Martin Kleppmann

Yes, well, I did undergraduate computer science like many others.

And then after that, I wasn't quite sure what to do with my life.

But I thought, well, it's like starting a startup seems like an interesting thing to try.

So I started a startup having no clue what I was going to actually do and then spent the first while searching around for things that might be interesting.

The first startup didn't work out that well, but through that I met some others who then became my co-founders for the second startup, which worked better.

And we sold that one to LinkedIn.

And then after that, I started being interested in like teaching these distributed systems concepts.

So that's when I got into writing the book.

And then during the writing of the book, I also switched over from industry back to academia.

Can we talk a little bit about your first and second startup?

Yeah, GoTested, this was like 2008 or something like that.

It was the age where people were having really difficulties getting their JavaScript working cross-browser.

Internet Explorer was still pretty big at the time.

Chrome had just come out.

All the browsers were incompatible with each other.

And so GoTested was a cross-browser automated testing service for websites.

was based on selenium an open source project that still exists and the ideas you would write like test scripts that automate the user clicking through the various interactions with a website and then just check that the right behavior happens and so yeah it was based on selenium but just as it provided as a hosted service so people wouldn't have to run various vms with various operating systems themselves it worked technically but i found it really hard to actually get adoption for it a lot of

people building websites like in theory said oh yeah this is great we we need to test cross browser and in practice actually it was really difficult to get them to integrate it into their workflow and just get in the habit of using it and investing in writing the test scripts so so that ended up not really going anywhere so it's like there wasn't like a business to be done or or like revenue to be generated in a meaningful sense

Yeah, well, there's at least one other, maybe two other companies from that same era that did manage to make a business.

Source Labs is one that managed to actually succeed.