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Justin and Jason interview Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, about how he got started as a coder and his passion for programming and mentoring, how he and Joel Spolsky came up with the idea for Stack Overflow, his belief in free software and the Open ID initiative, the process of raising venture capital for Stack Exchange and his views of entrepreneurship, why he and Joel stopped doing the Stack Overflow podcast and whether they might start up again, and the hardest step when scaling a web app.
Started to listen to the first half on my way to work and very much enjoyed it as I used to be a regular listener of the Stack Overflow Podcast as well. I have a ton of respect for SO, Jeff and Joel.
Justin, great interview questions so far. You brought up topics I never heard Jeff talk about on SO.
I found the Clark Kent vs Superman story quite defining and motivating. Looking forward to the second half tonight!
@Philippe – Thx for the kind words. Jason always prepares his questions before hand and I always make up mine as I go along. As you can imagine my technique is a bit hit-and-miss so it’s nice that it worked for once!
Open id does not communicate it’s purpose clearly enough to regular people. There is no possible way that the bartender down the street is going to even know what open id is. I guarantee that they are going to know what Facebook and Twitter is. The reason why facebook works is because the bartender down the street understands it. The same goes for apple products.
HI Guys,
Great podcast. I enjoyed the part where Joel says he doesn’t believe in selling software. I would have enjoyed hearing that discussed a bit more. Have you guys read “Free”, by Chris Anderson? Lots of interesting little point there. I think Jeff brought up a great point, but generalized it a little too far.
Over time, the cost of producing and delivering software decreases while the marginal gain benefit of producing more/bigger software doesn’t always justify the same size. So, it’s conceivable that at some point a very small team could produce a free alternative to Freshbooks. If it’s cheap (say, 1 person a 100k per year at the extreme) and successful (as many customers as Freshbooks at the extreme) enough, even the shoddiest of business models could be very lucrative. Obviously there is a continuum for each of these (business model, # of users, cost of developing) that freshbooks is already far to the left of (1.6m users with 50 employees compare to Intuit @ 8000 employees & $3b revenues). If you have a situation where some of the fringe benefits of free are important (network effects, low barrier to entry, etc) and there is definitely a kind of pressure towards free.
On the other hand, and I think this is where Jeff’s comment is interesting, there are non obvious effects to charging/not charging. Jeff mentions how it affect their dynamic with their users and helps the relationship be non adversarial. I can see how game dynamics could go down badly on a paid site. But in some cases, paying can change the dynamics in a positive way. For example paying for advice means you’ll probably act on it. Paying for hours means you’ll make them count. For bookkeeping, there might be an important positioning advantage to paid software, marking it as professional software.
Hi, thanks for a super podcast. I’m a fan from Denmark and your podcast have been my inspiration for my danish podcast for Startups. I’m editor of a quite popular tech blog in Denmark and have been listening to your podcast the last couple of month.
In this (#113) Podcast Jason talked about a online service for his soccerteam to get better and archieve point and trophies.
My blog, Trendsonline.dk are going to interview a webservice that does exactly that, check out http://www.soccertrix.com. If interested I can set you up with the founder or you can contact him yourself.
Looking forward to hear more podcast from you