Test, test, test. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Yep. I can hear you. Hello. Hello. Good morning. Hi, this is Dan con Chris and check. And so we're going to. Are another three minutes as normal. And then I'll kick off the meeting. Okay. Let me go ahead and kick off the meeting. Okay. So folks should have the slides open for February 6. I just pasted them into the window and a terror. Could you please share your screen. So that folks can see the slides. If they. If they want to, I'm just going to make one request here at the beginning of our call, which is, well, first of all, just a reminder that everything CNCF related operates under a code of conduct. And so the organization here gets a little heated. I would request upfront that everybody just interact in a respectful and. I'll emphasize collegial way. And I will say that one of the advantages of CNCF is that we're only two years old. And so a lot of our structure and organization such was put together as a best guess. So I don't think that's a good idea. It's a good idea to work well, but absolutely none of it is set in stone. Everything about CNCF can be changed. Essentially with either six votes out of the nine of the TLC or for a smaller subset of things, a majority of the governing board. So with that, I will hand it over to Alexis. If you don't mind leading the meeting today. Hello, Dan. I certainly don't mind leading the meeting today. I just want to figure out why I've got a. This on my screen. Hold on a sec. Okay. Do you mind if we jump to the first slide, which actually has something non-generic on it? Right. Do we want to do a roll call? I think it's offline. So let's go to the project status theme. Okay. So yeah, welcome to the exception level project. Let's move to the next slide. And the test incubation next slide. Do you want to say a few words about this slide, Dan? I think we've talked about it a lot, but it's becoming custom rates and talk about it every time. Well, it is. And we do have this election coming up quite shortly. So Brian Grant and Solomon hikes need to decide if they want to essentially nominate themselves to run again. And then on March 17th, the TOC will meet privately and the other seven members will decide whether to reelect those two or to pick a new ones. And then once the nine member to see is reconstituted, those nine will select its chairperson and Alexis needs to decide if he wants to run again for it. So that's coming up in a month and a half. And then things are stable until the end of January of 2019 when the other six members are going to be selected by the governing board or reappointed and Sam Lambert will either be reappointed or replaced by the end user community. This is a Brian. I do plan to run again, but do we have an official nomination process or voting process? But we definitely don't. Brian, the TUC gets to choose how to do it. The governing board. There's a whole like very detailed process on, on that's written out in the charter, but CNCF staff is very happy to run an election for you. We would just do it be a sieve, which is how we do all of our elections and people use the rank endorse it voting. But I actually wasn't here for the previous time, maybe Alexis can say how you guys picked Alex, how you picked Brian and Solomon. Um, I actually, I'm being honest when I say, I can't quite remember. Sorry, Chris can remind us when he's, he's here from, from what I recall, there were, there were emails with bios sent and, you know, the elections. Uh, I did talk to the TUC one time and then there were elections. I didn't participate in that obviously, but, uh, there, there was at least, I think, like a roster of candidates or something. Um, I don't, I don't know if we need an excessive number of candidates for this election, but, uh, it'd probably be useful to decide for this and for future elections. Okay. Well, I think the key thing, Brian is, is I'm not sure that Solomon is going to, um, um, renominate himself to run again. And so if, if he doesn't, then, um, I presume the TUC would like folks to put their names forward, but just to be clear, I mean, uh, the TUC could also ask people to put their names forward. Is it this, sorry, this is Justin. Is it up to the TUC to decide who nominates people or can the community nominate people as well? T, uh, TUC really needs to create the process. Right. So let me have a offline conversation with the TUC and propose it. I mean, basically I would just propose that anybody can nominate themselves and the TUC can request people to nominate themselves. Um, just on the TUC mailing list or something like that. Yes, exactly. And then, yeah. And then when we, when we get there, we would do the condorsed voting, um, of everyone. And obviously it's only the, the seven members would do the, would, uh, be eligible to vote. Okay. Thanks. That's it. Yeah. Okay. So I think that was worthwhile. So I will take that as an action. Great. Okay. Just trying to get this thing open again. So what's the next slide done? Project status. So this is something we discussed last time at hand. Uh, those of you who pay closer attention to such things will have noticed that, uh, it continues to be a live issue for the community. And I thought it would be very helpful for us to spend some real time on this call discussing the matter at hand, which is that, um, in a nutshell, uh, several people and I'm not necessarily not one of them feel that, you know, inception is being seen as a stronger blessing on projects than perhaps the TUC had intended when we first came up with the category. Um, so much so that, you know, companies appear to be, uh, betting their future on becoming inception projects and the associated, um, reception from customers in the community and from, um, VCs and so forth is consistent with that, that people are getting money that, you know, they're being promoted as the choice for Kubernetes for purpose X and other things which were not really intended. And I think that we need to, um, essentially look very carefully at whether inception is a valid category. I think it probably is, but I think we need to make its lowest status much, much clearer than we got as far as saying last, last time. So, um, this is what I want to discuss today. And, uh, already, I think on the, um, public list Camille suggested, for example, that we adopt some of the methodology of Apache with their incubation status for these very young projects. Uh, I think also we need to, um, come up with some much clearer guidelines for the marketing team in terms of what the TUC feel is the status of an inception project. Um, so that, you know, it's not promoted. Uh, I think, you know, if there is a press release and, uh, some, and what goes into that press release, very important considerations, you know, we don't want people to think that somebody, can you please stop typing or go on mute. Whoever that is. Um, if there is a press release, you know, that should message the correct status of the project. And it should describe the project very carefully. Otherwise we have a danger of overhype and the subsequent uh, costs of that, which have already been felt by many people. Uh, and there's been actually quite a lot of upset, which is not great. So, um, I'm not quite sure exactly. Yeah, let's actually go to the next slide, please Dan. Let's go to them. This is, this is what we have on the website right now. It states that inception projects are at a lower tier, but that's the only thing we've done so far. If we go to the next slide, you know, as you can see here, this is, these are the topics for today. Um, so my first question for the TOC is, if we start graduating projects, um, do we still need inception? Because at that point incubation will be clearly demarcated from inception as a sort of starting point for certain types of projects. That already have reasonably significant numbers of users and, um, you know, get hub stars or whatever you care about following. Does anyone have any strong thoughts on this that we should listen to first? Well, this is Brian. Um, I think inception does, could potentially fill a valuable place, which for, for these early stage projects that do want a neutral, uh, home for collaboration amongst many companies. The incubation bar requires production usage. And as we've seen in some other cases, um, you know, projects at the very early stage, my, I may either choose another foundation or, you know, even worse, they may not actually get, uh, enough traction. I mean, if they are track getting a lot of, uh, participation, maybe that's a suggestion that a foundation is not essential for them, but, uh, you know, for areas that are important to, uh, cloud native, uh, cloud native operations, cloud native technologies, I think it would be a shame if we couldn't take on those projects, uh, just because they were early stage. I'm definitely inception or sandbox or whatever needs a lot of improvement. Uh, as I was looking around this morning, we don't even have a statement anywhere that I can find about why we do inception projects and looking at a number of the press releases around some of our recent new, uh, inception projects. Uh, the press hasn't picked up on the reason either mostly. Uh, there were a couple of exceptions like geek wire actually figured it out. Um, but, uh, we need to make that distinction much, much clearer, uh, and make maybe more drastic changes to the marketing so that they're not just put on the same level at cloud native con and whatever, uh, as all the other projects. Right. Sorry, Camille. Okay. So here's what I was going to say. I, I feel like there are like a number of conflicting forces at play. And, uh, obviously I was in the room when we decided to make inception and put linker D in it. Um, but right now it feels like one of the reasons that people want inception is it appears to be, and Brian or one of you who works for one of these companies can correct me if I'm wrong, that, you know, there are companies like maybe like a Google and Microsoft or IBM or whatever that don't feel comfortable having developers working on open source projects in a collaborative fashion that aren't in some kind of foundation. That, that, that is an impression that I've gotten. Um, the concern that I have. So, so if that is a legitimate thing that's happening, I would like for us to be able to, you know, enable those kind of cross collaborations because I think a lot of valuable work from those companies is coming, you know, is coming into the open source world. And obviously we want to continue to encourage that the concern I have a little bit though is that we have created a little bit of a beast where we, we don't, where, where we have kind of this, um, this arms race to get into CNCF as early as possible because otherwise you are kind of competing frankly with projects that are either being done by these big, you know, a thousand pound gorilla companies that are in CNCF partly because they actually need that foundation protection to collaborate at all. Um, and you know, and it sort of starts to seem like everything legit is coming out of us even at these like very, very, you know, uh, small stages. And it, it is, it does make me worried, right? It makes me worried. It makes me understand why people want to get in as early as possible. But I think a lot of the things that we've, you know, had up for vote to join inception are like sketches of an idea it feels like and maybe not quite like a real thing yet. Um, not, you know, I think Cordy and us and Lincordy and Rook frankly are all good projects and I voted for them. And you know, but, but I, this is my concern is that we've created an impossible situation for ourselves because we kind of need this to help, you know, to help a very, a very important group. Um, but by helping that group, we, we kind of bless that group at the same time and we make everyone else have to do that also. I agree with what you just said. And I think like, um, I mean, now that I work for a big company, it's different, but also like I saw the world from the like, you know, the big people are trying to crush us kind of way.  But I think that right now what's happening is it's being gamed, like people are like gaming the system so that they can get in and then get the like vettedness of the CNCF, you know? So I'm not, I'm not sure how we, I'm not sure how we have a, have a, have an area unless we are really very much like there is no, you know, there is no sponsorship. There is no advocacy. There is no press releases. This is a, you know, this is kind of a, a place where we want to let people safely collaborate and therefore we have this kind of sandbox inception place. But that's all you get from it. It's kind of this safe, you know, whatever trademark copyright, I don't know, you know, lawyer, lawyer safe area for companies to collaborate. And that's it. Like I'm not sure we can do much better. I'm not sure that if we, we continue to do more than that, we're going to get a good outcome from this. Yeah. I actually like the idea of turning the marketing of these projects down to zero. I think in addition to just providing a neutral home, we could potentially do some of the other things that we have talked about doing to help open source projects like provide example governance models and things like that for some of the projects that need them. But in terms of marketing, yeah, I would definitely be in favor of just dialing that back to zero to remove that as a motivation. Yeah, guys, if I could, if I could offer a comment. So this is Bob Wise with Amazon. Yeah, I think, so I think that would be a great thing to do. I mean, I had suggested on the email list, you know, a turn in the other direction, which is to make the bar for inception higher, but going with the theme of the moment at least. If the, I think part of the issue is that the TOC votes on it. And that is going to be an, and that's done in public. And that's going to be an endorsement that people take very seriously. And to the degree that the inception level is just like a safe harbor for anyone, any and all projects, the marketing probably will take care of itself because lots and lots and lots of projects will join, kind of like they do in Apache. Thanks. So I think what I just heard someone suggest is that it might be better to lower the bar than raise the bar and then pull it, make it a lot clearer that it is a sandbox. You don't get marketing, but you do get service desk help. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that what everything that has been discussed is, is great actually. And I think that's, that's probably the right thing to do. Quinton here, I have one other thought. So clearly the plan for inception projects is that they should graduate incubation and eventually graduation. And one of the, I guess underlying concerns is that we get projects getting into inception just so they can get their seed funding and then basically don't fulfill the ultimate goals of the CNCF. And so what we could think about doing, and I'm sure this might be contentious, but allow some amount of marketing. I mean, there is some achievement in getting into be an inception project, but then equally, if things get kicked out of inception after some reasonable period of time not having reached incubation, we could also make that public. That the inception projects are early, but on a trajectory towards graduation eventually. And as soon as we decide they're not on that trajectory, we remove them from inception. Right. Well, we definitely should remove. Hold on a sec. Just very quickly, just wanted to respond to, to Quinton. We do already have the concept of pruning projects, even from incubation, although that is more extreme. And I, it's been made, the point has been made that how do we already done so, perhaps some of the misunderstanding around the inception here would be less. But I do believe that we should, we should be more correct in that pruning projects, maybe do some more frequently and make it a lot clearer when that's happening. So I agree. So please continue. Oh, I think. I just think we're not very good at saying no. We're not, we're not very good at pushing things out. Like, and I don't think that's, that's, that's a bad thing about this group. I think it's just human nature. It's, it's hard to, you know, it's, it's hard to reject a thing that isn't completely abandoned. So I, I am not, I don't have a ton of faith that we would, that we would frankly, it would even be like the thing we want to spend most of our time on worrying about pruning projects out. Like I, I'm actually much more in favor of letting a lot more stuff in and saying, look, we're just going to let a lot more stuff in and we're going to make it much less of a voting process, much less of a public to do. You want to put some stuff in a sandbox and you know, whatever, then great, go for it. You know, we'll provide some, some of support, but perhaps not that much support. I actually think that's a better, that's a better path forward for us than, than pretending like we're going to do a thing, which I just think is unlikely for us to do based on everything I know about the way people act, which is that we would kick a lot of projects out. So would it be a CNCF sponsored sandbox? What would be the difference between that? And I just go get something on GitHub. I mean, I guess I just want to understand the boundary. My understanding is there are legal, there are legal things. And I don't know if Brian Grant or someone else can speak to that. My understanding is there are legal reasons that bigger companies would prefer to have it in a neutral third party. Yes. That is correct. And I can appreciate that fully. So I get that. I just wanted to know what, you know, we were going to lower the marketing, which I think is a great idea. You know, what, what will be the boundaries. So it's well defined for those new projects. They understand what they're getting into as well. Okay. Another thing I think we can do, and that we would need to do if we lowered the bar is actually do for projects that want to graduate to incubation. To do the full diligence cycle, as if it were a project from outside at that point, as opposed to doing it when it became an inception level project. That's a good idea. Can you type it into the chat box? So one, uh, this is John Bill Knight from court DNS. So as a, as a maintainer of an inception level project, I mean, one thing about broadening that there are, it's not just marketing that the CNCF provides. So like one of the things we, we use pretty extensively as we have access to the packet.io. Um, for that's where we run our CI and things like that. And that's all funded by the CNCF. Um, how would those sort of resources be shared? And maybe that's more a question for Dan, but if we were to expand inception to a large number of projects, it seems like that might be prohibitive. I don't know where the funding levels are. Hi. Good question. And, um, just by the way, it's actually packet is contributing those resources. So we're not, we're not paying for them. Um, so we're, we're very appreciative of that. And that program actually right now, which we call the community infrastructure lab is available to any open source project that goes and requested via, um, it's on our homepage under community, community infrastructure lab. And so, um, as of right now, um, there's plenty of server resources available for dozens of new projects to come in and use it. The idea has always been that we would prioritize the graduated and then the incubating and then projects and then, um, but, but as of right now, there's no scarcity. Uh, but the other piece I'll just add is I think what we're talking about or possibly talking about is explicit. It is saying that all CNCF services would be available to the sandbox layer, um, but not the marketing ones. And, um, we would really need to be more specific about that. I mean, I presume we would want to have a sandbox page on the webpage, which would not be on the homepage, um, where we would list those, those logos and, and describe the projects and such. And, um, then we would need to talk about whether we would be giving those, uh, companies the chance, uh, like Kubernetes SIGs right now can have a session at cube con, whether, uh, those sandbox projects can, all those pieces would need to, we would need to shake out. Right. Right. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. So for, we, uh, for those of who may not be aware, uh, we've had a thread related to this, uh, with respect to Kubernetes that we have a lot of projects cropping up that, um, would have are a potential use to Kubernetes and contributors want a neutral home for those projects, but it's kind of unmanageable to host them under the Kubernetes project itself because they have, uh, potentially different sets of contributors and, uh, different ways in which the project actually, uh, wants to operate and things like that. Uh, and that amount of heterogeneity is, uh, difficult to manage, especially on GitHub, um, which doesn't have great tools for managing, uh, lots of GitHub organizations and repositories. Um, so we've been discussing this idea of maybe if there were CNCF sandbox, that could be a place that such projects could, uh, kind of start and grow, uh, and experiment and innovate, uh, without requiring, uh, oversight directly from, uh, the Kubernetes, uh, steering committee and maintainers. Yeah. So I think that would be done by the same function here. We would just have a general CNCF sandbox, but we would also cover Kubernetes early stage. Yes. So, oh, sorry. One other question I would have for the TOC on this is, do you want to have, uh, uh, require the same six out of nine votes to get into, uh, the sandbox? I think we would have three sponsors or something like that. And then we wouldn't need to have a vote. Right. That's exactly what it, so you could do one spot. Yeah. Three sponsors, uh, would be a lower bar. Well, do I have any sponsors at all? I mean, it goes back to the TOC endorsement is really, really valuable in the market. Um, as, as long as the CNCF staff have done some basic diligence on, you know, is it a real project? Um, you know, I think that's, that's better, but it's still sort of falling into the same endorsement trap that we're trying to avoid. Well, if you want thousands of projects, but we can have them if you have no parcel. Well, I think part of the endorsement concern does come from, from things like CNCF press releases and interviews when the project is inducted, um, the, uh, putting, putting the projects on stage at cube con, you know, I think if we just cut that down and just say, look, um, they're not on CNCF.io. We have a GitHub page somewhere that links all the orgs for all the sandbox projects. Um, they have a lighter weight process and a lower bar for projects to get in. There's some amount of vetting to make sure it sort of fits with the right direction, but they have to, you know, if they want to become actual go into incubation, they have to go through the regular proposal and diligence process. Um, I think that seems worth, worth a try. Um, I don't know that's who, how else the vetting would work until, uh, the TSE contributor, uh, process, for example, is still very nascent and I don't know if we have enough, uh, participation or shared understanding yet of what we're doing there to fully delegate that to, um, people who haven't been identified. Uh, I would be really hesitant to, to, to say no, that everyone's allowed in. I mean, there's 77 million repos on GitHub and in reality, it does take staff time just, uh, to, to respond to service desk requests and just simple, small things. And so an alternative proposal to three sponsors on the TSE would be one sponsor on the TSE. And I, let me make even more specific proposal, which would be that if you want to be a sandbox project, you need to find one TSE contributor to, um, sponsor you and one TSE member. And the, uh, TSE contributor would be expected to actually provide some meaningful ongoing, uh, oversight and supervision and suggestions. Yeah. I think there's, there's a very important aspect here that we mustn't overlook, which is the branding side of it. And that kind of goes both ways. So whether we call these sandbox or inception projects, they're still in some way associated with CNCF. Um, and the CNCF has a brand to, to kind of uphold. And so we do, yeah, we, we absolutely need to have some bar. Otherwise that brand will, you know, time become worthless. Uh, which is, it is not at the moment. Um, yeah. How does Apache do it? I think, uh, Camille or someone sent out a link that was quite helpful. There's a lot of Apache inception projects. Sorry. I'm, I forgot I was muted. Um, I don't remember the details. Um, exactly, but it's all, you know, it's Apache. So it's all extremely transparent. And, uh, Uh, So it's saying that Apache requires a champion. And Louis is saying that Fedora requires a single sponsor. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah. That would seem like a decent pattern. Yeah. So, uh, on a, um, from an implementation point of view, if we're going to drop all marketing, um, I think it might be wise for us to first, uh, list exactly what we define as marketing. Um, because there could be some things in there which are just, just sort of essential to the functioning of making sure that people are aware of the activities we're doing with these projects that other people in the TOC may see as marketing. So, um, I don't have that list off the top of my head, but I think it would be wise to put it together and then have that discussed at some point rather than just saying as a blanket decision when I'm going to do any marketing. Okay. So I think I want to thank everybody for their contributions today. Um, Dan, would you mind finding somebody in your team to take the notes in the chat window and turn them into a Google doc or something on GitHub in the form of a proposal for a sandbox tier to replace in session? Uh, yeah, that sounds fine. So I will take responsibility for that proposal along with Chris when he gets off out of the air and, um, we'll definitely have, um, you know, some brackets or areas to discuss, but I think from here we can take it to a Google doc and the mailing list and check it again at our next meeting. Thank you. So there's another topic on this slide which we haven't covered. I want to cover today, which is the concept of more mature or stable or slower moving projects. Um, this came up in Austin during the TOC meeting. There was a discussion about projects like, um, etc, which are separate projects, which are used within Kubernetes and other larger projects. And I'm not, not necessarily evolving new features very quickly, nor are being treated as kind of projects, sorry, products on their own, um, trajectory to kind of long term standalone success. So can you go back from this slide? Thank you. Back to the, yeah, that's fine. Thank you. Project hearing thanks. And, um, you know, I think that, uh, this is a good idea that, um, we could label projects as being slower moving. Um, Camille, I think you were potentially willing to, I don't know, uh, act as a sponsor for this idea as well. Uh, there is, there is a sketch of how it might work below the fall in the slides. I think it's essentially just a label on a project, but I'm not sure if that's the right thing. What are people's thoughts on this? Yeah. I mean, I, I think that there are going to be projects. And I think at CDE was the, was the, uh, impetus for this discussion that are essential pieces of infrastructure for major cloud native systems that are just not maybe going to be, should not be expected to be feature churning machines. Um, that, you know, for whatever reason they are at a point of stability or they are just sensitive enough that they don't change that quickly. And, you know, they don't necessarily have a humongous group of, um, active contributors, but we want to provide them a stable home and support.  I'm not sure at CDE is the best example here because their, their development is actually relatively active, even though it's not necessarily adding tons of new features. Um, I forget why exactly we, we, we got to that. Obviously I wasn't looking at it when, uh, when we had the discussion, um, Brian and I were discussing it. Um, so maybe he remembers some more details that I feel like it was partially partially some of the concern was just the relative, uh, few. Committers there are on the project. Yeah. We have language in the, uh, uh, principles document about what kinds of projects we're looking for in terms of high velocity growing, et cetera. And, uh, at CDE didn't seem to match the. Spirit of. Of that, at least like in terms of. Adopt, user adoption, just, just as one example, I don't know that it needs to necessarily be a goal to get. Uh, zillions of more. Uh, direct users of. At CDE since it is a critical component to. Uh, to Kubernetes and to other. Uh, current sets of users and yeah, the, the small number of, uh, maintainers was a concern, although. Um, we are trying to address that of course, but. You know, it doesn't need to necessarily grow. It doesn't need to grow. It doesn't need to grow. That dozens or hundreds of contributors in the same way that. Uh, Kubernetes has tried to do, uh, you need high quality, uh, contributors who actually deeply understand. Distributed systems. Um, so it does feel like it's, it is kind of a different. Point in the spectrum in terms of, uh, how does it look like it's going to grow and it's a trajectory in terms of where it needs to go. Obviously we're open to revising any of the guidelines, but I, I'm not, it seems like this is already taken into account when the TLC, um, evaluates a project that, that at CDE being the exact example of something that nobody wants to have tons of features added to and presumably container D as well. So, um, I think that, um, I think that we should slow down dramatically and that new development would, would take place at other layers. Okay. So I'm actually going to suggest that we. Stop the discussion for today on this. Um, let people go away and think about it. Um, or renew another day. Dan, um, if you could ask Chris to make sure that that happens. Um, let's move on to the other topics for the day so we can wrap very quickly. Um, this is just a reminder on project health. We have some TLC contributors to help us do, uh, project health checks and other reviews. Uh, please email Chris and me if you want to be one of those people. This is important. I believe so far Mark has done and a couple of other people. Let's go to the next slide. So, um, Brian suggested that we update the cloud native definition, which everybody thought was a good idea. Uh, Brian, do you want to talk us through this and what you think we can do next? Yeah. Uh, so, so the reason, the motivation for, uh, starting this, what came out of, uh, discussions from the storage working group about what is. Cloud native storage and reading the proposed definitions. Uh, 90% of it sounded like what is cloud native. And they were trying to define that. And I went back to look at the definition in the charter and it seemed very Kubernetes specific. We talked about containers, dynamic scheduling and microservices, uh, which seemed particularly helpful for evaluating, uh, other projects, especially if we want to do things like lower the bar for, uh, inception, we're still going to need sort of a rubric for deciding what cloud native, you know, whether a project fits with the cloud native mission or not. Um, so, uh, I think that the diligence guidelines that we came up with didn't really, uh, cover this in depth either. So, uh, I have what's shown here are the points from the second draft. There, there's a third draft now. Um, but, uh, thanks to, uh, Justin, uh, Garrison for, uh, helping to propose, uh, most of these points, uh, come up with attributes for that would be engineered into a system in order for it to sort of qualify as cloud native. Coming out of the discussion, there are also, um, points about, well, maybe we still need some examples. Like we can use containers and microservices as examples of things that would be considered cloud native or other, uh, sorts of approaches like declarative APIs or, um, uh, other specific technologies would be useful to help clarify. It's hard to get, uh, really clear, uh, accurate precise definition that's also concise. So I think we're going to have to, uh, balance it a little bit with, uh, having a definition that is concise, but maybe not fully fully explained and then defer the explanation to, uh, to elsewhere. The charter actually has a short section at the top labeled the mission, uh, and then a longer section as sort of an appendix called schedule a where it discusses, um, cloud native different parts of a cloud native, uh, ecosystem and, uh, somewhat more detail. And that part also needs to be updated. I haven't started to work on that. But that is, would be another place where we can put some of these additional details or we could just remove that entirely and create an entirely new documents, which contains our up to date understanding of, um, what key, uh, technologies or, or functionality in that ecosystem would be and how they fit with cloud native. Um, so as far as where to go next with this, uh, there is a document, um, which I can paste into the chat, uh, just a second. And there is an email thread. So either comment on the document or reply in the email thread and we'll try to come to agreement on, uh, something concise and then maybe we can start working on the longer form, uh, with additional details. Uh, there, I might, it's my understanding that there are a number of charter updates potentially that we may want to make. So this would be sort of bundled with those and a revised version of the charter for vote by the GB at some point in the, hopefully not tremendously distant future. Hey Brian. Um, this is all, I'm very supportive of it. And we're ready to immediately change the CNCF marketing in terms of, you know, what's on the homepage and our slide decks and such, but all things being equal, uh, I would, I think encourage the TOC to make a recommendation to the GB to just eliminate appendix A. Uh, I mean the context here is that a very small group of people wrote that appendix in mid 2015 when they were trying to kick this off when cloud native didn't have a clear understanding and you know, things were just way, way bigger than they were today. And so I'm just not sure that we want to have a complicated bureaucratic process for amending that in the future. It seems like it might be easier to just eliminate it from the charter and then the TOC can have a document, which, you know, maybe try and update once a year or something where it lays out what, what you currently believe cloud native represents. Uh, I like that idea. Yeah, me too. So Dan, are there any other changes coming out of the operating principles that need to be updated in the charter just while we're on that topic? I mean, I could be wrong, but I actually wasn't aware of other meaningful changes to the charter going forward. Oh, well. Um, and so the election, uh, details were clarified that I still think that the language in the charter is fairly confusing. Um, I don't know if we want to bother updating that or also just remove that to a separate document or leave it as is. Um, I would, I would have to read the charter again to point out specific things that could be changed, but it is. I don't know. Maybe the documents of historical interest, but it's like as a whole, I find the documents somewhat confusing. So I do as well, Brian, and I want to make the claim that I did not write the charter and have no allegiance to it, but the election was a specific example where trying to pull all the information from the charter to, to create that election document was tedious and confusing, but I believe creating those specific dates in the schedule and everything is completely consistent with the charter and that by getting both the TOC and the governing board to sign off on it to agree that this was the path forward, it's not actually necessary to revise the charter. And so my, my fear is that undertaking that is just a meaningful effort and it's not going to produce useful results at the end of it. So, so maybe what we should look at doing is, um, putting useful content that we want people to understand places other than the charter and just make the charter less prominent. Exactly. We mentioned the charter in every single press release. So, and that's an easy, I mean, that we can just change that going forward. And so we already have the TOC principles document, which we went through this process on. So we can start highlighting that and then whatever we call this new doc of the cloud native definition or cloud native principles, something like that. Great. So that's a great strategy. We can take bits out of the charter, replace them with better stuff in chunks over time. And, uh, this will be the next piece. So in terms of next steps on this document, knowing that Brian often volunteers for things while being very busy, would it be possible for a TOC contributor, perhaps some like Justin, who's been down this path before to volunteer to own or co-own the delivery of a document? I would love to have Justin's help with his wanting to do it. I just really don't want this document to be designed by committee. That is my concern with this is that it is starting, it's starting down the path of designed by committee where, where it, you know, I will be opinionated on this one because I think, I think, you know, we were, we were inching down that path a little bit. And I understand that these things can be hard to pin down.  But I hope we can, I hope we can keep this to be something that is actionable as a, you know, when I put on my end user hat, um, I actually have found the original definition, maybe Kubernetes specific, incredibly, incredibly useful. And one of the best definitions of like an application layer, what cloud native kind of needs to look like. Um, and we aren't evaluating projects that are application layer projects always, right? We're evaluating a lot of infrastructure, which is why it doesn't always fit perfectly for us. But, um, I just, I do, I do hope we can, we can, you know, uh, not, not make everything good about software engineering, uh, credited to cloud native in our, in our definition. So I will, I will be, it will be involved, whether you want me or not, I suppose. This is the Justin, I'd love to be involved with obviously, you know, driving some of that definition. Um, I'm also very scared that it would be designed by committee. Uh, so I've been trying to, you know, at least have some, don't try to go into it and assume that we have no opinions, uh, but to know that, you know, the definition is going to be opinionated one way.  I think, uh, it helps me kind of take a step back and look at those things, but also coming to edit more of a, I help manage infrastructure more than manage applications. So I do have a little bias there as well. So, um, but yeah, I'd love to be involved. I mean, as far as design by committee, I'm happy to just iterate on it with a small group like Camila and Justin. Um, and certainly I'm not going to include anything in the definition that I don't actually agree captures the, uh, the essence and the intent of cloud native. Um, right. I think that's a plan. Um, so if anyone else has a really, really burning desire to be part of that small group, um, please say so to the small group, um, that's a little bit of a big off line, but we'll proceed with that. And Dan, could you ask Chris to table a recall of the group for say a month's time when they've had a chance to form an opinion? Certainly. And, um, Taylor, can you put your slides back up please? We just lost them on the screen share. And I will just say if we do get more volunteers, I would prefer someone who's actually willing to contribute text as opposed to just willing, willing to review and offer opinions about the text. That's a good point. I do think that to Camille's point about being actionable, um, it would be lovely to see something where in addition to a set of properties of cloud native as illites, there was a statement along the lines of typically these are achieved by, you know, containers, microservices or something like that. Because I think I will help write Brian. No, I wasn't referring. I'm just, I'm just letting you know, I will help write. But, and yes, I, we got a number of good suggestions and ideas from the mailing list, but, um, it's not going to converge unless we actually get people with those ideas actually, uh, working on the texts suggesting alternate texts. So, yeah. But your point is taken, Alexis. I agree with that. Right. I'm actually going to leave the call to get ready for a podcast. And, um, I think we've kind of run almost run out of time. So I'd like to just shove the rest of the agenda unless anyone has any reasons to not do that. Okay. Good. Thank you everybody for talking about Inception without having a fight. That was great. And, um, see you next time. See you next time. Thank you. Cheers.


Okay, all right Let's roll my friends Thank you all for joining me, and thank you for coming to wordcamp Dayton. This is a wonderful event First time I attended here was like five years ago And it's been a special part of every year since about five years ago I Was starting to get involved in WordPress in a few different ways and I was kind of catching the bug as a lot of us have and I was Making some plugins and releasing them for free. I was helping co-organize a meet-up Up in Jackson, Michigan where I'm from and attending my first few word camps and kind of getting hooked Thinking like this is this is a really cool vibe I love the culture of this this community that I'm stumbling across I love the information that's being shared and some of these people seem like I can learn a lot from a lot of Cool stuff going on and I was kind of getting interested in doing more and finding new new ways to find my place or participate in this community and On Google plus of all places I stumbled across someone saying they wanted to start a WordPress show And they were looking for co-hosts. I didn't know the person, but I said hey, maybe that's the thing for me I'm comfortable speaking and pretending like I know something even though I don't and so the next thing You know I found myself Co-hosting the WP roundtable show back in early 2014 with a couple strangers now over the next five years I Continued co-hosting this show with along with a revolving door of no less than 10 co-hosts for the past couple years It's really been just me and I have somehow persuaded around 200 different people who work in the industry To come on my show and and talk about what it is They do and their stories and what success means to them and all that fun stuff Along the way, I learned a lot of different things and it's this is a fun opportunity for me to begin to share a little bit Of my reflections just looking back on this time getting to talk with I think are the the brightest minds in the industry I learned a handful of things about what they've done and what their lessons were when it came to Succeeding a lot of people I talked to have been very successful at what they've done. I learned a little bit about The makeup of this industry Who's working in WordPress who's actually doing stuff with it and moving things on the web these days? And I also learned a little bit about myself and what it takes to run a successful side project If you're curious who these people are here's a list of all their names Some of them might look familiar a handful of them are even in this room right now I've interviewed a lot of a lot of people and these these are very special people very excited about this list You'll very privileged to have had an opportunity to talk one-on-one with this many amazing minds But don't feel bad if these names mean nothing to you Maybe these brands do because these are some of the brands represented by the companies who I have had the privilege of talking to at length This should give us a little bit of context. I guess To understand like who these people are that we're talking about now let's start Let's start first with some of the reflections that I have About about me looking back How was I able to do this so consistently and and what did I learn? about myself in the process a Lot of things Maybe the most significant is what it feels like to regret experimenting with so many different hairstyles over the years way too many Anyway storytime the other day I went into my favorite coffee shop back home and the barista said Morning Kyle the usual and I was like this because Like achievement unlocked right I couldn't wait to get home and tell my wife about how awesome It was that I went the same place enough times in order the same thing that someone said the usual Kyle That's great. That is that sense of familiarity is something that I Appreciate and I think everyone else. I think you can relate to that We like we love that familiarity feeling we all love to feel like we're in cheers everywhere. We go except More often than not it feels more like first day at a new high school Everywhere we go.  I can relate to that feeling I felt that for a long time is still due to some extent and so I know I know what it's like and How difficult it can be to overcome It reminds me of how Frodo must have fell in the Council of Elrond, you know, it's a beautiful scene, of course where where a hobby of all creatures is Sitting amongst like lords and heroes and literal living legends and and the conversation is way above his head and pay grade and Doesn't understand what's going on and feels so out of place and we feel that way all the time So in this this journey of getting to talk with a lot of brilliant people I learned an Important lesson about the fact that there is actually a place for me there are things that I'm capable of doing and There's there's a spot that I can fill and I just have to be persistent and find it I think that's the case for all of us. We can all kind of find our place our role to play We all have something unique and special in some way and this really has helped me find that I've had to come to appreciate that I am unique and different than everyone else. I am not I'm not Chris Lema or Matt Mullenweg. I'm not Kerry Dills or Becca Rice. I'm not Pippa Williamson I'm not Steve Grunwell or Adam Silver or Dustin Hartslair. I am I'm Kyle. That's it And I've got a few little things that I can do in the place that I live and with the people that I know and There's a place for me that I can That I can flourish in and I think that's the case for everybody else and I encourage you to embark on that journey and find your place. I also learned a little bit about What it takes to sustain a project like I have started more side projects than Well, it's been a lot of side projects I've forgotten about more side projects that I started than then a lot of people start in their life and This is one little side project That's for some reason when I look back on it the biggest thing that stands out to me is like how on earth that I just That I keep doing it that I do not give up or stop Like I did with all the other side projects I started Well, I think it's I learned a little lesson about strategically tricking yourself into a Situation where it's really difficult to cancel on your commitments and I saw every couple months like I schedule all my guests for for months in advance and I put that on the calendar at a specific time and my family's on board that that's the time that I do this every single week and It's very awkward and difficult for me to cancel that and that's enough of a trick for me to still be doing it five years later silly little hack I suppose I also look back and appreciate that my audience is a huge this show is relatively unknown despite the fact that I've been doing it for So long and that I've talked to Like all the notable people in the industry really Even in spite of that no one knows about it and few people really even tuned in relative to a lot of the other cool Shows in the industry that are a little bit more polished. I've learned a Value of polishing things and putting in a little bit extra effort to make it good and to market it But I also know that One thing that I did do even though maybe I Didn't make it the most presentable and market it really hard. I did release stuff I made things that are out there now and I did that consistently for years And if I had in one hand something that was beautiful and polished that anybody could objectively be proud of and on the other hand things That were actually released to the world. I had to take that every day of the week But at the same time I have learned to appreciate that Making compromises and quality do limit my growth potential if I spent a little bit more time on this project I would have a bigger audience Thing is I don't care that much about that. It's not what it's about for me. So I don't Look back at what I thought I was gonna get out of this in The beginning compared to what I actually did in the end. I had some expectations and some hopes Why invest in this? Here's what I think the outcome might be. I was quite mistaken But I'm not dejected over this reality. I am actually very Peace with this and please in the end because I would take what's on this side of the screen any day as well I'm much more satisfied with these results. I find these things to be much more valuable and enriching to my life Let's talk now about the makeup of this WordPress community. These are these are my reflections on Just who the people are and what are their profiles? What are they like and interested in and and where they from and their backgrounds and all that? with the disclaimer of course that my network is Large relative to a lot of people's in this particular industry and yet it's still Microscopic relative to the global industry my network is a reflection of me and my characteristics in life and so being a White male 30-something in middle America My network really reflects that the kind of events that I attend and parties that I go to and discussions I engage in and people who are introduced to me and so on Reflect the characteristics that I have in the places that I go and so my network is not as diverse as the global community is Though I'm working hard on fixing that problem Even so even with this disclaimer, I think that there are some noteworthy observations to make and reflections to discuss first we are in a Young Industry and I'm not talking about the age of the people in the industry. We'll get to that momentarily. I'm talking about the age of the industry itself This industry has not been around a long time But it is beginning to mature. We're seeing the first signs of real maturation in this market now all industries follow a very similar trajectory All of them begin Moving through this highly fractured phase where the industry is made up of a tremendous number of Small players. We're talking about lots and lots and lots of micro companies all doing very similar or even exactly the same thing That's kind of like what our industry looks like right now We have tons of designers and developers and product makers with small single-digit number teams Tons in this industry But the market is beginning to mature and we're beginning to see some signs of consolidation consolidation occurs in every industry over time when eventually what occurs is Those small companies start to get a little bit bigger and the next thing You know some of them are maybe merging with or acquiring other companies or putting their competitors out of business And so gradually there are a smaller number of players and those existing players are much bigger than any Were previously and new entrants to the market are finding the barrier to entry much greater Harder to start a new business and be competitive because it's a little bit more Dominated by large players with more resources and that are more deeply entrenched And so eventually we get way up on this chart to a point where there are a very small number of players Just huge corporations dominating it and the entire industry is employed by just those two players I'm sure we can think of lots of industries that are like that that are very mature and established and are highly Consolidated and there's only there are very very very few like small entrepreneurs running scrappy small teams trying to giants that's That's not the case with WordPress right now We're still highly fractured with tons of small companies But we are seeing it begin to be a lot harder to enter the market than it used to be and become competitive Like new entrants people getting started are now more commonly like taking funding or like Starting like new ventures with big teams or New divisions of bigger companies are the new entrance as opposed to like just somebody throwing together some code on the weekend And a logo and calling themselves a business that still happens a little bit But it's getting a little more difficult because the market is more competitor And if you do so you're going head-to-head with teams of 50 or a hundred or 500 people This is a signal That the market is still young. This is these are the guests that I Talked to and the percentage of them who are self-employed versus employed by a company now in a young Highly fractured industry like WordPress. We see the pink side being much bigger a lot of people are self-employed and This industry that's still the case Probably more than half of the people in this room are self-employed. I would I would guess that's that's a distinct possibility It could be wrong. Maybe it's close to half But in a highly mature much more consolidated industry the white side will be much much larger And there will be very very few self-employed people. We're not there yet, but that is the direction that we're going This shouldn't really surprise anybody I've been told repeatedly over and over and of myself since signs that the WordPress community is actually doing pretty good and very open-minded and very committed to Correcting this like gender gap and diversity gaps that we experience in tech a very forward-thinking and trying to do things actively to promote diversity and to help with this problem But there's still a tremendous way to go still. We're still not there. We're actually not even close, but Generally, we're all doing our best to correct it and I'm optimistic about the future. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. This is the makeup of My guests which I look at this and I'm quite disappointed though I have tried I've tried and I continued to try harder and harder To work on this and to increase the diversity in my personal network and the guests on my show This is this was maybe the best that I could do in the first five years Turnover is a big deal. This industry is young. It is volatile. There are a lot of businesses coming and going there are a lot of Young people employed in the industry who are not established in their careers and are changing jobs quickly and So I see a high percentage of people Changing jobs and moving on to something new all the time We see Definitely big age gaps now this one. I think is a little interesting. There are a couple. There are a couple things that I Have come up with upon Reflection of this chart as you can see the overwhelming majority of the people on my show Have been in their 30s my age group now the first The first factor I think is these were people invited by me Which just means they were people that I met and became acquainted with because I never invite strangers on the show it's only people that I've met and unsurprisingly Huge majority of the people that I end up meeting and interacting with through social means Are in a similar age group to me. They're attending the same functions They're sharing and similar interests engaging in same discussions that I am and what do you know? They're similar age to me So that is one reason why I think this is large there are a couple other reasons that aren't me specific One is the age of the technology. I think contributes to this a little bit Where press is still a little bit too new to be dominating or really Really penetrating like the enterprise market. So like big businesses People more entrenched in their careers it's not as Prevalent there but at the same time we're presses kind of old and it's not the hot new thing that the kids are doing any longer And so there's this middle-aged group that is still really passionate about wordpress that a lot of us Started using wordpress when it actually was the hip new thing when we were in our 20s when we were the young kids trying out the new things and we were the the people who could afford to risk playing around with new Technologies and just seeing what we like and making a decision about what to go with because we were getting Started as opposed to being established So that stage in our careers Impacts the technology the week technology that we end up using so it's not surprising to me that a lot of us in kind of this Getting close to the middle of our career But still in the early half of our career are the ones really leaning on wordpress and the third reason why I think that this This slice of the pie is so dominant is I think our age group is very Disproportionately represented at conferences at least the conferences that I attend now this age group is one where us people like myself are not Are commonly not so Settled in to a life which restricts us from traveling at our leisure I am capable of going anywhere that I want to Really almost anytime I can attend a lot of events. I'm not really like settled and locked in and and and changed to home And I have the youthful energy to do so as much as I like But I also am old enough that I have that independence in the financial means to do so which the younger crowd does it quite yet Maybe still in college. Maybe not having the financial resources yet Or the independence to take off for conferences So my age group is very well represented at conferences because of just these life situations And that those are the three reasons that I believe this age group is Dominant in my network and on the guests that I've had on my show Yeah, so I live in the US and I haven't traveled much outside the US so my network is not very Big outside of the US. This is a map of my guests. That's kind of fun to make I've got a ways to go. I've got a lot of a lot of networking outside of this country to do and The WordPress community is global. I think the US is disproportionately represented Anywhere you go throughout WordPress The spotlight is always on the American developers contributing and the American companies Moving and shaking the industry even though there are just as many or more Great people doing things outside of the US. They don't get the same level of attention or appreciation. That's I That's that's for sure There's a little map of this is not very meaningful for reflections or anything This is just I made a map and I say look at that look at that I put pins on a map of all my guests There's no takeaway from this other than I've been getting around this country a little bit meeting the WordPress community It's pretty exciting. There are a lot of great communities around here I very I'm very fond of the Ohio WordPress community a lot of great a lot of great stuff happening and Dayton Columbus Northeast Ohio all over the place Pittsburgh has a really good community a lot of cool stuff happening in California in Florida But the greatest is in Michigan, of course I want to reflect a little bit WordPress is having its sweet 16 this year actually and if we were to really break up the Years that WordPress has been around into four-year chunks. We could for fun call each of those four-year chunks an era and I want to share some reflections on each of those eras Now these are reflections based on not just my conversations with all of these guests And I've talked to some from each era at length But also from my extensive research and just reading the history of this project in this community and being there for a lot of it the the first class is The smallest that's the first thing to say about it And this is it was small and it's difficult to find a guest for my show from this class Because it's such a small group. This is long before WordPress was Dominating in market share and it was a household name. It was it was just this new player. It was small and It rose quickly, but still at this stage. It was one of many options for powering your blog and So there weren't a trick, you know a tremendous number of people using it Also due to attrition There are a lot of people who are very active in the WordPress scene back then who are no longer using it This was a long time ago. So at this stage, it's a little bit difficult to really find a whole lot of people who were Truly active and participating in the WordPress project during this stage, but it was an interesting time There was just a lot of excitement There's a lot of kind of maybe younger people like I was talking about trying out new things experimenting with different technologies Pushing the limits of different platforms and trying out all of them and trying to extend them and hack away at the code And people like Matt Mullingway himself one of the co-founders of the project You know just like a young blogger and hacker and playing around with code and next thing, you know it's kind of popular and it's becoming a focus and An open source was just like a really passionate idea that they all held true to the next class Things started to get a little bit interesting because the project rose in popularity beyond the expectations of really anybody And this is when monetization of WordPress really started to become a commonplace though it was a contentious issue How do we monetize anything we're doing here? Is it okay to sell any software that we make? Is it okay to sell a theme or a plug-in? That was a very heated argument during this era and and we saw the first Beginnings of a community start to formalize the first word camps took place is starting to Expand through word of mouth. This is the era also where WordPress kind of like chopped the market share and became like significantly larger than Drupal or Juma or all the other players and it's being recognized as an important tool and This is where a lot of theme creators were suddenly making a whole lot more money than they expected to selling some themes the following era and at the beginning of this is when I really started actively participating in WordPress in like early 2011, so I'm still kind of new to the scene like I think This is when we really saw the the community exploding in size. This is where WordPress started to just dominate the market share became the undisputed leader having more websites than like all the next three competitors combined Plug, this is also an era where a number of prominent companies like who themes and and elegant themes and I themes Went from like being a theme focused company to a plug-in focused company and plug-ins started to be the hot thing to sell as a bit of an interesting time the software itself began to mature and turn into a content management system as opposed to a blogging platform and spent this era really battling that image that it had from the early days and then the most Recent years have also been interesting because this is really the era where WordPress is kind of like going into Uncharted territory This it's especially for a content management system like none of them have ever done this before or gone here achieve this level of success or Evolved this many years. It's it's it feels very new like we're going where no Platform has gone before and this is the era where we start to call WordPress a platform instead of Like a blogging tool or a content management system now WordPress is being used for weird stuff Nobody predicted crazy thing Steve is probably building absurd things with WordPress that nobody's nobody would have envisioned five years ago Crazy things, but it can't even talk about I'm sure Now we're seeing like I talked about before the market is maturing and we're seeing like legitimate companies form that are employing a lot of people and making real money and taking funding from venture capitalists and getting acquired from major corporations and Suddenly like major companies. I'm talking like Microsoft and Google are paying attention to WordPress and investing in the scene This was unheard of before when it was this funny little niche And it's also much more competitive than it ever was before We saw in the previous era you actually the era before this was the first time where Competitions started to be a real thing where instead of like there was one form plug-in There was one e-commerce tool, you know, there was one membership solution for this or that Then suddenly there were three now There's a dozen of each and it's highly competitive and starting one is a major Undertaking and you're going against the big boys and girls Now back to just some general observations about we're still on the people and the makeup of this community a little bit even though I sidetracked and just wanted a little bit about history This is one of the more cliche things that I hear from every guest as though like they're the first to say it except they're not Everybody says, you know, it's kind of funny story. I got into this by accident, you know, okay, cute Except every single guest said that That's not surprising. This is a young industry. It's not like your career counselors at college We're saying I'm gonna put you into the WordPress track, you know, that's that sounds like the right thing for you It's not established. That's not a thing. All right And anybody who's working in this industry kind of like stumbled into it as it sort of like exploded unexpectedly and Most everyone has a college education the majority of the people that I talked to a lot of them had really crazy unrelated careers and like them, you know the military or a firefighter or living out of their car or something weird I Heard repeatedly I don't know what to take away from this But there's a lot of people that I talked to have been successful in WordPress who are saying things to me like I'm a little burned out on travel. I was you know in the previous era going to Like every other word camp, you know when in the world there were 20 and I was trying to go to all of them And now there's like a hundred and I don't even know how many 125 probably probably more than that globally and So I heard a lot of these successful people say like I'm kind of scaling back a little bit But they're also getting to that age group like a lot of the people that I talked about before we're at a point where They were they were younger and free to just whoa this this things taken off I've made this goofy theme on a weekend. It's suddenly I'm making five figures in a month and I never expected this so I'm going to quit my Silly day job and just like hop around to these word camps across the country like it's not an uncommon uncommon story from that era Every like I said everyone was self-taught nobody had formal training for any of this hardly any hardly anybody and This is of note for a significant number of people. I heard this over and over this became a broken record The first word camp was a major turning point as this was the case for me as well I'm no exception. First time I went I was like, what is this?  You know, what can I do to make your life easier or to fix your websites?  I was very young naive But that was my business school training and when I came into this community where it was like, whatever Let's just help each other out. I was like You know the clouds parted and angels sung and I said, I'm never leaving this like this is beautiful. I'm here for life Let's move on to some of the lessons that people exchanged with me or that I learned either explicitly from them telling me the guests or implicitly just like me interpreting their stories Advice that they told me over and over The jack-of-all-trades kind of going out of style very difficult to market a jack-of-all-trades But a specialist someone who's actually like really good at a thing It's really easy to market really easy to employ and really easy to pay top dollar So specialized when you can it's a little bit difficult I ran an agency myself for a while and I found and I can appreciate how hard it can be to start like saying We offer a dozen things and now we're gonna only offer Six things and let go and if somebody asks for those other things we're gonna say no We don't do that and that was really hard and it felt unnatural and the result It's quite surprising that this actually helps your business suddenly. I'm able to charge more. I'm getting more customers I'm closing them at a higher rate and everything is going much better because I stopped offering more things This was advice So not just for my guests, but for me as well Everybody just keeps saying raising prices raising prices raising prices over and over broken record But there's a lot of cleanness to that. I think it's smart. I think it's smart I think the majority of us are not charging quite enough people said like I talked a little bit about before there's incredible And Releasing things to the world. I heard a lot of stories about people who waited too long to release something or We're a little bit too too cautious or too nervous about sharing it with the world or Overcome with that imposter syndrome like whatever I make isn't isn't going to be good enough But the people who who ship things even though they were crappy and today they're embarrassed about those early iterations They shipped it and iterated often and that is the model that succeeds. I Heard good advice from a lot of people about understanding when it's something's not working and when it's time to Pivot or move on to something different This is a valuable skill and the people who were most successful were not the ones who just blindly persisted indefinitely they were the people who Gave everything their best shot and worked super super hard and When things weren't working they learned from what they tried took all of that experience as though it were wealth that they had amassed and Invested it into a new thing where they were much better off than the last There's no such thing as like Stepping back and starting from scratch because along the way even accumulated a whole lot of knowledge and and talent and Connections and you're not starting back where you were before you've still moved forward Everybody has stories. I was asked about like what's an horror story like a worst client project and issues with employees and bosses and so on and Everybody says something to the effect of If if the communication is good, I think there's almost no problem. You can't solve Over communicate and stuff Engaging the community is absolutely a like fast track to success My phone stopped ringing from clients when I stayed home and live like a hermit and so my business suffered But not just not just business But everything relating to my work and my life and my satisfaction with my job was enhanced and enriched when I left home and participated in a community like this and also embraced this culture of like giving first Don't approach any situation thinking like what can I get out of this? But like what can I add? What can I provide and help others much like what Steve so well put this morning? I'm trying to help others. Good job Steve. I'm like I'm on fire because of you These are these are more me Interpreting like the factors that I think were present in some of the stories that were really successful Some of them were just right place right time. No denying that they'd be the first to admit it You can't copy some of the people who you model yourself after Because they were working in a different time There is no doubt that wordpress is a success and market share was like so fast and Unprecedented that a lot of people who were no more talented than you or more experience in fact probably less so we're throwing together little things and Shocked shocked to discover that they were selling like crazy There are a lot of people who are just doing the right thing at the right time and became successful as a result And so this is something to remind yourself of if your project isn't taken off and you're not prospering like so-and-so did The industry is a little bit different now You can't copy what they did because the situation is not the same A lot of them failed over and over repeatedly and it was just the last thing that they did they really took off So if you talk to all kinds of these people like the founders of these huge hosting companies Who are incredibly successful right now? those are the folks who like tried thing after thing after thing and They just flopped and fell on their face. I heard stories through my interviews from people who were like at rock bottom multiple times living in their car nothing's going right and somehow fast forward the tape years later and they are sitting on top of the mountain and They will tell their stories much better, but the truth is None of them where one hit wonders and then talk to anybody like that. There's like first thing exploded That's talked to a lot of people Look back and see a track record of more failures than successes and That's not the picture that we see when we look at them We see the successes But they look back and they just see a trail of wreckage behind them. A lot of people who found success just had money Know the simple as that some of them were fortunate enough to be in a situation Where they could just take time off and not earn a paycheck and just invest in a project Who knows what their situation was? Oh, they were all different Maybe they just had a lot left over from a previous job or took a An offer from a company or sold something or just whatever they could just sit back and make no money For a year or years and work on something and most of us don't have that luxury So some of them were successful just because they had that privilege Some of them were successful because they took VC money and built a big project and hired an incredible team of the most talented designers and developers in the industry and that took off these are just Factors that were realities behind some of the brands that you look and see prospering a Lot of them found their success from the people that they connected with and so many of those connections are made at events like this we're sitting next to someone who has a lot in common with you and Discover maybe your paths. Maybe your trajectories are like aligned and a lot of the really successful companies and people that I've talked to it all started when they met the right person Who wanted to go the same place with them and and just things took off from there And lastly, of course, you just worked their butts off These I'm talking to people who just worked late at night worked over the weekend made the big sacrifices let their social life suffer And and grew something that meant a lot to them real quick rapid fire let's talk over some of the key points and then I covered here that I think are the most important I Managed to keep this side project versus the hundreds of others I started going for five years, and I think that's because I tricked myself into making it hard to nut The industry is changing Our strategies must change we can learn a lot of lessons from the people that we look at as successful in the industry We can learn about how they worked hard and what they value and you know what what they centered themselves on But their specific tactics and strategies along the way Probably won't work exactly for us or at least in the same way because the industry is just fundamentally different It's changed rapidly even what worked two years ago might be off the table today All of us as a group this can't be just a few people in leadership It can't be just a bunch of us preaching up here on the stage who are as Steve also talked about not so Well, just fortunate in our positions, but all of us collectively need to just work harder on this Like we're still not close. We're not there yet And we have a long way to go when it comes to diversity I Think I Would ask especially those of you who are new to give the community a chance Just open yourself up to the conversations are gonna have here There are people who really want to help and people willing to approach the conversation with you would say I'm not looking to get something from you. I'm looking to help you if I can and just let them and Open yourself up to that and might might change your life and I did for a lot of us here and Of course if things aren't going quite as well as you had hoped This is probably just the reality. I think you just haven't failed enough times You might have to fail a few more times but you'll get there stick to it lastly, of course No one to quit and on that note thank you for tuning into this presentation and Do we have any time for questions or no? Usually I'm pretty long-winded. We have time for 20 questions No, we don't time for two questions first in the back Terry hi Okay, Tara asked a little bit about where are these emerging markets in WordPress like what is what's kind of like on riding that wave a little bit and increasing and also like where the VC funding is going in this industry that's a That would be a fun thing to discuss at length because I think there are a lot of examples and I I also think that we're in the early stages of this so a Lot of the examples are anecdotal at this point and and it's difficult to really read too much into them Because as I said, it's early so we can look and see like there's been Venture capital invested over in this and this and this but does that really mean that that's where the wave is going? Maybe but we're not sure because it's it's still a little early. We know that hosting is massive And WordPress specific hosting is just killing it right now. So a lot of the hosts Who are who only cater to WordPress and that's their game are just rocking and rolling They're growing and crazy and raising funding Round after round and and it's just crazy crazy town and all the hosts who aren't WordPress specific are like Heavily investing into WordPress and like saying that well now we offer managed WordPress hosting to and we're all about WordPress We're gonna sponsor all the events and like WordPress WordPress. That's us. And so hosting is like That we're pretty sure of there's major venture capital major wave in hosting highly competitive But still like all the money all the money As far as stuff outside of hosting then it's a little more Investments here and there we see we've seen like some Agencies get really really large most of those aren't taking funding most of those are bootstrapped. We've seen some like maintenance companies be acquired or very like Specialized development agencies in some cases who are really rocking and rolling like a certain discipline or a certain part of I Don't know what what's being demanded these days Some of those have been acquired or grown support companies sometimes have been able to scale up rapidly and Some of the product companies are really rocking and rolling like an e-commerce or Some of the forms plugins, but most of them are still bootstrapped So the overwhelming majority of the industry is still bootstrapped I don't know that there's something specifically that stands out as like a wave if I knew it like I'd be doing it probably Yeah, you're welcome time for one more No, we're done. Okay, great. Thanks for tuning in folks


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