Powerful CMS = Creative Development: with Simen Skogsrud, CTO of Sanity.io

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Simon, the CTO of Sanity.io, and we discuss how having a powerful content management system enables developers to think creatively, how the right partners can help customers realize the full value of a product, and lessons learned from being a career entrepreneur. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) So you mentioned you were always trying to build games when you were a kid. Is that your introduction to tech? Video games?

(Simon at 00:00:50) Definitely, yeah. I really, like, I was reading all the computer magazines. I was kind of pestering my parents to get me a computer. Like, this is like I was at like 10 years old, nine years old.

(Simon at 00:01:03) And the thing I wanted to do was to make games. I wasn't really into playing games then. I was just wanting to—I just was fascinated by that kind of creating a world inside a computer. It's a game called Adventure for the Atari 2600, which is kind of—it was the first time I saw like a little world where you can move around and there was more than one screen, and you could pick up things and fight dragons and stuff. It was all super crude, like, if I don't know, one-bit graphics. But it was just that that idea that there was like a world inside the machine. I could not understand how it was possible. So I wanted to understand that, and I just spent the first year just figuring out how to move things on the screen. And that was enough for me. Like, figuring out vertical movement after half a year—horizontal was quite easy. Vertical was super hard. I remember still remember the moment I woke up in the middle of the night and I'm like, oh, I just move across all the way until the next line, and that would be a vertical step. Oh, that's awesome. And then I realized I could basically make games from then on. So that was—and that's kind of, it kind of feels the same still in a sense. That kind of pursuit of those challenges, that thing of feeling impossible and you just keep kind of maturing them in your head over time, and then suddenly they become approachable, and then suddenly they become trivial, and you move on to the next impossible thing. And that's kind of what fascinates me about this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) That's awesome. So what was your first job in tech?

(Simon at 00:02:42) My first job—so I actually I had like two in a sense. Like I said, I had jazz piano, I had the computers, and I kind of at that time, it wasn't clear to me how culturally important computers would be. So I actually thought, like, I went into television. So I was a television—I was an editor in the beginning, and then after a while I had like a production company. And that was really interesting, and my kind of thinking then was like, yeah, the world is created by media. That's how you kind of basically in democracy, that's how you shape society. So that was kind of my thinking then. Then we made this social network initially for our friends called like Undergrowth. It was this kind of—it was meant as a tool to find underground cultural events in Oslo initially. It kind of blew up.

(Simon at 00:03:36) It was like just before like Twitter and Facebook and these things kind of really blew up. So kind of social media for, let's say, non-techie people was just ready to go. It's that, wow, like technology is taking that role. Like if you want to shape society, you make software. And we didn't know—like, we had kept that programming up all this time, but we hadn't actually minded much. And then it was kind of, oh, this is our calling because this is—like, this is—when I say "we" now, it's one of my co-founders, Evan, and Evan Roster. We have worked together since we were in our early twenties, still working together.

(Simon at 00:04:16) So we had this kind of journey where we realized, like, this is incredibly interesting. And then we started—we just transformed this TV company into a software company, and that's where we've been ever since. So yeah, so I actually never worked for anyone else in a tech company. It's always been my own or with my friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) That's awesome. How did you do that pivot? From—is it the same company that it was when you were a TV company and you changed to a tech company, or did you start a new company when you decided?

(Simon at 00:04:49) It was the same company all the time. It changed name a few times just to rebrand. No, it was owned by myself, Evan, and Ivan, and it was first a TV company. Then it was a games company, and then it was a kind of design and engineering company with a focus on the software part. So that's kind of where we were just before Sanity. I think now technically it's a new company because we had to incorporate in the States to do this. But yes, it's in spirit, it's been the same company my entire career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:25) That's crazy. That's really cool. So where did the name come from that is currently under Sanity?

(Simon at 00:05:32) I think that was, uh, that was just this kind of feeling that—I mean, it's been a—it's been a kind of—this is like 2015, I guess, 2016. It's been a kind of tough time with a lot of challenging things going on, and I just felt like one thing is we were feeling we're bringing—we wanted to bring some kind of calm and rational thinking to this field that we were entering, the content space. But also it felt like, actually, like, that's what I just wanted to think about, about bringing a calm, centered, rational approach to the world. So I just enjoyed that name and that concept. So I guess that was the motivation for the name, that we just wanted to be something that made things make sense. And of course, within the scope of being a content operating system in a sense.

(Simon at 00:06:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:36) I like that. Yeah. So can you give me the overview of what the company does today?

(Simon at 00:06:42) Yeah. So to stay in that kind of storyline, like we—like I told you, we were running this kind of engineering and design company, an agency. It's a very small agency. We had like a—we have a long table in the office. At that time we said, like, this is the size of the company. We can't be bigger than this. We have to be able to run it from a long table. We don't want to—we don't want to know about kind of complex management systems, or we don't want to be managers. We just want to run this company and make interesting things for people. So this was kind of a design and engineering company.

(Simon at 00:07:19) We were hired by the OMA, which is an architecture agency out of Rotterdam. It's run by a very, very famous architect called Rem Koolhaas, which is someone that myself and co-founder Evan, we just—we just are like fans of this person. He is supposedly like this draconian kind of Steve Jobs kind of character, but we just loved his work and his writing. So we read everything he has written. So we just took this job in order to basically to maybe meet him, actually. It was very selfish. It was very non-businesslike. But the point—the interesting thing was we hadn't been doing a lot of content-intensive work at that time. We had done very bespoke engineering, almost like artistic projects mostly. So this was the first time we really made like a, let's say, like a normal website with like normal content in it.

(Simon at 00:08:12) And we wanted to create this beautiful archive. We just love their work. They've been working since 1979. A lot of the works are like seminal pieces that are like important historical artifacts. So we told them, like, we don't want to make a website. We want you to make a proper archive. Go find—rescan all your books, all of your images at the maximum possible quality. Make sure we have all the dates, the timelines, the partnerships, the kind of sizes, the drawings, everything you can find. Just kind of get that in there. And then we knew there was like a separate department in the company whose job is just to remember the history of the OMA.

(Simon at 00:08:51) So if you have like a commission for, let's say, like a park with a we kept space on a bridge, you'll go to this department and you'll say, like, what have we done that's relevant to that? So we said, like, we could probably automate like the garden variety request for that, like a proper search engine, and they loved that idea. And then we saw they were like everywhere—in New York, in Rotterdam—there were interns creating books. So we saw, you are making all these books. Why are you making books all the time? And they told us, like, that's our sales process. Like, we make a bespoke book for a client with like relevant cases, then we get on the plane and we have a dinner. That's how we sell things. The website doesn't even enter into it. So we're like, you can probably automate that. You can probably kind of go to a proper design agency, get a rule system, and then we could take all the content you prepared for your archive, and we'll also generate these books. So now we had like a properly interesting project that we thought we were just making the website to meet Rem Koolhaas, but actually now we have this interesting thing where we want to have like an easy-to-use content system that is just like an improvement for the marketing and communication people. Nothing weird, nothing like no database, nothing like that. Just like the normal WYSIWYG editing experience. But then downstream from that, we want all of that to be captured in a proper database so that we can then leverage that content and use it for the website, for the archive, and also then generate these books.

(Simon at 00:10:22) And frankly, we expected this to be off the shelf at this time. We thought, like, in enterprise software and everything else we've seen, like, this is kind of being part of like how modern software works. But it turned out that like in content systems, this was not even approached in our opinion. So we made a system which we called Sanity for them. And we thought, like, okay, this is—not maybe we didn't know then that this would be our kind of destiny. We just kept using this for like, you know, another customer. And I don't know, the customer, I think it was MIT saying, you know, this system you're using, it's better than anything we can buy. And we're like, yeah, we kind of agree and kind of, yeah. So then we decided to just invert the whole thing and just become the company that makes that system. And the whole kind of motivation for building it this way was like we have, as an agency, always been kind of brought into companies as some kind of innovation help. It's like figuring out new ways of doing something. And then we always felt like we are always held back by the CMS, like the content management system. Like we come in with some ideas and the people will say, oh, we love the ideas, but actually we can't change the workflows for journalists, or actually we can't sync data in or out, or actually we can't like tag these onto the content bubbles. So we kind of thought, like, we want to make this system where that just unlocks that innovation, where like you get up and running really fast with whatever content workflows you need. But then as you kind of discover what you need and as you kind of want to grow and want to use that content in new contexts, you can just do that.

(Simon at 00:12:00) So that's kind of the crux of what we're trying to achieve here is like building this system where developers, content creators, designers, and kind of strategists or like the business side of the things is just set free to just create.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:16) That's awesome. So can you help me understand exactly like what the content management system does and who is the user of it?

(Simon at 00:12:25) Yeah. So typically with Sanity, you have sort of two pieces to the product. It's the content lake system. So that's the system that kind of keeps your content, distributes your content. It's like it's a backend system that just glues everything together. So this is kind of an abstract thing for developers to think about. It just makes sure everything is connected well and it can kind of connect to all of your enterprise systems or your Shopify shop or like all the things you kind of want to present content to or kind of gather content from. And then it's what we call the Studio, which is the content authoring experience. And that's the whole point of that was to create like a way for developers, designers, and content creators to kind of come together and make like exactly the content authoring experience that like makes sense to an organization. We were really tired of this kind of—very often a content system requires you to think according to their kind of model.

(Simon at 00:13:31) Like, let's say the way, way past, like—let's parody. It's like from the way, way past you go like, yeah, you're an architecture agency. You want to make—enter in a new project, a new building. But you have to then create a new page and you have to add the metadata tags for buildings and then put in the template for buildings. And none of those things are how you think. So we wanted a system where the button is just "new building," or to kind of—and just the extension of that, making sure the workflows, the names of things, the structures of things are customizable. So it can be built the way people think in the organization. And that's kind of how we connect them, the kind of content creators, making sure that's just an intuitive, immediate, and simple process creating the content. But then as I mentioned with OMA, but now a lot of companies are doing this, it's kept now—captured in a in a form we call structured content, which meaning like we know what each piece of information means, and then developers and designers can then leverage that and reuse that content in new settings. So let's say you have created—in this instance, for example, we had created the database of buildings, the website, the book, everything.

(Simon at 00:14:48) And then someone realized, you know, Instagram—lots of incredibly nice images are being taken of our buildings on Instagram. And we were like, but we have the locations of all the buildings. So we can build a new tool that based on those locations goes and finds new pictures taken near your buildings. We will integrate it into a workflow in your CMS, and then now you will just score those images, and we will actually insert those images inside your building presentations and they will be like snapshots from like this. And it that was just like a reasonable ask at that point because all of the building blocks were there and it was just simple to add. And now these books were now containing fresh Instagram images. Later they shut down that API, unfortunately, so that wasn't true anymore. But it was awesome at the time. Yeah. But the point is you can do these kinds of things.

(Simon at 00:15:36) Like, things that in the past would be huge projects are kind of easy or reasonable and kind of people can come up with these things and experiment with them and try them out. And, you know, in the past when we used TV and paper and stuff, if you worked in content, you'd be able to just try something. You'd say like, ah, you know, let's try this segment for like two days. And you wouldn't have to kind of hire an army of developers to kind of build out the system for it. You just try it. And then if it works, you'll develop it further. And I think with Sanity, we try to bring some of that logic into the content space, into the digital space, that kind of improvisational kind of opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:16) Yeah. So it's like a really smart tool for building and managing websites. Is that a good summation?

(Simon at 00:16:24) Yeah. But, of course, we will always then react to the concept of websites because people use it for websites, for apps, for set-top boxes, for integrating with—let's say, if you're a restaurant business and you want your menus in your stores, like in your restaurants, but also on your app, but also in Uber Eats and on several other kind of partners' systems, you can use Sanity to make sure your offering is modeled in a way where it can be then integrated into several kinds of mediums and formats, even things you weren't aware of when you created the content. So that's kind of part of this because increasingly, of course, the website is just one of the outlets for our content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:05) Right. That's really cool. So we were originally connected because a while back we had on Ryan Romer, the CTO of Formidable, on the podcast. And I'm just curious, what's your relationship like with Formidable? Are they using Sanity for—because they do, like, web app development, right?

(Simon at 00:17:28) Yeah. So for us, like, when we—it's pretty—so a frustrating part of being Sanity is that we are not an agency anymore. Right? We can, in one sense, we can't really help people anymore because now we are suppliers of this system. So we are really beholden to our customers using—getting good advice. Like, of course, we will help, but there's a limit to what we can do. So we really need our customers to have great partners to really leverage the value of Sanity, especially these huge, advanced companies that Formidable is working with. So our relationship to Formidable is that they have come in with some really big customers, and they really understand—of course, they really understand their businesses, but they also really understand the value that Sanity brings to the market. And then they are really able to help these companies really—like, even those things that are really innovative about Sanity that we struggle to explain to customers. We struggle to kind of—yeah. This part of our kind of, I guess, part of our mission now is to kind of get people to understand and unpack the value that this unlocks, but Formidable really gets that. And that's, of course, very important to us and very valuable. So that's kind of where we are with Formidable and look forward to hopefully more great partnership with more companies together with Formidable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:54) That's really cool. So how did you meet them and have that start?

(Simon at 00:18:58) Actually, they were introduced from one of our customers. So we were helping—this is really early days for us—helping a really, really big corporation figuring out their kind of content modeling, and they had this really complex need to kind of put this content into so many different channels. Some of these business cases are really, really hard to understand even for the companies themselves. Like, they have people with degrees in logistics to understand how their content works. And we were working to help them up to a point. And then I think they found Formidable. They wanted to kind of collect all of their agency help under one strong company. And that's how we kind of got in touch. So they came in and finally they had, like, a partner that really got this, and we saw things really move along. And then now, for our part, the customer having a kind of partner that really got us and could really help them. So that's how that started for us. Yeah, put together by a big corporation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:04) That's awesome. That kind of reminds me of an interview I just recently did with a company called AddIn 365, which their whole thing is they're, like, a premium partner of Microsoft, and they help companies, like, get the most out of Microsoft's tools. Because, like, apparently Microsoft Teams can do a lot more than just, like, video calls and messaging and stuff. But a lot of companies don't, like, unpack all that value. And so this company, AddIn 365, puts this layer on top where you can kind of customize your experience in there and anything and everything. But, yeah, just the concept of having a partner like that.

(Simon at 00:20:48) When you have something really kind of category-defining, like Sanity, you have to explain it in terms of something that exists. So of course, most of our customers think of Sanity as a headless CMS. That's what we are compared to. We never—like, when we created Sanity, we never thought about headless CMS. We didn't even use the word CMS. That kind of came later as a way to explain, like, part of the value proposition. But it reminds me a little bit of, like—when I kind of first saw computers in the eighties, they were marketed as typewriters. Right? Like, if you wanted to sell one to an adult, you would say, like, it's like a typewriter, only better. And if you didn't know better, you'd just use it as one. Like, you'd type your letter and, yeah, nice. You can edit, like, you can backspace. That's awesome. You can do that. And then maybe insert some text and print it, and then you're done, and that's fine. So we see a lot of a similar dynamic where people see our stuff. They think, ah, that's an awesome headless CMS, and then they use it as a headless CMS and not really kind of see that kind of power that comes as you kind of dig into this power—the structured content and the content lake. And that's where, like you said, like, someone like Formidable, or other strong partners that kind of really understand that, is really kind of vital to us and to our success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:15) That's really interesting. So what are some of those areas where Sanity is more powerful than a headless CMS? Like, I'm not super familiar with what the limitations are of a headless CMS.

(Simon at 00:22:29) No. So you could say, in a traditional—like, if you take, let's say—so let's start with the kind of really challenging, like, old-school systems like WordPress. So in that mode, you have a system where basically you create templates where you have, like, slots to fit in. Like, this is my title. This is my header image. This is my main text. And then you really shape your content to that specific kind of view. So you'd say, like, you make—you create images and prepare images that have that specific kind of shape that is kind of made for that view. You'll really—so when you later—and you'll typically put all your content in, like, let's say, for example, this is back to OMA. So they would have all of their content in, like, your long text. It would contain area usage. It would have a map. It would have, like, a list of partners. All of this was in an unstructured form. There was no way to kind of, let's say, make an index of partners or make a map out of all the locations because all of this was just kind of flat files in a sense. It was impossible to reason about for software. And the typical kind of approach to then make this modern is to put an API on top of that. Like, put it into some JSON, and then, like—and basically, you still have a very similar thing that is still kind of made to be used. Maybe a little bit—of course, it's much more flexible. But what you don't have is a proper—let's say, still a very specific content API. It's a system where you still will struggle to connect to other systems to combine text and data. And these are seemingly very abstract concepts, but immediately when you start really kind of coming up with new ideas, like, I want to have my—I have my product database. I want to have those kind of integrated into the text. I want to have, like, a buy button in my text with, let's say, that contains a bundle. Let's say I'm selling—let's go back to the games. Let's say I'm selling kind of Raspberry Pi arcade emulation kits, and I have different combinations that work well together. And then I have some content. It's about different games and periods of, like, eras of gaming. And then I'll have in that text will have ways to immediately go buy, like, a bundle of equipment, of arcade joysticks and Raspberry Pis and screens that fit together if I want to emulate, like, that specific era of games. And this is something you can do, like, in a proper, in a proper kind of a database-oriented content system. So it seems abstract and technical, but it really unlocks that kind of value. Another thing that's really special about this is that the content lake is able to be integrated into other systems deeply. So some of our partners are, like—let's put it this way. Like, content isn't always just created by humans. Sometimes it just originates in other systems. Like, the way we look at it is, like, everything you want to present to your audience is content. So it might be a price. It might be availability of the product. It might be coming from a lot of systems. Let's say you're a real estate developer and you have lots of such systems that generate different parts of your content. And in the end, you want to present these kind of projects with buildings, flats and areas and the quality-of-life experiences that you can have in these spaces. And you want to bring all of that together. And then some of this is editorial and is created by humans in the normal way, but some of it's just gathered from other systems. And content lake lets you basically connect all of your sources together and then in the end bring that into one source that you then can distribute into all the channels. Like, you're making—maybe you're making flyers and you're making—putting it into, like, a real estate kind of realtor's, like, sales system, and you're also putting it into your beautiful websites, of course, and maybe also partner sites. Like, I don't know, what is it like, like, a real estate sales, um, kind of marketplace in the States?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:49) Uh, Remax.

(Simon at 00:26:50) Zillow? Zillow, yeah. Yeah. Some stuff like that. So you, like, you will put this content in all these different places. So this is kind of a number of things where, like, a headless CMS can be, like, a part—like, a traditional headless CMS can be a part of this. But a proper kind of, let's say, content lake and, like, a proper content operating system kind of is that system that connects the people, the content creators, and the different kind of parts of the organization that generates different parts of the content and bringing it together and then redistributes it to wherever it needs to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:26) It sounds like you're enabling a lot more—going back to, like, the Instagram example of that auto-integration into that company, the architecture company's books, the photos. Like, you're enabling these really cool things to be integrated into websites and other areas of publishing content in an easier way. But it also sounds like it's still somewhat complex and that you still need to have a understanding, at least, of, like, software development, right, to use it and get the most out of it?

(Simon at 00:28:04) Yeah. I think that for, like—I mean, in the modern website, you will always have a developer creating your front end. Right? Like, unless you're going, like, super down market like Wix or Squarespace, you will have, like, a developer setting up your site or your app or some of your front-end stuff. That developer will be fully equipped to do everything you need to do in Sanity. So it's kind of the same. Yeah. So we made sure that it's—the developer just needs to be like a normal JavaScript front-end React developer. So it's nothing magical or hard about that. Like, make sure all of that is super approachable. Of course, there is lots of complex magic hidden behind that code. But, yes, you have to have a developer. But that developer, we are all about kind of empowering the front-end developers to just kind of do the whole, in a sense, back end. Nice. Yes. You have to be a developer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) So it sounds like you probably have to have a pretty complicated tech stack on your back end supporting this. And so just recently, I talked to a company called Quali, and their VP of product strategy, David Williams, first of all, educated me on what infrastructure is and how they even think about the stack. And then he was talking about how what his company does—infrastructure automation and what they call environments as a service. And I learned a ton on the episode. It was very fun for me. But so now that I have that, like, at least baseline understanding of infrastructure, when I'm hearing you talk about what your company does, I'm just like, oh my God, that's so many layers. So how do you—do you have some kind of tool that you use to manage the stack at Sanity?

(Simon at 00:29:58) I mean, like, of course, there's a whole group of people managing the infrastructure at our company. It's a huge part. Like, basically, it's all—in terms of, like, everything about the studio experience, everything a person touches in terms of creating content is completely open source and free, like, MIT licensed. What our business is is then running that back end. So in one sense, it's—our entire business is running that. And, yes, it's a very complex thing. What we have—like you said, like, what we see our job is making sure, like, that you can think about your content in a very simple way. Like, you can just think with us, like, a bunch of documents, and you will be able to reshape that content and distribute it and do all of those things, and we will just make that work on the back end. And it's like—we make it look very, let's say, easy or very approachable. But, of course, behind the scenes to make that—to, like, to pull off that being that kind of dumb, in a sense, which I like, it's a positive word in our company. Like, when you finally find, like, the dumb solution, then you kind of, you know, you were arriving. Yeah. Yes. It's really dumb, but this is perfect. And then so, yes, and that's then, of course, that makes everything hard for us. So we spend a lot of time making sure when we see, like, oh, that customer is doing something incredibly weird that, like, no kind of experienced developers would do that because that's like, you don't do that. And then you realize, actually, like, if you're a seasoned web developer, you might not do that, but actually, maybe we should just make it be right. Like, maybe we should just make it work. So we spend a lot of time on that, like, looking at what people do and then just figuring out how can we just make that work instead of needing to teach people to do back-pressure control—hard abstract concepts like that. Let's see if we can just make that work on our side. But, yes, it's a huge load of servers, and it's—we are using, of course, Docker and Kubernetes. It's, like, a system to manage a lot of, like, small machines that talk together. And then, yeah, on top of that, there's loads of tools to build and distribute and kind of run that. But it's, yeah, that's incredibly interesting, the whole—and, of course, like, you know, the whole kind of cloud computing thing. And it's not so long ago, we actually had physical servers in our company before we became Sanity. So it's interesting also then now having this kind of fleet of machines all over the world that we can't even physically access, but it's ours somehow, like, in an abstract way. That's incredibly beautiful. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:42) Yeah. I mean, it is really—I think it's funny how we have this concept of the cloud as, like, this information bubble that exists above us, but it's just computers that are somewhere else in someone else's warehouse.

(Simon at 00:32:56) Yeah. You could say that, but, actually, that's not exactly true. Right? Because if it was, then when the machine burns up or is destroyed, it would be gone. Right?

(Simon at 00:33:08) Right. But actually, I just get a new machine. It is exactly like the old one, and it just keeps doing my job. So in one sense, it's—I think the cloud is real because I don't know where my mail is. If half the server space for Google is burning up, I still have my mail.

(Simon at 00:33:28) So it's something else. It is actually, at least when it works. But of course, sometimes it breaks down. Sometimes Facebook misconfigures their DNS and everything goes offline. Then you're reminded there is a physical reality underneath it.

(Simon at 00:33:42) There is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) The magic breaks a little bit there.

(Simon at 00:33:46) Yeah, a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) So what's one thing that you're really excited for for the future of your company?

(Simon at 00:33:55) I think what I really spend my time thinking of now is just figuring out how to—we've, in one sense, I feel like we've seen the future of how content should work, how people should work with content, how organizations should work with content, how it should really work. And we haven't really been able to explain all of it. So that's what really fascinates me. How do we inspire people and companies to see these new ways of working?

(Simon at 00:34:30) So that's what I'm really looking forward to. And also, we are at the stage in the company where we are really, really growing. So in my leadership, it's in a situation where I'm going from being very, very hands-on operational CTO, like running the engineering teams, running design teams, to being more high-level. And it's a very new thing to me to be able to have that opportunity. So to get that opportunity and to use that to inspire and teach how to do these things, that's really fascinating to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) What are some things you're learning as you're getting into management and getting a little bit less hands-on now?

(Simon at 00:35:15) Yeah. I don't know. Everyone who's been focused on being a builder and living into management, initially you see it as majorly a loss. Initially, I felt like, "I just have to do this. I want to do this. I want to make Sanity, and to do that, I have to become a leader, unfortunately." But then after a while, we found an incredible mentor, our CEO, Magnus Hillestad, at the exact right time. And she's been helping us develop that part of ourselves. And after some time, I realized being a leader, trying to be a good leader is being a builder. You're just not building the product. You're building the environment and the processes, and you're building up the people who can do this thing. And then you realize the most rewarding part of being a leader is, of course, everything that's not working, everything that's broken is my job. And then when you get it to work, you realize, "Now I have created this situation where people are empowered to do this thing that last year I thought I was the only one in the world who could do this for us." Now we've found the people. We've developed the knowledge. We're there. And now I can move on to the next broken thing, the higher-level broken thing. And I feel that that's what makes it feel like building because I guess building is a similar thing. You're—everything that's broken about what you're making is your problem. And then when you get it to work, then you can move on to this higher-level challenge. But that's what I really love about leadership and being someone who—then you can develop a certain same kind of, let's call it, loving exploration that you had as a tinkerer. How can I—what can we make this thing do now, this thing that is our organization? How can we make it sing? How can we really—what is something we are not thinking of that we could really nail right now? So that's fascinating to me. And then one thing, of course, I spent a lot of time with, which was challenging in the beginning, is to build that instinct to always work through others. You always have this impulse to just do something yourself. Right? "Yeah, I'll just fix this thing or do this little thing." And then learning to always include someone, always work through others, always be developing the organizations that will do that thing, even though you maybe initially are doing it yourself. So these things are a list of things that I find incredibly fascinating with leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) I want to touch on one thing that you mentioned in there. You said you found—you and your cofounders found a great mentor in your CEO. Did you bring on your CEO, you and your cofounders bring him on after the fact, or is he also one of your cofounders?

(Simon at 00:38:35) He is a cofounder because he came in at the—so we had, at that time—this was when we had decided that we would make the product. It was not yet released, and it was, of course, just a very scrappy little operation. We would not have succeeded in that shape and form. So a friend of ours told us, "You should have a beer with this Magnus guy. You'll like it." They didn't know it was a very special time for us. We were just taking in everything. We had a beer with him. I think I had half a beer when I told Magnus, "Actually, Magnus, I think you are going to be my boss." And he was like, "No, no." He was planning to take some time off and learn to do some AI stuff. And we have a really beautiful office, so I told him, "Maybe you should just come to our office. You need some space, right?" So he came, and we spent some time together. And he's really, really good at leveling things up. How can we get to the next stage? So even just as a remote friend at that time, he would say, "Why don't we just go to San Francisco and just pitch it to random people who had talked to us and just see if the story sticks? Would it stick in San Francisco? Do they think this is old hat, or is it something new?" So we did that, just as a kind of birthday trip at that point, and it did stick. And we agreed that this is—so he joined as a full founder because he found out he was able to really co-own the vision, and he really does. And it was a really, really important step because now at that point, we just had that part, the organization builder and the leadership nerd that he is. He's really fascinated by that. I think that was what initially drew me to him. He knows about finance and leadership and organization building, and he knows about those things the way I know about event queues and workers and distributed systems, and has the same kind of fascination for it. So through his eyes, I can see how it's fascinating. And then he has brought on a lot of people to help us develop ourselves, to be these people who we need to be to build this business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:08) Nice. And now he gets to teach you about some of the leadership stuff? You get to teach him about some of the distributed systems stuff?

(Simon at 00:41:17) Yeah. And I think now sometimes the roles are switching. Sometimes I can tell him a thing or two about leadership, and sometimes he can tell me a thing or two about the distributed systems and what Sanity should be. So that's also—this is a great partnership. It's interesting to see also that someone coming in with—he's initially from private equity, so he's seen a lot of different companies very fast. So he has this ability to really quickly grasp, "Oh, what is the business value here? How does this business—how is it supposed to work?" And then very impressive ability to then just inhabit that and then become that person who—so now he's absolutely someone who co-owns not just the organization building but also the product vision, which is—I did not expect, which I think is beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:07) So what's one piece of advice you would give to, let's say, a technologist that has built some really cool piece of software. They're looking to productize it, make it a company. And so they're founding their company, building a little team. What advice do you have for that person getting that off the ground and growing that?

(Simon at 00:42:28) I think, first and foremost, just go with your—think about what really fascinates you about what you're doing and really, really nail that and make sure that is what drives the business. But then make sure it is a business. Think through who is going to pay for it, how it's going to work as a business. Because I see a lot of companies that have an awesome technical idea, but I haven't really thought through how that—and very often it can be small changes in how your software works and how, or how you market it or who you market it to, that can make things work. So make sure you—don't be too smart about being pragmatic about what you're making. Make sure it's something you're really, really, really fascinated with because you're going to spend your lifeblood on that thing if it's any successful. But then make sure it's an actual business, understand how it can work like that, and then get help. Find good people. Think about—I thought it was interesting to hear Bill Gates talking about why he was so successful. And I thought it would be something about his technical vision or something like that. But he said, "I really love hiring. I really, really love hiring, finding good people." And that's fascinating to me. Because it very quickly becomes about that, right? Finding these good partners, these good helpers, and building that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) Absolutely. So one last leadership-esque question for you. What's one thing you're learning right now? What's challenging you?

(Simon at 00:44:04) Oh, yeah. So right now, it is that thing where I'm going from—let's say I'm going this trajectory from being the main programmer on the back-end system in the beginning, then learning how to be the one who builds the team who makes the back-end system and runs that team. Then now being the person who furthers the vision for these systems. So to connect the product vision and the technical vision and the design vision and becoming now, in a sense, properly a CTO. Right? Up until now, I've been an engineering manager, head of engineering, head of design, sometimes a designer. But now, as we grow, I can see how I'm learning how to be that person who doesn't meddle too much into the details of stuff, but make sure I provide a well-thought-out North Star for my teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:09) Awesome. Well, before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't get out there that we want to make sure we get out to the world? If people think Sanity is really cool, how can they find you?

(Simon at 00:45:19) Yeah. So sanity.io. It's just—our free plan is very generous, so people can just start using it. Any personal products—we try to make it so the pricing makes sense. So just use it for anything you want. And then also consider joining us. We need more people. We are hiring for basically everything right now.

(Intro Narrator at 00:45:41) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.