FounderQuest

This week Josh, Ben, and Starr look back at all of the things that Honeybadger shipped in the last 12 months. They also give Apple some free management advice and provide their thoughts on MicroConf's latest announcement. Lastly, will Honeybadger move away from error monitoring and bet its future on textbox applications? Tune in and find out!

Links:
Exponent Podcast
Johny Ive
MicroConf
Hiring Process FounderQuest episode
Fireside Chat FounderQuest episode
Dundie Awards

Full Transcript:
Ben: I was just thinking. Hey, Tim. Let's give you tips on how to organize Apple.

Starr: That should be a show that we do. Yeah, we should do a special show where we just do something extremely full of hubris.

Ben: Every week we could pick a large multinational enterprise and give them tips on how to improve their business.

Starr: Yeah.

Ben: How to Honeybadger-ize it.

Josh: I think that's what the Exponent podcast does, which is-

Ben: Beat us to the punch.

Josh: Yeah. Is it Ben Thompson?

Ben: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Josh: Yeah. But I mean, he sounds like he's qualified to talk about that stuff.

Ben: He actually knows what he's talking about.

Josh: Yeah, but I have heard buzz just following... Because I've been having issues with some Apple services, and it seems like they are having some, like they have some growing issues, or they have had growing issues. There has been buzz about they might need to create some sort of clearer division or something. Because it's totally different, running services. Totally different from having a hardware, software company.

Starr: Well, if they're having problems scaling maybe they should move to AWS.

Josh: That is... yeah.

Ben: Pretty sure they have quite a big AWS spend as it is.

Starr: The whole Apple photos thing, I hear it's just run off a couple of Mac Minis in some guy's closet.

Josh: It's just running on a disc. It's running in Tim's closet.

Ben: Although, they have created Mac Pros now. They just released that. They don't have a rack mount yet for them.

Josh: Oh, yeah. And you can get eight terabytes in the MacBook Pros now, so they could finally extend their iCloud storage.

Starr: Yeah, do y'all think they actually run their services on Macs as servers?

Ben: No. I don't think so. I mean, maybe some old, old services are still running on some of those Xserves, but no. I think-

Josh: I'd be surprised.

Starr: Yeah, that would take some dedication.

Ben: I'm sure they're well invested in the public cloud.

Starr: If Steve Jobs was still around, they would be, I think.

Josh: Wait, you don't think-

Starr: That just seems like the kind of line he'd draw in the sand.

Josh: Did Jony Ive not design all their rack mounts?

Starr: See, the problem with Apple computers, with Apple servers in the data center, is it just is insane to manage all the dongles.

Josh: Just dongles between it.

Starr: Yeah, they don't have ethernet jacks. You got to have a dongle that goes into your USB 3.

Josh: Have you seen the fiber dongle, to connect the fiver to the Thunderbolt?

Starr: I know. It's crazy. It's crazy. What are we talking about today? We're talking about lessons learned in 2019. It's 2019, isn't it, guys?

Ben: Still, yes it is.

Starr: Okay. That's great. Yeah, so lessons learned in 2019 at Honeybadger. It might be applicable to your huge multinational corporation that manufactures software and hardware. It's been a pretty big year today... Today. It's been a pretty big year. I've had days that feel like that. It's been a pretty big year this year. We have grown the team to five people, and we've just gotten a whole bunch done. I guess maybe we should start by... What do you think we should do? Should with start at the beginning or should we start by talking about big 10000 foot view of lessons and then sort of get into the details? How do y'all want to do it?

Ben: I was thinking of this episode as the things we did this year episode, the recap, as opposed to things we learned.

Starr: Oh, I'm sorry.

Ben: I don't know.

Josh: Well, there might be things we learned that we'll share along the way.

Ben: Will come out of the things that we did. Hopefully, we learned some things along the way.

Starr: Okay, that's cool. Things we did. That's a little bit more cut and dry too.

Josh: I forgot we did a lot of this stuff, so I kind of learned what we did this year, today.

Ben: Yeah, it's good to reflect and celebrate your successes, right?

Josh: Yeah.

Starr: So what we did this morning, or what, I guess, Josh did is asked Ben Findley to compile a list of all the things that we did. So we didn't have to... We're getting the hang of this enforcing thing, I think.

Josh: I was like, "Hey, Ben Findley. What did we do this year, again?" And then he created a nice list in Notion, and here we are.

Ben: I jumped i...