Paul Frazee

But when we started on this thing, we didn't expect there to be either the relevance or the market opportunity to actually have this thing go into production quite like it did. So every step of the way has been really surprising on that front and exciting. But when we first started to do the beta and open it up,

I remember people were starting to come on, and this was, again, like, I don't know, the third, probably more like the fourth time I had launched a product in the decentralization space. And up until then, none of them had worked. So we had these users coming on. I was like, okay, cool. You know, they'll be here for a couple of days, then they'll leave.

You know, like I had really, really learned that, like, yeah, everything you do fails, of course, you know.

Yeah, exactly. Like that's when they die. Yeah, exactly. But no, they stuck around. And it was like, that was the moment that really shook me the most. It was like, oh my God, they came back today. And it's been kind of that level of surprise ever since.

That's a good lie. I'm going to try to give an answer that doesn't blow that up.

Yeah, no, so that's actually not an unfair characterization. Everything moves so much faster than we were ready for. We started working on this protocol in 2022 at the beginning of the year, and then by the October of 2022, we were starting to realize, and you may understand the timing if you can play back everything that happened.

So by then we were going, well, we're going to need to make an app. And suddenly we were productionizing the protocol, which the org wasn't designed to do. We were not prepared really for that. And so we were kind of initially, we did have a client, I think, already going, but it was really just like a test bed to make sure that the technology worked.

We suddenly were hitting the gas to get features in there. And get the servers to a place where they could start to accept users. And then once we started to have them on, you know, the single Postgres era lasted, you know, for a lot of that private data, right? So there was a... Yeah.

Oh, if you don't start that way, you're doing it wrong. You definitely should. Because the transition after that is into the ScyllaDB and the event pipeline era where the engineering gets way harder. So you only want to do that once you actually are scaling. But that's what we had to transition to.

So by the time we're in the fall of 23, we're looking at this and going, we got to stop everything and re-architect this thing or we're not going to be able to handle this growth. It was just the demand was too high. One thing I know that Jay would want me to clarify about the invite period is that that was always... There were some people who were like, it was about exclusivity.

It was not about exclusivity. We were more trying to make it like a hip thing. It was very much just that the servers could not handle the load and we needed to get our TNS team scaled up. And that stuff takes time. We just weren't ready. So the demand was way higher than our supply. and that's what we were able to buy ourselves by doing that in my only period.

And, but you know, we moved as fast as we could and it wasn't until February of 23, 23, 24 that we could, yeah. Right. You're in the post in, in the, um, yeah.

That is completely correct. Yeah. And it's actually, well, first of all, this is all pretty integrated. So the PBC specifically, what that does is it gives us space to pursue a mission in addition to the profit motive. And so the mission is to create this decentralized protocol for public conversation and for applications related to it, right?

And that's actually just remains like the main goal, product market fit, scaling of having a profit come in so that we can sustain the organization that is still all in service of that mission. It's just the vehicle that we've chosen to do it by.

But that, you know, was something that when we were sitting down to attack this project, we had all realized like, okay, we are all trying to get a change in how technology works, but what's your theory of change? How do you expect to reach the market? And the way you do that is with a product.

So all the mechanisms that come along with the startup are really, we try to maintain that that is the vehicle by which we're doing, accomplishing this mission. That's not the mission itself. And either the discipline around like the scaling side of it or the moderation side, that was tough. But the other one that we maintained was making sure that the protocol was consistent

sufficiently out of 1.0 that like, at least the self hosting part of it was active before we launched, we did not want to go into the public launch prior to having that set up because we wanted to make sure that we hit those targets for what. So that was another thing that we delayed launch for to make sure that we were actually acting on the protocol. And it's kind of always that balance.

No, we had no guarantees of what was going to happen, for sure. And there was certainly – we had the – it would be a lot if I said we didn't have that anxiety in the conversations about – making sure that we're capitalizing on opportunities, but I would never say that the protocol or mission focus was ever in question.

That was just something that this team never really is willing to throw overboard. You do get into some complicated conversations about capacity assignment towards protocol work versus product work. And there are definitely some times where we're kind of looking at the quarter and going like, okay, what are we gonna focus on? In fact, a lot of last summer,

We were sitting there and going, you know, there's just a lot of features that are missing if we want to be, you know, what users are looking for. We just had a lot of requests and things that were absent. And one area that we did, I think...