Hank: @rauchg is getting attacked from three sides. That's a triangle reference. And where should we start, Gonto?

All right, Gonto, we haven't recorded in a bit, though we have released some great interviews. Everybody needs to go watch that if you haven't. The Paul interview was great.

So there's been so many things we've said back and forth to each other the last few weeks, but I think today we only have time to focus on the freshest stuff, which all throughout last week, I think starting with Railsworld, there were some interesting Twitter fights, which we love to talk about. 

And DHH had this keynote at Railsworld, and he is such a great speaker. So I actually went and watched the whole thing.

I have thoughts on that. We can get into the spats and the rhetoric, what's good, what's bad about how these CEOs are and tech leaders are fighting. 

Cloudflare got involved. Levels got involved. @rauchg is getting attacked from three sides. That's a triangle reference.

And where should we start, Gonto?

Gonto: I actually want to start a bit with why I'm such a big fan of DHH. The dude now has, I think it's like 500,000 followers, but he got all of that, I think, by just being genuine. That's what I like about him.

He always speaks his mind. And I think it has to do with the fact that he's already rich. He tweeted the other day saying that he's rich, so he doesn't need to make money from Omarchy, which is his new Linux project to fight with Apple.

Hank: Yeah, someone was criticizing him for like, how are you going to monetize this? Seems like a bad business model. He's like, I'm doing it because I think it's the thing I want to do.

He didn't even try to make a moral claim with it necessarily, though we'll get into moral claims later, but it was enjoyable. 

Gonto: And that I think was fantastic. And that's the thing I like. He has been genuine and honest forever, literally forever. And that's, I think, how he got to where he is now. I remember people were complaining at him in the past that he was really liking Rails and other types. Then he was complaining a lot with Apple and how Apple was stealing people with that 30% cut, which is, I think, why he's doing Omarchy now. 

And he literally does things when he hates other people or when he hates companies just for the fun of it. And he does it everything in a way that he literally uses it, which means that the quality is awesome.

But what's your take on DHH? Did you follow him in the past? Do you start following him now? What do you think of DHH?

Hank: I've only really been aware of and following him for maybe the last year, year and a half. And yeah, I mean, I think he attracts a big audience because he is genuine. He seems to have that old school, I develop because development is freedom for me kind of mindset.

I basically studied his keynote that he did last week at RailsWorld because I was like, I can learn from the way this guy talks and does rhetoric clearly. And his talk is, for a keynote, it's so good. And a lot of the keynotes you see from big, well-known people, they're often overly polished, overly scripted and under-rehearsed.

And he may or may not have rehearsed it very much, but it was so good. It was so genuine. And he started all with moral appeals and purpose and why, which I think is something people skip over all the time in their talks. Like why is this important? What is my purpose? Why are we all here?

He talked about freedom. He talked about ownership. He talked about duty. He's starting to do ancient Rome metaphors.

Gonto: Did he talk about Rails? I didn't see it yet, but did he talk about Rails or not really?

Hank: Yeah, he talked about a bunch of things. So he was pretty light. Maybe if there's like a criticism, he's pretty light on technical demo.

He did one demo on, is it Omarchy or Omarchy? I've heard it both ways.

Gonto: I've heard it from Omarchy, but I don't know.

Hank: Yeah. So Omarchy, he did do a demo on that where he had a fresh machine and he put in a USB stick and yeah, he had, you know, he inserted lots of great humor. He's like, I have so many of these USB sticks at the conference.

He's like, but this isn't a souvenir. If you take this, you better actually install it. And it's just, yeah, he's, he's just an interesting fun guy on stage.

So he was a little light on technical demo, I thought, but he had lots of slides showing lots of things that were worked on. He talked about, what is it? Basecamp, the, the chat thing from his company, 37signals.

He's making it free or a huge part of it free. And he basically just had lots of goodies to share with the audience. He talked about a lot about Omarchy and then, but a lot of, a lot of the reason he didn't go deeper onto some stuff was he had other people he referenced, okay, these other people are going to speak later on this in more depth.

Gonto: I think what we can all learn from DHH is if we have a voice and we're genuine and we talk about it daily, it's going to work out. If you, we have a passion about something and that passion can start with hate and we use that passion, people will also get on board. Like he tweeted the other day saying that marketing is basically how enthusiastic you are about a product and then using that enthusiasm to give it to others.

I'm a big believer of that mostly because I'm the high energy people of the two of us. So to me, it's like, if you have a high energy and the enthusiasm, you can just give it to others. And I think what's fascinating to me is that in DHH case, Omarchy's enthusiasm came from hate, but it doesn't matter because he converted something ugly or dark to something that's good.

And I think that's fantastic about him. He's actually prioritizing, unlike other people who are rich, more on his passion and on doing things he really likes and values instead of just being more rich.

Hank: I think that's true. I think that's a good principle as long as, and I'm reflecting on our last podcast, which was with Paul, as long as you're in the thing that you're pushing and what you're passionate about or fixing, you do have to have a TAM, right? And so DHH's passions are aimed at very big things, right?

Basecamp is a messaging platform. Everybody needs that. Omarchy, it's an operating system.

Like it's, that's huge. So, you know, I, I'm always resistant to people saying you should work on your passion and then, you know, you won't have to work anymore. And I'm like, no, you got to find the passion that also people want. There's a, there's an important Venn diagram here.

Gonto: Unless you're rich. In that case, just find the passion and you're going to be fine because like you already learned the other thing. I don't know.

Hank: True.

Gonto: I've been following DHH forever. Like I used to code in Ruby on Rails. So I knew him and Tobi from Shopify from back then.

And I just love that he was always just controversial and calling on people. I actually just remember a tweet that somebody was tweeting like, I don't like DHH at all, but Omarchy seems good. I might try it out.

And he literally replied to the guy, “why do you have to be an asshole? You could have just said the good thing that you like Omarchy and just don't say anything good about me, but don't say anything bad.” And then by actually tweeting that and asking the guy to be more moral in a nice way, the guy ended up doing something from Omarchy for free, open source and shared the PR.

And then DHH was like, “I converted this dude.” And that's, I think what he does incredibly well. He's really good at being controversial, but genuine and nice. It's a hard mix, but I think he nails on it.

Hank: Indeed. Now. So one thing with the controversy, he does not mind attacking big ideals that he has a problem with.

And so like one of the things he talks about that was making the rounds is he wrote this blog post a year ago called merchants of complexity, and that was making the rounds again, Levels was amplifying it and clipping it. And they were talking about, you know, it's okay to be a crud monkey. And when did it get so hard to deploy a product and “Hey, these companies are trying to sell you, you know, too much stuff.”

And I think a principle here is if you like, it got a lot of attention and a lot of praise and love. And of course, we'll talk about like the spats that came of it, but I think what he does well, and something for listeners to learn is if you're trying to take down a status quo or prevent a new status quo from coming into being, you should have some thought and, you know, writing is thinking, he put in the effort to think through like, what are the actual problems with these merchants of complexity, you should find a catchy, like name to call them. Merchants of complexity, I've said three times now, and boy, it's catchy. Like it's a great, great little thing to say that just like label it has so many like good little negative labels captured in that, and then state very clearly and simply, you know, the with them without them and like the before and after keep the, he's kept the egos or authorities out of it more or less. 

He hasn't been too bad about name calling, though I've seen him do that. Or name calling is the wrong word, but direct directly naming the people he's attacking, but I'm curious your thoughts on that and how you saw it and where it went.

Gonto: I think on the DHH side, he does it honestly, because it's like, that's the thing he deeply cares about on these like related to this, like Vercel started to fight with DHH on levels on the DPS. But Vercel also fought this week with Cloudflare. And I think for example, for Vercel, it's incredible to be able to fight with Cloudflare because Cloudflare is a fucking monster.

So that's basically the Goliath. And Vercel, even though they are big now, they're the David to Cloudflare. And the fact that Cloudflare is so worried about Vercel, where the new city all day is actually calling Guillermo the Triangle Man, which I love the nickname.

It's so good for Vercel. And I think that as long as we feel confident that what we're saying and what we're doing, we should pick up fights with companies that are bigger than us when they are smaller. I don't know, like you have a lot to lose, but if you're fighting a huge company, you should pick that up and you should fight with them and talk with them.

And if you look, for example, at Guillermo, I think RauchG is really good at answering on Twitter, really good. He has very different responses to Cloudflare than to LevelsIO. Like to LevelsIO, the guy is not being an asshole to Guillermo.

He just believes in something on BPS. So Guillermo will just reply on it. That's not true.

It's not in our best interest. And this is why, which I think is on Cloudflare that they don't call him the Triangle Man.

Hank: He's mostly responding to like Levels accusations of inevitable lock-in. And RauchG did a great job replying there. And there were some replies about how it's gotten better.

Like a lot of people were able to defend that because I think two years ago, it was a real concern in the community. And RauchG saw that then, Lee Rob saw that then, they intentionally like turn that around. And you can see the benefits now of people defending people who migrated away from Vercel saying, actually, I had a great experience doing that. My Next.js is fine.

Gonto: And he gave examples of big companies like Nike.com that is actually using Next.js but without them. So I think he did a really good job of focusing on the thing that he needs to defend and not the people because LevelsIO is not a bad guy. He just has an opinion.

On the contrary.

Hank: Which wait… one more thing. What a great way to get value out of someone because Vercel's definitely tried to get Nike to pay Vercel before.

And so Nike has definitely said, no, we won't be your customer. But RauchG has said, well, fine. Now you're my case study on how you can use Next.js without lock-in. Perfect. And it's one of the best e-commerce sites in the world.

Gonto: And he can say it's fast and it works, etc. Other people will say like now Nike has a lot of money, but that's bullshit. They don't have that much money for the dev infra.

A really fantastic thing. On the Cloudflare thing, Dane called him the triangle man, meaning Dane was mean to Guillermo. And Guillermo could have been mean to him.

But instead of that, he just said, let me tell you how I feel about your pitiful answer. So he just qualified Dane's answer as pitiful, which I think is a very tasteful way of telling Dane to go fuck himself. And after that, he just continued the whole answer, actually explaining his points.

So he didn't take it. He stopped for a second, talked about the person because he was talked about, and then continued. But I think he did a masterful job there as well. And I think this is how you need to do it and how to think about this. 

One company I'm working with now is called BrainTrust. They basically help you build evals.

And this week, Sean Swicks actually posted a tweet about how a lot of big companies are not using evals. And there was another guy called Ben that was talking exactly about that. Those two things happen.

At the same time, we saw a tweet that Statsig had just been sold to OpenAI. And there were takes like, oh, AV tests are going to explode and blah, blah, blah. So we talked with Ankur, the CEO of BrainTrust about, you need to get into the conversation.

And before, he was nervous about it. But the idea was, in this case, if you get in and other people get in, this is going to be a trending topic on Twitter. And we just saw a tweet yesterday with somebody talking about how AV tests and evals are a trending topic.

We got Malte, the CTO of Vercel to join. And we had like 10, 15 other people just share their opinions. We're actually going to do a podcast on it next week.

But the learning here is, as long as you have good data and good information from your customers, as long as you actually understand the space and you have an opinion and you actually push hard for your opinion without talking bad about the other people who have the other opinion, you can be part of a trending topic or at least start it by just being controversial. People are scared of being controversial because they want to be liked. But you can be controversial while being liked if you're not an asshole and you talk about ideas and problems and not people.

Hank: Yes. And to build on that point, even joining in a controversy and knowing that people are going to disagree with you and other companies might attack you, we are in the attention game. Like part of distributing your product is getting attention.

And boy did so many tens and hundreds of thousands of people see all of these tweets and these conversations. And most of those people don't even pick sides. Most of the people that see these tweets don't even like any of the tweets, but they read them and they consider them and it goes into their future choices.

And they're thinking about, you know, oh, do I want to go more this style or that style? Cloudflare, Vercel, all of this taking up headspace. That's part of the marketing game and it has to be done.

You have to get attention somehow. And so if you want social media to be a successful channel for your company, you have to be willing to dive in and get a little muddy sometimes. Doesn't mean you have to sling the mud, but you do have to be willing to get in it.

Gonto: In the past, content was king because you could get people to come through SEO. Then besides content, you could do a lot of outbound. Lately, outbound and content are dead.

Like outbound, you can write with AI, send a lot of them. Nobody's even replying. We're seeing with our customers at Hypergrowth, like a reply rate going down.

Content's not that important anymore because there's so much fucking content created with AI and most people using chatGPT and others that it's harder to position yourself. And that's where being on Twitter or in social, working on influencers, thinking about how to show up on chatGPT are the things that are important. So what we're talking about today on being part of the conversation, being out there, being a bit more controversial, being a bit outside of your comfort zone.

If you're an engineer founder, which I think is most of the people who listen to us, you have to do it because attention is all you need sadly now. And attention means you showing up on social media and basically paying other influencers and working with influencers as well. But attention is a new marketing business.

Hank: Yeah. I mean, always has been just the channels are shifting, which is also always true. What else did we have here?

How'd you feel about getting ratioed by Elizabeth Holmes?

Gonto: I actually felt good about it.Like it was….

Hank: I knew you'd like it. You're like some sort of masochist.

Gonto: It was a nice tweet. Like for me, it was more about like, I wanted her to reply because I knew that that would give me followers and for her to see it. I got a lot of shits from people that I was burned by Elizabeth.

And of course I was going to like, she has 40K followers. I have only eight, but I've been doing a lot of work on it. I'm advising companies to get onto social media.

I have to get on with my social media. I used to have before 7,900 followers. Now I have 8,700.

I increased basically 900 followers, which is 10% for me in a month and a half by shitposting more, doing more baits, being more controversial, getting more in the conversation. So what I can say is it works, but the only thing that makes me feel bad about it is that the quality of my tweets is going down, but fuck it. I'm playing the attention game.

Hank: Well, there's an interesting thing that I tell people and I don't practice this myself very well, but if you tweet as an individual and nobody sees it, then nobody saw it. So what's the pain, you know? And even if you do that on a corporate account, I think it's more cringe, but you can delete the unsuccessful tweets if you want to prune it.

I like to keep corporate accounts really clean, but personal ones, eh, if nobody liked it, nobody saw it. Nobody can think less of you because they didn't even see it.

Gonto: And if they think less of me because I was ratioed by Elizabeth Holmes, I don't care. Like the next people won't even know that that's happened, but you're getting your followers, you're getting the engagement. I don't know.

I've been tweeting like today, I think I sent 20 tweets. I've been tweeting more and just replying more randomly to folks.

Hank: You're a machine. Or you need to work more. No.

Way to get your back five days a week.

Gonto: This is my fun project. Like my wife has been telling me that I'm spending too much time on Twitter because I'm spending two hours, two hours and a half a day. So my objective for this year is to get, be able to show in the revenue sharing program from Twitter, even if I get $1 a month, because then I can say I'm working when I'm using Twitter.

That's my new 2025 objective. That's why I've been working so much on my Twitter.

Hank: Then you can start… the requirements to monetize on Twitter are steep.

Gonto: It's 5 million views on the last three months, which is so fucking hard, but I work on it. I'll try to get it. 

Hank: We'll get you there. I'll keep giving you likes. 

Gonto: Thank you. I think that's it.

We're dropping a few more interviews on Essentials with Eric, the CEO of StackBlitz slash Bolt.new. And also we have one with Colin from Clark, which are coming soon. Hank is doing a lot of the work on that. So thank Hank, not me.

And yeah, we'll see you now next week. 

Hank: See everybody.