Episode 16: Glitch CEO Anil Dash on Strengthening Values in a Distributed Startup

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. Matt Mullenweg is an old acquaintance of mine. He's one of the early pioneers of blogging. And over the last 20 years, he's developed a reputation as something of a tech prophet, not just for predicting what's gonna 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 the semi-distributed structure fits into that goal. All right, let's get started. Anil, you've been blogging forever.

Roughly, yeah. In geological time it's short, but in human years it's 20 years.

So how'd you start and what keeps you going?

People in my life were tired of hearing me rant about things, so So they're like, go put it somewhere else. And, uh, at the time I had a really long commute. I was commuting by train like an hour and a half each way. I mean, it's really, it was like 3 hours a day on a train and I was going nuts.

Wow.

And you didn't have Wi-Fi back then. So I had a giant Dell laptop and I was like, I got to learn how to, how to do more with HTML. Like I knew the basics, but I want to do it. And I would do it just like literally just practicing on local on my laptop on like Internet Explorer 5 or something, whatever it was at the time. And I thought, oh, I could take these. I could just sort of have these rants in my head and put them out here onto the internet. And right about the time that I sort of had that idea in like maybe summer '99, I saw the first couple sites that I was like, oh, this is, this is what I could do. I could organize it this way. And I saw Peter Meyerholtz's site, Peter.me, and then very quickly discovered a couple others. And so these sort of 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 like, okay, this is legit.

So 20 years later, 20 years later, dashes.com.

Yeah.

Why do you blog now?

One is just, it's part of how I think, you know, my wife will always say like, you're staring off into space like you're writing something. Like she just knows that's this thing where I'm like collecting my thoughts and certainly, you You know, 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. And I love that push to accuracy and push to quality that it makes my thinking stronger. And then some of it's just, I like to write. For a long time, I had no other place to do it. You know, I was lucky after I'd written a million words online, people asked me to write for things, you know, like I got a column in Wired and I was like, where were y'all 10 years ago? But, but basically it was this like, nobody was trying to hire me to write, so I might as well put it out there. And that's still true.

What would make you stop blogging?

Well, you know, I've slowed down. And so I would say the thing that slows me down is, well, life, right? So, uh, I got, I got to spend time with my child and I got a, I got a company run and I got, you know, the priorities have shifted. I can't just like 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 that chipping away added is having other venues and other platforms. You know, I resisted doing a podcast for the first 15 years of the medium. I think like the week podcasts were invented, somebody's like, you should go do one. And I was like, I don't know.

And now you have your own little studio.

Yeah, exactly. And then I started thinking about the sort of craft of 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. And, and I think people are like, what, like, that's an absurd thing to say. Like, isn't this disposable? Isn't this ephemeral? And I don't feel that way at all. I have, like, I have Twitter threads that have been going for 6 years. I'm very mindful of how I use my audience, of who I retweet and who I amplify. And so I, I think very much of that is kind of a body of work too. Like, I never delete tweets. Again, same thing. I am certain somebody's going to go back and be like, you said this thing, it's terrible. Or, you know, and hopefully I've learned since then, but I think I, 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. And I don't think very many people look at their like YouTube channel or their, their Snapchats and they're like, yeah, how is this going to age in 20 years? But I, I have that luxury. So I try to do what I do with that in mind.

As you mentioned, you're running a company now, Glitch.

Yeah.

How is that culture of blogging or writing part of Glitch's culture?

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. And Joel is, to me, one of the all-time legends of blogging, you know, one of the greatest people to ever do it. Joel started Joel on Software in '98, I think.

Super early. Yeah.

And 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, you know, the work they did. They did not want to be just another dot-com, which is what, you know, at the time that was what was in vogue. And I thought, wow, that would be an amazing place to work. You know, 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 bloggers' dinner in New York City, which is a funny thing to say because we, the premise was all the bloggers, right? And we fit around two tables at a Mexican restaurant, right? And you fast forward over the next, you know, 10 years and they had built some products and really established a culture and Joel reached out and it was just like, we got something to show you. And I saw the prototype of what became Glitch. You could 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. Like you didn't have to ask somebody down the hall for the access to the AWS account. Like it just worked, you know. And I still have the notes actually from that first meeting. And we were looking at them not long ago. Uh, we'd had some folks join and wanted to show them where it all came from. And that first meeting that we had, or 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, you know, we have this list and we made these bullet points in the first hour, all of which we did, all of which are sort of the heart of the Glitch experience. I mean, it was really like a few moments in my career. Like I've seen things, 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 like, I don't know if, you know, 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. Like it was really, really clear. I remember actually really early on when I was talking to Mina Trott, you know, who had led the creation of movable type and was one of the, really, the bloggers that influenced me most, just with her voice and her tone. I'd said, you know, someday there's going to be a million blogs. And she just looks at me and she's like, you dumbass, there's going to be like 100 million.

You know?

And it was just, it was such a great, like, both, you know, affirmation and also like, no, this is so much bigger than we can imagine. And I sort of had that feeling with Glitch, which was, I think a lot of us had lamented You know, the web we make, that we have apps on our phones and what I always experienced on the apps of phones is aside from, you know, everybody complains about all the algorithms aren't fair and there's all kinds of, you know, 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. And it used to be 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 peccadilloes were. I mean, it's still good at like during Fireball. And I'm like, damn it, John Gruber, the font is still too small. I mean, like, we're all so much older now. Like, you're like, just make, just nudge the type size a little bit bigger, you know? And I'm sure he's been finessing the font for like 17 years to find exactly the right size, but he's not ready to commit yet. But, but, but I, you know, ultimately I come away, I'm like, that's fine. I know exactly why it is what it is. I know his, his personality is captured. And 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 their peccadilloes. I always use the analogy of food. Every meal I remember in my life was made by people who I love, who were, you know, maybe as part of a tradition that, you know, like our culture. I know where the ingredients came from. I certainly know who was in the kitchen, you know, and none of my great digital experiences do I know who made it. And can I thank them? And you know, we've had, 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.

So exciting.

Yeah. So I felt that all like a flash the first time I saw the prototype of Glitch. And then we spent a year and a half, almost two years really remaking the company in that vein. So, you know, 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 to Glitch. Joel was incredibly supportive. And then the team, you know, the people here. It's so interesting because we're not trying to be retro. Like, 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 imagine a modern version of that and everybody aligned around that. And it's really interesting where there are people that certainly of my cohort are like, oh, I remember the old internet and I used to, I don't know, go to MetaFilter or whatever, you know, whatever the sort of old thing was. But most of them are like, oh, I've never known that web. The web I've grown up on was, you know, 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. They're like, definitely I had a WordPress theme that I used to hack on, or definitely I had a, you know, a Tumblr thing that I would, you know, try to play at what the theme of, but those were the edges. It's satisfying to make something. And very little of their experience with the web had been that. And so they wanted to unleash that for as many people as they could. You know, we've been fortunate. We came out of beta a little over a year ago. People have built well over 3 million apps on Glitch and it's going up very quickly, which is fun. They're all full-stack web apps. They are 99.99% open source. They're all remixable. You can view source on all the apps. You can, and full stack, you can even view the server code. It feels like a bit of the promise of the web that got, I think, so many of us excited in the beginning.

So someone could think of it kind of like a largely open source code repository where all the code executes as well. Yeah. And you can see how things work. And if you build something, I can kind of click a button, remix it, essentially fork it. Yeah. Software terms. And start my own version.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, for, I think for, for everybody, if you come to glitch.com, it's almost like an app store. Right. There's, you know, there'll be something fun today that's like, you know, build a Slack bot or, you know, 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, like, 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, you know, my boss wants me to add this one feature to this little tool or whatever it is. And 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 yeah, behind the scenes it's just, it's cloning a Git repository, right? But what's happening is the editor is, it's like Google Docs. You could 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 you're, rather than I'm going to have 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. Like 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's been very, very freeing for people. There's this magic happening behind the scenes where that app runs. And then if you're typing code and you make a change, it immediately is running with that new 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 old timer, I used to do on GeoCities or, you know, on, on MySpace or something back in the day. But that has gotten hard. You know, I think you and I both started like FTPing pages up to a website and it's like, that's hard as hell to do now.

Oh my goodness.

Deploy scripts and there's, you know, just like cloud configuration and more complicated actually. Yeah.

Yeah. It actually always surprised me. MovableType had this feature, WordPress 2, where you edit the template in the browser.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah, so do we. Oh, cool. Yeah. And it's the same stuff.

People love those features.

Yeah, you gotta have— and the thing is, even if you're like, you know, experienced dev, you are gonna have your whole toolkit and you're gonna connect it all up. And it's the difference between like a weekend, you know, woodworker hobbyist and the person who's got the wood shop, you know? And it's like, okay, yeah, you have your—

But collaboration is a super feature that none of the desktop tools that I've used have.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the biggest thing we saw is that you could, well, people already have the behavior. If you're editing a Google Doc or whatever tool you use, you send them the link or you Slack them the link and you're sitting there. You don't even think about it. You're just like, you know, what do you think of this?

You might have resolving versions. It's just happening kind of in real time, which I think is really powerful.

And the olden days when you would email, you know, Word doc, final, final, really final version 3, you know, and you're approving changes is like, oh God, this This is hell, right?

Not old days. That's current lawyer days, by the way.

Well, right. Yeah.

Yeah.

If it's expensive, right. But if, yeah, legal contracts, sure. But the internally, you know, for some announcement or something, you're not doing that. And then code was still feeling like that. And I mean, I, I love GitHub. We use it every day. It's an essential tool, but I probably every single day type man git. Do you know what I mean? Like I, and I've been using it for as long as it's existed. Do you know what I mean? And I don't think I'm dumb. I think it's hard, you know, especially when you have other things to do. You know what I mean? If that's all I did, I think I could probably learn it, but like I have to do other things. And so that idea of like while you're just remixing something, it's already handled. And then while you type, then both of you or all 10 of you are typing in your Glitch project, we're auto-committing into Git behind the scenes. And then the biggest thing for me that after we launched in beta that sort of turn the corner for Glitch was we introduced a feature called Rewind, and it's a timeline slider at the bottom. You can pop it up at the bottom of the window, and it gives you the same thing you see on a YouTube video, but if you want to rewind back to old versions of your app, you just slide the slider back. And again, could I undo a commit and revert and do the right thing? Yeah, I can do it. I've done it. You know what I mean? I don't feel confident at doing it, and I certainly don't do it casually.

Mm-hmm.

Right? I wouldn't just be like, let me try a different version of this and undo these things.

Play around with it.

Right. And yet, you know, again, like I'm a spreadsheet nerd. In spreadsheets, we do scenarios all the time. Uh, what if it grows by 1.2% instead of 1.1%? It's just trivial, right? And so you're able to think more broadly. It unbounds your experimentation. It changes the way that you're willing to try something because there's a lower cost to it. And Rewind is about that. It's the, let me try a different version of this app. I'm going to remix my own app with one click. 3 seconds later, I got another copy. Now I'm going to rewind back to like last Thursday and what if I'd used this other framework, toolkit, API instead of this one? Now I can have them side by side and look at the difference. That kind of creation, I have that in GarageBand when I'm making music. I have that in turning off a stack of layers in Photoshop when I'm working visually. I have that in all my other creative tools. And in code, it's way too hard.

The only thing I've seen close is maybe the computational worksheets in, uh, from Wolfram.

Yeah. Yeah. I think they're great. I look at, you know, the Jupyter Notebooks and Python, and I think they get a little bit of that feel. I think those are all adjacencies. I don't think any of this is new. I mean, I think that people have been exploring these boundaries for decades in coding culture and in computer science, but productizing it for something you can actually put a live web app on today instead of, you know, in the lab, I think that's the leap. That's the thing that we want to do is take this out of— we can imagine a million things. But can you do something that you can use this and then ship a production app you're using at work?

Right?

The actual, the thing we have a lot of, uh, Slack bots, for example, people are like, I just want to get some data out of this old legacy system and dump it into a Slack channel. And I don't, you know, and I know the connecting pieces are here. So Slack, they created a bunch of examples that do the basic, you know, mechanics of it. Actually, uh, Matt Mullenweg, uh, old mutual friend of ours.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. Had built some of these examples.

And there's an amazing connection as well that the predecessor to Slack was Glitch. Mm-hmm. Yes. In a different implementation. Yeah, exactly.

So, so, right. So when, the team, um, the team had originally built Flickr, a lot of the same folks, and that started as Game Neverending. And they pivoted from the game into Flickr, which was a feature of what they were doing. And the second incarnation of the game was called Glitch. And, um, we had started, um, actually the first prototype that we had built was called, uh, HyperDev. We went through a lot of sort of iteration, but, uh, I, I reached out to Stewart Butterfield and the team at Slack and I was like, listen, you're not using the Glitch name. We've got something good that we think is worthy. Not, not just, you know, another generic photo sharing app. Like we got, we got some idea here. And they believed us and they thought that was worthwhile. So they were very generous in cutting us a deal to get it. And we got the Glitch handle on Twitter and all that stuff. And that was it. And it's funny because, you know, I'm always a little skeptical. Well, names are names, but the product, you know, it's always about the product and these things. But the truth of it is the changing the name was the biggest inflection point we had. As soon as that happened, people could understand what it was in a way.

Wow.

It was really, that was really surprising to me. And I, and then, you know, in retrospect, I said, well, if you get it, a Prince fan to run a company, they're going to rename things.

That's how it goes. I like it. Formerly known as.

Exactly.

You know, one of the things that was really an undercurrent there is a real optimism.

Oh yeah.

About what can be built and everything. You were also an early contrarian, perhaps pessimist or realist, however you want to define it.

Or at least critical for sure.

On the neutrality or goodness of technology.

Yeah.

And communities and things. So. Tell me about how, you know, you have the receipts. So what were, what were the receipts there?

You know, I—

what happened like you predicted?

I think like a lot of people who are changed by something, you have a crisis of faith, you know. So I had been working on building blogging tools at the point I left that work for 7 and a half years. And, you know, I had joined a company that my friends had started, then made a product that I loved.. And by the time I left, I felt like none of that was true. You know, they weren't in charge. The company was unrecognizable. The products had, you know, fallen into disarray or decay. I wasn't proud of a lot of the work. And I think more broadly, I had gotten very disillusioned with tech in general. I'd been in San Francisco for, at that point, 3 years or something. And, you know, I would walk my dog around South Park where I lived. And hear like 3 different people talking about their podcasting startups. And I, I swear my wife and I was like, I gotta get the hell out of here. Like, I gotta go home. I gotta go back to New York. As I think happens, like, there's not some, you know, epiphanic moment where like the, you know, the clouds parted and all of a sudden I saw this thing. I just was like, I always follow my gut and my gut was like, this is not good for me personally, but something is wrong here. Something is really wrong. And for context that you will remember, but I think has been erased. Because our industry doesn't have a great history. There had been a lot of effort around, just before that, a thing called OpenSocial. And so Facebook had had its platform that had succeeded in people building apps for Facebook, which is funny because they killed that off too. But at the time it was the hot thing and everybody else freaked out and sort of said, we're going to respond to this. So the company I was at, we participated, you know, it takes part. And also, you know, MySpace was big in it and Google. Yahoo, Google.

Yeah, exactly. Everyone except Facebook supported this.

Right, this is like coalition of the willing.

Right?

And they had some big event at Google and they had all kinds— I remember at the time thinking, wow, like, wow, these folks have a lot of money. And they did some big event and launched it. And I'd been very excited because I wrote about it. I was like, listen, the open web wins, you know, and this is about the open web and Facebook is closed and it's a, it's like the new AOL and it's the silo and all those things. The thing that it got me excited was I wrote that blog post and it got linked to by a blog I had helped recently set up just before that, which was Mark Andreessen's blog. And he said, this is the smartest take of the day. And I was like, wow, the Netscape guy thinks I'm smart. You know, that's awesome. You know, you fast forward not much later and Mark's on the board of Facebook and OpenSocial is dead. And in fact, all of the work I had tried to do on OpenID and, you know, pretty much everything except OAuth of that era died. And, you know, a lot of that was. The user experience was bad. The technology was too hard. It wasn't user-centric enough. Like, there's a lot of legitimate criticisms, but the motivations behind them were all legitimate. That no one company should own identity, that we should have ways to share identity, you know, pseudonymously between sites. Like, there were a lot of really key pieces there that were dead on, and that we should be able to control our information and where it goes and have a record. Like, one of the important ideas that totally got dropped, but that was an underpinning of things like OAuth, was that you would have a record of where you signed into and where your data got went to, and it would be this sort of audit log, you know. And you imagine how different that world would be.

And, and one of the lucky, right, was that— was the identity provider.

Yeah, yeah, that was— yeah. And there was a— it was, you know, we built a product.

It was great because it would show you like where you would—

yeah, yeah, show you the history. And also that we documented the protocol and said you can implement your own, and we never— you know, it was, it was, it was a thoughtful design. I think, again, the user experience was too hard. Like, there were a lot of legitimate reasons it didn't work, but there was a very informed, thoughtful perspective. And one of the last sort of big projects I'd pushed on was, um, so the company I was at at the time, we, we had MovableType and TypePad, which is sort of two big serious publishing platforms. And then we ran LiveJournal, which at the time I think was still one of the biggest social networks in the world, but it was probably the first to get to 10 million users.

And I think also, well, in addition to pioneering so much, was like largely open code or open source. Yeah, it was entirely open source. Created Memcached, a lot of things. Memcached, yeah, exactly. Mobile that like everyone uses today.

Yeah, so there's this hugely generative platform, right? So they invented a lot of like really a functional social model and of the underlying technology and open source it all. It's really, really thoughtfully done. But, you know, we're like adapting to the new world. And so Facebook reached out and said, will you use this new feature we have where people can share their activities on, I think it was still the wall at that point.

And, uh, was that Beacon or this was Beacon.

And so we pushed back and I leaned on our lawyer and we said, We'll do it, but it's opt-in and our users have to be informed. And it was all, actually, to my mind, the basics that you do. People don't share their information without consent. We were the only launch partner of Beacon out of dozens, and they had commerce sites and everything who made it opt-in. And Facebook had pushed back really, really hard. I was shocked because I just assumed everybody would do this. I thought, oh, they messed up in their defaults, but they Of course they want users to consent to sharing data with them. I was astoundingly naive. In retrospect, I didn't even feel stupid. Like, I should have felt stupid. And instead I was just like, I've misunderstood where I am.

I wouldn't put that on you. I would say that there was a general zeitgeist of openness and sharing with good intentions. Mm-hmm.

And that was a social expectation that we all had of each other. I mean, we were competitors, but we both believed, oh, this is how you do these things.

And we support the same standards and Things like that. And Facebook kind of bootstrapped on exploiting that, whether that's the address book APIs or things like Beacon or whatever it was that kind of like, I think, took advantage of some of that goodwill in a way that wasn't ultimately two-way. Although they tried to be two-way as well, let's be fair, like the platform, the API, a lot of the stuff they now get in trouble with was to try to open up Facebook.

Well, right. And I think part of it was the reason they exposed data people didn't expect is they'd collected data people didn't expect to share. Talking to people who were there early at Facebook, one of the things that's interesting is they weren't even intentionally exploiting. It had not occurred to them that we had these norms. They weren't of the community. We had all come up, you know, whatever, reading Joel and Software and Zeldman and Shelley Powers' Burning Bird. There were these people who were, I think in retrospect we would call tech ethicists, who were thinking about the impacts. And also, I think you and I both were like, we want to be cool to these people. You know, you want the nod and you want them to link to your blog and all those things. And that, you know, that healthy impact of them being skeptics and thoughtful, as well as those of us who were coming in saying we want to get the nod from them, all led to, you know, in good and bad ways, a set of norms. And I didn't understand the import of, you know, Zuck was not from that. So for him, like, it wouldn't even occur to him to try to conform to the norms of somebody he'd never heard of. Like, who would, you know? And so it's just like, I'm in this, I'm a stranger in a strange land. I'm just going to do, you know, what does it take to grow? Or is it take? And so, and so, you know, I'm not saying like, why didn't you have the same values as us? Because we also get, like I said, we get a lot of things wrong, you know, but, um, that was telling. And, and, and, you know, to your starting point here about like, how did I go from the cynicism to the optimism? And, and, and the truth is I still have a lot of both. I, at that point, I reached a breaking point. I genuinely thought I will never work in tech again, certainly never work at a startup again. I'm done with social media as a business. I have to be here because I need it for my career, but I got as far away as I could. I came back here to New York. I started working at a nonprofit doing research. I spent a couple years sort of trying to get a grasp on honestly what I felt I'd been culpable in. Like, what have I helped cause to happen And is it good? And then I also had thought about my— I'd spent a lot of time when I was younger as an activist and involved in a lot of really morally and ethically based movements. And I didn't feel like what I was doing contributed to the values that I had come up with and the people that had opened doors for me and inspired me. And so I just sort of looked around and in particular I looked at who was in the room when we built these things. And it didn't look like who was in the room when I had worked in the music industry or when I had worked in media or had worked in activism. And, and, and I thought, there's no way we're thinking about these things. And I wrote this series of posts on my blog in maybe 2009. I think I had said I was leaving Six Apart, but I hadn't left yet or something, you know, it was like that. Senioritis, maybe?

In between, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, senioritis.

You know, right? And I wrote, I wrote about basically every major tech company and what I thought was wrong. And I did one a week for like all summer long that summer. And I genuinely thought I had blown up my career. I thought, again, I got people like PR people that were like, basically, who the hell do you think you are? And the end of that was the Social Network had just come out.

The movie about Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The movie about Facebook. And They had a story tied to that in The New Yorker, and I just gave a quote basically saying what I thought, you know, and, and I just said, you know, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you don't know what you don't know. And of course you think everybody can have one public identity as yourself because if you're him, you're not going to get vilified for it. You're not going to get kicked out of your house for it. You're not going to be violently abused for it. I got, you know, all the back channels lit up. There are people like, Facebook is not happy that you are quoted in this and that you're seen as somebody credible, you know, and And I really thought, I was like, I'm never going to work in tech again. That was sort of my belief. And you fast forward anyway to 2017. And by the time I had sort of, you know, dabbled even with Gina and I were doing, we sort of very assiduously avoided the sort of conventional startup world. And I didn't, you know, I didn't go to Sand Hill Road and look for VC funding and all those kinds of things. But what I had a really great conversation with my wife and I was saying, like, I want to, I still want to change this industry for the better. I still want to have impact. I haven't given up on the potential, but Tech is itself one of the major social pillars that influences culture. The other I would say is like media and entertainment broadly. And I obviously, I deeply care about pop culture and those things. And then, you know, the third was policy and governance. And I'd spent a lot of years when I was doing that nonprofit work, working with, you know, the Obama administration and sort of gotten access in policy and government. And I started to see, okay, there's some things that government can do here, but it's by design slow. And also very corruptible or capturable by interest. So like, okay, we know there's flaws, but that is, you know, we don't maybe know the extent of them, but we knew that was there. And then, you know, media and entertainment, I had a little bit of an in and people knew me. They didn't know why. They're like, I don't know why this guy writes about Prince all the time, but like, he seems to know what he's talking about.

This is weird, but like, he's a worldwide Prince expert.

Yeah. I'm, you know, I'm not the most knowledgeable Prince fan in the world, but there aren't like 10 ahead of me. And, um, and so people are like, okay, You know, not just that, but they're like, okay, he understands how the entertainment industry works. And that's interesting. And I thought about how you triangulate fitting those pieces together into, you know, shaping tech to be something better. And the truth is I had as much access as you could have, and I hadn't been able to have any effect. I've been there banging the drum and to talk to like, you know, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States and be like, here's an issue about data privacy. And they're like, we're trying our best. And to see people in his office that spoke up on net neutrality and had their lives destroyed by companies trying to lobby to keep net neutrality from happening. You know, this all happens behind the scenes, but I would see good people who were targeted by the, you know, the AT&Ts of the world, by the, the Comcasts of the world who were like, do not let this happen. And then, you know, even in media, I had at the time, not long after that, I got a column in Wired. So I, you know, for me as a writer, that felt like the pinnacle.

It's making it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, like tech influence. It's like, this is this opinion column in a magazine that at least has the impact, you know, And I would write there and it would just sort of get dismissed and bounced off. They were like, oh, it's nice. You brought your blog into a magazine. You know what I mean? There was not, it didn't land. And what I realized is I'd even seen the most credible academics. Like I think about like Dana Boyd, who's just brilliant at this and her research institute, Data and Society, you know, would document all this stuff and it's incredibly valuable as the underpinnings, but it doesn't cause the change to happen. And so ultimately the sort of theory of change I arrived at was you only change the tech industry by being a founder and by having a hit. There kind of is nothing else you can do. Anybody else will get dismissed. You're not in the game. It doesn't count. You're just an outsider. You're just jealous. I mean, I see VCs say this all day long on Twitter to every valid criticism. It's like, you're just jealous because we're rich, basically. You know, they, they'll frame it different ways. But as we're speaking right now, there's a lot of criticism of WeWork ahead of their IPO. And there's a lot of fundamentals there that are a little iffy. And, you know, now people are sort of turning the corner into, well, okay, maybe there's some stuff here that's not as, you know, rigorous as it should be. But the first wave of defense was all, you're just jealous. They're, they're a unicorn. You don't recognize their vision and da da da. And I'm like, you know, yeah, there are times I miss a vision of something, but the reality is I'm like, this is real estate. This isn't magic. And, and, and software doesn't make real estate magic. And you have to be able to, you know, say something is what it is. And interestingly, there's a willingness to hear it if you are a certain title— CEO, founder— and if your product's a hit.

And here we are. Yeah. That's a good full circle. On Glitch, I noticed the careers page. Mm-hmm. You had some interesting stuff.

Oh, yeah.

A series of pledges including no endless meetings, allyship best practices, reasonable work hours.

Oh, yeah.

Do you ever worry about being held to these things in the future, or is everything on there something that you feel like is— I like to be.

Yeah, we, you know, the good news is these, a lot of these date back to Fog Creek and even to the earliest days, which at this point is 19, 20 years ago.

Which are the ones you think are most important just for people listening?

Oh, that's a good question. So I think, you know, the fundament is respect for the people on our team. Joel Spolsky as our founder and our chair said from day one, like we treat our people well and we give them a great working environment. And it's a very deeply held view of his. And I mean, I agree, but like, that's the ultimate authority, right? Like, that's my boss. And, and that's been true from day one.

To orient a little bit, like, how many people do you have here in the office? How many are remote?

Company overall is 56 people. We just had 2 people accept, so soon we'll be 58. Of those, 30 are remote. So 26 here.

Majority.

Yeah. And it's, what's interesting is that's shifting. This has never happened in the whatever, 12 years the company's been doing remote, people are starting to move to New York to be in HQ to balance it out. And it all sort of been the other way, which was like the remotes were the, you know, the one-offs. And so people are like, yeah, this like, you know, obviously it doesn't, you don't twist people's arm to be in New York, but it was a very like, it's an interesting sort of sense of like people like the balance of both. So majority remote, there's really an interesting mix of people that have been in the commute to work every day thing and don't want to do that anymore. And I really love that here in New York, we just all take mass transit, but nobody at the company has to drive to work and be stuck in a commute. Nobody around the world does that. And so that's really powerful. And then importantly, we make sure and pay attention to— there are people in leadership that are remote. There are people in every role, in every team, in marketing, in engineering, in infrastructure, everything we do. There are remote team members in media, all the things that we do. There's no sort of one side or the other.

I'm excited to hear your thoughts and to just learn a little bit more about how you operate in a distributed fashion at Glitch.

Joel Spolsky, who is our founding CEO and then co-founder of the company, you know, he had a lot of things to say about how you should set up your tools and your software, and everybody should have a really nice big monitor and all this stuff. And then he had this one principle, which he still is very adamant about. In fact, he mentioned it in the board meeting we had last week. Which is that every coder should have a private office with a door that closes. And he really feels it makes a huge difference about productivity and that there's a lot of research and evidence that shows having that space is very valuable, which I'm a full believer in. I, you know, I had never before I worked at Fall Creek and now Glitch had seen a workplace where that was true. And, um, I saw that like they were able to have these results for a long time. And then when they built Trello, they really started to grow the company and they ran out of offices. And so they were sort of like, you know, one, we can't just keep expanding forever here, but two, also there's lots of talent that are people that didn't want to move to New York City. And those two things, you know, led to the obvious, in retrospect, conclusion of the company should be open to remote contributors. And It's interesting because the impulse there was in order to keep doing the structural things they were doing. So remote workers at the company are required to have a private office at home, a room with a door that closes, and that is not like your kid's nursery or, you know, like where your greenhouse is that you're growing your plants or whatever. You know, it's, it's its own space. And in exchange, you know, the company, we provide a standing desk, we provide, or, you know, sit-stand desk if it's— you want a motorized one, a really nice chair. We'll pay for the internet connection. We make sure you get broadband. Like, all that stuff is taken care of. But it's very much this sense of to create the same atmosphere as what we have in the office. And then there's a whole set of processes around how everything works to make sure It's uniform whether you're in HQ or not for coders. And that was something that was really probably the biggest culture shock when I joined.

Having an office with a door is good for developers. Why not for everyone?

You know, that was the first question I had as somebody who's not a developer, right? I'm like, hey, can I get one of those? Like, I, you know, I can write a couple lines of code. Like, what do we got to do? And actually, what we came to really talk about, and this was really catalyzed in particular because we had shared an office with Trello as the other spinout, one of the other spinout companies, and they were growing leaps and bounds around and after their acquisition by Atlassian. We were growing as our team, and it was really crowded. We had this like shared office downtown Manhattan. And so people were getting doubled up in offices and there was this question like, well, why are these people over here and these people over there? And what I came to understand is we built out a new office here. Is there's different work modes. And I'm someone that definitely falls into this where I have, you know, one way of working when I'm writing, which I try to do a lot, one way of working when I'm coding for sure. And then, you know, of course you end up in a meeting, you got to be in a conference room, sit down with people. Like there's all these different ways of working. And I found like one of the things that I find from a lot of people really consistently is they'll say, I'm most productive on email when I'm on a plane and there's no Wi-Fi., or I do a lot of writing at a coffee shop, even though I'm not talking to anybody else that's there. I like that.

Totally.

I can totally relate to that. I had that experience with libraries. Yeah, right? And, and so there were different work modes, and that was what really was sort of the epiphany about, even though we were very, very effective with giving coders private offices, at the time the company was just that. There were really only coders. As recently as, you know, in the past decade, uh, Fog Creek was a company that where there was nobody who had a title of marketing, there was nobody with the title of sales, there was nobody— I mean, it's just like there's entire business functions that did not exist. It was a very, very extreme environment and good in a lot of ways, obviously had a lot of success, and then bad in a lot of ways. And so you couldn't do normal things like having a couple of people get together, talk about messaging or design, because those functions didn't exist and you didn't have any place to do them if everybody sort of warrened off in their own little room. And so finding the balance of like, how do you have different ways of working was really powerful. And in HQ, you know, it translates into a couple conference rooms. We have a space that I literally set up to be like a coffee shop. And we're doing that with our new headquarters that we're building and the building that we're in where we're, we're going to have, you know, it's going to feel like a coffee shop. You have the nice couch and get, you know, some caffeine or whatever you want. And so that's there. But the, the biggest thing was The very first day I joined, we had a meeting, we had all hands. We still have them every week. And everybody, even in headquarters, even at desks if they didn't have a private office, put on their headset and joined the video conference from their desk independently. And I had had this in many other companies that I'd worked for or worked with. It wasn't the scenario where if I was remote, everybody on the— in HQ was all around one table. In one room together, and then I was on the other end of some weird conference phone, like one of those Polycom phones, and they forgot I was there and they couldn't see me. Or the weird creepy thing of like your video shows up when you talk, so every time you talk, you know, you're on some giant 10-foot screen with everybody staring at all the pores on your face. Like, those are the only two modes of interacting that I'd ever had. And instead, this was everybody had the exact same setup and the same camera and, you know, their same kind of headset. And could see each other, and it didn't matter if you were in HQ or if you were thousands of miles away. You had the same experience of that meeting, and everything changed.

It sounds like y'all— it must be a delight to work there. Like, I'm sure some listeners are like, ah, I need to check out the Glitch careers page.

As I said, we have a weird background. You know, the company overall is— in 2 months, we're gonna be 20 years old. But we really started kind of reinventing the company about 3 years ago. Some of the things that we changed, you know, one, the top level, one of the very first things I did was around recruiting and hiring. We had very early on, Joel Spolsky, our co-founder and CEO, had said a good tool if you want to assess people's skills as coders is to use a whiteboard and talk to them about their thinking about code during the interview process. And this is something, as I'm sure you're aware, that kind of became almost a cargo cult thing, right? Like, people would do this, what to me felt like a hazing ritual of like, you know, demonstrate your memorization of some algorithm by writing it on a whiteboard from scratch, which is is not how anybody in the world ever codes, especially not when we're the company that had, like, you know, co-created Stack Overflow.

It's all about code cutting things. Yeah.

Of all the places, right?

Yeah.

Of all the places you should be able to just copy and paste from Stack Overflow, it should be here. And so his impulse had been right, which is like, let's see how people think and don't put them through all the pressure of having to set up a, you know, a dev environment just for an interview. But I think in, in the absence of like that steady hand saying, here's the principle behind it, it became— as I said, almost a hazing ritual. And I felt very personal about that because, one, you know, I care a lot about inclusion in the industry, and anything that's a barrier is really dangerous. And then for me personally, I had worked as a coder for years, and yet I knew I couldn't pass that test. So what did it say about the utility of that test? Right? It clearly was testing something else, you know, to be standing at that whiteboard and be put on the spot that way. So, so we changed that, but it was sort of the beginning of a change in the culture overall, which was interrogating which assumptions were about us being different for a real reason and which things were sort of rituals that we had held on to from the olden days. And, and things changed pretty quickly after that. For example, we had always had a pretty public set of rules around how the company ran, but we formally turned that into a public handbook that people could look at for our HR policies, and that that both helped us refine and sharpen what we shared, but also again helped in recruiting because people outside could be like, wow, I know how that company runs and how processes are going to work for me and whether I'll be taken care of. We did that around compensation. Joel and Michael Pryor, his co-founder, had set up an engineering compensation ladder, gosh, probably a dozen years ago, a long time ago. But it hadn't been kept up to date and it hadn't been modernized and it was only for engineering. And so we turned that into a full salary transparency document within the company where we documented what compensation and pay would be for every role, including non-engineering roles, which we introduced and actually defined. And that was, again, you know, it's far from perfect. There's a lot of work to do to improve it, but it built so much more trust where people, especially, you know, underrepresented people in the industry, could be like, at least I'm being paid fairly compared to the person next to me. You know, there's always improvements to make in compensation, but I'm not, you know, I'm not being targeted because of who I am to be exploited, to be paid less. And so there was a lot of this stuff where we took the building blocks that were there and then modernized them or updated them. And that took, you know, a year, year and a half of work, but it really, really paid off in terms of, one, attracting a new wave of incredible talent that were every bit the peer of anybody who'd ever worked here, which is extraordinary. And And then, you know, we grew this company and this product while hiring at a fast clip, while expanding our, you know, to a new headquarters, while doing all this other stuff simultaneously. It's very hard to walk and chew gum at a startup at the same time. And I think we were only able to do it because we'd built that level of trust around the process and especially around treating people in that basic way that they expected in the workplace. And some of that's about being remote-friendly. Some of that is about being friendly to people who are underrepresented in the industry. Some of that is just about building fair processes for how everything works day to day.

Why not go fully distributed? Why do you still keep the New York office? And, uh, why, why and how is it important to you?

We talked about it. There was a consideration actually before I had joined. There's a couple reasons that I decided to keep it. You know, the first is I am at the personal level, a very unapologetic New York City partisan. I think that, um, I've been, you know, somebody who cares deeply about the tech community in New York for um, almost 2 decades now. And I felt like the company is a symbol to the city of our tech culture and community. So there was a sense of like, you know, which of the old guard classic New York City internet startups were still relevant and pertinent and here, unapologetically here. The other part was that like at a real pragmatic level, we were able to attract talent in certain ways because we've got options, right? There are people that, one, like to work around other people. You know, there are people that like to have camaraderie and they like to have a connection to the people around them. Certainly we see that, especially in some of the other roles we brought in, where we have a team doing media and we have a team doing community and all these other things, and they sort of like to be able to commiserate and share ideas. So that was really powerful. And we sort of unlocked that. And, and also there are people that wanna live in New York City, so we were just able to attract talent and people that were like, I get to work at a cool tech company and be in New York, like sold. The wild thing about that is like, it's cheaper than living in San Francisco.

How do you keep, cuz in-person is so powerful. So how do you keep that from just being those ties being so much stronger and that communication being better?

You know what, it, it's something I'm very mindful of and we're, we're really disciplined in a couple of ways. One of the things is no hallway conversations about work. And actually, one of the telling things is that we as a company have always done lunch together every day in HQ. So everyone in New York, really meeting stop, call stop, you know, whatever is going on, everybody sits down. Actually company-wide, because it tends to happen in other, you know, locations as well. But really in HQ, we, we provide lunch every day and everybody sits down, has lunch together. And understandably, remote folks worry about like You know, that first day they're like, "Wait, everybody there is going to be talking about stuff and I'm not going to know about it." And the great thing is saying, "We're not going to talk about work. We're not going to make decisions about work in that lunch," makes it a social place. It makes it— it's actually, like, much more low-key.

Do they really not talk about work? That's so hard to believe.

Yeah, well, because it's not that hard because there's so much stuff that's interesting. Well, one, being in New York, and two, like, at a social level, like, people like to put it away. Like, we have really good boundaries. And also, they feel a real, like, a real out loud sense of, I'm not gonna have this conversation without her here, without him here, without that person who's in charge of that, right? Because we have leads, we have, like, people who are leaders in the company that are remote. So it's not that you couldn't have a full conversation, you know, it's, it's half the company is not there, so you couldn't have the conversation about And so, so that's really, really powerful. And then we already have a habit of taking notes on every meeting. And, you know, if, like, if 3 people are having a meeting and they're all here in New York, we'll sit in a conference room. There's not, like, it's not like there's not some weird, you know, ritual thing where we will refuse to sit together. But even there, there'll still be the notes that are shared, just like they are from any other meeting. And so I think those habits, because the habits are deeply ingrained, and at this point for 10 years there just isn't that impulse. And it's been very clarifying to us about, one, just real life and, and what affects people, but also helps with like not being insular to just the place where you are, to think about what's happening out in the world to people. You know, I think it can be really powerful. And that, for example, led directly to a policy we had created around paid climate leave And originally the catalyst came from a worker of ours who's in Florida and was being displaced by a hurricane. And then we simultaneously had somebody that was being potentially displaced by a wildfire at the same time in California. And so we made a policy to accommodate them. So it's paid leave if you're displaced by extreme weather. But that core accommodation was one also informed by— we had had our headquarters displaced by Hurricane Sandy here in New York when that hit. But that sense of just, we have people in different places and we build policies that work for all of them. And that rigor, that perspective, I think it makes us run better. It makes us much more disciplined. It makes us have to be intentional about communication. Those things are superpowers. They make our work better, faster, more efficient, more reliable, more trustworthy because we have that discipline. And we honestly I think we would be lazy if we were not distributed, if we were not rigorous around how we communicate, and in ways that would hurt our long-term opportunity.

Well, and I think it's one of the reasons that listeners will find the example of Glitch so fascinating, because you do put a lot of thought into all of your policies. And one of the, one of the ones that I'm a little curious about, especially given you have a hybrid structure, is how you approach onboarding. Like, do people fly to New York and do some of that in person, or how's it work?

So we do do onboarding here in New York. You know, the most extreme was actually back in the spring when we were really scaling up. We had 9 engineers join in a week. Interestingly, about— we have a number of leads, uh, whether they're director level or, or higher in the company who are educators and onboarding, you know, in its fullness of, of the plan, onboarding is something that we spend months on. So it's, you know, 3, 4 months. But yeah, the core of it is about those first 2 weeks. That's the experience that we really design most deeply. And the first week is school. You know, people come in and the first day is like, you know, get your laptop, get plugged in, get connected to Slack. We time it so that people join during the monthly all-hands. That's when, you know, in addition to sort of an overview of how the business is doing, we share financials with the whole team, but also we do our bravos. It's acknowledgement of people thanking each other for the work they've done. When they've gone above and beyond on certain work. And they get to see, you know, a new employee on their first day, how we show gratitude to one another within the company. And they get to see a meeting where everybody is dialed in in the same way, uh, whether they're remote or not. And they get to see us model the behaviors of what we are on the first day. And then, you know, they spend some time like, you know, getting two-factor auth set up and all that other, you know, annoying stuff. And then, you know, typically the rest of that sort of core onboarding process, and this, this varies by team. We do a big overview of like how the business runs, what the mission is, what the history of the company is, what our goals are, what the roadmap is. I spend a lot of time talking about the values and the vision of the company, and that's typically in, you know, one-on-one sessions with people who've joined so they can have room to ask questions, or sometimes with their lead. That's, uh, the better part of a day, usually right towards the beginning of the week when they've joined. We have a much more sort of social, like, get-to-know in small groups, um, people across different teams. Typically, you know, we'll have like a dinner with some folks so they can say hi to other people in like a little more social way. We will always bring in a person to HQ for onboarding and bring in their lead if their lead is remote. So people do get face time. Like, we do think that has value. You know, there's a way to sort of deploy that as a tool, and especially for like social interaction when people are getting to know each other and have to build a relationship. And so we'll do that for a full week with, like, the person and their lead-in for a week. Like, the two biggest anxieties when people join a company is basically like, am I going to know where I fit into any of this? And then variations on what I think of as, like, the problem we all had in junior high of, like, which lunch table am I going to sit at?

Yeah.

You know? And we are very intentional about that. Like, well, because we all eat lunch together every day, we're like, this is where you're going to be, and everybody's going to sit with you. You don't get picked for a lunch table. Like, everybody sits together. And that stuff is like, you know, nobody wants to talk about it, but it's like, even if we're adults, even if we're decades removed from those points, like, that's still that lizard brain, you know, back of your mind that's always there. And, um, and so we do a lot to accommodate that. And especially because, like, majority of our team, including in management, are women or non-binary folks. And that's very rare in tech. But then that's true, you know, whether you look at, like, like, you know, race or LGBTQ representation. Like, we over-index in a lot of ways there compared to the rest of the tech industry. So I try to be much more mindful of, like, there are a lot higher percentage of our team who will not have been in that scenario where somebody accommodated them and somebody asked, like, what do you want here, you know, or what do you need? And just that little bit of accommodation or thought, I think, has been extraordinary for people where they feel like just overjoyed at like, oh, I wasn't crazy at my last job when I thought it was wild that they didn't even tell me who I report to or where I sit, and that this place will tell me, you're gonna sit here and this is the work you're gonna do and this is why it matters. That's all it takes for people to feel like they were welcomed.

We've talked a bit about benefits, and I know equity is really important to you. So if I'm not in New York, how do you think about I don't get free lunch every day. Or if I am in New York, do I get a free internet connection?

No. And so that's where we go to is like, it's not going to be exactly the same, right? We want things to be fair, but they don't have to be identical. And there are things that are going to be better or worse, stronger or weaker in HQ versus remote. We try to, like, again, to document them and to be clear. And I think those are really good examples. And it's hard, right? And we do that for— like, we do cover internet access for home. For people who work from home and we don't cover it here. And, you know, we're iterating on this stuff constantly. But we— one of the big things we do is we just talk about it. We're able to raise it. We have people, you know, like leads are encouraged to ask their team about it. People want expectations to be clear and they want to know that things are fair, but they don't demand that they be exactly identical.

And Neil, thank you so, so much. This has been Anil Dash from Glitch on the Distributed Podcast with Matt Mullenweg. We'll see y'all next time. That was Anil Dash. You can find him on Twitter @anildash. That's A-N-I-L-D-A-S-H. It's good to know that people like Anil Dash are out there running companies and redefining what the tech industry can look like from the inside. On the next episode of The Distributed Podcast, I'll be joined by my colleague Mark Armstrong once again. We'll talk about the things we've learned over the last year, discuss some of our favorite takeaways from the podcast, and take a glimpse of what awaits us in 2020. I've learned a lot about how other companies are doing distributed work. I'm excited to collect my thoughts and maybe make a few predictions about where we are headed. Thank you for listening, and see you next time.