Ben and Cassidy chat with Ian Tien, CEO and cofounder, and Corey Hulen, CTO and cofounder of Mattermost, an open-source platform for developer collaboration. They discuss how Ian arrived at computer programming under duress, the relationship between game companies and SaaS companies, the challenges of monetizing open-source projects, and why “software is adopted, not sold.”
Episode notes:
Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM).
They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams.
Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch, calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like Slack and Discord. Says Ian: “Games are all the risk of a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B SaaS product.”
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Diogo for their answer to How can I call functions from one .cpp file in another .cpp file?.
Connect with Ian on LinkedIn.
Connect with Corey on LinkedIn.
TRANSCRIPT
Ian Tien When I was at Microsoft there was this person named Ray Ozzie who was kind of like the architect of Azure and the whole cloud strategy. And when I was there, I was on a product at OneDrive and Livemesh and all these different products and interacted with Ray's team. Ray Ozzie also was the creative Lotus Notes, so he knows the collaboration space, he knows the software space. And then as Mattermost was starting out and I was trying to figure out what to do, I wrote Ray a note and I was like, "Hey, I've got this project called Mattermost. It's in collaboration. And I'm wondering if you had some time to get your advice." And then he wrote back and he was like, "Not only have I heard of Mattermost, I've actually read through your codebase because I was trying to figure out if Golang was a thing and if I should use it, and based on your codebase, I thought I should." And I'm like, "Wow! Exactly." As Corey said, it's all these things you don't expect when you go open source. Like, the people that you can influence without even knowing it.
[intro music plays]
Ben Popper Did you know Skillsoft is integrating Codecademy content, which offers interactive hands-on practice environments in 14 programming languages, into its learning experience platform, Percipio. Visit skillsoft.com/blog to start coding in seconds.
BP Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast. I am your host, Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. Joined as I often am by my wonderful co-host, Cassidy Williams.
Cassidy Williams Hello!
BP Hi, Cassidy. You had to change your glasses. I have only this one pair of glasses, and as you know, my FaceID only recognizes me if I'm wearing them. So I can't take them off.
CW Oh, no. These are my blue light blocking glasses, and so I typically try not to wear them if we're recording video because you can see me not paying attention to meetings.
BP Ah, I see. Yes, I can see you slacking off on Slack. We have two great guests today– Ian and Corey from Mattermost. I'm going to throw it over to them to introduce themselves. Welcome, both, to the show. Ian, why don't we start with you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. We often ask guests to date themselves a little. What was your first computer? How'd you get into programming? And give us that 10,000 foot flyover of how you got to where you are today.
IT Got it. So my name is Ian Tien. I'm CEO and Co-founder of Mattermost. My first computer at home was a Commodore 64. My favorite game there was bowling that had to be loaded on multiple floppy disks, like the five and a quarter.
BP Did you know that Gen Z doesn't know what a disc or a file folder is? Unfamiliar with the concept.
IT Oh, yeah. I used to be in video games, and there was a save button that was a floppy disk and people just associated that with save, but not like what it actually came from.
BP It's just an icon that means 'save' now.
IT Yeah. It's kind of like if you had these old Solaris machines and you had the little task bar that had little Neural on it that was like what Metal used to be, and that Neural was this affordance to move the task bar up and down. All these things are kind of lost in the sands of time, so feeling quite dated right now.
BP That's what we do at Stack Overflow. We try to make people feel old right off the bat. That's our main goal here on the podcast. No, but please continue.
IT I learned how to program in grade school. I'm from Toronto, Canada, or actually suburban Toronto, Canada. And in the winter time we'd come with jackets, and you'd have to be really careful because the static electricity on your jackets could like blow up the whole computer lab. So people would walk into the computer lab and everyone turned around and would be like, "Touch metal! Touch metal!"
BP Right. Where's the cleanroom before you get in there?
IT Yeah, it's just there's a lot of stack electricity. I think they were like 286 or 386 machines. But we had color. Well, no, actually at home I didn't. But those were the days.
BP Yeah, 386 DX was my first big PC.
CW There's a funny story about Grace Hopper, the famous older programmer. Way back in the day, she wanted to take a day off from this computer lab that she worked in, so she went to a joke shop and got a bunch of bugs, like just fake bugs. And she put all the fake bugs in their big computer and they were just like, "Oh, what's this?" And they vacuumed out the computer, but that messed up the static in the gigantic computer system and so the entire research group got like two weeks off instead.
BP Nice. So that's awesome that you had programming in grade school. That's not something that's very common. Did you then take that all the way through academia?
IT It was under duress. So I actually wanted to go to university for film and my dad was like, "No, you're going to be an engineer because you need a job and I don't want you to be home after college." So that's my journey to computer engineering.
BP Now you can afford to produce your own independent films, so jokes on him.
IT Yeah. He's like, "All right. It is now acceptable." So yeah. I couldn't decide what I wanted to do until I was past grad school. It was sort of like, "Okay, now you're an adult."
BP Corey, how about you? What was your journey into the world of software?
Corey Hulen For me, my first computer was an Apple IIe and I used to actually buy the magazines. I didn't know what I was doing, but I'd type in all the code and try to make something run as a little kid. And that was always really fun. But I think for me, it probably really started with my uncle. My uncle was in this industry and I'm really dating myself more, but this is mid-80's. He showed up with this brand new Corvette, like one of those old school 80's fiberglass Corvettes. I was like, "Ahh, that's what I want to be."
BP Nice. It's like, “This guy works at Sun Microsystems.”
CH So yeah, that was my first introduction to it. And ever since then, I just kind of stayed around in it, went to the college for it, that kind of stuff.
BP Sweet. And how did the two of you meet and come together in this organization that you work at now, Mattermost?
IT Microsoft was my first job out of college and Corey was there and we got on the same team. I was in program management and Corey was in engineering. And then the person that was managing me, like four months after I joined, left the group. So four months out of college I had to lead the group. And I remember people were like, "We're doomed! This group is over!" And I was trying to do what I could. I mean, I was a user interface designer. In college, I went to Waterloo, so I had a lot of co-ops. I worked at Trilogy, which was an Austin, Texas enterprise company. I worked at E-Trade. I worked at a startup over in the Washington, DC area, so I learned how to do interface design. That was like my shtick. So I was a front end developer and I just did the user interfaces because I was faster at that. And Corey, when we started, he was just like, "Just make the screens. We'll do the rest. Just make the screens." And shockingly it worked. And every time there was a new headcount open, we had to decide whether it was going to be an engineer or a program manager, and since I was so junior, I always wanted to make it an engineer so I could keep my job. And we ended up with like 10 engineers and I was just trying to make as many of the UIs as I possibly could. And we were the Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, that was our product.
BP Sweet! Nice. Business Scorecard Manager.
IT It's crazy. It definitely had its own CD-ROM. But the problem was, it was built on top of SharePoint and the actual executable was only 25 megs. And we were charging $25,000 per server and I can't remember what the client access licenses were, but we'd actually get complaints about, "How come we're paying so much for 25 megs?" And I'm like, "Corey, what can we do to inflate the installer? Can we add like graphics?"
BP A thousand dollars a meg seems fair.
CW So, Corey, when you were at Microsoft, were you just like, "Who's this Ian guy? Ugh." Or did you get on right away?
CH I think we did. Like I said, I think we were both young, excited to be there, and excited about terraforming new product and stuff like that. It was just an overall really fun experience. Like I said, I think we built a great relationship there. It's kind of funny. Three other people who used to work for us in that team work at our company. So I think some really strong bonds were formed back then, and it's been a great relationship ever since. We've always kept in touch. We kind of grew apart for a while, but we've always kept in touch.
BP Right. That's so cool.
CW So did you go straight from Microsoft to Mattermost or did you kind of have adventures in between?
CH No, we both had adventures in between. I co-founded another company called Temple AI. I always like to tell a joke. We spun out of Stanford Research Institute using the same intellectual property, the same venture licensing program, the same source code, as a little tiny company that spun out of there. A little tiny company called Siri that sold themselves to Apple. We spun out and sold ourselves to Salesforce for a very, very minor success, for a lot less. But, so I went through that experience. That was what I was doing previous to here.
CW What about you, Ian? What did you do in between Microsoft and Mattermost?
IT So I stayed at Microsoft a little longer than Corey. I moved from engineering over to product management and I did Outlook.com and OneDrive where I was sort of running those for a little bit. I went to B-School because I was like, "I want to do something on my own.” But you can't leave Microsoft and do that directly. It's a hard transition. So I took B-School in the Valley to kind of understand how all this stuff worked. And then I tried a whole bunch of ideas while I was back in school, and the one that started working was doing video games. So we had an HTML5 game engine back in 2011 that was basically like Adobe Flash and JavaScript on 2D canvas. And we found out, unfortunately, that that's not a thing. It's a technology, but there's no business model behind it other than selling it and licensing it, you just can't do anything. But the prototypes that we'd made to play games, they were actually making money. So we kind of accidentally became a game studio. And then we ran that for about three or four years, and sort of by accident, we kind of discovered this Mattermost opportunity of an open source project. And then that kind of became a thing. There was just a lot of market demand for it, and here we are. So Mattermost as a company is yet another one of those video game companies turned B2B software companies.
BP Nice. Yeah, Slack has that story, and the guy who did DeepMind, didn't he make like Roller Theme Park Tycoon or something like that?
IT Yeah, I think Reflective, I think Discord, I think Slack, definitely. I think in Asia, LINE and NAVER Corp. The thing with video games is that it's kind of like the mothership, right? So it's like, "Okay, I want to make a free to play game. I need to have graphics. I need to have an economy. I need to have game rules. I have to do a lot of security with all the people trying to break in. I have to do e-commerce and payments." And we had a chat platform inside the video game. And when you go to B2B you're like, "Wait, I don't have to build one of those? That's a business?" So if we can hire game designers or people from games, just please, please come to Mattermost. Because games are so hard. Games are all the risk of like a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B SaaS product put together.
BP Yes, the narrative arc is important or you're not going to get that fandom going. So obviously both of you worked as developers, as managers of developers, and then wore different hats at different companies. When you made that pivot from game studio to Mattermost, how did that bring the two of you together? And what was that core squad coming out of the mothership, front end, back end, what language were you working on? You were like, "We get that there's demand around this open source project so we're going to build X." Tell us a little bit about that origin story there.
IT I mean, Corey did all the work and I wrote the docs. I did the UI and he did all the work. A couple of thoughts. One is, if we can talk about how did we end up at Golang and like the early primordial pieces. On the functional side, we were using an online messaging service before Slack got really huge, and then this service got bought by a big company. It was kind of a startup. And then they really neglected the product. It would crash, we would lose data. We were so frustrated. And when we tried to leave, they wouldn't let us export. And we stopped paying our subscription and they paywalled us from our own data. And it's like, "Oh my gosh! Really?" So we prototyped our own version of it, where we were like, "We have 10 million hours of messaging in our games. Let's prototype this." We wrote it three times, and the third time, it started to work and we could use it. And we made the decision to open source it and it just really took off and it became so clear based on the customers that were adopting and buying us that this was an extraordinary opportunity. And that was where we kind of went all-in. And then Corey and I would be like, "How do we arrive on the tech stack?" We kind of started off in Python and some other things and that was an interesting journey.
CH Yeah, we started off in Python, and quickly into that journey, we ended up rewriting it in Go. And this is in 2015, so back then Go was just starting to get popular. It wasn't a safe choice as it is today. Same thing with React, even more so with React back then. It was a very unsafe choice in that sense. But it was just two of the technologies I think we really fell in love with and really loved. For us, the kind of safe choice was our big database technology. Kind of echoing what Ian said, we were very frustrated by the data lock-in so for us, things like data sovereignty were really important. We decided to sort of leverage just a very plain MySQL, Postgres database in that sense, so nothing special there. But that's kind of how we arrived at the different technologies at that time. And I think for us, that was probably a large part of our success, at least for the building open source community side of it. Probably some of the biggest original projects, and things like even React Native for our mobile, I think is probably still one of the biggest open source projects around. I think that just attracts a lot of open source developers. "Oh, let me check out this new technology. Let me see the code," that kind of stuff. So I think that technology coupling really helped propel us. Kind of like what Ian said, in the beginning it was almost like, "Here it is!" It was like, "Whoa! This response is crazy." He might've been, but I wasn't expecting that. So it was a fun, crazy ride in the beginning for sure.
CW I love that you have an open source company that is doing so well, because I think there's a lot of back and forth right now on how can open source get funded? How can you make this actually work as a business model? But I feel like if you do it right, it's not only great for your business, but it's great for sales because people can see exactly what they're going to get if they want to look at the code. And it's also just good for recruiting because developers can see what code they're going to be dealing with.
CH I don't know if this is unfortunately or fortunately, but we hire a lot of people out of our open source community. They get interested in the codebase, they start working in it, and that's, for us, people we really love to go hire. But on that hiring open source technology side, it's a really great win-win. I think it's always a hard balance, open source is always hard. We just try to be very honest, transparent, and open with our community. And it's a balancing act and sometimes we get it wrong, sometimes we get it right. But we just try to be very open and honest when we deal with these types of situations.
BP Important question. How many blog posts did you write to your personal blog about the brave decision you made to choose React or Go early on, that then made it to the front page of Hacker News? Because I need to know if you were like one of those, "We're taking a gamble. We're going out on a ledge here. Here's why I love Golang." No? You didn't write those?
IT Well, there's an interesting story. So maybe not that direct one, but when I was at Microsoft there was this person named Ray Ozzie, who was kind of like the architect of Azure and the whole cloud strategy. And when I was there, I was on a product at OneDrive and Livemesh and all these different products and interacted with Ray's team. Ray Ozzie also was the creator of Lotus Notes, so he knows the collaboration space. He knows the software space. And as Mattermost was kind of starting out and we were trying to figure out what to do, I wrote Ray a note and I was like, "Hey, I've got this project called Mattermost. It's in collaboration. And I'm wondering if you had some time to get your advice." And then he wrote back and he was like, "Not only have I heard of Mattermost, I've actually read through your codebase because I was trying to figure out if Golang was a thing and if I should use it, and based on your codebase, I thought I should." And I'm like, "Wow! Exactly." As Corey said, all these things you don't expect when you go open source, like the people that you can influence without even knowing it. So we didn't do a blog post on it, but actually I think even now, there's not many applications written in Golang. And in terms of open source applications, written in Golang, we're kind of at the very, very top of that short list. And React as well, like React Native. In terms of a full mobile app, it's open source that people can kind of poke on and understand. And what's amazing now, to your point, is it kind of comes full circle. A little while ago, Golang had a pretty significant SAML SSO vulnerability where you could bypass authentication in the Golang language. We found that out while we were reviewing a library. It never actually got in the Mattermost codebase, but we found that out and we got to work with the Golang security team and contribute back. We spent months doing a coordinated disclosure to companies, including public companies that were vulnerable. We worked with the downstream libraries that were doing the SSO and we could contribute back that way. So it's amazing to be a part of those early communities in open source, but what's so rewarding is that we can contribute back.
CW Yeah. It just is good for everybody. It's paying it forward both to your community and also people can contribute to your software as well. I remember at an early startup I was at, we were able to add some extensions to Kubernetes, which are now completely standardized today, but you couldn't do that before if it weren't open source. It would've just been like, "This is what you get." And instead we were able to have all of these different features. It's just great for everyone and it builds so much trust all over.
BP Absolutely. Let's dive a little bit into Mattermost, what it does, and for the sake of this podcast, talk about some of the early adopters, the clients, either named or unnamed. Describe sort of roughly where they had a very developer-centric culture, or it was the software team that was embracing it? Why would a developer, engineer, programmer use Mattermost? What do they get out of it that they can't get elsewhere from Slack, or Stack Overflow for Teams, some collaboration, productivity, knowledge management tool.
IT Yeah. The whole world has gone remote and what does remote development look like kind of remote? And it really looks like open source. It's pretty much identical, right? When you're going to build software in groups completely without a physical location, that is literally the open source way. And there's a lot of teams that just look to open source for all these solutions. It's like lightning doesn't strike twice. Mattermost is 22,000 stars and growing. But we did this other thing on the side called Focalboard, which is an open source alternative to Asana, Trello, and Notion. That's at 10,000 stars and Q4 it was one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world. So what we found is, when you create open source alternatives to these mainstream products, there's a lot of interest. So Mattermost now includes not only this open source alternative to Slack, but also this open source alternative to Notion, Trello, and Asana. And we've also got something called Playbooks. I don't know how familiar people are with Rundeck or Transposit or FireHydrant as incident management tools. This really came from our community saying, "We absolutely need this." So we've got an open source alternative to those as well. So what Mattermost does is, it's a developer collaboration suite that is supporting DevOps teams in the wild in remote. And it's all open source. They can see under the hood. And they can have an integrated experience across all those different products. And what we believe in the future is that the way that you have voice, video, and screen share in one thing, the way you've got email, calendar and contact lists in one thing, your collaboration for developers needs to be in one thing. How you instant message people, how you manage projects, how you run incident management. And we've got a couple other things down the pipeline that we'll be sharing out. But it's really one solution to do all your collaboration to help software teams work better together. And in terms of customers, I think I can share this because it's just the truth. We've got a lot of named customers, we're under NDA, but there's wonderful ones there. I got this call in the early days of Mattermost and it was the CIO of the Department of Energy. And we didn't have a sales team back then, so I was the sales team and he's like, "Who are you? Why are my teams using Mattermost? Where did you come from? Who are your salespeople?"
BP Are you an agent provocateur?
IT And then he's like, "Okay, well how do I buy you?" And he talked about schedules and federal things that I didn't understand. And he was really clear, I didn't know how you could procure. You could go online and swipe a credit card and buy a license key, but we didn't know how to do federal procurement. And he was like, "Okay, I'll just go figure this out." And apparently you have to have multiple labs in the DOE go and put Mattermost on a special list, they have to do all these security audits and over time they're able to procure us, and that's been wonderful. And then now, with fed results, we're with Carahsoft, the largest federal reseller into the public sector. We're on all these public sector accounts. But it’s really about bottoms-up adoption. It's like, "Here's the open source product and it's available for free and it solves your problem," and people just go use it. And then over time as they adopt it, they'll want to get the commercial versions and then they'll bring those in.
BP Cassidy, I'd be curious to get your take on this because I was just listening to an episode with you where we were discussing the challenges of monetizing open source and the folks that you knew from React Redux, and the struggles they had. So I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this and then why it works here and not in other instances, like how to make this work. Maybe that could be useful for our whole audience. But I would rather hear your take. I don't know, that just came to mind because I listened to you talking about that earlier today.
CW I don't think there's any one way to monetize open source because they're always so different and it's the classic, 'it depends' scenario. But what I love about it is that because it is open source, it's so easy for developers to just play with it. And then because developers like it, then it kind of just goes up the pipeline to the point where the CIO is saying, "I want to procure this. I want to buy this because clearly the developers love it." And that access is so easy. And I think with a lot of open source libraries, they might struggle because they don't have a license model or they don't have a way of saying, "Okay, well if a business is doing this, we have to do it this way." It definitely is a difficult problem to solve depending on the software that you're making, but that's how you get millions of users. That's how you get tons and tons of people using your software, is by making it easily accessible to everyone.
CH You're totally right. And for us, we always like to say, “Software is adopted, not sold.” And we also have a distinct advantage in that we're an application. So we're an open source company that has an application. A lot of open source projects are technology or they're more infrastructure. And I think those, at least from my perspective, would be a lot harder to sell or to have a business plan around or something like that. Where for us, it's really that model where they adopt us, they start using us, and they're like, "Okay, we should probably pay for this or buy this or do something or whatever." And it leads into those types of conversations. So I would say the majority of the cases, if not all of them, they're already Mattermost users, they're just not Mattermost customers when they come to us.
CW Yeah. I love that phrase– “Software is adopted, not sold.” I think that's a perfect summary of everything.
IT Yeah, I think there's a sort of analytical framework for open source businesses. And there's three ways to make money in open source. You can sell services around it, like support. You can host it, so it's a SaaS service. Or you can have an open-core model, so you have paid or commercial extensions or enhancements off of the core open source project. So you look at GitLab or HashiCorp, and as public companies, you can read their investor documents and their model is open-core. And that's the model we're in. So Mattermost is a developer collaboration suite. It's got sort of an alternative to Slack and an alternative to Asana and Trello. And the free version, as an application, is fantastic. If you've got a team for a couple dozen people, it's everything that you need. And then at some point, people open up that Mattermost instance and they're like, "Whoa! There's like 50 to 100 people here. I don't know who these people are." And the developer that installed it is like, "Okay. Hey IT person, this is a shared service. I'm a developer, you should run this. It's a shared service that lots of teams are on." And at that point, the IT person looks at our pricing list or our packages and they're like, "Oh, we need the paid version because we need user management and we need these core compliance and permissions features," and then that's where they purchase that commercial version. So that's the open-core model. You have open source, and then you have an open-core, and then you have the commercial sort of like surrounding.
BP Right. You get them with the governance. I got it. They need to make sure they're authenticating the users. Very cool. What are some things you're excited about for the coming year or that you think developers who are familiar with you, either on the open source side or the user side, can look forward to?
CH I think for us, it's really pushing towards this suite adoption place. We really think of developer collaboration as the area we're in. We have Mattermost, what we call channels today, or chat. We have Focalboard or boards or project management. We have Playbooks. We just recently started working on things like audio call and screen share. And I just think the more we can bring those pieces together, the more we can give developers like a true collaboration platform, and how they can interact with not just other developers, but whatever it is, designers, I use the word developer, but I mean it in the most broadest sense of anyone who interacts with those types of teams. And not even necessarily developers. Almost all of them are paid customers, but if you do anything in the space exploration space, you're probably a Mattermost at least user, if not customer. And there they're building things like rockets and stuff like that and hardware, so they're not necessarily developers writing code, but they're still kind of in that developer collaboration space. And that, I think for us, or at least for me, is exciting to be executing along that vision and dragging that ball forward in this space.
IT Yeah, I'm just excited about the market and how it's changing. This year, there's four and a half trillion dollars that's going to be spent on IT. And how much of that spend turns into results depends entirely on how well developers can collaborate. And that's what we're focused on. We're like, "What are the tools that people need to make that work?" And we believe very firmly it has to come from open source. It has to come where people are authentically building these things and modifying them and giving quick feedback and seeing fast releases. I think we're solving one of the most important problems in the world, which is how to get more efficiency out of that four and a half trillion dollars of spend. And I think open source is the answer and I'm so excited for everything that can be built in this space. And when that one developer comes in with that idea and implements that feature, it goes out to the whole world and it makes all of that better.
BP Very cool. All right. Power to the developers and open source, but you're making money off of it, most important.
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BP Let me shout out the winner of a lifeboat badge and then we will say our goodbyes. Awarded six hours ago to Diogo, "How to call functions from one .CPP file into another." All right. If you want a call from a CPP to another, we've got you covered. I am Ben Popper, the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter @BenPopper. Email us, podcast@stackoverflow.com with questions and suggestions. Or, if you like the show, leave us a rating and a review on your podcast platform of choice. It really helps.
CW I'm Cassidy Williams, Head of Developer Experience and Education at Remote, and most recently, Portfolio Partner for Developer Experience at OSS Capital. You can find me at @Cassidoo on most things.
BP Congrats on your VC pedigree! That's new, alright. There we go.
CW Thanks! Open source will eat the world.
IT Hi, my name is Ian Tien, CEO and Founder of Mattermost. You can reach me @IanTien on Twitter and LinkedIn, and it33 on GitHub.
CH My name is Corey Hulen. I'm CTO of Mattermost. The best way to reach me is just you can @ mention me on our community server, so that's where all of our community and contributors and staff members hangout, and that's just community.mattermost.com. It's a nightly build, so it's really fun to live on the edge of craziness, but 10,000 plus community members stick there and several hundred of our paid staff. So that's the best way to reach me.
BP All right. Get in the scrum. Sounds good. If folks want to learn more about Mattermost or do a demo or something quick, where should they go?
IT To try out Mattermost, go to mattermost.com. If you want to see the most recent nightly build, go to community.mattermost.com. That's our daily build server and you'll see the freshest and latest.
BP Awesome. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you soon.
CW Bye!
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