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A Half-Century of Silicon Valley with Randy Shoup

/ 01:57:20/S5:E6
Adam Leventhal:

Hello, Bryan. How are you?

Bryan Cantrill:

I'm doing well. How are you?

Adam Leventhal:

I'm good. Did you, take the day off or or or hard nose to grindstone?

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, nose to grindstone, please. I'd I, you know, I I would like to think that that the presidents that we honor, only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, I choose. Yes. You know, I I we call it president's day, but it's only just presidents plural. I feel it's very specific.

Bryan Cantrill:

I feel it's just it's just two presidents that we're honoring today. I am. Anyway, that's how I'm observing it today. I don't

Bryan Cantrill:

know how you're doing it.

Bryan Cantrill:

We're not we're not observing I'm sorry. I'm not observing Warren Harding today.

Adam Leventhal:

No. He can get he can get stuffed.

Bryan Cantrill:

Warren Harding who croaked in San Francisco.

Adam Leventhal:

I did not know that.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. Did you not know this? No. Randy, welcome. Did you did you know this that Warren Harding bought it in San Francisco?

Bryan Cantrill:

I so actually, I've so I was at the House of Shields.

Adam Leventhal:

Yes. Great great bar in in Surma. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Well, so I'm at the house of shields. Who am I with?

Adam Leventhal:

O'Grady. Of course.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Of course. Exactly. Right. They're well played.

Bryan Cantrill:

So Steven O'Grady is in town. He wants to to so we we go to the House Of Shields. And, we and I start I I bring up Warren Harding, of course, the death of Warren Harding. Why do I bring up the death of Warren Harding? Because Warren Harding died in the Palace Hotel across the street.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I'm like, yeah, it's great to be here. It's in the Palace Hotel here to where Warren Harding's final moments on this earth. Last words, I need water. I can kinda feel that's like emblematic of someone not exactly going out on their own terms.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Soda and water, and that was the end, the palletale. And, and a Jason Hoffman, you know I both have been on the been on the pod. I believe it was Jason who's who said, you are the only person who knows that. That is so obscure. But, you know, that is really not that obscure.

Bryan Cantrill:

Do you know what I mean? Like, this is like a US President died here. Like, this is just not you know, it feels obscure because, you know, Warren Harding feels like but Warren Harding was the president of The United States. It's like, it it was a very big deal. There weren't

Adam Leventhal:

that many, actually. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

There weren't that many. Not that many died in office. Not that many died in office in San Francisco, namely one. So it's like, this is a big deal. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I'm like, you know, it to the contrary, I think you could walk across the street and and you could any employee at the Palace Hotel is going to know that Warren Harding died in the Palace Hotel. He's like, no way. $20 you're on. I'm like, alright.

Adam Leventhal:

Okay. That was an opportunity to really make some money, I feel like.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, stay with me. So we we go across the street. And, of course, the first person we see at the hotel and we would agree that is the first hotel employee we see. And of course, the first hotel employee we see is the concierge. And so I go up to the concierge where Jason and I go up together, and I'm like, sir, a a US president died in this hotel, and I didn't even get to the end of that sentence.

Bryan Cantrill:

And the knowing look in that guy's eyes, I'm like, I have this thing, like, absolutely aced. Like, this guy is gonna be able to answer any single question about this guy. So I finished the sentence, died in this hotel. He said yes. And I'm wondering if you might be able to answer some questions about that.

Bryan Cantrill:

He said, certainly. And then I think he was a little offended when I was like, what was the name of that president? He's like, come on. It's like, I was hoping for, like, I want, like, a room number

Adam Leventhal:

and a time of there's

Bryan Cantrill:

so much else I can offer, but he's like and he just says, with just, like, the look that you would give a toddler that thinks they've asked a sophisticated question that has not actually asked a sophisticated question at all, he just says, Warren g Harding, the whatever president he was of The United States. And Jason's kinda dumbfounded, and he's and then he immediately starts, like, well, I mean, that's because it's the concierge. And I'm like, okay. And now this is where you're like, opportunity to really take some money. I'm like, okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

Thousand dollar bet. We find someone for whom the question needs to be translated who knows the answer.

Adam Leventhal:

Love it.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, like, we like, you can find and because, like, you work at the hotel. Like, you're the house keepings. Like, whatever your role is at the hotel, you I mean, it's a hotel. Like, you you you know what the US president died there. It's part of the lore.

Bryan Cantrill:

You know what I mean? And he lost his courage. He's like, no. No. I'm not taking that bet.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I, you know, I probably overshot. I should've gotten, like, you know, a hundred bucks or something. I I I probably overshot the mark. But so I guess I I am today celebrating, I guess, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the death of Warren Harding. Not not the life, my dear, but only only the death.

Bryan Cantrill:

Standard written presidency. Teapot Dome scandal. Like, the guy was a I mean, he was the you know, how they give each president, that has, like, a nickname associated with him. I was super into the presence as a kid. And yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

That didn't seem earnest.

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, no. Go on, please. No. No. That's good.

Bryan Cantrill:

I feel like I'm, like, the deep sea garland model. He has said something that does not seem earnest. It may be sarcastic. I will need to ask a further probing question to know if, and the Warren Warren Harding's Warren Harding's nickname was the man from Main Street, which is, you know, and it kinda tells you. This is not this is not a a sparkling presidency.

Bryan Cantrill:

This is, but that was when the standards for the presidency were different. And now I would take quarter hour a thousand times. It's like sober.

Adam Leventhal:

Man from Main Street, like, you've got my book.

Bryan Cantrill:

Man from Main Street. I'll take that. That sounds terrific. I I mean, you just I I I can feel a sense of rectitude just the way you say it. Yes.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, anyway, welcome, Randy. Welcome as we celebrate the president's day here, on on Oxide and Friends. So so, Randy, I'm gonna, you know, I we know you're a listener of the pod. Is that is that a fair

Randy Shoup:

I may, I can't say long time listener, but I'm a relatively recent time listener, but I've been, binging. And not just because you not just because you invited me, but because so I was a big fan of On the Metal, and then, you know, you guys went dark on that and came back in your various spaces and clubhouses and, you know, ephemeral things. And so I lost track, but now I'm back.

Bryan Cantrill:

Now you're back. Well, so so as you know, it it there are many episodes and many, some episodes in which we we we get trolled. We get trolled by a tweet. We get trolled by a blog post. And I know that you have thought to yourself, well, this is good because, like, this is not one of those episodes, but this actually is one of those episodes, unfortunately.

Bryan Cantrill:

And it's got nothing to do with the meta ad. Don't worry. I'm not going there. The, the the or or no further there anyway. So the the reason that this is actually the the there is kind of a, an underlying troll here is there was this, and I and again, I I I don't wanna over index on the, more it's more of the sentiment that this, was a tweet, but I've I've posted the the blue sky post in the channel, and it is from, let's just say a young technologist in Silicon Valley.

Bryan Cantrill:

It doesn't really matter who, but it's the And the the tweet is, Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn't we run it? And this is in kind of tacit support of what we are seeing currently in Washington and this kind of this very much, move fast, break things approach to the government, which is breaking a lot of things as it turns out. And, you know, and, Randy, I I imagine I mean, surely, you must feel the same way of just, like, your skin crawling when you have someone who is not just choosing to speak for Silicon Valley, but someone who is so grossly unqualified and speaking in a way that so doesn't represent so many of us in Silicon Valley. And

Randy Shoup:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Totally. Yeah. Right. Exactly. You're just like, yes.

Bryan Cantrill:

That is that is one way of expressing the reaction I'm doing right now.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Look, I mean, feel free to complete your thought. But, yeah, it's crazy. I mean, the fact that, you know, it's this whatever PayPal mafia, you know, slightly enlarged, and the worst of them all that are, like, you know, destroying the republic. Like, that's not great.

Randy Shoup:

And then what has annoyed me actually, and maybe told me in this area is, these, like, relative I've written I've read, several articles recently about, oh, Silicon Valley's always been super hard right. Like Yeah. No. No. Have you ever been here?

Randy Shoup:

Like, we were like, since the seventies, it's been like hippies and, you know, LSD and, you know, counterculture and changing the world. And it's only relatively recently in the history of Silicon Valley that it has been about money, money, money. And even the people, you know, that have made, all that money, and I there are a number of them, and I know a number of them. For the most part, they didn't start coming here just to make bank. Right?

Randy Shoup:

They came here to do things that they cared about. And, oh, by the way, those things that they cared about turns out that, you know, millions and billions of other people cared about and and therefore, we went from there. But I do get my backup, yeah, with this, like, implication that, oh, everybody in Silicon Valley is an Elon Musk or a Peter Thiel.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's right. Well, and

Randy Shoup:

That's not alright.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's not alright. And I think that also I mean, what thing that that I've kind of come to to accept is that and I think something that's important to express is that there are many different Silicon Valleys. And there's a there's a tapestry of Silicon Valley, and there are many different threads through it.

Randy Shoup:

We attain multitudes, Brian, multitudes.

Bryan Cantrill:

We do contain multitudes. We do contain multitudes. And it's like and the I think for people who haven't been out to the literal Silicon Valley, if if you are out in the Santa Clara Valley, it's barely a valley. It's like a valley is not the term that's gonna come to mind. You'd be like, okay, I see like there is a mountain range over there, and I guess there is technically another mountain range that I can see way over there.

Bryan Cantrill:

Is this the valley that people are talking about? It's like, yes, this is this kind of this this flood plain. It's the Bay Area. But the Silicon Valley as metaphor, and, you know, I've often spoken of kind of my Silicon Valley or out of our Silicon Valley, which is, you know, the Silicon Valley of the Traitor's eight or of Xerox PARC or Randy of the Counter Culture. And I I you know, there is there is no one, I think, that is, I think, has got a better perspective on this.

Bryan Cantrill:

Or you got a unique perspective on this whole thing, in many different kind of dimensions. So, can we get into your life story for a little bit? Do you mind if we?

Randy Shoup:

I don't mind at all. I I I do not have the best perspective, but I do have a unique perspective. So I'll

Adam Leventhal:

happily I

Bryan Cantrill:

think that that's right. Yeah. I think well, because in particular, so you come out you you not actually born here. You're born, I guess, in in Pittsburgh when your your parents are at what we now call CMU, but was then, I guess, Carnegie Tech. Is that right?

Randy Shoup:

Carnegie Institute of Technology. Yeah. Everybody, abbreviated to Carnegie Tech.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yep. And you but you come out as your father is is is he coming out to work for Berkeley Computer Company? Is that do I have that?

Randy Shoup:

You have that exactly right. Yeah. So, both my parents grew up in Western Pennsylvania around, Pittsburgh, And they met at what was then Carnegie Tech and now Carnegie Mellon University. My dad earned his, undergrad in double e in '65 and then got his PhD in computer science in 1970. And then he Computer science

Bryan Cantrill:

in 1970. God, that is a very early computer science department.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. There, I believe that it might be it is, it might be the first computer science PhD program in The US.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That was Which

Randy Shoup:

which might mean in the world. Yeah. So his his, his application to join the PhD program was his, his professor Gordon Bell saying, hey, Dick, I'm starting up a computer computer science lab. Would you like to join it? And my dad's saying, yes.

Bryan Cantrill:

So And You

Randy Shoup:

know? That was pretty cool.

Bryan Cantrill:

Worth elaborating a little bit on who Gordon Bell, was. I think Gordon Bell has passed away. Right? You think that was

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. I mean, he's another generation. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

But describe Gordon Bell a little bit because, yeah, Gordon Bell just passed away last year, May of twenty twenty four. But so, a a pioneer of of computing for sure. And just kind of amazing to think of, I mean, the the discipline is still so young, you know, in so many regards that you have. So so he he goes to work for, and then picks up his family and moves moves to the West Coast to go to Berkeley Computer Company.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So, I was a year and a half. So I was born in Pittsburgh, like I said, Shadyside Hospital right outside, Carnegie. And then, we moved out when I was, one and a half, 19 70. So he's got, you know, freshly minted PhD.

Randy Shoup:

We'll talk a little bit about what it's in or I'll just mention. His PhD proposed FPGAs. Like, okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

I

Randy Shoup:

actually was just looking around in my little archives, which is a, you know, a shelf on my on my bookshelf. And I have an actual print copy of his, of his PhD that was typed by my mom.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Which is pretty cool. I mean, it's a it's a photocopy of it because the original is obviously in the CMU archives or whatever. But,

Bryan Cantrill:

what an what an heirloom, you know, to have that is that that's amazing.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So he he proposed in his, he proposed, I forget exactly what he called it. Reconfigular cell reconfigurable cellular logic. I think that might have been the the title, something like that. Didn't use the term FPGA that came later, but it's exactly that idea.

Randy Shoup:

It's, you know, earlier, you know, all computing was phenomenon architecture, so separate, you know, the data from the from the processing. And this was, hey, what if we took the silicon and, like, made it super generic and, and, you know, reconfigured it on the fly, essentially. And it's only relatively recently, like so again, this PhD is 1970. It's only relatively recently. Let's call it twenty two thousands maybe, but certainly twenty tens, where that has become somewhat mainstream.

Randy Shoup:

Like, I think there's an Amazon FPGA, service. And then, yeah. And then, Microsoft on Bing, had a project that they called Catapult, which was pairing FPGAs to do the ranking function right next to CPUs essentially, you know, that computed all the search stuff. So anybody who's super interested in that should, Google Catapult. Anyway, but, like, relatively niche, you know, from that perspective, you know, in in the broader ecosystem.

Randy Shoup:

Obviously, what you guys would know about and what my dad was originally envisioning was testing new silicon. Right? So, like, hey, let's build the generic silicon and, and then use that to refine, techniques and ideas and then kind of reify those, if that makes any sense.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. For sure. And we we I know it's, I know it's gauche to make reference to one's early on podcast. Although, actually, it it I mean, do I actually believe that because, like,

Randy Shoup:

I do it so for you You do it all the time.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, we do it, like, six times

Adam Leventhal:

an episode now, so gauche it up.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Exactly. I'll go shut up. But the, our conversation with Roger Kadoori was so good in that regard, Adam. And that was Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. The and the I ran into Raja, but a a pioneer in his own right, and kinda what the the it just talked about the differences between the CPU and GPU and FPGA and ASIC and kinda when you need these different things and

Randy Shoup:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And and soft logic and FPGA has got a very important role to play. So, yeah, kind of wild that your, that your dad is proposing this in his in his PhD thesis. That is that's really Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

It's it's crazy. So if you if you track the graph of the papers about FPGAs all the way back, like, they sort of terminate or begin at, at this PhD thesis.

Adam Leventhal:

Wayne, I I know he passed a number of years ago. I I watched your talk where he had passed recently. Yeah. And, was he delighted to see FPGAs develop in the way

Randy Shoup:

that they did? That's an interesting that's a great question. He consulted on the side every so often for Xilinx and Nice. That's What's the other one? Is it Alterra that might not be right?

Bryan Cantrill:

It's Alterra. Alterra well, there well, the other one yeah. There are the, this is where you get the, there are a couple other ones. Lattice is definitely weeping because you you're the the other one you're referring to is not Lattice. It's Alterra.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And Alterra was was an Intel property. A a and and what the hell? I'm just gonna make reference to our episode on Intel. Sorry.

Bryan Cantrill:

Until after Gelsinger. December two. You know, I'm just I'm not gonna apologize for it. You know what? I'm I'm loud and proud

Randy Shoup:

about it.

Bryan Cantrill:

You should go listen to our Until after Gelsinger episode where I I think we had mentioned out there at least once, but, yes.

Randy Shoup:

Yes. So he

Bryan Cantrill:

he he so he that that and that's a great question because he I mean, clearly, that I mean, that's an entire industry that he is, like, dip

Adam Leventhal:

Can you imagine, like, kind of, like, doing some work as, like, in your early twenties that then turned out to be, like, this whole, you know, I'll make up another billion dollar industry or whatever. That'd be wild. That'd be crazy.

Bryan Cantrill:

We we you don't need to Hold on.

Randy Shoup:

We're we're not there yet. Yeah. So, so I think he was, I think he was pleased, but it wasn't the crowning achievement of his life by a long shot because Right. Basically, he never did, he never def did FPGAs for Sirius after he completed his PhD. We will fill in the blanks here, but he ended up at Xerox PARC and started most of modern computer graphics, in particular, animation.

Randy Shoup:

So, like, there's a direct line from the work that he did at PARC to, Pixar and Toy Story. And even there's a collection to Jim Clark, interestingly, and s and SGI. So, yeah. So what he is known for, is, computer graphics and being again, follow the graph of the contributions back. And he's a very early contributor to, to digital video graphics, which I'll well, I'm sure we'll go into in great detail.

Randy Shoup:

But

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. I mean, and it's it's almost understating it in terms of his I mean, he is he he really he's at Xerox PARC. And, you know, Randy, I know that that, you're a big fan, as am I, of Dealers of Lightning, the book on on Xerox PARC. And the, and I I I'm I'm sure you've read it many times, but the the the chapter on your dad, I think, is just extraordinary. And it's kind of amazing to me is that he is actually too revolutionary for Xerox PARC.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I think I I was just kinda rereading it today, and I one thing I wanted to ask you because what what he's doing in particular is he wants to build a color display, which is absolute madness in this is, like, in what? Nineteen seventy four or something like that?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. They formed the lab. So he came out to Berkeley Computer Corporation in 1970. It collapsed Yeah. Exactly perfectly for him because Xerox was right then starting up a lab, you know, in Palo Alto called the Palo Alto Research Center or PARC.

Randy Shoup:

And the first STIX or eight researchers that Bob Taylor seeded the lab with were people from, Berkeley Computer Corporation. So those include Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, my dad. Simone was at Berkeley Computer Corporation, but went elsewhere and then came back to PARC to do Bravo, which later became Microsoft Word. Right. And then Alan Kaye was immediately after those six.

Bryan Cantrill:

Just extraordinary. And but then but your dad is at park with this kind of, like, this really personal mission that's a little bit outside the Alto. That's kind of like the you know? Oh, yeah. And and I mean, this must have occurred to you, but I definitely it occurred to me on reread that it's like your dad was like a park within park that in that like your dad was almost treated by Xerox PARC the way Xerox treated PARC.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh my god.

Randy Shoup:

So frankly. That's I I mean, obviously, I've thought about this for, you know, fifty years, but, Brian, you've said it, that's l that's you said it perfectly. That's exactly right. In exactly the same way to your point that Xerox, the center, you know, big, Rochester, New York based copier company was like, who are all these crazy long haired California nutcases? And, basically didn't commercialize much of anything.

Randy Shoup:

We'll talk about it. They did pay back the lab with a laser printer, but they didn't commercialize any of the other things which included, graphical user interface, object oriented programming in the form of small talk, the first word processor, which is Simone's bravo, Ethernet with Bob Metcalfe.

Bryan Cantrill:

You just kept doing it? Like, Ethernet is like, oh, there's a fourth thing. Alright. Ethernet. Ethernet.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, yeah. By the way yeah.

Randy Shoup:

I mean, Ethernet's to your Ethernet's not even the first thing that comes out of my No.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. It's not even the first thing that comes to mind. It's just insane.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, and also email, and, touch screens. But other than that

Bryan Cantrill:

But other than that, exactly. Yeah. And but it it it it but even but within that, your dad is too radical for the group. And that you He's

Adam Leventhal:

the nutcase's nutcase.

Randy Shoup:

He's the nutcase's nutcase. So I'll tell you the story. But, so, people should if they're all interested in this conversation, you should go by and read Dealers of Lightning, which is, 1999, book from Michael Hiltzik about Xerox PARC. There's an earlier one called Fumbling the Future, which is about the business thing that was written in the eighties. That's hard to get.

Randy Shoup:

But Dealers of Lightning is amazing. There's a there's a chapter, all about my dad, which is called the Pariahs. And okay. So, Bob Taylor forms this lab, and he came out of ARPA and the whole deal there, and was excellent at assembling really top notch scientists, researchers, particularly computer people, and bringing them all together and getting them to do amazing things. And so that's why he, you know, that's why he was running the lab.

Randy Shoup:

Cool. And so he got all these people together. And his his MO is basically tell people to find what's interesting to them, which he told to my dad, and then mold that interest over time so that everybody's all working just kind of in parallel, if that makes any sense or not in parallel, but, like, pointed in the same direction. Like timing? That makes sense.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Yeah. Convergent. Perfect. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So hit so Bob Taylor's, you know, MO, again, I only met him maybe once or twice when I was very, very young. But so this is all, you know, hearsay or whatever Reed say. And, so he so, you know, he formed a lab with all these, like, you know, super top top notch, freshly minted PhDs from around the country and figured that he could mold everyone and point them in the right direction. And he succeeded with the exception of one or two people, just my dad and another guy, Alvy Ray Smith, who's the founder of Pixar.

Randy Shoup:

We'll get there. So my dad when they when my dad showed up, Taylor says, take a year to figure out what you wanna do. And my dad Alvy describes my dad in this wonderful phrasing. It's like, I guess I just reread it. It's like, he's kind of a crusty guy.

Randy Shoup:

He doesn't play politics, and he's very stubborn. And I was like, got it in one, Alvy. There's a reason why you were dad's, best man that is, you know, when he remarried in 1990. They but they were the best of friends forever. And I'll tell you that whole story in a moment.

Randy Shoup:

Anyway, okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

So Wendy, do you mind if I did if I just on the Albie Ray Smith because Albie Ray Smith arrives at Park. And do do you mind if I just read out loud the two paragraphs from that chapter from Dealers of Lightning? Because I think that this is really very evocative of their relationship and kinda how extraordinary that time was.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Park then was at a peak of creative ferment. Each day, some new feat of engineering appeared, virtually demanding to be shown off to anyone of the free moment. And here was Albie Ray Smith, curious as a cat at large with time to spare. Shout fairly tingled with anticipation as he drove to the research center the next morning. Seated next to him was the one man he knew possessed the temperament to get super paint.

Bryan Cantrill:

Sure enough, the machine hit Smith like a lightning bolt between the eyes. He came in the door and got completely entranced, Schaub remembered. He just deep ended right into it. For the next several days and nights, the bewitched artist scarcely left the lab for more than an hour or two at a time. I realized this is what I'd come to California for, Smith recalled.

Bryan Cantrill:

You could just see it was the future. And and just to think that, like, that's the founder of Pixar, you know, in terms of, like, when he says being hit by a lightning bolt, this is a lightning bolt that has, like, has real ramifications for, like, this is, you know, we this is why, you know, you you your your three year old is singing, you know, so I wanna build a snowman nonstop because it all starts here with a, you know, but just So so let me let me

Randy Shoup:

let me motivate this for people who haven't done either have either haven't lived it or or just done the research. So, super briefly, Bob Taylor constructed a lab out of these amazing people. He pointed all of them at the office of the future or something that the other, the, like, chairman or CEO of Xerox said, the architecture of information. Nobody knew what that meant, including that guy. But but but, but everybody was excited about it.

Randy Shoup:

And so everybody so all the things that I mentioned, right, graphical user interface, object oriented programming, Ethernet laser printer, all those things, you know, direct line to Office of the Future. So you could see how all that research, you know, combined. And it totally did in the, Xerox Star, then the Apple Lisa, then finally the Mac. So we we can see the direct thread, you know, from everybody else in the lab. My dad, again again, because he was told he would have a year to think about it, he took it only took a month.

Randy Shoup:

But he's like, I wanna do color graphics, and I want to do video. So I wanna be able to use this new cool technology called the frame buffer with these, with these new, massively new pieces of hardware called semiconductors made by a little tiny company in the valley called Intel. Yeah. And because they made memory then, not, wasn't wasn't even CPUs yet. And he wanted to construct the world's first, not the first paint program, but, like, he wanted to construct he wanted to combine a paint program, a few people have played with that, with a frame buffer, a few people have played with that, with being able to take in video at frame rate, 30 frames a second, manipulate it digitally in the frame buffer, and then send it out the other end at frame rate thirty thirty frames a second.

Randy Shoup:

And so that's what he built. So he built a frame. So if you haven't heard of a frame buffer, it's very obvious what it is. You take a frame and you put it in a buffer. And this particular buffer was intended to be exactly the, what is it, six eighty by no.

Randy Shoup:

Six forty by four eighty six for of it, which is a standard television, you know, ratio. And, so if you multiply that out and you give yourself one byte, eight bits of color, So 20, you know, 256, color depth essentially. Then you multiply that out, it comes out to 300 and something thousand, bytes. And so Intel was just shipping two kilobit, shift registers shift registers, put a pin in that, not DRAM, but shift registers. And the frame buffer that, dad built called, the system overall is called SuperPaint.

Randy Shoup:

The frame buffer that was, you know, the core of the system was a bunch of these shift registers all chained together to be one long massive virtual shift register of 300 and some odd thousand bytes. And the way that it worked is associate it was like shifting along byte by byte chunk chunk chunk chunk. The video comes in, it gets manipulated, and it comes out raster scan. So people know how television works. Right?

Randy Shoup:

The raster scans one direction, then it scans the next direction, one lower, then it scans the next direction, one lower, etcetera, back and forth and back and forth. And that, snaky back and forth that the raster does was represented directly one byte each, in, in memory. And so the system, the paint system was all, manipulating those, those bits digitally. And so what was amazing this is 1973, '10 years eleven years before the Mac. Nineteen seventy three, he gets this working in April.

Randy Shoup:

And the way that the system so anybody who's used any patent program has used exactly this metaphor invented. There you go. It works sort of. It used, used, anybody's used a, patent program has used something, you know, exactly analogous to this. And it's basically the metaphors that he, in collaboration with few other people in the lab, came up with.

Randy Shoup:

So it's, one, part of it, it was actually one television screen. So one television was the canvas where it's where you draw and stuff, but the other was the, the palette. So you choose your color, you choose your brush size and shape. You choose various effects, various animation effects, and then you go over using a stylus on a massive tablet as opposed to a mouse, but other stuff was done doing using a mouse at park. So you use a stylus on a tablet, and you go over into the onto the canvas and you draw things.

Randy Shoup:

And that was the thing. So now I'm kind of now it's maybe motivating why Alvy was so amazed. Alvy Alvy was, had a PhD in computer science. Also, he had been a mathematics professor at NYU, I wanna say, had a really bad accident and then, like, totally rethought his life and got in his, I don't know, VW van or whatever it was and, like, you know, drove across the country to visit his pal, Dick Shop, and try to figure out what's next for his life. And, you know, that's the hit like a lightning bolt.

Randy Shoup:

You know what I mean? It was sort of, like, very fallow ground, if that makes any sense. You know, like, he was he was he was wrecked. I mean, he had all the, like, again, PhD in computer science. The guy's a freaking rock star.

Randy Shoup:

And, so very ready to appreciate and understand all aspects of this from a computer science perspective. But also, he's a he's an artist and a painter, you know? So that's why that's why the the clip or, you know, the quote that you gave, you know, my dad saying, you know, it was one person who could understand it. Again, understand it technically, but also really appreciate it artistically.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I I dropped this this image in the chat, but the the image, it works, bang, underneath written, sort of. Your dad holding it holding it above. And that is this is an image from the actual system. Right? I mean, this is the

Randy Shoup:

So yeah. Sorry. So, yeah, this is April 1973. So, obviously, nineteen seventies. Look at the you can't it's a gray scale, but it's flaming red hair.

Randy Shoup:

And, so this is the very first image that was taken by, SuperPaint, and he had not yet debugged the so it's it's using a a data general 900, something like that. I don't know. Using some mini mini computer of the time, and,

Bryan Cantrill:

he he

Randy Shoup:

has he hasn't that's it. Did you know him exactly right?

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

He, and he is, he has not yet he's gotten the frame buffer, but he hasn't yet debugged or even hooked up the, DG system. So he took this picture because he finally had the frame buffer working. He apparently needed to pull apart or put the clip leads back on with his knees so that he could get this image. So now so it's on and the image is in memory and until and before it degrades or whatever, he needs to because he wants to save it. He wants to he, like, now connects up the interface to the, DG Nova and debugs it because it's super complicated and figures out how the interface works, and writes the code for it's like he's writing the code on the fly.

Randy Shoup:

I don't know, like some, you know, hacker stupid hacker movie. He's writing the writing the interface code on the fly in, of course, machine code, to to, to save this image, and it works, sort of.

Bryan Cantrill:

And and this is, I mean, just and this is an extraordinary moment in the history of humanity, not to put I mean, this is this is like Alexander Graham Bell, mister Watson, come here. I want you. I mean, I feel it's like the it's just in I mean, this is, a this is a breakthrough. And I I you know, the fact that he's having to, like, you know, manipulate it with his feet shows what I mean, he was working by himself on this, really. I mean, this is like Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

He he def he definitely had help from a few other people in the lab, but everybody, you know, he's a pretty modest guy, but, yeah, he did it all himself. I mean, you know, he had he had a bunch of help on a few things from a guy, Bob Flagle in the lab and, Patrick Baudelaire, I wanna say. But, but, yeah, he mostly did it himself. And, you know, he's 30 years old, at this point, not quite 30.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Oh, wow.

Randy Shoup:

And then Wow. We'll we'll do all this if you want. But, like, fast forward, he won an Emmy for this. Ten years later, television Emmy, and then he won an Academy Award, a Science and Technology Academy Award. So not an Oscar because it's not a statuette, but a Science and Technology Academy Award in 1998 for this work.

Randy Shoup:

And so, again, we mentioned Alvy Ray Smith as being his, his collaborator and, like, his, you know, most excited fan or whatever. And they collaborated for a number of years at PARC. And then, you know, over time, people left to go found their own things, including Albie. So Albie went to, New York Institute of Technology and, hooked up with Ed Catmull, who had been doing graphics at Utah. And then they ultimately, got themselves, acquired into become the computer group at Lucasfilm.

Randy Shoup:

Lucasfilm. And then, let's see. Then they did, they were hoping they were planning to do something for Empire Strikes Back, but, Lucas didn't want to. They did do something for Return of the Jedi, but their famous calling card was the, Star Trek two Wrath of Khan 1982 Genesis effect. So people will remember watching the Wrath of Khan, will remember the Genesis device.

Randy Shoup:

It's it takes a dead world and turns it into something living. So, so that whole it's like a two minute sequence is the first fully computer generated animation sequence in a major motion picture. And with that calling card, they ended up doing a bunch more Lucasfilm. They spun themselves out as Pixar. Steve Jobs got involved.

Randy Shoup:

Toy Story, back to just, you know, acquired by Disney later in life. But that's, you know, super that's a super quick thread there. But yeah. Oh, and and the and sorry. Let me just finish this up.

Randy Shoup:

Sorry. Yeah. How did so the the television Emmy was a thing that, you know, SuperPaint was used in a bunch of television things, including by NASA for the Pioneer Venus mission in '77, the Pioneer Saturn mission in '78. So, like, it was known in television that this thing existed, but he wasn't but dad never did anything in movies. Right?

Randy Shoup:

So why would the academy, you know, award him a lifetime achievement award? Well, it was with Alvy and another guy, Tom Porter from Pixar. And it was because in 1998, the academy went to the Pixar folks and said, we would like to give you a lifetime achievement award. We think you've earned for Toy Story and the whole deal. And Alvy, to his great credit, says, sir, happy to take that, but you also have to find this crazy guy, Dick Schaub, and give him the same award because Superpaint, because this inspiration, and so on.

Randy Shoup:

So

Bryan Cantrill:

Which I think is, I mean, such inspiring in so many different dimensions. Because I mean, I think that, like, the, you know, the the kind of people the way people commonly think of Park as, you know, Steve Jobs kind of descends upon Park and realizes that they're gonna kinda fumble the future, and and and does the Lisa and and like, and the kind of the the kind of the narrative is this kind of not giving credit where it's due, perhaps to to to the Alto. And I just I I kinda love this, like, other narrative of this this kind of park within park. This person is too renegade for the rest of park. Right.

Bryan Cantrill:

That Bob Taylor's like, what what are you doing over here? Like, what what this is not this is not when I said pick anything that you want, this is not what I meant. This

Randy Shoup:

is I didn't actually mean it literally. Oh my god. I'm sure that was exactly the conversation that was had with my dad many, many times. And, again, like, to quote Alvy, like, he's very stubborn.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. Well, he and I I mean, so so Bob Taylor is an enormous, like, inspiration to me personally in terms of, like, the way he got people to take on really hard problems, I think is is really inspirational. And I can definitely understand, like, the Bob Taylor perspective of this of, like, look, I mean, yeah, we're trying to, like, we're, you know, we're we're pretty crazy, but, like, we're not that great. You're you're actually you're kinda two hills further ahead of us in a way that is, like, really tough. But I and I also just love this kind of the the fact that Alvy Ray Smith really wanted to make sure that, like, your dad got the credit that he was due, that this was it was not about, like, stealing the work of someone else or or or I mean, I just I think it's really, and I mean, when when I say, like, I mean, that is just it's that's a it is a great Silicon Valley story in terms of, very inspiring.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. It's exactly the opposite of the current, those articles we were talking about in the beginning. Right? So, like, Alvy could have said, yeah. I invented, you know, computer animation.

Randy Shoup:

And, like, he wouldn't have entirely been wrong. Right? But every time he's interviewed, I mean, any Google anything that Alvy says about his background, he will, in the first paragraph, say, yeah, I was really inspired to you know, I was doing a bunch of graphics and I was interested in this area. But, you know, until I saw Superpaint and got inspired by Dick Schaub, you know, I didn't see I didn't see how it would be the the next, whatever, multiple decades of my life. You

Bryan Cantrill:

know, and, and yeah.

Randy Shoup:

And yeah. So I mean, exactly. Credit credit where credit is due, but in a wonderful I mean, Albie's wonderful. Like, a wonderfully humble and, I don't know, confident, if that makes any sense. Like, Albie Alvy's got accolades up and down and left and right.

Randy Shoup:

Like, he

Bryan Cantrill:

does his He yeah. I mean, he's like, I'm not worried about, like, I'm not taking anything away from myself by sharing by giving credit where it's due. Like, I've yeah. I've got total self confidence. I also feel like that there's something really about the fact that, you know, there at the moment, right, like, I know I know what the before times were like.

Bryan Cantrill:

I know what the after Like, I was there when this was created. This is not and I think one of the challenges that we've got in Silicon Valley, and this maybe this has been true at different times in Silicon Valley's history, but this idea of and you you see people who who have inherited wealth, who pretend that they built it themselves. It's like, everyone should, you know, it's like, well, you didn't build the stuff that you're talking about. And, you know, you like, when you say Silicon Valley built the modern world, why shouldn't we run it? It's like, who who

Randy Shoup:

are you? I'm sorry.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. Right. Is that Bob Taylor saying this? This Yeah. Right.

Bryan Cantrill:

Exactly. Bob Noyce? Is this are you Gordon Moore? Are you I mean, sorry. You didn't build any of these stuff.

Bryan Cantrill:

You put a hair into it, pal.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. No. That's that's a % true.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like, this is this is daddy's money. And, you know, you and I get it. Like, on the one hand, you know, I wanna allow people their own, like, search for meaning and, like but, I mean, come on. I mean and I I I feel that, you know, we all have kind of a challenge of, like, when we've got these kind of great contributions that kinda come before us and how do we get kind of inspired by those and build the next thing while still understanding how how fortunate we are for those, you know, the the that kind of ancestry that solved all these hard problems.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Look, everything everything in a modern computer I mean, you you know more than anybody, you guys, at Oxide. Right? Everything in the modern computer setup, any modern computing system, is layer upon layer upon layer of outrageous invention and discovery and science and hard work and, you know, perspiration in addition to inspiration. Like, the multiple every layer is, like, there's somebody whose life's work was that thing.

Randy Shoup:

And we have now I'm making this up, and you would know, like, okay. There's a hundred layers or whatever. Right? Like, every single you're right. You know what I mean?

Randy Shoup:

Like, every single and you're, like, that's only the firmware.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's like You know, when also, like, on the one hand, it is kinda like, okay. No more layers, please. Like, I need I I need because the other thing that we've discovered in, of course, in oxide is then, like, you you get down to enough layers and then the world goes analog again. You're like, what's this? It's like, oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Sorry. Digital's a lie. Wait. What do you mean digital's a lie? It's like, no.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. That's what you saw for people need digital, so we created but it's actually this is an analog system. You're like, that is extremely unfortunate. So, yeah, the layers never stop. There there there's a there is an infinity of layers, but, yeah, just to your point, Randy, like, the, you know, when you get into, like, build building these things, you get that kind of reverence for all the stuff that comes before you.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's I'm I'm not I'm not unaware of the, like, self serving aspect of this, But, like, I do not think that people today fully understand how much of current software systems that they work with owe everything to park. Right? And again, not even my dad.

Randy Shoup:

Right? Like, again, my dad to your point and it's correct is like an offshoot of an offshoot. Like, he, you know, his his work, as he would say, did not figure in the main line of Alto to star to Lisa to Mac, etcetera. I'm like, that's fine. He was he felt happy with what he did.

Randy Shoup:

But but I think it is way underappreciated by particularly the younger generations. Right? You know, get off my lawn. How much how much in 1973 was there? And it took it it was so far ahead.

Randy Shoup:

I mean, it took ten years minimum. The IBM PC came out and there was nothing graphical about it. Right? That's ten years. So Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

It took it took till the Mac and, you know, amazing, but still and this was, you know, quite the long like, the part people were looking at going, a, we had that ten years ago, and, b, what a toy. You know, ultimately, not one. And, you know, breadth versus depth, if that makes any sense. Like, right? I mean, it went it it went viral and did the personal computer that Alan Kay wanted to build.

Randy Shoup:

But, yeah, I just don't think, you know, I just think think I don't think we appreciate enough the giants upon whose shoulders we stand, if that makes sense.

Bryan Cantrill:

I I totally agree with you. And so one question I've got with you too about in terms of, like, the breakthrough because of the to me, the breakthroughs at park are not merely technological, but they're also cultural and organizational. And these are breakthroughs that I'm and this is maybe a good segue to kind of your own career. Well, first of all, I've got I mean, this is a little intimidating to have this as I I I mean, this is, like, no pressure, by the way, but, like, aren't you Dick Shops kid? Like, you know, I'm I'm I'm kind of like, what was it like growing up in the shadow of that?

Bryan Cantrill:

Or or or or does is is this like this is actually this is actually a relief that this is it stands so tall that I actually don't have to worry about, like, my own sense of intimidation. What what was it like?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. I mean, all of the above. So, when I was growing up, I saw I was always interested in math and computers, and I didn't appreciate how different it was to I mean, no one appreciates how different their family is until they have experience with other families later in life. Right? So I didn't know it was weird to be a five year old and to beg your dad to take you to work on the weekends, which I totally did.

Randy Shoup:

So my parents were my parents were divorced when I was four, but dad was around and, we, my brother and I would would be with him on weekends most of the time. And he would work because, hey, he liked to work. And we could not have been happier to go to park because when we were when we were babies or even babies, not babies. When we were little, we used to play in the beanbag conference room and make forts. And then later on, really, in retrospect in retrospect, his was the only work that would appeal to, like, a five or six year old.

Randy Shoup:

Right? So he's building this. Right. Right.

Adam Leventhal:

You were getting screen time before any other kid was getting screen time.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's right.

Randy Shoup:

I yeah. And I and I didn't know that again, like, wait. Don't you beg your dad to take it? No. My dad's a teacher.

Randy Shoup:

Like, yeah. So, you know, we would we would beg him to take us to, to work and, you know, we would, again, play in the beanbag, room when we were younger. And then, there was a a Star Trek simulator thing, which, of course, we love to play. And then as, my dad's stuff with super paint came along, yeah, we would drop pictures of spaceships, and then we would print them on the laser printer in color. Oh my god.

Randy Shoup:

And and so the one time he told me not to, like, divulge anything was when we printed out the color, thing from the laser printer, he's like, maybe don't show this to anybody from IBM.

Bryan Cantrill:

And what year is that? I re I re

Randy Shoup:

gosh. Let's see. Maybe '77.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, my god.

Adam Leventhal:

I'm just imagining my seven year old showing up with, like, a laser printed drawing and just can't like, imagine, I just can't even imagine what it would be like to bring that to school in that era. It's like walking in with a bar of gold or something. Just, just unimaginable riches.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Or or or the company just go into hovercraft. I mean, this is, like, 1977. The the this is, like, the laser printer would not be broadly commercialized for another decade, and that's black and white. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, like, you I mean, I remember, like, literally seeing the first laser printed thing by the a, a a friend whose whose father was a software engineer, had a laser printer at work. And I printed I printed this thing out, had the laser printed, whatever, like, an an agenda for a scout meeting or whatever it was. And I remember, like, just my eye I mean, just eye popping.

Adam Leventhal:

No perforations on the edges. No. You're evil.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Right. Right. So, it was a dot matrix.

Bryan Cantrill:

Contrast, like, a dot matrix printer to a laser printer. You're like, this is like you took this to a professional printer? It just doesn't make sense. I mean, it was and that was in, like, 1987. I mean, it's like in 1977, you had and it was a black and white.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, I just think that, like I think I mean, you literally start a religion on the spot. Like, no joke. You'd be like, you like, you Randy, like, I I think you had the opportunity to be a prophet. I think you could have been, like Oh,

Randy Shoup:

so many missed opportunities.

Bryan Cantrill:

You could have been, like, the the the Randy Farians. Like, didn't they I thought that it was, like, a wasn't there, like, a rituals. It wasn't or something that they did. No. No.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. The Randy Farians were the, but They

Randy Shoup:

were they prayed to the laser printed, Absolutely. Gods.

Bryan Cantrill:

The spaceship gods. I would have a % would have prayed to the spaceship gods. If you showed me a color laser printer in 1977, that is absolutely Yeah. Unthinkable. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Unthinkable. It is unthinkable. I there there is no modern analog that's gonna, wow. That is amazing.

Bryan Cantrill:

I also love that you're, like, making beanbag forts in Xerox Park. I mean, at what point were you, I mean, in your kind of you know, so you you you obviously, you grow up in the Bay Area, you grow up in Mountain View, or I get where you're at San Jose. Bay the this Palo Alto and San Jose. Palo Alto. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

At what point were you just like, wait a minute. That was Xerox Park that I was I I mean, you must or or did you maybe you had the sense of gravitas at the time. But, No.

Randy Shoup:

I really didn't. I mean, yeah. I mean, when you're a kid, you're a kid. You things you know, whatever your experience is seems normal. So I only really it only real I mean, I knew it intellectually, maybe in let's call it in junior high and high school, but it didn't really hit me maybe until college or later just how very, very different, you know, that experience was.

Randy Shoup:

Right? Yeah. I mean, again, you know, we all, you know, we all stand on shoulders of giants. Anyway, but you're asking

Bryan Cantrill:

the question. Making beanbag forts in, like, Faneuil Hall or something. I'm like, I'm trying to what is the analog for this? It's like, it is it it it kind of anyway, it defies analog. It's it's just really

Randy Shoup:

extraordinary. I mean, I don't this is only an analogy that I just thought of, and I don't know if it works. But you could one could imagine growing up in a royal family. And so this was not our case. You know, we were we we were very middle class.

Randy Shoup:

You know, one thing one thing dad never did was make a huge pile of money, which is, you know, fine. He had a great he had a great life. But yeah. No. I mean, I guess if you're talking you guys are reacting in the way that you're reacting.

Randy Shoup:

And the only thing I can think of that comes immediately to mind is, you know, somebody that grows up in some, like, actual castle. Right?

Bryan Cantrill:

And I was like, Oh.

Randy Shoup:

Well, you know, I walked out and we had the the the horse carers, you know, brought the horse for the day, and then I rode

Bryan Cantrill:

Right.

Randy Shoup:

Rode it and blah blah blah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Or I'm in

Adam Leventhal:

the presence of Sasha and Malia. You know, like

Randy Shoup:

There you go.

Bryan Cantrill:

Coming to

Randy Shoup:

baseball. Yeah. Exactly. Whatever. What yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Show and tell. Big fans of the pod.

Bryan Cantrill:

Big fans of the pod. Those those two.

Adam Leventhal:

That's right. Call anytime. You we'll we'll have you on.

Bryan Cantrill:

Exactly. Love the baseball one. Absolute big ballers fans. Those two.

Randy Shoup:

So anyway, you you do ask quick I'll just quickly answer, like, what how much of a conflict or in terms of expectations. And as I like to quote from the, Tom Mariasi of Car Talk, happiness is reality minus expectations. So expectations were higher. I mean, look, I already tick all the privilege boxes. Right?

Randy Shoup:

You know, white male, hetero, grow up in a strong economy, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. You know, so the expectation should already be higher. But, yeah, you know, debt set a pretty high bar. And also, he never I don't know how to feel about this, to be honest. He never once placed any expectation on me or my brother.

Randy Shoup:

And part of me, it's like, wait, you don't think it could be as good? It's like, well, maybe not. So, you know, it kinda goes both ways, I suppose.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That's why but did you know is I mean, you're interested in this stuff. Did you have any reticence about going into computer science?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Actually, so I didn't. Yeah. So my, and this wasn't because I was scared away, but I just thought my talents were elsewhere. So, very briefly in high school, I did debate.

Randy Shoup:

And so, like, all but one other person I can think of who is, you know, that I knew from high school debate, I was planning on becoming a lawyer. And I wanted I was super interested in international relations and, you know, that time's height of the Cold War. So I was really interested in reducing the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that, you know, The US and The Soviet Union had pointed at each other. And so that was a real thing that I really cared about. And, so my things don't always work out as you expect when you're a kid.

Randy Shoup:

So if you asked me at 13 all the way through to 23, I would have said my career is to be an international lawyer. It turns out that, so I majored in political science at Stanford. But I also wanted to study math and computers because I was always interested in them. And thankfully, Stanford didn't have minors when I went because otherwise, I would have gotten a minor and fine. But instead, the only way to to do it seriously was to double major in mathematical and computational science, which is was like nobody took did that.

Randy Shoup:

It was like a handful of us in that major. It's not wasn't the computer science major. Even then that was not that many. I hear it's like the, you know, a third of the school is now

Bryan Cantrill:

computer science major. Right? I

Randy Shoup:

mean, not even not even joking. Not even joking. So now the now the major that I had is the data science major. But Oh, interesting. But anyway, whatever.

Randy Shoup:

So I had so I had you double majored in the two things. And then during, during school for another weird set of coincidences, I ended up interning at, Intel for several summers, and so got a taste of as a software engineer, so I got a taste of doing software at Intel.

Bryan Cantrill:

So so you were interning in even though you were a poli sci concentrator, because you'd taken enough computer science courses or you'd you were able to and realized, like, okay. This is what I wanna do with my

Randy Shoup:

I I did not ever lie, but I bluffed as hard as I possibly could.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. So I will

Randy Shoup:

I will tell the story because it's funny. So my roommate, sophomore year was a double e. Weirdly, he he studied double e and is now a lawyer. I was planning to be a lawyer, and now I'm a computer computer guy. So Love it.

Randy Shoup:

I don't know where Stan z went is wrong, and I went right or She's a different guy. Yeah. We were we we crossed the streams and went entirely different direction. Anyway, so Stan was a double e and very good at it. And so, I'm reading one of my poli sci books and he sets the phone down in the room and he says, hey, this is weird.

Randy Shoup:

I said, what? He's like, well, you know how I just got an this is like fall of the sophomore year. He's like, you know, I just got an internship at Intel for the summer. I'm like, yes. And he says, well, I just got another.

Randy Shoup:

I'm like, what? And the story was the guy so he had, applied to several. A guy said, please, hire Stan and then went on vacation for three weeks. And then when he came back, he, you know, he said to the whatever executive assistant or whoever, hey, did you hire Stan? And, like, forgot to do that.

Randy Shoup:

Anyway, so they called Stan back.

Bryan Cantrill:

After lied, but I did go by Stan for two summers.

Randy Shoup:

No. Not quite. So,

Adam Leventhal:

I just responded to Stan. I didn't tell you that. That's right.

Bryan Cantrill:

It is your inference that my name is Stan because you called out Stan and I responded. That is like, that's on you.

Randy Shoup:

That's right. No. I did it I did it above board. So Stan so Stan had already taken another job, another internship at Intel. And so he said, do you know anybody who would want this internship?

Randy Shoup:

And I was like, well, I you I had applied at the arms control center, you know, to work over the summer, but they haven't gotten back to me. So sure, let me, you know, let me talk to them. And so I ended up, you know, working really hard on talking about all the math classes that I had taken and, you know, the the the limited computer science and, you know, really tried to, impress upon the guy who became my boss that, I could learn things and, oh, by the way, my dad does this stuff, so whatever. And, anyway, so

Bryan Cantrill:

he he later Oh, I okay. I I definitely have a question on this. No. Because, like, dropping the dad references is gutsy. Right?

Bryan Cantrill:

That can backfire big time on you.

Adam Leventhal:

Totally.

Bryan Cantrill:

The I I I I

Randy Shoup:

didn't know. I all I knew was this is a like, hey. I've been around computers for a long time. My dad used to do this thing. And,

Bryan Cantrill:

So my analog to this actually is I sliced my nose skiing. So I I I was skiing and I I was kinda mid air and deep deep snow. I come out of my boots and fly, and I know my skis are still going, and they come up behind me and slice my nose. My my skis did.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

And so I'm bleeding kind of profusely out of my nose, which is just like a lot of blood. And I need to go get stitched up. So I'm in the the the Tahoe emergency the the Truckee clinic there. I'm about and I'm about to get stitched up. And, the And actually, I mean, in in some strange ways.

Bryan Cantrill:

So my father's an emergency medical physician. And emergency medicine is actually, like computer science, is very young. And my father ended up being, working in one of the the first residency programs in emergency medicine and for the the pioneer really of emergency medicine, Peter Rosen. And he, they were writing the book on emergency medicine. He's just doling out chapters to these, like, kids.

Bryan Cantrill:

And my father ended up writing the chapter, well, wrote a bunch of chapters, but one of the ones is on facial lacerations. Yeah. And so here I am with a facial laceration, and I'm like, do and one thing I definitely knew is the the scarring that you're gonna get is based solely on the hands that are on you. It is the if if someone is is paying attention and has got is got is is dexterous, you will not have a scar. And if they aren't, you will have a scar.

Bryan Cantrill:

So I'm like, I have got kind of like a very limited window. Like, do I name drop this or not? And the needle is coming at my nose as this guy's gonna stitch me up. And I'm like, suddenly, this could backfire. Like, what what is kind of a snotty thing to say?

Bryan Cantrill:

Being like, oh, by the way, have you heard of my dad? But I'm also like, but this could be a scar I could have, like, on my nose for the rest. I could be, like, known as Scar Nose for the rest of my life. You know? So I'm like, You know, it's funny.

Bryan Cantrill:

And he kind of stops. He's like, What's funny? I'm like, Well, you know, here I am. I've got a facial laceration. I'm in the emergency room.

Bryan Cantrill:

I've got a facial laceration. Just a regular Cantril. Just a regular guy with a facial laceration. And, you know, it's funny because my father actually wrote the chapter in Rosenparkon on facial lacerations. And he's like, Oh.

Bryan Cantrill:

And you could just see And I'm like, It's backfiring. This is a mistake. Like, I could just see the guy is like, Are you fucking kidding me? Like, what are okay. And and he says, who's your father?

Bryan Cantrill:

I'm like, Steve Kenter. I said, oh, Steve Kenter from Colorado General. And he had done a residency. He'd been in Colorado General. And I'm like, oh my god.

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay. Okay. This is like diving catch though. Like, total diving catch. And I'm like, this could have, like so you Ray, did you have any of the same nervousness?

Bryan Cantrill:

I'm like, do do I mention that I'm like that I'm that I'm related to Dick Shoup. Do I how would I do this?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. I wasn't so strategic. I just thought I was trying to get an internship. And, and, anyway, it ultimately worked. So and and but it later, Bob Chen, who was my boss there at Intel, was like, yeah, I could read that you didn't really he didn't quite say it this way, but you didn't really know what you were doing, but you really impressed upon me that you were willing to learn.

Randy Shoup:

And, so I liked your attitude.

Bryan Cantrill:

I thought that's great. Yeah. I mean, that's that's important. And so what did you do for Intel? Were you because you were at Intel for a couple of summers.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right? A couple

Randy Shoup:

of summers. Yeah. I worked, I worked in a mask shop. So for you guys know, I know. But for the others, a mask is the, for to make semiconductors, you need this big glass plate that you write you draw the outline of the circuit on there and then you shine the now it's X-ray light, but then UV through that thing and it makes a shadow and it changes the chemistry of the thing you're writing on, and then you etch it away blah blah blah.

Randy Shoup:

Anyway, so Underneath.

Bryan Cantrill:

For those of you who are looking to learn more about either the the photo lithography or then e v it's e v lithography and e v lithography. Yeah. I'm sorry.

Randy Shoup:

No. No worries. Anyway, so yeah. The, so the mask shop Intel did that in in the house, you know, and it was a pretty small group, and they needed people to write software tools to help them do statistical process control for, for the machines, and just a bunch of software tool you know, just a bunch of software tools. So it was I got a lot of playing around with Oracle databases and writing, yeah, writing queries and graphs and so on for the technicians and the engineers to do their job.

Randy Shoup:

So, I had a great time. And it was a great group of people, really, really fun. So I did that after sophomore summer, then after junior summer, and then I actually worked part time as, like, a flexible work hours employee, like an actual part time employee, not an intern or, for senior year. So I I would take classes, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at Stanford, then I would drive down to Santa Clara to, work Tuesday, Thursday all day.

Bryan Cantrill:

And at what point is law school beginning to lose its appeal?

Randy Shoup:

Oh, not yet. Not yet. So I actually Okay. What? Okay.

Randy Shoup:

So, very briefly. So let's say I graduated. I did not wanna go straight to law school because most people don't. So I worked for Oracle, for two years as a software engineer. That was great.

Randy Shoup:

Had a great time. And then much to the chagrin and surprise of my compatriots and manager, I'm like, okay, now is the time to take the GRE and the LSAT and, you know, get all set to go to law school and international relations school. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, hey, I've been telling you for two years. This is what's gonna happen.

Randy Shoup:

So I

Bryan Cantrill:

So, again, we wouldn't take you seriously, obviously.

Randy Shoup:

I should I should I should be taken most seriously and literally when I when I tell you when I tell you that. Anyway, so, yeah. So, apply to, law school and international relations school. I end up starting a program which is a joint Stanford Law, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, master's. Normally, three years plus two years.

Randy Shoup:

If you combine it, it's four. So I started and the way that you do it is you do like a year of law school, then a year of the IR school, and then back and forth semester by semester. Wow. Anyway, so I so I did the first, I did the first year at Stanford Law School. It was fine.

Randy Shoup:

And then I took the took an, they would call it a summer associateship. So, you know, an internship for law students over the summer, and it should have been the perfect job, and I hated it. So it was the small office in on Sand Hill Road, of a so a big New York firm called Weil, Gotcha, and Manjos, a tiny, Silicon Valley branch office that did what's called patent prosecution, which is getting people patents. It's not about suing.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. And so what I I thought it would be and again, on Silicon Valley Road, I was on a Sand Hill Road, like, right next to all the VCs at that very last right before 280 on the right hand side when you're going north, that whole complex there. It's a bunch of VCs that are still there.

Bryan Cantrill:

Anyway, that's KP is still there, but a bunch of them are still right

Randy Shoup:

still right there. There you go. I've I've visited several Sharon Heights.

Bryan Cantrill:

Long time. Heights Shopping Center. I know it. I'd say it's like the waiting room for Silicon Valley. It's Starbucks in the Sharon Heights.

Bryan Cantrill:

Even shopping center.

Randy Shoup:

Even farther away. So, like, really right in the very if you're go from Sharon Heights to 2 I know.

Bryan Cantrill:

I know. It's just it's like literally there is no retail establishment between Sharon Heights and those offices at the intersection of San Diego.

Randy Shoup:

It's a view. Because it's all, like, VC, VC, VC, VC. Firms.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Anyway, so, small office. It was casual dress, which was very unheard of for people in, lawyers in 1993. But, you know, hey, our clients were dressed in business casual. So we were too. Really liked the attorneys, but I just hated every minute of getting people patents.

Randy Shoup:

And what so anybody who's been involved in a patent on either side, it is it is the inventor is up there on the whiteboard describing his or her amazing invention. And the lawyer is a scribe who writes down diligently all the things that the amazing inventor has invented and then does bureaucratic infighting with the patent office to get a patent. And so every moment, it was so painful for me to be sitting at the conference table looking at somebody designing or outlining their design on the whiteboard where it's like, I wanna be that person. I don't wanna be this person. And, that was a big, soul searching for me that summer because, hey, I've been telling people and myself wasn't lying.

Randy Shoup:

I didn't think so. For ten years, this is what I wanna do. And, oh my god, I now I have exactly what I've always wanted, you know, the combination of the two interests and I hated it. So I'm immediately thinking, okay, well, what if I finish up law school and IR school, I go in house at a technology company, maybe in ten years they give me a technology group to run, and I'm like, oh my god. You're an idiot.

Bryan Cantrill:

You can't cut whoops.

Adam Leventhal:

I, you know, I didn't

Bryan Cantrill:

wanna I I didn't wanna put my thumb on the scale on that one, but No.

Randy Shoup:

No. No. Anyway, long story short, it's you know, it was so obvious what needed to happen, but it took me a long time to get comfortable with it, if that makes sense. So, yeah, so I never so I never went back. So I, you know, I I stopped out as Stanford says, never finished the never went to the, Johns Hopkins.

Randy Shoup:

I never never completed law school. And I have never once ever regretted that decision.

Adam Leventhal:

I would say this sounds like the most successful internship I've ever heard of.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, my God.

Adam Leventhal:

To provide absolute life clarity.

Randy Shoup:

Life clarity internship. And Adam Adam, to your exact point, if it had been anything else other than the otherwise perfect job on paper and after my first year summer, I would have continued on because, like, oh, it is a formal dress or, you know, whatever. Right. Right. Right.

Randy Shoup:

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Randy Shoup:

It was it's a big firm that's all faceless or, you know, tick, tick, tick. I, you know, I would have looked for just because, you know, I'm a human. Like, I I had this plan. I was gonna execute the plan. So, yeah, all, if it had been anything other than perfect and early.

Randy Shoup:

Because the other thing is, like, oh, this my whole life is gonna be terrible, but, hey, I'm already halfway through the program.

Bryan Cantrill:

Some customers.

Randy Shoup:

I may as totally, totally I've already done

Adam Leventhal:

this for a year and a half, so I might as well spent the next thirty years on this.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Well, yeah. And there are a lot of people that come out of law school and never wanna practice and don't. And, you know, you can do other things. But but it would have been hard for me to go back to being a software engineer, which I did do.

Randy Shoup:

So I, I finished that up, and, I went and begged for my job back at Intel. And my great friend and mentor, Girish Pancha, who just retired from being CEO of StreamSets, Welcome you back with open arms and,

Bryan Cantrill:

At Intel. So you you were

Randy Shoup:

No. No. At Oracle. At Oracle.

Bryan Cantrill:

At Oracle. Yeah. Yeah. I actually I was gonna say, I couldn't tell if you're being sarcastic or not about your time at Oracle, but it sounds like that was not sarcasm that that

Randy Shoup:

that No. Oracle. So

Bryan Cantrill:

so It was it's okay. You're in a safe space. You we we you know, we can accommodate all Make

Randy Shoup:

it safer, Brian. Make it safer. There are there are Yeah. So it is both true

Bryan Cantrill:

We can get all this out.

Randy Shoup:

Oracle overall. It it is both true that Oracle overall, even at that time in the early nineties, was, you know, you don't wanna be a partner with them. I I I have a sidebar to say about making your customers your enemy and is that a really good business strategy? But I loved my little group. So, all of them were all of them were great friends.

Randy Shoup:

You know, they were all groomsmen in my wedding and, like, my best friends, for what's this now, thirty five years, are all the people that were on Team Browser. And so we built a, this is before Web Browser, so that was only '95. This was 1990. We built a ad hoc query tool, which was called Oracle Data Browser.

Bryan Cantrill:

And,

Randy Shoup:

it was, it was all bitmap graphics, and you used, you graphically built your query out of little boxes and lines. You know, imagine an entity relationship diagram, and then it was a spreadsheet output.

Adam Leventhal:

So it was Freddie, when you bring this home and show it to your dad, it's like That did he laugh. I mean, yeah. It's like Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Look. We look.

Adam Leventhal:

I I our intern at PARC did that. You know?

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. Yeah. Twenty years ago. I feel like I'm looking ten years into the future. No.

Bryan Cantrill:

I don't. No. I don't think I was in. I mean,

Adam Leventhal:

ten years into the past. Excuse me.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because right. So, let's see.

Randy Shoup:

That was so I graduated That

Bryan Cantrill:

was very forward looking, honestly. I the the because that isn't so you said that was in 1990. So that is in Yeah. And Oracle was a much smaller company then. This is like a It was.

Bryan Cantrill:

How many employees were at Oracle? I mean, this is, like, probably

Randy Shoup:

less than I'd have to look. Thousands. Maybe less than 10,000. Probably less than probably less than 10,000. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

That's probably about right. Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing about, going to work for Oracle in 1990 and graduating from Stanford then is I hope they have changed this policy. But at the time, the policy was, Oracle only only hires from these whatever eight schools, and you can imagine what they are.

Randy Shoup:

And they the the very explicit recruiting strategy was we will hire smart people no matter what, and we'll put them in any place that they're willing to do the job. So I had it was well known and well, leveraged among my graduating class that, like, if you had a heartbeat in a Stanford degree, you could work at Oracle. So Oh, interesting. So there was a part of me okay. And, you know, I had people who are, like, amazing people in my poli sci classes, like, totally amazing people now in the school now in actual foreign service.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, yeah. Receptionists at Oracle. You know, it was their first job. And, so that was actually a potential downside for me because it's like, hey. We devalued this whole thing by, like, anybody from Stanford could come here.

Randy Shoup:

But, I made myself feel good, and it was actually true that they actually for the engineering group, it was, like, a little more rigorous, if

Bryan Cantrill:

that makes any sense. Well, I mean, this is just in general true at Oracle. But the closer you are to the database, the more technically interesting it is. And so, you know, that is their their core product. And I think especially that time, that

Randy Shoup:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

What you were up to, I mean, that's is, that's and so so you all make this kind of graphical data browser that, again, is, like, is ahead of its time. And when you kind of so you you're able to get your job back at Oracle. And then how long do you stay how long do you stay there?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. I was there for a total of seven years from 1991 to '97. And you can forget about the year I was away, I suppose, at law school. And yeah. And so, after that, I went to a company called Tumbleweed, which did, security software, worked there ultimately as chief architect and a technical fellow for about six years, brief stint at Informatica, which does, you know, data warehousing, etcetera, data integration.

Randy Shoup:

And then I joined eBay for the first time. 02/2004 to 02/2011, I worked as an individual contributor on eBay's real time search engine. So at the you know, now real time search, you get that for free with Elastic. Everybody has it. It's easy.

Randy Shoup:

It nobody, as far as I can tell and find, nobody was doing real time all in memory search in, 02/2004. So I didn't invent that, but I got

Bryan Cantrill:

about that era because in so we we obviously go to the .com boom and bust

Randy Shoup:

and Oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, in the the bust was a thermonuclear event around here. I mean, it was a It was

Randy Shoup:

very busty. It

Bryan Cantrill:

was very deep.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I mean, I was you remember the the you remember that excited home facility on the 101 that went from, like, absolutely nothing, went from, like, wetlands to a a new construction to full parking lot to empty parking lot with, like, rocks thrown through the windows to add to abandoned all within, like, eighteen months. Yeah. And then it was it was abandoned for a long time before it ultimately became, I think, a Stanford building. But they

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Yeah. I I so I I blew past that in my so I was a tumbleweed through the through the up and the downof.com. So, again, that's 02/2000.

Bryan Cantrill:

And did you think about, like, at that point, do you or or do you just know so resolutely something I knew resolutely then that, like, this industry is my this is my calling. Like, I'm not there's no amount of bust that's gonna get me to do something else.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, yeah. I never I yeah. I was loving I was loving doing, you know, being an individual contributor and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

My leadership. Our traffic was, like, so much better

Bryan Cantrill:

during the bust. Oh, my god.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, my gosh. And for so many years. Also, after 02/2008, it it took several years for it's very nonlinear. Right? It took several years for February to get traffic again.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So, so Tumbleweed went public in August, 1999. Oh, that's good. And as a and as a sidebar, one of the things I loved about that place was the so it was, founded by a Stanford two people from Stanford, but one, is an American who went to Stanford, and another was a French person who got his, his master's at Stanford. And they were the cofounders of this security company.

Randy Shoup:

And the day so we went public on, I wanna call it, 08/06/1999. And so August 7, a Saturday, we were moving. My, my then wife and I or wife? Yes. Then wife and I, were, moving and we got everybody to help.

Randy Shoup:

So the day after, the French cofounder became a multi 10 millionaire, he and the other and my boss, another French guy, and a bunch of other people from work drove up to San Francisco to San Francisco to help us move. And it's like

Bryan Cantrill:

I also just feel like that is such a, like, snapshot of an age too where it's like having friends help you move is something you grow out of.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

You know what I mean?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. But not what's that awkward?

Bryan Cantrill:

There's a certain age and there's an age in which it's like age appropriate, and then there's an age at which it is not age appropriate get movers. And I would say that our last move was right outside of that age appropriate window where I kind of realized that, like, you know what? I think I think it's time

Randy Shoup:

to get Uber's to

Bryan Cantrill:

the next day.

Randy Shoup:

Pizza and beer only work as a

Bryan Cantrill:

Pizza and beer, it's like yeah. Tim and Claudia, God bless you for toting in a very hard day of labor for a pretty meager pizza and beer at the end of it. Like, Yeah. Yeah. Anyway So okay.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So public yeah. So public in August 1999, which is why I remember it. Rocket ship, stock price. It it was over a hundred within, let's call it, six months or so.

Randy Shoup:

And then about a month after it hit a hundred, it hit 3.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, wow.

Randy Shoup:

Hate when that happens.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, man. And then you of course, on the way down, because it's been at a hundred, you're like, it can't go below 50. It's like, why can't it go below 50? It's like, well, because it was at a hundred. It's like, well, now it's at 20.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's like, well, I can't

Randy Shoup:

go below 10. I I let's just say this, that I learned a lot about the tax law about how you can take you can take, what you're already laughing at me.

Bryan Cantrill:

Loss carry forward.

Randy Shoup:

Yes. Loss carry forward. And so, ultimately, that,

Bryan Cantrill:

that My loss carry forward from the .com bust, I was I was living off that for a while. Let's just say that loss carry forward I had for many, many years.

Randy Shoup:

Let's just say I didn't pay any capital gains for the next decade.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's right. That's right. Oh, man. I wish I wish I were

Randy Shoup:

making that up.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. I know why I wish I were making it up. So, there we go. It's all lived experience. But, we I also felt like that whole experience though was also a just a good reminder of like, okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. No. No. Like, why am I here? Like, because it's very easy.

Bryan Cantrill:

You get When employees are all checking the stock ticker every day, it's like it's

Randy Shoup:

Oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

You know, and I always felt that like one of the the the things that was, an interesting observation. I felt, Adam, that we did much better work at Sun in the bus than we ever did in the boom. And the, you know, I I I think it's it's just when you kinda take away that, when you get everyone there for much more intrinsic reasons, when you take because the because the extrinsic motivation has gone to three. So it's like

Randy Shoup:

It wasn't a hundred and now it's

Bryan Cantrill:

It wasn't a hundred and my extrinsic motivation is now at three. So it's like, well, I I think I need to go look for some intrinsic motivation around here.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Look. I mean, it it this is true every what is it? Experience, success comes from experience, experience comes from failure. Right?

Randy Shoup:

Totally. So all these things are all these things are learning experiences. I mean, they really are. And, you know, we could have our blameless post mortem about it. Like, in retrospect, I learned a lot.

Randy Shoup:

Like, okay, don't assume that everything's gonna always go up. Take take profits along the way, you know, and and various other things. I'm like, look. It cleared out the fairway.

Bryan Cantrill:

Company can trade for less than its cash on hand. That's, that was what I was like. Thank you Wall Street for that high praise. Like, we you were treating

Randy Shoup:

us like we were worth less than.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's then the literal cash. Like, forget real estate. Like, this is, like, actual cash on hand. Like, you don't it's like, oh, this is fun. We're having a good time over here.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. But you'll appreciate this, Brian, in particular. Like, it clears out the fair weather fans.

Bryan Cantrill:

It does. It absolutely clears out

Randy Shoup:

the fair weather fans. And Yes. Is that a good like, do I is that a thing where, like, oh, I'm so glad people suffered? Like, no. But this is what happens.

Randy Shoup:

Right? Like, something bad happens in the world. And, okay, it causes us to reassess things. And sometimes we make different decisions after something. Like, again, if everything's all well, it's like the trust fund baby.

Randy Shoup:

Right? If you've always everything's been handed to your whole life, you don't really appreciate it and you don't really learn from it. You don't really grow. Like, you stay as a toddler, at least in most Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I also think it's a it's a very important point that that, you know, when that when you have this this kind of, larger adversity, like, there's there's a lot of positivity that can come out of it even though it can be very hard to see at the time. And because I also feel that, like, you know, we're talking about you know, you talk about your dad in 1973. Nineteen '70 '3 was not a good time in The US. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

A lot a lot I mean, like, people 1973, what is that? You mean, you think of oil lines. Right? You think of, cars. It it's oil it was the, you know, Middle East oil crisis.

Randy Shoup:

Crisis. It's cars backed up around at gas stations, backed up around the corner, huge, economic shocks all over the world.

Bryan Cantrill:

You are just outside of a deeply unpopular war that that had that had, I mean, had, in a draft that had, really ripped apart the country. You had a, a president in the office that would later resign in, and, I mean, it's just like there was a lot kind of going on. There were there were plenty of reasons for pessimism in 1973. Yeah. And I I I and it's very easy kind of in hindsight to be like, oh, how amazing would it have been to be, you know, in at Xerox PARC in 1973.

Bryan Cantrill:

And it it was amazing, but it also was like, just don't overly romanticize the larger time that it lived in. And that part of what made that I I mean, part of that I think that's the purity of Xerox Park is you've got people talk about intrinsic motivation, especially your dad, in in where it's like, no. I am as stubborn as as a you're right.

Randy Shoup:

Right. I wanna do computer graphics whether my boss, likes it or not. Yeah. Absolutely. And, again, sort of back bringing it back to the opener about, you know, is Silicon Valley really all about hard right politics and money grubbing?

Randy Shoup:

Like, the people, the researchers in that lab paid pretty well, but they weren't multimillionaires.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Right.

Randy Shoup:

Right? There was no expectation from I mean, they were doing freaking research. Right? Right. You know, so you could work for, I mean, if you wanted to do research, you could be in academia or you could work for a government thing.

Randy Shoup:

You work for Bell Labs, you work for Xerox and maybe IBM. But, you know, it wasn't people did not choose that life. Nobody nobody goes to to be a PhD to make money.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Right? Like no one sits there for five years, you know, doing what they do because they think they're gonna get rich. Anyway, so I just coming back to, again, is everybody perfect and it's all rainbows and unicorns? Like, no, of course not.

Randy Shoup:

But the but again, looking back can teach us a lot about, you know, there really is there really is a spirit to this place. And should there be other places on the planet that are like this? Like, I as a Silicon Valley person, I I hope so. I want that to be true. I want there to be the Silicon Slopes and the Silicon Alley and the Silicon Tundra and the Silicon Jungle.

Randy Shoup:

I mean, like, that's a great thing for the world. I mean, that's a great thing for the world. You know, so, you know, I I know enough distributed systems to know not to have a single point of failure. But but I will say that, personally, I benefited a lot because I love travel. And, you know, one of the things that I wanted to do in my international deal was, hey, go around the world and make things better.

Randy Shoup:

Well, the world came the world came to me. Good. Like Yeah. In in the in the most wonder I mean, like, do I also wanna go places? Sure.

Randy Shoup:

I am due. But, like, what a wonder I mean, the other thing I think people don't fully grok, again, because all the billionaires are all white men, is just how incredibly diverse this place is. Could we be more diverse? Oh, yeah. Could we have better gender diversity?

Randy Shoup:

Oh, my gosh. And also people from every place on the planet come here, and they come here because they this is the place, you know, to do this kind of stuff. And I don't think that's bad. You know, again, I want there to be more places. People shouldn't have to leave Nigeria to do great stuff, if that makes sense.

Randy Shoup:

But, anyway, I just, you know, I I think that we should I mean, certainly those of us who live here should feel really grateful about that.

Bryan Cantrill:

We we and so let me ask you about that because I think that I do think that that, there is a, again, cultural breakthroughs in Silicon Valley. I mean, when, you know, in 1973, the world is very command and control. And Xerox is very command and control. Right? I mean, that's part of you got these kind of park these these nuts out on the West Coast, but Xerox as a company is actually very command and control.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's part of the reason that they do fumble the future is there's such an intense mismatch between the way Xerox is structured and the way PARC is structured. Yeah. A %. And but the way Parc was structured is actually a much is is much more fitting for the for what are gonna be the next fifty years. And, you know, you look at the the the innovative companies and at their peak of innovation, and they all are structured.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, they look pretty similar to park in terms of Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

It's flat flat organization. So I mean, people you guys are probably familiar with the Western organizational model. Right? Pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. So, bureaucratic is like rules and standards.

Randy Shoup:

That's exactly Dirux at that time, you know, broadly. You know, we do it this way because it's it's the way it's always been done. And then every successful every successful group technical work over the last century, I will fight people on this, is a gen comes from a generative culture. That's awesome. So park was absolutely you know, so very little hierarchy, respect for the ideas, not respect for the people.

Randy Shoup:

You're you're, like, not respect for the titles that makes it like, respect for the people, but not the title. Makes any sense. Everybody helping each other.

Bryan Cantrill:

Focus on prospects.

Randy Shoup:

Focus, focus on outcomes, you know, autonomy, mastery, purpose. And it's exactly Triad is yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

It it's exactly, it's, you know, and, you know and also it was a business. So, like, they were not just trying to research for research's sake. They were trying to, you know, Xerox didn't capitalize on it, but all the individuals did. They all invented, you know, the future, you know, each individual one. So, you know, it spawned out.

Randy Shoup:

There's a wonderful, there's a wonderful poster, which I would love to get access to again. I'm sure it's somewhere on the, on the interwebs, that shows PARC at the center and then all of the other companies that were derived from it. And it's it's outrageous, you know, what they are. Anyway, where where I was going with that

Bryan Cantrill:

was And by the way, like, PARC as as amazing as PARC was was and and Cingular, you can see a lot of echoes of PARC in Fairchild a generation earlier. And the in terms of, like, Fairchild's contrast to and Fairchild and then what what the way Intel, the way Bob Noyes structured Intel. I mean,

Randy Shoup:

In the early days, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

The early days of Intel where I mean, you can just There's this through line through Silicon Valley of when you see a group that did something extraordinary together, there there are these they are generative cultures. I mean, they do there's some real commonality there.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So I I I I am so convinced by that that I did a talk, which you can find on YouTube, called, what is it? Breaking Codes, Designing Jets, and Building Teams, something like that. And so the and so Park didn't invent this, this structure. The the three examples that I use are Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and Toddy Flowers and everybody broke the German Enigma codes and the Lawrence cipher in one World War two.

Randy Shoup:

Again, exactly similar to this, hugely generative culture, actually very diverse. Three quarters of the people at Bletchley Park were women of the 10,000 people at, at peak. Again, autonomy, mastery, purpose, exactly a park structured thing. This is in, obviously, in the in the mid forties. Lockheed Skunk Works, where they built for generation after generation the fastest, highest flying aircraft the world has ever seen.

Randy Shoup:

That includes the U two. That includes, stealth technology with the f one seventeen. That includes The good one. The SR 71 Blackbird, which is still the fastest, highest flying aircraft, even though it was built in the sixties.

Bryan Cantrill:

Built with slide rules, that thing.

Randy Shoup:

Oh my gosh. And and, And easy aircraft. And Kelly's, model there, again, starting very soon after the war. I think it was like '46 or maybe even maybe even during the oh, no. Absolutely.

Randy Shoup:

It was during the war. What am I what am I talking about? Because they replicated a during the war, they replicated a bunch of German jets. They built the the the lightning. They built everything.

Randy Shoup:

Anyway, where was I going with that? Again, extremely generative culture. And, Kelly has, the, his, like, 14 rules, which are almost exactly like you could quote that verbatim and it'd be exactly like a DevOps streamline team topologies, setup today. Anyway, and then part was

Bryan Cantrill:

meant for the past Ben Rich's Skunk Works is a phenomenal read.

Randy Shoup:

Yes. That that actually was reading that book, which I got for my son, who's an aviation enthusiast and the third generation of, of shop engineers, by the way, or will be, will be very Under

Bryan Cantrill:

the pressure. Are you? He's going he's going a lawyer. He's gonna do an internship as a software engineer. He's gonna be like, you know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

Actually, I'm realizing that, like, the law is really my calling.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. By the way, I I did say Kelly Clarkson, then I met Kelly Johnson. But, anyway, yeah. So it was reading, reading Ben Rich's Skunk Works book that I bought for my son, where all the stuff clicked. It was like, oh my god.

Randy Shoup:

It's like describing in the forward what kind of culture that, Kelly had put together and, and Ben Rich had continued. And it was like, oh, this is exactly DevOps. This is exactly generative culture. And then the the talk almost wrote it. I mean, I did a bunch of research, but, like, the structure of the talk, like, just wrote itself in five minutes, if that makes sense.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Well, in so, I mean, I think this is one of the this is a very important, again, through line in Silicon Valley. And you because your career has really been not just about this kind of technical contribution, but much more so, I dare say, than your father, thinking kind of organizationally and thinking about, like, teams and how we structure people and how we motivate them. I mean, that's something that is really not what your dad did, but correct me if I'm wrong. I know he did it.

Bryan Cantrill:

He he he started a company of his own, after although I cannot find much on it on Aurora. Oh my gosh.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Well, you have to come to my house to find any remnants of

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay. So we might do that. I actually did wonder about that as well. I'm like, because there is, like, Aurora Systems is what he started after Xerox PARC, and there is just not a lot on the Internet about this company.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So it's called Aurora Imaging Systems. Okay. And and they built hardware they built graphics hardware to do like SuperPaint plus plus and started that in, I want to say, '79. That sounds about right.

Randy Shoup:

And did that for ten years. And then later and then later, he went back to research. So, he actually went back to he went to Paul Allen's, interval research, which was the attempt to recreate PARC. And then he went to a research lab funded by Rico in the Bay Area. Anyway, but, but Aurora for a sec.

Randy Shoup:

So, yeah. So, when he was ignominiously fired finally, you know, at at park for, you know, being too crazy and too colorful, you know, in And

Bryan Cantrill:

and also there's a moment outlined in the dealers of lighting book where they are having a meeting about how to carve up the hardware that he's using that they do not invite him to.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, yeah. Right. He shows up and they're like, hey, Dick, they're having a meeting about you. And so he bursts in and yeah. They're talking about how to take all this yeah.

Randy Shoup:

It's like, why do you

Bryan Cantrill:

have my right leg on a slide and you're feeding it to the pigs? It's like, what's going on? It's like, wait a minute.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. He was able to rescue all of the hardware. Oh, and oh, and I I didn't close this loop. SuperPaint is in the Computer History Museum collection. That's nice.

Randy Shoup:

And and it right and it rotates. So, so there was a time when I was visiting actually with eBay colleagues. We're just like, you know, sometimes you do escape rooms as things. This was, hey, we'd go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and we're just walking along.

Bryan Cantrill:

The History Museum should have an escape room. I just wanna say that now.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, that would be awesome. I would I would totally do that. Anyway, so we go there and we're walking along and I'm like, hey, here's my dad's computer system. And they're like, what? I'm like, read that.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, it says, you know, Richard G. Schapp, Superpaint, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so it's in the collection. And I'm not sure where I was going with that, but it's

Bryan Cantrill:

But then or then he does Aurora. So he Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So he he, founds, a hardware company to build, think SGI, but, like, whatever, fifty ten, fifteen years or whatever is the whatever is the time frame. Ten.

Randy Shoup:

Let's call it ten years or

Bryan Cantrill:

yeah.

Randy Shoup:

And so they weren't that successful. You know, they sold to a bunch of, a bunch of, television and video things that, you know, one could make up lots of things. I mean, arguably, it was too early. But also arguably This is tracked? Pardon?

Bryan Cantrill:

Was it was it VC backed?

Randy Shoup:

How did he raise money for it? Yes. Yes. He that's there was a VC called Seven Rosen. That was the main, investor.

Randy Shoup:

Actually, his my stepmother is the niece of one of his investors.

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay. Stepmother is the niece of one of us. I'm trying to think

Randy Shoup:

of So one of you so he bare he he remarried. No. There's nothing. He he remarried. And so, again, my parents were divorced in '70 they were separated in, like, '73, '70 '6, somewhere there.

Randy Shoup:

And then he remarried in 1990, and he married the niece of one of his investors, who he met that way. Okay. Yeah. And and our

Bryan Cantrill:

So Sevin Rosen is, I'm I am pretty sure this is correct. Ben Rosen, yeah, Ben Rosen, who's the cofounder of Seven Rosen, is an early investor in Compaq, and he is on the Silicon in the Silicon Cowboys documentary. Features quite prominently. Cool. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

So there's

Randy Shoup:

there's there's another guy whose name I'm blanking on, but will come to me later. Roizen, r o I z e n is his last name. He was also an investor and had his offices at the Oak Grove Apartments just north of Stanford University where a bunch of my friends lived after college. But I remember going as a kid and they're doing some deal and, you know, they gave me a Coke, and I sat in a room, well, for a couple hours while they were they were negotiating.

Bryan Cantrill:

And you're like, you know, this is like I'm kinda used to Xerox Park. It's kinda my bar for Beanbag Forts and this this I don't know. This this this PC office is this this doesn't feel as quite as historically relevant.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. I I, you know, I I wanted to draw some spaceships or or make some forts. And, and instead, I had to actually, they, I remember it was quite embarrassing because I must've been so I must've been a little bit young. They had a, videotape of, four of the early Saturday Night Live people. Jane Curtin and a few other Saturday Night Live people did, like, a comedy album that they called or where there was a song that was, like, let's talk dirty to the animals.

Randy Shoup:

And I remember feeling real real like, I was super embarrassed. Like, oh, they were using all these swear words and stuff.

Bryan Cantrill:

You know, I don't know if that featured prominently on the SNL at fifty special last night. I the the let's talk dirty to the animals. I don't remember that one being, Yeah. So the so does Aurora for for a deck and that's a long time, though, to to Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

I mean, look, he

Bryan Cantrill:

he gave it he gave it

Randy Shoup:

a good run, and there were other companies that were doing similar things around that. I mean, so there's a real need. Right? For Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. Right. Right.

Randy Shoup:

Computer graphics. He wasn't doing animation systems like Pixar, you know, did for their first decade. But graphics systems, like, think for, think for, like, television weather graphics, that type of stuff.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, so this is kind of the space that Avid is in now today. Do you know Avid?

Randy Shoup:

I haven't paid attention. The the the

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. This is like this is like an early Avid. What was, like, kinda his take on that whole experience? And did you have any because are you actually I guess, you're still too young to be quite be working then. And how do how do the kind of the years line up?

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. So I do remember a conversation at Intel my senior year of college, where they were like, hey. Do you wanna come work for us? And I knew that I didn't because it not because I wasn't having a good time, but because Intel's a hardware company and I wanted to do software.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

So they were I remember somebody saying, hey, should could you go work for your dad's company? And it was like, I never that never occurred to me. And, like, probably not. He's a little fancy. You know, so, yeah.

Randy Shoup:

But but that means that in 1990, that that was a possibility. So he was or still must have been, going then. But it wouldn't have been going for that much longer. Yeah. Because, again, he joined he was at interval research, which is Paul Allen's attempt to recreate park at Kitty Corner from Park.

Randy Shoup:

He was there for the full five years. So I think that was, '91 to '95, something like

Bryan Cantrill:

that. And then so but in your career, again, you were really thinking about this kind of team formation and and how you would I mean, the the so kinda I mean, it really does feel like you're kind of, building on your father's experience in a way that taking it in a different direction. Is that Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

That's fair. Look, you know, I I think all of us, you know, are obviously influenced by our parents, but, you know, there are only some of us that are like clones, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, he wasn't I mean, he would say if he were around to say it, he would say he was never very interested at all in management or in team dynamics that were anything other than getting stuff done, if that makes any sense. Like, he's mostly alone alone. I mean, he was a lone wolf, you know, and not He's a lone wolf.

Randy Shoup:

He he he made he made great friends with people, so I don't wanna give that wrong impression. But, like, he was not the team built. He was like a crotchety, you know, crusty as Alvy said, guy that he is pretty damn smart and, like, he knew he could just do it all himself and was very happy doing it.

Adam Leventhal:

Does that

Bryan Cantrill:

make sense? I mean, he I mean, he's the lone inventor and and I don't mean that pejoratively. I mean, he's good. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's a very well good very good way to say it. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

And he was always very, very much about ideas, if that makes any sense. So, he was not the hardware tinkerer as much as he was the great idea philosopher. So, much later in life, he was always interested in, like, physics and quantum mechanics, and he had some really interesting actually, on YouTube, you can look for them. He had a bunch of interesting lectures, where he was trying to come up with, and doing a lot of good stuff around scientific explanations for various, like, psi phenomena, you know? So he believed that he believed in parapsychological phenomena.

Randy Shoup:

He believed that many of those things happened, like, not a bunch of them were hoaxes and whatever, but he said not all of them. And he believed there's no magic. There's no sneaky whatever. It's just we just don't understand the physics. And I don't think I can fully do it in thirty seconds.

Randy Shoup:

But he had an explanation of entanglement in quantum mechanics where things could flow both forward and backward. Causality flows both forward and backward, and it's pretty tight. And he never fully explored it in the last years of his life, unfortunately, but he was always intending to write a book about about that. Yeah. Spooky act just briefly.

Randy Shoup:

Spooky act in a distance, he's like, that's bullshit. But what it is is when there's the collapse of the wave function, it travels back in time in the sense that that collapse forces a particular thing that was always true in the in the entangled articles. I don't think I'm I'm probably not doing it justice, but, anyway, neither here nor there.

Bryan Cantrill:

So but you I think by by by contrast, your career has been very team oriented and have been kind of very is that I mean Yeah. It must give you great I mean, obviously, you are a technologist as well, but just having that from your father must give you great empathy for that kind of contributor because we still have, like, plenty of people that are like that that that make extraordinary contributions that are really important to kind of to to inspire and, I mean, is that as as the your experience with your dad, I I mean, helped you as an engineering leader?

Randy Shoup:

I mean, probably in ways that I'm not aware of, if that makes sense. He was always very good at understanding things very deeply and then therefore explaining things very clearly. And I think that is a trait that I have and I think is, you know, not a little bit due to him.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

I don't know. He personally, he kept I'm not sure how to say this. He kept his work life private. So it's not like he came home Yeah. Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

In contrast to other people in my family over the years where, you know, they come home and they talk about work and they tell work stories and so on. You know what I mean? And he was he was, like, for him, it was maybe it's the lone I mean, now that we're talking about the lone wolf, lone lone inventor, like, yeah, it was all in his all in his head, if that makes any sense.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And I can I mean, I for whatever it's worth, I'm like that too? I do not talk about work at home. Yeah. I'm always like, listen to the podcast if you're curious.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah.

Randy Shoup:

Do you like, dad dad, how was work?

Bryan Cantrill:

Like, it was just like Go go yeah. Go listen to the podcast.

Adam Leventhal:

No one's ever asked me that. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Exactly. Not yeah. Right. And I think it's a trick question.

Bryan Cantrill:

Usually is.

Adam Leventhal:

What do you want? Right.

Bryan Cantrill:

Exactly. Whatever you want. It's fine. Let's just get what what what did you do? What what what, what did you break?

Bryan Cantrill:

Let's just well, you get past it.

Randy Shoup:

Exactly. Dad, how was your day at work? What happened? Yeah. I'm not falling for that shit.

Bryan Cantrill:

Tell me what you broke. The so a question about, like, what what are some of your, like, must read books? Certainly, I think you've already mentioned you we've already mentioned Dealers of Lightning. I think Dealers of Lightning is a must read for everybody. I really do think that that's a it's a terrific book.

Randy Shoup:

Or the top I mean, I'll give a broader answer because it's a more general question, but, like, the other one that isn't as well known as Dealers of Lightning is called Valley of Genius. Yeah. That's excellent. That's, Adam Fisher, and it is it's a it's a it's a, format that I've never seen done before since, but it's wonderful. It's he he interviewed all these people, including my dad and, like, Zuckerberg and Jobs and, you know, all these people, Gates.

Randy Shoup:

And the book is as if they were having conversations with themselves using quotes that he got from direct conversations with them. So there is no text in there from him beyond whatever the forward. It is only people's

Bryan Cantrill:

says people's says

Randy Shoup:

says dot dot dot. Alvy Ray Smith says so so so. Bill Gates says such and such and such. And the individual chapters are all themed, like, you know, one about whatever the Internet and one about graphics and so on and various other things. And it's just this a very it really flows very nicely.

Randy Shoup:

And it's as if these people are all in some, you know, swan talking to each other. Right? Like, intellectual salon, as if they were right as if they were all

Bryan Cantrill:

for pronouncing that in the original French, by the way.

Randy Shoup:

Oh, you're, you're

Bryan Cantrill:

you're We're trying to get that right around here.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. But right. So yeah. That's so that's a good one. Let's see.

Randy Shoup:

Learning wise, must read books. Well, it depends on what you're going for. I think you cannot go wrong with Accelerate. So that's Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humblejeans Kim on basically how to do modern software correctly. And, for fun, I like Gene Kim's, Phoenix Project and Unicorn Project.

Randy Shoup:

Those are Oh. Novels about IT, which I would even though I love Gene and he's a great friend, I would have thought there's no way you can make our job interesting, but, like, they're page turners. Like, I do wanna find out how Bill just doesn't lose his job and blah blah blah and, you know, whatever parts unlimited or whatever it is.

Bryan Cantrill:

I guess you are a huge Phoenix project fan.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Big Phoenix project fan. Yeah. Gene let me see the, the Unicorn project early. So I like to think I had a very small twist of one of the characters.

Bryan Cantrill:

But, oh, oh, I've not heard this before. I didn't realize that this is

Adam Leventhal:

no big deal. Yeah. No. I love cheating and and and really enjoyed, Phoenix Project and, Unicorn.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That is great. This is kinda like the, the blogging software that that took your PR once. And as a result, you feel like the

Randy Shoup:

Oh, I co wrote this blogging software. Oh, you mean you submitted a PR? Yeah. Good. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

You know? I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking they got very good taste. That's all I gotta say. They got they they they have they have ex exquisite taste in PRs.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I will very I

Randy Shoup:

will very briefly so I'll make sure very briefly. So the question from Blacksmith for Life is must read books for individual contributors. And so super quickly, Michael Feathers working effectively with legacy code. Have to have have to read that one. If you have not read obviously, Refactoring by, by Martin Fowler, you have to read that.

Randy Shoup:

I am I really liked, Chris Richardson's Microservices Patterns, actually. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Are actually quite good. Happy to if people wanna connect with me

Bryan Cantrill:

I was gonna say microservices or we I thought I thought microservices were what the, persona non grata on the and that'll be or maybe they're back again.

Randy Shoup:

Well, I mean, at eBay and Google, they were never gone.

Bryan Cantrill:

There you go.

Randy Shoup:

But yeah. Look. I mean, we could have a whole podcast, and I have done podcasts on when and when not to use microservices. Do we do we live in an industry that is fad driven and do lots of times people copy things they shouldn't? Oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Absolutely not. I don't know.

Randy Shoup:

Does that mean does that mean that those things are wrong and broken for everybody? No. I love that so that I I have been trying to come up with analogies and metaphors for these for a while, and I put this one on LinkedIn a little while ago. Something like, a fleet of buses. No one could possibly ever need a fleet of buses.

Randy Shoup:

All you need is one stupid little car. And if your mental model is it's a single family, well, yeah, you just need a car. But if your mental model is you're a municipality, then you need a fleet of buses. And it's not right? One is appropriate for the one and the other is appropriate for the other.

Randy Shoup:

And, you know, that's not weird.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, one final thing I wanted to ask you because we're talking about Silicon Valley and kind of, you know, Silicon Valley as kinda as, you know, literal spot, the Santa Clara Valley and now really the the broader Bay Area and, you know, much bigger than that. I mean, it's hard the but I you know, because we this spot was I did have these kind of important cultural breakthroughs, and I feel that actually one of those big important cultural breakthroughs is the ability to have a distributed workforce and have people I mean, I'm kind of, like, I mean, you well, you know our opinions on some of this return to the office business, which I think, you know, to your kinda earlier point about, you know, the I I personally think, you know, I don't know if you wanna call it. So I know there is a Silicon Tundra, but I think that the, how much do you think the ability like, the the remote working to me, and I think we likened to this on the when we did the podcast episode on it, but the the the forcing people into the office feels to me like a forced dress code, And it feels to me like the the forced dress code that people were bucking when you were at Kyle Warshock and were like, wow, this is great because it's like a dress down law firm.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. It it it feels to me like that what's your take on how a distributed work is gonna affect the future of Silicon Valley?

Randy Shoup:

Oh, wow. I have so many thoughts, and I hope I can get them all. Okay. Return to office is the Roman Empire on its down, on its, downward trajectory. Right?

Bryan Cantrill:

This is great. Finally, we got someone who's, like, drawing grander historical metaphors than I am at it. This is this is I forget this. I love it. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Randy Shoup:

Poly sci major, dude.

Bryan Cantrill:

Here we go.

Randy Shoup:

So yeah. So it is it is the you know, and it scares me, frankly, you know, on behalf of those folks. It's like Amazon. It's like shooting yourself in the foot, and I don't, you know, I don't know how you recover. So, Walmart too, I will say without, you know, divulging any specific names that people are rushing for the exits and people are very happy to consider working for, the entirely remote Thrive market where I currently head engineering that work at companies that are doing RTOs right now.

Randy Shoup:

So that is it's gonna force whether that's the intention or not and I'm equally as, you know, conspiracy minded or or pragmatic, you know, depending on my mood, as you are, Brian, in in that episode. But, but, yeah, no, I think it's I think it's it's gonna it's it's gonna force a brain drain no matter what. So how do what do I so, yes, we now live in a world where anybody can work anywhere and do things. And this concept that and also so many things to think. So the I love and have for ten years working remotely.

Randy Shoup:

And also, if we if I don't get together in person with my team at least once a quarter, you know, being respectful of people's family time and so on. But I would prefer a little bit more often, then we lose trust and we lose the, you know, the sort of really collaborative opportunities because I agree that, you know, lots of people can have ideas whether over video or not. But just there's nothing quite like being in person.

Bryan Cantrill:

There's something special about being in person.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. And and in fact Absolutely. And in fact, on that score, I will I think I do not divulge any secrets when I say the reason that we are having this podcast today, Brian, is because you and I were in person you're laughing. You and I were in person on Wednesday

Bryan Cantrill:

That's a good point.

Randy Shoup:

At the San Francisco CTO club, and we started having a chat about other random things, how much I enjoyed the podcast, and hence, we're here. So there is, you know, is it true that only the only place to do creative ideas between people is in person? Like, no, that's crazy. It's crazy thought crazy talk. And also, the the optimal situation, I'm not gonna call it hybrid because that has another meaning, but the optimal, like, the the the peak of it or, you know, the efficient frontier or whatever is, mostly is remote most of the time and then get together, every so often.

Randy Shoup:

And that's how we just do it.

Bryan Cantrill:

So and I personally wonder if it's going to be I mean, ironically, Silicon Valley companies leading the charge on that kind of flexible approach because I I I and maybe not. Maybe it'll be that you'll see that happen elsewhere. But you but that requires a a kind of cultural creativity and flexibility that the I mean, because, you know, interestingly to me, the the the company that's not RTO is NVIDIA. So it's like, there I think that there is, I think it's the people would assume that, wait, boy, if people can work from anywhere, Silicon Valley will become nothing. But Silicon Valley already was metaphorical, really.

Randy Shoup:

And Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

The And I and I and

Randy Shoup:

I and I hope it does. I mean, honestly, like like I say, like, I love the fact that the world has come to me. And also, I don't I don't want this spa for the entire world. Like, I'd love for a little bit less traffic on the 280. Right?

Randy Shoup:

So, you know, I I would love for it to be and and, you know, the other thing the other point I wanted to make, about, return to office is people have said out loud that, oh, good software cannot be built except by being in person. And I'm like, do you use any open source at

Bryan Cantrill:

all? I sure don't. Next question.

Randy Shoup:

Right. Have you ever heard of I don't know. The Linux operating I mean

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. No. It's it is nuts to me. It is nuts to me. How and I I think that but I I, you know, I think as as you kind of like look forward, I I, you know, and this is why it is so valuable to kinda look at your whole through line.

Bryan Cantrill:

And to know that that especially young people who are, you know, are excited about the possible of of possibilities for the future, but also wondering, like, having anxieties about that. Those anxieties are not new. We grew up in the cold war, the the threat of nuclear war. Your dad was doing this in 1973 when there were gas lines. It's like, you you you gotta find the joy, find the stubbornness, and and at somewhat at some point, you gotta push past the anxiety.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, you know, I think you kinda get to that, that it works mostly, or somewhat. Was it so it is is it is it somewhat or It works

Randy Shoup:

sort of.

Bryan Cantrill:

Sort of. There you go. It works sort of, which is just like that to me, is like it works sort of is should be the motto of of Silicon Valley. Not move fast and break things. It's it works sort of, which is, kind of where Silicon Valley kind of permanently finds itself.

Bryan Cantrill:

But, I think we gotta find ways to kinda stoke that that great creativity and be inspired from it. But, Randy, thank you. I really appreciate you. This has been a great, somewhat random walk, but, it's so, I think, inspiring to hear your story and how, like, we can be and thank you for being so, by the way, so generous with your dad that we all get to kind of, we all get to be inspired by it. And that we, you know, again, it's such an extraordinary story.

Bryan Cantrill:

And

Randy Shoup:

Park

Bryan Cantrill:

is an extraordinary story, but then your father's story within it is so amazing and has had such profound and lasting influence. I think it can really, serve to inspire us all. It's really, really great stuff.

Randy Shoup:

Yeah. Thanks for saying that, Brian. I mean, obviously, he's always been inspiring to me. And I and I think, well, given his, his lifelong interest in in, sci and occult phenomena, like, he would want to believe that he's there partly, you know, experiencing the the conversation. So,

Bryan Cantrill:

That's awesome.

Randy Shoup:

So, yeah, I think in in any event, he would, completely rationally, he would have liked to have known that this conversation happened, if that makes any sense, and and would have been would have been happy about it.

Bryan Cantrill:

Alright. Well, Dick Schaub, wherever you are, thank you for thank you for the inspiration to it to and know that it's been, the torch passed to it to, another generation and a generation behind that one.

Randy Shoup:

Indeed. Third generation now.

Bryan Cantrill:

There we go. As we, look forward to, hopefully, again, many narratives for Silicon Valley, but, the one that is currently destroying destroying the republic is not the only one. That's all I'd like to say.

Randy Shoup:

Yes. I'm I'm the one that Yeah. Here here. Awesome. Good.

Randy Shoup:

Thanks, guys.

Bryan Cantrill:

Alright. Well, thank you very much, Randy. Adam, thank you for thank you for for your family too for accommodating and this this was a great one. We had Randy, it was so great to hear, hear your perspective and stories. Just amazing stuff.

Randy Shoup:

Lots of fun to share.

Bryan Cantrill:

Alright. Thanks, everybody. See you next time.

Creators and Guests

Adam Leventhal
Host
Adam Leventhal
X Mastodon Bluesky GitHub Website Link
Bryan Cantrill
Host
Bryan Cantrill
X Mastodon Bluesky GitHub Website Link
A Half-Century of Silicon Valley with Randy Shoup

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