02:46 i'm pontus i've been an engineer for the past 10 years but just recently launched midday and started

02:53 that as a project from my own side just to basically streamline my end-to-end process of

03:00 handling my own businesses but yeah i open source it last week been building it on

03:07 my spare hours for the past four and a half month but now going full time of

03:13 course and yeah really pushing this platform forward so very cool my mission

03:19 very cool yeah I think I'm on the wait list and I'm very excited to try the product. I

03:25 think I actually started signing up but I didn't know if my co-founder, we need to do

03:32 like a compliance check on like where we connect our financial data. So I guess that's Jet

03:36 Haskell.

03:37 Yeah.

03:38 Cool. Kinjo, do you want to go next? Yeah, sure. Hi, guys.

03:45 I'm Kinjo.

03:46 I was building this marketplace for listed startups

03:50 to recruit talent through referrals,

03:51 clocked around 60K.

03:53 And it's been a couple of weeks since I decided to pivot.

03:56 And before that, I had a small exit.

03:59 And I've built a consumer social with 50K plus users.

04:03 Yeah, that's pretty much it.

04:04 And I moved to SF in a couple of months, 50K plus users. Yeah, that's pretty much how I moved to SF.

04:05 Been like a couple of months, dropped out of school.

04:08 Yeah.

04:10 How was the experience so far?

04:12 Oh, that was fun.

04:13 I mean, it's better than New York.

04:16 I don't like the nightlife though.

04:18 Yeah.

04:19 Yeah, nightlife sucks in the South.

04:21 That's true.

04:22 Yeah.

04:23 Well, it doesn't suck because it doesn't exist.

04:25 But yeah, I'm fine with it.

04:25 It doesn't exist.

04:28 Cool. Zach, do you wanna go next?

04:30 Sure.

04:31 Hey, I'm Zach.

04:32 I've worked on some open source Nostr stuff recently.

04:35 I saw that Piers, you're at least like you're on Nostr,

04:39 you don't post too much, but yeah, like you're interested.

04:41 So I'm very curious to hear your thoughts

04:44 on like making a lot of these open source

04:46 and non-store clients like economically feasible and

04:49 your thoughts on the space in general.

04:52 Yeah, I'm very I'd say I'm very interested in the space.

04:56 It's just that I think and it's the worst thing about social networks,

05:02 but like you can have the best product and people will still end up using Twitter or X

05:07 because they have a following there

05:09 or they're just used to it and it's muscle memory.

05:11 So I think I'm very bullish on Lustre,

05:13 especially with its focus on Bitcoin.

05:16 But yeah, it's tough.

05:17 And especially from a client point of view,

05:19 even more interesting how to monetize that.

05:22 Cool.

05:25 Okay, yeah.

05:26 Let's go into open

05:27 questions. I know you have one.

05:30 Shahan, if you want to go first.

05:32 You were quite eager.

05:35 Yeah, so

05:35 I think I

05:36 really want to know how

05:39 cal.com operates

05:42 at the team

05:44 level. So what are some things which sets apart

05:47 cal.com in terms of work culture in the team compared to any other

05:51 yeah um so there's this interesting dynamic in open source where people ask like why are you

06:01 open source and there's many reasons um compliance and self-hosting and white labeling and developer frankness but um i'm at a point where i say you actually ship

06:10 faster because you empower your users to help fix things or build products and build features

06:16 and so from a pure um like the fastest startups are the ones that that most likely hit product

06:24 market fit

06:25 because you just have a certain amount of runway.

06:28 If you run out of runway, you shut down the business,

06:30 or you try and raise more funding.

06:33 And so you really don't have that many options.

06:36 And also once you hit product market fit,

06:38 it's all about kind of protecting it and building it out and you're growing,

06:42 growing the product. and so both for

06:45 finding programmatic fit but also growing the business once you have it um the speed of iteration

06:51 is the most important one so i think if you have a good community if you have users if you have a

06:55 user base that's growing um but you only have one or two engineers well they will ask for a ton of

07:02 stuff for bug fixes, for features.

07:06 And I think what I've seen with the open

07:13 source community, and this is true for Calabcom, for Documento, for Formbricks, is

07:18 if you empower your users to become contributors and they can actually

07:23 come in and contribute and maybe even get paid with, you know, Agora.

07:26 And I think that's just you're beating every other company that has just two engineers you have two engineers and 500 contributors right and so for us

07:33 um speed has always been a focus uh but also you know um speed internally as a core team so we do

07:40 have a from the very beginning we had a core team um because you can also not just

07:45 like rely on the community like you still need kind of like a red line you know like this is

07:50 where we go this is also like you need to become very good at saying no because if you have a

07:55 community there's also people who want to take a property in a different direction or they want to

07:59 you know uh i don't know want to put a button on the top right? And we're like, no, we don't put the buttons there.

08:06 So I think having a really good core team

08:09 that just really focuses on speed,

08:13 like on just getting shit done, beats everything.

08:17 And I think that's true for every startup.

08:20 And so when you're an open source,

08:21 I think you can have a superpower,

08:24 but of course also communities can be distracting.

08:26 So make sure you really have your own way of thinking.

08:31 A quick follow up, if I may.

08:34 So here, for example, how do you think about this iteration?

08:40 In the sense of let's say you're getting a lot of feature requests,

08:43 especially if your roadmap is

08:46 non-linear, you can try multiple things, but you don't know which one to implement first.

08:51 Like, do you have some signals you observe at your team level which we could take inspiration from?

09:00 It really depends on the stage of the product. I think if you are building something,

09:07 like say fundamental, I think I would focus on features that reach the most people as they go

09:14 live. As you grow out the business right now, we also, you know, let's say work with enterprise

09:20 companies. Some of them make a quarter million a year in revenue and so now you

09:25 end up having a situation where you may have to prioritize those features but we

09:31 kind of solved that by having we split the team into kind of like their core

09:35 team that just works on continuously core product and then you have like a

09:40 small let's say enterprise team that just like really goes into the more niche features that only one out of 100,000 people will use, but that person

09:50 pays you a lot of money for it.

09:54 These features also typically end up, if you have an open core product, which means you

09:58 have an open source piece and you have a closed source piece.

10:02 It doesn't even have to be closed source, like all of our source code is open,

10:05 but the enterprise version is only source available.

10:11 And I think to me, the day-to-day engineer

10:17 doesn't need that single feature

10:19 that we just shipped for this one single customer.

10:22 And so you kind of end up building an open source team,

10:27 you know, like an open core team,

10:28 and then be more like a close core team.

10:31 And you want to empower them to, of course,

10:34 move as fast as you can.

10:36 So I think making the decisions in the early days,

10:39 it's really just, you know, getting to market quick.

10:43 And we, you know, I'd say by the point of version three,

10:49 I think every component has been like rewritten,

10:52 every database adapter has been rewritten.

10:57 Like there's just so much,

10:58 there's very little code today that's from the early days.

11:02 So I think the main objective is, you know,

11:04 get the V1 out as soon as you can

11:07 and then just keep, you know, V2, V3.

11:10 We're actually about to launch V4, like, in a month.

11:15 And, yeah, and just, you know,

11:17 truly keep working and working closely with your customers.

11:21 But I think the noise there is,

11:22 if you have a product that's really accessible for everyone really focus on the features that like are actually relevant for everyone

11:30 yeah one last like follow-up i have for this so uh yeah so we keep building the features on a daily

11:38 basis uh but how do you align like the long- mission towards this? Should we see as this long-term vision or mission as a fluid thing which could change?

11:49 Or we should have that one thing in mind?

11:52 For example, I've seen you want to reach a billion people.

11:55 So is that a fluid vision or it keeps changing or it's just one thing you're running towards?

12:01 Yeah, it's actually a great question.

12:04 Let me share my screen so we do have a

12:07 handbook written and I think the very first day we like before we wrote a line of code me and my

12:14 co-founder were like okay if this becomes a company and there's a chance that this doesn't

12:19 but you know every time you work on something you can consider okay what happens if this actually becomes a thing and

12:31 the reality is if like if you're working on something you have to optimize for the best case you have to think okay what happens if this is actually a success because the chances are it's

12:36 going to fail like 99 anyway so like you don't need to prepare for failure because that's that's

12:41 a default like what happens if this fails it's not as a default like what happens if this fails is not as interesting as like what happens if this actually works and so i do recommend to spend at least one day to think

12:50 about if what i'm working on today works what does that even mean like is this going to be a billion

12:56 dollar business is this going to be a bootstrap revenue cash uh like cash flow positive business

13:02 um and and and by really thinking, you know,

13:07 what if this actually works?

13:09 Like, is this going to go public?

13:11 Is this going to be a large enterprise?

13:13 Is this going to employ 500,000 people, you know?

13:17 You don't need to do that.

13:18 Like, you don't need to know the answer,

13:19 but like, what actually happens?

13:22 What happens ifx actually sends someone

13:26 to mars you know like so so you really need to think about what happens if what's the best case

13:31 of this outcome and then you need to walk your way backwards so our vision has always been uh

13:36 to connect a a billion people uh within the next 10 years so we started in 21.

13:43 and to me that's something that is, you can grasp it.

13:47 Like, you know what a billion is,

13:49 and you can communicate what a billion is.

13:51 And you also have comparisons.

13:53 Email has reached 7 billion people today, right?

13:56 SMTP has reached 7 billion people by today.

14:00 WhatsApp has reached two and a half billion people today.

14:03 And so it's not something that's like, it is outrageous,

14:07 but it's also like, you know, possible.

14:09 And I think one of the best cases is we do that in the next 10 years.

14:13 And so you start your way walking backwards, right?

14:15 And so if you have the mission, what's the strategy, right?

14:18 Okay, so the strategy is building the right infrastructure for the web

14:22 that's being used by every startup, every Fortune 500 company,

14:25 every government, you know, like you really need to,

14:28 the same way WhatsApp is being used by every person.

14:33 And then you can go even deeper and say,

14:37 okay, what's the company-wide objectives?

14:38 And then, you know, of course, you know,

14:40 building the developer environment and grow, you know,

14:43 deeper and deeper into enterprise and infrastructure. And then you can go, you know, smaller into business and grow you know deeper and deeper into enterprises and infrastructure and then you can go you know smaller into

14:48 business objectives you know make enough money to to offer our product for free

14:52 right free is such an interesting concept because if you just ship

14:57 something that exists today for free people will think it's worse like if I

15:02 open up in lemonade stand and I say lemonade is free,

15:06 you probably sell next to nothing or at least less than paying two euros or dollars for it, right?

15:14 It's very simple. People think what's free is bad. The way you change that perception is

15:21 if people think what you're selling is very expensive but you

15:25 give it to them for free and the way to like I would take a free Tesla I know

15:30 Tesla is worth 50 60 grand but like if someone gives it to me for free I'm like

15:34 hell fucking yeah so the way to achieve a free product is not to go out in the

15:40 market and say we have a free alternative to Calendly or we have the

15:43 free alternative to Cero or QuickBooks. If someone tells me, please use a free QuickBooks, I'm like,

15:51 no, I don't want to go to prison, right? So the way we achieve that today is we make enough money

15:58 with infrastructure, with enterprise and larger businesses so we can give the rest away for free.

16:05 And so that's like the key business objective.

16:07 And giving something away for free is how you can go back to your mission

16:10 and say, okay, how do we reach a billion people?

16:12 Well, it's pretty hard to reach a billion people

16:14 if you have a product that costs $15 a month, right?

16:16 That's just really hard.

16:19 And then, you know, you go back to how do we achieve this

16:23 from a product point of view?

16:24 You know, You need to have

16:25 the best consumer facing product. Even though we sell infrastructure, it has to become the best

16:31 consumer facing product. And the great thing is as we learn to work with consumers,

16:37 we also build the best infrastructure. It's kind of interesting how OpenAI has chat GPT,

16:45 but the real business right now is selling the infrastructure

16:48 to developers and charging for the API.

16:52 They couldn't have done it in the way they do today

16:55 if they hadn't had a consumer facing product

16:57 where they could learn and improve

16:59 their large language models.

17:02 And then internal objectives, of course,

17:04 work as closely as you can with your customers,

17:05 hire the best engineers.

17:06 I think that's the startup 101.

17:09 I think if you follow those steps, you'll be at least in a good position.

17:15 And then you can have some monthly KRs.

17:17 I'm not a big fan of OKRs, but at least make them concise and say, okay, I want to listen

17:23 to customers, plan engineering,

17:25 assign the best people and just really consistently ship and fix bugs.

17:31 I think if you're onto something and you keep following that, I think you'll be fine.

17:35 And then individual projects is also, you know, like you, you chuck them down into,

17:40 you know, small things that you can actually give to someone and say, okay, publish 100

17:44 videos, publish this, build this,

17:46 more endpoints than others.

17:49 Yeah, so everything at the end of the day goes back to this kind of like pyramid.

17:55 But the day one for you should be what happens if this actually works out?

18:00 What happens if this actually becomes something that's connected

18:04 between people and then walk your way backwards it's like what do I

18:07 actually and this also really helped us to to raise a seed round and in series a

18:14 because you also want to figure out how you can actually communicate your vision

18:17 because like it's easy to build something just because you like it but

18:22 the moment you put yourself into this mindset of like,

18:25 okay, what happens if this actually works?

18:26 You can talk to others about where you want to go

18:30 and what you're thinking about, right?

18:32 And so I highly recommend reading this.

18:35 This is all public, handbook.cal.com.

18:38 And yeah, this really helped us, at least in the beginning,

18:41 to align on incentives

18:50 it was a bit of a monologue i hope that was answering your question

18:54 helpful yeah that's helpful for sure uh yeah i think i'll let others ask questions

18:58 i have more questions but we can do that later you can go you can go in the end again

19:07 cool should we talk about midday i'm very excited by the way beautiful website a rapper on top of victor is uh is my designer so uh and

19:17 co-founder so yeah i mean uh super exciting uh and also like super scary at the same time a lot of

19:26 super exciting and also like super sky at the same time a lot of users a lot of stars on github etc a lot of interest so basically my first question would be

19:32 like if you would start over regarding open up your repository and going public

19:37 what are you learning from doing that regarding like building the community as

19:42 you mentioned you have the red line of your company or your vision but I mean it's hard in the beginning to

19:48 communicate that because everything is like chaotic you need to fix all the

19:52 fires and fix everything in between right right so my my first question is

19:58 basically how would you communicate with a broader community, your mission, but also how to work together?

20:05 It's a huge job that needs to be done.

20:09 So I'd say these are like three questions, right?

20:12 So the first one is like, what would I do different when it comes to like the repo setup, I imagine?

20:17 So we have new repo, question mark.

20:22 What was the second one?

20:24 More like you have this vision that you're communicating visually. What was the second one?

20:25 More like you have this vision that you're communicating visually.

20:29 I mean, that's also good for investors, but also for the whole community as a whole.

20:34 I mean, coming up with that, I mean, I have a vision in my head and my long vision, but

20:40 I need to basically communicate that in an easy way.

20:44 How to come up with that? I need to basically communicate that in an easy way.

20:46 How to come up with that, basically.

20:50 How did you come up with reaching one billion persons?

20:53 Like, what is the formula?

20:55 What is the formula?

20:58 And was that all questions, or do you have another one?

21:02 I mean, I have a lot of questions, but we can start with those.

21:04 Okay.

21:05 Yeah, let me dive into the new repo so um mistakes um i i would do a couple things different so uh when we were getting

21:14 started um we really had no idea how to kind of separate um separate the open core with the open core versus closed.

21:33 Yeah.

21:33 And we actually had a split repo where you had like github.com.com and then kind of like you know cal.com and we had a which was open

21:51 and so open source free and then we had a clone a fork of this was kind of like and it's just called

21:59 closed closed oh jeez uh i, you know what I mean.

22:06 And this was what was running on prod.

22:13 And as you may imagine, the moment you have two code bases, you have tons of merge conflicts

22:19 because you need to keep these in sync and stuff would suddenly break because you introduce an

22:25 independency in one thing.

22:27 And so we were doing this for like at least three months and we realized this

22:32 is just a fricking shit show.

22:33 So we ended up going the,

22:36 the GitHub route and I would probably recommend doing the same thing again

22:39 tomorrow is with a folder,

22:43 which is enterprise edition.

22:47 And the way you do this is actually kind of easy.

22:48 So you just have a repo of,

22:51 I'm gonna actually share my whole screen

22:53 so you can see the rest.

22:55 So you actually start with a license at the top.

23:00 And this license here says everything is AGPL

23:03 or MIT,

23:05 whatever you want.

23:06 However, there is content that resides under this EE folder

23:11 and you can have multiple folders

23:13 because maybe you have an API,

23:14 maybe you have a front end that's under a commercial license

23:18 and you can define this license in these folders.

23:22 So if I go into this folder now,

23:27 you'll see that there is a

23:35 other license which is this one and this one is just a commercial license right so now the risk is people can violate your license and yes this has happened before but the people who violate

23:39 the license are the people who would never pay for it anyway in the first place so you're not really

23:43 losing money it's just more like an first place so you're not really losing money

23:45 it's just more like an ego thing whether you're okay with that or not yeah um but it's it's way

23:51 easier you know to um to um to maintain yeah so i would do that we lost a lot of time doing that um

24:01 and uh second uh i don't know we didn't do many mistakes, which I think is a good thing.

24:09 But there's definitely things, you know, like there's many great automations like this graphite.

24:18 Yeah, there is mage.app, there is synclinear.com.

24:30 mage.app, there is synclinear.com. These tools are just like really good to get your repo cleaned up and just focus on the business. We had no idea how to build certain CI, like

24:38 workflows and CIs. We literally just tried everything from scratch. But yeah, there's great workflows as well. So see GitHub actions.

24:47 Yeah.

24:50 Yeah, but like, I mean, again,

24:54 this all doesn't matter if what you're building

24:56 is not useful, right?

24:58 So like, if you build something that's useful,

25:00 it's just a time sink, but like not come up with your own fancy license.

25:08 We literally took this from GitHub, sorry, GitLab, and we were like, well, they went

25:13 public so I guess this works.

25:17 So yeah, don't reinvent the wheel, don't come up with what we did with this split repo setup

25:23 and things. you know um keep it simple

25:27 i'd say that's the most important thing um i guess the communication the vision part that's something

25:34 i can't really help you with because like it's your business and i don't know where you want

25:38 to take it um but i mean um it i think it's really also down to like, what's your ideal outcome for the

25:49 business?

25:50 Like, are you looking to build a large corporation with different people involved?

25:56 And you know, like, I would say, I would like to rephrase the question a little bit. I mean, more like communication regarding your company,

26:06 like open startup, open source, that kind of thing.

26:12 I mean, it's sort of a brand by itself to communicate that.

26:17 Well, to me, if I look at your business today,

26:20 and to those who are unaware of the day,

26:22 this is your business, right?

26:26 And to me, it's fairly obvious, right?

26:30 Like you focus on compliance, you focus on embedded, you focus on infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

26:47 And typically you also have like integrations.

26:51 So you have like an app store, app store play.

26:55 Why is this not? Okay.

26:58 And so like all of these things are amazing in open source, right?

27:01 So for you to share the vision is to build the best financial

27:09 operating system in the world. And then guess what? Linux is the best because they open

27:18 source. So it really writes itself.

27:21 And if you want to build the largest financial operating system, you probably need funding community

27:33 contributions, that stores app store content, openness,

27:40 transparent, transparency and trust by like it really writes itself.

27:45 And now you just walk your way backwards, right?

27:47 And then there you go.

27:49 Yeah.

27:50 Yeah, that's super good.

27:52 Cool.

27:55 Awesome.

27:56 Who wants to go next?

28:04 Oh. I started like, you know, you're muted.

28:08 I'm audible now.

28:11 Yeah, you're good.

28:14 Yeah.

28:15 Okay.

28:16 Yeah.

28:17 So the first question I had was sort of related to open source only today.

28:20 I mean, I see like, there's a lot AI-based companies which are coming out and naming them open

28:27 source just in the name of distribution.

28:28 So if we look at the role of open source in terms of distribution, my hypothesis is for

28:35 the sake of distribution, it doesn't make sense unless you have a great product.

28:39 So yeah, the question will go forward, what's your take on Red Hat package distribution

28:44 and analytics and sort of comparing

28:46 the story of GitHub and GitLab, how it was before?

28:50 Did you mention Red Hat?

28:52 You mentioned Red Hat, right?

28:54 Yeah, Red Hat.

28:55 Yeah.

28:57 Yeah, Red Hat is very interesting,

28:59 mostly for being kind of like one of the first-ish

29:03 open source businesses that really, really went well.

29:06 And you know, went public of course.

29:09 For those who are not like well aware of Red Hat.

29:12 So Red Hat took a different approach.

29:15 They actually didn't build their own technology.

29:18 They were kind of like on top of Linux

29:19 and they were making it like enterprise ready.

29:21 And they did all the,

29:23 of course they built their own technology, right?

29:24 What I'm saying is their core IP was not built in house.

29:28 Cal.com was entirely built in house and there's different commercial open source projects.

29:33 Like you could take Bitcoin today or Nostra today, which is not built by you and build

29:38 a commercial open source company on top.

29:42 Or you take Elasticsearch or I don't know something else so I

29:48 think what Radha was really mastering is having a really close connection to

29:53 Linux and the Linux foundation and of course Linux

29:58 what's his last name again?

30:02 well founder of Linux, Linus.

30:06 And so they really mastered the whole licensing game and contributing back, building lots

30:12 of drivers for the ecosystem.

30:18 And so it was kind of like a yin and yang, like the commercial part, which was bringing

30:21 in revenue, which means more funding for linux as a as an ecosystem um and uh that helped both organizations both the linux foundation and red hat to to become

30:33 what they are today so i think for us also as cal.com we want to build an ecosystem where

30:38 multiple companies multiple organizations can win you know you can be a service agency implementing cal.com

30:45 for local whatever barbers or local governments, right?

30:49 Like we want that, we want to promote that.

30:51 And a lot of closed source companies are very tight knit

30:55 on like, I want to own everything

30:57 and I want to reap all the benefits.

30:59 But I think if you take a look at WordPress, for example,

31:03 like WordPress would not be the thing it is today

31:06 if it was closed source, like all the plugins,

31:08 all the web agencies using it in their technology stack

31:13 because it's open source.

31:14 I think that's really valuable.

31:17 You mentioned something about AI.

31:20 Is this referring to like, to like ride a wave

31:23 and like not knowing what to build,

31:24 but you want to be part of the AI wave or was that a different question?

31:29 So I'm building like sort of AI employees that integrate with human knowledge workers.

31:34 And recently the primary, primary like thing I've been dwelling about, like, should we

31:38 create an open source agent framework where people can create their own customized agents?

31:42 But doing that for just for the sake of distribution doesn't make sense, right? So yeah, I was reevaluating on the RAID

31:49 head package distribution, how they did it back then, because they are the pioneer of it.

31:54 So sort of the question comes around the flywheel role of open source versus closed source in terms

32:02 of AI innovations, and should one do it just

32:06 for the sake of distribution?

32:09 Well as you may imagine, open AI was open source first, went private, got a lot of shit

32:19 for it and I think in the next year we will have equal or better open source large language models than OpenAI.

32:29 And I think this will keep, you will keep seeing this in all industries.

32:33 I think there is an advantage to be first closed source, but there's not really so much protectable knowledge, right? Like people move between companies

32:45 and at the end of the day,

32:47 even open AI is a bunch of open source things

32:51 like connected together.

32:53 Like the transformer is open source,

32:54 that the data is scraped from the web.

32:59 So yes, there is some secret sauce somewhere,

33:03 but I think it's only a matter of time

33:04 until people find it and open source it and commoditize it.

33:08 So if you find something today

33:11 that you think you have a competitive advantage,

33:13 it's only a matter of time until you don't have it anymore.

33:16 And so for me, there's not going to be

33:19 a second open source scheduling product next to me

33:23 because it's a really, I mean, maybe there are like two, three open source alternatives product next to me because it's a really i mean maybe there are like two or

33:26 three open source alternatives to something but it's a very much like when you compare to all the

33:32 other scheduling tools out there that are closed source i think it's like i wouldn't call it when

33:38 it takes it all because when it takes actually nothing everything's free and so for you as a

33:42 developer you're like well why would i start in

33:45 a repo if this exists like developers only build it themselves if they can't get it for free

33:50 um and so if that's what you're going for you know if you want to build a really large impactful

33:57 piece of infrastructure i think you have to be open source today if you want to again build a

34:03 small profitable boutiqueique bootstrap business

34:06 and you sell something because you have some you've built something that others

34:10 don't have, you're probably fine being closed source. I would never start a

34:17 company just like open source for distribution because I think you're

34:21 doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

34:27 For us, there was never a point of questioning whether we should be open source or not.

34:29 It was always very clear.

34:30 And also the way we run the business,

34:32 with everything public and cal.com slash open and handbooks,

34:38 it's really hard to like say,

34:41 oh yeah, we're open source, but that's like more marketing.

34:43 Like that doesn't go

34:45 well with employees with investors with customers and people realize that quite

34:50 quickly I think there are like some examples where like I don't want to I'm

34:54 a big fan of skiff I use it for a long long time but like I do think there are

34:59 still components out there that are not open source and so you're kind of like in the in the messy middle

35:06 you you have like this open source angle but but then some of the backend is still closed source so

35:12 you can't really fully use it um and now it's like is this an open source company or is it not

35:19 to me open source means if we die as a company if we get acquired and shut down like nothing happens

35:24 open source means if we die as a company if we get acquired and shut down like nothing happens

35:32 but i do think apps like these like stop working as far as i know i don't think you can like run skiff locally today and that's really sad again i i'd love to get in touch with them and see if

35:38 there's a way to you know like save that but um you're really only open source if the company or foundation whatever changes

35:46 hands or shuts down um and so if if you have like a little bit of open source sprinkled on top of

35:54 your your product it's not really open source so it's not worth the hustle in my opinion then just stay private and find another marketing channel

36:08 yeah thanks for answering that i have like a second question this is this is completely not

36:14 related to this i've seen like you also did on deck i recently did on deck and uh like yeah apart

36:21 from the program the primary question is like how do you build like the ideal co-founder

36:28 fits because i've been doing sort of trial and i feel it's like it's like the hardest job like

36:33 yeah you know just coding and shipping things is way more easy than finding the right co-founder

36:38 so yeah how how do you like detect like the ideal characteristics of ideal co-founder market where how did you did it back your back your time i think it's um i think for it for a tech

36:54 entrepreneur it's uh it's very hard i think it's it's probably as hard or harder than uh finding a girlfriend if you're single

37:08 and when you're single it feels like you'll never get a girlfriend because it's like

37:13 it's so hard and it's so it's it's it's really i mean speaking for myself i don't know about the

37:19 others in the room but and then it happens and you find the right person and you just know it and you're like okay wow this

37:26 is we're really vibing and after six months you're still vibing and after a year you're still vibing

37:31 and um as an example um some people you meet in the first week and you just really like them

37:40 right and some people you don't like them after week and so it

37:46 doesn't really take that much time and as a personal reference I met my

37:50 co-founder he was pretty much one of the first five people on the waitlist of our

37:56 product so I was working on it for like a weekend like literally maybe 16 hours

38:01 of work max and launched the landing page and send it to some people and

38:07 you know started collecting some interest um and and then funny enough as you mentioned on deck

38:13 my my core business got acquired by on deck and i completely stopped working on on calenzo back

38:19 in the days for like seven eight months and luckily i launched that landing page otherwise

38:24 we would not have this conversation,

38:26 but people kept signing up for the wait list

38:28 and keep bugging me like, hey, Pierre,

38:30 when can I help and when can I use this and stuff like that?

38:34 And so I was like, damn, I have a very good job now

38:39 in full time and I don't wanna work on this right now.

38:41 So I reached out to people in my network

38:43 and friends and families, but no one really was standing out.

38:47 And I basically told them like, Hey, like take this,

38:49 give me 10% of whatever company you're incorporating.

38:53 You'll be in the driver's seat.

38:55 And ultimately I sent a mass email to everyone on the wait list saying like,

39:01 Hey, there's a chance I'm going to shut this project down.

39:04 I have no time.

39:05 Is anyone here who wants to like take over?

39:07 And so one of these people is Bailey, my co-founder today.

39:11 And from the very first day, we're just like really vibe,

39:15 you know, you do video calls, you work together,

39:17 you contribute.

39:19 I was not really much involved.

39:22 I just like kinda handed over over the keys but I had

39:26 this single contract but like I had the single thing I told him like if this

39:32 ever goes crazy and you want me as like a full-time person right like let's

39:38 incorporate this and do 50-50 split and like I'll I'll catch up with you even if

39:43 you spend six months working before,

39:46 probably figure out how to catch up.

39:49 And so as things turn out, he launches it on Product Hunt

39:52 and it goes completely crazy.

39:54 And we were like, okay, should we do this?

39:56 Should we incorporate?

39:57 Should we build a business and go after this opportunity?

40:00 And he's like, yeah, let's fucking do it.

40:02 And so I met him about a year after in person. So we just really met online and we's like yeah let's fucking do it and so um i met him about a year after in person

40:05 so we just really met online and we're just like you know if you have two people in this room you

40:10 could be co-founders right if you just end up working together and fighting um the good thing

40:15 that people don't realize is you have vesting and really use that there's nothing wrong um

40:22 talking to your co-founder and say hey I don't think this is working out the same

40:26 way you should be doing that to your late relationship if things are not working out

40:29 you don't owe anything to anyone and quitting early is the best thing than keeping something

40:37 toxic alive and you could even say something like a two-year cliff like make it two years

40:47 like that's not too crazy I know people who have two-year cliff and six-year

40:53 vesting or even more when you're building something really big because

40:57 it's just becomes a bit of a risk we did something interesting when we raised our

41:02 series a because we raised the seed round in the first two months,

41:08 and then the series A about eight months after or so in the same year,

41:11 I think, or maybe in the next year.

41:13 It was a different market back then,

41:14 but also we were growing like really,

41:16 really fast that I asked our lawyers to reset our vesting.

41:23 Like, just like,

41:26 the investors didn't ask for it.

41:27 They could.

41:28 They sometimes do.

41:29 But I was like,

41:31 this is way too fast.

41:32 Like, I want more time for us to figure things out.

41:34 Because like,

41:35 you know, as the company grows

41:36 and valuations increase

41:38 and responsibilities increase,

41:40 you still want to make sure

41:41 that like this is not all or nothing.

41:44 And so a lot of companies die with co-founder conflicts.

41:48 And if you find a way to mitigate these, whether it's by contracts or just by working with

41:53 someone for a longer term, like six months is a long time, right?

41:57 Remember six months is a long time to get to know someone.

42:01 And if you like someone after six months, you probably like them after 12 months.

42:10 And you're an SF.

42:11 People build.

42:14 So go find someone who builds.

42:18 I mean, in the past two months, I have like four trials.

42:19 So, yeah.

42:22 Yeah.

42:24 Okay.

42:25 I have like two more questions.

42:29 One was, like, when you just started, like, Cal.com,

42:32 and you were just sending this, launched a landing page,

42:35 you sent, like, hey, we'll launch this,

42:37 and people signed up for your waitlist,

42:38 and then you thought of stopping it.

42:40 But, yeah, anyway, coming to the primary question,

42:43 what were, like, your user acquisition channels for the initial 100 customers and what was what was the story it was sold to like your customers when they were they

42:51 were getting on boarded and the follow-up question will be what was the first like vision and story

42:57 you sold to like like the investors when you're planning to like raise your first round i mean

43:02 of course you're so like hey i want to reach like one billion people but what was the hypothesis of backing that okay i'm going to reach like one

43:09 billion people and i'm confident about it yeah i think that's like one of those questions where

43:15 it's like asking someone who like won the lottery of like what numbers you've been in it for like 14 years, I think finding product market fit is really inevitable as long as you keep trying very fast with many projects.

43:40 And to me, I love the comparison to like playing the lottery because that's actually true.

43:46 Some 19-year-old, and remember, Bailey was also very young

43:49 when we started this, may play once and win the lottery.

43:55 Like chances doesn't care how much you've played in the past.

43:58 But the question is how expensive is your ticket?

44:02 And the ticket is literally free.

44:04 Like for you, it is literally free like for you it is

44:05 literally free if you as long as you pay your rent and you have food on the table

44:10 so the job is to play as many tickets as you can right so you build something you

44:18 launch it it doesn't take off fine shut it down you launch something else you

44:23 play another ticket and it may work mediocre,

44:28 but it's not going anywhere.

44:29 Maybe mediocre means you build it to 10K a month in revenue

44:33 and you sell it to another company

44:34 and you do something else.

44:38 I've probably launched over the past,

44:40 and this is also true for indie hackers and bootstrappers,

44:43 but I've probably launched a hundred products

44:47 and two of them worked out.

44:49 So there's like a 2% success rate.

44:51 And I think this is true for every outcome.

44:55 Some people again, play once and win,

44:57 but that's less likely.

44:58 It's just less statistically likely.

45:01 But I don't believe in people saying we use this strategy and we

45:06 became wildly successful this never this is never true sure there's survivorship

45:10 bias I can tell you things that we've done incredibly well like shipping fast

45:13 and shipping a lot and ship and like really talking to customers these things

45:17 are always true but every startup book talks about that and you probably don't

45:21 need that need to hear that again But I really mostly believe in like fundamental pivots where you try as many

45:32 things as you can in a good short amount of time.

45:41 I completely agree with you.

45:44 There we go.

45:45 There's another person joining.

45:47 I know we only have one minute left, so I don't know if this is...

45:51 Sorry, I sent a new link in the calendar invite.

45:54 Sorry you didn't catch that.

45:57 Yeah, I didn't see it for some reason.

45:59 Hi, guys. Hi, everyone.

46:01 We're about to close the office hours, but I think I have time for one more question.

46:07 You said you had a follow-up question, Sharan?

46:11 Oh, one second.

46:13 I'm muting.

46:15 I don't know if you can mute yourself.

46:18 Can you?

46:19 Or is it just me as an admin?

46:20 I don't know.

46:21 Yeah, go for it.

46:23 Oh, I think now you're actually..

46:25 I don't know.

46:30 No, no, no.

46:33 You're not muted on my end.

46:34 Anyone else here?

46:35 No.

46:36 No, there you go.

46:37 Sorry.

46:38 OK.

46:38 Sorry about that.

46:39 Hell yeah.

46:40 So I think you've just mentioned that you've

46:42 tried multiple products and you've

46:44 landed upon two or three. what are some two or three reasons

46:48 you've learned from all of those failed products? What are your takeaways from them?

46:58 Well they clearly didn't solve any problem and And if they did solve a problem,

47:06 it was not an exciting problem to work on.

47:07 And I go back to this,

47:09 like what happens if this actually works?

47:12 For example, the previous project that kind of worked

47:17 was a hiring marketplace and it was pretty profitable.

47:23 It was growing from zero to like maybe maybe 10 15k a month in revenue

47:28 like fairly quick within like two months but it was also in the hiring industry and recruiting

47:37 and i was like am i going to be a founder of a large hiring marketplace

47:44 be a founder of a large hiring marketplace.

47:50 And when you really sit down and you think of like, okay, is this going to be like, where I want to spend all my time and all my energy on, and then you realize, well,

47:55 I mean, while this is a fun project, I don't think I want to do this for the

47:58 rest of the next decade or 10, 20 years.

48:00 I mean, we're still entrepreneurs.

48:01 We can always change gears.

48:03 But to me, that was the moment I'm like, like okay how do i make the best of this right so you also want to

48:10 be very picky like for example if i'm if i were to like not work on cal.com i would be very very

48:18 particular about the problem i'm solving right there could be there could be a new technology

48:23 coming around the corner ai's

48:25 everywhere in the streets uh and in the sheets but if there's not a problem that i really really want

48:31 to solve even though i may have found something that could solve a certain problem but i really

48:38 don't care about that problem i would not touch it like i would give it to someone who likes that

48:42 product like problem i would probably sell the technology early on,

48:46 or I don't know,

48:47 like give it to them for free.

48:49 But as an example,

48:50 right?

48:50 Like AI,

48:53 like it's really easy to think of like,

48:55 Oh,

48:55 what can AI,

48:56 what else can AI do?

48:58 Right.

48:59 And if you follow that line of thinking,

49:00 you will end up in a bad industry because you will end up something

49:04 solving that a maybe should not be solved B can be

49:10 solved but I'm not interested in the in the solution and C is like you will

49:15 probably not find park market because you don't know the problem you know a

49:19 solution but you don't know the problem you don't have the problem and if you

49:23 don't have a problem you can't solve it easily as if you have a problem and you solve it right um and so i'd be

49:31 very very careful of following uh a technology if you don't know the problem at its core and to me

49:38 going back to you know my previous business i was building a marketplace to connect recruiters with employees or contractors, and I had no

49:47 good scheduling infrastructure.

49:49 And so the reason I built this open source repo is I'm building a marketplace.

49:53 I don't want to deal with time zones and calendar APIs and scheduling and cancellations and

49:58 rescheduling and video.

49:59 I don't want to be dealing with that.

50:02 So let me open source this so everyone can like contribute and help and use

50:06 this thing while i focus on my hiring marketplace that was the idea and if i didn't have this hiring

50:12 marketplace i wouldn't have thought of scheduling infrastructure which you know now i spend my

50:17 waking hours thinking about um and so for me it was really easy to to figure out okay what do i

50:22 need how do i build this what what do other people people need to get to the point where I am today?

50:29 The interesting thing is now when you have a product, now you can think of like, okay,

50:33 how can I infuse things with a large language model?

50:36 For example, we recently launched a phone agent that can make bookings in my calendar.

50:44 That's freaking dope but if you don't

50:47 experience the pain first and you wake up tomorrow and say let me build a large language model to

50:51 interact with a calendar because i think it's kind of cool you'll never fall in love with the

50:56 problem you'll never understand the problem as much as someone who works from like first principle

51:00 cool silence my first principle.

51:06 Cool.

51:08 Silence.

51:14 Yeah, I think that's all the questions.

51:16 I think like maybe one small thing,

51:18 like can you tell me about this phone agent because we are working on something internally.

51:21 Maybe we could like collaborate on that.

51:23 So I'll maybe throw you an email after the call call yeah amazing yeah shoot me an email you have my email now

51:31 well this is fun i'm excited for the the next week's um i don't know does anyone sign up for

51:36 the next week or just this one just this one for now just this one yeah i've seen a lot of

51:43 different emails signing up.

51:45 So just curious if someone has book follow ups.

51:47 But cool.

51:49 Well, again, my DMs are open.

51:51 My emails are open.

51:52 If you have any other commercial open source question,

51:55 happy to follow up here.

51:57 This is all live.

51:58 So feel free to rewatch if you miss something.

52:02 And catch you all next time.

52:04 Yep, sounds great.

52:06 Thank you.

52:06 Take care, everyone.

52:07 Bye.

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