Read more about Anil Dash in “To Remake Tech, Remake the Tech Company“

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Anil Dash didn’t like the direction the web was going, so he joined a tech company that promised to take web development back to its indie roots. That company became Glitch, a semi-distributed company based in New York City. In this episode, Matt and Anil talk about the good old days of blogging and how the ideals of those pioneers inform the way Glitch treats its employees and its product. 

The full episode transcript is below.

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MATT MULLENWEG: A lot of tech companies talk about prizing “people over profits,” but Glitch is a startup that is serious about these ideals, and holds itself publicly accountable for sustaining this commitment as the company grows.

That’s partially because Glitch’s CEO is Anil Dash. Anil’s an old acquaintance of mine — he’s one of the early pioneers of blogging. Over the last twenty years he’s developed a reputation as something of a tech prophet — not just for predicting what’s going to happen next, but for holding the industry’s feet to the fire. 

Glitch is a partially-distributed company that runs a social platform for building and sharing web applications. To do that, they’ve developed a workplace environment that centers around employees’ well-being. I’m interested to hear from him how his company has aimed to go beyond platitudes and create a genuinely equitable and respectful workplace, and to learn where their semi-distributed structure fits into that goal. 

Alright, let’s get started. 

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MATT: Anil, you have been blogging forever.

ANIL DASH: [laughs] Roughly, yes. In geological time, it’s short, but in human years it’s 20 years.

MATT: How did you start and what keeps you going?

ANIL: People in my life were tired of hearing me rant about things. So they were like, “Go put it somewhere else.” [laughs] And at the time I had a really long commute. I was commuting by train an hour and a half each way. I mean it was really — it was like three hours a day on a train and I was going nuts.

MATT: Wow.

ANIL: You didn’t have Wi-Fi back then. So I had a giant Dell laptop and I was like, “I’ve got to learn how to do more with HTML.” I knew the basics but I wanted to do it. I would do it, literally just practicing on local on my laptop, on Internet Explorer 5 or something, whatever it was at the time, and I thought “Oh, I could take these rants in my head and put them out here onto the internet.” 

Right about the time that I had that idea in maybe summer of ’99, I saw the first couple sites. I was like, “Oh, this is what I could do. I could organize it this way.” I saw Peter Merholz’s site, PeterMe, and then very quickly discovered a couple of others. And so these pioneers were doing it, and I thought, I don’t think I can write like them but I think I’ve got something to say. 

It really felt like it was the right time too because I had started in maybe July and by September the Pyra team had built Blogger and the Danga team had built LiveJournal. Even just the fact that there was software to me meant “OK, this is legit.”

MATT: So 20 years later?

ANIL: 20 years later.

MATT: Dashes.com.

ANIL: Yes.

MATT: Why do you blog now?

ANIL: One, it’s part of how I think. My wife will always say, “You’re staring off into space like you’re writing something.” She just knows that it’s this thing where I’m collecting my thoughts. Certainly one of the most important things to me is, I think better and organize my thoughts better and share my ideas better when I write it, and it introduces a rigor to what I’m sharing. I love that push to accuracy and push to quality. It makes my thinking stronger. 

Some of it’s just, I like to write. For a long time, I had no other place to do it. I was lucky, after I had written a million words online people asked me to write for things. [laughter] You know? I got a column in Wired and I was like, “Where were you all ten years ago?”

MATT: Cool.

ANIL: But nobody was trying to hire me to write so I might as well put it out there. And that’s still true.

MATT: What would make you stop blogging?

ANIL: Well I’ve slowed down. So I would say the thing that slows me down is, well, life, right? So I’ve got to spend time with my child and I’ve got a company to run and I’ve got — the priorities have shifted. I can’t just say I’m going to stay up all night and finish this 3,000-word piece like I used to. 

But at the same time, the biggest thing chipping away at it is having other venues and other platforms. I resisted doing a podcast for the first 15 years of the medium. [laughs] I think the week podcasts were invented somebody was like, “You should go do one,” and I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.”

MATT: And now you have your own little studio.

ANIL: Yeah, exactly. Then I started thinking about the craft that… The same is true actually of other social media. Like Twitter in particular I spend a lot of time on. And this is a strange thing to say but I think you’re probably one of the few people who can appreciate it — I care about being good at it. I think people are like, “That’s an absurd thing to say,” like, “Isn’t this disposable, isn’t this ephemeral?” I don’t feel that way at all. I have Twitter threads that have been going for six years. I am very mindful of how I use my audience, who I retweet and who I amplify. 

So I think very much of that as a body of work too. I never delete tweets. Again, same thing, I am certain somebody is going to go back and be like, “You said this thing that’s terrible,” and hopefully I’ve learned since then. But I very much want there to be a body of work between all the things I’ve done that I look at on a years — and now decades — timescale. I don’t think very many people look at their YouTube channel or their Snapchats [that] are like “Yeah, how is this going to age in 20 years?” But I have that luxury so I try to do what I do with that in mind.

MATT: As you mentioned, you’re running a company now — Glitch.

ANIL: Yes.

MATT: How is that culture of blogging or writing part of Glitch’s culture?

ANIL: So Glitch is the latest name and current incarnation of a company that started as Fog Creek Software in the year 2000, founded by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. Joel is, to me, one of the all-time legends of blogging, one of the greatest people to ever do it. Joel started Joel on Software in ’98, I think.

MATT: Super early, yes.

ANIL: Yes. I would read Joel’s blog and he would talk about a company where they cared about the software they made, cared about how they treated their people, were very thoughtful about the work that they did. They did not want to be just another dot-com, which at the time that was what was in vogue. I thought, “Wow, that would be an amazing place to work.” And also, “I would never pass their coding test.” That was the other thing I thought about the company.

And in late ’99 — December ’99 — they had a blogger’s dinner in New York City, which is a funny thing to say because the premise was —  

MATT: Of all the bloggers.

ANIL: All the bloggers, right. And we fit around two tables in a Mexican restaurant. You fast forward over the next 10 years and they had built some products and really established a culture, and Joel reached out and it was just like, “We’ve got something to show you.” 

I saw the prototype of what became Glitch. You could have live-in-your-browser code. And as you coded and typed your code out, it would live-deploy without you having to run anything, do anything, touch anything. You didn’t have to ask somebody down the hall for the access to the AWS account. It just worked. I still have the notes from that first meeting, and we were looking at them not long ago, we had had some folks join and I wanted to show them where it all came from.

That first meeting that we had of the demo of it was — we talked about, well, we need to have a social network wrapped around this so you can find the apps, and you need to be able to remix the apps so you can redo it, and we need to have multiplayer editing, so more than one person can edit at the same time. And we had this list, and we made these bullet points in the first hour, all of which we did, all of which are the heart of the Glitch experience. 

It was really like few moments in my career. It actually felt a lot like when we first saw blogs. I first saw the blogging tools and it was like, “Oh, this is going to be it. This is… I don’t know if what w