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Read more about Anil Dash in “To Remake Tech, Remake the Tech Company“ Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Anil Dash didn’t like the direction the web was going, so he joined a tech company that promised to take web development back to its indie roots. That company became Glitch, a semi-distributed company based in New York City. In this episode, Matt and Anil talk about the good old days of blogging and how the ideals of those pioneers inform the way Glitch treats its employees and its product. The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: A lot of tech companies talk about prizing “people over profits,” but Glitch is a startup that is serious about these ideals, and holds itself publicly accountable for sustaining this commitment as the company grows. That’s partially because Glitch’s CEO is Anil Dash. Anil’s an old acquaintance of mine — he’s one of the early pioneers of blogging. Over the last twenty years he’s developed a reputation as something of a tech prophet — not just for predicting what’s going to happen next, but for holding the industry’s feet to the fire. Glitch is a partially-distributed company that runs a social platform for building and sharing web applications. To do that, they’ve developed a workplace environment that centers around employees’ well-being. I’m interested to hear from him how his company has aimed to go beyond platitudes and create a genuinely equitable and respectful workplace, and to learn where their semi-distributed structure fits into that goal. Alright, let’s get started. MATT: Anil, you have been blogging forever. ANIL DASH: [laughs] Roughly, yes. In geological time, it’s short, but in human years it’s 20 years. MATT: How did you start and what keeps you going? ANIL: People in my life were tired of hearing me rant about things. So they were like, “Go put it somewhere else.” [laughs] And at the time I had a really long commute. I was commuting by train an hour and a half each way. I mean it was really — it was like three hours a day on a train and I was going nuts. MATT: Wow. ANIL: You didn’t have Wi-Fi back then. So I had a giant Dell laptop and I was like, “I’ve got to learn how to do more with HTML.” I knew the basics but I wanted to do it. I would do it, literally just practicing on local on my laptop, on Internet Explorer 5 or something, whatever it was at the time, and I thought “Oh, I could take these rants in my head and put them out here onto the internet.” Right about the time that I had that idea in maybe summer of ’99, I saw the first couple sites. I was like, “Oh, this is what I could do. I could organize it this way.” I saw Peter Merholz’s site, PeterMe, and then very quickly discovered a couple of others. And so these pioneers were doing it, and I thought, I don’t think I can write like them but I think I’ve got something to say. It really felt like it was the right time too because I had started in maybe July and by September the Pyra team had built Blogger and the Danga team had built LiveJournal. Even just the fact that there was software to me meant “OK, this is legit.” MATT: So 20 years later? ANIL: 20 years later. MATT: Dashes.com. ANIL: Yes. MATT: Why do you blog now? ANIL: One, it’s part of how I think. My wife will always say, “You’re staring off into space like you’re writing something.” She just knows that it’s this thing where I’m collecting my thoughts. Certainly one of the most important things to me is, I think better and organize my thoughts better and share my ideas better when I write it, and it introduces a rigor to what I’m sharing. I love that push to accuracy and push to quality. It makes my thinking stronger. Some of it’s just, I like to write. For a long time, I had no other place to do it. I was lucky, after I had written a million words online people asked me to write for things. [laughter] You know? I got a column in Wired and I was like, “Where were you all ten years ago?” MATT: Cool. ANIL: But nobody was trying to hire me to write so I might as well put it out there. And that’s still true. MATT: What would make you stop blogging? ANIL: Well I’ve slowed down. So I would say the thing that slows me down is, well, life, right? So I’ve got to spend time with my child and I’ve got a company to run and I’ve got — the priorities have shifted. I can’t just say I’m going to stay up all night and finish this 3,000-word piece like I used to. But at the same time, the biggest thing chipping away at it is having other venues and other platforms. I resisted doing a podcast for the first 15 years of the medium. [laughs] I think the week podcasts were invented somebody was like, “You should go do one,” and I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” MATT: And now you have your own little studio. ANIL: Yeah, exactly. Then I started thinking about the craft that… The same is true actually of other social media. Like Twitter in particular I spend a lot of time on. And this is a strange thing to say but I think you’re probably one of the few people who can appreciate it — I care about being good at it. I think people are like, “That’s an absurd thing to say,” like, “Isn’t this disposable, isn’t this ephemeral?” I don’t feel that way at all. I have Twitter threads that have been going for six years. I am very mindful of how I use my audience, who I retweet and who I amplify. So I think very much of that as a body of work too. I never delete tweets. Again, same thing, I am certain somebody is going to go back and be like, “You said this thing that’s terrible,” and hopefully I’ve learned since then. But I very much want there to be a body of work between all the things I’ve done that I look at on a years — and now decades — timescale. I don’t think very many people look at their YouTube channel or their Snapchats [that] are like “Yeah, how is this going to age in 20 years?” But I have that luxury so I try to do what I do with that in mind. MATT: As you mentioned, you’re running a company now — Glitch. ANIL: Yes. MATT: How is that culture of blogging or writing part of Glitch’s culture? ANIL: So Glitch is the latest name and current incarnation of a company that started as Fog Creek Software in the year 2000, founded by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. Joel is, to me, one of the all-time legends of blogging, one of the greatest people to ever do it. Joel started Joel on Software in ’98, I think. MATT: Super early, yes. ANIL: Yes. I would read Joel’s blog and he would talk about a company where they cared about the software they made, cared about how they treated their people, were very thoughtful about the work that they did. They did not want to be just another dot-com, which at the time that was what was in vogue. I thought, “Wow, that would be an amazing place to work.” And also, “I would never pass their coding test.” That was the other thing I thought about the company. And in late ’99 — December ’99 — they had a blogger’s dinner in New York City, which is a funny thing to say because the premise was — MATT: Of all the bloggers. ANIL: All the bloggers, right. And we fit around two tables in a Mexican restaurant. You fast forward over the next 10 years and they had built some products and really established a culture, and Joel reached out and it was just like, “We’ve got something to show you.” I saw the prototype of what became Glitch. You could have live-in-your-browser code. And as you coded and typed your code out, it would live-deploy without you having to run anything, do anything, touch anything. You didn’t have to ask somebody down the hall for the access to the AWS account. It just worked. I still have the notes from that first meeting, and we were looking at them not long ago, we had had some folks join and I wanted to show them where it all came from. That first meeting that we had of the demo of it was — we talked about, well, we need to have a social network wrapped around this so you can find the apps, and you need to be able to remix the apps so you can redo it, and we need to have multiplayer editing, so more than one person can edit at the same time. And we had this list, and we made these bullet points in the first hour, all of which we did, all of which are the heart of the Glitch experience. It was really like few moments in my career. It actually felt a lot like when we first saw blogs. I first saw the blogging tools and it was like, “Oh, this is going to be it. This is… I don’t know if what we’re building is going to be the way it happens, but this way of creating the web is going to be how we make the web.” It was really, really clear. I remember really early on, when I was talking to Mena Trott, who had led the creation of Moveable Type, and was one of the bloggers that influenced me most, with her voice and her tone. I had said, “Someday there’s going to be a million blogs.” And she just looks at me and she’s like, “You dumb ass, there’s going to be like a hundred million,” you know? [laughter] And it was just such a great, both affirmation, and also “This is so much bigger than we can imagine.” I had that feeling with Glitch, which was — I think a lot of us had lamented the web we make. That we have apps on our phones, and what I always experienced with the apps on my phone. Everybody complains about [how] the algorithms aren’t fair, and there’s all kinds of awful content being shared, and misinformation and these things. What I miss most is, I look at my phone and I look at the apps and I don’t know who made any of them. MATT: Hmm. ANIL: It used to be [that for] every website I went to, I knew the person, and I knew what they liked, and I knew why they made it the way they made it, and what their peccadillos were. I mean, I still go to Daring Fireball and I’m like, “Damn it, John Gruber, the font is still too small. [laughter] I mean we are so much older now, just nudge the type size a little bit bigger,” you know? I’m sure he’s been finessing the font for 17 years to find exactly the right size but he’s not ready to commit yet. [laughter] But ultimately I come away and I’m like “That’s fine, I know exactly why it is what it is, I know his personality is captured in every pixel on that screen.” And then the stuff I spend my time tapping on, on my phone, has none of that. It doesn’t have people behind it, I don’t know the peccadilloes. I always use the analogy of food. Every meal I remember in my life was made by people I love who were — maybe it was a part of a tradition, like our culture. I know where the ingredients came from, I certainly know who was in the kitchen. And in none of my great digital experiences do I know who made it and can I thank them. You and I both have had this experience where we see an app or a tech that meant something to us, or a website that meant something to us, and we get to meet the creator. MATT: It’s so exciting. ANIL: Yes. So I felt that all like a flash the first time I saw the prototype of Glitch. Then we spent a year and a half, almost two years, really remaking the company in that vein. So I joined, which was incredibly intimidating, to be the first non-founder CEO of this company after 17 years and 18 years in business. We had shared an office with Trello and we moved out on our own, which felt like being 18 years old and moving out of mom and dad’s house. We renamed the company Glitch. Joel was incredibly supportive. And then the team, the people here… It’s so interesting because we’re not trying to be retro. I don’t have any idealistic view of the good old days, but I think there were things on the web that we used to like that we miss. So we imagined a modern version of that and everybody aligned around that. It’s really interesting where there are people certainly of my cohort who are like “Oh I remember the old internet and I used to go to MetaFilter,” or whatever the old thing was, but most of them are like, “Oh I’ve never known that web. The web I’ve grown up on was — the wildest part of it was MySpace and everything else has been this blue box we shove our photos into.” And the exceptions are around the edges. Definitely I had a WordPress theme that I used a hack on, or definitely I had a Tumblr thing that I would try to mess with the theme of. But those were the edges. It is satisfying to make something, and very little of their experience of the web had been that, and so they wanted to unleash that for as many people as they could. We’ve been fortunate. We came out of beta a little over a year ago. People have built well over three million apps on Glitch, and it’s going up very quickly, which is fun. [laughs] They are all full stack web apps, they are 99.99% open-source, they are all remixable. You can view source on all the apps — and full stack, you can even view the server code. It feels like a bit of the promise of the web that got so many of us excited in the beginning. MATT: So someone could think of it like a largely open-source code repository where all the code executes as well? ANIL: Mhm, yes. MATT: You can see how things work and if you build something, I can click a button, remix it, essentially fork it, software terms, and start my own version? ANIL: Yes, yeah, exactly. So for everybody, if you come to Glitch, I comment it’s almost like an app store. There will be something fun today that’s like “Build a Slack bot” or “Make a fun game for your friend,” or whatever it is — very simple stuff. And if you just want to go, take that and play, you’re great, it’s fine, you don’t have to be a coder, you don’t have to dig in. What we find is most people are like, “This is cool, but I want this button to be blue instead of green,” or “My boss wants me to add this one feature to this little tool,” or whatever it is. Then that idea of, “I’m going to remix this and customize it and make it my own.” The fact that you could do it in the browser, you click remix, you get your own copy, and behind the scenes it’s just a cloning a git repository. But what’s happening is the editor — it’s like Google Docs. You can do live, real-time editing together on the code, and you can share the link with somebody. As soon as you get in that mode where rather than “I’m going to figure out what this is on my own,” but I can collaborate with somebody — and especially that you can just do it in your browser, you’re not installing a dev environment, you’re not configuring an editor, you’re not doing all the complicated things, you’re just doing the creative part — I think that has been very, very freeing for people. There is this magic happening behind the scenes where that app runs and then if you type in code and you make a change, it immediately is running with that newer version. Those are things that have empowered people to sit there and say, “Now I’ve got permission to do this again,” maybe in a way that if I’m an older-timer and I’m used to doing it on GeoCities or on MySpace or something back in the day, but that has gotten hard. I think you and I both started FTP-ing pages up to a website. That’s hard as hell to do now. MATT: Oh my goodness. [laughs] ANIL: There’s deploy scripts and there’s cloud configuration and — MATT: It’s gotten more complicated, actually, now. ANIL: Yeah, yeah. MATT: It actually always surprised me, Moveable Type had this feature in WordPress too, where you edit the template in the browser. ANIL: Yeah. MATT: How popular that would be and actually still is today. Like, we still invest in — I guess we build it on CodeMirror or something, which is an open source library. ANIL: Yeah, so do we. And it’s essential. MATT: Oh cool. People love those features. ANIL: If you’re an experienced dev, you are going to have your whole toolkit, and you’re going to connect it all up. It’s the difference between a weekend woodworker or hobbyist, and the person who’s got the wood shop. MATT: But collaboration is a super feature that none of the desktop tools that I’ve used have. ANIL: Yeah, exa…
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