Elan Feingold CTO of Plex TV

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Elan Feingold, the CTO and co-founder of Plex TV, and we discuss delegating responsibilities to the team while remaining involved, how hiring a product manager is like sending your kid off to school, and cultivating an environment where opportunities can grow. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So where are you at?

(Elan Feingold at 00:00:41) I am on the North Shore of Maui.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) Oh, that's fancy, man. That sounds awesome.

(Elan Feingold at 00:00:48) Yeah. Well, I can't complain. We moved here ten years ago and haven't really looked back. I quite like a lot of the aspects of it. But it's kind of funny because I think people think of Maui and they think of ritzy hotels and stuff, and that's totally on the other side of the island. And where I am right now is super rural and just a lot of people raising families and hanging out and growing bananas in their backyard. So it's pretty mellow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) Nice. I live in a town like that. I live in Sarasota, Florida. And so Siesta Key is one of the top two or three beaches in the world, and so it's very touristy and ritzy down there. But, you know, you go fifteen minutes east, and it's just like normal life.

(Elan Feingold at 00:01:35) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) Which I prefer. So what what prompted the move down there?

(Elan Feingold at 00:01:41) To be honest, it was the only place that my girlfriend at the time, now wife, could agree on, which sounds kind of crazy. But she's from the Midwest. We met in the Midwest, and she would have moved back there. I didn't want to move back to Minnesota because it's incredibly cold and incredibly hot in the winter with giant mosquitoes the size of small birds. And I wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest or Vancouver, and she thought that was too rainy, so we were kind of at a bit of an impasse. I wanted to move back to the East Coast. She thought East Coast people are stuffy. I strongly disagree. So then we thought, well, we like Kauai. Why don't we just try it out there? So we decided to try it for a year. And like I said, that was about ten years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) So what were you working on professionally at the time?

(Elan Feingold at 00:02:24) So at the time, I came of age in the job world kind of right around not too long before the big tech crash of 2001, 2002. So I was working in the Midwest in a telecom startup and then did some other VoIP type stuff. And then eventually, you know, every single startup that I was at failed pretty much. And one of the companies that failed, a Belgian Alcatel, ended up purchasing the assets, so I got brought on as kind of an hourly contractor for transferring technology transfer. And so that gave me the flexibility to move. So I moved first to California and then from there to Maui. But in a sense, the move to Maui was kind of a huge career shift. At least, that's what I thought it was because, you know, I was in LA doing other startup stuff. And the move to Maui was like, okay, it's North Shore. There's no one on there. On that island, there's no jobs. There's nothing. I've got this remote job that's going to help me get there. But ten years ago, remote jobs were few and far between, and it was kind of like an end of career kind of a thing. So it was basically a "I kind of want to get out of the rat race and sit back a little bit and take it easy, and I'll do this remote contracting thing for as long as it goes on and then figure out what comes next."

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:50) You're like, "I'm going to go hang out on an island, do remote contracting, and just chill?"

(Elan Feingold at 00:03:55) Kind of. Yeah. I mean, it was a little bit less thought into it. It was kind of like, well, you know, this contracting gig will go on for a while. And then after that, presumably, I'll be able to find something. But it was pretty seat of the pants. And like I said, you know, picture what the environment was like ten years ago. There was no such thing as a remote company. There were very few people who had remote jobs, and it was definitely a kind of a career-limiting option, if you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:21) Yeah. And then the whole revolution happened. DHH, David Heinemeier Hansson, he put out the book Remote, and everybody's like, "Remote. Woo hoo."

(Elan Feingold at 00:04:28) Remote. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:31) So so then you're jumping up and down remote. You're doing this sort of contract work, like an acquihire almost situation. Right? And then you're just like, "You know what TVs need? TVs need apps."

(Elan Feingold at 00:04:45) I wish. Yeah. I know. It was more like—I mean, honestly, as I'm well aware that you know, it's a scratching the itch kind of a thing. So before I moved to Maui, I was running the Xbox Media Center with a hacked Xbox. And that was right on the cusp of that year, 2007 was right on the cusp of a lot of things. The first iPhone came out and, but it was on the cusp of HD TV. And so the Xbox didn't have enough power to decode reliably, you know, just barely 720p, definitely not 1080p content. So I was like, oh, well, there's this Mac mini. I just switched to Mac again. It was—Macs were even Intel a couple years before that, like 2005 or something. So I switched over to Mac and I was like, wow, Mac mini, man. That would make an awesome media center underneath my TV. And they seem to be porting the Xbox Media Center to Linux. That's kind of similar to macOS. Right? And so it was literally like the Christmas after we moved here. My wife was visiting her family. I was really bored. What does a tech guy do when he's bored? Download something and code. So I just kind of downloaded it and was like, yeah, well, let's see how hard it is to port.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) Nice. You're just geeking out, you know?

(Elan Feingold at 00:06:08) Pretty much. So right after that happened—well, I spent a few days on it, posted some results to the forum. People are like, "Oh, cool." Because I guess, you know, it's kind of like the hundredth monkey thing. Everyone had had a similar idea. Like, wouldn't the Mac Mini make an awesome media center box? And a couple of people reached out to me from the Bay Area and basically are like, "Well, you know, we're looking to do this too. We think it's cool. And how'd you like to partner up? And if this goes anywhere as a business, let's be partners on this." And, you know, at the time, it was—I mean, it's still to this day, I can sort of trace—I can remember the evening that I was sitting around super bored and decided to download it. And I think one of my takeaways ten years later is, and I know this is such a trite expression or whatever, but, you know, the smallest decisions can have the biggest impacts because it's—you know, and and the whole sort of scratching the itch sort of thing. Those are a few kind of takeaways: scratch itches and just realize that there's a lot of interesting opportunities and be open to them. Because this was a little bit weird. Right? Like, two guys in the Bay Area, I don't know you. I never met you. And, you know, it ended up working out great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:21) Yeah. Well, if you want great things to happen, it's a prerequisite to be open to opportunity.

(Elan Feingold at 00:07:27) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) And you can always trace it back too. As you're speaking, I'm sitting here thinking of those one moments, like that call that I usually would reject, but I decided, "I'll answer it today." You know? And and then that changes the whole life in hindsight. Right? So it's all—I always find that absolutely fascinating.

(Elan Feingold at 00:07:51) It's very rarely a long-planned thing. Right? It's much more often just a chance encounter or a chance—yeah, totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:59) It's beautiful because it's really like you can't—in the act of making the decision, it's meaningless or it's very small. But then in hindsight, it's like everything hinged on that one item.

(Elan Feingold at 00:08:13) Exactly. Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) I guess there's the case to stay positive though. Right?

(Elan Feingold at 00:08:19) Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I—yeah. And I—I mean, I think it's hard because it's hard to get an actual takeaway from that because it is—at least these things that we're talking about are so random and such sort of chance things, you can't really try for them. Right? You're not like, "Oh, I'm going to try a lot of chance things and talk to a lot of random people." You can't necessarily create them. But like you're saying, you can stay open to the opportunities and, you know, do good work and and be a good person, but you can't really make these things happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) Right. I found that I can't go intentionally make the things happen. I don't have much control over that. But what I do have control over is cultivating an environment where opportunities can grow. Right? I can't make it grow, but I can create an environment where they can grow. And then it's just more like ensuring my environment's created and then paying attention for and being open to the opportunities—looking for what's growing, you know?

(Elan Feingold at 00:09:22) Yeah. No. That's a great—I'm sure there's a garden metaphor in there somewhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) I'm sure there is.

(Elan Feingold at 00:09:26) Water your soil and water your ground and something will grow. It's quite terrible because out here, it'd be a bunch of weeds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) Oh, no. What do you guys have for yards? Do you guys have grass? Is it just all beach sand?

(Elan Feingold at 00:09:36) I wish. No. Yeah. No. It's grass. I mean, it's grass, and then there's areas that I've given over to fruit trees and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:44) Oh, what type of fruit you got on your property?

(Elan Feingold at 00:09:47) I am sort of most recently obsessed with making cocktails. And so I kind of—you've heard of the farm-to-table program, and we run a farm-to-bar thing out here where we joke about it. So basically, everything we plant is like, okay, got to have a couple of orange trees for the old fashioned, have a couple of Tahitian lime trees for the margaritas, got to have a couple of lemon trees for the whiskey sours. So we have a lot of citrus basically, like grapefruit, pomelo, blood orange, you know, stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) Yeah. Yeah. We have a lot of citrus in our area too. We're the headquarters of Tropicana, the orange juice company.

(Elan Feingold at 00:10:19) Oh, wow. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:21) Yeah. They're—you know, what's interesting is driving on the interstate, you can actually smell this very odd smell. And it's burned oranges because what they do is they incinerate the orange peels.

(Elan Feingold at 00:10:35) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:36) Yeah. So at a certain time of day, certain days of the week, when you're on the interstate, you can smell it, and it's burnt oranges.

(Elan Feingold at 00:10:44) I mean, that almost sounds nice, like a new Calvin Klein perfume or something, but maybe it doesn't smell that good or maybe it does. Burnt citrus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:52) It's like you can tell it used to be something that smelled good. You can tell it had genuine origins, but in a sense, it's taken the wrong path in life.

(Elan Feingold at 00:11:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:06) So how do you make—how did you make money off of, like, how did you progress this from, "Hey. What's up, Bay Area friends? We've got this sweet prototype. We're all vibing on the same idea. Now let's put it out into the world and make money." How did that go?

(Elan Feingold at 00:11:22) Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, for the first few years—I wish I had a more exact time frame—it was definitely still a nights and weekends thing. So I kept my contracting gig and then, you know, kind of on the side, worked on this. And I think one of the big lessons we learned early was kind of the power of the community because we had, you know, we found people that really wanted to help out and be involved. And we'd set up some forum software early, and we were early users of the 37signals chat, the pre-Slack Campfire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:04) Nice.

(Elan Feingold at 00:12:04) Yeah. So we had Campfire going. And so, you know, early on, we were just building this in our spare time and collecting, you know, kind of—I think the right metaphor is kind of concentric circles, you know. There were people that were super close to the product, or to the project, and then there were sort of the outer ring of people that we eventually officially became called Plex Ninjas, where they're kind of volunteers. They're super passionate about Plex, and we bring them in. And they're kind of under NDAs, so they get access to all our internal stuff, and they test stuff for us and give feedback. So there's kind of like that ring of really trusted good users. And then, of course, there's the local community and Reddit forums and then our silent user base beyond that. But so early on, you know, we were just kind of—we made a big change in the architecture of the system to be from being kind of a monolithic app to being a client-server app. So out of that sprung the phoenix of the Plex Media Server, which was kind of our—well, not kind of, which was our first piece of, you know, sort of bonafide intellectual property because the client and XBMC and the first version of Plex were all totally open source. So the media server was our first kind of IP. And then we, you know, grew that and eventually we took an angel round, the small angel round at one point. And then after that, we essentially—when that was dwindling, we went for a premium model where we essentially have this Plex Pass, which is a premium version of Plex, basically. So you can subscribe or get a lifetime Plex Pass and that gives you access to premium features. Like, for example, you can sync content to your phone from the media server. And so at that point, basically, and right after we launched the Plex Pass, we were lucky enough because we were running super scrappy to be profitable. And since then, we've essentially always run our business like that, not ahead of our headlights and, you know, staying as fundamentally just a solid business. And we've been super fortunate that there's enough, you know, premium users who are willing to pay for the premium features that that's been good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) You mean to tell me it's not fun to sell large chunks of your company for cash? First, large chunks of your company away to other people that have control? That's not a fun thing to do?

(Elan Feingold at 00:14:41) That's, you know, from what I understand, that's not fun. Yeah. We have done it, but yeah. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:47) Giving up control is always a good thing, though. Right? That's what we want.

(Elan Feingold at 00:14:53) Well, yeah. So, I mean, that might segue into talking about, you know, CTO roles and stuff, because I think there's a lot of levels at which you can give up control and learn to let go a little bit. But, yeah, definitely, selling a big chunk of your company away to VCs and and letting them get control is definitely a path we didn't want to take.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why I really gravitated towards, you know, your story, your company is because I really liked how you grow from your cash flow, and you do the right things, and you say the right things, and your team looks really strong too. I was looking through all the different team members. When I was reaching out to you, I was like, oh, they've got some really bright people doing some really right things. Now it's just a matter of time before they own the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:43) So what type of—what type of CTO, you said let go, right, as CTO? Are there some times—well, not are there. We know there are. Maybe you want to talk about some times as the company grew that you had to create processes, learn things, and then let them go to other people so that you could continue to be the CTO.

(Elan Feingold at 00:16:05) Yeah. Sure. And to go back to one of your earlier points, I really appreciate you saying nice words about our team because I think that that's something that we also focused on incredibly early, and we kind of had to by necessity of the fact that, you know, we weren't rolling in the cash and we couldn't—it wasn't like we got $100 million and we're supposed to grow the company to a thousand people tomorrow. Like, we hired very slowly, you know, to sort of make sure that we're hiring the right people and, you know, match our growth. And so we were very, very careful about the people that we brought on.

(Elan Feingold at 00:16:34) And early on, we instituted a thing, and this was—essentially, we did it for reasons, but it ended up being beneficial. It ended up being a super win-win, which is we have sort of a temporary trial period for people. And I know now, I know, you know, I don't have to tell you, like, the interview process is kind of a gnarly one. I think it's kind of evolved over the decades. Like, there was back, you know, twenty, thirty years ago, there was the, like, what would you say your biggest weakness is? Right? Like, that was your typical job interview.

(Elan Feingold at 00:17:11) Uh, well, I'm too much of a perfectionist. Like, I keep trying to do this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:14) Of course. Yeah.

(Elan Feingold at 00:17:15) You know? And then I think Microsoft kind of changed that. Right? And so Microsoft, I think—I'm probably wrong, but I think was one of the first, at least, to kind of do the, oh, well, you want to code? Like, here's a whiteboard.

(Elan Feingold at 00:17:29) Go reverse a linked list or go do a binary search or, you know, go write some code basically, and, you know, or like brain riddles. Um, the, you know, they pioneered sort of that kind of interview. And in my first run, kind of up until Plex, that was the kind of interview that I was used to delivering when hiring people. And it didn't work that great, that well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:56) No. It doesn't. Yeah. It really doesn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:01) I found that when you're hiring someone, it's really good to center the questions in the interview around the functions that they would be executing and their capability to do so. Their capability to perform the job as well as, you know, who they are, like how they make decisions as people. And yeah, I always thought it was strange when I would see the movies and they would ask those strange questions about what are your biggest weaknesses, you know?

(Elan Feingold at 00:18:32) Like, or, you know, the great one is, like, I've heard some crazy ones over the years, you know, like, estimate how many gumballs are in this thing, you know? Because they essentially want to see how you work through problems and stuff. But, I mean, to your point, like, yeah, you want to see how people are going to execute the responsibilities that you're going to give to them. And in my opinion, there's no better way to do that than to actually watch them execute some things.

(Elan Feingold at 00:18:53) And for us, it ended up being great too because, I mean, there were some people that were, like, passionate about Plex, wanted to work ten hours a week for Plex, but didn't, you know, didn't necessarily want to make the leap from a full-time job, were slightly nervous about this whole remote company concept, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, we'd tell people, like, well, we kind of like to start off ten hours a week, fifteen hours a week. And they'd be like, oh, wow. Awesome. Great.

(Elan Feingold at 00:19:17) Okay. So when's the interview? I'm like, well, this was the interview. So when do you want to start? And generally, what we looked for and what we ended up kind of codifying later in our, you know, sort of like book of Plex is that the people we were looking for were, first and foremost, kind and thoughtful people and humble people.

(Elan Feingold at 00:19:38) And so, you know, you notice I didn't say smart geniuses anywhere there. Those, you know, being humble and being kind were—especially in a remote environment, especially when, you know, people aren't communicating face to face—like, those were the prime things that we looked for. And, yes, of course, you had to be smart and be able to, you know, execute your job well. But first and foremost, we were looking for just, you know, good people with a capital G.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:06) Well, it makes your job easier, managing your internal team, the mass of your team. Because if you have a bunch of cool people, right, I'll just abbreviate it to that—really cool, humble, chill people that can execute—your time is spent less on dealing with the one diva that's offending everyone else and everyone complaining. That's, like, a whole—that's a whole chunk of your schedule where you're not doing the things that you want to be doing. Right?

(Elan Feingold at 00:20:34) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) And so how much are you remote? How much of your entire company is remote?

(Elan Feingold at 00:20:39) We are, I mean, almost 100%. We have an office in Los Gatos, California. And there's probably, I mean, I want to say 10 people that work out of there, roughly, more or less. We got a couple of the execs, like, live right near there, so they go in at least a few times a week. And then we have a big hardware test lab upstairs.

(Elan Feingold at 00:21:02) So, like, a lot of those, sort of, testers and stuff like that work there. But otherwise, you know, I think we're 80—I always lose track of the exact number. But, you know, so of those 80 people, we have a few execs, some testers, some QA in the actual physical headquarters. And, as you know, like, the key to having a remote company or one of the keys to having a remote company is basically doing things, you know, kind of all or nothing.

(Elan Feingold at 00:21:29) You can't be in a situation where, you know, people are like, well, when did you decide that? Well, we chatted around the water cooler. Like, okay. Well, I wasn't there and it wasn't in Slack. So, I mean, you'll go in headquarters and you'll see people, like, talking to each other on Slack just because it's better to, you know, have a record and have more visibility and let everyone else see.

(Elan Feingold at 00:21:48) But we're, I think, in 20 countries or something crazy like that. So we're definitely geographically spread wide. We're not just, like, remote in the US.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Yeah. That's one of the benefits of the team communication is when you can have that conversation and everyone else can see it, you cut down on the conversation around conversation that was had. Right?

(Elan Feingold at 00:22:08) Right. Meta conversation. Yeah, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:10) Oh, I like that. We'll call it that. Yeah. So in your role at Plex, right, when I ask you this question, you don't have to find the most difficult one. You can just whatever one pops into your head. Right? So what is the most difficult decision that you've had to make in your CTO role?

(Elan Feingold at 00:22:31) Yeah. That's a tough one. I'm going to—I mean, I think essentially, this goes back to one of your earlier questions around letting go and stuff like that. Because I think, and I know you've done this too where you've, you know, grown a company kind of from zero up. And I think that one of the, sort of, one of the challenges, in my opinion, that faces people in the CTO role is that the company gets to be big enough and the engineering team gets to be large enough that you essentially have to decide what you really want to do with your life and how you want to do the role.

(Elan Feingold at 00:23:10) Because I think there's various flavors of CTO and I'm by no means, like, experienced. It's not like I've been CTO at a thousand different companies. This is just my experience at Plex. But there are definitely two facets to running engineering. Right? There's the technical side and there's kind of the people management, organization, trains on time kind of side. And I think that when the company is small, if you've just got 10 engineers, it's perfectly possible for one person to do both, assuming they have, you know, decent skill sets or decent skill set to do that. But once the company grows to a certain point, I think that it's very challenging for a single individual to handle both the technical, architectural, strategy type questions and handle the person management, team growth, organization, scheduling, all that kind of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:04) That's the one. Typically, I find the most often that's the hardest to do is, like, when you get that product manager and you kind of, you know, it's like sending your kid off to school or something.

(Elan Feingold at 00:24:17) Well, and I mean, in this case, it was hiring a VP of engineering to handle the other half, basically. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) Because what you're doing, whatever the role is called at whatever stage, essentially, what you're doing is you're taking that product chunk or that engineering chunk of responsibility that you've had since day one, and you're letting someone else take care of that.

(Elan Feingold at 00:24:38) Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I think, I mean, I think, in the Medium stories that I've read, it's kind of a—it seems to be a fairly common sort of point for CTOs at companies that are growing from small to larger.

(Elan Feingold at 00:24:53) And there seem to be, you know, those three choices essentially. One is, no. No. No. I'll keep doing everything because I like doing everything and I'm good at both, and that's how I like doing my time.

(Elan Feingold at 00:25:03) The second is, I consider myself primarily a technical person. I'm good at building stuff. I'm good at architecture. I'm good at technology. Or you say, you know what? Like, the technology doesn't interest me so much. I'm going to do the—I'm going to grow this team. I'm going to manage the people and their careers and their growth and all that kind of stuff. And that's the point where you go, well, I actually want to keep being CTO. I want to bring in a VP of engineering, or I want to be the VP of engineering and bring in someone else to be the CTO.

(Elan Feingold at 00:25:31) Or at least that's kind of how I've come to understand it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Yeah. So I—yeah. No, I agree. The thing is you get to—you can shift your responsibilities and still have your life contain the information. So you can get that VP of engineering and still geek out with that VP of engineering about what's happening, you know, from time to time, like, as needed, as you feel the need to bring that up while having your primary focus be on these other, you know, more CTO responsibilities. Right?

(Elan Feingold at 00:26:02) Yeah. And I think, I think in a, you know, I mean, obviously, I think the VP of engineering and the CTO both need to have experience building stuff because they just have to have a good, you know, good technical understanding. But I think—and I mean, you were asking me about the most challenging decision, and I think that was probably at least one of the top few just because of the potential for, you know, how it could all go wrong. Like, let's say we brought in a VP of engineering who, you know, had super strong technical and architectural opinions and then, you know, you kind of butt heads with them about that. That was, you know, a possibility. Or I maintain a lot of strong opinions about the teams and stuff like that and butt heads with them about that.

(Elan Feingold at 00:26:45) So in my opinion, for another super lame metaphor, like, the CTO and the VP of engineering should fit together, like, you know, kind of puzzle pieces. Right? Like, complementing each other, caring about things that the other people might not care that much about, being really good at things that the other people are maybe less interested in, in my opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) For sure. So you're technically a cofounder. Correct?

(Elan Feingold at 00:27:08) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:09) And then how many other cofounders do you have?

(Elan Feingold at 00:27:13) So there's one active cofounder. One of the, like, of the original three, one—Scott is the—he runs product and he's still active. And Casey, one of the original three, he's no longer active inside the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:29) So when you have these relationships with the cofounder, so we talk about everything here because this is like a CTO safe space. So the relationships, what have you—what's your experience? I just kind of want you to talk for a minute about, you know, you were writing this code and you were doing this contract work and then random people called you up and were like, hey, let's do this. And then it turned into what ended up being, you know, like a decade of your life in this awesome large company, Plex. Right? But what are some of the key highlight, like, if it's a highlight reel, right, of the relationship aspect as you guys grew, as you, Scott, and Casey grew?

(Elan Feingold at 00:28:11) Yeah. And honestly, like, it's—I mean, Scott and I will be friends forever, and we've worked really closely together. And absolutely, you know, trust is such an important aspect, especially early on in a company. With all the divvying up equity and taking investments and doing all this stuff, there's just so many opportunities for people to get screwed. And so having someone trustworthy is incredibly important.

(Elan Feingold at 00:28:43) Where I find the relationship is even more special than usual is, he's a product guy. I'm the technical guy, but, you know, I care a lot about product too and user experience and stuff like that. And he has a ton of technical ideas. And we joke because there have been so many times in the past where, you know, he's called me up late at night and he's been like, oh, I have this crazy idea. Okay.

(Elan Feingold at 00:29:08) So, like, what if we did x, y, and z and we built it like this? And I'm like, dude, go to sleep. That is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Like, I'll call you in the morning. And then I wake up in the morning, I think about it, and I'm like, that actually might work.

(Elan Feingold at 00:29:20) So it—he just has this, like, crazy out-of-the-box thinking that is, like, such a great complement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:31) Like, he's been doing too much farm to bar.

(Elan Feingold at 00:29:36) Yeah. You might think. No. But it's just—it's been awesome. And then that's been—it's actually one of the things that, in the last year, we've been super busy and we haven't had a chance to chat that much.

(Elan Feingold at 00:29:49) We used to chat every day. Like, my wife would say, oh, you chat with him more than you chat with me. And I was like, that's probably true. But, yeah, just that back and forth, like, having the, sort of—and also having a shared experience of coming through hard, lean times. Like, we had to figure out how to do a lot with a little.

(Elan Feingold at 00:30:09) And so we were constantly trying to optimize and, like, you know, figure out how we can, you know, commonalities and economies of scale and refactoring and just, you know, figuring out how to basically get the most out of not a large team. And so I think that's sort of philosophy and coming from those really hard times, those sort of garage days really helped us have the right perspective as we continue to grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:39) It's so interesting. I love how it's true that the company takes on the personality of the owners. Right? Because it's so true.

(Elan Feingold at 00:30:47) Definitely. And I think the team also does, and which is why I think, like, hiring early for those kind, humble, great people ends up, you know, cascading down and ends up being the feel of the entire company and the culture of the entire company. So I think that's super important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:08) You guys are smart. You're doing it right. What's the next step? What's the next step for your company? What are you doing? What's big? What's exciting?

(Elan Feingold at 00:31:15) Something like that. Wasn't that your?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) Well, of course. I know, but I want execution. Like, I want to know what you're doing to dominate the world.

(Elan Feingold at 00:31:21) I mean, you know, we're doing a lot of different things. We're working, as you might expect, you know, to try to make the software more accessible to people. Our software has long sort of been targeted at the people who collect media and like to curate it. You know, if you have a music collection at home or a bunch of photos at home you want to organize, stuff like that. But we're sort of moving beyond that.

(Elan Feingold at 00:31:47) We added a news feature so that you can get news feeds inside Plex, and we're going to be adding podcasts also. Yay. So, yeah, we just want Plex to be the place you go to to consume media. So whether it's your own media or whether you want to catch up on a quick news briefing or whether you want to follow a podcast, we have, like, a really great ecosystem. Our clients are available across just about every single screen.

(Elan Feingold at 00:32:15) I think we have—I mean, clearly, Netflix is everywhere, but we're almost everywhere. So, yeah, we're just hoping to keep growing our user base and making our product even more awesome for the people who both curate media and the people who are coming to our platform and maybe don't have a lot of their own media, but, you know, want a great place to go find online content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) Now, do you let people publish onto your platform?

(Elan Feingold at 00:32:44) So the first instance of that will essentially be—I mean, well, with news, we have agreements with people who, you know, we assimilate their news content. But with podcasts, that'll essentially be the first instance of that. I mean, even if it's a little bit indirect, but that'll be a way. And what we're doing is, you know, since our platform is so rich visually, we're essentially trying to allow people who have podcasts such as yourself to sort of provide extra content and extra media and make it look, you know, even better inside Plex. So, yeah, we definitely want to make it the best place to go for podcasts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) So we'd be able to, like, put our podcast feed in and then customize, like, the banner image and maybe add the video.

(Elan Feingold at 00:33:38) Exactly. Like, I mean, if you look at Plex right now, you know, for, like, a movie or TV show, we have, like, theme music. You know, we have, like, banners and background art and beautiful posters and extras, behind the scenes, you know, kind of all things like that. So you can imagine, you know, a very rich, structured kind of podcast experience. And we're also—we have, you know, like, ten years of working with episodic content like TV shows.

(Elan Feingold at 00:34:06) So we have all sorts of cool features around—we have this on deck thing. So if you subscribe to—you know, if you're watching TV shows, in this case, we'll tell you when the next episode comes out or, you know, if a new season comes out, we'll say, oh, the new, you know, first episode is up for this new season. So it'll be a great experience for podcasts too because, again, you know, many podcasts are episodic. So, yeah, I'm excited. I'm a big podcast listener.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) So have you done anything with—I was just trying—I'm just brainstorming, right?

(Elan Feingold at 00:34:38) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) So as the voice to text becomes more advanced, right, because it will eventually work great, right, conversion. And as more tools come up that can sift through and detect themes in video and tag video and things like that, you could actually create more personalized ways of delivering content that you may be interested in.

(Elan Feingold at 00:35:06) Absolutely. And we've definitely, you know, looked into and will continue to look into those kind of things. I think there's great opportunities, and you see little companies spring up that try to, you know, address little aspects of that. Like, there was one, Audio Search, I think it was called, that did mostly what you're describing. They downloaded podcasts—and not downloaded them, but they, you know, processed them text to speech, indexed, you know, so it made it really easy to search for certain things inside conversations and podcasts and stuff like that.

(Elan Feingold at 00:35:38) There's definitely a lot of sort of cross media potential too. So, you know, for example, like if you're a fan of the OJ—of the, like, Making a Murderer, like, you probably like the Serial podcast too, right? So there's a lot of opportunities for, you know, that sort of collaborative filtering across media types and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) You would be the only platform in a position that could really do that, right? Like, I mean, other than iTunes, but they don't—I don't think they really do that.

(Elan Feingold at 00:36:06) Yeah. I mean, you'll—I mean, Google is kind of getting into podcast. A lot of companies are getting into podcast, but we definitely have that ability to sort of cross-sect it with your own collection of media and stuff like that. So, yeah, it'll be cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:20) Do you have an Alexa app yet where I can just be like, Alexa, tell Plex TV to record Friends?

(Elan Feingold at 00:36:26) That's actually a really cool idea. We have an Alexa app and it's probably going to be like, what? Are you talking to me? And it—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:35) Oh, you do have one.

(Elan Feingold at 00:36:35) We have an Alexa app. Yeah. We—it's used for both remote control. You can be like, play the Walking Dead on my living room TV. And we have it for music playback. So if you have a music library inside Plex, you can play it, you know, right on the Alexa device. But we do have DVR, so that's a cool idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:54) Yeah. I'm so pumped that you guys have the—you guys are on it. You're on top of it. You win. That's the domination plays right there, man.

(Elan Feingold at 00:37:01) We're trying. We're trying. We're definitely doing a lot, and we don't have an enormous team. So, you know, it's definitely challenging to do some of the things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) Before you know it, Bezos is going to call you up. He's like, we're going to buy you.

(Elan Feingold at 00:37:14) I think he might just land a rocket in my backyard. I think that's how he travels these days, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:19) Right. Or he's just going to send, like, a drone holding an Alexa video screen.

(Elan Feingold at 00:37:23) Or that. Or that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:25) I refuse to FaceTime. This is how I roll. I send drones with my face. Oh, man. Thank you so much. If people want to find out more about you, how would they do that?

(Elan Feingold at 00:37:35) Plex.tv is the place to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) Plex.tv. Was .tv around when you first started?

(Elan Feingold at 00:37:44) No, I don't believe it was. We used to be plexapp.com, because that was kind of like the cool thing for a person only two weeks to add an app to your domain name. But, yes. We used to be plexapp.com, but now we're plex.tv, and it's the country of Tuvalu or something, right? I think they're sitting pretty with their expensive domain name registrations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) Right. I've got the Indian Ocean online, so .io.

(Elan Feingold at 00:38:12) Oh, nice. Yeah. That's great. I mean, it's fun. Wow. I didn't realize the ocean actually had a TLD.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Yes. It's the Indian Ocean or something like that. That's awesome. It's pretty cool.

(Elan Feingold at 00:38:24) Oh, floating registrar floating on a cruise ship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:28) The floating registrar. It's like a cruise. It's a cruise ship. Indian cruise ship. Man, I had so much fun.

(Elan Feingold at 00:38:36) It's been a pleasure, Joel. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) Yeah. That was so much fun when we were going back and forth, like, the paperclip and stuff.

(Elan Feingold at 00:38:43) Yeah. I knew you'd be a fun guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) Yeah. It was great. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.