Stephen Wolfram on 28 Years of Remote Work

Howdy, howdy. Welcome to The Distributed Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Mullenweg. I got the chance to catch up with today's guest, Stephen Wolfram, because my company Automattic invited him to give a talk at our annual company meetup in Orlando, Florida. This is a magical occasion where all 950 automaticians, which is what we call ourself, get together to meet up face to face. This gives us an opportunity to hang out, break bread, and collaborate over the course of a few days. We also invite in a number of speakers, smart people like Stephen. Stephen's been leading Wolfram Research for 32 years, which is a really long time for a tech CEO. The company has pioneered a lot of different technologies in computation and education. Wolfram Research has about 850 employees, many of whom are scattered across 29 countries. So it's pretty close in size to Automattic. Stephen's been doing the remote CEO thing for way longer than I have, about 28 years. So naturally I wanted to pick his brain, which is an amazing brain, on why he chose to go the partially distributed route and learn about how he's led his company remotely for longer than just about anybody. All right, let's get started. Welcome, this is Distributed with Matt Mullenweg, and today we have Stephen Wolfram, who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, known for things such as Mathematica, amazing tome called A New Kind of Science, which I guess you worked on for about 10 and a half years, created Wolfram|Alpha, which is one of the intelligence engines behind Sounds like Alexa and— Siri. Siri. And other things, yeah. And many other things. And just an incredible amount. I encourage you to Google him, go down the rabbit hole of all the amazing stuff and people you've worked with and everything. Thank you so much for joining today.

Nice to be here.

Part of the reason, in addition to all those fun things, I wanted you to be here is your company is similar size to Automattic, around 800, 900, and is geo-distributed as well. Yes. You have been a remote CEO since 1991. That is correct. And your company goes back to, was it '80?

'86, late '86.

Late '86. Possibly one of the older geo-distributed companies I'm familiar with.

I think so. I mean, I think—

It's got to be one of the longest. Maybe there's something out there, but like, that's got to be one of the longest. That's pretty cool. What caused you to be geo-distributed at the beginning?

So, okay, first thing was I started the company. So this was the second company I started. First company I started, I started when I was I was 21 years old, and that was in Los Angeles. And that company was a pretty traditional company. It was venture capital funded. It had— I brought in a CEO. I didn't CEO it myself. I was the technical sort of person.

And did they call it adult supervision back then?

No.

Oh.

No, they didn't. I mean, that company went through various sort of mergers and things and eventually went public sometime in the 1990s in a very undistinguished IPO. So anyway, so my first company was not distributed at all. It was, you know, sat in this building near the Los Angeles International Airport. I was involved in basic science and I had sort of developed this area of science that I guess now gets called complexity theory. And so I kind of tried to figure out, you know, what university will give me the best deal to start a research center in this kind of science? So I went round to lots of universities and the one that won that was the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. But I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm going to start a company that kind of builds the tools that I want to have for myself and that I perfectly well know are going to be useful to lots of other people in the world. So we started the company in Champaign, Illinois, which is, you know, not probably most people's first choice for, you know, where to start a tech company even back in 1986. But it was great. Got terrific people from the area. It's a university, a good university producing a lot of interesting graduates. We were sort of the only game in town, so to speak, And, you know, I think we're still the largest sort of tech operation there. So we kind of started in this slightly outlying place, then got off to a very quick start, you know, up to a few, couple hundred employees, I think, maybe 150 or something. And, you know, I was like injecting ideas into this thing at a very high rate.

So when you inject ideas, you're coming and saying, "Hey, we should do this thing." Yes, and getting more and more frustrating that they weren't getting done.

I have to say that just a few years ago, we finally finished my 1991 to-do list. Huh. So it's done. That one is— That one's— Yeah, finally.

The thing that got you to leave is now all the way complete.

Right. You know, my original plan had been build these tools that will, among other things, allow me to do basic science that I want to do. I said, let me step back a bit and let me go off and spend some chunk of my time doing basic science and, you know, let the company kind of grow up and we'll see what happens next. Maybe there'll be a coup and somebody else will say, I can run this better than you can.

So everyone was in the office except for you.

Not quite. I mean, what happened was, I'm trying to remember how many people weren't in the office at that point, but I was definitely the main go-offsite person.

And what were the tools at that time? Was that because you had been in a university setting and familiar with email or internet or?

Yeah, I mean, I, well, I started using email in 1976.

Yeah. That was pretty familiar to you.

Yeah, right. You know, it was modems dialing up and my email would arrive in bunches every 15 minutes. And I was, you know, I was on the phone a bunch. I had hired a chief operating officer. Operating officer.

I was going to ask what the exec team looked like. So you had a COO who could be kind of the on-the-ground lead, right?

You know, he was with us for like 6 or 7 years and he did a good job, I would say, of maturing the company from being a, you know, high growth to something which had good systems in place and, you know, could roll forward.

But in this second iteration of the company, did you also raise venture capital or did you decide to take a different approach to have the longevity?

Yeah, no, no, not at all. Version 2, I was the CEO from the beginning and forever type thing. Um, no outside money ever. It's been kind of a shame for me that I've never really had a, quotes, business partner. I think of myself as pretty average at business kinds of things, but I'm not totally incompetent. Personally, I view it as sort of a, you know, an optimization. It's like you can do things that are very commercial, but a little bit intellectually boring. And, you know, it tends to be the case that you're doing a lot of kind of rinse and repeat stuff if you want to you know, like grow purely commercially, so to speak. Or you can do things that are wonderfully intellectually, but the world doesn't happen to value them and you can't make any, you know, make it make commercial sense that way. And I've tried to sort of navigate something in between those two where it's kind of where I'm really intellectually interested and where it's commercially successful enough to kind of sustain the process for a long time.

I love finding that intersection. And it feels like now the world has caught up a little bit to voice assistants and the natural language processing stuff you've been working on forever. You found, is that the main business model for Wolfram Research now?

No.

Oh. No. I would've thought that sort of licensing drove it, 'cause there must be billions of users of these voice assistants.

Yes. And it's a good source of revenue. At this point, it's fairly diverse. I mean, there's a big chunk of licensing software, but a lot of that, so, You know, there's, for example, the academic sector, there's site licenses to universities where basically the goal is make the software to be free for people to use at universities. And we're kind of complete now in the US in the sense that all the major universities have site licenses. So if you are at any kind of sort of major university in the US, you will be able to use our software for free. There's a lot of commercial use of software where we're basically selling prepackaged software. It's been nice that it's been, you know, gradually quite diversified between different kinds of channels. Back to the whole, you know, no venture capital, you know, do— it's been great. You know, I don't have a boss. You know, it's— I recommend it. I mean, it's— and also, you can do things—

I feel like you always have a boss. It might be a customer or all of the customers in the world.

Yeah, I mean, it's somewhat—

It could be the employees for whom you'll respond to if they reach out.

That is really what happens. In the first approximation, you know, you kind of think, "Oh, I can do anything." And then the second approximation is, "Oh, we have all these customers. Oh, we have all these employees." I take those responsibilities really seriously, but for some, you know, I've been doing them so long that they kind of seem natural, so to speak. It's a thing where I think there's a certain kind of sort of intellectual freedom, so to speak, that I at least believe that I have by virtue of the fact that We just have, you know, I'm sort of just responsible to myself, so to speak.

I will say that I think as a result of so much capital flooding into the market that there is, there now are very long-term investors who, if you choose them correctly, can be aligned on longer time spans than the standard sort of 5 to 7 fund life of sort of some historical venture capital.

Right.

And then founders now are able to retain a lot of control. Through voting mechanisms. Yeah, you know, I always— They might sell economic interest, but no longer selling control interest.

I always kind of wonder how that's going to come out in the end. You know, I thought about taking my company public back in the early 1990s. Okay. And, you know, we were on a great sort of trajectory and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, but then I was like, hmm, I don't know. Actually, the final thing was my employees saying, why are we doing this? This just doesn't seem like a way to have a good time type thing.

It's great that you had the kind of culture where people felt comfortable challenging that as well.

Yes. Yes. We have, I think it's fair to say that we have a culture. We have a lot of very, you know, bright people who have a lot of opinions. And I like to believe that we have a company where, you know, what we're mostly interested in is finding people who can be productive in our environment. And they have very different personalities. Some of them, I think, I at least have the view that they pretty much couldn't work anywhere else.

Unemployable.

Yeah, they have very, you know, unusual personality traits and, you know, poor internal politics skills and so on.

What makes them successful at Wolfram?

That they do good work. And, you know, that's the, I think the thing that—

Part of good work is working with colleagues and the teamwork aspect.

Yes, but I think that the, you know, I think the role of management is given who these people are, you know, how do you fit them together with what we're trying to do in such a way that you, take advantage of their good traits.

So in the business thread, do you grow the employee base of the company along with the revenue or with sort of your scope of what you're trying to accomplish?

Good question. I mean, the— look, you know, we have been lucky enough, touch wood, that we've been profitable every year for 31 years now. That is achieved by a very simple process, which is spend less than you make. Thankfully, we've never had to have a big sort of, oh my gosh, the revenue is less than we expected, let's let people go. We've fortunately never had that. Our general principle is we'll pay, you know, we'll pay Champaign, Illinois rates for a certain set of people. Other people, it'll be based on where they are, but we're never going to go above that. So, you know, that means when people, if they wind up in San Francisco or New York, we'll often lose them because we're not gonna pay, you know, the rates that people expect and need in those places. On the other hand, if they go to some, you know, they find some obscure place somewhere and they're gonna be, you know, they're gonna be doing really well because—

I recommend Houston where I'm based. Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Not too obscure and very reasonably priced.

Yeah, we have quite a number of people in Texas. I think we may even have a couple of people in Houston. I have to look at the map.

I read some really interesting research hypothesis around why actually geographic mobility has gone down in the United States. You would think people would move more for economic opportunity, and it's actually gone down. And the conclusion of this was actually the blocker was two-income households. Where if one person were moving and sole breadwinner, you only have to find one job, but now you have to find two jobs in the new city, which is— —at least twice as hard. Maybe. But when one of the partners has no geographic attachments, you end up following. I just talked to a colleague who ended up in Copenhagen, and he's from, I forget where, someplace very far from Copenhagen. He said, "Yeah, my wife got a research job and now I work in Copenhagen for a few years." Yep, we find that all the time.

I mean, there are some obscure ones. Like there's one guy in our user interface team who's been at the company a long time, but he said, "Well, I'm going to go remote and I'm going to this island off the coast of Nicaragua." Nicaragua, because my wife is a primatologist and she's studying— what were they? Some kind of monkey-like creatures. Wow. On this island. And he was like, got a microwave link set up and there he was being perfectly productive. Impressive. To me, the focus is on, you know, can you be productive? Are you doing, you know, good stuff? And then, you know, where you live is kind of your independent business, so to speak. And, you know, there's a certain amount of complexity in scheduling things and meetings and so on when people are in all different time zones, but somehow that doesn't end up being that horrifying.

And is there some sort of predetermined taxonomy, or is it more of a freeform?

It's freeform. One of the things that is fun about my company is I think of us as kind of a microcosm of sort of what goes on, because we have people who, from the history PhDs to the, you know, who are actually doing history stuff for us, to the people who are doing, you know, whether it's graphic design or whether it's, some software engineering, server infrastructure thing. I mean, one of the things we've done, don't know how you've done this, but the company is pretty vertically integrated in the sense that we have, we don't outsource anything really. I mean, it's all in-house graphic design, legal, this, that, and the other. Partly because we've got enough stuff going on that there's not really a group that's going to have nothing to do. And it also really, really helps to have, I don't know, let's say designers who really know and understand our technology. And they've met customers of ours and they know the story. And plus, some of the people in our design group have become really good Wolfram Language programmers. Cool.

Actually, some of our best developers and architects started off as designers.

Yeah, I think it's a really good field to start in. I've been— it's funny because I track sort of where people come from and so on. And physics, for example, is good for the techies, is a really good export field, so to speak. I think graphic design is another one of these good export fields where you learn a certain discipline of thinking to do good graphic design. For a while, it seemed like UX was as we were pretty early in the kind of hiring official UX people, and it seemed like that might be sort of taking off more in that direction. But I think it's kind of a little bit merged with the graphic design. And I kind of feel like sometimes the designers, they always have something to show for what they've done in a sense, whereas UX is a little bit less clear. Somebody made this flow diagram or something, But that turned into something different from what was what finally came out.

The visual communication helps a ton, right, for getting people on the same page. It's one thing we're trying to do more is just, you know, draw something, even if you're not an artist or a designer or anything, so you really are on the same page, literally, with what you're trying to communicate.

Yes. You know, I don't know in your geo-distributed setup, but, you know, we never use video conferencing. I mean, really never, um, to the point where it's always screen sharing and voice. Just screen sharing and voice.

We, we do, we have, it's mostly video actually with us. And what was interesting or fascinating to me, kind of observing it from the outside, is before Zoom we had very few meetings, um, because I feel like the process is so frustrating to everyone, we just didn't do it. When Zoom kind of spread like wildfire in our organization, because there was just something to it that made it— it worked just a bit better. It got over that threshold, whatever that uncanny valley was that kept it from using us before, us using it before. And now I think we have too many meetings, perhaps. But video is a thing, and people think about their background and like try to have good lighting. Good audio is really important to me personally.

Yeah, good audio is very important to me. I'm always making, complaining about that.

I'll send you a link to the Sennheiser headset we like. It's USB and it's only about $34. It's become very standard.

I like that. I'm always— Yes, we've spent lots of effort on headsets for people and complaining about people not having the right audio setup and so on. And I am glad to know that I'm not the only person who's really careful.

Makes a huge difference. I'll use this opportunity to tell people to check out your blog post. Was it Seeking the Productive Life? Yeah. On your WordPress-powered blog. Indeed. Which is a very comprehensive view of kind of your entire personal operating system and productivity, which I found, well, It's impossible to summarize. And then two, we'll use this to point to that you have started live streaming many of your design meetings. Yes. And so they can probably Google Wolff Firm livestream or something like that. Yeah, right. And so these actual internal meetings are now broadcasting publicly, which is pretty unique and fascinating.

You know, this live streaming meetings thing, you know, I started doing it just a year and a half ago or something, because I thought these meetings are fascinating, you know, and it's like, it's a shame for these things to just go off into the ether and not some, you know, nobody, you know, so I thought, let's do this.

So it's mostly screens and then audio, so we're not seeing people.

Yeah, no people. You know, we'll get people who are both expert users of our product and often sort of world experts in the particular thing that we're talking about and They show up and they contribute useful things.

It's interesting, you have a lot about your company which is very much like open source, how open source works, but you don't, a lot of what you do is not open source, correct? That is correct. Yeah, there's a post I read about this while doing some research, 12 reasons, I think one of your colleagues wrote it, why Wolfram Language wasn't open source. Uh-huh. Has this kind of, and one of them was that things like language design aren't benefited from being more open is how I interpreted one of the words.

Yeah, probably, yeah. I mean, I think, look, my, you know, it's a complicated thing because, you know, my goal is to be able to produce this sort of intellectually valuable long-term thing. And the question is, given the world as it is, what's the best way to do that? And, you know, over, we've sort of built, you know, back 33 years ago, You know, when I started the company, it was like, okay, we're gonna sell prepackaged software. And I didn't know whether that industry would survive. I mean, back at that time—

It wasn't clear, right?

Piracy was huge and like— Yeah, piracy was a big problem. Another big problem was what was the price point gonna be for software? Because at that time there was, you know, Borland versus Microsoft. You know, Borland was at $100, Microsoft was at $500 for typical software. And it's like, who's gonna win in that space?

And how much is Mathematica?

Well, it's very complicated.

It ranges from— How much was that at the beginning?

It was $495. $495. But no, I think that the, you know, what we've done, it's a thing I thought about quite a bit. It's like, what is the right way to slice? You know, we're trying to do a long-term sort of intellectually valuable thing, saying, you know, having something, you know, maintaining that kind of coherence over a long period of time. I don't know what the best way to do it is. I think we found pretty good scheme. I think that a lot of, you know, Wolfram|Alpha has been free from the beginning to use. We recently introduced this thing, Free Wolfram|Engine for Developers, okay? People seem to like. And, you know, the deal is using it for development, it's free, you can do whatever you want with it. But, you know, if your work product is what it is producing, if it's actually in production, that's when you have to start paying something for it.

I think it's interesting you're adopting some of the elements of what helps open source become ubiquitous. And some of the open things that, by the way, open source didn't invent, they come from academia and many things before in terms of the collaboration. And I think it's very cool.

An important thing for us is the alignment of, you know, where we make money versus, you know, who is actually getting value, who our real customers are. And I think a lot of the, you know, some of the cracks that are happening in some of the areas of the technology industry, I think come from a lack of alignment between, you know, who are the actual customers? Well, the actual customers are advertisers. They're not the people. Who are, you know, whatever else. And I think we've been both, you know, lucky in that our customer base is wonderful people who we really like. The thing that tends to happen though is these projects that, you know, it starts open source and then there's some kind of, oh, it's a bait and switch somewhere.

Totally.

And it just drives me crazy. Oh, me too.

I mean, we just find— And that was the open source model for a long time. Like, we're gonna be open source, but then, hey, that open source license is really scary, don't use it. Buy our proprietary license or things like that. Or we're gonna put all the good new stuff in this proprietary version you have to license.

Right, right.

That's why I wanna talk more about open source at some point because if you look at, they're not always the best products. Wikipedia was not the best. WordPress, in some ways you could say is not the best. Chromium engine, I don't know if you saw, the engine behind Chrome was just actually adopted by Internet Explorer. So we're getting like a ubiquity and a standard, a de facto standardization. Of a codebase that becomes so useful as that. You could never force Microsoft and Google to say, we're going to do the same thing from like a third-party entity. But they've, through their own personal utility maximization, chosen to collaborate in this one area, which is really beautiful.

That's interesting. I mean, look, I think that there are these different things like let people see the source, right? I don't care if people see the source. That's not the issue. I mean, that's not the point. Although we did have an interesting experience. So, you know, one thing that happened because we're our products get used for lots of kinds of sort of fancy techie things. At the very beginning, we would have the following sort of thing that would happen. Some mathematician would come up at a trade show and say, "How can I trust your stuff? I can't see inside how everything works." And I'd say, "Well, how can we trust these papers you're writing?" It's like, how is it? It's kind of like their mechanism for validity is peer review. Our mechanism for validity is software quality assurance, which is a lot better. And more people, but then— I take it you have some opinions on peer review.

Oh, it's terrible.

I think peer review is— I always thought it was broken, even when I was in, you know, in the business, so to speak. I mean, my point of view was if I have an actually original paper or idea, it's going to be really tough to get it through, you know, a peer review process. 1986 was the last time I published a paper in an academic journal. I decided they were a bad idea and I wasn't going to do it.

Yeah. And now you have a blog, which is even better. Yes. It's funny.

No, no, no. The blog is, it's always, you know, some of the things I write on the blog are quite sort of academic. And I, it's really kind of interesting. I remember I was writing, I was writing a piece about Ada Lovelace actually, at the time of her 200th birthday celebration. And I happened to, at the last minute, I decided to go to England and go to some fancy celebration that was happening about it. And I was visiting some museum that has a bunch of her papers and so on, which I'd already, I've got copies of most of, but you know, the curator there was saying, you know, is used to academic stuff, was saying, "Oh, you know, when do you think you'll be publishing this?" Thinking the answer would be like, you know, a year from now or something. It's like, "Well, no, I'm, you know, I'm gonna publish it tomorrow morning," you know, "before I get on the plane." You know, 'cause you can write anything there. And I, you know, I write some stuff that's quite technical and, you know, and some stuff that's very, some stuff that's quite, you know, product-oriented.

I'm gonna loop back to that live streaming of meetings because I think it's great that you say the meetings are kind of like they were before you were live streamed. They're not too performative or anything. Yeah. How do you— I will add something else to that, which is, you know, you said you're CEO for life, more or less. Like, there's a lot of authority vested in you in this company, but it also seems simultaneously like people are comfortable with challenging yourself and presumably the other executives. Mm-hmm. So what do you feel like you've done to foster that culture where there is a comfort, sounds like at many levels, to challenge you very directly?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I suppose that I'm actually prepared to listen at some point. I mean, you know, some of these things get quite heated. I mean, it's hardly as if it's like, I don't necessarily, I mean, I kind of know myself well enough to know by the time I'm getting heated, I don't know what I'm talking about. Ha, the typical. And you know, I'll even say that because 'cause it's like, if I can explain myself, I'm just gonna explain myself. And it's always frustrating when people don't speak up and don't say.

Do you do anything to encourage people who you might feel are hanging back a little in the meeting? Yes.

I mean, I'm enough of a people person. Look, the fact is that having been running a company for 33 years, if I wasn't a people person, it would've driven me nuts, okay? Or them away.

Yes. And there wouldn't be a company. Yeah, right.

No, I mean, I like people. I find people interesting. You know, I sometimes I would say more cynically, I would say, you know, kind of, you know, after I've been managing people for, I don't know, 40-something years and, you know, you might have thought you've seen every pathology that could possibly happen. But no, there's always a new one. At this point, you know, I just find it kind of faintly amusing that, you know, oh my gosh, another bizarre, you know, thing I've never seen before. And, you know, I see a large part of my role being I've got all these talented people. We've got all of these projects we'd like to do. You know, how do we match talented people with projects we want to do?

Do people feel like they're moving around a lot, or is there some stability once they get onto a project?

There's as much stability as they want, basically. I mean, like the people who worked at the company for 20 years and never done management, even though I've, like, I can tell they have good personality to do management. Finally, we persuade them, you know, you should do this. And they say, oh, this is actually quite interesting.

Is that— Is that more in your head or do you do any sort of like testing or other sort of objective ways to determine people's strengths or potential outcomes? No, nothing.

I mean, other than the who knows what database of just factual information. I mean, it's kind of— No, it's really—

And has this all come from you or is this also the rest of your executives?

No, there's a bunch of people who have gotten, you know, experienced at doing this, I would say. And it's a, you know, when I look at org charts, okay, so I look at org charts lots of companies.

I love org charts.

Yeah, right. I mean, there was probably a decade ago, I was like, "Oh, our org chart is such a mess." For a long time, our org chart was sort of classified because there were people, it was like, you know, it was particularly one person who was with the company for a long time, has now sort of spun off doing sort of related things, but who was a sort of executive at the company was always like, we shouldn't really tell people what all the, you know, what all the weird reporting arrangements are. I wasn't a big believer in this, but it wasn't— but, you know, then look at our org chart and it's got, it seems kind of messy in many ways. And then I was, we were working, actually that was with Microsoft and somebody who's actually now even much more promoted executive at Microsoft said, to me, we were trying to understand how it worked, he said, "You know, well, we just buy this, you know, there's this company on the outside that's reverse engineered the Microsoft org chart. We just buy their stuff to understand what's going on." That's funny. Yes, right. So I get this thing and it's a big fold-out thing. It's fascinating because it's a huge mess. I mean, I don't know whether it's still a mess, but at that time it was a huge mess and you could see lots of historical stuff. And so after that, I felt so much better about our org chart. Although our org chart is now much cleaner, I would say. But it's— It's the map and the territory, right?

So our org chart is currently clean, but it's not comprehensive. So there are some things that aren't represented on the org chart, which, yes, sometimes a person is in two different places, and that might be represented, but then they have sort of an informal authority in an area that we don't try to demarcate necessarily. Right. We've had a lot of success actually removing everything compensation related from the management structure. Right. So there's only a few, only the centralized HR deals with all that and everything else, everyone else just focuses on getting the job done and peer feedback and everything.

Yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, so one thing at our company, which was sort of a long-time joke, was the claim there are more projects than people. Of the company. Yeah, we have the same thing. Wow. It's been kind of a sort of running joke. Can we actually inventory all the projects? But we've now, we've, you know, I got this team together to just go and do that. And it's been a good process, actually.

Are you familiar with Marie Kondo? Sure. Yeah, you know, her thing is like, you put all the stuff that's the same, like all the clothing in one pile. Sounds like you're doing that from an organizational point of view. You're like trying to get all the stuff together so you can kind of sort it out. Right.

I mean, I'd certainly like to apply sort of software design methodologies to the way that we're doing things. Look, the thing that we've done, I think has worked pretty well, is we have pretty good project management, you know, tradition and infrastructure. And, you know, part of that is, you know, I'll come up with some crazy idea. You know, actualizing that is, you know, it has to be sort of flowed through the organization. Now, you know, to be fair, I think I am probably, You know, one of my less bad traits is that, you know, I'll come up with these ideas and then people say, "How on earth are we gonna actually do that?" And I'll actually know. I mean, that is if they don't, you know, it'll be like, you know, 'cause I know enough about engineering and, you know, the whole technology stack that I'll be like, you know, "Look, we can, you know, something or other thing, you know, has to be authenticated here and do this and that and the other." And I can actually dive down to sort of, pretty high level of detail about how it should be done. I think, you know, part of my role is to explain why things aren't impossible. And I mean, this is, you know, I see increasingly, you know, with a lot of projects we've done, you know, the first response is, "That's just impossible." You know, I'll have some idea and it's some, and actually I'm happy when people say that. What I'm not happy is when people say, "Oh sure, we'll do it." when I plainly know there's no way they can do it. It's just too hard. And, you know, so then I'm trying to figure out, okay, so let's see whether we can figure out how to do it. I mean, I think the other thing that I find I do a lot of now is, you know, we have all these projects connecting, you know, be in some meeting and it's like somebody will be talking about, oh, I'm doing this, this, and this, and say, I'll say, oh, you know, you should talk to so-and-so because they're doing something similar, you know, and we were doing, I know we're doing stuff to do with external storage systems. And so, you know, it's like we have this group that's been doing database, you know, integration and a blockchain group, and they all have things to do with this external storage story. And, you know, that sort of becomes part of the role is kind of explaining to, just knowing enough about what's going on around the company.

And how in this, just, I'm curious from a software point of view, How does maintenance work in this kind of structure?

Well, okay. So it's a good question. I mean, we build— so first of all, a lot of things we do in the language are quite modular. I mean, you know, there's a function, it fits into the language, but it doesn't have, you know, a lot of nasty dangling interdependency. Gotcha. We've done, you know, we've gotten a lot of experience and good systems for doing software quality assurance. And I think we're pretty good at that, you know, pretty good at doing that. Some of the QA we have to do is kind of hair-raising, like, well, a lot of real-time things, which are always difficult. But even for Wolfram|Alpha, there's the, you know, natural language is a fundamentally non-modular thing. And so, you know, the classic example is, you know, if you type in 50 cents, you get the money. If you type in 50 cent, you get the wrapper as the default thing. You know, what happens when there's a, you know, another rapper who's called 30 Cent or something. You know, that's a very non-modular thing and you have to be able to deal with all those kinds of situations. But I think we've done pretty well at that. I think that this question of how do you go into a mode where, you know, something is being— I mean, what we tend to do is these big subsystems, they get swept through every some number of years. And then a lot of stuff gets, you know, a lot of things that, you know, we'll fix it.

And who decides to sweep through the system? Is it because a number of bugs accumulate or?

No, it's not as organized as that. I mean, that's a good question. I mean, you know, it ends up being the people who run those engineering teams. And they're very, you know, I have to say that I'm pleased with their level of responsibility in the sense that, you know, we're gonna rewrite a bunch of the UI stuff because, you know, it's not, because it's out of date.

On the converse side, sometimes, I believe it's easier to write code than read code. And so you get sometimes new engineers on an area that want to rewrite it partially to understand it. That's true. So how do you keep the over-refactoring?

Yeah, right. Well, I push back on that and say, why are we doing this? In fact, I was just doing that yesterday. A particular thing, it's like, we can do this wonderful thing. It's like, why are we doing this? This is not an important feature. This is just not the time to do it.

Are there programs around sort of learning and development or ongoing training?

The one constant is a lot of our development, most of our development is in our own language. So, you know, but at this point, most of the people we hire know it. I mean, you know, it's kind of— Before they get there. Yeah, it's kind of scary that the system is older than, you know, many of the employees. And they're like, oh yeah, I started learning this when I was 10 years old, type thing. So that's—

I started to get, have conversations like that in WordPress and it's very humbling.

Yes, yes, yes. Right. You know, for some areas, I mean, I let different managers have sort of different rules about how they set that up. And some people kind of insist the person should come to an actual office for some number of months when they start to kind of— As an onboarding. Yeah, right. And that seems to be, you know, it seems to work well in some cases. I mean, and I don't know whether it's really necessary. I don't know, you know, I haven't really, we haven't done a study.

And would the prospective employee know what kind of team they're joining? Like, are you hiring for specific teams or are they generally open roles and you try to place people based on their—

We're placing people, but by the time they're actually joining, it's pretty clear what they're going to be doing.

You'll say, "Hey, you'll need to come to Champaign for 2 months or something." Yeah, right.

I mean, I think that the, you know, sometimes we are hiring people where it's like, "When I finish my PhD, I'll come." And so it's some number of months and we'll say, "Well, we'll have something interesting for you to do by then." Yeah, right.

Yes. Let's say I'm just a coder in Houston. And I apply to Wolfram and I get my application. What's my process like on the way to being hired, assuming I am hired?

That's a good question, actually. I don't, I don't, it's, I have to say I kind of regret the fact that I don't get to see most of the frontline applications, only the, you know, some of the more senior ones. Gotcha. I mean, I used to look at a bunch of these things. Cover letters are to me a critical part of the story. And, you know, I haven't been reading them recently because I haven't—

That's why I don't like applicant tracking systems or form applications. I want to see how they emailed, what client they used, what fonts there are, how they formatted it. I want to see everything about the application as freeform as possible. Yeah, right.

Well, I mean, so, you know, what I find is that, you know, when I used to read these things a lot, the ones that were just, "Oh my God, I can't believe this is," you know, like, "I just graduated in computer science from this place and therefore I am qualified for whatever." It's like, no, you know, and then there are other ones which say—

There's some that are beautiful. What's that? There's some cover letters, though, that are such a good story, and you can get a sense for someone's clarity of writing.

Right. Well, also, it's, you know, some of the ones that are more fun are things like, you know, "I've been reporting bugs in your software for 6 or 7 years now. I want to come and help fix them," type thing. And that's, you know, that's kind of cool.

And what are the characteristics that you feel particularly make someone successful at Wolfram Research?

Gosh. A certain, you know, just Independence of mind that they can think about, that they keep the thinking apparatus engaged at all times. I would say, oh yeah, a very important one. No bullshit. I mean, that's a, you know, how do you detect that though? It's really easy, I think. I mean, it's like you just listen in the interview, you know, how people will say, oh yes, I know all about that, versus, well, I know a tiny bit.

And, you know, some people can be more kind of humble in there. Yeah, right. So interviews are very high pressure. Something we do a lot of our interviewing on text, on the chat. Oh, that's interesting. And that's partially because we found that as a class of people for whom, like, a real-time conversation like this can be incredibly intimidating. The sort of asymmetry as well. Yeah, right. Like, they're hoping for a new job, and they just don't perform well in that situation. That looks like almost nothing else we do in most people's daily work, this sort of interview. It's very artificial. But the text chat looks a lot like what an average developer might do most of the day. And so it can allow people that kind of space to— it's like a take-home test a little bit. Like, they can take 5 minutes to respond to something. They can Google something. They can, like, they get really freaked out by the question, they can take a walk around the table.

I have to say, in all the interviewing that I do, people sometimes come into it kind of tense, but I don't think, you know, I think if you're doing interviewing right, the people aren't that tense. I mean, they're just—

It's probably an inherent power dynamic that's impossible for you in particular to remove. Maybe. Well, text removes that even more.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that at some level, you know, if the people are sufficiently kind of intimidated, that's probably not a great indicator because the fact is, you know, in our company, there are a bunch of strong opinions and people will, you know, express themselves. And, you know, if somebody is like, "Oh no, I can't deal with that," that's, you know, that probably isn't a great indicator. And I have to say, I think, I mean, it's a different thing with more senior folk and I like business people and things like that. That is, that's a horrifying world of interviewing for me at least. I mean, I've, because people who are, you know, who have used to a very kind of polished presentation, It's just so difficult to find out, you know, who's the actual person here.

And how do you balance kind of that pattern matching, not leading the confirmation bias, or where the company might need to evolve, which might be different from where it has been in the past?

Look, I'm a guy who likes new stuff, so that helps me be more, you know, change-oriented than— I, you know, I have to say that by the time it's working smoothly, I'm not the person to be, you know, to be dealing with that. I mean, it's like I have for myself in my sort of personal life, I have endless systems that I've sort of developed and they work. And, you know, but I'm also— sometimes they stop working and then I, I'm like, oh, this didn't work anymore, I'm going to change it. For example, it could be the case that the things that I like and that resonate with me and that are the directions that I think of going are just not the ones the world happens to be keen on. You know, recently I was like, a couple of years ago, I was like, "Let's look at VR and AR." And it's like, well, I have a bunch of long-term people at the company and they said, "You told us that in the early 1990s." That's funny. And you know, "What a bust that was at that time. You know, you're going to have to do better this time to convince us." And I have to say I couldn't, you know, I couldn't really convince them that, 'cause I couldn't, you know, Whereas, you know, but I'm always, or, you know, IoT is another area where we've done a bunch of stuff, a bunch of interesting things, but it hasn't, you know, it hasn't quite taken off the way that I think some people thought it would. You know, this question of, you know, when you're the CEO, when do you fire yourself type thing? And, you know, do you change or do you, is the thing going in a direction that you just don't want to change?

And your name's in the company. So how does that happen? Is it just research at that point?

Yeah, yeah, right, right. No, that's an interesting issue. I mean, I was thinking—

We joke automatic would be just auto-ick.

Yeah, yeah, right, right. No, I've been thinking of this, that I was thinking at one time of having a club of people who'd named their companies after themselves. And you know, you'd be a partial member, right?

Thank you. Well, we luckily have, I think, 17 other Matts at the company, so it could keep going without me.

Okay, okay. Okay, but I think—

Yeah, I do joke the egotistical founder, you know, we always slip our name in. I want to ask one thing as we start— two things as we wrap up. You have a lot of trust, it sounds like, which allows this very candid communication, candor between folks. Do you have something like the meetups that we're doing here? Like—

Yeah, we have a— well, we have— it's not quite as formal. We have once a year, we have a technology conference. Users come, they have a good time, they get to meet a bunch of our employees. The employees come, they have a good time, they get to meet a bunch of our users.

Cool. Well, after all this time, would you consider management or running a company computationally reducible?

Ha, ha, ha, ha. That is a good question. You know, this is one of the embarrassing things about people who like to think they've invented paradigms for thinking about stuff. The question is, can you live your own paradigm? And this is, you know, and like, you know, it's often the case in these things where I can see something developing at the company, you know, I've been doing this a long time, so it's kind of like, I kind of know how this story ends. From the point of view of science and technology, there are like things we've invented, I've invented, you know, I could be very worried, you know, is the world ever going to pay attention to this? Is the world ever going to care? Is this going to be in— I'm, maybe I'm just too arrogant, but I mean, the fact is I just know it's going to go that way. This thing about computational language and the importance of having a sort of rich language which can express computational thoughts, this is inexorable. This is going to be, you know, this will be really important. And, you know, I'm just, I'm, you know, I don't know how long it will quite take the world to realize how important that is.

It's not if, it's when. Yes. Yes. Well, that's, I think, a good place to wrap up. Stephen, thank you so much. This has been an endlessly fascinating discussion. I'm looking forward to continuing over dinner. And this has been Distributed with Matt Mullenweg, and we'll see you next time. That was Stephen Wolfram. You can find him on Twitter @Stephen_Wolfram. That's Stephen with a P-H, underscore Wolfram, W-O-L-F-R-A-M. He also has an awesome blog if you just Google his name and blog. It's powered by WordPress, of course, and it's really good. Stephen says that he set out to build a company that would, quote, allow him to build the tools to do what he wanted to do. By that, he means working on projects he calls intellectually valuable. It's easy for CEOs to come up with lofty mission statements, but very few actually follow through. I'm inspired by Stephen's steadfast commitment to intellectually valuable work and the organizational freedom that has allowed him to pursue it across 3 decades and hopefully for many more to come. Next time on the Distributed Podcast, we'll be talking to Tasso Duvall, the CEO of Toptal, a freelancer network where employees can access a highly curated pool of remote contractors. Toptal itself is fully distributed, and they're trying to convince blue-chip companies to integrate remote talent onto their teams. So I'm excited to talk about how this could help Usher in a distributed future. Thank you for joining us and see you next time.