Party on PartyKit  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Party on PartyKit - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/eb217a01-ef2d-491b-868f-0eaa1e57db04 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **PartyKit Origin Story** - Sunil Pai developed PartyKit after leaving Cloudflare, inspired by TLDraw's multiplayer needs. - They built a multiplayer prototype quickly and scaled it efficiently with a small team. Transcript: Speaker 2 About PartyKit. It's a developer first platform for multiplayer collaboration. What are all those things we're going to find out today? So Sunil, before we get into the double party situation that we've got going on here, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? You're kind of like, I feel like you're kind of internet famous. So tell us, tell us, and you're also internet mysterious because he's one of those people that doesn't have a real photo on Twitter, you know? It's like something yellow and black to represent. I'm sure his love of JavaScript. Yeah. So you're kind of mysterious. So tell us about yourself, Sunil. Who's the man behind the party? Speaker 1 Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me over. Like I'm extremely grateful. Like a follow Js party for a while. I loved some past episodes. And yeah, like the who's who passes through here. So it appears I needed to raise a pre-seed round and become a real founder to show up. So thanks for having me. Oh gosh. I also appreciate how you all named the podcast after my company. You're welcome, of course. Man, I've been an engineer for like a little under 20 years now. I've done a bunch of things, which is nice. Like in the past, I've done like e-commerce. I worked on government websites, small startups. I think the last six years are kind of what people are most familiar with. I moved to London and I worked in Oculus for a while. By the way, writing React for VR applications is the most sci-fi job I've had in my life. I miss it. Wow. It's crazy. That sounds trippy. Oh, it is. Then I spent a year in the React team. I think I've probably the worst person to have been on that team. I hold that badge with pride. Speaker 2 It takes a lot of hard work to do that. Yeah. And so that just means you scored 99.9997 instead of 99.999. Like I'm just to be clear. Like bad contributing to React means like you're like a 1%er, my friend. But it's fine. Speaker 1 You can be modest. I shipped some things there. I shipped like a testing API, which was nice. I helped do a bunch of releases. It wasn't a bad year all around. I worked in a bank for a year. I don't recommend that to anyone. The companies are way better. But I worked in Cloudflare for a year. And that was cool. What happened is I got interested in the tech right about the time the beta for durable objects happen. And we'll go into that in a bit. But I tried using the product and it was a pain in the ass. So I complained about it online. I got into the DMs. And at one point I was like, do you want to just hire me to come fix it? So they said, yeah, sure. Let's go. And I was fun. What we did is we rewrote the CLI from Rust to TypeScript, which is the opposite direction that most other projects go in. And it was the right thing to do. It was a lot of fun. So I did that for a year. And not only was it fun, but I really got insight into, I think, what the next phase of computing, edge computing, the way Cloudflare does it is absolutely fascinating. And then I left because as you know, it's a time of global world peace. The economy is doing so well. It's a great time to start a company, a figure. And I did that. And I think I left Cloudflare in September last year. And it's been an absolute ride since then. Like things escalated really, really quickly to the point where we just announced like a funding round for BardiCad, a team and office. Like I have my first office. I love it. It's beautiful. We share it with DLROP. But yeah, people might know me otherwise from a CSS in JS library. I did a while ago called Glamour that and that was right in the middle of being an extremely divisive topic. Oh, yeah. I have a lot of stories from that that I'm saving for my members. Oh, my bad. Uh, I, yeah, I think like just being a part of the React community really like brought me into like the public because there was a lot of experimentation in the past. But otherwise I like making friends and I have a loud mouth, which is why people hear me whether they want to or not. Speaker 6 So can I, can I ask a question? Did you, so did you start like building Particat before you left the Cloudflare? Speaker 1 No, not really. Yeah. So I left Cloudflare and I knew that I wanted to do something in real time with, with Cloudflare. I was like, okay, this is special. Like there's something here and very few other people get it. I was hanging out with the TL ROT team and they were doing a full, so TL ROT is an online collaborative infinite canvas and it's beautiful. The founder is a friend of mine. He obsesses over arrows, which is why TL ROT.com has the best arrows in the business. His words, not mine, but I agree. And they were doing a rewrite and they needed to do multiplayer well because they want to compete with big shots in the business, right? Figma, Adobe, whoever it is. And it struck me that there was a match here for the technology and their desire. So I built out the deployment platform for how they do multiplayer. The rest of their app is deployed on vorcel, but all the multiplayer networking stuff happens there. And it went really quickly. We had like a prototype sort of working in about a week, two weeks, and it was production ready in like two months with a team of like three, four people, which is kind of unheard of for that. And it went really well. Their launch went well. It scaled really well for such a small team and it made it like really cheap for them. That's when I knew that this product, I was already thinking about real time to be clear. I was thinking about it for the past six years through Oculus, through React, even in the bank because I ([Time 0:05:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3f5c4231-8040-4701-a1e6-b95bea36c7c2)) - **Core Multiplayer Tech Insights** - Multiplayer collaboration requires ordered message delivery and fast infrastructure to ensure consistent user experience. - Centralizing state in one process simplifies programming and synchronization challenges. Transcript: Speaker 1 Cheap? Great question. By the way, the Figma blog has a bunch of blog posts about how they did it, which is just great reading for, and they're written really well. So for any kind of engineer, whether you're a junior or senior one, it's you should literally go and like, I'll be happy to share links in a while. But traditionally, the way real time multiplayer work is by setting up messaging pipelines. You, you write you literally a JavaScript object that says, Hey, this is an event which changed this squares background to red. You'll write a little object like that and you'll send it into the void. And there are little pipes that make sure that message reach everybody who's connected to that particular drawing so that everyone sees the square with a different background color. Speaker 4 Fair. Speaker 1 It turns out this is a hard problem because computers are like, we are not all using the same computer. You have to make sure that the messages are ordered in the same order, I guess, so that everyone sees the same thing on their screens. You have to make sure that the infrastructure is fast so that there's not a lot of delay in between these things, because if it's something like 100, 200 milliseconds might be fine. But if it's in the order of seconds and let's say you're also having a video call while doing it, you're just it's a terrible user experience. What happens if you are both editing the same item at the same time? Let's say one person changes the background color and somebody deletes the square. What should the user see? It's a hard question. So that that's why and for the crew out there, if you don't know, like distributed systems is one of the hardest computer science problems. The other three you might have heard is caching and naming variables and misogyny. So those are the ones that I find that we aren't actually working on right now, but we are working on trying to fix multiplayer and collaboration. Well, and through the course of this, we should figure out how multiplayer is going to fix misogyny because I would love that. I have some ideas we can talk about that. Anyway, so that's how it traditionally used to be done and still it's expensive. But as hardware and infrastructure started getting a little cheaper, one of the thing Figma kind of got made this mainstream. A lot of other people did it, but Figma did this mainstream, which is like, you know, what? What if instead of we do this message passing stuff, what if we also spun up one process on a machine somewhere and we made sure that every connection, usually a web socket, web sockets Were announced in 2008, landed in Chrome in 2009. So like real time has been like mainstream since then, but Figma was 2014, 2015, I forget when. Speaker 2 And landing in node this October. And while we're recording this, we're recording this podcast October 2023. And yeah, no, no 21 is going to have web socket support. And that issue has been open for years. So I love it. It's very exciting. Speaker 1 So folks like Figma who can afford to build this sort of thing, Evan Wallace and gang love them. Evan Wallace, of course, creator of ES build as well. Love would love to talk about that later. They say, Hey, it's one process and we make sure all these connections connect to this. It makes the programming model a little simpler, because now you don't so much have to worry about ordering of messages, because it's all happening in one space. It's easier to have a source of truth. Literally, let's say a variable in this process, right, like a const or a war or a let. So you don't have it becomes a little easier to make sure that the folks who are connected to it are seeing the same object. And like it simplifies the programming model a little, but it still isn't cheap per se. You still have to make these clusters out of invest a lot as a team into figuring out the routing in the world from wherever people are connecting to it to make sure that it connects to the Same thing. But they did do that and it works really well. In fact, one time, I think the Figma homepage was down. So they just opened up one Figma document to the world as their homepage. ([Time 0:17:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4b94ac9b-4276-41b5-9b93-9fca11f82100)) - **Cloudflare Durable Objects Role** - Cloudflare Durable Objects host stateful processes near users and guarantee persistent connections per ID. - This enables simpler real-time collaboration apps by centralizing state and broadcast logic. Transcript: Speaker 1 That's on the Figma platform, whatever. In 2020, Cloudflare announced this tech called durable objects. So Cloudflare workers incredible product. So Cloudflare started off as a CDN company, just making the way Cloudflare does its network is incredible. Like someday don't necessarily have like even their own data centers. Like they go and install their hardware directly in the ISPs, etc. Which is why things that are fronted by Cloudflare are so fast. They are their default choice for a CDN in this day and age. Like there's nothing better. They hired Kenton Warda, who was doing a bunch of stuff previously ex Google. He came into Cloudflare and he invented Cloudflare workers, where he was like, you know what, you have all these machines that are on CDNs. We're going to run JavaScript on it. It's wonderful because you can write a little function that takes a request and returns a response. And it finds it in a spot that closes to you as a user. So inside London, it's like, I want to say like 10 millisecond latency on a good day, which is as far as I'm concerned, it's instantaneous. Like that's sometimes faster than a service worker in your own browser responding to responses. Like so it's crazy. Hold on. Hold on. My JavaScript's still waking up, you know. Exactly. Exactly. Like, oh, like here's all the end of the machine. And my React app is still loading. Hold on. Speaker 2 Hold on. Speaker 1 You know, like exactly. Right. Like the React constructing your DOM trees probably slower than the response time from. Speaker 2 Also fun fact, another fun fact about Cloudflare is that they serve they, you know, anytime you install something from anywhere, any package manager, as long as it's, you know, coming From the 9 p.m. Registry, it's fronted like by Cloudflare, unless Microsoft has changed that. Speaker 1 I think they still do. Yeah. They have some types. So they have Cloudflare workers. Speaker 4 And in 2020, they announced durable objects, which are like Cloudflare workers, except they're stateful. Speaker 1 They do two things which are awesome. One is they spit for a given ID, which could be a document, a game session, a code base, who knows, whatever you're using for to build like a collaborative thing. It spins it up in a location closest to the person who first initiates it. And secondly, much like the Figma model, it guarantees that every future connection for that ID connects to the same process, which suddenly, like I said, it makes the programming Model for someone who's building an application like this extremely simple like doing a there's there's a term in this real time programming model calling a broadcast, right? One user will send one of these edits to a document. And you have to do a broadcast to everyone else that's connected. So this would be a hard problem in the past. But in the durable object, it's a for loop, because you can store all the WebSocket connections in an array and literally do a for const connection in this array, send the message. In fact, that's how dot broadcast is implemented in PariKit. It's a for loop. So they build this tech. And that's what one of the reasons I also got interested. I was like, Oh, this is some sci fi like I really need to learn more about it. That's how I got into Cloudflare, learn more about it. And when I left, I was like, there is a potential to build something very to bring this to the rest of ([Time 0:22:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c9303dd1-5496-478f-90f8-e851d59c8134)) - **Advantages of Centralized Event Logic** - Using a centralized process for events lets you run custom logic on messages, simplifying client code. - Run logic like throttling, rate limiting, or event transformation on the server for better experiences. Transcript: Speaker 3 With this. Can I jump in real quick and make sure I'm understanding? Sorry. You should stop me because otherwise I have brain dumps. Yeah. So just so that I'm understanding, I'm going to replay back what I think I heard. So talking about initial versions of distributed system or real time systems, you essentially have an event based or an event driven model where you're sending out these events with Changes to all the users. But you don't have a central process that knows who are all the people connected. So there's some sort of like query based or database driven like, Oh, this change happened. I need to look up all the people are connected and go. Version two is I have a central process. So everyone connected to this particular document or whatever it is who is currently connected. It's easy for me to access those are the people to send things to now question on this. Is it still an event driven approach where you're sending out these events that are the changes or is you somehow communicating a snapshot of current state? Speaker 1 It's still event driven like you still send out these events. But importantly, unlike the previous thing, which was only messages, you now have a little server where you can run code that acts on these messages and decides how to act on them. Like what you should do, who do you respond to? This makes sense where you might want to run some logic, which, hey, like, you literally want to make sure that they're the right types of events, like you want to make sure that no one Is spamming this particular document with unneeded things that might break your machine. You might want to do stuff like create limiting. You might want to do stuff like batching. You might want to change the events itself that are sent. Like you might be getting some event from a presence is an interesting one, right? Like you just want if you go to the party, get homepage right now, it's a lot of fun because you can it shows everybody's cursors from across the world who are on the page and everybody keeps Playing with it. So the events you send down are probably, okay, this is my mouse position and this is the country that I'm from. We do that. Actually, the country flag is added on the server side, which is not something you can do. Otherwise, from a browser unless you ask for location and we don't want to do that. But also, we don't necessarily have to send all the events that are happening. We could buffer it, we could throttle them. And these are things that can make the application better. Like you actually get to run code that defines the behavior of this application. Speaker 3 Does that help? Got it. So basically, in the old event driven world, because you didn't have a centralized place with those like keeping track of state, you just have to send everything and make the clients Really smart. Speaker 1 That's right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Speaker 3 And in this version, you have kind of essential process that you know, every event is flowing through this process. I can write logic, under thinking about these events, just, you know, aggregating them, doing other fun things, and then send them out to my clients. So my clients can be a little simpler, easier to understand. And the programming model is more centralized, ([Time 0:28:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/300b101a-17f6-40dc-868f-72f2f33b5efb)) - **Multiple Players Expand Market** - Multiple companies exploring different approaches to real-time collaboration expand the market. - Competition encourages diverse use cases and increases adoption of multiplayer technology. Transcript: Speaker 1 To sort of win to become mainstream. One of my insights over the last year is that there actually have to be multiple players in the space, exploring different avenues like party kit doesn't do some things and it would be Like we would be a different company if we tried it, but there have to be multiple companies that try out different approaches to making this mainstream simply with to provide the spread Of options for different use cases, etc. Don't get me wrong. I think party kit is very good because it is actually fairly general and low level. But hey, sometimes you just don't want to have to write even the code that we give you like they know there are specific use cases that other companies bend highly integrated like vertically Integrated stuff or they do it differently. I'll give you I'll give you examples. Some of the older players in the space it's kind of weird in this in this industry like even a few years is like older player. There are still going strong like so I think about other message passing companies like pusher, ably, I think pubnub is also one of them all great players. I know some people who work there wonderful people. Then there are people who are trying to build that but with durable objects I think one of those is called sockety. There is a company that is trying to build its version of durable objects. They call them session backends. The name of the company is drifting in space. Love that company love those people. New York based I think there is a popular player in the space right now called live blocks. So they have a highly I want to call them like vertically integrated solution where they provide CRDT as a service a comments widget as a service even a YJ is back end as a service very easy For you to add cursors etc to your application. So they take these vertical use cases and provide not just a very polished experience for using it but great documentation and examples for those use cases. I like them they're a French company. I think they're doing like a great job. So there are and there are others that I might not even know right now or are probably building it as we speak. Oh another one I heard recently is called welt. They're also trying to do like vertically integrated comments as a service cursors etc. Speaker 2 Here are React hooks that you can put in your application and get going. So so more is good is what you're saying like right like we like more players is good for is good for everyone it raises the like like it raises the tide for everyone essentially. Speaker 1 Exactly like the mistake would be thinking that there is a particular size of the market and someone should go to win it. The truth is that the what you can do is dramatically expand the size of the market by having multiple players competing with each other but trying to provide great experiences for different Use cases so that more and more people use it because I think I mentioned WebSockets landed in Chrome in 2009 and it is not a mistake that it's taken multi-billion dollar companies to Build a Google Docs a Figma or AAA games because it wasn't just about the software it's about how expensive it was. So we have like 15 years of unlearning to do for the world for millions of developers to show them that it is now if not easy it's definitely straightforward it's copy-basedable that If your game gets popular overnight you're not going to go bankrupt with the build that hits you in the morning. ([Time 0:37:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba95f302-8eeb-496b-8225-18b7dbe24bc8)) - **Developer Empowerment in PartyKit** - Developers want to write code and feel empowered, not magic done for them. - PartyKit offers full control and treats collaboration like infrastructure with transparent pricing. Transcript: Speaker 2 You can kind of create your own experience run the code on your hardware etc so what's what's the value prop there for party kit. Speaker 1 Sarah Drinkwater friend of her she told me this great quote a few months ago that I need to tattoo on my on my butt at some point which is that developers don't necessarily want magic but They want to be magicians it's not like writing code is a bad thing but making it easy to write the code that enables people it's such a thrill I mean it's why front end developers know this That you can write some code and refresh your page and immediately it's there and you can do this a thousand times a day I think party kit is special in that way that it gives you complete Control over what's happening in these little servers you get to much like writing a serverless app deploying a next-js app to build your next great startup you can build these experiences Really look inside it being controlled choose the trade-offs that you want I think this really separates us from other systems right now and the other thing that we do of course is we Are we are a boring infrastructure company even though you get to build all these cool things by yourself you get to treat it like you would any other boring web hosting infrastructure Company you pay for the CPU by its and the reliability the uptime and the uptime it just was support right in the future like as you continue to scale I have to tell you one of the nice things About building on cloud floor is that when cloud floor goes down half the internet goes down so no one's looking at your thing you're like okay I'm taking an early lunch it's fine they Don't go down that often it's like once twice a year but I think I'll be able to team lunches when that happens but yeah that's what that's what developers want they don't wonder how to Give us like really care about async await and the actual electrons flowing through these bytes they want a mental model that works on their laptop gets them running quickly they want To deploy and have it available to everyone on the planet in seconds and these are the things that and they want like insight into it trying to build a non-open source infrastructure Company in 2023 is a dead end so we this is what ([Time 0:41:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d05aca99-77ac-4500-9c35-efacad5845f3)) - **Getting Started with PartyKit** - To start with PartyKit, run `npm create party kit` for a full project or `npx party kit init` to add it to existing projects. - You can develop locally with `npx party kit dev` and deploy globally with `npx party kit deploy` in under a minute. Transcript: Speaker 1 Install or do i like how do we use how do we use this thing you tell me so if you're making like a new project the thing you want to run inside your terminal right now is npm create party kit That spins up a whole project including a little like front-end thing which we should make a little more polished i think but an index.html and entry point js that uses party socket which Is our client that connects to it but also a fully flitched back-end that like listens for messages etc that so that's really nice because you can deploy that entire thing front-end And all to the party kit network we have a little metric internally where we are like from install to deploy it has to be under one minute right now it is under one minute really like that I think it's about 12 seconds if you're adding party kit to an existing project instead what you should run is npx party kit in it so it doesn't try to make a whole full-fledged project To you it just detects your how your project is constructed makes a little party kit.json file one of these little servers that's great by the time this podcast is out there we will also Have support for templates and a range of templates so you'll say hey npx party kit in it dash dash template wheat react for example so we like hey here's the thing that uses wheat this Thing and with support for multiple providers hey here's the thing that deploys your front-end onto vercell but does the everything else on the party kit network something with a chat Template something that does cursors that's part of the goal like i want a hundred templates for like a number of use cases and like combinations of those but that's that's how you get Started like right now if you're listening to this i think a good thing to do is to just run npm create party kit in your terminal it might it'll ask you a few questions hey do you want to use Type script do you want to do so and so and it'll give you a it'll customize it for that you can open visual studio code inside this and it should all just sort of work you can explore the files I think i read me also gives you a little indicators of what to do next you can run npx party kit dev which runs a local server fully running on your machine by the way which means you can also Run use it to run tests by the way again since it's open source it's so nice that we are able to do this like you don't really need to be connected to the internet to develop so if you're on A trade or a plane just works once you're happy with it yeah once you're happy with it run npx party kit deploy it'll ask you to log in so that we can get a little username that we can attach To the domain so it would be project name dot username dot party kit dot dev custom domains are coming soon definitely before the end of this quarter but those are the three commands you Can say npm create party kit npx party kit dev to run it locally and npx party kit deploy to deploy it within seconds onto the rest of the internet that's it that's what it takes if you have Speaker 3 Feedback for making that shorter i'd love to hear it but that's what you'll land it on right now yeah i just uh inst ran np at create party kit and it was done in seconds wow love that three Questions i think um it asked me what i wanted ([Time 0:48:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/884c9c91-0e63-4882-b4dd-e73560dfc792)) - **Real-World PartyKit Use Cases** - Wheat Conf used PartyKit to power a live like button with thousands of concurrent users. - Site GPT built a collaborative chat with human handoff using PartyKit's multiplayer backend. Transcript: Speaker 2 Give me an example of like a customer success story or like a customer use case like who's building on party kit and what are they building i can give you two different use cases because Speaker 1 They just happened in the span of the last few days so yesterday was wheat conf uh which is the conference uh everything wheat which is the bundler developer tomb and the like button on Their page was powered by party kit it's uh interesting use case because as you can imagine the the events are very simple right button click and you say hey like increment the counter But it can be like thousands of people clicking at a time and thousands of people receiving these events the back end for this i'll have to check but i want to say it's under 50 lines of code Like the body kit server for this if it's not we should make it less than 50 lines of code it's such a nice use case and then the front end is like a little go i think they built it with view uh I have to check again i'm only speculating here but wheat conf just used it and it went off without a hitch like thousands and thousands of users and dirt chief another one is recently A company called site gpt i like i love this use case by the way there a company that does let's you add a little chat board onto your onto your company website that can be trained on your Documentation or your business processes and relax so that you can carry out a great project the seo's name is palu pratapteja and they started off as a regular chatbot but then they Realized that they needed the ability to call a human into the conversation an actual customer supporting executive because you are you and i know that elipms are not all the way there Yet uh and they can be like fooled and they'll light they're not just light you i think they think it's the truth as well like and i say they like they're actually i think they don't have Speaker 3 A concept of truth right like they don't yeah no their only concept of truth is does this linguistically make sense there's no reference to the real world so at some point a customer will Speaker 1 Say hey no i want to talk to a proper support agent which makes it a multiplayer scenario it's to a user a support agent maybe multiple support agents and an elip connected to the same thing There are no third-party services that let you sort of build this right now unless you control the code that runs it that lets you do all these actions so uh they deploy they built out a Backend that enables all of these things and shifted to production just a few days ago and it's been going great for them is what i hear like we look into their code uh no we look into their Code have a look at their code and stuff like they shared some of it with us that's cute uh no not the thing that deployed we can't do that by the way yeah no i i know i know i know i was just giving You a hard time that's good to know though yeah oh yeah which is like it's one of these things that we decided early enough that we don't want to lie to our customers and we're like listen Can you put a console dot log statement and show us what it says and they're like can't you do it for us and like yeah but that would be super unethical if we did but anyway so they built out This and it's great like they scale it out to like hundreds and thousands of users and it goes without a hitch uh i'll give you even a third use case because i think it's public knowledge Now uh stately the company is a company that loves state machines uh they have a popular library called xstate that you can use to build ui interface state machines uh user interface State machines uh they're coming out with a product they call statey sky which is hey state machines in the cloud that you can use to build work business workflows or have multiple people Jump in and see what the state of the machine is possibly add their own actions and stuff and all of that is powered by party kit like it's such a huge cool use case i hadn't even initially Speaker 2 Thought about it but they are building a platform on top of our platform oh my god no that's awesome that's like basically bringing like a google docs experience to manipulating a state Machine like graph right yeah exactly and yeah and we love david piano on js party hope to have him back again and next year but um that's so cool that's like so cool that's like i would never Speaker 1 Have even thought about that as like a use case like that's so neat um so yeah i love david and jenny at the whole team and they're being like such good partners to work with as well it's nice When they're like just a bunch of nerds they're like what do we do for our users oh well let's go yeah so those are three separate ([Time 0:52:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0e183434-da0f-461a-851c-877e04ab8e71)) - **Audio/Video in PartyKit Roadmap** - PartyKit plans to support real-time audio and video but customer demand is mixed. - They focus first on data-driven real-time collaboration, with media features further down the roadmap. Transcript: Speaker 1 And says we need it like tomorrow we'll probably do it but it is part of the thesis you're right in that right i'm just thinking about it when you're talking about the emergency services Speaker 3 Right like there's some amount of this this is purely data and there's some amount of like we need to be able to do an audio broadcast or we need to be able to link you up with an emergency Speaker 1 Provider or things like that hundred percent so it's on our road map like i feel strongly about it it is not clear to me at what the shape of the solution that's let me put it that way i i yeah Speaker 2 That's that's what i think about it i'm amazed that we managed ([Time 1:06:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/04f5f887-7c47-452d-b83d-d91b22fca8bc)) - **Founder Wellness Advice** - Prioritize physical health, relationships, and mental well-being when building a startup. - Basic self-care beats business books for long-term success and resilience. Transcript: Speaker 2 Bonus questions so stay tuned for that so if you could talk to yourself like the like two years ago like what would you tell yourself oh so much this is a message like for other founders Speaker 1 Out there and i've now been like beating this drum on my twitter account as well so three years three three and a half years ago when the pandemic started i used it as an opportunity to fix My health i quit smoking i quit smoking movie my drinking is down to like i want to say like a 50th of what it used to be and i'm doing sober october so i'm not even drinking this month i got My physical health into shape i started swimming i started walking a lot walking in london during the pandemic was very 28 days later i arrived like the city's not existing i fixed relationships With my friends and family i got a lot closer with my wife and i feel if i hadn't done any of those things i would have faltered at the very first step i would have fallen apart because doing A startup is stressful look i feel very grateful that you called me on to this thing but announcing this funding round is not really a sign of success it just extends our chances for success I realized that we have so much more to do i'm grateful that i have the opportunity but we're not there yet and the way to get there there are a lot of books about business theory and all but Trust me the most effective things and i'm not joking i'm being very specific about this it turns out our three square meals a day eight hours of sleep making sure that you're loved one That you're in touch with your loved ones that you take time for yourself that you're staying healthy getting a 20-minute walk in every day those are so much more effective than any business Book that you could pick up i think so far it's been working really well if i went back two years i would say hey good call on doing that if i went five years back i'd be like idiot you're ruining Yourself this is not like you need to fix that earlier and i guess that's maybe it's not just a thing about founders right like a lot of people especially engineers in the space man like The world is in like not a great space right now so finding this space for yourself your health and like your close ones if you can do that that's like so precious like there's like that Is the thing that has been giving me benefits over anything else so that's very good two years ago oh well i would be just starting in cloudflur no i had a perfect year in cloudflur i love Like almost everyone that i hung out with and i miss them dearly so hey like enjoy the year in cloudflur it was great yeah no that's great oh so well said cenille thank you for that priceless Speaker 2 Reminder um i've been on that journey ([Time 1:18:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c9cf78aa-5b2d-47fb-ab68-3934b53f7f4f))