We'll get a founder that's like, oh, how do I like test my product before I launch to make sure it's going to work? And I always come back and tell the founders the same thing. Like if you have a house and it's got full of pipes and you know that some of the pipes are broken and they're going to leak, you can spend a lot of time trying to check every pipe, guess whether it's broken or not and repair it, or you can turn the water on. And like, you'll know. You'll know exactly the work to be done. Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today, we're going to talk about what does it mean to do things that don't scale? The software edition. In this episode, we're going to go through a number of great software and product hacks that software companies used to figure out how to make their product work when perhaps they didn't have time to really build the right thing. Now, Dalton, probably the master of this is a person we work with, a guy named Paul Buhite, who confronted this term, the 90-10 solution. He always says something like,
How can you get 90% of the benefit for 10% of the work? Always. This is what he always puts onto people when they tell them it's really hard to build something. It'll take too long to code it. He'll just always push on this point. And, you know, founders don't love it. Right? Would you say that's a fair assessment, Michael? That's a fair assessment. Yes. Founders hate it. But tell the audience why it's worth listening to the guy. Like, why does he have the credibility to say that to people? Well, PB is the inventor of Gmail. And as kind of a side project at Google, he invented something that 1.5 billion people on earth actively use.
And he literally did it doing things that don't scale. So I'll start the story and then please take it over. So as I remember it, PB was pissed about the Gmail product, the Google product he was using, sorry, the email product he was using. And so Google had this newsletter product. The first version of Gmail, he basically figured out how to put his email into this Google Groups UI. And as he tells the story, kind of...
his eureka moment was when he could start reading his own email in this UI. And then from that point on, he stopped using his old email client. And what I love about this is that as he tells the story, every email feature that any human would want to use, he just started building from that point. And so, you know, he would talk to YC Batch and he's like, and then I wanted to write an email. And so I built writing emails. And if you know PB, like he could have got a couple of days reading emails without replying at all. So he didn't need writing emails to start. I remember him telling the first time he got his like coworker, like literally like his deskmate or something to try to use it. And his deskmate was like, this thing's pretty good. It loads really fast. It's really great. The only problem is PB, it has your email in it. And I want it to have my email. And he was like, oh shit. Okay, well, I got to build that. Perfect solution. And so then it started spreading throughout Google. And do you remember when it broke?
No, what happened? Oh, so he told this story where like one day PB came in late to work, which is, you know, knowing PB every day, you know, and everyone was looking at him really weird. And they're all like a little pissed. And he got to his desk and someone came over to him was like, don't you realize that Gmail's been down like all morning? And PB was like, no, I just got to work. I didn't know. And so he's like trying to fix it, trying to fix it. And then his coworkers see him like grab a screwdriver and go to the server room. And it was like, they were like, oh God, why do we trust PB with our email? Like we're totally screwed. And I think he figured out like there was a corrupted hard drive. And I remember at that point of story, he was like, he says, and that day I learned that people really think email is important and it's got to always work. It's like perfect. I think the reason, I think the reason he did it, man, is because he liked to run Linux on the desktop.
And he didn't want to run Outlook. The Google suits were trying to get him to run Outlook on Windows. And he was like, I don't really want to run Windows. But yeah, it was the dirtiest hack. As I recall in this final part of the story, it was hard for him to get Google to release it because they were afraid it was going to take up too much hardware. And so there was all these issues where there was a decent chance I think it never would have been released. Well, this part was that everyone thought Gmail's invite system.
was like some cool like growth hack like virality hack it's like oh if you got access to gmail you got i think four invites to give someone else and these are like precious commodities and it was it was another product it was just another version of things that don't scale they didn't have enough um server space servers so they had to build an invite system yes there was not an option to not but basically there was no option other than building my system it was not like genius pm growth hacking it was like yeah well we saturated the hard drives are full so i guess we can't invite anyone else to gmail today that's it that's it so you had another story about facebook early days that is similar in this light So let me paint the picture. Back when you started to start up a long time ago, you had to buy servers and put them in a data center, which is a special room that's air conditioned that just has other servers in it. And you plug them in and they have fast internet access. And so being a startup founder until AWS took off, part of the job was to drive to the suburbs or whatever, drive to some data center, which is an anonymous warehouse building somewhere, go in there and like...
plug things in and what was funny is when your site crashed it wasn't just depressing that your site crashed it actually until getting in your car like part of being a startup founder was waking up at 2 a.m and getting in your car and driving to like santa clara because your code wedged that you have to physically reboot the server and your site was down until you physically rebuilt the server so anyway i'm just trying to set the stage for people so this was this was what our life was like okay and so my company i mean we had a data center in santa clara And there was a bunch of other startups there as well. And so something that I like to do was to look at who my neighbors were, so to speak. There was never people there, it was just their servers. And there'd be a label at the top of the rack and you could see their servers and you could see the lights blinking on the switch. Okay, so this is what I was like. And so our company was in the data center, this data center in Santa Clara. And then one day there's a new tenant and a new neighbor. So I look at it and the label at the top of the cage next to ours, three feet away, the label said thefacebook.com.
And I remember being like, oh yeah, I've heard of this. Like, cool. Like, sounds good. And they had these super janky servers. I think there was maybe eight of them when they first moved in. And they were like super cheap, like super micro servers. You know, like the wires were hanging out. Like, you know, I'm like, cool. But the lights were blinking really fast. Okay. And so what I remember.
was that there was labels on every server and the labels were the name of a university. And so at the time, one of them, one of the servers was named Stanford. One of them was named Harvard, you know, like, and it made sense because I was familiar with the Facebook product at the time, which was like a college social network that was at like eight colleges. Okay. So then I watched every time we would go back to the data center, they would have more servers in the rack with more colleges. And it became increasingly obvious to me.
that the way they scaled Facebook was to have a completely separate PHP instance running for every school that they copy and pasted the code to. They would have a separate MySQL server for every school and they would have like a memcache instance for every school. And so you'd see like the University of Oklahoma, you'd see the three servers next to each other. And the way that they managed to scale Facebook was to just keep buying these crappy servers. They would launch each school and it would only talk to a single school database. And they never had to worry about scaling a database across all the schools at once. Because again, at the time, hardware was bad. Okay, MySQL was bad. Like the technology was not great.
If they had to scale a single database, a single user's table to hundreds of millions of people would have been impossible. And so their hack was the 910 solution like PBUs for Gmail, which is like, just don't do it. And so at the time, if you were like a Harvard student and you wanted to log in, it was hard coded to the URL was harvard.thefacebook.com, right? And so if you try to go to stanford.thefacebook.com, you'd be like, you know, error. That was just a separate database. And so then they wrote code so you could bounce between schools. And it actually took them years to build a global user's table, as I recall, and avoid this hack.
The thing they did that didn't scale is to copy and paste their code a lot and have completely separate database instances that didn't talk to each other. And I'm sure people that work at Facebook today, I bet a lot of people don't even know the story. But like, that's what it took. That's the real story behind how you start something big like that versus what it looks like today. So in the case of Twitch, all, if not all, like most of the examples of this came from this core problem. And it's why I tell people to not create a live video site. A normal website, even a video site, on a normal day will basically have peaks and troughs of traffic.
And the largest peaks will be 2 to 4x the steady state traffic. So you can engineer your whole product such that if we can support 2 to 4x the steady state traffic and our site doesn't go down, we're good. On a live video product, our peaks were 20x. Now, you can't even really test 20x peaks. You just experience them and fix what happens when 20x more people than normally show up on your website because some pop star is streaming something. And so two things kind of happened that were really fun about this. So the first hack we had was if suddenly some famous person was streaming,
on their channel, there'd be a bunch of dynamic things that could load. Like your username would load up on the page or their channel and the view count would load up and a whole bunch of other things that would basically hit our application servers and destroy them if 100,000 people were trying to request the page at the same time. So we actually had a button that could make any page on Dustin TV a static page. All those features would stop working. Your name wouldn't appear. The view count wouldn't update. Like literally a static page that loaded our video player and you couldn't touch us. We could just cache that static page and as many people as possible to look at it. Now to them,
Certain things might not work right. But they were watching the video. The chat worked because that was a different system. The video worked. That was a different system. And we didn't have to figure out the harder problems until later. Later, actually, Kyle and Emmett worked together to figure out how to cache parts of the page. We'll make other parts of the page dynamic. But that happened way, way later. Let me give you a quick anecdote. Yes. Remember Friendster before MySpace? Yeah, of course. Every time you would log in, it would calculate how many people were two degrees of separation from you. And it would fire off on MySQL thread where you would log in. It would look at your friends. It would calculate your friends and friends and show you a live number of how big your extended network was. And the founders.
John Abrams, he thought this was a really important feature. I remember talking to him about it. Guess what MySpace's do things that no scale solution was? If they were in your friends list, it would say, this is in your friends list. So-and-so is in your friends list. And if it wasn't, it would say, so-and-so is in your extended network.
There it is. That was it. That was the feature. And so Friendster was trying to hire engineers and scale MySQL, and they're running into too many threads on Linux issues and updating the kernels. And MySpace was like, oh, so-and-so is doing extended network. That's our solution. Anyway, carry on. But that's the same deal. So our second one was, it always happened to popular streamers. Our second was, if you imagine, if someone is really popular and there's 100,000 people who want to watch their stream, we actually need multiple video servers to serve all of those viewers. So we basically propagate the original stream coming from the person streaming across multiple video servers until there was enough video servers to serve all people who were viewing.
The challenge is that we never had a good way of figuring out how many video servers we should propagate the stream to. And if a stream would slowly grow in traffic over time, we had a little algorithm that could work and spin up more video servers and it'd be fine. But what actually happened was that a major celebrity would announce they were going on and all their fans would descend on that page. And so the second they started streaming, 100,000 people would be requesting a live stream. Bam, video server dies. And so we were trying to figure out solution, solution, solutions. And how do we model this? There were all kinds of overly complicated solutions we came up with.
And then once again, Colin and I got together and they said, well, the video system doesn't know how many people are sitting on the website before the video stream, before it starts, starts trying to start video. But the website does. All the website has to do is communicate that information to the video system and then it could pre-populate the stream. to as many video servers as they would need to and then turn the stream on to users. So what happened now in this setup is that some celebrity would start streaming. They would think they were live. No one was seeing their stream. Well, we were probably getting their stream to all the video servers that are needed. And then suddenly the stream would appear for everyone and would look like it worked well. And like the delay was a couple seconds. It wasn't that bad, right? But like dirty, super dirty, but it worked. And honestly, that's going to be kind of the theme of this whole setup, right? Super dirty, but it worked. You had a couple of these in iMeme, right?
Yeah, there was a couple that we had at iMeme. So one of them, so at the time, again, to set the stage, the innovation of showing video in a browser without launching real player, no one here probably knows what that is. But it used to be to launch a video, it would launch another application in the browser that sucked and would crash your browser and you hated your life, OK? So one of the cool innovations that YouTube, the startup YouTube, had before it was acquired by Google was to play video in Flash in the browser that required no external dependencies. You just play right in the browser. At the time, that was awesome. It was a major product innovation to do that.
And so we wanted to do that for music at iName. And we were looking at the tools available to do it. And we saw all this great tooling to do it for video. And so rather than rolling our own tools that was music specific, we just took all of the open source video stuff and hacked the other video code that we had so that every music file played on iName was actually a video file. It was a .FLV back in the day. And it was actually a flash video player. And it was basically, we were playing video files.
that had like a zero bit in the video field and it was just audio. And we actually were transcoding uploads into video files. You know what I'm saying? Like the whole entire thing was, it was a video site with no video. I don't know how else to explain it. And it works. And I do think this is a recurring theme is a lot of the best product decisions are ones made kind of fast and kind of under duress. I don't know what that means, but it's like when it's like 8 p.m. in the office and the site's down, you tend to come up with good decisions on this stuff. So we had two more at Twitch that were really funny. The first one talking about duress was our free peering hack. So streaming live video is really expensive.
Back then, it was really expensive. And we were very bad fundraisers. That was mostly my fault. And so we were always in the situation where we didn't have enough money to stream as much video. And we had this global audience of people who wanted to watch content. And so we actually hired one of the network ops guys from YouTube who had figured out how to kind of scale a lot of YouTube's early...
usage. And he taught us that you could have free peering relationships with different ISPs around the world. And so that you wouldn't have to pay a middleman to say serve video to folks in Sweden. You can connect to your servers. It saves you money and it saves them money. That's what they wanted. Yeah. And there were these massive switches where you could basically run some wires to the switch and bam, you can connect to the Swedish ISP. Now, the problem is that some ISPs wanted to do this free peering relationship where basically you can send them traffic for free. They can send you traffic for free. Others didn't. They didn't want to do that. Or they weren't kind of with it.
And so I think it was Sweden, but I don't remember. Some ISP was basically not allowing us to do free peering, and we were spending so much money sending video to this country, and we were getting no revenue from it. We couldn't make a dollar in advertising. And so what we did is that after 10 minutes of people watching free live video, we just put up a big thing that blocked the video that said, your ISP is not doing a free peering relationship with us, so we can no longer serve you video. If you'd like to call to complain, here's a phone number and email address.
And that worked. I don't remember how fast. I just remember it worked. And I remember thinking to myself, it's almost unbelievable. Like that ISP was a real company. Like we were like a website in San Francisco. And hey, that worked. And then the second one was translation. So we had this global audience and we would like call these translation companies and we'd ask them like how much would it cost to translate our site into these like 40 different languages? And they were like infinite money. And we're like, we don't have infinite money. And so I think we stole the solution from Reddit. We were like, what happens if we just build a little website where our community translates everything?
And so basically, it would just like serve up every string in English. And it was like serve to anyone who came to the site who wasn't from an English-speaking country. And it was like, do you want to volunteer to translate the string in your local language? And of course, you know, people were like, well, what if they do a bad job translating? I was like, well, the alternative is it's not in their language at all. So like, let's not make the perfect enemy of the good. And I think we had something where like we would get three different people translated and like match. But like that happened later. We basically got translation for a whole product for free.
Maybe to end because I think this might be the like maybe the funniest of them all tell a Google story because I think this one's like the like really like So look for the Facebook story that was firsthand where I personally witnessed the servers with my own eyes So I'm a hundred percent confident that is what happened because that's me, right? This Google story secondhand and so I may get some of the details wrong I apologize in advance, but I'll tell you this was related to me by someone was there. All right, you're right So look the original Google algorithm was based on a paper that they wrote which you can go read page rank It worked really well. It was a different way to do search. Okay It worked. They always didn't have enough hardware to scale it. Because remember, there was no cloud back then. You had to run your own servers. And so as the internet grew, it was harder and harder to scale Google. You still with me? Like there were just more webpages on the internet. So it worked great when the web was small, but then they kept having more webpages really fast. And so Google had to run as fast as they could to just stay in the same place. Just to run a crawl and re-index the web was like a lot of work. And so the way they worked at the time is they weren't re-indexing the web in real time constantly. They had to do it in one big batch process back in the day. Okay? And so...
There was some critical point. This is probably in the 2001 era. Again, this is secondhand. I don't know exactly what it was. There's some critical point where this big batch process to index the web started failing. And it would take three weeks to run the batch process. It was like the, you know, re-index-web.sh. And it was like one script that was to Google, you know, and it started failing. And so they tried to fix the bug and they restarted and then it failed again. And so the story that I heard is that there was some point where for maybe three months, maybe four months, I don't remember the exact details.
there was no new index of Google. They had stale results. So anyone, any user of Google, they didn't know that, you know, the user didn't know this. Many user of Google was seeing stale results and no new websites were in the index for quite some time. Okay. And so obviously they were freaking out inside of Google. And this was the genesis for them to create MapReduce, which they wrote a paper about, which was a way to parallelize and break into pieces all the little bits of crawling and re-indexing the web. And, you know, Hadoop was created off of MapReduce. There's a bunch of different software use. And I would argue every big internet company now uses the descendants of this particular piece of software.
And then it was created under duress when Google secretly was completely broken for an extended period of time because the web grew too fast. But I think this is the most fun part about this story. When the index started getting stale, did Google shut down the search engine? That's the coolest part. People just didn't realize it. They didn't know. And did they build this first? Again, in terms of doing things on scale, did they build MapReduce before they had any users? No. They basically made it this far by just building a monolithic product. And they only dealt with this issue when they had to. I think this is such a common thing that comes up when we give startup advice.
we'll get a founder that's like, oh, how do I test my product before I launch to make sure it's going to work? And I always come back and tell the founders the same thing. If you have a house and it's got full of pipes and you know some of the pipes are broken and they're going to leak, you can spend a lot of time trying to check every pipe, guess whether it's broken or not and repair it, or you can turn the water on. And you'll know. You'll know exactly the work to be done when you turn the water on. And I think people are always surprised that that's basically all startups do is just turn the water on, fix what's broken, rinse and repeat.
That's how big companies get built. It's never taught that way though, right? It's always taught like, oh, somebody had a plan and they wrote it all down. It's like, never, never. And you earn the privilege to work on scalable things by making something people want first. You know what I think about sometimes with Apple is picture like Wozniak hand soldering the original Apple computer.
And like those techniques compared to like whoever it is that works on Apple that designs AirPods. Like it's the same company, but like Wozniak hand soldering is not scalable. But, you know, because that worked, they earned the privilege to be able to make AirPods now. And because Google search was so good, they earned the privilege to be able to create super scalable stuff like MapReduce and all these other awesome internal tools they built, right? But if they wouldn't build that stuff first, it wouldn't be Google, man.
And so to wrap up, kind of what I love about things that don't scale is that it works in the real world, right? The Airbnb founder's taking photos, the DoorDash folks doing deliveries. It also works in the software world, right? Like don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. Just try to figure out any kind of way to give somebody something that they really want and then solve all the problems that happen afterwards. And you're doing way better. All right. Thanks so much for watching the video.