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Jonathan: You know, Todd and I had been working together for I guess five years at that point
and we built applications and user interfaces and Todd's a great designer and creative
guy and and uh...and I'm a uh...a passable programmer although, you know, I think that
most of my code has now been ripped out, which is a good thing. And and we uh...you know
we built applications at Rackspace with both applications for other people and all of those
applications have to run somewhere. And we uh... we had free servers at Rackspace back
then, that was one of the one of the benefits. And so we would build some applications, run
them on there, but we still had to actually sysadmin the servers. And we had uh...we
had a hard drive fail one time and back-ups were corrupted, and so then we were scrambling
around and we were like where is the uh...do we have a recent back-up of the database?
Do we have... Todd: Looking on laptops
Jonathan: Yea, looking on laptops. Wait, uh...yea, I wrote that on my old laptop. And scrambling
around trying to find all of this and we were like this is just a pain in the butt. And
if we work at a hosting company and if it's a pain for us to try to run servers, then
imagine what it's like for everyone else out there who really just wants to develop
applications and create content. Todd: And and, through our work at uh...uh...a
hosting company um...through our work at Rackspace um...we saw a lot of the enterprise configurations.
You know, these are big, you know, beefy configurations that have multiple servers responding to web
requests. Um...they have like real legitimate back-up strategies and shared storage. And
you know, we uh...you know with these even though it's great to have these free resources,
you know, you look at that with sort of envy. You're like man that would be great if that
kind of technology could be sort of democratized. Like, you know? It's not just the big enterprise
guys need that, they just have the funds to facilitate it, you know? It's every website
that really needs that kind of uh...redundancy and reliability.
Jonathan: Yea, the goal is was you know, the um...what we executed on was a a kind of an
application platform, but the goal was really to to give people access to resources that
they wouldn't normally have access to.