Vercel
Dax, have you seen, have you seen me get all upset on the Internet the last few days?
Dax:Which time? Which one
Adam:of the times? Just the overall, just as a package, has my persona on the Internet seemed a little bothered?
Dax:Yes. I think you've been obsessed. I think there's a lot of stuff pent up inside of you about Purcell, about Next. Js. I think it's coming out in all sorts of ways.
Dax:So let's just get it all out in this episode and then you'll feel better.
Adam:I will feel so much better. This is honestly gonna be therapy for me. This is gonna be Dax saying things that make me feel better. I think it started with April 1. I did an April Fool's joke.
Adam:It was good fun, making fun of Vercel. Just overall making fun of lots of things that are not really bothersome to me, but, like, just like little annoyances, like their vibe, their, like, pretentiousness, the, like, front end hosting sound like I don't know. It's really, really important. That was sort of, like, just I'm annoyed. I'm a little annoyed.
Adam:But then I think it's drifted into some darker places where I think I'm bothered by individuals and what I feel like is the deployment of $300,000,000 in capital to, like, brainwash the entire web dev community. Did I say this is gonna be a therapy? I don't know. This is turning into me just getting more upset.
Dax:Well, we'll start there, and we'll see where we end. Okay.
Adam:And I'm realizing this is the second Pockets episode we've done where it's, like, about how we've had fights on the Internet or something or we're upset with people. We just we're we're just hostile. We just need to calm down. Yeah. No.
Adam:I I do feel like I need to walk it back a bit. I don't wanna be somebody who comes off as blindly hating something because I know, like, anytime something's really popular, like Apple, you just got a a whole group of people that hate Apple because other people love it. So when people love something, there's always people who hate it. And I don't want I don't wanna just look like another Vercel hater because I'm not. I love Vercel.
Adam:I use it all the time. I use it for mostly for projects where I know it's never gonna grow. It's like, I need a personal website, so I'm gonna put it on Vercel. Or I need I'm doing some dumb project just to show off some technology or something, and and don't expect it to, like, actually have traffic. In those cases, Vercel is great, and I see the advantages, the trade offs where I can think about less.
Adam:I can just put it up there. It's very serverless in that way. Like Mhmm. Not serverless from, like, a runtime perspective, but serverless from, like, a I don't wanna deal with these things. Someone deal with it for me.
Adam:But I just feel like the web the the reason I'm so bothered, I think, is that I feel like the whole vibe right now, the whole narrative in the web dev space, especially on Twitter, is like AWS is too complicated for you. You need Vercel to save you. So I'm so thankful for for Vercel to, like, saved us all from the horrors of AWS. That's what I feel like the vibe has turned into, and it just seems so ridiculous to me. And also, it bothers me that Vercel is, like, lauded for being so cheap, and AWS is universally hated for being so expensive.
Adam:This is the dumbest thing in the world because it's completely opposite. Okay. I've said a lot of words.
Dax:Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of break some of that down. Yeah. I think to start with any technology, with anything, there's like the perpetual haters group that like whenever it comes up or whenever something kind of bad about it happens, the perpetual haters come out and just repeat all the same stuff.
Dax:And it's just it's just like, you know, a thing you generally should just ignore. I think you're concerned that you're coming off that way, but that's not the category you're in because you actually use it and you genuinely like it and you're a fan. Just because you're a fan doesn't mean you can't be also really critical about it. And I think my relationship with AWS is exactly that. Right?
Dax:I deploy everything in AWS. I spend a lot of time helping others deploy AWS. I spend a lot of time teaching people how to do it and explain people why they should even try it. But no one is no one is a bigger critic of AWS than me. Right?
Dax:Yeah. So just to, like, say it out there, you can like something and you can also come across as, like, hating it at times because, you know, things are complex, things are nuanced. So that's kind of what we're trying to get to here. Does that make sense?
Adam:Yeah. No. Perfect sense. Two things can be true and live in your head at the same time. Like, I don't come out publicly and talk about hating AWS because, like, that's the popular thing to do.
Adam:Like, there's a lot of things I hate about AWS. I'm an AWS hero, and there's things that just drive me crazy. But I don't really feel like I need to voice that because I feel like it's well covered. And maybe the Vercel hatred is well covered, but I do think, like, I don't hate Vercel, and I don't think I'm coming from that place of just blindly criticizing something for the sake of it. Like, I genuinely feel like there are people building startups today, and they think they're making good choices because of the general narrative right now, and they're gonna end up in painful places down the road, I think.
Adam:And I think now that's the other thing. This week, I discovered that nine years ago, I built a startup that is still alive today and is actually kind of it's successful. And I don't think I attributed that to, like, I am a successful startup founder, so I've never felt like I had anything to offer to the conversation. And then I just woke up this week, and I realized, like, I can say things. Okay?
Adam:Cause people use my thing.
Dax:Yeah. It's funny because I had the same realization about you this week. It's it's, like, so obvious. Like, it's kinda dumb to even say this out loud, but, yeah, you don't lean on your credibility too much, but you actually do have a lot to sit on. And what's interesting about this conversation is just to summarize what is a little frustrating, it's that this is a good product.
Dax:Vercel's product is good, but there it's gotten to a place where there's this narrative of you need to use it for literally everything, and it is the best choice. And if you don't use it for literally everything, you're like, you're making a bad choice or like, there's nothing that it can't do well. Right? It's like unfallible. Yeah.
Dax:Nobody else in software engineering is pushing the bar at all. This is a pinnacle of software engineering. It's all there everything Vercel does is all there is a software engineering. It's kind of it's kind of the vibe. And it's all coming from most of this is coming from people that just have not had a lot of experience.
Dax:Right? Literally anyone with experience does not feel that way, and I think that's what's missing from the conversation. It's the joke I made today was, hey, like everyone's just talking about this stuff. It doesn't seem like any of you have products that people actually use. Let's try to hear from people that have products that people actually use.
Dax:And, yeah, I think you should sit on that a little bit more because that's just what it's just completely missing from from the conversation.
Adam:Yeah. No. I think, I just don't know enough of the cases where startups have scaled with Vercel and stuck with Vercel, and it worked out. And I think when I start hearing those, at least there could be a dialogue. Like, I just don't know who I'm even, like, having a dialogue with because I feel like everyone who uses Vercel and so blindly recommends it doesn't have that experience like you're saying.
Adam:I don't know. And I I guess that bothers me. I guess I start getting angry. I I don't need to be angry about it. I I do I don't wanna, like, just have an emotional reaction and just like I think that's the wrong kind of criticism that I'm not looking for, but I do wanna look at it more objectively and, yeah, not feel like I'm living in the past because I don't use yourself for everything.
Adam:Like, that's kind of what you said, the narrative.
Dax:Kind of dig into some of that. So what are so when you say it doesn't like, if you're building a startup, like, prob it doesn't make sense for you to, like, just build everything out of yourself. You know, what are some of the reasons that that stick out to you and what are some of the problems that you think people will run into?
Adam:Yeah. So I think the main thing is if you're building with Next. Js on Vercel, the the amount of, like, and I hate the term locked in, but the amount of things you're going to run into if you ever try to move off of Vercel for a variety of reasons, you might be, like, pricing or whatever, you might need to move off Vercel. That integration between Next. Js and Vercel is very tight, and it should be.
Adam:It's a great business model. It makes sense. I think that's one of the problems, though, is that startups might lay lean on a lot of Next. Js features and also just feeling like that whole world of Vercel and Next. Js is so front end dominant, and it feels like front end engineers what they think the whole app looks like.
Adam:And it's all synchronous HTTP requests from the browser. And if your whole back end can be represented that way, great. But I I've not built anything where the whole back end could be represented in that way. So I guess, like, it seems pretty clear to me you're gonna immediately start need to jump out of her cell because you need a queue or you need, you know, whatever. I guess they have cron jobs now.
Adam:Something like cron jobs maybe. Mhmm. But even things like that weren't supported even weeks ago. So it's like, I don't know. There's there's a lot more to building applications than just building a front end and having some API routes.
Adam:And I do think that whole, like, picture of full stack web development is being painted by front end engineers right now. I just don't think it's doing a good service to developers who are new and and maybe do wanna learn full stack, and they don't go any further than that. So that's one I mean, one thing is just, like, architecturally, not encouraging people to dive a little deeper, to go a little deeper and say, what are the things that make up an application? I see this honestly all the time on Twitter with friends who are in the kind of the indie hacking crowd, and they immediately hit a use case where, like, I need something. I don't even know how to articulate it, and I don't wanna use AWS because it sucks.
Adam:Now everybody's gonna know who I'm talking about. Love Like, Rox is great. But, like, he he builds a new app, like, every other day that's like he's building stuff that's complicated. Like, he needs to queue up big background jobs working on media and doing this stuff. He's trying to create tools for creators.
Adam:And I think you immediately run into cases where it's not a good fit for Vercel. Or if it is if you are gonna use Vercel, just use it for your front end. But then you're having to deal with the the, like, gluing together Vercel and your actual back end.
Dax:Mhmm.
Adam:And that gets painful, just the shuffling around of environment variables and whatever. So there there's all those things in terms of, like, it just not being very deep.
Dax:Mhmm.
Adam:It's a pretty shallow view of the world in terms of full stack dev. Then there's, like, pricing. I mean, like, it's funny to me that people think Vercel is so cheap. It is. It's free when nobody uses your app.
Adam:Like, it is free. And that's the case for a lot of things. Like, the free tiers are generous. That's great. And again, I love Vercel.
Adam:I use it all the time. It's a great product. But if you start to scale, that free turns into pretty expensive pretty fast, and a lot of it's pretty tran it's pretty opaque. So the enterprise pricing is just a completely black box. You can kinda, like, start to figure out if you didn't go to enterprise, you know, what would it cost to build your thing at levels of scale, and it gets pretty expensive.
Adam:I mean, it's not it's not cheap. It's a big markup on top of something like AWS. And I feel like you could just spend some time as an engineer, even just a month, and learn some things, especially with some of the developer experience stuff with SST and and other sort of infrastructure as code frameworks. You could invest in yourself a little bit and have this ability to build out anything you can dream up and really, like, not be terrified of hitting the the bandwidth, you know, free tier limits or getting DDoSed as we've seen on Twitter last couple days. Okay.
Adam:Now I'm saying a lot that I don't know there's even context for, so I need you to stop me, Dax.
Dax:No. That's a let's, like, kinda dig into that last one. So because it's a topic I've been thinking about a lot too. Right? So what you said was you can just spend a month and invest in yourself and and learn some of these skills.
Dax:That's the thing that to me is the root frustration. It's I'm all in on managed services. When I teach people about serverless and try to get people to do serverless, that's my pitch. My pitch is don't worry about lock in, offload work that's not differentiated to other people. Right?
Dax:So that is a key part of my pitch. But I think people conflate that with, I never have to learn anything. Like if I'm not, if if I have to learn something, that means I'm doing something wrong. But there's a difference between offloading an ongoing cost that you have to pay every single day and a one time cost. Learning a skill, learning a framework, learning parts of AWS is a one time cost.
Dax:I'm not saying it's easy, it is challenging. AWS sucks and there's like a thousand ways to do things and it's hard to know what the right way is. Yep. There are paths to doing that now, like, you know, with the work that we're doing with SST and all these other things. There is a way to get through that in, let's say, week and a month, whatever.
Dax:You pay that cost once. Like, you do that once. You never have to deal with certain things ever again. You're never like, oh, man, someone just used my product, you know, a 100 times more than I expected them to use it. Like, how do I queue up my work?
Dax:Or how do I, you know, run this asynchronous? You just have tools for all of that. You never have to pay this price again, right? So I think people are starting to avoid these one time costs, whether it's learning AWS or like even like learning SQL. I'm starting to see people argue against like, oh, you shouldn't learn SQL, that's a waste of time, like just build on top of these abstractions.
Dax:This is a one time cost, just learn SQL. Yeah. And use ChatGPT to learn it. It's like super easy and ChatGPT can even write a lot of it for you, but it helps you understand how some of these things work at a lower level and a key part, and I think people miss this, people forget that this whole managed services thing, this whole, like, offload your work thing, that philosophy, as much as I criticize AWS, that did come out of AWS. And a key part of that philosophy is, yes, offload stuff to your vendor, but deeply understand how your vendor works so that when you build things, you can kind of build in in sync with them.
Dax:Right? Yeah. And this comes from like that whole like title manufacturing thing. Like, this gets cited a lot, so I don't wanna repeat it over and over. But their key insight was I'm not afraid of my vendor.
Dax:I'm gonna offload their undifferentiated work to my vendor, but I'm gonna go visit my vendor's warehouse. I'm gonna understand how they build all this stuff. I'm gonna understand how this all works So that that influences my own process. I think with a lot of this stuff, it's kinda like just throw over the wall to whoever and it should just magically work. And you're kinda seeing the issues with that where this cal.com issue is a great one.
Dax:So cal.com, one of the few companies that's using this like Next. Js for everything deployed a Vercel, stack that's doing incredibly well. They're doing really well as a business, they're growing great. They hit a pretty fatal issue because just kind of build their application without really thinking about how serverless works, how Vercel works, and they're hitting severe cold start issues and their application is like very slow. They're losing users because of it.
Dax:And it's because of this mindset of I shouldn't have to know anything, just throw it over the wall and I'm expecting Vercel to figure everything out. Vercel can only do so much. They have like great engineers. They can only do so much. They still need you to understand how their stuff works so you can build in coordination with them.
Dax:So, yeah, it's kind of one of mindsets around all this stuff that I think is it's like close to right. Like, yes, trust your vendors and help let them help you build stuff. But no, like learning stuff isn't like a thing that goes away. Like, still need to need to understand all of these things.
Adam:Yeah. I as you're saying all that, I'm realizing, like, there is sort of a conflict for me, and I haven't really thought through it, and I could use your help, where I feel like my arguments against Vercel or against, like and maybe we're saying the same thing. Maybe it's not such a a conflict. But it's like, I am such a fan of managed services and specifically using a lot of different AWS higher level primitives that abstract away stuff, and I don't have to think about. I don't like SSH ing into servers.
Adam:Like, I like serverless compute, functions as service, whatever. I like managed APIs that just give me all these cool features. What is the difference, I guess? Am I am I a hypocrite that I'm saying Vercel like, it's less I don't know. I I I guess I'm saying I I like using Vercel.
Adam:I like offloading front end deployments to Vercel at times, but I wouldn't consider using it, like, for stat muse where we have a ton of traffic. And I just don't feel like it's justified to spend that premium for their CDN when I can use a cheaper CDN. Is that me kinda going against my philosophy of, like, take advantage of managed stuff?
Dax:No. I don't think so. I think the way I think about this is, I tell people you're probably irrationally afraid of vendor lock in, but that doesn't mean blindly accept all vendors. It means try to understand if you and your vendor are aligned. Like, are the problems that you're gonna have, like, do they do they want to solve them?
Dax:Is the direction they're going into stuff they're interested in? Like, does that align with the stuff that you're interested in? So I think that's kind of what you have to understand a little bit. I think with something like Vercel, it's you do have to understand a little bit about the company and the technicals and even the business. Right?
Dax:You need to understand that, hey, Vercel is built on top of AWS. They're gonna be constrained by all kinds of AWS stuff as well. They need to make a margin on top of AWS. They do mix in Cloudflare a bit here and there. That's helpful to know.
Dax:It's also helpful to know they raise a lot of money at a crazy valuation during a time where valuations were really out of control. You need to know that, okay, they haven't yet justified that. You you need to know they're not profitable. You know, these things factor into whether you really, like, tie yourself to a vendor or not. I know with AWS, it doesn't matter what's happening with the economy.
Dax:It does not matter anything. Anything on the planet pretty much could be happening, and I know they'll still be around to handle my traffic. Right? There's like no the the fundamental business model works, so I'm not really worried about them too much. Like, whatever scale I have, whether it's small or big, it's gonna be fine.
Dax:I know they can refund me because it's not you know, if I make a mistake and I spend a lot of money, you know, it's a blip for them. They understand what my spend is and they know what the mistake is and they're very forgiving with that. It's a lot more challenging for a company that, you know, needs to meet certain sales targets, like justify their their valuation so they can continue to raise money. You know, it's you need to think deeper about your vendor than just, they have good branding and I like their vibe. Right?
Dax:Yeah. But you're not a hypocrite. It's just more more more involved.
Adam:So I'm realizing, I guess this episode is just like the Vercel episode. And I feel like there are other things to talk about with Vercel that it, like, very recently have happened. Well, I don't know. We're not reporters. And, like, the thing with the support well, I I guess, yeah, podcast.
Adam:I don't know. The the thing with the support issue, I don't know how much to even it's not, like, that damning. Like, it happens. They had an issue. Somebody was they ran up a big bill, some kind of billing issue maybe on Vercel's side.
Adam:I'm not sure. They said they wouldn't refund it. Then the person took it to Twitter, kinda blew up, and they did refund it after that. I don't know. That kind of stuff happens probably.
Adam:Learn from it as an organization.
Dax:And this is kind of the same thing I was saying earlier. It's, you know, you have to understand where they are in the life cycle of their business. When you start a startup, you have fantastic support because that's all you can offer. When you start to scale, that just goes away. Like, it's just it's just hard for you to retain that, especially when you're trying to figure out your your unit economics, especially when you're trying to figure out your business model.
Dax:You just support is just the last thing that you're gonna spend money on. Right? You have so many seemingly bigger problems. So if you're gonna use a company that's in this like growth phase, you're gonna have to accept that, hey, the support is gonna be bad. Sometimes they're gonna like make a decision that doesn't make any sense.
Dax:I'm gonna have to go blow it up on some social media. It's just a reality. It's not and I don't even fault Verseille for this. Like every business just kinda goes to this. If you really care about support, you need to go to a company that's much more established that, you know, has all that figured out.
Dax:So I think those are some of the issues that happened this week. I think it's something like the perpetual serverless haters came out being like, this is why you shouldn't use serverless, you can run a bill blah blah blah. It is like a thing that happens and it almost always gets resolved. That said, it did attract a lot more people to come out of the woodwork and I think that's what was interesting a little bit in the past week. I think we hear a lot from people that are using Vercel in the free tier.
Dax:We don't often hear people from people that are, like, paying those big enterprise bills. And I think we heard a lot more from them being like, hey, I got there's another threat I got that they got charged $22,000 and that's so unresolved. I think people are realizing the only way to get attention is to blow it up on Twitter. Yeah. So tough week for Vercel, like all that stuff coming out.
Dax:There's a lot more attention and scrutiny on them. And one of the other things that I've been thinking about, and we've talked about this a bunch because we kinda saw it happening, you know, with them acquiring more and more of the React team, that just draws attention in ways where, like, you know, now people are looking at it like, this is is this good? Like, is this good for us? Is this a bad thing? Are they taking it over?
Dax:Are their incentives aligned? So I think whatever benefit they got from having those people on the team, is that going is like the scrutiny worth it? You know, I think a lot more people pay attention to it. A lot more people are eager to say like, this is bad. Right?
Dax:So I think we've in the last week, we've kinda hit a tipping point with a bunch of things coming together and there's been a lot and a lot of talk around, hey, like this is a problem and like, don't use this platform, etcetera.
Adam:In the React thing, I I should note, like, I think a lot of my problems with Vercel are amplified by how I feel about React right now, which I I do feel like it's really interesting that the two seem to be merging, that they're hiring all these React core members. And that it's just more and more React is, like, pointing to Next. Js. Next. Js is pointing to React.
Adam:Like, that that's the best way to build React apps is on Next. Js. It takes it takes advantage of all the features. So then I sort of, like, lump in all of my feelings about the people in the React community and the figureheads and just like I don't know. The ivory tower stuff, it's been I'm not the first person to point this out.
Adam:I don't know. It's just the whole vibe around React bothers me right now, and it's hard for me not to take that on in Vercel as well.
Dax:Yeah. I mean, I think that that is like another thing to it's like, while all this is happening, React feels like it's losing touch with the real problems people face. You know, you shouldn't need a 10 message thread constantly to be like, no, this is actually good. Like, if you are smart enough, you would understand this is actually good. And it's kind vibe they give off.
Dax:I know it's not the intention, but a lot of the stuff is coming off this way of like like we are again, it's like, you started off with saying like Vercel's branding is kind of this pretentious Apple branding, which can work really well if you can like really back it up with like, hell yeah, we're like a thousand times better than literally everyone else. Like Apple
Adam:Yeah.
Dax:Can back it up that way. It's a little bit harder when you're a platform optimized for e commerce websites. Right? Like it's it's like Yeah. It's off.
Dax:Similarly with the React stuff, it also feels a little pretentious. Like, we really understand all this really complex stuff and we're gifting you the gift of React. Yes. If you are smart enough, you will appreciate it.
Adam:Right? That is exactly you're you're just putting words exactly into the the feeling I have, which I've never been able to articulate. Yeah. And I don't feel like I'm that dumb. Like, I I'm not I don't think I'm the smartest guy, But I feel like if I still struggle with stuff after, like, eight years of writing React, maybe it's React's fault.
Adam:Maybe it's not my fault. And I'm tired of feeling like it's my fault. I feel like I spend most of my time writing React code, and when something goes wrong, it's like, that's me. I did that. Oops.
Adam:But like maybe it's not. Maybe it's React.
Dax:Yeah. We have I think there are really great React code bases from people that are very, very good. But I think the average React code base is actually really bad. I think you saw that thing I posted on Twitter with the screenshot of this code base. That okay.
Dax:This was not an average code base. It's definitely like way way way way below average. And I was just posting because I thought it was funny, like, at how bad this is. And a bunch of people in the replies were like, this isn't React's fault. Like, don't say this is React's fault.
Dax:Like, this bad coke and I'm like, yeah. I wasn't saying it was React's fault. I was just saying that this isn't this crazy? Like, look at it. It's funny.
Dax:So there's just this, like, weird thing where it just starts to feel like a cult and everyone's rushing to defend it and, like, how dare you say anything even like, you know, it's just when things get to that stage, it's it's kinda done, like Yeah. You're just gonna start losing people. The thing I think about a lot is, I been thinking a lot about ASTRO and how they're like the anti Vercel in so many ways.
Adam:The vibe is completely opposite.
Dax:Yeah, exactly. Right? Their stuff, great framework, just so fun to use, so simple, everyone just loves it. Right? Just like, it's kinda brings a lot of joy just using ASTRO.
Dax:It deploys anywhere, literally deploys anywhere, and works pretty much the same everywhere. It works super well everywhere. And as someone that built an adapter for it to deploy AWS, very, very easy to build an adapter for it. And I'm sure as I get more features, it's gonna get a little more complicated, but for now, it's it's excellent. Their branding is, like, just fun and silly and, like, super approachable and, like, hey, we're here to teach you to, like, you know, build better websites.
Dax:And, like Yep. It's so it's just clicking with me so much more than this, like, elitist thing where, yeah, front end is goofy and fun. Like, it just, like, a kind of a mess, but we can kinda make it good and, like, we make these funny websites. Like, that that is how I feel about the front end side of things. And I feel like they're, like, nailing that really, really well.
Dax:And their business model is not built around hosting. I think we I think we've been through two generations of hosting on top of other providers. Like we have the Heroku generation, now we have the Vercel generation. I think it's clear the hosting business sucks if you're not literally AWS. You're squeezed on all different sides and it's hard to make a business work.
Dax:So I'm excited to see them do all this stuff but monetize it without being a hosting business because I think they end up being quite a different company than than Vercel.
Adam:I love this is my first experience with ASTRO. That's what I'm drawn to. It's just how it fits so well into the modern landscape. Like, they've got first party adapters for everything, both on the hosting side and the front end side. Like, you can plug anything into ASTRO, and it all just feels really good.
Adam:And to your point, lighthearted. It doesn't feel so heavy and, like, I'm being judged the moment I start using it. But I now I have a question. Like, what what is Astro's business model?
Dax:Yeah. I mean, so I think they have so many opportunities. So I think for me, especially because, you know, I build SST, I think about business models around open source a lot. I don't think a hosting business model is a good one. I think that's probably the least creative thing you can do.
Dax:I think complementary services are the best thing to do. Like when people use your open source framework and they deploy to production, there is just stuff that they need that's complementary. Right? It could be anything from so I think right now they had they're doing like a like a template marketplace. So if you think about how big WordPress is and the whole like template marketplace is there, if they get that big, that's gonna be enough on its own.
Dax:Could be anything from like a a headless CRM so that you can manage your content, right? So I think Yeah. The core is great, like it helps you build websites, but you're always in a complimentary service. It might be analytics, it might be so you can just see how like Yeah. Okay, there's enough people using Astro websites and deploying it wherever they want.
Dax:There's just so many complimentary services that Astro could eventually build. I don't know. I'm making some of those up. I don't know what they're actually going to do. I think that's a you can get a lot more creative and like not and your users aren't gonna feel like you're you're trapping them.
Dax:Right?
Adam:Yeah.
Dax:Like, you're tricking them into using this open sourcing and then trapping them in some way. You're just like, use it however you want. We built this really cool service that if you like it, you can use it. If not, it's fine. Go have a good day.
Dax:Right?
Adam:That makes sense. Yeah. We're we're rebuilding stat mes in Astro and I'm I'm a big fan as you know.
Dax:Yeah. Exactly. It's just, yeah, it's a weird time. I'm really excited to see how how all this plays out. Like I said, you just need to when you pick a vendor, you just need to really understand everything about them.
Dax:It's gonna be interesting to see if Vercel struggles. So because like if you look at their business, it's actually fine. Like they have a massive successful open source project. They have a pipeline to people deploying on their platform, it's good. The only issue here is their size and their valuation because the amount of money they raised is now creating problems for them.
Dax:So it would be interesting to see if they fail only because they were able to raise a ton of money. Yeah. And of course, the other other thing with like this money is leaking into places that just feel off. Like I I it doesn't they don't really feel like an open source company anymore to me. They feel like something else and I think people are picking up on that and that's just only gonna grow, in my opinion.
Adam:Yeah. I know if you read the GitHub trail, like, if you just get into GitHub issues, like, there's a lot of people that feel that way, that they're, like, masquerading as a very open company. Yeah. I don't have a lot of strong personal conviction about that stuff. But, I mean, people want to feel like you're authentic.
Adam:And that that's the thing I would say about Vercel. The vibe is not authentic to me. Mhmm. Both in how they, like, present at the top, but also the people who represent, you know, DevRel position. It just feels very, like, robotic, not very, like, personable, I guess.
Adam:Now I I feel like I'm just personally attacking, and I don't wanna do that.
Dax:No. It's it's not it's not a personal attack. It is like companies have cultures, and you kinda set your culture, it shows up in a lot of ways. You know, you you can definitely go for this elite culture. Like, we are elites and this is our vibe.
Dax:Yeah. There are trade offs of that culture. I, I talked to someone. I'm not gonna get into any details, but I talked to someone whose company was doing integration with Vercel, and they were working with just with the product manager that works there. They were, like, really verbally abused by this product manager, just like just going into them acting like they don't even deserve, like, a minute of their time, like, just their ego was in a crazy place relative.
Dax:Like, the he's this private manager is talking to a founder of a company that's doing a partnership with Vercel. Right?
Adam:Yeah.
Dax:You can't be treating your partners that way. But this culture just leak into places. Right? If the if your culture is really elite, a trade off is sometimes you're gonna have people come in and, like, get power hungry and have an overinflated self sense of worth, and that's gonna, like, you know, bleed into your relationships with other companies. So the type of culture you pick, comes from the top, and it just gets amplified every level of that.
Dax:Like, I'm sure like Guillermo is elite. He is, like, an amazing engineer everything. Right? He is. And he, like, has probably the humility and everything to, like, balance feeling elite and also kind of being, you know, a person that people don't hate.
Dax:But when that trickles down, that might not all those nuances and that balance might not actually make it. Right? So I think that's kind of what you're seeing with with the company.
Adam:So I don't know if I feel better. I'm gonna be honest. I feel like I need to wrap this up somehow with a little bow on my personal stance. Just just for yourself, it's not for everything. And I just don't like monocultures, and I don't like feeling like everyone around me is saying the same things.
Adam:And I just I I feel like my feelings are invalid. I don't like that. It makes me emotionally react. But at the same time, I shouldn't emotionally react. I shouldn't have taken it out in the ways that I've taken it out of ourselves.
Adam:So I'm sorry. At the same time, everything I said, I
Dax:still believe. So I wasn't,
Adam:like, lying when I said those things.
Dax:Yeah. I mean, it just it's you're not gonna feel good about yourself because the environment that is created, no one can really operate in a way that they're proud of, I think, on any side. So, yeah, for me, the summary is just there is this vortex happening. Be aware of it. You're probably getting affected and pulled into it.
Dax:Myself, I am affected and being pulled into it. Like, with all the experience I have and the fact that I don't even use this company or this product, I'm like questioning like everything I do because of this massive vortex. So just be aware of that. Don't get trapped in it, like, just go The thing is, with all the stuff happening, the economy the way it is, like the technology moving at the pace that it that it is, just build useful skills that you can just learn once and have forever. It's more important now than ever to do that.
Dax:I think a lot of the monoculture you're talking about is a is kind of the result is people aren't going as deep as as they should be. Me and you have experience doing all kinds of things. At this point, I think both of us are pretty secure in our ability to earn money. The things that we're sitting on top of that allow us to do that are because we went deep in a bunch of different places where you're not gonna if you kinda get trapped in this vortex, you're not gonna make it there. So that's where my frustration is I think for for you as well and Yep.
Dax:That's kind of if anyone takes away anything, it's probably gonna be
Adam:I love it. Thank you for for that, Dax. You're always good at actually putting coherent thoughts together after I
Dax:just say a lot of words. You're oh, yeah. It's a it's a process. Yeah. I hear everything you say and that's like the Alright.
Dax:Fuel for what I
Adam:I think we're good here.
Dax:Alright. Cool. See you. See you see you next.
